The German corporal threw open the wire barrier and jumped in Trufflefoot’s face. “Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to, Private? Get out of here before I have you court-martialed for insubordination! Goddamn jealous grunts! Nothing but cheap cannon fodder that think they’re special.”
Trufflefoot stuck up his middle finger and tried not to glance over the German’s shoulder.
“Sure, fine. We’ll leave you alone so you can get back to sucking each other off…”
The corporal roared, and sucker-punched Trufflefoot right in his oversized nose.
“Ah, shit.” He bent over the old geezer and slung his weapon over his back.
“I didn’t mean to knock the smartass out. Damn, Sergeant Fritz is going to be pissed. Heiko, give me a hand!”
The corporal fussed around the unconscious man, trying to rouse him. All that came out was a groan. “Odd. This asshole’s really old for a private. Hope he’s not having a heart attack. Heiko, what’s—”
Heiko lay face-down outside the sandbag-covered guardhouse, only his left boot twitching a little. The corporal flashed his rifle up at the other private leaping towards him with a bloody Maori ax swinging over his head.
The trigger fled from the corporal’s grasp, as something cold wrapped around his neck. Instinctively, he clawed with both hands at the steel slicing through his skin. With every wiggle, the piano wire sawed its way deeper into the muscle and closer to his windpipe.
“What are you waiting for, Steele? Finish him already before someone sees us!” Trufflefoot wheezed through his bloody nose, struggling to keep the younger German pinned down.
Captain Steele lowered his ax and waved at some shadows down the block. “It’s your first kill, isn’t it? Take your time. Always a special moment.”
He squatted over the gasping German as Trufflefoot leaned back, the garrote slowly but surely finishing its gruesome work. Steele glanced up as ten of his LRDG men trotted out of the shadows in a wedge formation.
“We had to neutralize a two-man roving patrol a couple blocks south, but otherwise the coast is clear. We can bring up the trucks whenever you’re ready, sir.”
Steele wrinkled his nose as the NAZI soiled himself, his manic struggle reduced to a few spasms. He reached down and took Trufflefoot’s shaking hand.
“Not bad, Major. You’re not a virgin anymore.” His team dragged the bodies out of sight and fanned out inside the compound. “Swallow that puke and pull yourself together. You’re the only man I’ve got that speaks German. Stay out here and keep visible, just in case any Krauts come snooping around.”
Trufflefoot rammed a pair of cigarette butts in his leaky nose and whimpered. He hefted his rifle to the low ready and straightened his back. Steele nodded and tossed his ax from hand to hand. “Give us two minutes before you signal the trucks to come in.”
The Major snapped his head around. “There’s probably eight, maybe even ten supply guys asleep in the main building. Some are bound to be armed.”
Steele smirked, so Trufflefoot wagged his dizzy head.
“Why so long? Slowing down in your old age?”
The Captain was still laughing when he came back 90 seconds later and wiped his ax clean. Trufflefoot choked back his own vile as he noticed the impromptu war paint streaking Steele’s face.
Instead of dwelling on the nasty details, Trufflefoot flashed a red lens covered flashlight down the street. Seven engines roared to life at once a hundred yards farther south. In seconds, Kat sprang out of the lead truck. She patted Steele’s blood-soaked cheek and cooed.
“A shave and makeup? Who you trying to impress, sir?”
She winced and whipped out a bandage when Trufflefoot turned around. “Lord, Major. You look like you’re having fun playing infantry. Not too bad, Professor.” He grimaced as she gave him a quick peck on his swollen cheek.
“You should see the other guy.”
Steele tucked his ax away and shouldered a rifle as the last truck rushed through the gate. “All right, enough messing around. Sergeant Dore? Pull your jeep and crew deeper in the shadows and back up the good Major. Shouldn’t take us five minutes to take what we need and set the charges. If anyone shows up, keep them talking, and we’ll gun them down on the way out.”
He trotted off into the sprawling compound without a backward glance. Kat followed on his heels through the rows of crates and shipping containers, filling up the dusty soccer field. “What are you doing? Get back with your team, Kat.”
