Through Bargideon's Sights

 

📖 Chapter 1 — Among Wolves 

Dawn, July 5, 1943. Near Kursk.

The ground trembled beneath Friedrich Bargideon’s boots long before the first Tiger crested the ridge. Dust hung low in the summer heat, the haze broken only by the black silhouettes of steel monsters crawling forward. He adjusted the strap of his binoculars, eyes narrowing against the glare.

“Sixty… seventy… perhaps more,” Bargideon muttered in Norwegian, though his aide did not understand the tongue. To him, numbers were not just statistics — they were omens, the count of fates about to be decided in fire and blood.

The Soviet colonel beside him spat into the dirt. “They come as wolves. We have built our fences strong enough.” His tone held more faith than certainty.

Bargideon said nothing. His mind drifted, as it often did, to Narvik — the northern port city where he had grown up, staring across icy fjords and mountain passes. It was the only home he had ever known, though his family had arrived there as strangers. His father and mother were immigrants from Germany, Jews by blood, Christians by choice, converts before his birth. They had carried with them the surname, Bargideon — “son of Gideon” — a name carved from Scripture, meant to bind them to the mighty warrior who once defied Midianite hordes with only faith and a few hundred men.

The irony was bitter. Now Gideon’s son stood against the armored horde of the Reich, a son of Germany fighting to avenge Norway. The boots of Hitler’s occupiers marched even now through Oslo and Narvik, desecrating the land that had taken his family in. For Bargideon, every battle was not only against an enemy army, but against the shadow of his own ancestry.

A courier galloped up, horse lathered in sweat. “Sabotage on the Belgorod line! A train carrying ammunition — destroyed!”

The words passed down the line in murmurs. Soldiers spat curses, some muttered about spies in the villages, others simply looked down at the dirt with the grim knowledge that less steel would answer their rifles today.

Bargideon’s jaw tightened. Coincidence? Or the whisper of a Fifth Column? He raised his binoculars again, focusing on the German advance. The Panzers were spreading wide, too precise, as if they knew the lay of the trenches before the first shot was fired.

He turned to the colonel, voice low but cutting: “They are not only in front of us. They are among us.”

The ground quivered again, heavier this time. A low growl rolled across the plain as German artillery began to speak. The barrage swept the Soviet line in a measured cadence. Bargideon braced himself against the observation post’s beam, listening. He had learned to hear ranges in the rhythm of shells — a grim instinct burned into him since North Africa and sharpened now on the Russian steppe.

“Seventy-fives, short-barreled,” he said. “They are grooming the field before they commit.”

The colonel’s eyes narrowed. He did not much like the foreigner telling him what his own ears could hear, but he said nothing. A German-born immigrant who had grown up in Narvik, Bargideon was an awkward fit in any uniform — an Allied attaché to Soviet command, a reminder that Moscow’s war was watched by Western eyes.

In the trenches below, the soldiers braced. Their banter had faded, but scraps still clung like tattered banners of courage.

“Two weeks,” a boy whispered, “and I see my wife again.”
“You’ll see her when Moscow sends a letter with black trim,” another muttered.
A third laughed, sharp and too loud. “Better to die here than to starve back home.”

Bargideon heard it all. He thought: courage is not the absence of fear — it is the art of swallowing it so the man next to you believes you have none.

The first Tiger appeared, crawling into the haze, its turret sweeping left and right like a predator sniffing the air. Bargideon felt his stomach tighten — not with fear, but with recognition.

He had studied the machine: eighty-eight millimeters of death, thick frontal armor, tracks heavy enough to grind stone into powder. Inside its belly, he imagined the crew — a commander barking crisp orders, a loader sweating as he rammed the shell home, a gunner whispering to steady his hands. Germans, yes, but not demons. Men, trapped in the same iron coffin as the boys they were hunting.

A line of Soviet 76s answered the barrage and fired, the flat crack of their guns like clenched teeth. One Panzer lurched to a halt, smoke belching from its turret. A cheer rose from the Soviet trench — too soon. The Tiger behind it shifted, fired, and erased the gun crew in a single flash.

“Hold your fire until they close,” Bargideon said under his breath. “Patience is a weapon; haste is a wound.”

