The Rat Patrol 4 - Two-Faced Enemy (10 page)

"That must have been it," Troy said. "We'll cross over and work back until we pick up the trail."

They drove back on the west side of the road until they were opposite the dune where they'd lingered. They had seen no marks in the sand.

"You'd better take over," Troy said bitterly to Moffitt. "You can easily see that my judgment is impaired. Now we'll have to follow their tracks out in plain sight on the road."

"Carry on," Moffitt said quietly. "We all were in it with you."

On the road, the cleat marks of the halftracks were plain. Tully followed them easily without lights, although the moon was beginning to wane. Troy and Moffitt both had climbed in the backs of their jeeps and were alert at the machine guns.

They'd traveled only a few minutes when Tully suddenly slammed on his brakes. Hitch ran alongside to avoid crashing and stopped.

"What is it?" Troy shouted, swinging his gun in every direction.

"Damnedest thing I ever saw, Sarge," Tully called, hopping from the jeep and running ahead. "The tracks end right here. They just disappear."

Troy looked right and left and then up at the dark sky. "So a convoy of a dozen six-wheeled trucks and two ground-chewing halftracks just disappear in thin air!" he yelled in frustration and jumped to the road.

Tully and Hitch were creeping forward on their hands and their knees.

"Aw, Sarge," Tully drawled. "You know better than that. They used our old trick and put down some rakes."

"And covered up the halftrack marks?" Troy demanded. "Those cleats bite deep."

"This road surface isn't much more than sand, Sarge," Hitch said with a pop of his gun. "The cleats bite but this stuff doesn't hold the marks. Look, you can see the furrow marks made by the rakes."

"Sure," Tully said soothingly. "We ain't lost them. All we got to do is follow the furrows to where they turned off." 

"Can you see them in this light?" Troy asked. "From behind the steering wheel?"

Tully got into the jeep and admitted he could not. "Let's not waste any more time," Troy shouted in anger. "I got us into this. I'll bird dog."

He trotted ahead on the road, bent over the trail like an Indian scout. The jeeps tried to keep behind him. He followed the trail half blind, hoping only that the rakes meant that the convoy was turning off soon. Surely they wouldn't drive very far with the rakes holding them back.

He was right. He'd trotted bent over like a potato picker for scarcely a mile when the furrows made an east turn into the desert. His feet dug into the sand and he pushed doggedly on, sweating and cursing as he plowed ahead.

Moffitt trotted alongside him. "I'll spell you, old boy," he said.

"Damnit, Jack," Troy growled, punishing himself. "Why aren't you back with your weapon giving me cover?"

He came to the place where the jeep tires had crossed over the furrows almost an hour before. Any advantage they'd had was slipping away fast.

He was still tottering on with his nose to the trail when Tully let out a yell. "You can get back in the carriage, Sarge. There's plenty of trail on ahead."

Stiffly he straightened and lifted his head. The tracks pointed like an arrow more to the east than the south. He didn't walk back to the jeep. He waited until Tully was beside him, then pulled himself into the front seat.

When Troy had rinsed his mouth out with water and let a little of it trickle down his parched throat, he called to Moffitt, "Cover, will you, Jack? For a few minutes. Until I get my wind back."

"Surely, Sam," Moffitt answered, and if he chuckled he covered it with a cough.

Side by side, the jeeps leaped away like hound dogs hot on a scent, although there was no moon and it was quite dark now. Troy sometimes thought Tully drove by his nose.

Troy jerked his head up with a start. The jeep was stopped and Tully was shaking him. Moffitt and Hitch were pulled alongside. It wasn't morning, but it was no longer night. In the strange light he could see details and features quite clearly, but everything looked either black or blue.

"Why did you let me sleep?" he demanded unreasonably, "Forget that. Thanks. Have we caught up with the convoy." Tully pointed straight ahead. Dust hung like a black feather against a blue drape.

"We think we might circle now and run on ahead of them, Sam," Moffitt said.

"How long have I slept?" Troy asked, looking at his watch. It was oh-three-thirty-five hours.

"Almost an hour," Tully said. "We picked up on them in the sand."

Troy swore. "We don't know how much farther the dump might be. We don't know how much time we have. Move. Move, damnit. Get a compass reading on their course and take off."

