by David King
"Yes," Dietrich said. "Now you have employed an unorthodox patrol which has been troublesome to me. It is called, I believe, the Rat Patrol. To continue my analogy, this Rat Patrol compares with the Indian raiding parties that struck swiftly in small numbers and were gone before their victims recovered from their surprise. Will you not agree there are many points of similarity between the warfare we have waged here in northern Africa and the forays of your Indians?"
"Yes," Wilson said, smiling a little at this admission from Dietrich that the Teutonic supermen could learn from others. "I will concede there are many points."
"Ah, Colonel, I am gratified," Dietrich said and his smile was smug. "If you will pardon me, I must say that this has been a satisfying day. You are a chief of a tribe of the Indians who have opposed us. With your capture I have removed a long thorn from my side."
"The fortunes of war," Wilson said, coldly now.
"But of course," Dietrich said with a genial wave of his hand. "And I think that by tomorrow morning, I shall have pulled a second thorn that has annoyed me even more than you personally have done."
Wilson felt apprehension chill his heart and remained silent.
"I see you suspect," Dietrich said and laughed aloud with obvious enjoyment. "I expect that your Rat Patrol will come racing across the desert in a foolish attempt to rescue you and I have laid an Indian trap for them. Out there, the way they must come, we have planted a small Devil's Garden which we expect them to discover. We have, however, left the gate invitingly open to the safe pathway. Once we have them in the garden, we shall close the gate and nail it tightly shut.
2
It smelled. Out of the darkening desert afternoon, the odor of the trap reached from Dietrich's headquarters at Sidi Abd across the Devil's Garden and irritated Troy's nostrils. He had no intention of entering the garden through the gate they had so easily discovered. The mark of the halftrack and the safe path were an obvious trap.
Halfway through the garden, the path would be thickly sown with mines or the Jerries would be waiting for them by the fence at the other end.
Troy had a plan. It was a desperate one but it might work. Hell, it had to work. Wilson was walking around, or penned up somewhere, with too much knowledge in his head. If Dietrich couldn't get him to talk, there was always the Gestapo and they would work Wilson over until he talked or was dead. Either way Wilson was dead but a man could take only so much before he spilled his guts.
He had Tully drive the jeep forward through the wadi and onto the path, reverse meticulously following the impressions left by the treads of his tires, then drive back into the garden. Tully, who had learned to negotiate a trail only the deer could follow when he was running the ridges of Kentucky with moonshine, repeated the operation until the wadi and the path showed the unmistakable marks of a jeep entering the Devil's Garden through this gateway.
Troy leapt in beside Tully and back atop the dunes where the shifting sands quickly obliterated all sign of passage, the two jeeps raced north for two miles along the crest until they found a depression concealed from horizontal view that thrust into the garden area.
He watched with Tully and Hitch from far back as Moffitt crept forward, studied the terrain, retreated and hurled a grenade into the sector he had marked. As Moffitt plunged to the earth, a series of explosions blasted the desert, throwing great curtains of sand and dust and metal into the air. A second and a third time, Moffitt pitched grenades into the depression until he was certain no more antitank mines remained in a space wider than the jeeps. Then Troy examined with him the craters where the sand already was sliding back. They worked the blasted area carefully with rapid successions of bursts from their tommy guns and when they did not explode any mines, lifted their fire in five-foot paths into the desert beyond. They exploded half a dozen T-mines beyond the horseshoe of antitank mines and then, advancing on foot, detonated several S-mines. The air hung thick and gritty with dust and sand.
"I said we'd ride," Troy said, halting Moffitt who shook his head and smiled faintly.