She clucked her tongue at Steele. “What can I say? I just love shopping.” While the others dashed off and tossed sacks of rations and Jerry cans of petrol and water in their trucks, Kat searched the Wehrmacht trucks already loaded and staged behind the main building. She whistled after throwing open the fourth tailgate.
“Oh! This is too easy. Captain Steele, check out what I…”
Kat shut her trap as someone barked in German from the front gate.
It wasn’t Major Trufflefoot.
Trufflefoot only sighed as the patrolling German Command Car hit its brakes and swung a tight U-turn. He slipped deep in the shadows of the shack as the car pulled parallel to the gate. At least the heavy machine gunner in the back swiveled around to keep his weapon covering the street. Not that the three dismounts bounding out were exactly helpless. Each carried the fanciest, brand new style of fully automatic rifles developed just for the elite Fallschirmjäger corps.
“Come back here, Private! Where the hell is your guard partner? For both your sakes, he better not be sleeping in there.”
Trufflefoot took two steps outside, never moving far from the sandbags. He blew his swollen nostrils out as far as he could and poured on the condescension.
“Who the hell do you think you are? Let me see some papers, or I’m calling my Commanding Officer! He’ll strip your rank for waking him up.”
The lead soldier moved closer while the others fanned out. All sported odd splotchy camouflage uniforms and helmet covers, rather than the dull tan or gray styles issued to the regular army. Trufflefoot caught a brief flash of twin lightning bolts glinting in the moonlight from the leader’s collar.
“I’m already here, Private. The SS is taking over security of the supply chain. Now go tell your Commander to report to me right now. And wake up two more men. We’re doubling the guard duty, permanently.”
The SS guy never lowered his mini-machine gun, peering over Trufflefoot’s shoulder at the random shadows shuffling about inside the compound.
“Sofort, mein Herr!” Trufflefoot briefly distracted the newcomer with fawning obedience. He clutched his rifle and gave a quick salute, scurrying with respectable haste out of the line of fire. The SS lieutenant hissed something to his comrades and then raised his whiny voice.
“Not so fast. You have a strange accent. Where do you come from exactly? The Rhineland?”
For a millisecond, Trufflefoot’s stride faltered. That was all it took.
The stormtrooper snapped his weapon to his shoulder and whispered.
In clear English. “How many of you are in there?”
The SS Officer hit the deck as blinding white headlights flashed on from twenty yards inside the compound. He fired a wild burst, knocking out one of the lights, just as a tsunami of lead swamped his whole team.
Trufflefoot froze in the middle of the storm as Capson’s twin MG42s shredded all four interlopers. He was still gaping in awe as Atkins ran their Willy up, bouncing a few tires over the squirming SS leader’s spine. Dore dived off and gave each of the dying men a quick double-tap.
“Better grab one of these auto rifles, Major. I reckon the party is just getting started.”
Someone blew a whistle from the Atiq Mosque up the street, only a few hundred yards across Freedom Square. Calm, deep voices bellowed orders in the dark while countless weapon bolts clicked to the rear. Only the roar from dozens of vehicle engines cranking to life in every direction drowned them out.
“Oh dear…” Trufflefoot
tore off running as Capson squeezed a burst off at a shadow rushing their way from the square. In response, scores of other shadows erupted in muzzle flashes. Mostly automatic.
Atkins rammed the jeep in reverse while Dore and Trufflefoot levitated aboard. The dust cloud from the disintegrating sandbags gave them a brief moment of cover as they retreated inside the compound.
They swerved to avoid the line of Chevy’s rushing towards the gate, crushing the rear fender against a pallet of something covered in flammable warning labels. Captain Steele waved his hand over his head from the lead truck flitting by.
“Wrong way. Time to extract. Follow us!”
“Wait, where’s Kat?”
Steele didn’t hesitate. He slapped his driver and leaped out. “Get everyone back to the rendezvous point, and don’t stop for anything. We’ll meet you soon.”
