The Sand Panthers (16 page)

*  *  *

Before he could realize what was happening, Schulze’s machine pistol butt slammed into his face and sent the jaunty young skipper sailing against the wall of the bridge. The officer’s face blanched. ‘What…what…’ he attempted to stutter, staring in astonishment at the naked giant who had appeared from nowhere on his bridge.

‘
Schnauze!
’ Schulze rapped, kicking the door closed behind him and flashing a quick look around the tiny bridge. He had been right. The charts and instruments were scattered across the small conning table, as if the scared young officer who faced him had been just planning a course.

‘You are German?’ the skipper, who did not look a day over twenty, said, dabbing his bleeding face with the end of his silk muffler.

‘No, Father Christmas,’ Schulze sneered, relieved all the same that the young skipper seemed to understand his language; it would make his task easier. ‘Now listen, no harm will come to you, if you do exactly as I say. If everything works out right, Tommy, you’ll be spending a nice holiday in Germany, out of the nasty war for good. So listen.’

Carefully he explained what he intended to do, while listening all the time for any unusual movement from outside. But everything seemed to be normal. As yet no one had discovered the dead seaman’s body and raised the alarm. But it would not be long before they did; he knew that.

The young skipper looked at him, his gaze a mixture of fear and complete disbelief. ‘You can’t…get away with that,’ he exclaimed. ‘It is impossible.
Unmöglich
…impossible!’

‘Then you’d better make it possible,’ Schulze snarled and raised his Schmeisser. ‘Or you’ll be a dead duck. Now come on, let’s get cracking…’

*  *  *

‘How far now, Prof?’ von Dodenburg gasped and halted for a moment in the cover of a buttress. Behind him the panting survivors, most of them wounded, clattered to a stop, grateful for the rest even though the Tommies were still firing at them.

‘Quarter…quarter of a kilometre,’ the ‘Prof’ gasped. ‘I think this is the
Kasr El Nil.
’

‘Thanks,’ von Dodenburg swung round to Matz. ‘Now, Corporal, what do you think? Where are we going to find Schulze? With this ship of his.’

Matz shrugged. ‘All he said was to tell you to come to the docks. He was going to get Wotan a ship.’

Von Dodenburg breathed out hard. ‘Alexandria is a damn big port. That rogue could be in any one of a dozen places.’ A slug whined off the bricks just in front of the buttress and reminded him again of the danger they were in. ‘All right, come on,’ he cried. ‘We can’t just stand here!’

*  *  *

‘My God, man, don’t you realize we’ve got to kill every last one of them!’ Slaughter, his face blackened with gun-smoke and his uniform ripped by bullets, cried angrily.

The harassed infantry lieutenant pointed to the cook and the regimental postman dying in the corner of the shattered wall. ‘But my lads have had it, can’t you see,’ he protested. ‘They’re base wallahs, not fighting men.’

‘The bren carrier,’ Slaughter snapped, pointing to the little carrier.

‘But my driver has been hit,’ the Lieutenant objected.

‘Drive it yourself then.’

‘I can’t,’ the lieutenant answered.

‘No, because you’re yellow – you’ve got a yellow streak a mile wide down your back,’ Slaughter cried in rage and snapped at the boy in Arabic. ‘Get in.’

He slid into the driver’s compartment. Next to him the boy fondled the mounted bren gun lovingly, his dark eyes shining; he had never seen so much killing as he had this night.

Angrily Slaughter clashed home the gear and let out the clutch. The bren carrier jolted forward. At 30mph it rattled along the Kasr El Nil towards the port. ‘Get ready with that gun,’ he ordered, as the snap-and-crackle of small-arms fire indicated that they were coming closer to the spot where the Germans were trying to break out of the trap.

The boy beamed at him. ‘Never fear effendi,’ he replied, ‘I will do you honour with it.’

They clattered over the debris of war to where a couple of wounded SAS men lay in the gutter next to a smashed tram car, still firing their weapons at a group of houses, walls bullet-pocked as if with the symptoms of some loathsome disease. Slaughter braked. ‘Are they in there?’ he asked. One of the SAS men, a bloody gash down the right of his face in which his one eye lay like a pearl, croaked in a hoarse Yorkshire accent ‘Ay, that the booggers are.’

