Russians work, the clink of hammers and spikes. The rain had washed away some of the day’s close heat. He slept, and did not awaken until the train lurched into the gray dim afternoon.
* * * *
July 3
1845 hours
Belgorod station
At Belgorod, Luis’s mission dissolved around him. The rain stopped, too.
The company of grenadiers filed from the train and was met by its new captain. They marched away. The locomotive uncoupled and chugged off on a different line to lug another train back to the west. Major Grimm disappeared and did not say goodbye. Luis was not greeted by anyone, though the station bustled with people in uniform. No one came to congratulate him for arriving with the Tigers safely. He felt deserving of attention but was unnoticed.
The train yard was large and not ruined at all by bombs. He stood on the platform waiting, making himself easy to find should someone be looking for him with new orders and a pat on the back. He gazed over the skyline of the small city. Onion domes, crosses on spires, and water towers were visible against the overcast sky. Solid brick buildings without adornment made the character of the town humble and strong, Luis sensed it was very Catholic, and he liked Belgorod at the end of his long journey back into Russia. He thought this boded well for him. He cheered up and walked to the rear of the train to supervise the off-loading of the ten Mark VI Tigers, and the change from their narrow transport tracks to their wider combat treads.
He knew this work to be back-breaking; he’d watched the tan-colored Tigers loaded onto the train in Germany, and now the process had to be reversed. Crews of mechanics from
They stood admiring, heartened. Luis felt even better, because he’d brought the Tigers here to Russia, he had saved them from the partisans.
The Tiger crept down the ramps, screeching and belching, surrounded and welcomed. When it was flat on the ground, two pairs of mechanics hammered at the tracks on either side, to knock out one of the pins that held the transport track sections together. The mammoth stood fuming under their blows; the small sledgehammers insignificant against what this tank’s armor could withstand, the hammer strikes like petting strokes.
While the pins were hammered out, the crew assembled the Tiger’s wider battle tracks on the ground at a spot twenty feet in front of the tank.
Each cast-steel link weighed seventy-five pounds; the assembled tread would weigh well over a ton. A dozen men wrestled each link from the flatcar and hefted it into place, then pounded its pin in to join it to the whole.
Luis sat on a fuel barrel watching the mechanics; when their Tigers roll over a mine in combat, or lose a track to an enemy shell, these mechanics would have to effect this repair on the battlefield, under fire, or lose the Tiger. No one was better at this than the Germans, Europe’s greatest machinists.
Once the pins on the transport treads were beaten out, the tank rolled slowly forward, allowing the unhinged tread to spool out onto the ground.
The tank rolled across the earth on its bare wheels for a few meters, then crept up onto the new combat tracks. Mechanics on both sides guided the tracks over the sprockets with come-along rods. When the new tracks were in place, they were joined with the pins bashed back into place. The transport tracks on the ground were hooked to a tractor and dragged off.
The first of the new Tiger tanks stood ready, leaving behind an exhausted crew staring at nine more groaning flatcars.
Luis watched the off-loading of the second tank, wondering if the mechanics would be able to get them all on the ground and re-treaded by dark. The tanks had been his charges for several days, he’d risked his own neck to protect them, and he felt little pangs when they were started up, refitted, and driven off without him.
While the third Tiger was idling on its flatbed, another SS captain walked over from the train platform. He leaned against a steel pillar beside Luis’s perch. The man was impeccably outfitted, every buckle and strap gleamed. A cigarette was pasted on his lips, his pale blue eyes were hooded and sleepy. He folded his arms and crossed his boots, standing on one leg, spewing smoke, rakish.
‘What do you think?’ He spoke without taking the cigarette from his mouth.
Luis turned to the man, the only one to talk to him in the hours since the train pulled in. He was one of the German SS, wearing the lightning bolt runes at the collars. Between the collar tabs hung an Iron Cross First Class.
This captain was close to Luis’s age, the blond, lithe Aryan of posters. Luis felt something pleasant he’d missed for most of a year: He was drawn to another human. This captain was disdainful, confident with a cool carriage, the manner Luis considered best for soldiers and bullfighters. The man cut the figure that Luis imagined he would have without his wound.
‘About what?’ Luis answered.
‘The Tigers. What do you think? Are they worth waiting for? We’ve been putting off the attack until they got here.’
Luis couldn’t tell how to respond. Was he being baited into saving something negative? He didn’t know this captain; what was the man’s interest in the Tigers? Or in Luis?
He watched the next tank amble onto the ramps. The thing was huge, its cannon so powerful, the chassis and turret girded with the thickest armor of any tank ever produced. It would be operated by SS-trained crews. What did the Russians have to counter the Tiger or the SS? Luis envisioned the fire belching from the big cannon, Russian tanks bursting before it, Russian villages burning, his own hand - the old hand, the fleshy one - on the trigger.
Luis had arrived with the Tigers, defended them on the rails, and they remained under his protection until they were off the train and driven away.
He felt loyal to these tanks. He would not criticize them simply to curry favor. And he would not utter anything good about the Russians. Is that what this captain wanted him to do? Luis watched the man grip his cigarette between long, elegant fingers. He noted the band on the captain’s left cuff, the words
