The Rat Patrol 2: Desert Danger (3 page)

"Hold on," Moffitt muttered before they had advanced ten yards. "Got a bloody bugger here. Shall we see if we can find a way through to the left?"

The jeeps stopped, their running motors smelling hot. Troy moved cautiously over to the left and came up short. There was a telltale sink spot.

"Nope," he said and they moved off to the right. Moffitt found evidence of another mine.

They separated, examining the field for thirty yards in each direction and discovered that a line of mines had been laid about three feet apart, barring their way to the fence at the end of the garden. The obscured sky seemed to be getting darker and Troy glanced at his watch. It was 1630 hours. He lifted one shoulder and one corner of his mouth in an attitude that expressed no choice, sent the jeeps back into the garden for fifty yards, climbed behind the machine gun and exploded the two mines directly in their path. Then he and Moffitt went forward again by foot. Apparently the line of
mines had been the last defense because they reached the great tangle of barbed wire without encountering further planting. The fence looked impenetrable.

"What now, Sarge?" Tully asked, climbing out and leaning against the nose of the jeep. He twisted the match-stick in his mouth as he glanced up and down the bales of wire.

"Turn the baby around, Tully," Troy said patiently and laughed. "Here's one question anyway we don't have to answer for ourselves. Here's where we park the jeeps."

"Here?" Tully said and clucked.

"Right here by the fence at the edge of the Devil's Garden," Troy said firmly. "We'll take out the things we're going to need, throw the camouflage netting over them and take off on foot as soon as it's dark. This is the one place they'd never look if we are picked up. We've already got our getaway route right through the middle of the mine field. It's about as good as it could be."

"If they haven't got us spotted like bears in a berry patch," Tully said and something in his voice made Troy look sharply at him. Tully's eyes were distant and Troy followed their direction to a dune that lay ashy-colored in the late afternoon. A
thin
whorl of dust was swirling smokily from behind it.

"If they haven't got us spotted," Troy agreed.

The desert night was quick in falling and by the time they had thrown the netting over the jeeps, deposited small but essential pieces of equipment upon their persons and concealed themselves within enfolding dark robes and burnooses, it was dark enough to start the trek over the sandy swells of the desert to Sidi Abd. Tully had his Bowie knife slung at his belt while Troy had a kris with a ridged serpentine blade in a sheath. He touched its razor edge and grinned; he hadn't had a chance to use the knife since he'd taken it from a Malaysian he'd caught cheating at craps in Tangiers. Neither he nor Tully carried side arms although Moffitt and Hitch wore forty-fives beneath their robes.

"Watch the way you point that thing if you have to use it," Troy told Hitch who had left his glasses behind. "If you think it's a Jerry, give it a chance to say something in German before you pull the trigger."

"Hey, now, Sarge," Hitch protested, "I see like an owl in the dark."

"We shall use firearms only in a moment of extremity," Moffitt said mockingly.

"Yeah, like to save our skins," Hitch said.

They snipped a passageway through the fence with heavy wirecutters, bending the spiney strands with leather gloves so they faced into the desert and would not impede them if they came back through at a dead run. The wire-cutters and gloves were buried in the desert outside the fence. Silent, gliding shadows, they merged with the chill, black night, moving like tenuous clouds over dunes and through wadis until they came to a rise above the town of Sidi Abd. From a distance it appeared to be a substantial place for a desert village. They moved slowly forward toward the hunched outlines of buildings where most lights flickered feebly like candles, dimmed by the white brightness of illumination from a few places that penetrated the night until they could make out a thick plastered wattle wall of sunbaked clay that surrounded the town. There appeared to be only one entrance in the enclosure and at its vault an acetylene lamp was burning with a garish intensity.

Outside the walls, massed in two double rows, one row on each side of a corridor leading to the entrance in the fortification, were Dietrich's halftracks and tanks, massive and sinister. The halftracks lined either side of the corridor. The tanks were on the outsides and on either side beyond them were ranks of tents. All of the vehicles were facing out into the desert. There were a few feet between tails and noses of the armored vehicles and a tight passageway between the lines of halftracks and tanks. There appeared to be about a dozen halftracks and a dozen tanks in each column. It was a formidable sight.

