Luchki lay fifty kilometers north of Belgorod. In the two hours he spent bouncing on a bench in the back of the four-ton truck, Luis saw a thousand charred vehicles: tanks, self-propelled artillery, personnel carriers, supply trucks like the one he rode in now, ambulances - there was no preference of army, both iron crosses and red stars alike blistered on their burned aprons. The ground had been torn up by mine blasts and cannons, creviced with abandoned trench works, and charred under the gusts of flamethrowers. Unattached wheels and spent shell casings were common on the ground, so were the dead, every human or mechanical bit of them seared murky by the heat of the fighting. The battlegrounds bumped past and Luis was surprised at how the natural colors and contours of the earth had been sooted over, as though the black German blocks of the big map were actually here pressing their shade into the world. He rode amazed at how even the immense steppe sky could absorb so much of man’s stain that it lost its own blue; it was blotched by the streaks of fighters and bombers, smoke from ruined villages and smoldering fields, flak burst in its deepest reaches. He recalled Breit’s cigarette cloud over the map and thought, Yes, that’s here, too. Calm hovered here in the aftermath of the fighting, but it was uglier than any battle, a scorched peace. Luis held on to the truck’s panels, eager to rejoin his division, where the battle took place and everything was not already settled.
In Luchki, he dismounted the truck. The Soviet farming commune was unrecognizable as having ever held the roofs and beds of people. It was a junkyard now, a vignette of the power that frothed when the two battling armies met on the field. Three silos lay on their sides, crumpled, riddled tubes. Fences and sheds, porches and painted windowsIIIs, were strewn flat in a jumble and crushed, nothing of the village stood higher than a hitching post. Luis smelled the battle perfume of petrol and gunsmoke splashed over the smashed slats that had been homes and barns.
Luchki was in the rear of Leibstandarte, in the shaft of the salient thrust like a pike into the Russian defenses by the SS divisions. The front lines were only eight kilometers away on three sides, surrounding all but the south where Luis had come from. Rumbles stomped back to Luchki from these fronts but the early morning had not yet erupted. Luchki filled with supplies of fuel and medicine for Leibstandarte. A battlefield armor repair station was set up next to an aid tent. Luis made himself known to a passing lieutenant. The subaltern directed Luis to the repair area.
Luis walked past men of every mint, clusters of fresh-faced replacement grenadiers just trucked up from the rear, filthy SS fighters slumped around their weapons. Outside the stuffed aid station were men cut in pieces, sometimes in half, groaning on stretchers. Soldiers in undershirts, white-skinned Aryans of long muscle and bone, formed bucket brigades behind the convoy to off-load supplies; officers in still shiny boots spoke in gaggles about what they’d survived out there on the battlefields. Luis overheard one of the officers curse Kempf for not protecting their eastern flank. Another wondered how the campaign in the north was going. Luis walked among them, knowing none of these men and everything about the dispositions of the battlefields around Kursk, not just Kempf but Hoth and Model and von Manstein’s progresses and failures. He was freed from the map room at last, but had not yet shed the knowledge of the map, the vast perspective, like a god sent down among mortals.
He approached the repair area, arranged beneath a hasty camouflage tent. Several tanks were under repair here, two dozen mechanics ministered to them, banging and yanking, clanking the blocks and tackles of mobile tripods to hoist heavy parts. In the center of the shop, four mechanics in rolled sleeves leaned on the fat handle of a jack to raise the immense side of the only Tiger tank under the tent. Luis walked close. He was astonished again at the size of the Tiger, while the four stout mechanics labored over the jack to raise the left-hand tread a few centimeters. One of the twelve interwoven bogie-wheels on this side had taken an anti-tank round. The mammoth Mark VI must have limped into Luchki to have it replaced. But the Tiger had to be lifted first; these mechanics heaved together, counting ‘Eins, zwei, drei…’
Luis walked around the Tiger, counting in its thick armor the scoops and punches from Soviet shells. The tank had weathered an excruciating number of hits. The whole exterior had been covered with zimmerit, an anti-magnetic paste made from sawdust that dried like concrete, to keep the Red infantry from attaching magnetic mines to the chassis once the giant tank broke through their lines. He read the markings painted on the Tiger: on the left glacis plate beside the machine-gunner’s portal was a horizontal bar topped with two vertical bars, the special signet designed by the SS to denote the battle of Kursk; on the turret was painted the vehicle code, S21. The ‘S’ signified a heavy panzer, the numbers denoted it as part of the second platoon, the first tank out of four. Luis thought this might be one of the Tigers he delivered to Thoma last week. He recalled the sight of the huge machines on their flatbeds, they’d been new and awesome, bearing the promise of victory. Now, to look at this Tiger after only four days in battle, it seemed to bear the scourges of a thousand guns.
