The Sand Panthers (7 page)

It came in a frightened quaver. ‘Major…Major von Dodenburg,
look!
’ The ‘Prof’ pointed a skinny finger, which trembled visibly, to the horizon.

On the horizon, silhouetted against the setting sun like some classical frieze, twenty or more of the riders were strung out in a long line gazing down at them in silence.

‘What shall I do?’ the ‘Prof’ asked fearfully. ‘They’re the Blue Veils all right.’

‘Don’t worry, Prof. Those rifles have – at the most – a range of a hundred metres. And they’re more than two hundred away. If they get closer, give them a quick burst.’ While the three of them continued in their desperate attempts to link the two sections of track, a group of the Blue Veils dismounted from the camels. Under the command of an Arab they began to unpack a shining cylindrical object from the back of one of the kneeling pack-camels.

Just as the three SS men managed to pull the two sections of track together and Schulze started to hammer home the link-pin, von Dodenburg glanced at the Blue Veils. His heart sank. The Arabs were setting up a mortar on the heights, and if they did not get under way quickly, they would be sitting ducks in the hollow at that range. He had underestimated the Blue Veils.

‘
Mortar!
’ he gasped.

‘I’ll get the pincers,’ Matz cried. ‘You fit the cotter-pin, Schulze.’

‘No time,’ the sweating giant cried through gritted teeth. He inserted the pin which held the track-link in place and taking a deep breath, he turned it with his powerful fingers, feeling metal dig deep into his flesh as he did so. ‘That’ll do,’ he yelled and kicked the track with his big boot. It held. ‘Come on, get the lead out of your ass, Matzi! Into that driving compartment!’ Matz saw the danger at once. He scrambled for the driving seat, while von Dodenburg and Schulze clambered onto the turret.

The light mortar opened up with a cough and a frightening howl. Crouched in the turret, the SS men could see the black blob of the mortar bomb wobbling downwards through the darkening sky. It exploded with a thick crump. Sand shot skywards, some twenty metres away and showered the tank with pebbles and small boulders. They ducked instinctively.

On the ridge, the Blue Veils under the direction of the little Arab made an adjustment and re-loaded. Down below in the green-glowing driving compartment, Matz completed all his frantic starting checks. Just as the second mortar bomb began to howl towards them, he pressed the starter-button.
Nothing happened!

Schulze swept the ridge with the machine-gun, but the Blue Veils had anticipated that. They had dragged their camels hurriedly behind the cover of the height and after a moment’s pause had begun firing once more from beyond it; and from the way the first bomb came winging down only a dozen metres away, von Dodenburg realized with a sinking feeling that the man who was directing the firing knew his mortars.

Below Matz wrestled with the engines. Frantically he pressed the starter time and time again. But it would not start. Desperately von Dodenburg clenched his fists in anxiety and willed the shitty monster to fire. Soon he knew the little Arab would get lucky and land a bomb right on the turret, or on top of the engines. Even if they survived the explosion, which was unlikely, then they would be easy meat for Blue Veil infiltrators. Matz had to start the engines!

Cursing furiously, Matz fought to start up. And then he had it. There was a long, low groan like some eerie unearthly dirge. Von Dodenburg glanced to the rear, just as another mortar bomb landed so close that the blast ripped the shovel clipped to the turret away. A stream of black smoke was pouring from the twin exhausts. Matz was doing it. He pressed his throat mike urgently. ‘It’s working, Matz,’ he cried. ‘
Come on…come on!
’

The noise grew in intensity. The Mark IV shivered violently. Its every plate rattled, as if it might fall apart at any moment. An ashen-faced ‘Prof’ hung on grimly, his lips moving rapidly in prayer. A sharp series of backfires. A burst of bright white smoke. Next moment the twin engines roared into full life. Frantically Matz gunned the engines, and slammed home the gear.

Just as the bomb intended to land right on the trapped tank’s turret came hurtling down out of the dark sky with a stomach-churning howl, the big tank lurched forward. With his engines still not reliable enough for him to brake and turn, Matz made his own decision and rolled straight ahead, right into the Blue Veils’ positions.

