Peter Idone: Red Vengeance
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“As long as I continue to draw breath, my task is to put down that steel beast, Red Vengeance. If I must give chase to as far as the arctic reaches of the Finnish Gulf or across the blazing steppes to the Sea of Azov, I will hunt it down. I will remain on this side of the Dniepr until its severed hydraulics bleed and black diesel fuel gushes from its mauled, smoking hull. This is what I have sworn! Are you with me, grenadiers?”
With these words Captain Hans Falkenstein implores his small vulnerable unit of panzergrenadiers to swear an oath of retribution before embarking on a hellish personal mission of reckoning. As Army Group South retreats toward the safety of the west bank of the Dniepr River, putting everything in its path to the torch, the crushing weight of the Soviet Red Army snaps at its heels. And yet Falkenstein is determined to stay behind in an effort to destroy a mythic Soviet T-34 tank known to war weary German troops as Red Vengeance. As the Wehrmacht suffers defeat after imminent defeat, Red Vengeance is observed, lurking on the horizon like a predator ready to ambush and devour all those who cross its path. Falkenstein’s mission is personal since Red Vengeance had annihilated his reconnaissance unit on the Kalmyk steppe over a year previously. Emerging from that hideous attack wounded, and quite possibly deranged, Falkenstein seeks revenge for the unwholesome, almost joyous slaughter of his men. He believes that Red Vengeance is no mere machine but a construct of evil operating under the control of an occult force.
With the aid of his trusted bodyguard, Khan, an alleged shaman from eastern Siberia, Falkenstein endeavors to employ the shaman’s magic as well as the weapons from his meager arsenal in order to destroy Red Vengeance and put an end to the myth of its invincibility.
Although I have attempted to be as accurate as possible concerning the historical setting of the novel (i.e.) the retreat to the Dniepr and the scorched earth policy enacted by the Wehrmacht, I wouldn’t characterize the novel as strictly historical fiction. I began
September 1943. The Wehrmacht has instituted a policy of scorched earth in the southern Ukraine as it retreats to the Dnieper River. Entire armies, civilians, even animals are herded west to escape the onslaught of the Soviet Red Army. All but one man, Captain Hans Falkenstein, or “Mad Falkenstein” as he has come to be known, is determined to remain on the barren burning steppe in an effort to complete his singular mission. While the countryside erupts into flames Falkenstein and a ragtag group of panzergrenadiers, assembled from the whirlwind of a losing war, are pressed into service to help the Captain complete his cycle of revenge. Their orders are to hunt down and destroy the T-34 Soviet tank known as