The Rat Patrol 4 - Two-Faced Enemy (2 page)

"But this day is your own," she cried.

"I've got to see what they want," he called, starting up the steps without looking back. He heard Ray's bare feet racing after him.

Without turning to look, he ran into the living room, sweeping his boots and clothing from the low, damask divan as he crossed the room.

"Don't bother to come back," she flung at him as he started down the steps.

When he reached the downstairs hall, he heard her feet pattering after him. As he pushed the door and stumbled into the dark, cool cellar, he saw two GIs in familiar headgear starting up the front entrance steps. He held his breath uncertainly for a moment as he felt Ray standing tensely behind him, then he called, "Tully! Hitch!"

They swung about and he walked to meet them, already getting his arms into his shirt. Ray followed. She was breathing fast. Tully and Hitch stopped a few feet from him, stood looking from him back to Ray for a few moments. Troy had not seen Laurentz, but he could feel him hovering somewhere in the background.

"Troy, you've got to come with us to HQ right away," Hitch said urgently. He pressed his lips together and frowned, looking back again to Ray. "The colonel wants you and is raising hell."

"He knows this is my day off," Troy said irritably, but he started pulling on his pants. "What's up?"

"We've got to go out," Tully answered. "On a patrol." 

"Shut up," Hitch hissed at Tully, eyes darting back in Ray's direction.

"Knock that off, Hitch," Troy snapped and turned back to Tully. "Why do we have to go out on a patrol? Right now? On a day like this? When it gets this hot, nothing moves." He sat on the edge of a table and started pulling on his boots. "Your radiator will boil before you've gone ten miles and it won't cool off when you stop. What in hell is going on?"

"We'll tell you on the way to HQ," Hitch mumbled, eyes moving meaningfully in Ray's direction.

"Hitch," Troy shouted, angry now. "I told you to cut out that stuff. I'm not budging until I know what's so urgent."

"It's the Jerries," Tully blurted. "There's a passel of them coming at Sidi Beda, a couple armored divisions maybe, and they're not very far away. The colonel wants the Rat Patrol out behind them before they box us in."

Colonel Dan Wilson fumed. He was standing in the middle of his map-hung office directly under the creaking, four-bladed wooden ceiling fan, but his khakis were soaked. He could feel the perspiration bursting from the roots of his close-cropped hair. His eyes kept blurring with moisture from his eyelids and his lungs withered at each breath he took. He was waiting. For an hour and a half, he'd been waiting. The Jerries were advancing, but at Sidi Beda, nothing moved. He'd ordered out his mobile unit of halftracks and armored cars at eleven-hundred hours, but they still hadn't arrived. He'd ordered Privates Pettigrew and Hitchcock to bring in Sergeant Troy, but they had not returned—with or without him. He'd ordered Sergeant Moffitt to personally supervise the outfitting of the Rat Patrol's jeeps for their crucial mission and to see that the vehicles were delivered to HQ without delay, but like the others, Moffitt was dawdling. It was too hot to smoke, it was too hot to pace the floor, so Colonel Wilson just stood under his big ceiling fan and suffered.

He heard the sound of gasoline engines and started for his window that overlooked the military boulevard. There were two motors, jeep motors, he thought, but they didn't sound right. They seemed to be clacking and sputtering. When he finally reached the window, the two Rat Patrol jeeps, windshields flat down on the hoods, long snouts of fifty-caliber Browning machine guns fixed forward, were parked and the motors shut off. Sergeant Moffitt in his dark beret, goggles dangling loosely about his neck, seemingly with all the time in the world, waved lackadaisically to someone concealed within one of the native alleys, said something to a man in fatigues who'd driven the second jeep, then sauntered toward the entrance to HQ. The enlisted man in fatigues strolled away as if the war would keep. Sergeant Troy, flanked by Privates Pettigrew and Hitchcock, walked casually onto the avenue from the native quarter and ambled over to HQ. Colonel Wilson returned to his position under the fan and stood straddle-legged, arms behind his back, waiting for the Rat Patrol. His rage was monumental.

They straggled in, first Moffitt, then the others, and stood limp and slumping, looking at him without a spark of interest in their faces.

