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 corrected 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.