The crew laughed. By now, they all looked down on the nomads who smelled horrible, appeared sixty by the time they were thirty, scavenged the dead, and otherwise showed up out of nowhere to beg, steal, or try to sell junk.
“Them A-rabs don’t care who rolls through,” the loader said. “They just go on with their lives while we kill each other off. You tell me who’s smart.”
The tank quaked. Swanson’s big helmeted head thunked against his hatch. The man cursed.
“We blew a bogie wheel,” Russo blared over the interphone.
The wheel’s rubber padding had heated up, detached from the rim, and flew off into the dust. If the rough wheel rode on the track too long, the track itself could be damaged. It wasn’t a difficult fix, and Boomer carried spare parts like this. Plenty of spare parts, all manufactured to high design tolerances, was one of the things the U.S. Army was good at.
“We’re stopping at Kasserine,” Austin said. “We can hold until then.”
The men groaned. The bogie wheels were part of the tank’s suspension system. A rough wheel meant a very rough ride. Wade’s helmet banged against the ceiling.
“How far?” Swanson said.
“It’s at the end of this wadi.”
“That would be helpful if I knew what a wadi was, Sarge.”
Wade said, “It’s a valley that’s normally dry except—”
“Can anybody except Wisenheimer tell me what a wadi is?”
Too preoccupied with riding out the jolts, nobody answered.
“Like a peanut in a can,” Swanson growled as his head thunked again. He opened his hatch. “Screw it. I’d rather eat dust.”
That left Wade the only crewman with his head still in the tank. By the time the battalion rolled into Kasserine, he was nursing a throbbing headache. Russo changed the bogie wheel, Swanson and Clay raised the engine deck to add coolant to the radiator and clean the air filter, and Austin topped up the heavy oil and watered the battery. Wade popped a couple of aspirin and washed them down with swallows from his canteen. He poured more water onto a rag to clean the scopes.
Their work done, the crew ate their chow—franks and beans, which the men called Army chicken—in a hurry, eyes glued to the eastern horizon where a plane would come from. The Messerschmitt attack had stripped away a lot of their cockiness and replaced it with the heebie-jeebies.
Austin showed them a map. “This is us.” His finger moved. “This is Gafsa.”
“Good place for us,” Wade said.
The tank commander nodded. “It’s all about the roads.”
Gafsa was a crossroads town providing the ability to mobilize either to support the front line or strike east toward Sfax or Gabés. The capture of either would cut the German army in two, separating General von Arnim’s forces in northern Tunisia from Field Marshal Rommel’s Afrika Corps holding the Mareth Line.
“And that’s how we’re going to win,” Austin said.
Wade said, “The Germans aren’t going to let that happen.”
“According to the grapevine, the brass believes the Krauts are going to give the French a good drubbing up north.”
“Well, that’s how General Fredendall thinks.”
The commander narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean?”
“Fredendall learned everything he knows in the last big war. If he thinks Rommel earned his nickname the Desert Fox by trading jabs, he’s got a severe lesson coming. When it comes to mobile warfare, Rommel’s king.”
“Didn’t I tell you he’s a pain in the ass, Sarge?” Swanson said.
Austin raised his hand to silence him. “What’s the lesson, exactly?”
“That the Germans have air superiority and shorter supply lines. They have the initiative, and when they punch, they do it fast and decisive. They’ll attack through the southern passes to secure their communications. It’s what I’d do.”
Now the commander smiled. “With what? We outnumber them.”
Wade shook his head. “You don’t know Rommel. He’ll leave his infantry to hold Montgomery and bring up every tank he has from Libya.”
“I say let him,” Clay said. “Let him come right at us.”
“Give it a rest, Eugene,” Russo said.
“No, he’s right,” said Austin. “Even better for us. We’ll have the whole 1st Armored Division at Gafsa. If the Fox wants to do our work for us, so be it.”
“You scared of Rommel, General Wade?” Swanson said.
“I respect him,” Wade said. “There’s a big difference between fear and respect, even if you don’t seem to understand it.”
The loader scowled. He knew he’d been insulted but wasn’t sure how.
“I understand plenty,” he muttered.
“I respect Boomer,” Austin told his crew. “She’s a good tank and more than a match for whatever the Germans can throw at us. If Rommel wants to take on Old Ironsides, I’m looking forward to it.”
Wade hoped the commander was right.
They drove into Gafsa the next day and found a motley camp of French and American infantry and tanks sprawled around the town. They were close to the Sahara now, a land of wadis and brown mountains receding into a purple haze. The desert wind blew dust devils across the rough landscape.
They drove to their designated area in the tank park. Combat scars streaked some of the tanks there. They were light tanks, and their crews told one hell of a story. They’d been fighting in the north with Anderson, pushing ahead of the main body to raise hell. After surviving a Stuka attack, they’d blazed through a town, leaving the burning wrecks of armored cars and trucks in their wake, and took cover in an olive grove. When they emerged along a ridge, they looked down onto the plain to find a Luftwaffe airfield.
Being Americans, they charged right in whooping. The tanks rolled down the hill straight onto the airstrip, lighting up planes and mowing down the fleeing airmen. Ammo cooked off in the burning planes, popping tracers everywhere, while the fuel stores in the hangars belched massive fireballs.
“It wasn’t until later we ran into Kraut tanks,” said a bog with a big wad of chewing tobacco stuffed in his cheek. “They were Specials, Mark IVs with a long-ass barrel. They were knocking us out at three thousand yards, while all we had was our pop guns. We couldn’t hurt a fly past a thousand yards. We got our asses kicked. If the Brits hadn’t showed up on their flank, they’d have eaten us alive.”
“How many planes did you blow up?” Clay wanted to know.
“Maybe fifty or a hundred, I don’t know. Closer to a hundred, I guess.”
Which means thirty or forty, Wade thought.
“Wow.” Clay’s eyes shined with a crazy light. The kid wanted every gory detail.
Austin pressed for more about the German tanks, information he could use. Russo puffed out his chest and told a dramatically embellished story about how his M4 had knocked the tracks off a French tank with a single shot. The tanker’s tale had exorcised the heebie-jeebies. They were cocky again and hungry for glory.
Wade glanced at Swanson, who walked away toward Boomer. Whatever the light tank crew had experienced, the loader wanted nothing to do with it.
Looks like we have at least that in common, he thought.
Wade followed and found the man lying on the engine deck smoking a cigarette. When the supply trains had started running again, Swanson had scored a carton of Chesterfields and was finally able to give up his lousy homemade cigarettes.
“There’s a fair chance we’re going to die out there,” he said.
The loader cocked an eye at him. “Are you being doom and gloom again, or are we still being honest? Either way, you’re bad luck.”
“I don’t believe in luck. I believe in probabilities. If we’re going to survive, we need every edge. And that means we can’t have rounds jamming in the breech.”