The shockwave from the sympathetic detonation of the 122mm howitzer shells hadn't even fully dissipated before the entire Soviet camp descended into a state of morbid frenzy.
"These Russians... they've lost it!"
The clerk crouched behind an overturned ammunition crate, watching with his own eyes as three T-26 tanks roared forward, flattening their own tents. The treads rolled mercilessly over a Soviet soldier who was desperately trying to douse a fire. Leading the charge was a political commissar, brandishing a megaphone and pointing toward the distant hill like a man possessed.
In Walter's vision, the clusters of heat signatures representing the Soviet forces were rapidly moving away.
The Soviet commissar had made a decision that defied all military logic. He had abandoned any attempt to save his base of operations, choosing instead to bet everything on Hill L.
Walter had initially thought that blowing the ammunition dump would force the Soviets to retreat or dig in for defense. He hadn't expected to punch straight through their psychological breaking point. The commissar knew that if he lost the artillery without taking the heights, the only thing waiting for him would be a bullet in a Lubyanka cellar.
Faced with oblivion, he chose to embrace primal ferocity. Against a backdrop of devastating inferno, he led his remaining forces in a desperate, cost-be-damned death charge.
"Simo! Cover the flanks! Cook, hurl every remaining cocktail at the ones staying behind!" Walter growled.
A Soviet company of about fifty or sixty men remained in the camp. Though shaken, they were leveling their rifles and beginning to encircle Walter's small squad.
…
Meanwhile, on Hill L.
Niemi gripped the handles of the Maxim machine gun so hard his knuckles turned white; his eyes twitched uncontrollably. Through a night sky illuminated by tracer fire, he witnessed a scene pulled straight from hell.
The Soviet forces, who should have been in a defensive posture, were pouring out of the burning woods in an all-out assault, without a single scrap of suppressed fire to cover them. Three tanks plowed deep furrows into the snow, swaying as they lumbered through the dark. Behind them, a dense mass of khaki greatcoats moved like a turgid mudslide, pressing forward in a chaotic wave accompanied by the earth-shaking roar of "Ura!"
"They're not using artillery? They're just... charging?" An old veteran nearby froze, his hand slowing halfway through cycling his bolt.
"Don't just stand there! Fire! Every weapon, fire now!" Niemi shrieked. "These Russians want to trade their lives for ours!"
Hill L instantly transformed into a vomiting volcano. The thirty-odd survivors, fueled by a sudden, terrifying will to live, rained bullets into the surging tide. But the tanks were too close. Seven hundred meters was a distance that vanished rapidly under the speed of full-throttle treads.
The battlefield had dissolved into total carnage.
…
Back in the Soviet camp, Walter and Simo's seven-man team were locked in a bitter struggle.
Bang!
The M39 in Simo's hands barked, and a Soviet gunner trying to set up a light machine gun slumped backward. Simo moved like a phantom; he no longer sought the perfect vantage point. Every shot he fired dropped another enemy attempting to close the circle.
Walter, however, had activated his Eye of Death.
In his world, time became viscous. The motion of a Soviet soldier lunging with a bayonet looked like someone treading through a swamp. Walter stepped aside, his Suomi submachine gun letting out a series of staccato bursts that shredded the man's chest.
"Lieutenant! The fire! It's too big!" Cook yelled, frantically lobbing Molotov cocktails and torching the last of the remaining Soviet tents.
The seven of them, right under the noses of hundreds of Soviet troops, had turned the enemy camp into a sea of fire. But they were also in grave danger of being swallowed whole.
"Walter! Look at the hill!" Simo shouted between shots.
Walter looked back, his heart leaping into his throat. The first T-26 had already reached the base of Hill L's slope, firing its cannon point-blank at Niemi's machine-gun nest. The khaki wave had crashed into the first Finnish trench, and the two sides were locked in primal hand-to-hand combat under the glare of flares.
This was exactly what the commissar wanted. He had sacrificed his entire logistics camp and heavy artillery for the chance to seize the heights.
The orange glow in Walter's eyes flickered violently. In his vision, the defensive line on Hill L was slowly dissolving. The flashes of tank fire and the heat signatures of melee combat were tangled together. Niemi's silent plea for help seemed to ripple through space, slamming into Walter's eardrums.