When the mechanics had struggled enough with the jack, two of them stepped off to dab their brows while the two others wrestled with the bolts on the hub of the damaged wheel to release it. Luis was noticed now. A mechanic crammed his kerchief into his overalls and executed a quick dash over to Luis.
‘Yes, sir, Herr Captain.’
Luis could not break his recent habit of searching the eyes of every new man who looked at him for the first time, to ferret out what that man thought of the chalky apparition, the Spanish SS officer in front of him. This mechanic did not react to Luis’s gauntness. Good, Luis thought, excellent. The soldiers up here at the front are different from the cows in the rear. They don’t flinch.
‘I am Captain Luis de Vega. I’m taking over Captain Thoma’s company in the 1st Panzer Regiment.’
The mechanic nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’
Luis paused, to let the mechanic instruct him further, where to go, where the other Tigers of Leibstandarte were. The man said nothing.
Luis asked coolly, ‘Where is Captain Thoma’s regiment?’
‘They’re just south of Sukho-Solotino.’ The man turned to point northeast. ‘It’s about…’
‘I know where Sukho-Solotino is,’ Luis said. The mechanic lowered his arm and set his jaw. Luis did not care to mollify his tone. ‘This is one of Captain Thoma’s Tigers, isn’t it?’
The mechanic shrugged. ‘Yes, sir, you might say that.’
Luis saw insolence and was about to correct it, when another voice came through the hammering in the tent.
‘This was Captain Thoma’s Tiger.’
Four men advanced through the loose parts on the ground and the other noisy repair crews. They came dressed in Waffen SS blacks under cloth caps, slim and purposeful young men, walking abreast. Their strides as much as their insignia identified them. Leibstandarte tankers.
They stopped in front of Luis. All four presented the Hitler salute, that outlandish thrust of the arm. Luis returned the salute and felt asinine, the five of them forming an arbor of upraised hands. He lowered his hand first, the others followed suit. The tallest of them stepped forward. He appeared to be the oldest of the four, as well, perhaps twenty-two.
‘Sir. I am Sergeant Balthasar. We were Captain Thoma’s crew. Are you the new company commander, sir?’
These boys were stolid, Nazi dogs of war. Luis did not bother to scrutinize their reactions to him. Every chin jutted above the SS runes at the collar. These German lads knew their place well enough for Luis to have no need to put them in it. Yes, Luis thought, these fellows are of the right makings. Steel-eyed, puffed chests, godless hearts, each one of them was as deadly as a bullet, and Luis was now in charge, the one to aim and fire them. He was back in command.
‘Si,’ he spoke in Spanish deliberately, to announce to his new crew that he was different, he was exotic, he was not Thoma nor did he care to be. Thoma was dead.
‘Ja,’ he cor
rected himself in German. ‘Captain de Vega.’
Luis added nothing more for a moment, a little test for the four crewmen. Who would speak if not spoken to, who would scrape his feet with impatience? He cast his eyes up and down their line, their mouths stayed shut and awaiting, and he was again satisfied. Thoma had whipped them well. Luis mounted a cruel sneer for them and nodded, his first performance of leadership; the boys surely saw him as a bizarre-looking, extraordinary man. He let them have a first glance at the new power he brought to them, and to this scarred, apparently indomitable Tiger they controlled.