Too late to brake, too late to slow down, the 25-ton monster shot over the ridge. In panic the Arabs around the mortar scattered. A boy fell screaming under the tracks and Matz caught a quick glimpse of rouged cheeks and painted eyebrows, before he was dragged under, churned to a bloody pulp of flesh and bone by the great tracks. However, he had no time for the Blue Veils. His whole energy was concentrated on keeping the tank from overturning on the almost sheer descent which had suddenly loomed up before his horrified gaze.

The left-hand track hit a hidden boulder with a bone-shuddering impact. Instinctively Matz braked the track. In a blinding flurry of sand, the tank swerved to the left. Somehow Matz managed to keep control with hands that were dripping with sweat, as it began to slither sidewards down the slope. One false move now and they would be over. Behind them the Arabs lying in the sand were taking wild angry shots.

Gingerly Matz started to brake the right track. The Mark IV wobbled violently. Sand showered up from the tracks. They were only a matter of metres from the bottom of the descent now. Matz exerted more pressure on the right track. It screamed as it churned up sand. Matz tensed for the bone-breaking crash that must come. A huge wake of flying sand was following their progress down the slope in a hellish howl of protesting metal. Then the track caught. Revolving frantically, showering up stones and rocks, the other track caught hold. They started to swing around. Matz pressed his foot down hard on the gas pedal, and chanced more pressure on the right track. The Mark IV did not let him down. Now it swung right round and in a flash they were hurtling down the steep incline, with Matz holding on the controls, his stomach seemingly floating somewhere high above his sweat-drenched head.

Just before the tank ran full-tilt into the depression, Matz braked, let go, and braked again. The trick worked. They hit the bottom at less than ten kilometres an hour. At any other speed, it would have shattered there. Just before the tank came to rest, Matz tapped the accelerator. The twin engines responded at once.

They throbbed sweetly and swiftly built up power. The tracks bit into the soft sand of the ascent on the other side.
They held!
Matz breathed a sigh of relief. Slowly but surely, the battered Panzerkampfwagen IV started to climb while behind them the sound of the Blue Veils’ firing grew fainter and fainter. They had escaped!

Thirty minutes later they bumped into the stalled Italian truck, its back filled with the Italian soldiers Schulze had kidnapped from the quay. They were drunk and unhappy, eating sticky chocolate sandwiches and drinking the Chianti they had stolen from the German Supply Depot. They were lost too and frightened, very frightened.

For a moment von Dodenburg was bewildered. While Matz and Schulze grabbed what was left of the Chianti, he leaned weakly against the side of the truck, drained of energy. However, the crackle of the radio in the truck’s cabin soon shook him out of his reverie.

By some stroke of good fortune, the Italians’ radio was on the column’s net!

Thrusting the anxious Italians out of the way, von Dodenburg grabbed the mike and bellowed into it. ‘Hello, here Sunray…here Sunray. Are you reading me? ...’

One hour later they had rejoined the column.

Angrily Slaughter scooped out the two yolks of the precious fried eggs with his fingers, Arab-fashion, and swallowed them. By the light of the flickering camel-dung fire, Yassa looked at him silently and thoughtfully, smoking his cigarette in the Mohammedan manner so that his lips did not come in contact with the tobacco, as the Prophet had prescribed. He was an incredibly wrinkled old man beneath his blue veil, his eyebrows plucked in what he thought was a seductive curve and great smears of
kohl
below the tired yellow eyes. Yet if the Blue Veil Chiefs face and manner were pathetic attempts at female coquettism, there was nothing weak or unmasculine about his determination. Stretching one painted hand to the warmth of the fire, he said: ‘We shall ride all day and all night. We might not catch them the night of the morrow, nor the night of the day after that.’

‘When?’ Slaughter demanded angrily, stubbing out his cigarette in the white of one of the fried eggs, as if he were grinding out the socket.

‘Do not worry, my friend,’ the Chief answered easily. ‘We shall earn your Horsemen. Perhaps in three nights.’

‘
When?
’ Slaughter persisted. He knew his Blue Veils, his ‘boys’ as he always called them to his superiors in Cairo. One had to pin them down; they were as skittish and as capricious as women.

‘Three nights, I have said,’ the Chief replied. ‘Like all infidels, they will rest at night. We will not. We will catch them, Englishman, and then –’ The Chief grinned at him over his veil, though there was no real warmth in his faded old eyes. ‘Then,’ he echoed, ‘we shall ensure that they never leave the desert.’

