The Sharp End (Raiding Forces Book 10)

by Phil Ward

  Skipper Finley never let anyone aboard the King Duck ever forget it.

  Lt. Hoolihan walked up as Col. Randal and W/Cdr. Gordon were preparing to climb aboard Frank Polanski’s gun DUKW.

  “Change of plans, sir,” Lt. Hoolihan said. “When we beach, you and Wing Commander Gordon dismount your DUKW and move up to my jeep—you switch out with my driver and the Wing Commander can man the pedestal-mounted Vickers K.”

  “Sounds good, Butch,” Col. Randal said. “Ronnie’s itching to take a crack at the bad guys tonight.”

  Frank was sitting behind the wheel of the gun DUKW. The former U.S. Marine Corps heavy weapons man had the identical twin to Skipper Finley’s stub of a cigar stuck in his jaw. When Col. Randal and W/Cdr. Gordon climbed in, he immediately began a briefing on the Cannone da 47/32.

  “This gun was primarily designed as an anti-tank weapon,” Frank said. “However, it is also intended for close support—don’t think what the Italians had in mind was as close as we use it, Colonel.”

  Col. Randal said. “Probably not.”

  “The advantage this weapon provides is that, in addition to its armor-piercing round—which will penetrate all known enemy armor up to a German Mark III—it also has a high-explosive round, which is what we’re going to use on the roadhouse tonight.

  “You will be impressed, gentlemen—I guarantee.”

  “That’s what we’re here for,” Col. Randal said, “to be impressed.”

  Frank ran down the Little Elephant’s nomenclature. “This gun is 47mm, weighs six hundred ten pounds, has a muzzle velocity of two thousand sixty-seven feet per second with a maximum range of seven thousand yards—but like I pointed out, tonight we will be firing at minimum range.”

  “How close shall that be?” W/Cdr. Gordon asked.

  “I like to try to stick the barrel in the front door,” Frank said. “HE point-blank takes the fight out of everybody inside on the first round.”

  “He’s joking, Wing Commander,” Col. Randal said. “But it’ll be close.”

  “Let’s hope,” W/Cdr. Gordon said, “we do not require any of the armor-piercing rounds.”

  “If we do,” Col. Randal said, “the enemy tanks will be mounted on wheeled tank carrier transports—the single most strategic target in Afrika Korps.

  “Rommel only has a limited number of carriers and the word is if we can knock ’em all out, the war in the desert is over.”

  “Now that sounds like information I should have been aware of before now,” W/Cdr. Gordon said. “Communication between the RAF and our ground forces is turning out to be worse than previously thought.”

  Col. Randal withheld comment.

  Skipper Finley appeared at the DUKW. “Ready to go ashore, Frank?”

  “Roger, Skipper.”

  Skipper Finley reached in his pocket and produced a much-traveled flask that had sailed the seven seas. “Chill in the air, nothin’ beats a nip a’ brandy—hair a’ the dog. Gentlemen?”

  He handed the flask to Col. Randal.

  “I want you to know I’m proud of you for sinking the U-Boat, Captain,” Col. Randal said, taking a shot and passing the flask to W/Cdr. Gordon. The King Duck is really whipped into tip-top fighting shape.”

  Not many people had ever told Warthog Finley they were proud of him. Being a hero was a new experience. Living up to it was taking some getting used to.

  “Take good care of the Colonel for me, Frank,” Skipper Finley ordered, retrieving his flask.

  “Aye, aye, Skipper,”

  Up front Lt. Hoolihan’s DUKW began rolling down the ramp. Then the rest of the column began slowly moving forward to launch. As usual, Col. Randal experienced a “this is insane” moment as they drove off the LCT into the sea. He turned to check on W/Cdr. Gordon.

  The pilot’s face had turned a pale shade of green.

  Frank loved driving the DUKW. There was a big grin on his face as the amphibious truck dipped and bobbed, snaking along at the tail end of the convoy closing the three-mile distance to shore.

  Trying to take his mind off the idea that the DUKW might sink—it seemed to him that it most likely would, W/Cdr. Gordon asked, “How did a U.S. Marine end up in Raiding Forces?”

  “I was outta the Corps at the time, after serving a burst of six down south in the Banana Wars. The Colonel and I met when I was advising a low-life shifta warlord in Abyssinia,” Frank said. “My boss brought up his army to threaten Colonel Randal, who had his own guerrilla outfit called Force N.

