“Is anyone wounded?” Price shouted, everyone momentarily deafened by the roar of the three automatic weapons in the confined space of the hallway.
No one had been injured by the surprise attack, and the shooter had stopped firing. Price motioned for Lynch and Nelson to take the door, while Herring and White followed closely behind. As they approached the door, Nelson glanced at Lynch, clearly wondering which of the two of them was going through the door first. Lynch tipped an imaginary hat to Nelson, followed by a deep bow and a sweep of his arm, pointing towards the door.
“Bloody wanker,” Nelson muttered. Lynch just grinned.
Taking a moment to load a full magazine, Nelson took several deep breaths, then reared back and kicked the door, slamming the heavy oak back against the wall as he charged through, Thompson up and at the ready. Lynch followed a step behind, breaking left as Nelson broke right, the two of them sweeping the entire space of the room within a couple of heartbeats.
They were in the mansion’s master bedroom, opulently furnished and decorated with a tasteful blend of Egyptian and European fashion, a mix of the ancient and traditional with the sophisticated and modern. Wardrobes, an enormous three-mirrored dressing table, and a massive four-poster bed dominated the room. At their feet, a young man in servant’s livery coughed up crimson froth, a trio of bloody wounds punched through his chest by one of their Thompsons. An immaculate Bergmann MP-18 machine pistol lay next to him, surrounded by a scattering of spent brass cartridge casings.
At the other end of the room, standing in a corner, Salih El Haddad held a small Walther automatic to the temple of a young servant girl as tears streamed down her face. Haddad was dressed in an expensive European suit, several gold rings on his fingers, a delicate gold watch on his wrist. The men had all been shown Haddad’s picture before the operation to ensure his capture if at all possible. He was tall and lean, his jet-black hair slicked back from his forehead, a thin moustache across his lip. Haddad looked like he could be an American movie star, sleek and charming, if it weren’t for the cruelty in his expression and the sneer of contempt he showed both the Commandos and the girl he held at gunpoint. At his feet, another, older female servant lay sprawled in death, a pair of small bullet wounds in her chest.
“Stay where you are, or the girl dies!” Haddad commanded.
Price stepped into the room between Lynch and Nelson, his Thompson’s muzzle lowered. “Really now?" the lieutenant said. "My good man, how terribly unoriginal."
Haddad’s brow furrowed in anger. “Do not mock me, Englishman! I’ll blow this girl’s brains all over the room if you or your men come any closer!”
Price considered this for a moment. “Mister Salih El Haddad, you are suspected of committing espionage, of passing information on British activities to the enemy. What do you have to say for yourself?”
Haddad spat at them from across the room.
“We can only assume informants in the city brought you the news of a gunfight at the base that killed several Egyptians,” Price continued. “You might have suspected that the Egyptians killed were some of your spies. Did you pass word of this on to the Germans? Do they know we’re aware of your activities?”
“I’ll tell you nothing!” Haddad growled. “I hope Adolf Hitler burns your pathetic island to ashes! I hope he takes a piss on the corpses of your king and queen!”
Price’s eyes narrowed.
“Very well,” Price said softly. "Corporal Lynch?”
“Yes, Lieutenant?” Lynch replied, his eyes never leaving Haddad.
“Make it clean, for her sake.”
Lynch raised the muzzle of his Thompson half an inch, steadied the weapon for an instant, and then squeezed the trigger. The submachine gun fired a single shot, the .45 calibre slug punching through Haddad’s shocked features just below his right eye, blowing the back of his head all over the expensive wallpaper behind him. Flecks of blood and brain matter sprayed the gold-edged dressing mirrors, leaving tear-shaped pink streaks across their surface.
Haddad’s corpse crumpled to the ground behind the servant girl, his pistol tumbling from nerveless fingers. The girl, trembling in terror, reached up and slowly wiped a fleck of blood from her cheek, then turned and let out a shriek of horror at the sight of Haddad’s brains slowly sliding down the wall. With a swoon, the girl fainted, sprawling across Haddad’s king-sized bed.
“Hysterical bint,” Nelson muttered.