"Hey, Jack," Troy whispered and Moffitt slid next to him. "Look at that. Sitting ducks. If it weren't for Wilson, we could blast Dietrich's whole armored outfit sky high."

"Perhaps we can accomplish both purposes," Moffitt said with a chuckle. "I have a couple packages, you know."

"Only if there's an opportunity after we come out with Wilson," Troy said sharply. "He's the first objective."

"Right-oh," Moffitt said softly.

Troy was studying the village beyond the wall. Solid groups of low white huts with several larger, more impressive structures were built wall to wall about a palm-filled area where the waterhole must be. There seemed to be a bazaar near the center of the town and one imposing two-story building at the intersection of two streets or alleys opposite this trading area. Moffitt had said the two-story building had been the palace of a strong tribal chief-tan and probably was where Dietrich had established his headquarters. The old palace was brightly lighted with what appeared to be acetylene lamps.

The sounds from the village carried to the dune, alien voices in many languages;, and above the voices and the shouts, Troy could hear occasional clatterings of machinery in motion. Even out here on the desert, the smells crept out—cooking smells, greasy and throat filling; odors of gasoline and oil of the fat lamps that burned in the houses and bazaar; and the lingering smell of war from the recently fired gun barrels. There was the not unpleasant odor of animal defecation but it was overridden by the rotten smell of human sewage.

"All right, Doctor," Troy told Moffitt. "Tully and I will slip into town through the gate. You and Hitch hide somewhere near the vehicles. Pick out one and be ready to grab it and take off when we come through with Wilson."

"I say, old boy, wouldn't it be better if I went in?" Moffitt asked quietly. "I speak most Arabic dialects, you know."

"That's why I want you outside," Troy said sharply. "If you're discovered loitering, you can pass it off. If you went in, there's the chance some Arab might recognize you from the trips you've made here with your father. Tully and I will locate the building where they're keeping Wilson and we'll do whatever we have to do to spring him. If we're not back by an hour before sun-up, you'll have to assume they've picked us up. If that's the way it turns out, you and Hitch go back to the jeeps and hole up under the camouflage until tomorrow night. Then give it a try yourselves. But remember, if you do have to come in, it's Wilson who counts, not us. He's the one we have to get away from here."

"Right," Moffitt said with a smile. "Well, luck and all that. We'll wait about here a bit until we see you're safely in before we drift down and pick out a vehicle for our departure."

Hitch popped his bubble gum.

"And you get rid of that gum, you idiot," Troy hissed. 

"But Sarge," Hitch protested, "It's all I've got with me." 

"Stick it," Troy said, "behind your ear."

Troy and Tully circled away from the dune and came toward the vaulted entrance in the village wall from the opposite direction. A corridor between the armor, ready for pursuit or attack, was patrolled on each side, and other guards were stationed behind the vehicles, between them and the tents. The two sentries in the dark way that led to the entry in the wall paid little attention as Troy and Tully, heads bent and faces concealed within their burnooses, approached the wall. At the opening, however, a bullnecked sergeant with a machine pistol blocked their way. He was carefully scrutinizing each robed figure entering or leaving the village in the light of an acetylene lantern hanging at the top of the arched entrance and he looked sharply in the direction of Troy and Tully as they approached him.

Troy hunched within his robe, head sunk between his shoulders until his burnoose concealed all of his face but his nose. He extended his hand from his robe and shuffled directly to the guard.

"Baksheesh,"
he wheedled,
"baksheesh, enfendi."

"Neiti,"
the guard barked, shaking his head vigorously and pulling back as if he feared that Troy might touch him.

Troy grinned behind his burnoose and entered Sidi Abd with Tully at his heels.

The loud-voiced, beery-smelling soldiers of the Afrika Korps demanded and received unquestioned right-of-way in the dark, cramped streets. Troy and Tully hugged the walls and they squirmed toward the bazaar. The village was drenched with shadows and only now and then did a little yellow light spill from some unshuttered window or uncurtained doorway. But at the two-story structure opposite the bazaar, light glared blue-white from opened doors and windows. A dimly lit restaurant or some kind of public house stood across the way from the large, brightly lighted building and soldiers pushed in and out the open doorway.