Slaughter let out the clutch. The carrier shot forward. The fire from the houses where the Germans were holed up intensified. The boy pressed the butt of the bren into his right shoulder as he had seen the British do. He pressed the trigger. Tracer began to zip towards the houses. Bullets pattered against the carrier’s armoured sides. Neither the Major nor the boy flinched. Both were possessed by an all-consuming rage and desire to kill the men who had plagued them for so long. This time they would not escape again.

*  *  *

As the little armoured carrier rattled past the two snipers who were holding up all further progress to the port nearby, von Dodenburg saw his chance. ‘Matz, Meier after me!’ he barked.

He vaulted out of the window and doubled forward towards the advancing carrier. The boy saw them at once. He swung the machine-gun round. A flood of tracer headed towards them. Meier skidded to a stop and sank to the cobbles, staring at the bloody hole ripped in his thigh, his liquid eyes full of disbelief.

Von Dodenburg and Matz, the veterans, kept going. Instinctively Matz knew what his CO was going to do. When the two groups of desperate men, were separated by a matter of metres, Matz cried, ‘
Now sir
,’ and fired a burst right at the driver’s slit. The bullets whined off the metal crazily. Matz knew that they could not hurt the driver, but they could put him off. Just as von Dodenburg ran up the bren carrier’s glacis plate, Slaughter, confused by both the tactics and the bullets, braked hastily, throwing the boy face forward against the metal front. Next moment, von Dodenburg was inside the stalled carrier. The boy, his face covered with blood, squirmed round in the tight compartment to face this unexpected enemy. Von Dodenburg did not give him a chance. Balancing on the side of the carrier, he aimed a tremendous kick at the boy’s head. The Blue Veil howled with pain, and red and blue lights exploded in front of his eyes and he slumped in his seat stunned.

‘You bastard – you German bastard!’ Slaughter screamed as he saw his beloved boy fall back. With surprising speed he sprang from his seat and rose to grapple with the man towering above him.

Matz squeezed the trigger of his Schmeisser. Slaughter howled with unbearable anger as the burst ripped his back wide open. Grabbing the air, trying to keep his balance as if he were climbing the rungs of an invisible ladder, he crashed over the side.

Von Dodenburg grabbed the dazed boy by the scruff of his neck and flung him out after his lover. Sobbing blindly, the boy cradled the dead man’s head in his lap, stroking the suddenly still face with his brown hand. Major von Dodenburg slipped into the driver’s seat and re-started the engine. Matz sprang over the side next to him. Now the survivors began to stream out of the houses behind the cover of the bren. Over the roar of the engine, von Dodenburg yelled: ‘Follow me!’

In typical panzer grenadier form, the troopers covered by the firing carrier, advanced and swept by the dead bodies of the two SAS men, leaving behind the sobbing boy and the dead Major who had saved the day for the man who was soon to be called the ‘Victor of El Alamein’.

*  *  *

Doubling all-out with the last of their strength, the Wotan troopers ran onto the quay behind the carrier. Tracer was still coming at them from the confused mass of sheds. But most of it was wild and the troopers were too eager to get away from the Alexandria death-trap to worry about it.

Von Dodenburg halted. There were ships everywhere, many of them with their lights blazing. Some of them were merchantmen, but most grey warships. Even if Schulze had pulled off the impossible task of seizing a ship single-handed, how could he hope to get it out of Britain’s chief naval base in the Mediterranean, with so many enemy ships present?

‘Which way, sir?’ Matz yelled.

‘If I only knew,’ von Dodenburg groaned. Behind them there came the sound of machine-gun fire from one of the sheds. Sergeant Doerr cursed and flung his last stick grenade. There was a thick crump and the firing died away. But it was followed by the sound of running feet.

‘This way,’ von Dodenburg ordered. Obviously the whole harbour was beginning to wake up to their presence. In minutes the naval base would be roused. He swung the carrier’s wheel and clattered down the quay to the right, with the men doubling desperately after it, slugs hitting the concrete or whining off the corrugated iron sheds.

Von Dodenburg felt himself covercome by despair.

Ship after ship flashed by, with their alarmed crews turning on the lights and yelling in anger and surprise at the sight of Germans in their midst. ‘
Come on; Schulze for Chrissake, come on
,’ he called to himself frantically like a frightened child after a nightmare, wishing morning and the light to come again.

The howl of a ship’s siren drowned even the growing volume of small-arms fire. ‘Oh, shit. What now?’ Matz cried above the racket.

‘Where’s it coming from?’ von Dodenburg demanded.