Chapter 12
Mersa Matruh Airbase
October 29th, 0600 Hours
“Well, that was a bloody disaster!”
Abercrombie stood behind his desk, his face reddened with anger, white-knuckled fists grinding into the tabletop as he leaned forward, stiff-armed. Before him stood Eldred, Price, McTeague, Donovan, Lynch, and Nelson. The Commandos had managed a few hours of fitful sleep before one of Abercrombie’s aides fetched them from their hangar a few minutes ago. As usual, the officers looked refreshed and spotless in their uniforms, while Lynch and the other enlisted men still bore smudges of soot and blood on their hands and faces, and their uniforms were still filthy from last night’s operation.
“Actually, I believe the mission was a success,” Captain Eldred responded, his face showing only mild bemusement. “All of my men survived the action with only a few minor injuries, while the enemy position was secured and their forces neutralized.”
Lynch knew Eldred was being a bit flippant, but he had to agree with the captain. McTeague’s section had wiped out the two truckloads of men racing to Haddad’s compound in a short but vicious firefight along the beach. Within the compound, their two sections had killed or wounded over a dozen armed guards and servants, while a handful of non-combatants were captured. Those survivors were being interrogated somewhere nearby. In purely military terms, their assault had been a smashing success, with only a couple of lightly-wounded men injured by the broken glass along the compound wall and bits of flying wood, stone, or bullet fragments.
Abercrombie, however, was not amused by Eldred’s answer. “Don't play dumb with me, Captain. Your job was to capture Haddad, so we could learn what he knew and discover who his contacts were in the city. All that knowledge died with him.”
Eldred's only reaction was to raise his eyebrows. “These men are not constables or detectives, Abercrombie. They're trained for swift, surgical assaults relying on extreme violence to overwhelm the enemy. They don’t go about with magnifying glasses and notebooks, licking their pencil tips and scribbling down clues.”
“That doesn't mean they can't avoid killing one damn Egyptian!” Abercrombie retorted.
Price cleared his throat. “To be fair, Captain, Haddad was not coming along quietly, and he had an innocent woman at gunpoint. He would have shot her dead if we'd tried to take him by force.”
Abercrombie sneered. “Endangering your entire mission here in Egypt, and possibly all of Operation Crusader as well, for the life of one bloody Egyptian peasant. I was led to believe your men were professionals, Lieutenant.”
At that, all the Commandos stiffened, their faces darkening with anger. Price leaned forward, his hand unconsciously dropping to his holstered pistol. Eldred reached out and laid a hand on Price’s shoulder.
“My men are professionals, Captain,” Price answered, ignoring Eldred’s gesture of restraint. “That is why they don't allow criminals such as Haddad to endanger the lives of innocents. If you felt we weren't up to running your errands, and cleaning up your mess, you were more than welcome to buckle on your kit and lead the assault!”
“My mess?” Abercrombie shouted. “Your men were the ones starting gunfights in the middle of the airbase!”
“There wouldn’t have been a gunfight in the first place, if you’d done your job and found these spies before we arrived. Or for that matter, if you’d gone ahead and thrown Haddad in a cell when you first suspected him of smuggling. But instead, you decided to try and be clever!”
Lynch saw that Eldred had had enough. The Command
o captain stepped forward, putting himself between Price and Abercrombie, his calm demeanor completely absent, replaced now by an expression of indignant anger and exasperation.
“This argument is over,” Eldred said flatly. “Captain Abercrombie, you requested our deployment here from Scotland, even when there are assets in North Africa that could do our job. You agreed to send us after Haddad tonight, even though you’ve known he was a criminal for months. If you don't like the outcome of our actions, that is unfortunate, but there is no profit in arguing about it now.”
The three officers glared at each other for a long moment, before Abercrombie finally let out a long sigh and collapsed back into his chair, rubbing his hands across his face. Reaching into an open drawer, he pulled out his bottle of Scotch and a glass. He held the bottle up as a silent offering.
“A bit early in the day for that, don’t you think?” Eldred asked, a note of disapproval in his voice.