"Attention!" Wilson barked. When the four were aligned in a semblance of military order, he stared furiously at Sergeant Sam Troy. The man returned the look indifferently. Wilson addressed his remarks directly to Troy. "Sergeant, time is critical so I shall not waste it now. We shall deal with your dereliction upon your return from this assignment. If you exhibit any of the impaired judgment on this mission that you have already displayed this morning I have ordered Sergeant Moffitt to take command of the patrol and place you in restraint."

Sergeant Troy glared resentfully but remained tight-lipped.

"Briefly the situation is this," Wilson went on, still seething but keeping his voice even. "Somehow under cover of darkness the enemy had managed to approach our position with an unexpectedly large armored force. It is, in fact, a force of overwhelmingly superior strength. An observation plane picked up the enemy about thirty miles southeast from Sidi Beda at ten-hundred hours. His radio went out or was jammed, so it was eleven-hundred hours before his report managed to creep into HQ." He paused to get an accusing tone into his voice. "Since that time, we have been looking for you, Sergeant Troy."

Troy was breathing heavily now and his jaw was jutting stubbornly, but he remained silent.

"It appears the enemy has two forces which are approaching a rendezvous or command position about fifteen miles south and east on the track," Wilson said tightly. "Each force consists of approximately fifty units—tanks, halftracks and armored cars. That is an estimate only, because our observation plane was driven from close surveillance by Jerry's eighty-eights and we know Dietrich employs dust-makers to conceal the real strength of his columns. One thing is obvious. The armored unit he had at Sidi Abd has been reinforced by a strong strike force. We have twenty-five Sherman tanks dug in behind minefields above the town and our mobile force of twenty-five units with which to oppose the enemy. The enemy's strategy appears to be a two-pronged attack, one force directed at the port through Latsus Pass, the other an encircling movement aimed at our tank positions on the escarpment. Although we are well fortified both at the pass and above the town, against the numerical superiority of the enemy our situation is difficult. Have I made myself clear on this point?"

The four sweat-streaked faces were rigid and emotionless as he examined each in turn.

"Very well," he said tersely. "Our mobile unit has been ordered to Latsus Pass to effect an entrapment. When the enemy has been destroyed or compelled to withdraw at this point, it should be possible to flank the prong attacking the Shermans. I want the Rat Patrol out of Sidi Beda and behind the enemy lines. You will leave the back way over the escarpment. It is up to you to find a trail or goat path. There must be some way to the top. You cannot use the Latsus Pass route because of the action we plan there and because I want you behind the enemy lines undetected. The jeeps have been equipped with demolition bombs, plastic charges and anti-personnel mines, in addition to your usual arms. Each tank tread you can blow, each ammunition or gasoline dump you can destroy, whatever harassment and havoc you can create, will contribute to the defense of Sidi Beda. I have called for bomber support, but this will not be immediately available. Are there any questions?"

Sergeants Troy and Moffitt and Privates Pettigrew and Hitchcock remained wooden-faced and silent, but their eyes were burning. They were fighting mad, Wilson told himself with satisfaction. Now let them take it out on the Jerries.

"When you run out of ammunition and supplies, commandeer them," he said curtly. "I don't want to see you back in Sidi Beda until the enemy has been defeated. Dismissed."

Four grim men, they saluted, heeled and marched from the office. Wilson went to the window, heard the engines cough several times before they caught, then one behind the other, the jeeps spun and darted without slackening speed into an alley that left scant inches on either side of the little bugs with the scorpion stings. He heard other racing and roaring motors, the grinding whine of gears, the slap of metal treads. Picking up his white varnished helmet with the gold eagle on it, he strapped on his twin pearl-handled pistols and went to the street. When the armored column approached, he ran onto the avenue and leaped into the front seat of the lead armored car before it had braked.

"On, on!" he shouted to the driver, half standing to fling an imperative hand signal to the column.

"Can't put on much speed today," his driver grunted. He was a greasy-faced, unshaven sergeant in a steel helmet and he was chewing the unlighted stub of a cigar. "Got to baby them along or the radiators spout geysers."

"Jerry has the same problem and he's moving," Wilson snapped.

"He ain't moving very fast," the sergeant said complacently.