‘Over there,’ Matz answered, pointing hastily at a Royal Navy torpedo boat.

Von Dodenburg cocked his head to one side, while the panting exhausted troopers clustered behind the carrier for protection…‘Can you make it out, Matz?’

Matz’s face set in a look of absolute astonishment. ‘It’s morse…somebody using the hooter for a morse signal.’

‘Yes.’ Von Dodenburg’s eyes glowed with sudden hope. ‘Listen to it! W…O…T…
It’s Schulze
.
Come on!
’

The ship was signalling WOTAN.

They doubled towards it, its mighty engines already throbbing, its deck shuddering, like a lean whippet anxious to be let off the leash.

*  *  *

Schulze watched them come. He pressed his Schmeisser into the pale, but defiant captain’s back. ‘All right, skipper, get your beautiful sailor boys ready to cast off,’ he ordered.

‘You swine, you can’t –’ His protest ended with a yelp of pain, as Schulze poked the muzzle hard into his back.

‘I can do anything, Captain,’ Schulze said cheerfully, as the Wotan men started to spring across the gap between the trembling boat and the quay. ‘I’m the admiral of this particular fleet.’

The young officer spoke into the mike. ‘Cast off,’ he said, forcing out each word through gritted teeth.

Just as the deckmen flung off the last hawser and the boat began to move out at an ever increasing speed, von Dodenburg took a mighty leap forward and landed on the deck in a heap. ‘Good for you, sir!’ Schulze exclaimed in delight and shoved the captain’s tense back. ‘All right, Nelson, full speed ahead!’

*  *  *

They had almost reached the boom when an echoing voice from the shore demanded: ‘What the devil do you think you are playing at, sir?’

‘This is it!’ von Dodenburg standing at Schulze’s side in the heaving bridge tensed.

‘I said, sir, what are you doing?’ the impersonal voice over the loud-hailer repeated. ‘Heave to – or we will fire.’

‘All right, Nelson,’ Schulze said with more cheerfulness than he felt, as the great shore batteries of 12-inch guns started to swing round in their direction. ‘Here’s where you win the Iron Cross – Third Class. Hit the gas!’

This time the young skipper needed no urging. He and his crew would go down with the Jerries too if they were hit now. All their lives were in his hands. He opened the throttle full blast. The two Germans caught themselves just in time. The long sharp prow rose right out of the water. At thirty knots an hour, with the boat hitting each wave as if it were a solid brick wall, it shot out into the sea just as the inferno broke loose.

Balls of fire were flung across the chasm of water. Tracer shells spat and ricocheted, dragging a blazing white light behind them over the sea. It was a vast impressive picture of frustrated fury, immense, volcanic and spectacular, like the anger of the gods.

But it was too late. They had gone…

‘
Oh, bloody! Bloody! Bloody!

All bloody fleas, no bloody beer

No bloody booze since we’ve been here

Oh bloody! Bloody! Bloody…
’

The crazy Australian General prisoner, tied to one of the escape transport’s stanchions, was singing with a mad grin on his brown face.

Von Dodenburg, standing next to the ‘Prof’ at the railing, tried to ignore the dreadful noise and focused his binoculars on the far end of the beach, which was swamped with troops. The
Afrikakorps
was fleeing Africa, or at least some of it was: the generals, Rommel in the lead, specialists and the survivors of Assault Battalion Wotan. Von Dodenburg swept his glasses around the beach and thought he would never forget this tragedy; the sight would be etched on his memory forever.

Everywhere lines of weary men were staggering to the boats, ignoring the shell bursts of the Allied armies which were in the hills beyond, with the foremost ranks shoulder-deep in the water, pleading piteously to be taken aboard.

British planes came zooming in at mast-height, machine-guns chattering. Men sank beneath the waves everywhere and the transports’ anti-aircraft guns thudded in a vain attempt to fight the Spitfires off. At the stanchion the Australian General began his crazy dirge once more:

‘
Oh, bloody! Bloody! Bloody!

Air raids all day and bloody night

They give us a bloody fright.

Oh bloody…Bloody…
’

The squadron of Spitfires roared in for one more sortie and then they were off to refuel before coming back to wreak more havoc, soaring high into the brilliant sky. The ‘Prof’ replaced his new stainless steel false teeth which he kept in his helmet in moments of danger. ‘It’s about time we went, Major, don’t you think?’ he said.