The Rat Patrol 2: Desert Danger (8 page)

A heavy wooden door opened to the large room at the front of the building just beyond the head of the stairs and a hall extended to the rear of the building. Lamps were burning in the large room but it was empty. A lamp hung from a barrel ceiling about halfway down the hallway and under it a guard was sitting on the floor in a recessed doorway. His knees were drawn up and his head was slumped on his chest. His mouth was partly open and his chin was slack. He was breathing heavily. The guard's rifle had fallen to the floor and lay slantwise, almost beyond reach, in the hall.

Troy grinned; they had found the CO's cell. He pulled out his kris, motioned Tully on with his head and crept toward the sleeping guard. He reached with one hand to bottle the sound and directed the rippled edge of the kris at the man's throat. Tully waited beside him to drag away the body. At the moment he was ready to slash the knife across the guard's throat, the sound of pounding feet thumped in the hallway downstairs.

Jerking away from the guard who slept on undisturbed, Troy darted to the back of the hall with Tully at his side. He sought swiftly for a door to a room in which to hide, ran on past several when he glimpsed a door in the sidewall at the very rear. With luck, it would lead to the roof. At the least, it would offer a closet in which to hide. Troy pushed the door and turned the handle in the same motion and he and Tully found a steep stairway. He closed the door quietly and felt his way in the thick blackness ahead of Tully to a door at the top. He opened it and stepped onto the flat, paved roof of the building.

The back of the palace was lost in the night but enough light from Dietrich's office crept up the wall to silhouette the parapet at the front and a rectangular mass at the far side that must be a water tank. Troy and Tully ran across the roof to the far comer, cautiously edged up in the far comer and peered into the street. The Jerries had found Colette and the officer who had watched Troy and Tully in the tavern was supporting her. One guard stood with them. As Troy and Tully watched, Dietrich came from the building with a second guard who led Colette over to the tavern and left her at the entrance. The second guard trotted off in the dark, zigzagging alley, heading toward the opening in the wall. Dietrich and the other officer turned into the headquarters building, followed almost immediately by the guard who had escorted the wobbly Colette to her doorstep.

"Dietrich is sending for reinforcements," Troy said, stepping back from the parapet.

"Whyn't he use radio?" Tully asked. "Or field telephone?"

"He doesn't know who's out there or how many." Troy laughed softly. "He knows he's got a couple of us running loose and it's bugging him. How many are inside? Who's out there monitoring his radio or clipped onto his wire?"

"It's going to be a rough night on the Ay-rabs," Tully smirked. "He'll strip them all."

"All right," Troy snapped. "Now's our chance while we have just the two guards, Dietrich and the other officer to deal with."

"In a box like this we're still going to bust out the CO?" Tully asked doubtfully.

"That's what we came for, isn't it?" Troy said sharply.

At the bottom of the steps, Troy opened the door a hair at a time until the crack was wide enough for the pupil of his eye. Fuzzily he saw the guard who had been sleeping at the cell door standing erect at rigid attention. The other guard stood beside the door to Dietrich's office. He was faced straight down the hall. The door to Dietrich's office was still open and through it Troy had glimpses of Dietrich striding back and forth and heard his wrathful voice. With a steady, patient hand, Troy closed the crack in the door and led the silent way back to the roof.

"No good," he told Tully. "They'd shoot the minute the door opened."

"What you aim to do, Sarge?" Tully asked hopelessly.

"Give me the rope," Troy said. He fixed a loop around his waist and walked to the parapet on the bazaar side of the building, leaning over at the point he positioned the room on the hallway below. He squinted into the night until he thought could discern a blacker darkness that indicated a window ledge a few feet to the left. "You're going over the side," he told Tully, sitting with his feet braced against the parapet. "You're going to see how they've got the shutters on Wilson's room fixed. If we're lucky, you're going to open that room with your Bowie knife."

"I was afraid you'd think of something like that, Sarge," Tully moaned. "What'll I do if it's nailed shut?"

"Pick out the nails with your knife," Troy said.

Tully dropped his burnoose and robe, gave his belt a hitch to the side so his knife rode well to the front. He grasped the plaited nylon rope with both hands and eased himself over the parapet onto the wall.