The Captain sprang in the back of Trufflefoot’s jeep and pointed with his submachine gun barrel. “She was trying to steal a supply truck. Must be over th—”
At the gate, his first truck redlined the engine and hung a right turn, blazing away with all four machine guns at the north. They only made it ten feet before scores of high-explosive 37mm AAA shells pulverized the truck and all three men inside.
Steele punched the deck and screamed over all the fuel cans onboard torching off. “Fall back! Get the Rhodesians up for cover fire. Executive Officer, we need to blow an emergency evacuation hole in the south wall. Go!”
The Executive Officer spun his truck around, as Kat roared up in a German 5-ton cargo hauler and nearly sideswiped them, blocking the path. She pounced down from the cab and howled.
“Wrong way! The Huns will be all over us long before we get out of town. Give me a hole in the northeast corner, and I can take out both those flak guns.”
“With what? Do you have a couple of dive bombers in your back pocket?”
Kat snagged Steele’s arm and dragged him to the tailgate. She threw open the tarp and snapped her fingers. “Can I borrow one of those detonators?”
Steele whooped at the crates of 150mm artillery rounds. There must have been close to a hundred of them, each packed with 50kg of high-explosive goodness.
“You’ll need detonation cord also, if you want to blast them all off at once.” He snagged the demo team as they rushed past and shouted orders.
While the team split up and rigged the truck and northern wall, Steele fired up a cigarette. He took a long drag as the cover firing at the front gate reached crescendo. Kat and the Captain carefully avoided glancing at one another. As soon as the demo experts came trotting up, he helped them wrap the plunger around the steering column.
“How long?”
“Just a twenty-second fuse delay.” Stewart bit his lip and snapped the Captain a crisp salute.
“See ya’ in Valhalla, Nate. I’ll get the boys out of here.”
Steele choked up and turned away as he opened the driver’s door.
Kat shoved past Steele as the Executive Officer ran off. “Oh no you don’t. This was my idea. I’m just a tag-along civilian anyway. The most expendable.”
Steele squeezed her shoulder. Hard. “Take care of yourself.” He gave the shocked redhead a quick kiss on the forehead and tossed her into Trufflefoot’s arms. The Major pinned Kat tight from behind while the Captain climbed up in the cab.
He paused, one foot inside, and studied the northern wall as his demo team tore a two-meter hole in it.
“Major, I’m so sorry.” Kat flopped her head back and smacked his swollen nose.
Trufflefoot stumbled away and grasped his spurting snout while Kat reached up and wrapped both hands around Steele’s leg. She yanked him down, giving the big guy another scar as his chin bounced off the truck’s step ladder.
Kat levitated inside while he cussed and bounded to his feet. She dropped the clutch and roared away, pelting the men with a cloud of gravel. The flapping, open driver’s door sheared off as she smashed through the hole in the wall. Kat wedged her slim frame in the floorboard, butt on the gas, and tried to keep the steering wheel over her head straightish.
Over hundreds of rounds tearing through the engine and cab above, someone yelped. She opened her eyes and spotted a German rifle go flying past the open door, without anyone attached. The truck bounced over several more crunchy SS men lying prone on the ground, but that’s not what brought a grin to her face.
Kat twisted the detonator’s arming key. With a banshee shriek, she tucked and rolled into the firestorm outside.
She rolled to her feet, forcing her wobbly, skinned knees to keep pumping. Behind her, the truck rampaged another thirty yards before plowing into a twin-barreled flak cannon. A dozen Stormtroopers ran over to drag the gun free of the wreckage and get it back in the fight.
Twenty more SS fighters rose nearby and leveled their weapons. An eerily familiar voice bellowed in German, “Take her alive!”
Kat fought the urge to glance at her savior somewhere inside the main mosque. Instead, she stretched out her stride as far as humanly possible and closed on her target, the standalone minaret next to the holy building.
With less than three seconds to go, she gave the gaudy blue iron door a flying kick, knocking it free of the old, rusty hinges and collapsed inside. She heaved her gasping body a few feet to the left into the cramped stairwell leading to the top of the tower.