Abercrombie let out a snort. “It’s not too early if you haven’t gone to bed yet.”
Pouring himself a generous portion, Abercrombie drank it down in one large gulp. He stared at the bottom of his empty glass for several seconds.
“If Jerry really wants to win the war,” Abercrombie mused, “he should forget about bombing London, and focus on destroying our distilleries in Scotland. The whole bloody war effort would grind to a halt, like an engine without sufficient lubricating oil.”
McTeague took a half-step forward. “Sir, any news on the three Englishmen we found among the ruffians trying to get into Haddad’s compound?”
“As best as we can guess,” Abercrombie replied, “the three men were German infiltrators, posing as Eighth Army corporals.”
The Commandos let out a collective sigh, but McTeague was clearly the most relieved.
“Bloody hell, that’s good to hear,” he said. “Finding those lads among the dead, thinking we’d cut down some of our own by mistake...ye cannae know how awful that felt.”
“They were wearing Eighth Army uniforms,” Price said. “Their weapons and kit were all regulation, they were even wearing identity disks.”
“Their disks look very convincing,” Abercrombie said. He lifted up three pairs of pressed fibre identity disks from his desk and held them dangling by their strings. “But these are forgeries. Good ones, too. No real telling how long those chaps were among us, poking their noses where they didn't belong. This means much of our planning for Crusader could be compromised.”
“Captain,” Lynch spoke up for the first time, “do we have any idea what unit the Jerries belonged to?”
Abercrombie put the disks down and thought for a long moment, then reached for his bottle and poured himself another dram, drinking half of it before answering. “We have heard rumors of a secret German unit, designation 'Brandenburg'. They're dedicated to behind-the-lines operations. Not so much like you Commandos, but rather more like saboteurs and assassins, real cloak-and-dagger stuff. Specialized teams with men who speak English, French, and so on, wearing our uniforms, trained to blend in as they slip through our lines and infiltrate our bases in order to cause mischief.”
“And you think these dead Germans were some of these Brandenburg men?” Price asked.
Abercrombie nodded. “It makes sense. If I were Rommel, I wouldn't trust the Egyptians I was buying information from to be completely trustworthy. What if we were paying them to feed disinformation back to our enemies? So Jerry sneaks a few of these clever chaps into Mersa Matruh, and has them pretend to be our men. They gather their own intelligence, keep an eye on Haddad, and maybe even commit a little sabotage while they're at it. Sugar in petrol tanks, sand in the crankcases, that sort of rubbish.”
“Captain, I wonder if those fellows were sent to Haddad's, not to warn him or rescue him, but to silence him?” Lynch asked.
The room was quiet for a moment. Finally, Abercrombie drained the last of his glass before reaching again for the nearly-empty bottle.
“Either way, Corporal,” Abercrombie replied, “I think you can be certain of one thing.”
“Sir?”
Abercrombie raised his glass in a salute, eying Lynch over the rim.
“Jerry knows you're coming, old boy. And he'll be ready for you.”
Chapter 13
Mersa Matruh Airbase
October 29th, 0700 Hours
After the debriefing with Abercrombie, the whole of Eldred’s command prepared for departure. The men washed up and bolted down their morning bacon, biscuits and tea, then loaded their weapons and equipment onto Bedford transports. The officers decided that time was of the essence, and rather than wait for the Long Range Desert Group patrol to get closer to Mersa Matruh, the Commandos departed, having used the wireless to arrange a rendezvous a long day’s drive to the south.
None of the Commandos looked forward to sitting in the bed of a canvas-topped lorry for most of a day, bumping and lurching along a laughable excuse for a desert road, coughing and choking on the dust raised by the lead lorry. But as miserable as it was, every man preferred the jostling and the dust and the cramped space inside the cargo bed to another day’s interminable waiting inside the oven of the aircraft hangar. At least on the move, they were doing something, not just sitting around, slowly baking over the course of another scorching day while cooped up under lock and key.