Another blast shook the rear — not artillery. This time it was a munitions truck. The explosion threw shards of wood and metal into the sky, raining down on scrambling men. Soldiers shouted, some running to help, others pointing rifles wildly at shadows in the hedgerows.

“Sabotage,” Bargideon growled. His grey eyes scanned the supply lane, searching for a shadow where none should be.

Rumors spread fast. “It was partisans!” one man shouted. “No — Germans in disguise!” another countered. Fear crept quicker than smoke.

Voronov’s face reddened. “Cowards! Traitors!”

Bargideon put a hand on his shoulder, firm, steady. “Do not waste your fire on ghosts. The enemy is before us. The truth of your traitors will show in time.”

Colonel Alexei Voronov stared at him, suspicion still lingering in his dark eyes, but the words steadied his hand. Orders flowed again, shakier but given nonetheless.

The duel began in earnest.

A Tiger ground forward, its eighty-eight leveled, the barrel dark as a cave mouth. Across the field, a T-34 swerved left, tracks biting into soft soil. The Soviet crew fired — thunder; the shell whistled across the gap and struck the Tiger’s front with a shriek, sparks scattering like daylight fireflies. The German tank did not flinch. Its gun barked in reply, the sound rolling over the earth like a hammer. The T-34 shuddered, flame spitting from its seams, the turret popping like a kettle, crew flung upward in a cloud of smoke.

Bargideon lowered his glass, jaw set. “A fair duel,” he said softly, “until the gods chose sides.”

Not far away, another T-34 charged recklessly. Its commander — a boy named Yuri, who had lied about his age to enlist — slammed the gear forward in a reckless zig-zag to spoil the Tiger’s aim. Bargideon tracked him. The Tiger fired; the shot went wide, dirt erupting in a brown geyser. Yuri’s driver slammed the brakes, the gunner fired point-blank into the Tiger’s flank. Steel screamed; the beast shuddered, smoke belching from the turret ring.

Bargideon smiled faintly. “That one has the courage of Gideon’s three hundred.”

The colonel crossed himself. Bargideon, for his part, thought only of the boy inside the iron oven — whether his mother still lived to see him again, whether she had any inkling her son had just cracked the hide of a monster.

Victory was brief. The Tigers advanced in packs, their hides impervious, their discipline unshaken. More T-34s burned. Black smoke curled heavenward, carrying with it the screams of men.

“Order them to close,” Bargideon said. “Don’t duel — swarm.”

Voronov bristled at being told how to command, but the logic cut through. Signals relayed. Engines roared. The Soviet tanks surged, weaving through the fire, seeking the flanks like hunting dogs slipping under a boar’s tusks.

Another explosion boomed to the rear — this time a communications tent. The blast shredded canvas and sent splinters through the signal team. Men staggered out, bleeding, dazed, some clutching useless headphones.

Panic spread faster than the flames. Runners shouted conflicting orders. One officer cried out that radios had failed across the sector.

Voronov cursed, pistol in hand, eyes darting for saboteurs. Bargideon caught his wrist. “Point that at the enemy, Colonel. Not at shadows. Every bullet you waste on fear is one less for the men in the trench.”

Voronov’s nostrils flared, but he lowered the pistol. Around them, soldiers whispered: “The Germans know everything.” “There must be traitors in the villages.” “Even our officers may not be clean.”

Bargideon’s voice cut through like a blade. “Men! The wolves want you to fear the dark. Do not oblige them. You hold your rifles steady, and you spit in their teeth. Traitors or not, the enemy still bleeds.”

The muttering stilled. Fear lingered, but Bargideon’s words gave it form — anger instead of panic.


Petrov’s Sappers

A runner sprinted for the artillery battery. In the press of bodies, Senior Sergeant Petrov — commander of a sapper section — nearly collided with Bargideon, a coil of detonator cord over his shoulder and dust caked into the lines of his face.

“You, Sergeant,” Bargideon called. “The culvert east of the schoolhouse. Can you bring it down?”

Petrov followed his pointing hand, gauged distance with a squint. “If we live long enough to set charges.” He smiled without humor. “We will need three men and ten minutes.”

“You will have five,” Bargideon said. “And smoke to cover you.”

Petrov spat into the dust and nodded. “Five, then.”

