Unfortunately, open seats in transport planes were limited, and the vehicle situation on the ground was even worse. Captain Ahrens had honestly begun to wonder whether he should just go alone and trick the mechanics into becoming his tankers.
Experience, however, soon suggested a better plan.
“What if I take a page out of the colonel’s book?”
Clapping his hands together, the captain negotiated with a mage battalion flying toward the vicinity of command on orders from the Eastern Chief Inspector. He was somehow able to convince the battalion to drag him and twenty tankers to where they needed to go.
The mages transported artillery gunners in Ildoa, or so Captain Ahrens claimed in a bold bluff. Usually, it would never even occur to an armored unit commander that a mage could carry a person easily enough. It took a commander from the Salamander Kampfgruppe, someone already up to his eyeballs in mages, to think up an idea like that.
In any case, by the next day, he had already stormed the maintenance base near command, seizing one of the technical officers and haranguing him to “lend” them their tanks. “What’s the issue? Just let us use them for a little while. We’re just borrowing them, that’s all,” said Captain Ahrens, dragging the poor, confused technical first lieutenant out by the shoulder.
“But, Captain, they aren’t our tanks to lend…”
“But no one’s using them right now, are they, Lieutenant? Can’t you see there’s a war going on here?!”
Fine. Captain Ahrens decided to change tactics. “These are vehicles that were collected from the front line and repaired, and are just waiting to be sent back in, right? In that case, why don’t I take them there for you?”
“And drive them around a bit yourself while you’re at it, I bet!” said the technical first lieutenant, with a look of exasperation. Captain Ahrens, however, shook his head with wounded pride.
“No more than minimally necessary for self-defense. Worry not, I am a veritable coward.”
“I’d sooner buy in to empty promises from upper brass than believe a tanker’s tall tales of cowardice and self-defense!”
“Please, you can trust me. I am just an honest, upright panzer commander.”
“Don’t give me that!”
“I asked before I borrowed, didn’t I? See, this is me asking! Come on!”
“What did I say?! This is exactly why I hate tankers,” cried the poor technician, but Ahrens paid him no mind, continuing to zealously insist he “lend” them the tanks.
Before the technician could answer again, their almost comical back-and-forth was suddenly interrupted by the sound of sirens. “The air raid siren?!” Their astonishment only lasted a moment.
Captain Ahrens and the technical first lieutenant, though from different branches, shared the same instinctual habits. They immediately called off their fruitless squabble and dove for the nearest dugout.
It was just a shallow hole, barely large enough for one person, but it was still far better than nothing.
In the middle of a bombardment, no one can help but pray that, whatever else happens, a bomb won’t drop on their head. If one had drunk down the cocktail—not so much of courage as of experience and resignation—one might also stare up at the sky on the lookout for enemy aircraft carrying possible payloads.
Captain Ahrens was a tanker. In other words, he was a creature used to riding around in the coffin of steel known as a tank. The obvious catch was that, even if enemy aircraft appeared, a tank couldn’t just run and hide. Spend enough time on battlefields where air superiority was out of your hands, and enemy aircraft became as loathsome to a tanker as an AT gun.
The enemy had firm control over the skies. Thus, Captain Ahrens—experiencing a strange mixture of relief at being hunkered down in a dugout instead of in a tank, and discomfort at not being surrounded by armor—expected to have plenty of time to settle in, stare at the sky, and curse the tides of battle.
These expectations, however, were not met, for Captain Ahrens then realized that something strange was happening. With nothing else to do, he stared at the dreaded enemy aircraft, which should have been striking them at any minute, until he noticed something off.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen that model before…”
There were no fighter bombers or the like buzzing across the sky at that moment—which was all well and good, but a heavy bomber could easily annihilate the roads with level bombing.
Neither prospect was great. Ahrens tried to make out the plane’s shadow. For some reason, though, as far as he could tell from this distance, although the plane’s body was squat and fat, it did not resemble any bomber he recognized.
Just as Captain Ahrens was thinking the plane seemed too large even for newer heavy bombs, he furrowed his brow, realizing that the enemy had begun to drop something.
“That’s falling pretty far away. Did they miss? It happens. But the fall seems unusually slow…”
As if it were a parachute…? Well, who knows? Maybe sometimes bombs are dropped with parachutes. But Captain Ahrens knew of something even more dangerous than bombs that could also be dropped from planes.
“What? No, that can’t be. Can it?”
Captain Ahrens’s education as an officer with the Salamander Kampfgruppe meant he was more than familiar with the ways a unit could drop in from above and lay waste to an enemy’s position. His experience told him that whatever was happening right now was very bad.
And as a veteran officer, Ahrens knew that allowing himself to become blinded by normalcy bias was a surefire way to get killed. His battlefield experiences had etched that fact into his bones, whether he liked it or not.
In the next instant, Captain Ahrens completely reversed his plan to wait out the attack in an air shelter and, as a veteran, began bellowing the alarm.
“Airborne! Those are enemy airborne troops! It’s a combat drop!”
The enemy was carrying out an airborne assault on command. Captain Ahrens understood perfectly well what that meant: a decapitation strike designed to take out Eastern Army Command’s head while it was in the midst of a large-scale operation. If that strike landed, it would be an instant knockout. Match over. Having been on the offensive end of such strikes before, Captain Ahrens knew just how powerful decapitation tactics could be. Now, finding himself on the receiving end for the first time, he trembled at the savagery of it all.
“All armored personnel, prepare to deploy! Don’t forget ammo and fuel, but prioritize getting those tanks up and running above all else! Get moving!”
At Ahrens’s command, the tankers leapt from their dugouts, completely undisturbed by the risk of bombardment as they began running toward the precious tanks, fuel, and equipment.
“Get those tanks moving! Hurry it up!”
They scrounged together cans of fuel and whatever ammunition they could get their hands on. “This should be enough to get them going!” With cries of excitement, the tanks began to move out.
Naturally, as a member of the Salamander Kampfgruppe, Lieutenant Colonel Degurechaff had instilled in Captain Ahrens the importance of playing by the rules. He didn’t forget his p’s and q’s before leaving.
“I’m borrowing these, Lieutenant,” he said. Emergency or not, communication and consultation were fundamental.
Unfortunately, due to a cultural barrier, this fine show of consideration on Captain Ahrens’s part was met with rebuttal—and even abuse—from the exasperated technical first lieutenant. “Borrow?! More like rob, you mean!”
“What? Clearly we are evacuating them in the face of enemy bombardment. This is an emergency, remember?” said Captain Ahrens, delivering his most reasonable and heartfelt appeal. After a moment of waffling, the first lieutenant in charge of the tanks reluctantly agreed.
“Well… Try not to damage them at least, okay?!” he sobbed. To which Captain Ahrens nodded in solemn reassurance, the height of sincerity and practicality.
“I will give it my most sincere, most serious, most dedicated effort.”
“Why do I not believe you?!”
This was a fine moment for Captain Ahrens and the on-site technical first lieutenant to reflect on the sad reality that trust can only be built upon a foundation of shared achievement and interpersonal relationships.
The technical first lieutenant took his position very seriously. He shouted warnings over the radio as the tanks charged away: “Don’t overestimate your armor! A lot of the tanks have been wrecked or blasted! Most of them have just been patched up. Even the running gear…!”
The radio receivers, at least, seemed to be in good order. For all their yapping, the engineers seemed to know what they were doing. Captain Ahrens stroked his chin in satisfaction.
“Not bad. Looks like it even comes with service and warranty.”
Patting the vehicle’s armor with satisfaction, Captain Ahrens broke into a grin and addressed the world, repeating his favorite phrase: “All right, tanks, move out!”