After eight hours on the move, the Commandos’ convoy of five Bedfords, guarded by a pair of Morris armoured cars, made contact with the LRDG’s scout car. The light Chevrolet was manned by a couple of the scruffiest-looking soldiers Lynch had ever seen. The Chevrolet was loaded with boxes of ammunition and food, cans of petrol and water, as well as camouflage netting, tools, and other miscellaneous pieces of kit piled into and hanging from every square inch of the vehicle. The scout car boasted a pintle-mounted Lewis gun, as well as a Thompson and a pair of Lee-Enfields, all three in leather scabbards. In addition, the two Desert Group men wore holstered revolvers and belt knives. Both men were brown as a bean from life under the relentless desert sun, and they sported thick bristly beards. One of the men wore a wide-brimmed canvas hat, while the other wore a native headdress of white cloth covering his head and neck.
After Captain Eldred and Lieutenant Price greeted the LRDG men, the scout car led the convoy on for a dozen miles before turning off the desert track and into a slight depression, where they discovered the rest of the eleven-vehicle unit. The thirty men of V Patrol met the thirty-seven men of Eldred’s Commando force, and each unit sized up the other. Although the Commandos were, as a rule, not the sort of soldiers who adhered to parade-ground standards of dress and grooming during a mission, all of the men wore their issued Eighth Army uniforms in a regulation fashion, and all the Commandos were clean-shaven, with close-cropped haircuts. In contrast, not one of the Desert Group men wore a complete regulation Army uniform. Their clothing was a medley of various uniform pieces and differing patterns, mixed heavily with native North African garments, mostly jackets, headdresses, and footgear, although some shirts and trousers were African as well. In addition, many of the men wore a revolver or automatic, often in a hand-tooled leather holster of local manufacture, as well as a knife of some sort. All of them looked like the two soldiers driving the scout car: deeply tanned, lean, raw-boned men with unkempt hair and thick beards, some so dark-complexioned that they could easily have been mistaken for Egyptians if the Commandos didn’t know any better.
“Bloody hell,” Nelson exclaimed when they first saw the men of V Patrol, “they look more like a band of pirates than soldiers!”
Lynch nodded at the comparison. The Commandos and the men of the Desert Group couldn’t look more different, and their desert guides did have a roguish, motley appearance that made Nelson’s comment surprisingly accurate.
Bowen hopped down from the back of their Bedford and stretched straight up on his tiptoes, arms in the air. “A pretty spot-on observation, actually. These men roam the deep desert like pirates, far from resupply and even far
ther from any sizable settlement. They’re looking for Jerries or Eyeties, hunting not to attack and destroy, but to observe and report.”
“But we’re a hundred miles or more from bleedin’ anything,” Nelson waved his hands around them. “So why the hell would Jerry be motoring about in the middle of nowhere?”
Price walked over as the Commandos disembarked from their transports. He’d overheard Nelson’s comment and scratched his chin, smiling as he glanced over at the Desert Group.
“Strategy, of course,” Price answered. “Think of the front lines here in North Africa. We face off against the Germans and Italians north of here along a pretty narrow front, maybe thirty or forty miles perpendicular to the coast. To the north of that, in the Med, we’re constantly taking a crack at Jerry’s supply lines, just as he’s after ours, but it’s not really feasible to move men or vehicles over the water to engage in combat – too few places to land them where they wouldn’t be vulnerable to attack before the landing could be completed.
“On the other hand, here you have thousands of square miles of open desert, almost all of it unoccupied. If you had routes properly studied and mapped, you could move an entire army in a flank march against Jerry’s rear echelon and strike before he even knew our forces were on the move. The same goes for our enemies, of course; that clever chap Rommel would love to steal a march on us and pop up from the southern desert to catch us while we’re in the middle of afternoon tea.
“So these lads have a twofold mission. On the one hand, they’re constantly mapping and gathering intelligence on the terrain, finding paths through the deep desert along which we could bring armour and infantry to strike deep into Libya. On the other hand, they’re on the lookout for Jerry trying the same thing, reporting back on any signs of enemy movement or fortification. Here in the deep desert, there are no borders or front lines, just an ocean of rocks and sand.”
Commando- The Complete World War II Action Collection Volume I Page 37