Last Citadel

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.

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