"Already got it, Sarge," Tully said mildly and let out the clutch.

They circled wide to the south since the course was ESE and in an hour they were back on the bearing. The sun wasn't up yet but it was light. The sky was blue and pink. It was going to be another scorcher. Troy and Moffitt were back on the guns, searching the limitless desert for some indication of a dump. Troy was betting on a small oasis. The trucks that hauled the drums would have needed water and Jerry would not have wasted precious room to carry it. He estimated they had half an hour on the convoy, perhaps forty-five minutes, at the most an hour. But to be safe, thirty minutes. The Jerries would have picked up their tracks now and be after them. The halftracks had a speed of about twenty-five miles an hour, the trucks not much more than that in the sand. It was a toss-up. Maybe both a halftrack and a truckload of men with machine pistols were on the trail right now.

"Pour it on, Tully," he urged.

Tully just shrugged helplessly.

Twenty minutes later, Moffitt sang out, "Land ho, hard to the lee!"

Troy looked to the south and then to the north and back to the south, uncertain just what the leeboard might be in this sea of sand. A dark patch, a blob showed to the south.

"Easy does it," he called back. He doubted there'd be a guard of any sort at this isolated dump and hoped the drums weren't too hard to find. But he remembered the earlier conversation he'd had with himself before he'd blown all reason to the wind and lost the convoy.

In standard procedure, the jeeps parted before they reached the oasis to make a slow circle of it from opposite sides. It was an inviting place that covered perhaps an acre and nourished a few dozen palm trees that looked well fed along with some other greenery. There would be a waterhole at the middle, Troy thought, and just then he noticed a squatty, boxlike concrete structure with slits that probably were for machine guns. He was swinging his Browning on it when two men in shorts with shirts with hacked-off sleeves sprang from behind it and ran toward the jeep waving their hands and shouting in German at the tops of their voices. Just before Troy almost cut them down with a burst, he remembered Moffitt, Hitch, Tully and he still were wearing the Jerry uniforms they'd put on the night before and he relaxed his hold on the grips. The poor devils probably had been stuck out here alone for months and didn't even question the jeep.

"Stop," he told Tully, handing him a coil of nylon rope. "Walk up to them grinning. I'll keep you covered. Tie their hands behind their backs and secure them together."

The Jerries looked so happy when they saw Tully coming toward them, Troy almost felt sorry for them. He trained the Browning right at their guts. The Jerries got the idea. They saw their mistake fast and started to run. Troy put a burst in the sand at their feet. That stopped them. They cried all the time Tully was tying them together.

"Hey, Tully," Troy called. "Leave them a little play, give them three feet or so. Let them walk side by side, at least."

When Moffitt and Hitch drove up, Troy turned the two Jerries over to Moffitt, asked him to explain they weren't being sent out to die in the desert but that the convoy would be along soon, probably before sunrise. Then Troy gave each one of the canteens he and Moffitt had taken from the Volkswagen.

"How are they going to drink with their hands tied behind them, Sam?" Moffitt asked with an amused glint in his eyes.

"Oh hell, cut them loose," Troy said gruffly. "Just tell them to get going and not to come back."

Armed with submachine guns, Troy and Tully ran to the slitted concrete box. It was open at the back. Machine guns were in position at each of the slits.

"You suppose there's a third?" Tully asked, flattening against the wall and pointing his gun down a flight of concrete steps.

"There was," Troy said tersely and jerked his thumb at a cross under a palm tree a dozen yards away.

Down the steps was a bunker with cots and living facilities. A heavy metal door at the rear led to an underground concrete storehouse. There must have been two hundred hundred-gallon drums of gasoline in the place.

"All right," Troy said, starting up the steps. "You and Hitch fill the jeeps and the cans with gas and water. The doctor and I will plant the packages."

Back at the jeep, he took four plastic time charges from a crate in the back, glancing as he did at the Jerries he'd turned loose. They were half trotting into the desert and they weren't looking back.

