The Rat Patrol 2: Desert Danger (11 page)

"Give me another inch or two," he said.

Wilson slid his feet ahead, used his forearms to help his straighten and Tully did the same. Troy gripped the top of the wall with the lengths of his fingers, did a slow and trembling finger pullup, heaved and slipped one arm over the parapet. He got a grip with his other hand and lifted himself up and over.

"Whew," he said and lay on the roof, gulping air to stop the quivering in his arms. Then sitting beside the reservoir for added support, he threw the line, still looped about his waist, over the wall.

"Wilson first," he called softly and braced his legs. Tully must have boosted Wilson from his back because the unbearable, sweat-popping, dead weight pull of the lift lasted only a few seconds. With Wilson helping, they brought up Tully and then sat with their heads hanging between their knees until they had their wind back. When Troy lifted his head, Tully was studying the top of the reservoir.

"What's that?" he asked, pointing up.

A ledge about a foot wide extended skyward at a forty-five degree angle on all four sides.

"To catch rainwater," Troy said. "There are holes for it to run into the tank."

"You don't think they'll look for us up here, Troy?" Wilson asked. He seemed to be taking it calmly enough and for once, he wasn't trying to run the show.

"Of course they will," Troy said, "but it's going to be the last place they look and they won't search so thoroughly. Now give me a hand, Tully, and we'll see how our luck is running today."

He gripped the ledge that ran around the five-foot-high reservoir and swung himself on top of it. When Tully followed, they gripped the iron ring that was fitted into the cistern cover. After the weight of Wilson, lifting the concrete lid was like uncapping a bottle. Troy spread-eagled on the top of the tank and reached his arm into it. He did not touch water.

"Our luck is running," he said and grinned at Tully. "Now you hop in and tell me how deep it is. Wait, wait, I just remembered something." He pulled the rope up from the roof and slung it around his canteen. "Might as well fill up our canteens before you jump in the bathtub." He let the bottom of the canteen touch the floor of the reservoir, then brought the rope up and measured the wetness here on it. The water was about a foot deep. Troy filled Wilson's and Tully's canteens after he had filled his own.

"All right," he told Tully. "Get in there and sit down. Wilson, you hop in after Tully."

"We going to be able to breathe all right in there, Sarge?" Tully asked.

"It's not airtight," Troy said. "I told you about those holes for the rainwater."

"Uh, Troy," Wilson said. "You've done first rate up to now and I don't want you to think I'm complaining, but haven't you forgotten one thing?"

"What's that?" Troy asked.

"Once the three of us are inside, how are we going to get this lid back in place?"

"That could be managed," Troy said. "We'd leave the lid halfway in place and then a couple of us just edge it in the groove. But the three of us aren't going to be in there."

"No?" Wilson said with lifted eyebrows.

"No," Troy said. "I'm staying out. I'll be in the neighborhood. If they come up here and it looks as if they're getting warm, I'll hoot and holler and draw them off." 

"You're going to get caught, Sarge," Tully said.

"Probably," Troy agreed and grinned. "But there's nothing in my head that's worth a damn to them.

"There's one thing," Wilson said quickly and furrowed his forehead. "You know where we are and they'll try to beat it out of you."

"Don't let that fret you," Troy said sharply. "I'll say you went over the wall with two other guys last night.

"But when you do get caught, all you've done is delay the end," Wilson said. "We'll not get out of here."

"I'll do my damnedest not to get caught," Troy said scornfully and turned to Tully. "All we want is to buy more time. Moffitt will be in tonight. When it's dark, the two of you lift off the lid and come on out. Work back toward the entrance on the rooftops. No telling what Moffitt will try to pull but keep alert for him. Now in with you."

Tully lowered himself through the hole and after he'd splashed, Wilson followed doubtfully. Troy shoved the cover almost into place.

"Oh, Tully," he said. "You know what to do if they should discover you?"

"Sure, Sarge," Tully drawled. "I'll take care of the CO."

"Boys," Wilson said and although his voice echoed hollowly in the tank, it was choked a little. "I just want you to know that I've never seen men so devoted to their commanding officer."