  “My employer saw the colonel as a competitor,” Frank said.

  “We outmanned Force N by about five to one at the time, so eliminating the competition shoulda been easy.

  “Only my guy decided to pay a call on Colonel Randal before the fight commenced. Liked to look his next victim in the eye before the bloodbath—man had an attitude.”

  “What happened?” W/Cdr. Gordon asked.

  “The colonel shot him,” Frank said. “I switched sides.”

  Up ahead, Lt. Hoolihan’s DUKW beached. The crane DUKW in trail behind it came ashore and immediately started lifting the gun jeep out of the back. The third DUKW in the column landed. The second crane DUKW came in right behind it and repeated the process.

  Utilizing one crane per jeep dramatically speeded up the landing process. The two gun jeeps were ready to roll out by the time the DUKW armed with the Little Elephant beached.

  “OK,” Col. Randal said, as he was climbing out, “let’s see what you’ve got, Frank.”

  “You’re going to love this, Colonel,” Frank said. “Sit back, relax and enjoy the show.”

  As Col. Randal and W/Cdr. Gordon were getting into Lt. Hoolihan’s jeep, the Headhunter asked the RAF pilot, “Are you are familiar with the Vickers K, sir?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Excellent,” Lt. Hoolihan said. “Let’s roll, then. Remember, Colonel, we have to avoid driving into any patches of soft sand. Frank’s DUKW will not be able to negotiate across.”

  “Roger.”

  Col. Randal let out the clutch and eased off the beach in four-wheel drive. The moon was still up but sinking fast, and visibility was as good as it was going to get tonight. He was relaxed but clicked on—very aware.

  Lt. Hoolihan was walking ahead of the jeep, guiding it to the Via Balbia, which was approximately five hundred yards away. The Headhunter was not taking chances about the soft sand. The Royal Marine was leading from the front—Col. Randal noted.

  As he drove, Col. Randal finger-touch-checked his personal weapons—he had already done it several times on the trip ashore. Tonight he was carrying one of his U.S. 1911 Model Colt .38 Supers, a 9mm Browning P-35, a .22 High Standard with silencer, Fairbairn Fighting knife, and the Beretta 9mm MAB-38A submachine gun. He had his 45mm shoulder-fired Brixia mortar with forty rounds in a pack in the back of the jeep. He was not expecting to need them—this was a quick, arrive unexpected, under cover of darkness, shoot up the roadhouse with the 47/32 cannon and away home—but why take a chance?

  Lt. Hoolihan held up his hand to stop. Then he disappeared into the dark. By the time Col. Randal had stuck one of Waldo Treywick’s thin cigars between his teeth, the Headhunter was back.

  “Road in sight,” Lt. Hoolihan said, climbing in his seat, adjusting the handles on his twin Vickers K MGs mounted on the hood. “Ready, Wing Commander?”

  “Ready!”

  Col. Randal noticed that the pilot seemed less tense now that the prospect of action was at hand—tonight the RAF officer was out of his element but he was game. Good for him.

  “OK, sir,” Lt. Hoolihan said, “showtime.”

  The jeep rolled up on the hardball. Col. Randal shifted out of four-wheel drive. The lime green hands on his Rolex showed straight up 0200 hours. The casa di strada was approximately a mile ahead. Now the moon was down and pitch-dark was settling in.

  Col. Randal flipped on the cat’s eye headlights—designed to look like German blackout running lights. The other two vehicles behind h
im did the same. If anyone was awake at the roadhouse at this time of night they would think Duck Patrol was a friendly convoy arriving late.

  That happened all the time.

  Visibility was limited to the much-restricted cat’s eye beam. Col. Randal resisted the impulse to speed up and get the fight started. He knew where the roadhouse was located but he did not know who or what was there.

  The scheme of maneuver called for Col. Randal to pull off on the left-hand seaside shoulder of the road upon arrival and for the second gun jeep to pull off on the right desert-side shoulder, while Frank moved up between them online and commenced fire with the Little Elephant 47/32 cannon as soon as it came to bear. With any luck, Duck Patrol would be out of the target area in less than one minute—headed back to the crane DUKWs waiting on the beach to load up and exfiltrate back to the King Duck.

  The plan called for the roadhouse to be a smoking ruin, reduced to rubble.