Troy leaned back, legs riveted to the parapet and grabbed the rope, pulling it toward him to ease the strain around his waist. He felt the dead and dangling weight of the lanky Kentuckian in his arms, on his back, against his legs. He closed his eyes against the stinging sweat that streamed into them as the weight grew almost unbearable. And then, while the line remained taut, the weight on it lessened. Good boy, Troy thought, his toes have found the ledge.

Troy let out his breath and flexed his muscles briefly. From below he heard the rasp of metal and the screak of a shutter swinging on its hinge. It was strange, Troy thought, and then so abruptly that he fell backward on the paved roof, all the weight left the line. He sat up in his old position at once and almost immediately the line was tight. Now the weight was greater than he could resist and he felt himself being pulled forward and his knees buckling. He tugged at the rope until the muscles in his forearms and biceps knotted and cramped and then all the tension was gone and he fell flat on the roof. When he opened his eyes, a figure was clambering over the parapet.

"I knew I could depend on the Rat Patrol," Colonel Dan Wilson said. "Shove over and let me help on the rope."

Troy braced his feet flat against the wall again and Wilson grasped the rope ahead of his hands. Together they heaved back as the line grew heavy. Tully was laughing when he tumbled onto the roof.

"What's the joke?" Troy gasped and lay back, breathing deeply and trying to pump some air back into his tortured lungs.

"Take a minute," Wilson said soothingly. "Get your wind."

Troy bit back the words that sprang from his throat. "Let me tell you, Sarge," Tully said, lying beside Troy. "That window had been barred from the inside just like that garden door. When the Jerries fixed it up for a cell, they just moved the brackets and the bar to the outside." 

"That was a break," Troy agreed, sitting up and winding the rope around his wrist. "But I don't see it's belly-laughing funny."

"Look, Sarge," Tully said, still laughing. "I barred it again from the outside when I left. It's like magic. How did the prisoner escape from the barred, locked and guarded room?"

"That ought to bug them proper." Troy laughed shortly. "Providing we're not on the roof to give them the answer when they look."

Troy ran to the front of the building and looked down. No one was in the street and he heard no voices. He ran back to Tully and Wilson. Tully was back in his burnoose and robe. Wilson spun the wheel of his Zippo and sparks flew. The wick did not light.

"Put that away," Troy snarled. "Come on."

He jogged ahead to the other side and leaned over the wall next to the water tank. Gradually he was able to make out the dark surface of a roof below. It was difficult to judge but he estimated the drop at ten to twelve feet plus three feet from a hand grip at the top of the wall.

"I'll go first," he said, "and see if there are any obstructions."

"Why not secure the rope and go down it, Sergeant?" Wilson said disapprovingly.

"Because we'd have to leave the rope behind and I don't want any evidence up here that points to us," Troy snapped and went over the wall.

He clung to the parapet a moment and dropped, landing on a hard surface with his knees bent. He rolled over and came up on his feet, crouched and swept the roof below the water tank with his hands. Above, a figure leaned over the wall.

"Okay?" Tully called softly.

"Come on," Troy said, finding nothing.

Wilson fell first and Tully as soon as the thud sounded. Troy scrambled over to them.

"Everything all right?" Troy asked quickly.

"Yeah," Tully drawled.

"I hurt my hip when I hit," Wilson said.

"Walk, man, walk," Troy said nervously, helping Wilson to his feet. "Let's check it out."

With Troy at his elbow, Wilson tottered stiffly for a few feet and then walked almost normally although he seemed to favor his left leg.

"I can make it," Wilson said thinly.

"It'll walk out, sir," Troy said, grimly thinking, a bruise and he's going to be brave about it. "Let's move on. Over the rooftops to the hole in the wall."

"Used to be a cave we called the hole-in-the-wall where we hid out from revenooers," Tully drawled.

"Sometimes I wish you still were there," Troy said.

Although there still was no moon, the cloud cover seemed to be thinning and the walls between buildings and objects on the rooftops became distinguishable. No sound came from the squirming alley below and as they moved from building to building, now merely crawling or stepping over the walls that separated the one-story houses and stores, the entire Arab community with the exception of an occasional dog seemed to be asleep. Troy led the single file with Wilson in the middle. His slight limp had disappeared and Troy stepped up the pace until they were trotting, crouched, near the backs of the buildings. As they ran they carried with them the strange, dust-ridden smells of the town that had been cooked into the buildings for centuries.