The next step was to show them his physical vitality; though he was reed thin he was still nimble and strong. He turned from the crew and swung himself up on the tilted chassis, leaping easily from the ground onto the fender, then climbed up to the turret.
There was an element of swagger in his swift motion, the crew were all young men, he drew hints of smiles. He started to step down into the commander’s open hatch, to lower himself into the Tiger, to give the appearance of inspecting it, leaving the four to wait on him until he popped back up. Luis had never sat in the commander’s seat of a Tiger. He would not tell the crew that, or describe the thrill spreading into his hands and ruined stomach. The tank was a brute - the crew were brutes, too - and they were all his. Outside this clanging repair tent rang the battle and the war and his redemption.
The Tiger reached up to embrace him with an oily, dark aroma. The jagged, close quarters welcomed him. In the padded seat of the commander, more than anywhere else in the world, Luis was not wounded, he was not ugly or woeful. He felt his lost wholeness returning.
He reached up to close the hatch door, to enclose himself in the Tiger and imagine what lay ahead in the warming morning. Above his hand, something was splattered in the workings of the round raised door.
Thoma’s blood.
Luis did not hesitate. Thoma was off the board. He wrapped his fist around the smirched handle and pulled the heavy door down. He’ll take Thoma’s blood back into battle for him, gain some measure of revenge for the man. This felt right. Luis sat alone inside the Tiger, with the mechanics pounding at its side.
As he expected, the Tiger was far roomier than the last tank he’d sat in, the Mark IV His commander’s seat was secured above the massive breech of the main gun. He set his feet on the turntable and could almost stand erect. Inside the cupola, his head was ringed by five thick glass vision blocks, each with a padded browrest. He leaned into them one at a time and peered into the tent, forward, to the sides, and back. There was his crew, in their tight little chorus line, still black-clad and disciplined. This added to his delight.
Below Luis’s feet were two more chairs. Directly in front and to the left was the gunner’s position, with all its firing controls and sighting and aiming systems. This was one of the great advantages of the Tiger, for German optics were the finest in the world. The gunner was expected to hit a stationary target inside twelve hundred meters with his first round, at two thousand meters with his fourth round, and a moving target under twelve hundred meters with his third round, each shell aimed and fired within thirty seconds. The gunner had at his disposal a hydraulic turret traverse and a handwheel for the final few degrees of accuracy. The commander’s position had only a manual traverse flywheel in case the hydraulics failed, but no access to the power traverse control. The designers made it plain that operating the cannon was the gunner’s job.
Below the gunner sat the driver. Luis craned himself lower to see into the driver’s position. The main features there were the steering wheel and poor visibility. The driver was only allowed to see the outside world through a narrow glass block visor and a periscope. No provision had been made for him to drive with his head out of the chassis. At the driver’s feet were conventional pedals for brake and clutch. To the right, across the bulk of the transmission and a shelf for the tank’s radio, was the position for the bow gunner/radioman. The bow gunner had a 7.92 mm machine-gun and a telescope firing sight. The odd thing here was a metal headpan, an upside-down cup at the end of a rod designed to rest on the bow gunner’s skull, so that he moved the direction of the muzzle with his head. When the bow gunner was not firing, the radio to his left was his priority.
Luis straightened his back and sat up in his commander’s seat. Beside him, on the right-hand side of the big breech, was the loader’s position. This chair faced the rear of the turret. The loader had the most room of any of the five-man crew, with superb access to the many rounds of the tank’s ammunition. The shells were mounted on horizontal wall racks in the compartment, five dozen rounds within easy reach. There would be more in bins beneath the floor. The rounds were huge, the sharp teeth of this Tiger, bigger than anything the Russians could hurl back at him. Luis tried to take one in his arms and almost dropped it out of the rack. He put it back gingerly, a little embarrassed, he’d almost fumbled it and let the crew hear him knocking around inside their tank. It appeared the Tiger had been reloaded, with a full complement of rounds divided equally between AP and high-explosive.
