During the run-up to the beach, Richard Paterson Sawyer was making ready the tank's snorkel as Adrian was busy affixing the exhaust-plate to keep the seawater from backflooding the engine. Thus, their tank would be able to ford through the waves up to five meters deep, although they'd hoped they would never need to worry about anything deeper than the four meter draught of their landing-craft, accidents have historically happened, and helping push the landing-craft free if the beach back out to sea as the last tank out would be their responsibility. As a beached LST would prove quite the valuable and inviting target.

Further assisting the tank in its role of preventing any of the other tanks foundering in the sand, including themselves, were a pair of un-ditching logs strapped fore and aft of the tank to be secured to the treads for added traction if necessary.

Inside the tank, Marly their gunner was already sulking and keeping busy with the gunner's optics and general state of the tank's interior while everyone was making final outside preparations.


Sitting atop the turret, Captain Grable looked up from his map and at the helicopters as they made their run and came back to tip their rotors to the side indicating good suppression of the bay's naval assets. He gave a re-assured nod at them before going back over the map, trying to find good positions, vantage-points, and other points of interest they should focus on reaching if they wished to survive the mission.

Soon it was time, and Marly thumped the turret roof with a wrench to tell Marcus to patch into the intercom as Maddie gave their pep-talk and Adrian lept into the driver's position and revved the engine to keep the manifold pressure high enough for the exhaust system to work as Richard became seated himself and closed his hatch. Marcus hesitated a moment as he watched Ash performing some strange ritual on a Patton tank, but had more important things to worry about than witchcraft; in this business, sometimes it paid to be a little supersticious.

When the ramp dropped, all tanks gunned their engines and everyone at the back of the boat could feel the hull groan as all that mass shifted forwards and suddenly off from the ship, their tank following the K2 and the self propelled artillery into the surf just as the ramp was closing. By now the beach defenses had come alive and the team went into action.

"Driver, smoke! Loader, manual ejection. Gunner, HE, trenches, 100, coax and ricochet." Marcus bellowed orders in rapid succession as Adrian injected raw fuel into the exhaust to create a plume of thick low-hanging smoke to surround the landing-craft while Richard quickly disabled the shell-ejection port and slammed in an delay-fuzed HE round which Marly lined up and shot into an otherwise inconspicous stretch of trench that looked perfect for an RPG team to hide in, penetrating into the sand and blowing up inside the bottom of their foxhole, followed by some .30 caliber machine gun rounds and another delay-fuzed shell that bounced off the sand before exploding, cutting down any defenders who'd suddenly lost their nerve and tried to flee. The two shell-casing clattered to the floor, filling the tank with acrid fumes as Marly continued to mow the defenders down with her .30 caliber machine-gun.

"Driver, reverse, easy." Marcus's order was non-standard, but Adrian complied, and the sudden jolt and shudder of bumping fender-to-fender with their landing-craft and pushing it off against the sand until the silent sound of freedom and waves lapping over the hull could be heard.

"Driver, advance!"

Some time later, as Adrian's vision periscope cleared from the surf, he chimed in "Surf clear" and Richard promptly ejected the tank's snorkel and reactivated the auto-ejector for the tank's main gun. Adrian also was quick to open the radiator-vents to keep the tank from overheating now that it wasn't being cooled by copious amounts of seawater as it took up position besides Itonhide and Marcus poked his head out as the SPG was laying down a defensive smoke-screen and 30mm covering-fire. He clanged on their hull with his Uzi to get their attention, Richard also unbuttoned from the tank to man the tank's grenade-launcher as Marly switched to the mantlet-mounted 14.5mm KPV machine-gun to make swiss-cheese of the nearby concrete bunkers.

It was here, at this moment, when Marcus calmly handed 'Anakin' a grilled cheese sandwich, smiled, nodded, and ordered the tank to move forwards once more as the crew buttoned-up once again.