"Sure, Wilson," Troy said and pushed the lid in place. He started to gather the rope around his waist and then grinned. Leave the Jerries a trail to follow and they would not think of looking in the cistern. He untied the loop from his waist and tied one end of the line in a square knot to the iron ring. He threw the rope over the wall and went down it.

Crabbing on arms and knees, he lay at the front of the one-story building and saw, striding from headquarters the same officer who had watched Tully and him at the tavern. The German's face was set and gray in the bleak light of morning. He walked rapidly down the alley that led toward the entrance. A guard was stationed in front of the German headquarters but there seemed to be no patrol activity yet.

Troy had no illusions about the hounds and hare game he proposed to play. He knew the consequences. He would be tom to bits if the hounds caught up with him and he did not propose to sacrifice himself if it could be avoided. He retired to the rear of the building next to German headquarters to study his surroundings and the course he'd take when the chase started.

The squeezed-in one-way passage below was littered with refuse. It was nothing but a common garbage can for the buildings backing on it, a contained areaway piled with the detritus of life. Crawling over the moldering debris were hordes of savage, snarling, skittering rats. The stench of the vermin and offal and rot lay in visible layers in the dusty air. To the left, down the passageway and across a thin street, lay the shuttered shops of the bazaar, corrugated iron frontings armorlike in the bluish light. The roofs to his right, some tiled, mostly coarse clay brick sprinkled with sand, lay like parched rice paddies separated by dykelike walls. Where the cul-de-sac resulted from the blank wall, roofs twisted around providing an open but hedged field that extended back over dozens of walls to the palms about the waterhole and common well.

The oasis would bear investigation, he thought, looking over his shoulder at the nylon line that trailed from the cistern lid, and then down at Tully's dark robe lying with the other discarded and useless rags at the end of the way. The trail was marked and the Jerries would follow it. If he was lucky, he had them off the scent. First they would investigate his own robe near the entrance, and finding nothing, push on with the search. But when they discovered the nylon line and Tully's robe, they would think they had uncovered the start of the trail and return to intensify their investigation of the area near the entrance. He grinned; he hoped they would.

He leapfrogged from roof to roof at the backs of the buildings, always wary although there was no indication that patrols had started to prod through the town. The inactivity disturbed him. The Jerries with their methodical, almost machinelike, thought processes were usually predictable, but Dietrich did not always fit the pattern. The Jerry captain was capable of extreme measures to gain his end and Troy did not think Dietrich incapable of razing the walled village, reducing it to rubble to regain the rich prize Wilson represented. Or—and the thought lifted the hairs on his suddenly chilled arms—had they captured Moffitt and Hitch?

He flattened on the roofs and moved like a leech.

It was perhaps a thousand yards to the waterhole in a straight line from German headquarters. Over the contorted tops of the buildings, it was more nearly a mile. The roofs, as he crept back from stores and warehouses onto the huts, became a squalid obstacle course, strewn with rags, with washings, with discarded implements of life, inhabited by chickens and dogs and on one a goat that resented the invasion of his arid pasture by a foreigner and protested in a plaintive bleat.

Among the scabrous trunked palms that opened their umbrellas above the muddy waterhole, a dozen goats were tethered, some horses and mules chafed at the meager fodder and an Arab family had crawled from a striped awning and squatted about a dung fire. More one-room huts lay beyond, their white walls lavender in the cloud-filtered light of morning.

Sidi Abd was awakening and a murmuring of voices became a babble. Robed Arabs squatted in the alleys to relieve themselves and Troy started back toward German headquarters on his belly over the middle of the dusty roofs where he hoped he would be seen from neither front nor back.

It was going to be another gray day and the dismal threat of rain nagged like a shrewish wife. If there were a deluge in the desert, the Rat Patrol would be mired and at the mercy of the Jerries even if they eluded capture in the town and broke through the walls.

An angry outcry, many voices raised in a wail of enraged complaint lifted in a minor chorus from the direction of the gateway, and scanning the roofs in all directions for posted sentries, Troy reversed his direction and twisted toward the principal alley of the town, the in-and-out route. He had precious little time, he knew. A thought had suddenly struck him that he had not considered before. German headquarters was the tallest building in the community. The Jerries were certain to man an observation post atop it where constant watch could be maintained on every roof.