Slaughter shuddered in spite of the fact that the Blue Veils had been his lovers and employees ever since he had begun to use them for espionage purposes against the Italians in Libya in 1935. They would slit the Germans’ throats and unspeakable atrocities would follow that. Slaughter, his voice suddenly dry and husky, asked: ‘Where?’

‘The Great Ascent,’ the Chief said simply and with a gesture of finality tossed his cigarette into the fire. It flared up for a moment, illuminating the old man’s perverted face, and eyes which flashed with cruel anticipation of the slaughter to come.

‘Madam is the bravest of the brave. Not even Nasser and Sadat surpass her in courage and hatred of the English.’

Major Mustafa, Egyptian Army, to von Dodenburg, Ain Dalla Oasis

It was furnace-hot. In that heat the sand shimmered a crazy wavering blue. Wearily the column steered its way onwards.

‘It’s the khamsin,’ the ‘Prof’ explained through cracked lips. ‘Blows in from Central Africa across hundreds of kilometres, being heated more and more all the way.’

Von Dodenburg had never experienced a wind like this before, not even in the Caucasus. It was not like the heat that came from the sun, from which there was some relief in the shade. The khamsin was a searing, blistering heat that made one blink with shock, as if an oven door had been flung open to release a fearsome blast of burning air.

‘Jesus, Mary, Joseph!’ Schulze groaned, ‘you’d think it was bad enough with the Tommies and those Niggers out there somewhere trying to croak us – without this shitting wind roasting the nuts off us!’

The almost unbearable heat was also making the young drivers of the sections of the column commanded by the two 18-year-old second-lieutenants more and more careless. Time and time again they drove into patches of soft sand because they were not alert enough and the whole column had to stop while the trapped vehicles were dugout.

In the end, when yet another of Seitz’s Mark IVs became bogged down in soft sand, von Dodenburg’s temper got the better of him. He stopped the column, ordered Matz to drive back to where the weary young tank crew were staring numbly at the vehicle, which was up to its bogies in sand, and bellowed ‘Seitz and Meier to me – at the double!’ Both officers dropped from their vehicles and shambled wearily across to where von Dodenburg stood grimly on the turret, hands clamped to his hips. ‘
At the double!
’ he bellowed again. ‘Get the lead out of your damn tails, will you!’

Sergeant Doerr, whose halftracks had not bogged down once because his drivers were exceedingly scared of him, guffawed. But the rest of the Wotan men were too weary to laugh even at the sight of two red-faced, sweat-lathered officers doubling through the sand as if they were green recruits back at
Sennalager
. Gasping painfully, their shirts black with sweat, the two of them came to a halt in front of von Dodenburg and stood to attention.

Von Dodenburg’s red-rimmed eyes flashed angrily. ‘You call yourselves officers,’ he barked bitterly. ‘Officer means someone who commands, leads, makes decisions, advises. You two pathetic creatures have done none of those things. You have idled in your turrets and allowed your men to make the decisions – the wrong ones. That’s why tank after tank of yours has bogged down. Well, I have had enough of it. You must be taught to be officers the hard way!’

He turned to the crestfallen corporal in charge of the tank which had bogged down. ‘All right, get all of your crew except the driver out of there, corporal!’ The crewmen dropped to the sand and stood staring up at their crimson-faced CO. ‘Corporal, clip off the turret shovels and give them to the officers!’

Silently the Corporal did as he was commanded and stood to one side, leaving the young officers staring down at the implements in embarrassed bewilderment.

‘Now, you two. You will clear the sand away from this one by yourselves till the driver can start,’ von Dodenburg. announced grimly, ‘and you will clear away the sand from every other one of your vehicles that bogs down after this,
personally and unaided!
Perhaps that will teach you both to ensure that your drivers and commanders don’t sleep at their posts. Now get on with it!’

Embarrassed, hurt, on the brink of tears, the two young officers began the back-breaking task of clearing the tracks, watched by equally embarrassed and sympathetic Wotan troopers.

Thereafter there was no further bogging down of vehicles in the rest of the column, but the mood among the men, von Dodenburg knew, was rebellious. He longed to reach the Ascent and leave the hell of the Great Sand Sea.

*  *  *