Tully and Hitch worked at the double and when they'd taken all the gas and water they could carry, Troy and Moffitt put the four plastic time charges in the middle of the drums, closed the metal door and raced to the jeeps that were waiting with motors idling. As they jumped in their seats and sped off, Troy saw the two Jerries now a good mile away, and not more than a mile or two beyond them the convoy approaching. The Jerries were running. The convoy stopped when it came to the Jerries and the sun was just rising when an entire oasis blew into the sky.

6

Hauptmann Hans Dietrich had a problem. It was the minefield. He was standing in his armored car, radio earphones clamped over his cap and glasses about his neck, a field map beside him on the seat, when the first rays of the sun turned the pink on the horizon to gold. He had spent most of the night studying the locations of the five halftracks that had been lost to the mines and comparing them with the penetration that had been made by the other nine vehicles. He was puzzled and had come to the conclusion that some of his crews had been careless, although he was not prepared to say just how.

Throwing his eleven reserve tanks into the line to supplement the remaining halftracks as minesweepers, he gave the order to advance. The mighty armored force churned into the battlefield. The backup line of tanks had been ordered to hold fire until within effective range. Once more the deafening blast of seventy-five millimeter shells slamming the earth and the clapping explosions of detonated mines rang in Dietrich's ears, but this morning he did not stand quite so straight and his eyes were clouded. He had come to the conclusion that the American colonel, Wilson, had sown the minefield in a casual, haphazard fashion. It offended Dietrich's military sense of precision and it confused his approach to the minesweeping problem.

It was both physically and logistically impossible to clear every square yard of the field. Dietrich had considered this solution and had come up with a figure of some seventy-five thousand shells, which was of course completely out of the question. He was hopeful that his force could advance to effective firing range without sustaining serious losses and he also was hoping, though not being hopeful, that some pattern still might be read into the design.

The field before Dietrich was a pounding haze of blinding, golden dust when the sun burst full upon it and one of Dietrich's tank commanders reported the first loss. A mine had blown the treads from the right side of a tank. There were no casualties.

It was at this moment that Herr Oberst Funke chose to call. The old man was babbling so brokenly and incoherently that Dietrich decided he was drunk and was about to sign off in disgust when he caught one word that curdled his blood. It was El Alghur.

"Herr Oberst, Herr Oberst," he said crisply, though he was shaking inside. "Please speak more slowly and clearly. There is a battle underway and it is very difficult to hear and understand. What did you say of El Alghur? Have the trucks returned?"

"No, Hans. Oh! It is terrible." The colonel was sobbing. "It is unbearably inconceivable, this fresh disaster at El Alghur."

"Come, pull yourself together, Oberst! What happened at El Alghur?" Dietrich asked with sure knowledge of what he would be told.

"It was just as they arrived. The convoy, Hans." The colonel was speaking haltingly. "I sent two halftracks to protect it. The convoy arrived safely. They were within sight of the oasis, perhaps no more than a mile away. The two of the guards who remained, they were running to meet the convoy in the desert. They warned of what was to happen, and as they spoke it happened. The entire dump simply exploded. Everything gone, Hans. What shall we do?"

"What were the guards doing in the desert?" Dietrich asked needlessly and purposefully from the unthinking part of his brain. His mind was racing ahead furiously, questing for petrol and oil.

"They had been taken unaware by this Gottverdamtig Rat Patrol." In his anger now Oberst Funke was more intelligible. "Do you suppose, Hans, the guards were in this treachery with the Rat Patrol? Else why were they permitted to run out to warn the convoy?"

"They were allowed to leave and warn the others simply because there was no need to kill them," Dietrich stated incontrovertibly. His mind was functioning as a single-purposed unit again. "Where is the convoy?"

"At El Alghur, or what is left of El Alghur," the colonel said piteously. "They radioed the information and asked for instructions. What shall we do, Hans? I think I should order a withdrawal at once while we still have fuel enough to return."

"We do not have fuel enough to return, Herr Oberst," Dietrich said disdainfully. "That is why we must take the port. There is no choice for us now but victory. You must signal the convoy at once. At El Alghur, they are more than halfway to Sidi Abd. They must continue to Sidi Abd where there is a store of petrol. I do not think the Rat Patrol will attempt to blow that dump, but the convoy must be alert every minute when the return trip is started. I want them back here tomorrow afternoon. Will you relay that message at once, Herr Oberst?"