Back at the jeeps, Troy directed Tully to pull his jeep around and put it in reverse at the edge of the holes the mines had dug in the depression. While Troy stood beyond within the garden, Tully gunned the machine. The jeep plummeted into the unsubstantial sand which the explosions had left the consistency of dry cornmeal. The jeep came back, wheels spinning and slipping to one side. Troy felt the muscles knot in his jaws as Tully fought and twisted the steering wheel with one hand as he craned his head to watch the sides of the trough. The jeep continued to slip as it skidded through the middle of the horseshoe and then, just as it seemed certain it was going to climb right off the path, Tully whipped the wheel a full half-circle and the jeep pounded up onto the narrow trail within the garden where the lighter, anti-personnel mines had not completely disintegrated the sand foundation. Tully grinned and winked as Troy jumped into the rear of the jeep behind the machine gun and pointed the fifty caliber weapon over the back of the vehicle into the endless furrows of the Devil's Garden.
Hitch plowed the other jeep with Moffitt over in forward. With Tully in reverse, nose to nose in single file, the jeeps of the Rat Patrol began to inch their way through the dreaded minefield. At the machine gun, Troy swept their pathway clear, firing into the sand in interlinking arcs fifty yards ahead. The mines seemed to have been laid with typical German precision in a checkerboard. Troy quickly established the pattern and picked them off accurately with short bursts.
The pounding blasts hurled gritty showers of stinging sand that blinded Troy and the sharp taste of cordite burned his throat. Although the sun was mantled, its heat seeped through and came down in clinging coats of dust. Troy tried to keep the path cleared at least fifty yards ahead but in the thick spray of sand that rose from the desert floor, it was impossible to see without stopping every few yards. When a chunk of metal would come hurtling out of the unseen distance to clang against the jeep, Troy would jam the bush hat that afforded no protection over his forehead and resume firing.
Although the desert floor was blown with pockets of loose sand, Tully managed to hold to the right-of-way Troy was preempting and when the jeep's tires began to spin, Hitch eased up to give a push.
It was a tedious, nerve-rasping procession. A few yards further on they stopped while the air cleared and until Troy could blink his eyes, bare his teeth, grip the machine gun with both hands and blaze back into action. It must look and sound like a major tank battle out here, he thought, wondering how far they had come into the garden and whether they could be seen or heard from Sidi Abd.
He called another halt, swiped his grimed face with the back of his hand and took a swig from his canteen. When the dust had settled and he looked into the other jeep, Moffitt was standing, scanning the distance with his binoculars.
"What is it, Jack?" Troy called hoarsely.
"We're about through, Sam," Moffitt said, jumping down and edging on the path close to the jeeps back to Troy. He handed him the glasses. "Ahead about a half a mile, you see what looks like a hedge?"
Troy rubbed his eyes and adjusted the glasses. The line across the desert came into focus. It looked like tumbleweed piled along a prairie fence line. As he studied it, the dark and thorny fence came into detail. Poles and steel stakes were interwoven with a jumble of barbed wire that raised a barrier in both directions. He raised the glasses to the rolling dunes, searching for the outline of a sentry, a watchful Arab or a patrol but the land was as empty of life as the mountains of the moon.
"This is your country, Doctor," Troy said, returning the glasses to Moffitt. "How much farther to Sidi Abd?" Moffitt went back to the other jeep, got out a chart and did some calculations with compass and dividers.
"Three miles, more or less," he called, sounding surprised. "We're closer than I thought. Straight ahead over the blasted dunes."
"Thank God for the dunes," Troy said, pushing back his hat. "I hope they've hidden our sound and fury. Think you and I could bird
dog the jeeps through to the fence, Jack? I don't like to risk any more noise and dust."
"Carry on," Moffitt said cheerfully.
Troy came stiffly down from his mount behind the gun. He felt like an ancient mummy whose skin had stiffened and whose veins had been drained for two thousand years. Submachine guns tucked under their arms, he and Moffitt crouched a jeep's width apart, pushing gradually ahead as they examined each foot of ground for the depressions in the sand that usually marked the place an S-mine had been buried. The jeeps, Tully still in reverse, crept closely after them.
"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 S
arge," 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.