The column moved at an agonizingly slow pace along the graded road that ran away from the tranquil Mediterranean through barren, rock-studded, gray land toward the long pass that slashed up through stone to the plateau. Wilson wiped the sweat from his eyes and wiped it off his forehead. When he looked ahead, the road shimmered and seemed to swim. But the column pushed its tortuous way on. At Mile Seven, Wilson directed his driver off the route and climbed into the back of the car. He dispersed his force with a dozen halftracks mounting thirty-seven-millimeter weapons stationed near the bottom of the gorge-like defile on either side of the route. He signaled the dozen armored cars to move up through the pass to the top, where machine gun emplacements along the sides controlled the road down through the rock. He planned to deploy his armored cars back on the plateau away from the road and use them to bottle up the enemy when Jerry had his units in the pass. Far to the southeast, miles away, he could see a tenuous curtain of dust hanging in the still air. Let Jerry come on, Wilson thought. The enemy would find he'd walked into a bear trap.

The dozen armored cars ground up the incline and the first three vehicles pulled into the passage itself. The fourth car spluttered and stalled before it entered the defile. Behind, eight armored cars halted.

"Go on, go on," Wilson shouted to his driver. "We've got to get that fool off the track so the others can go ahead."

His car jerked forward. An explosion rocked the ground and broke the dead air into crackling pieces. A black cloud billowed into the sky above Latsus Fass.

"Stop!" Wilson shouted, stunned and shocked. He stood to peer into the enfolding smoke. He could not understand what had happened. Somehow, one of his armored units had exploded.

Now machine guns crackled and there was the whoosh and boom of mortars. Wilson could not see into the pass, but the armored cars at the bottom were churning the baked earth in confused flight. Within the pass, flames crackled as two more explosions sent bursts of smoke smashing into the sky. The mortars and machine guns continued to fire. All of the fire seemed to be coming from the sides of the defile, from Wilson's own emplacements. The halftracks were moving uncertainly forward into the path of the withdrawing armored cars from the mouth of the pass, and the crew of the car that had stalled abandoned it and raced back toward the halftracks on foot.

Wilson was standing now with his walkie-talkie in his hand, shouting into it and waving the other hand to beckon his mobile unit to withdraw. He did not think anyone either heard or saw him. Gradually the vehicles were pulling back in confused, unordered retreat. The mortar and machine gun fire had stopped as the armor fell out of range. Wilson slumped in his seat and watched his crippled mobile striking force limp back on the route. He'd lost three armored cars and he couldn't count his casualties. Jerry had slipped across the desert unnoticed, destroying or capturing whatever patrols had been on the route, and taken Wilson's emplacements. Jerry commanded the one strategic entrance to Sidi Beda and Wilson was bottled up. Wilson's defensive position was very nearly hopeless.

2

Herr Hauptmann Hans Dietrich of the Afrika Korps permitted a tight smile to lift his lips as a black cloud of smoke edged with flame boiled into the sky over the plateau from the neighborhood of Latsus Pass. The faint thud of a distant explosion followed the billowing mass and Captain Dietrich pulled the field glasses from his inscrutable pale eyes. Slim and erect, he was standing on a ledge of limestone at the command post seven miles southeast of the pass. Under cover of darkness, the two Allied machine gun emplacements at Latsus had been seized without a shot being fired by a patrol he had sent forward in Volkswagens. Unhampered by overheating radiators and equipped with mortars, machine guns and mines, the commando patrol under Lieutenant Fritz Lungershausen had sped ahead of his armored column, taken the position and dug in. The patrol now held the gateway to the port.

It was a shame, Dietrich thought without much regret, focusing his glasses on the dozen tanks and twenty-four halftracks parked on the route a mile beyond the CP, that the armor had not been at Lungershausen's heels to follow the quick and silent night victory at the Allied emplacements. He dismissed his mild disappointment. He had never expected to come so far without being detected nor to capture control of Latsus Pass so easily. He turned his glasses to the west where the main unit of the task force, thirty-six tanks and fourteen halftracks, awaited the signal to attack the Allied defensive positions above the town. Streamers of dust trailed after the supply trucks with gas, oil and water that already were shuttling between the dumps and the two columns.

At the command post, a dozen pyramid-topped tents had been thrown up and squads of men, stripped to their shorts, were sweating under the scorching sun as they unloaded and stockpiled ammunition, fuel, water and rations. Although Captain Dietrich's sharp and handsome face was beaded with perspiration and his short-sleeved tan shirt was damp, he was unmindful of the heat. His pleasure at the way this campaign had started precluded physical discomfort, for he had been among the tank commanders who had retreated into the desert when a powerful Allied force had seized Sidi Beda.