He chose two men at once — Artem, a quiet farmer with shovel-strong hands, and Lev, a city locksmith who’d learned to make bombs after he learned to open doors. They ran low, packs clattering, their boots thumping a rhythm Bargideon had come to recognize: the step of men who had decided to die if they must, so long as it meant the other fellow did too.

The first artillery shells laid a white curtain across the culvert approach. Petrov plunged into the milk and vanished. Beyond the smoke, Tigers growled, their engines a basso drone that traveled through the soil into the bones.

“Your sappers,” Voronov said, half-admiring, half-afraid.

“They’re the bravest men on any field,” Bargideon replied. “They build the road to victory — and bury it behind them.”

He tracked Petrov’s progress by instinct — the faintest shiver in the smoke, the staccato cough of a submachine gun, then silence. Petrov reappeared at the far bank, half-crawling, hands working calmly even as a stray round chewed the mud inches from his ear. Lev slid down the culvert wall like a man descending a grave; Artem passed the charges and counted under his breath.

A minute later, the wrong signal flare arced skyward — yellow instead of red. Bargideon’s jaw tightened. He pointed. “There! That is not our code.”

Voronov bellowed for the NKVD. Soldiers surged into the hedgerow. A man in a quartermaster’s coat stumbled, tried to flee, pistol firing wildly. He carried a German compass and a torn map strip in his boot. He died shouting curses in German.

He died hard, cursing in a language he had tried to forget. Bargideon did not cheer. He looked at the dead man for a long time, the counterfeit uniform already soaking through. Turning to Voronov he said “One chord cut from the piano, Colonel. The song is not over.”

The smoke thinned. Through gauzy white Bargideon saw Petrov waving back from near the culvert, a flat-handed signal: ready. Bargideon lifted his whistle — an old habit from training cadets — and blew once, a short, sharp note swallowed by thunder. Petrov’s hand went down.

The culvert erupted. Earth convulsed, timbers folded, water and mud poured into the gully. A Tiger lurched, sank, its tracks spinning in the mire. Its wingman tried to avoid the trap — and exposed its flank. Three T-34s burst from the smoke like wolves. Two shells bounced; the third punched through, splitting steel with a howl. The Tiger died without grace.

From the trenchline, men whooped and pounded helmets with rifle stocks, howls rising like a chorus of wolves answering their prey. The roar of triumph rolled along the dugouts, desperate voices clinging to this moment of vengeance as if it might banish death itself.

But Bargideon did not join them. His glass stayed fixed on the wreck, watching the blackened silhouettes spill from the Tiger’s hatches. He counted aloud under his breath.

“Four… three… two.” He stopped when one failed to rise. His lips pressed thin. “Every tank once,” he said softly, almost a prayer. “Every man, twice.”

Voronov heard him but did not reply. His jaw worked as if to grind down the truth — that even victory was counted in corpses.

Through the haze, movement caught Bargideon’s eye: Nadya, the medic, running with her canvas satchel bouncing at her hip. She skidded into the dirt beside a loader torn apart by shrapnel. With quick hands she pressed cloth into wounds that poured life with every heartbeat, whispering as though they were alone in a quiet meadow.

“You will live,” she told him, her voice steady as stone. “You will live because I will it so.”

The man gasped, caught between belief and pain. Nadya bound him fast, called for bearers, and was up again before the stretcher had lifted. Her eyes flashed across Bargideon’s for an instant — not seeking approval, only declaring that her fight was as fierce as his.

Bargideon dipped his head. “Saints,” he murmured, “come in canvas as often as in gold.”

Voronov gave him a sidelong look. “You are a strange man, Bargideon.”

A thin smile touched the Norwegian’s mouth. “So I have been told. Strange — but useful.”

The battlefield answered with fresh thunder. Through a thinning wall of smoke, Bargideon saw Yuri’s battered T-34 limping out of the maelstrom, a long gouge scorched across its turret. The hatch clanged open, and a hand lifted two fingers into the air. Alive.

Bargideon exhaled slowly, tension uncoiling from his shoulders like air bleeding from a puncture. “Signal the second battalion,” he said. “Hook left behind the bogged heavies and bite their tail. Keep the sun at their back if they can. Tigers don’t like to be hunted.”

Voronov relayed the order without argument this time, his voice carrying the steel of a man who had seen the outsider’s words bite true.

