The Rat Patrol 3 - The Trojan Tank Affair (14 page)

The jeep raced west at the edge of the rolling hills, ready to dart into a wadi or valley for cover at the first sign of a plane or patrol. Behind, black smoke pillared into the cold moonlight night from the two flaming wrecks.

Troy remained in the rear at the machine gun. Whether or not the patrol cars had used their radios, the planes would be down to look at the fires and report them. Troy didn't know whether they'd blown their cover but even if they hadn't, they were a long way from their base, deep in Jerry land and deep in trouble.

10

Moffitt watched the scraggly band of Arabs from a wind-rippled sand hill above the wadi where Hitch and he had hidden their jeep under a camouflage net. There were eleven of them, old men and boys, driving a herd of bleating goats on the old trade route toward Agarawa. Their robes were tattered and flapped as they turned and struggled to wrap themselves against the wind-driven puffs of sand. The evening was dusky and hazed and the moon had not yet risen.

"Come along," Moffitt told Hitch, who was lying beside him, snapping his gum. "They're a mangy lot from some poor nomadic tribe and they're taking those goats to market. Bury your cud. We'll fall in behind and enter the town with them."

When the shambling group was well beyond on the ancient trail that linked the desert marketplace, