The Sand Panthers (11 page)

Ger-man soldier plenty mon-ey

Me no jigajag for you no more.’

This time Slaughter did not attempt to steal into Mustafa Barracks. He had no time. Instead he showed his pass and was allowed through immediately, followed by the boy. They passed a pile of secret documents being burnt on the parade ground under the supervision of grim-faced Redcaps. Obviously Mustafa Barracks was preparing for the worst.

*  *  *

Five minutes in the echoing anteroom opposite Brigadier Young’s office told Slaughter that the base wallahs had little confidence in the new Commander’s ability to win the impending battle. Immaculate staff officers hurried to and fro with anxious drawn faces, speaking in grave whispers, and from behind one of the closed office doors, he could hear a petulant upper-class voice saying: ‘But it is as clear as the nose on your face, old chap. The wogs are ready to rise up at any moment. There’ll be blood in the streets before this week is out. Believe you me.’

Finally Brigadier Young was ready to receive him. Slaughter strode into the big airless room. Young looked much older than when he had last seen him. There were dark blue circles under his eyes and there was a nervous tic in his left cheek which he seemed unable to control.

‘Good to see you again, Slaughter,’ he said without conviction, his voice slightly unsteady, ‘and your news?’

‘The Jerries have broken through the Great Sano Sea. My boys and I failed to stop them at the Ascent. For all I know they are now heading for the coast.’

Brigadier Young looked at the ragged little Intelligence man aghast. ‘Oh, my God,’ he groaned. ‘How many, in heaven’s name?’

‘Perhaps a couple of hundred of them, at the most, sir. But I counted at least a dozen Mark IVs.’

‘Christ! Not even the new Sherman can stand up to that monster.’ Young stopped and thought for a moment. ‘But I say, Slaughter,’ he said, a little more cheerfully, ‘a company or two of Jerry infantry, even if they are supported by tanks, can’t do that much, can they?’

‘I’m afraid they can!’ Slaughter said severely. There were too many officers in the Delta like Brigadier Young, who invariably misread the situation in Egypt. One day, if they weren’t careful, they’d lose not only Egypt but the whole of the Middle East because of it.

‘As far as the Gippos are concerned, the Germans are simply cannon-fodder. They are expendable. But let them appear in Cairo or here in Alex and be shot to pieces by our chaps, and they’ll be the symbol the plotters need to rouse the students and fellaheen. Thereafter the Germans can disappear from the scene.’ He pressed home his point brutally. ‘Let that armour appear in the centre of Cairo – and it’s my guess that is where they are heading – for one single hour, and we’ll have a revolution on our hands. The Eighth will be stabbed in the back and, within a week, Rommel will be on the Nile.’

Brigadier Young gave a groan and let his greying bead sink into his hands in a gesture of utter defeat. ‘What can we do?
My God, what can we do?
’ he gasped. Suddenly his body was racked by a sob.

Slaughter looked at the Brigadier’s heaving shoulders with contempt. He and his boys had more guts than all these big tough he-men, who broke down like women once real trouble started.

‘What can we do?’ he echoed, iron in his voice. ‘This is what
you
can do. You can give me the forty odd SAS men you still have here at Mustafa.’

Brigadier Young raised his head slowly. ‘But what good are a couple of score men, even if they are from the Special Air Service?’ he asked in a voice thick with emotion.

Slaughter leaned forward across the big desk and told him in an urgent flow of words. When he was finished, he looked eagerly at the Brigadier. ‘Well, sir, what do you think?’

‘But my God, Slaughter,’ Young protested. ‘I’m a British officer, you’re a British officer. We can’t condone –
murder!
’

Slaughter’s eyes blazed. ‘Listen, Young,’ he snarled, dropping all pretence of military courtesy. ‘If we lose the British Empire, it will be because of people like you. Our forefathers – the men who gained the Empire for us – were ruthless, brutal, unscrupulous thieves and murderers, whose sole morality was – what is good for England is good. This time if the Germans break though the Delta, they will undoubtedly capture the Suez Canal. When that goes there’ll be nothing to stop them until they reach India and you know what desperate straits we are in there due to Jap pressure. Failure this time could well mean the end of the British Empire.’

‘
The end of the British Empire!
’ Young breathed.

‘Yes.’ Slaughter pressed home his point, forcing a smile although he had never felt less like smiling in all his life. ‘Look at it this way, sir. One day we’ll order another Scotch in some London pub and paint up this bitch of a war in such wondrous colours that she’ll look like a latterday saint. The real, nasty bitch will be forgotten. But first we’ve got to win it! Then what we
have
to do this month no-one will want to remember.’ Slaughter’s fake smile vanished. ‘Do I get those SAS men, sir?’

Brigadier Young gave in. With a hand that shook, he picked up his bell. ‘You get them, Slaughter…. But for God’s sake, never let me see your face in this office again…’

The SAS man’s big ammo boot crashed against the door. The wood around the lock splintered and gave and they moved in. Two of them, with Slaughter bringing up the rear, crashed into the hail, slithering on the tiled floor. From upstairs there were cries of alarm. A woman shouted something in Arabic. When there was no answer she repeated her demand in atrocious French.

Slaughter nodded. The two big SAS men raced up the marble steps. From above there came the sound of cries, blows, and curses. ‘Is this him, sir?’ the SAS Corporal demanded, thrusting their prisoner to the edge of the decorative iron-work.

Slaughter stared up at the trembling face of the man in the striped lounging pyjamas, which the richer Egyptians liked to wear in the afternoon. ‘That’s him,’ he snapped. The Egyptian politician seemed suddenly to realize what they were going to do. ‘No, no, please,’ he cried in English. ‘I have wife, I have children.
No…no…
’ His pleas ended in a howl of pain as the other SAS man rammed the butt of his sten onto his fat brown fingers, clinging desperately to the rail. The next moment the two of them seized him and tossed him down into the hall below. He screamed and hit the marble floor like a sack of wet cement. His spine snapped audibly and his head twisted at an impossible angle. Slaughter knelt down swiftly, while the two SAS men clattered down the stairs. ‘Dead,’ he announced.

‘Come on,’ the big Corporal said. ‘Let’s beat it before the Gippo rozzers turn up!’

They ran out of the open door, leaving behind the silence of death.

*  *  *

‘
But I am a doctor
,’ the Egyptian protested across the metal table, littered with gleaming instruments of his calling. ‘I am not interested in politics. None of us here is interested in politics, simply in medicine.’

Hastily Slaughter checked his list. ‘You are all traitors and terrorists,’ he announced. ‘You, Dr Ali Hamshari, Dr Abdel Shibi and Dr Mustafa Hafez.’

The young bespectacled Egyptian doctor knew he was trapped. The clinic was packed with illegal explosives and by now the British rummaging around below must have found them. ‘We are patriots,’ he declared proudly, ‘whose sole aim is to throw you English out of our –’

A SAS man rammed his rifle butt into the doctor’s stomach and his words ended in a startled gasp of pain. ‘Outside with them,’ Slaughter ordered, putting away his list till the next house, ‘
shoot ’em!
’

*  *  *

The Egyptian, whose playboy image had concealed his work for the revolution, suddenly jabbed his elbow into the stomach of the SAS man holding him, while Slaughter checked his list. The SAS was caught off guard and the Egyptian dived for the door.

The SAS corporal was quicker. He fired from the hip. The luxurious penthouse apartment stank of cordite and the fugitive screamed and dropped to the thickly carpeted floor. Blood pouring from the gaping hole in his back and dripping onto the white sheepskin carpet, he continued to crawl to the door.

Slaughter nodded to the boy, whose eyes gleamed. He pulled out his knife and crouching over the crawling man, drew the wicked curved blade across his throat, as if he were slaughtering a sheep. The boy looked up and grinned, he wiped his bloody knife on the Egyptian’s immaculate Savile Row suit.

‘Miserable bastard,’ Slaughter said and ticked the playboy’s name off his list. ‘Come on, all of you.’

*  *  *

That afternoon, Slaughter and his hardened SAS carried out their bloody task. Blinded by hatred of the ‘gippos’ and the ‘wogs’ and brutalized by their years of hard fighting and hard living in the desert, the troopers under Slaughter’s command rushed from house to house all that long October afternoon, murdering those suspected by the Major of belonging to the organization which was ready to rise up and throw the British out of Egypt. Twice they bluffed their way into Egyptian Army barracks and before the eyes of hundreds of Egyptian soldiers, shot down young officers who belonged to the group around Nasser. They told the provost marshal permanently stationed outside Dolly’s House, the capital’s most expensive brothel, to disappear, and in the heavy luxury of that perfumed place, stabbed the Egyptian General to death, as he lay in the arms of his black girl.