The first Jerry patrols were in the town and soldiers in pairs with bayoneted rifles were rummaging through the houses and buildings. The outraged Arabs were massing in the tight streets, plugging them with their bodies, crowding the Jerries back. Troy grinned. It was not unlikely that Dietrich would have a native uprising on his hands before the day was over. But patrol after patrol was pushing through the entrance, and the Arabs yielded foot by foot to the bayonets. When an Arab lagged, he was shorn of his burnoose. Troy's eyes narrowed at the German procedure. The Jerries were driving the Arabs out of the buildings so they could be inspected without interference. When the Arabs had been herded into a compound, probably at the waterhole, each individual would be stripped of headpiece and examined.

Still the Arabs poured out until it seemed every alley within sight was a congealing, bobbing mass of shouting, shrieking Arabs. A Jerry discovered Troy's discarded robe; the natives were shoved away by stabbing bayonets.

Teams dived into every building in the vicinity and a Jerry appeared on the roof of the building where the robe had draped on the window sill. He considered the empty roof briefly and dropped back into the building. Troy scrambled away.

The cacophony of the raddled village swelled in Troy's ears as he scuttled now in the gray but open light of day toward some refuge, a place where he could hide and lie undetected, at least for a while. It was futile to think he could escape the Jerry net for long. He wanted some place within sight of headquarters, but far enough away to give him a running start. He did not think the Germans would shoot at him, a solitary figure. They would want him at least alive enough to tell them where the others were.

Across the cul-de-sac passage behind headquarters and near the bazaar, he found a penthouse, a good-sized crate which had housed some piece of German machinery and which some Arab had purloined for its priceless wood. It was upended but he turned it on its side, crawled under and pulled it over him. With the kris, his only weapon, he enlarged cracks between the planks on all four sides, making the peepholes facing the headquarters building and the bazaar across the street larger than the other two. It was a temporary hiding place, he knew.

The commotion from the far side of town grew in intensity even within the warren the hare had found, but patrol activity had not yet reached headquarters or the bazaar. He turned his attention to the bazaar. Shutters were clattering up and merchants were laying out their stocks of fine brass pots and scurvy tin trade goods, strings of garlic, herbs and spices, beads and calico, American and English cigarettes and Italian wines, pillows, pipes and pistols. Troy considered the bazaar thoughtfully. Behind the shops must lie a maze of living quarters and storehouses. He hefted a leather pouch of gold coins from his shirt pocket. Mad money. Escape money. Bribes. It was possible that when the time came for him to run, he could buy more time across the street. And then again, an Arab might take the gold and merely re-sell him to the hounds.

With a rushing roar like the outpouring from an opened flood gate, Arabs flowed into the bazaar, infuriated Arabs who had been forced back by the relentless pressure of the bayoneted troops.

Troy returned to the peephole that looked at headquarters. A Jerry was on the roof. Troy caught his breath. He had not expected the Krauts to inspect their own back yard so soon. The Jerry marched directly to the reservoir and Troy got his fingers under the crate, ready to lift, shout and run. The soldier grasped the gutter trough, swung himself to the top and stood upright on the middle of the tank, right where the lid with the rope was. White against white, the line had not yet caught his eyes. He lifted binoculars and started a precise scrutiny of the rooftops.

Troy pulled his fingers back inside and started to laugh. Tully and Wilson were safe for the day with a Jerry observer guarding them. They would be miserable, scarcely daring to breathe with a Jerry on their lid, but they would be safe. The observer would soon enough zero in on the crate as worthy of investigation and Troy would have to bolt. And he would discover the rope and the robe. And that would be two leads to follow while the skin withered and whitened on Tully's and Wilson's feet.

The observer made a three hundred and sixty degree cursory sighting of the town and returned to an object that apparently interested him. Troy's penthouse. He fixed his glasses on it and held them. Troy fought an impulse to pull away from the peephole. He had the feeling that the Jerry was looking straight into his eyes. Well, perhaps he was, because he put down a hand to jump from the reservoir and noticed the line dangling to the next door roof. The Jerry ran across the roof toward the stairway. Troy crinkled his eyes, slid his fingers under the edge of the crate and prepared to evacuate. The chase was about to begin.