At a remote site in Minnesota, filmmaker Kurt Carpenter has built a secure compound and invited a select group of people to bunker down until the worst is over. The world into which they re-emerge is like nothing they’ve ever seen. At first they think they’re the only ones left. But they soon find out how wrong they are. In the wasteland of what used to be America, their battle to survive is only just beginning.

One nation taking a desperate gamble of war.

Another fighting for survival.

Two armies locked in a bloody cataclysm that will decide history…

David L. Robbins has won widespread acclaim for his powerful and splendidly researched novels of World War II. Now he casts his brilliant vision on one of the most terrifying—and most crucial—battles of the war: the Battle of Kursk, Hitler’s desperate gamble to defeat Russia, in the final German offensive on the eastern front.

Spring 1943. In the west, Germany strengthens its choke hold on France. To the south, an Allied invasion looms imminent. But the greatest threat to Hitler’s dream of a Thousand Year Reich lies east, where his forces are pitted in a death match with a Russian enemy willing to pay any price to defend the motherland. Hitler rolls the dice, hurling his best SS forces and his fearsome new weapon, the Mark VI Tiger tank, in a last-ditch summer offensive, code-named Citadel.

The Red Army around Kursk is a sprawling array of infantry, armor, fighter planes, and bombers. Among them is an intrepid group of women flying antiquated biplanes; they swoop over the Germans in the dark, earning their nickname, “Night Witches.” On the ground, Private Dimitri Berko gallops his tank, the Red Army’s lithe little T-34, like a Cossack steed. In the turret above Dimitri rides his son, Valya, a Communist sergeant who issues his father orders while the war widens the gulf between them. In the skies, Dimitri’s daughter, Katya, flies with the Night Witches, until she joins a ferocious band of partisans in the forests around Kursk. Like Russia itself, the Berko family is suffering the fury and devastation of history’s most titanic tank battle while fighting to preserve what is sacred–their land, their lives, and each other–as Hitler flings against them his most potent armed force.

Inexorable and devastating, a company of Mark VI Tiger tanks is commanded by one extraordinary SS officer, a Spaniard known as la Daga, the Dagger. He’d suffered a terrible wound at the hands of the Russians: now he has returned with a cold fury to exact his revenge. And above it all, one quiet man makes his own plan to bring Citadel crashing down and reshape the fate of the world.

A remarkable story of men and arms, loyalty and betrayal, Last Citadel propels us into the claustrophobic confines of a tank in combat, into the tension of guerrilla tactics, and across the smoking charnel of one of history’s greatest battlefields. Panoramic, authentic, and unforgettable, it reverberates long after the last cannon sounds.

DEATH FROM THE SKIES

Geronimo raised his hand over his eyes and squinted. “What are those things attached to the bottom of its wings?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Blade said, and saw the aircraft arc into the heavens again. As it did, a small spherical object dropped from the right wing directly toward them. Blade’s intuition flared, and he gave his friends a shove. “Into the forest! Move!”

Confused, Geronimo and Hickok nonetheless trusted the giant’s judgment enough to obey him instantly and without question. They darted to the northwest.

Blade raced on their heels, his gray eyes glued to the spherical object.

When it was 15 feet from the soil, he threw himself to the ground and bellowed, “Get down!”

Again the pair complied, and not a moment too soon. For when they hit the ground, a blast with the force of a quarter-ton of dynamite rent the air and rocked the ground…