"Simo! Take the other three and hold! You have to stall the rest of these Russians!"
Walter roared, his Suomi barking a crisp short burst that sent a Soviet sergeant sprawling.
"What are you doing?" Simo asked in a low voice, his hands a blur as he worked his bolt.
Walter pointed toward the artillery positions to their front-left, still billowing black smoke. Simo didn't waste another word; he rolled behind a pile of discarded oil drums, his M39 beginning to rhythmically harvest the Soviets trying to flank them.
Walter grabbed the cook and the clerk, staying low as they darted through the scorched, cratered ruins of the battery.
"Find one that works! Move!"
The position was a wreck. Several M-30 howitzers had been twisted into scrap metal by the explosions, their warped barrels pointing uselessly at the sky. Finally, on the very edge of the position, Walter found a piece slightly removed from the center of the blast. Its left wheel had been partially sheared by shrapnel, but the breech block still held the healthy gleam of oil.
"Dammit! Where are the shells?" Walter wiped the frost from his eyelashes.
"Lieutenant! You blew everything up too well!" the clerk cried, frantically digging through charred wooden debris. "It's all empty! Everything's gone!"
"Over there! Under that overturned truck!" the cook shouted.
Together, the two men hauled a surviving ammunition crate from the tilted cargo bed. The cook panted as he pried the lid open. "Just one crate! Six high-explosive shells!"
"That's enough! Get over here!"
Walter leaped onto the gun carriage, his hands like iron clamps as they gripped the cast-iron handwheels, stiff with frost. His pupils contracted sharply amidst the smoke. The vision of the Eye of Death acted as an invisible ruler, stretching from the dark maw of the barrel straight into the distance.
"Turn! Turn the damn thing!"
The dry grinding of gears was shrill against the roar of gunfire. The elevation and traverse mechanisms shuddered under his frantic movements. The M-30 howitzer slowly turned its grim head, aiming directly at the blood-soaked path they had just fought their way down.
"Cook! Brace the trails! If this beast flips when it fires, it'll turn the three of us into paste!"
The cook let out a roar, throwing his weight onto the end of the carriage like a bull, his heavy deerskin boots stomping the steel spades deep into the frozen earth.
"Clerk! Take the trigger! Set the fuse to instantaneous!"
Walter scooped up a heavy, twenty-one-kilogram HE shell. The clerk's hands shook so hard he could barely grip the mechanism, his voice chattering behind his teeth. "Lieutenant... instantaneous? It'll blow the moment it hits. It'll catch our boys on the hill too!"
"The Russians are stepping on their scalps! If we don't use instantaneous, do you want to wait for it to bury itself in the dirt and blow up rocks?" Walter grabbed the clerk by the collar. "Set it! I'll take the heat if something goes wrong!"
Walter reached back, snatched the brass shell casing, and ripped off the seal.
"Open the breech!"
The cook spat out a mouthful of slush, veins bulging in his arms as he slammed the breech handle. With a heavy metallic clunk, the large horizontal sliding block glided open.
"Lift!" the cook and the clerk worked together to hoist the lethal steel core.
The shell slid heavily into the chamber. Walter grabbed the rammer nearby and threw his entire weight forward in a sharp shove.
Clang! The crisp mechanical snap signaled that the Reaper was in place. Walter immediately shoved the brass casing with the reduced charge inside and slammed the breech handle home.
"Locked!"
He ducked to the side of the carriage, his right hand gripping the lanyard tight. His gaze pierced through the swirling ice and snow, locking onto the distance. The ugly silhouette of the first T-26 had already breached the crest of Hill L.
"Fire!"
Walter pulled.
In an instant, the tremor of the earth drowned out all other noise. A gout of deep crimson flame erupted from the muzzle, instantly vaporizing the surrounding snow. The massive recoil sent the entire gun surging back a meter as the hydraulic recuperators screamed. The air seemed to turn into a vacuum, and the titanic blast nearly blew the clerk right out of the trench.
In Walter's vision, the shell traced a beautiful, near-vertical arc, carrying the judgment of the gods as it plummeted toward the khaki tide seven hundred meters away.
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