The rooftops formed a strange geometric pattern as the buildings bent away from the bazaar like a cornered quarter of an octagon. Troy turned another comer and saw one hundred yards ahead the lamp burning in the vaulted arch. We've taken you again, Dietrich, he thought triumphantly.

Wilson and Tully came up beside him and he motioned them to crouch while he examined their situation. The buildings extended to about ten feet from the wall and then there was an open area to the base of the fortification. The wall was about five feet thick at its foundation and and about one foot thick at the top, a good twelve feet above the ground. With the clear space between the buildings and the wall, it was impossible to enter or leave the village without a scaling ladder.

The guard was standing in the middle of the entrance passage which was no more than four feet wide, too narrow to admit a vehicle. He was under the acetylene lantern and his broad shoulders were to Troy as he faced the desert. Suddenly the guard turned about, stepped out of the entrance into the town and a squad of soldiers came through, a tight two abreast, at double time. The first two men were carrying lanterns in their left hands and Schmeisser nine millimeter machine pistols in the right. The rest of the squad, about a dozen in all, were armed with Mauser rifles. All were wearing pot helmets and looked ready for combat.

The trotting squad pounded past the building on which Troy, Wilson and Tully squatted and Troy could hear the heavy breathing of the men scarcely ten feet below. The lanterns disappeared around a bend, the last of the squad went by and the alley again lay in silent darkness except for the lantern at the entrance.

"All right," Troy said. "Over the rooftops as far as we can. I'll take the guard and then it's over and out."

They worked their way slowly and cautiously and Troy poised at the side of the last building. He decided to drop near the back, edge along the wall to the entrance and pounce upon the guard with his kris. He had one leg over the low roof wall when he heard the rhythmic stomp of marching men again. He motioned Wilson and Tully to their bellies and flattened himself atop the wall at the rear.

A squad of a dozen men marched into the open space, an order was gruffly given and the squad dispersed, six men on each side, back from the alley and lighted entrance. They knelt there, rifles ready, Troy rolled slowly back onto the roof and swore silently, not in his mind but in his throat. Dietrich had them bottled up in Sidi Abd.

6

Jack Moffitt could feel the tension etching his face as he pushed with his elbows and pulled himself backward with his toes in the sand. He wormed alongside the tanks until the full length of a halftrack loomed between him and the vehicle Hitch and he had appropriated. Then he stopped in the deep black pocket, hard against a tank track, to consider what he must do.

What could have happened to Hitch was beyond his comprehension or imagination. He dismissed any idea that Hitch had wandered off to have a smoke or for any purpose whatsoever. Renegade, don't-give-a-damn, school bad-boy he might have been, but guerilla soldier he was also and one of the best. Hitch would not willingly have left his assigned position, which left the only alternative: Hitch had been taken away by force.

But how, in the few minutes between the time Hitch had crawled onto the floor in the front and Moffitt had slid from the back of the halftrack to the front seat, could Hitch have been spirited away without a sound?

The situation was so fantastic Moffitt could not believe it but he was forced to accept it. Accept it and look at it calmly, old boy, he told himself. Hitch is gone, you are not. Therefore, whoever nabbed Hitch is unaware of you. But he could not accept it calmly. Wouldn't Hitch have been marched straight to the guard? Wouldn't there have been conversation or at least an order that he would have heard? Wouldn't the sentries immediately have combed the entire area? Certainly there would have been a hubbub at the discovery of an American soldier, or even an Arab, hiding in a halftrack. Arabs? Were they the answer? Had the Arabs somehow taken Hitch to hold for the highest bidder?

There were no answers but one: whatever the odds, Moffitt had to remain, hidden and uncaptured, to be on hand when and if Troy and Tully came out with Wilson.

Moffitt ground his teeth in frustration and experienced a strange pressure that seemed to bind his head with bands of steel. He had to see, to know whether there was any unusual activity. He pushed away from the tank and burrowed under the halftrack next to it, between the caterpillar treads and front wheels. With his cheek pressed against the hard cold rubber of a tire, he looked toward the gateway of the town. The guard was within the shallow tunnel under the lantern in his usual slumped position, relaxed but alert, noting the sentry about-facing by the halftracks across the way. That meant the sentry between the tanks and tents on this side was in the same position and would be starting back down the line. Moffitt lay perfectly still between the wheels under the vehicle so no motion would betray him.