A windowless concrete structure with round sides to dissipate the shock wave.
Kat kicked the iron interior door shut in the laughing faces of the four NAZIs who followed her. A split second later, the sun came out. Nearly 8,000 pounds of high-explosive, equivalent to a B-17 dropping its entire bomb bay in one spot, atomized everyone within fifty yards of the truck. The blast wave flattened everything within three hundred more yards with the kinetic energy of a steamroller… one traveling faster than sound. The dozens of SS troopers in the open were the lucky ones.
Those inside the window-lined mosque, like the four chuckling idiots outside her door, had their internal organs ripped apart by the unholy overpressure wave. They lived long enough to roll around, vainly trying to put out the flames engulfing their bodies.
Shrapnel and body parts still rained down from the mushroom cloud in the city center when Kat popped her sweat-soaked ponytail out of the rubble.
“Oh, come on…”
She dived to the side as the upper half of the minaret crumbled and gave up the ghost. A German half-track clambered over the debris, just as the rest of the mosque collapsed. An old Colonel in the Commander’s seat reached a hand down and heaved her up. The back of the track was half-filled with filing cabinets. The rest was crammed with severely wounded staff members.
“It’s all right, soldier. We’ll get you to an aid station, but we have to get somewhere safe first.” He didn’t give the skinny private, covered head to toe in soot, a second glance. He shoved a submachine gun in her hands while scanning the smoky darkness.
“There’s too much sensitive information exposed out here, and God knows what happened to Pernass.”
Kat dropped the canteen she’d found an inch before it touched her cracked lips. “Oberführer Rudolf Pernass? With the Gestapo’s Department E?”
“How do you—” The Colonel twisted around in time to catch the full brunt of her folding buttstock in the jaw. Kat waited until the half-track was out of sight of the cratered square before bending over and tip-tapping the driver’s helmet with her muzzle.
“Don’t you think there’s been enough killing tonight? Help me offload the wounded, and I’ll let you live.”
The kid complied without a word, but he never stopped shaking. When they had the last litter on the side of the road, he snatched Kat’s arm.
“Don’t kill me. Please take me with you. Then you know I can’t tell anyone where you went. Besides, the SS will crucify me upside down for letting you take the Colonel. He’s the damn head of counterintelligence, did you know?”
Kat shook her head and dropped her eyes. She
came up a moment later and flashed her blade across his gut. He stumbled backward and took a knee, but didn’t collapse.
“Relax. Deep enough to bleed, but no lasting damage. Now you’re just one of the wounded. Your grandkids can thank me.” She tossed him a final wave as she revved up the half-track.
“I’d appreciate it if you could give me a five-minute head start before you call for help. Not too much time, though. Let’s keep it sporting.”
She blew a kiss and hauled ass south, a wolfish howl trailing in her wake.
Jalo Oasis
East Libya
A ny luck?”
In the shade of a red sandstone outcropping, Kat peered around a hulking New Zealander Sergeant at her hog-tied prisoner. No one had laid a finger on the Colonel, but the last eight hours of nonstop interrogation and threats, without any food, water or rest, must have been torture enough for the gray-haired NAZI Officer.
The interrogator’s iron visage skidded as Kat slipped past him. He gaped at the ghost turned living girl half his size and reflexively stood at parade rest when addressing her.
“No, ma’am. Not yet, but I think he’s coming around.”
The Colonel squinted through the heat haze at the familiar voice coming out of the shadows. He stumbled to his knees and laughed through cracked lips.
“You! If you really know Pernass, then you should know what hell awaits me if I talk. Your childish attempts at torture are a vacation in comparison.”
Kat squatted down and offered him a cool canteen. His resolve held for only a second before accepting the gift. Kat clucked her tongue while holding the jar to his lips.
“So what now? Should we drag you back to headquarters? I bet you’d love that. No POW camp for you. Probably get swapped in a prisoner exchange within the week.”
The Wehrmacht Officer sputtered and choked on the water, his eyes bulging at the mention of being sent to the Allied rear area.
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