  “Stand ready, Wing Commander,” Col. Randal said over his shoulder.

  Lt. Hoolihan was leaning forward over his pair of Vickers K .303 caliber MGs, trying to see past the glow of the headlamps. Up ahead, a red tail reflector glinted as the light struck it. Col. Randal immediately pulled over as planned and the second jeep pulled right.

  The big DUKW rolled up and all three vehicles eased forward online until the dim shape of the roadhouse could be made out through the dark.

  Duck Patrol was very close—almost in the parking lot. Three cars were parked outside the building. Cars meant officers were inside. German? Italian? It was impossible to tell, but only senior officers were authorized command cars.

  “What’s the bursting radius of Frank’s gun, Butch?” Col. Randal asked.

  W/Cdr. Gordon said, “Little bloody late to be asking, is it not?”

  “Fifty yards, sir,” Lt. Hoolihan said.

  Uh-oh.

  KAAAAABOOOM—BLAAAAAM!

  Shrapnel screamed, some of it whizzing back over their heads. The muzzle blast was deafening. The sky turned a golden white from the discharge of the cannon and the instantaneous explosion of the high-explosive shell detonating.

  Night vision was destroyed.

  KAAAAABOOM BLAAAAAM! KAAAAABOOM BLAAAAAM! KAAAAABOOM BLAAAAAM! KAAAAABOOM BLAAAAAM!

  Frank’s gun team was working fast.

  Not only were the Raiders night blind, but everyone in Duck Patrol was virtually deaf because their ears were ringing so loudly.

  As promised, the casa di strada was reduced to a pile of rubble. Frank had not exaggerated. The Little Elephant was very impressive.

  What was not part of the plan was that the Italian AB-41 armored car escorting a convoy of trucks driving down the Via Balbia behind Duck Patrol would open fire with its high-velocity 20mm anti-tank gun. While the 20mm round would not penetrate any known armored vehicle in the world, it was sure death on thin-skinned vehicles like gun jeeps or DUKWs.

  The shell screamed by overhead, down the road into the night. When it did, it struck a fuel carrier parked in the middle of a large Axis convoy that was laagered for the night a quarter of a mile past the casa di strada that, until now, had gone undetected.

  The ten-ton tanker went up in a ball of fire. The Italians in the laager, who had been awakened by Frank’s five rapid cannon rounds and were wondering what was happening, now acquired a target—the AB-41 armored car—and they opened with what appeared to the men of Duck Patrol to be one million automatic weapons.

  Tracer fire illuminated part of the enemy convoy parked down the road. It was made up of a number of captured British trucks, adding to the confusion. The AB-41 shifted its attention to what the car commander believed was a large force of enemy vehicles and commenced firing with both its 20mm anti-tank gun and its 8mm coaxial MG.

  Duck Patrol was in a bad spot—caught in the cross-fire between two Italian convoys that were under the impression they were fighting for their life. While there were not actually one million automatic weapons firing at the Raiders, there had to be at least a million tracers crackling overhead from both directions, which had a detrimental effect on morale.

  The only Duck Patrol weapons able to shift to fire on the Italians to the rear were the twin Vickers K pedestal-mounted MGs on the jeeps and those on the back of the DUKW.

  W/Cdr. Gordon got his pair around and let off the first burst. The second gun jeep gunner opened almost simultaneously. The hail of .303 caliber rounds ricocheted off the AB-41, streaking straight up into the sky. The MG rounds caused no damage, but the tracers did attract the attention of the Italian armored car gunner.

  Frank was desperately trying to muscle the big, ungainly DUKW around. He was backing and turning, fighting the wheel hard not to run off the road and get stuck in the sand off the shoulders. Finally, he managed the maneuver—but not before the AB-41 got off a round—knocking out the second of Duck Patrol’s jeeps.

  The Little Elephant fired a 47mm HE shell, which was not the round of choice for armored fighting vehicles but was what Frank had up the spout at the time. However, the result was spectacular. The AB-41 blew up and flipped on its side. Secondary explosions from the ammunition onboard started cooking off.

  Typically, Italian armored cars traveled in pairs when pulling convoy escort duty. If there were a second AB-41 along tonight, it chose not to intervene and risk the same fate as its mate.

  Now the enemy truckers traveling behind the AB-41 got into the fight. Rattled by the sight of their escort exploding, they misjudged the location of Frank’s DUKW and engaged the source of all the MG rounds coming at them from farther down the Via Balbia. The battle escalated—the two Italian convoys fighting it out with Duck Patrol still caught in the middle.

