Then why aren’t you out tending to your landcruiser? Ussmak thought. But that wasn’t something he could say, not to his new commander. Instead, he answered, “Boredom I know all about, superior sir. I just spent a good long while in a hospital ship, recovering from radiation sickness. There were times when I thought I’d been in that cubicle forever.”
“Yes, that could be bad, just staring at the metal walls,” Hessef agreed. “Still, though, I think I’d sooner stay in a hospital ship than in this ugly brick shed that was never made for our kind.” He waved to show what he meant. Ussmak had to agree: the barracks was indeed a dismal place. He suspected even Big Uglies would have found themselves bored here.
“How did you get through the days?” Tvenkel asked. “Recovering from sickness makes time pass twice as slowly.”
“For one thing, I have every video from the hospital ship’s library memorized,” Ussmak said, which drew a laugh from his new crewmales. “For another-” He stopped short. Ginger was against regulations. He didn’t want to make the commander and gunner aware of his habit.
“Here, drop your gear on this bed by ours,” Hessef said “We’ve been saving it against the day when we’d be whole again.”
Ussmak did as he was asked. The other two males crowded close around him, as if to create the unity that held a good landcruiser crew together. The rest of the males in the barracks looked on from a distance, politely allowing Ussmak to bond with his new comrades before they came forward to introduce themselves.
Quietly, Tvenkel said, “You may not know it, driver, but the Big Uglies have an herb that makes life a lot less boring. Would you care to try a taste, see what I mean?”
Ussmak’s eyes both swung abruptly, bored into the gunner. He lowered his voice, too. “You have-ginger?” He hesitated before he named the precious powder.
Now Tvenkel and Hessef stared at him. “You know about ginger?” the landcruiser commander whispered. His mouth fell open in an enormous grin.
“Yes I know about ginger. I’d love a taste, thanks.” Ussmak wanted to caper like a hatchling. Instead, the three males looked at each other for a long time, none of them saying anything. Ussmak broke the silence: “Superior sirs, I think we’re going to be an outstanding crew.”
Neither commander nor gunner argued with him.
The big Maybach engine coughed, sputtered, died. Colonel Heinrich Jager swore and flipped up the Panther D’s cupola. “More than twice the horsepower of my old Panzer III,” he grumbled, “and it runs less than half as often.” He pulled himself out, dropped down to the ground.
The rest of the crew scrambled out, too. The driver, a big sandy-haired youngster named Rolf Wittman, grinned impudently. “Could be worse, sir,” he said. “At least it hasn’t caught fire the way a lot of them do.”
“Oh, for the blithe spirit of the young,” Jager said, acid in his voice. He wasn’t young himself. He’d fought in the trenches in the First World War, stayed in the Weimar Republic’s Reichswehr after it was over. He’d switched over to panzers as soon as he could after Hitler began rearming Germany, and was commanding a company of Panzer IIIs in the Sixteenth Panzer Division south of Kharkov when the Lizards came.
Now, at last, the Reich had made a machine that might make the Lizards sit up and take notice when they met it. Jager had killed a Lizard tank with his Panzer III, but he was the first to admit he’d been lucky. Anybody who came out alive, let alone victorious, after a run-in with Lizard armor was lucky.
The Panther he now stood beside seemed decades ahead of his old machine. It incorporated all the best features of the Soviet T-34-thick sloped armor, wide tracks, a powerful 75mm gun-into a German design with a smooth suspension, an excellent transmission, and better sights and gun control than Jager had ever imagined before.
The only trouble was, it was a brand-new German design. Bumping up against the T-34 and the even heavier KV-l in 1941 had been a nasty surprise for the Wehrmacht The panzer divisions had held their own through superior tactics and started upgunning their Panzer IIIs and IVs, but getting better tanks became urgent. When the Lizards arrived, urgent turned mandatory.
And so development had been rushed, and the Panther, powerful machine that it was, conspicuously lacked the mechanical reliability that characterized older German models. Jager kicked at the overlapping road wheels that carried the tracks. “This panzer might as well have been built by an Englishman,” he growled. He knew no stronger way to condemn an armored fighting vehicle.
The rest of the crew leaped to their panzer’s defense. “It’s not as bad as that, sir,” Wittman said.
“It has a real gun in it, by Jesus,” added Sergeant Klaus Meinecke, “not one of the peashooters the English use.” The gun was his responsibility; he sat to Jager’s right in the turret, on a chair that looked like a black-leather-covered hockey puck with a two-slat back.
“Having a real gun doesn’t matter if we can’t get to where we’re supposed to use it,” Jager retorted. “Let’s fix this beast, shall we, before the Lizards fly by and strafe us.”
That got the men moving in a hurry. Attack from the air had been frightening enough when it was a Shturmovik with red stars painted on wings and fuselage. It was infinitely worse now; the rockets the Lizards fired hardly ever missed.
“Probably the fuel lines again,” Wittman said, “or maybe the fuel pump.” He rummaged in one of the outside stowage bins for a wrench, attacked the bolts that held the engine louvers onto the Panther’s rear deck.
The crew was a good one, Jager thought. Only veterans, and select veterans at that, got to handle Panthers: no point in frittering away the important new weapon by giving it to men who couldn’t get the most out of it.
Klaus Meinecke grunted in triumph. “Here we go. This gasket in the pump is kaput. Do we have a spare?” More rummaging in the bins produced one. The gunner replaced the damaged part, screwed the top back onto the fuel pump case, and said, “All right, let’s start it up again.”
The crew had to take off the jack to get at the starter dog clutch. “That’s poor design,” Jager said, and pulled a piece of paper and pencil out of a pocket of his black panzer crewman’s tunic. Why not stow jack vertically between exhausts, not horizontally below them? he scribbled.
Cranking up the Panther was a two-man job. Wittman and Meinecke did the honors. The engine belched, farted, and came back to life. After handshakes all around, the crew climbed back into the machine and rolled on down the road.
“We’ll want to look for a good patch of woods where we can take cover for the night,” Jager said. Such a patch might be hard to find. He checked his map. They were somewhere between Thann and Belfort, heading down to try to hold the Lizards away from the latter strategic town.
Jager stuck his head out of the drum-shaped cupola. If he was where he thought he was-He nodded, pleased with his navigation. There ahead stood Rougement-le-Chateau, a Romanesque priory now in picturesque ruin. Navigating through the rugged terrain of Alsace and the Franche-Comte was a very different business from getting around on the Ukrainian steppe, where, as on the sea, you picked a compass heading and followed it. If you got lost here, heading across country wasn’t so easy. More often than not, you had to back up and retrace your path by road, which cost precious time.
The woods were still leafless, but Jager found a spot where bare branches interlaced thickly overhead. Behind scattered clouds, the pale winter sun was low in the west. “Good enough,” he said, and ordered Wittman to pull off the road and conceal the Panther from prying eyes in the sky.
Within the next half hour, four more tanks-another Panther, two of the new Panzer IVs with relatively light protection but a long 75mm gun almost as good as the Panther’s, and a huge Tiger that mounted an 88 and armor poorly sloped but so thick and heavy that it made the panzer slower than it should have been-joined him there. The crews swapped rations, spare parts, and lies. Somebody had a deck of cards. They played skat and poker till it got too dark to see.