He leaned into the forward vision block, to stare along the magnificent length of the 88 mm gun. He relaxed in his chair, just for one more private minute, and breathed in the cave of the Tiger’s innards. He liked the arrangement in here; unlike the Mark III and the Russian T-34 where the commanders were also gunners, every crewman in the Tiger - like the older Mark IVs, with a five-man crew - had a well-defined task. The radio, all guns, the driving, each had its station. The commander had only to command. Luis, even without experience in a Mark VI, knew he could do that. He’d led tanks in battle many times. Command was his nature, and as soon as the mechanics repaired the wheel, it would be a nature unbound. He’d never had this kind of force at his fingertips - not in another tank, not in the corrida holding his banderillas over his head, not even in his fast knife hand. He caressed the Tiger’s thick hide from the inside, where he and his men would be the Tiger’s courage and anger. The partisan’s heartbeat still throbbed in his hand, but different now, encased in steel.
He drew a deep breath and put his hand to the bloody hatch cover. He shoved Thoma out of the way and stood in the commander’s cupola. The four crewmen below had not moved. He glanced down at the mechanics, they’d gotten off the bad wheel. The Tiger would be rolling inside the hour.
Luis climbed down and stood in front of Sergeant Balthasar.
‘I’m sorry about Captain Thoma. I knew him only a little. But he must have been a fine commander to bring you through like this.’
Luis expected this sentiment would dispose of Thoma and finalize his taking of the Tiger and crew. Balthasar said, ‘Yes, sir.’ The others made memorial faces. Luis changed his tone.
‘Now, Sergeant. We’ll leave for Sukho-Solotino as soon as possible. Which is the driver?’
‘I am, sir.’
A teenager with a big gap in his front teeth spoke, a corporal. He lisped his name and Luis did not remember it a second after it was said.
‘Make certain she’s properly fueled. Any problems with the transmission, the engine, anything the mechanics should look at while we’re here?’
‘No, sir.’
‘I’ll rely on that.’ Luis dripped a hint of threat into this remark. ‘Radioman?’
Another of the four straightened. Luis asked again if all was well. He repeated this query with the loader, Are we fully armed, machine-guns and main battery? Luis listened to perfunctory replies, marking each man in his head by role and not by name or rank. Driver. Loader. Gunner. Radio. There was no need for them to be men. They were tasks.
‘Gunner,’ he said to Balthasar. ‘Walk with me.’
Luis led the young man away from the tent. The sun climbed in the morning but it was not yet even eight o’clock. Luis spoke.
‘The crew,’ Luis said. ‘Tell me right now anything I need to know.’
‘They’re the best, Captain. Every one of them.’
‘Again, I’ll rely on that.’ Again the th
reat on the pallid lips. ‘You understand.’
The sergeant took this in. Luis saw and savored the impact.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘The rest of the regiment is in Sukho-Solotino. What’s the condition of the other tanks?’
‘We’re down to thirty-one Mark IIIs, thirteen Mark IVs, and seven T-34s.’
‘What about the other Tigers?’
The sergeant hesitated.
‘You don’t know, sir?’
Luis was aware only of what the map and messages had told him, the progress and location of wooden block armies.
‘Know what?’
‘We’re the last Tiger.’
‘In the company?’
‘No, sir.’
The gunner drew himself up, like a schoolboy ready for punishment. ‘In the division.’
Luis went stock-still, to keep from the gunner how this rocked him. He was about to join an armored division that four days ago had thirteen Tigers. Seconds stretched out while he stared at the sergeant. The wreckage of a dozen Mark Vis, invincible machines, would not play out in his head. Something was wrong. Luis couldn’t believe it was the Tigers themselves but the hands that guided them, into minefields, into ambushes, into indefensible positions. Yes, the Tigers were slow, and certainly there were mechanical problems cropping up here and there. But to lose all but one to the Russians in four days? No. Luis could not blame the machines.
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