But slowly the plotters in the capital found out what was going on. The telephone lines buzzed with rumours and warnings. Nasser went underground. The King ordered his palace to be locked and shuttered, and called out the Palace Guard. One by one the survivors, so confident that morning that nothing could go wrong with their plan, fled like the rats they were, and as that terrible afternoon drew to a close, Major Slaughter began to feel that he had crushed the revolt before it had really started.

But Major Slaughter was wrong for once. For just before the death of the young Egyptian Army Captain, standing ashen-face with fear in his bedroom, he had the presence of mind to call a number in Alexandria and give her the alternative code-word. She gasped an anxious query.

‘Pomme,’ he began, just as the Englishmen broke into his bedroom, stens blazing. He went down, his stomach ripped open in a welter of blood and entrails, with her name on his dying lips. ‘
Pomme
…’

The clatter of the tracks alerted the whole oasis. Von Dodenburg, who had been dozing in the shade of a palm tree sprang to his feet in alarm. But Schulze beat him to it. ‘All right, you crappy wet-tails,’ he bellowed, fumbling furiously for his machine-pistol, ‘get the lead out of your asses! We’re getting visitors!’

The tankers ran for their vehicles, carefully camouflaged by palm fronds, while the half-naked panzer grenadiers doubled for the slit trenches they had dug all around the oasis.

Von Dodenburg ran across to Major Mustafa’s tent. For once the fat Egyptian Major, who seemingly spent most afternoons dallying with his handsome young batman, was not in his bunk. Von Dodenburg had no time to ponder his disappearance. ‘Come on, the lot of you,’ he yelled to the crew of his command tank. ‘Let’s see what’s going on!’

With the ‘Prof’ trailing behind, von Dodenburg, Schulze and Matz doubled through the burning sand to where the command tank was hidden at the edge of the northern side of the oasis. Von Dodenburg focused his binoculars on the lone vehicle ploughing its way through the desert.

He had never seen anything like it before. The top seemed to belong to a large civilian car, vintage 1920, or thereabouts, but instead of the wheels one would expect on such a vehicle, they were replaced by tracks.

Swiftly he handed the glasses to Matz. ‘What do you make of it, Corporal?’ he asked Wotan’s vehicle recognition expert.

Matz surveyed the vehicle in silence for a while, as it came ever closer, his leathery face creased in a puzzled frown. ‘I don’t know exactly, sir. But I think it’s a ’twenties Rolls-Royce mounted on probably a Berliet track chassis. The Tommies and the Frogs used them on their trans-Sahara expeditions in the ’thirties.’

Von Dodenburg’s face hardened. ‘Allies eh?’ Blowing three shrill signal blasts on his whistle, he cried: ‘Stand by everybody! This might be trouble!’

Throughout the oasis, the camouflaged tanks swung their long hooded guns towards the strange vehicle which seemed to be walkmg straight into their trap. Tensely the half-naked crews waited for the order to fire.

But for once, Wotan’s muscle was not needed; for to von Dodenburg’s surprise, a familiar figure plodded stolidly into the bright circle of his lenses and approached the slow-moving vehicle. It was the Egyptian Major. As von Dodenburg watched in complete bewilderment, the tracked vehicle stopped. The major clicked to attention and saluted, before crooking his arm around the cab support and waving the unseen driver to proceed. ‘Now what the devil is that fat fool up to now?’ the Major hissed.

‘Let’s go and see, sir,’ Schulze suggested, already dropping to the ground and waving his arms back and forth to indicate that the gunners should not shoot in anticipation of von Dodenburg’s expected order.

Together, followed by Matz and the ‘Prof’, they thrust their way through the palms towards the strange vehicle, watching the Major busily chatting to the car’s passenger, who was still obscured by his body.

With a groan and a hiss of escaping steam from the boiling radiator the ancient conveyance came to a halt. The Major dropped into the sand and with a great flourish opened the squeaky rear door, which they could now see was adorned with an elaborate coat-of-arms containing enough heraldic animals to stock a small zoo.

Schulze caught a glimpse of an elegant, silk-clad leg beyond the Egyptian Major’s bulk and nudged Matz excitedly in the ribs. ‘
Shit!
’ he whispered.

‘Impossible,’ Matz breathed. ‘It’s a mirage!’

‘Shut up!’ von Dodenburg began and then his mouth fell open with surprise when he saw the woman who emerged from the back of the ancient Rolls.