Troy and Hitch stepped back into the dark recess of a doorway next to the tavern and Troy studied the building no more than ten feet across from him. Although it did not bear the usual German legend proclaiming in great, black block letters to the world of Sidi Abd that this was an important post, Troy was certain it was Dietrich's operational headquarters. The acetylene lamps burning in the two rooms behind the windows on either side of the open entry hallway and the four windows at the front of the second story indicated this clearly. Through the vaulted first-floor windows, Troy could see tables and filing cases and on the far wall of one room, maps and charts. A guard stood at stiff attention at the entrance and as Troy watched, several officers entered the building. He could not determine much about the second floor but the position of four tall windows spaced close together seemed to indicate a single large room at the front of the old palace.

Unless Dietrich already had sent him away, Colonel Wilson probably was confined within that building. Troy smiled lopsidedly; all he and Tully had to do was get inside the building, find Wilson, liberate him and get out of town with him.

He felt someone looking at him and glanced quickly down from the roof of the structure. An officer with the peaked cap of the Afrika Korps riding squarely on his head was standing a few feet away, examining him suspiciously. Troy pulled his face inside his burnoose, took Tully by the hand and led
him
down the wall and into the tavern doorway.

It was a long and narrow room, a hallway of a place, murkily lighted with fat lamps that permeated the smoky air with their reek. Tables lined either wall with a cramped aisle between. Although the place was jammed with soldiers, most of them were concentrated at the far end where there appeared to be a small stage and entertainment. Several tables near the entrance were vacant and Troy hustled Tully into a dark comer.

Now he heard wailing music that seemed to be coming from some single stringed instrument, a piping horn and a muted drum. Between the shoulders of the soldiers, he caught flashes of a dark-haired, bare-shouldered girl who was convoluting and swaying. Troy glanced swiftly at the doorway and finding it empty, stood. From the distant brief views he had of the girl, he thought she must be French or Italian or even Spanish. She was not, he was certain, an Arabian girl.

As he watched, the music stopped abruptly and the girl disappeared through a curtained doorway at the back of the room. There was no applause although several of the soldiers shouted after the girl. Then they began to move back down toward the front of the tavern, not sitting at the tables but crowding toward the doorway. Troy and Tully withdrew into their comer.

There was the clang of a cymbal and the men still seated pushed back their chairs, rose muttering among themselves and drifting out with the others.

"Curfew," Troy whispered.

"That go for us Ay-rabs, too?" Tully asked.

"I don't know," Troy said tightly. "One thing for sure, it's going to make us conspicuous."

Troy looked back at the doorway, suddenly and decisively knocked back his chair and stood.

"I'm going to take a chance on that girl," he said and walked rapidly toward the curtained doorway at the rear.

"Won't you never learn, Sarge?" Tully moaned at his shoulder.

"When we go through the curtain take a quick look behind you," Troy said stepping into a dismal passageway.

Standing in the doorway at the front observing them closely was the Afrika Korps officer in the peaked cap.

3

Moffitt and Hitch
crouched motionless and hidden by the enveloping night in the sand beyond the double rows of tanks and armored cars that faced into the desert outside the walls of Sidi Abd. At the entrance to the town, the acetylene lantern was a bright blob of light in which hulked the outline of the guard. The light scantily touched only the hoods of the first two halftracks and the corridor between the vehicles became a tunnel to the opaque oblivion of black at the far end where Moffitt and Hitch lurked. A few acetylene lanterns burned within the tents that stood in taut ranks behind the vehicles on either side, but most of the shelters were dark. There was a tenacious impenetrability to the night. It was as if the clouded desert sky was an inky-colored sponge that sucked in and absorbed whatever light was spilled by wasteful man.

Although the sand still was warm from the diffused heat of the gray day, the night was cold and there was a faintly dank smell that seemed to warn of rain riding above the fat-sodden, slow-crawling cooking odors. Sergeant and private, Briton and Ivy Leaguer, scholar and school dropout, Moffitt and Hitch huddled in their dark robes and patiently observed the movements of the sentries about the Jerry armor. The patrols of each of the four guards had been carefully planned so that at all times there was one man, front or back, at each end of the double rows of vehicles.