By noon the steppe stank of oil and turned earth. The sun climbed high, a merciless overseer, baking steel until crews wrapped rags around hatch handles to avoid searing their hands. Smoke hung in low skeins, tasting of burnt rubber and singed canvas, and the cries of wounded men rose like a counterpoint to the ceaseless thunder of guns.

Petrov’s sappers returned from the culvert, mud caked to their knees, uniforms torn. Artem limped, grinning through a mask of dust and blood. Petrov still carried the same coil of cord, now blackened and frayed at the ends. But Lev did not come back.

When Bargideon’s eyes asked the question, Petrov shook his head once. “Charge took him. Or a bullet. The coin lands the same.”

Bargideon pressed his palm to the sergeant’s shoulder — a rare intimacy, heavy as a medal. “He bought dearly.”

Petrov’s grin faded into something harder. “We all do.”

Behind them, stretcher-bearers trudged past with men wrapped in cloth that already seeped red. Nadya strode beside them, voice hoarse from shouting, hands stained to the wrists. She stopped only long enough to wring fresh bandages from a bucket of boiled water, then pressed on to the next moan in the dirt.

Voronov approached, his face set in granite lines. “We’ve held them for now. But if they find another seam—”

“They will,” Bargideon interrupted. He turned his head, scanning the haze where Tigers prowled just out of range, like wolves waiting for dusk. “Wolves test every fence. That is their nature.”

He went still, listening as the battlefield’s cacophony shifted in rhythm — German guns falling to a lower tempo, Soviet artillery answering with sporadic cracks. The lull was temporary, a predator’s breath before the lunge.

When he spoke again, his tone was not guesswork but certainty. “They will come at dusk, when the light is a lie. Prepare smoke and silence both. Let them think we have nothing left. When they commit…” He tapped Voronov’s map, scarred with coffee stains and fingerprints. “You will push reserves not where they strike, but where they hesitate after striking.”

Voronov studied him for a long moment. Suspicion wrestled with respect, then yielded. “Very well. We will do as you say.”

A stretcher party passed between them, boots dragging in dust. On it lay a burned tanker staring upward with glassy eyes, his lips moving as if naming stars that were not yet visible. Nadya jogged beside him, hand on his wrist, whispering words Bargideon could not hear but knew by their cadence — promises stronger than morphine.

Bargideon looked once more across the field, where smoke drifted in lazy ropes. Somewhere beyond, Reinhardt was arranging his pieces with cold precision. Bargideon felt the tug of that mind across the distance — recognition of another who believed war could be coaxed like machinery, but who mistook control for mastery.

He raised his binoculars and let the steel fill his eyes until memory painted another image: his father’s voice in Narvik, reading Gideon by lamplight. The words had been German in tongue but softened by fjords and mountain air, carrying a Norse cadence that wrapped Scripture in something older — something born of the same barbarians who had once stormed across both their lands.

Bargideon lowered the glass, a thin smile on his mouth that was not quite joy.

“Among wolves,” he murmured, mostly to himself, “the first night belongs to the patient.”

Voronov frowned. “What did you say?”

Bargideon slipped the binoculars’ strap off his neck and laid them on the table. “I said we will hold, Colonel. And we will make them bleed for every yard of earth.”

He looked once more at the men in the trench — the boys who shook but stood, the women who bound wounds with quick hands, the sappers who came back one short and did not count it as despair but as the price stamped on a receipt — and felt the familiar, unwanted ache. He carried it the way he carried everything: without complaint, like extra weight in a pack.

“Signal all guns,” Bargideon said. “We begin again.”

From his command Panther, SS-Obersturmbannführer Klaus Reinhardt observed with the dispassion of an accountant. Reports came in — culvert lost, depot aflame, flare captured. His pencil traced adjustments on the map.

“They are clever,” he told his adjutant. “But clever men leave footprints. Commit the reserve — not to the gap we planned, but to the hesitation they do not see.”

The radio officer blinked. “Sir, the trap—”

“Is theirs. And they are proud of it. Pride blinds more than smoke.”

He raised his binoculars, watching the Soviet rear unravel, yet not collapse. Among the chaos, one figure stood tall, foreign in carriage, steady as stone. Reinhardt’s lips curved.

“The one with the old eyes,” he murmured. “Yes. Let him live. A worthy enemy makes victory clean.”