  Lt. Hoolihan hopped out of his seat and ran to check on the knocked-out jeep. Col. Randal engaged the laagered convoy past the smoking rubble of the roadhouse with his pair of Vickers Ks while W/Cdr. Gordon sprayed the trucks to their rear.

  Not anticipating a full-scale war and always conscious of weight when driving off the beach to the Via Balbia, Frank had only brought the six 47 mm rounds. The cannon was out of action.

  The Little Elephant’s DUKW’s machine gunners joined the fight.

  Col. Randal was squeezing off crisp, short bursts from his pair of Vickers Ks when there was a rattling that sounded like hailstones striking the front of the jeep. The motor cut out. Without a moment’s hesitation, he immediately unlocked his pair of MGs from their mount, threw them over his shoulder and shouted to W/Cdr. Gordon, “Bail out, Ronnie—head for the DUKW.”

  The Wing Commander jumped out the back of the jeep and limped alongside Col. Randal to the amphibious truck.

  “Get ready to roll, Frank,” Col. Randal ordered. “Both gun jeeps are knocked out.”

  “Which way we going, Colonel?”

  “Hard left to the water,” Col. Randal ordered, tossing the Vickers Ks in the back of the DUKW. “We’ll put out to sea, run back up the coast and pick up the two cranes.”

  “Can do, Colonel.”

  Lt. Hoolihan was at the gun jeep when Col. Randal returned to retrieve the pedestal-mounted Vickers Ks. He had the three men from the blown-up jeep and the jeep’s MGs with him.

  Incredibly, no one had been killed, but all three Raiders were wounded. The AB-41’s high velocity, armor-piercing 20mm round had sliced completely through the jeep, throwing off razor-sharp steel splinters in its path.

  Frank turned the DUKW around again as Col. Randal placed an incendiary grenade on the hood of the command jeep. Every jeep kept one strapped to the steering column to disable the vehicle in case of emergency. He did not pull the pin.

  The three wounded raiders were helped into the back of the DUKW as the firefight raged.

  “Drive for the water, Butch,” Col. Randal ordered, jacking a 45mm round into his Brixia. He slung his Beretta 9mm submachine gun across his chest. “I’ll provide rear security.”

  The volume of firing continued with no decrease in intensity. Tracers were crisscrossing
overhead and off to the right. Occasionally, a truck would catch fire.

  The only good thing was, since they were truckers and not combat infantrymen, Col. Randal did not expect anyone on the enemy side to fix bayonets and initiate a ground attack.

  “I am not leaving without you, sir,” Lt. Hoolihan said.

  “You’ve got your orders,” Col. Randal said. “Move out, Butch.”

  “Colonel . . .”

  “Don’t let that DUKW get stuck in the sand,” Col. Randal said. He raised the stubby little mortar to his shoulder and fired it back over the burning AB-41 armored car at the laagered convoy down the road. The result was a satisfying BOOOOM when the 45mm round detonated against the side of a truck.

  The gas tank of the truck he hit exploded, sounding like a five hundred-pound bomb.

  Lucky shot—he was not aiming at it.

  “Get going.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The DUKW rolled off the Via Balbia into the dunes between the hard-topped road and the beach, with Lt. Hoolihan walking out front guiding it.

  Col. Randal kept up a steady drumbeat of mortar rounds on both convoys, shifting back and forth between the two with every other round. No one likes being mortared, no matter how small the mortar round may be. His goal was to keep heads down.

  The truckers were not likely to maneuver against each other—catching him in the middle. But there was no guarantee on that.

  When Col. Randal was down to his last mortar round, he pulled the pin on the No. 76 Special Incendiary grenade sitting on the hood of the jeep, turned and started for the beach. When he reached the first grassy sand dune, he turned and fired the Brixia one-handed into the side of the fuel storage tank standing beside the ruin of the casa di strada. It went up in a massive fireball.

  The blue-on-blue battle raged on as he made his way down to the beach.

  When Col. Randal reached the DUKW, he pitched his gear in the back. So much for sitting back relaxed and watching the show.

  “Let’s get the hell out of Dodge.”

  8

  NEW MIST-O-MATIC

  Colonel John Randal was sitting out by the private pool on the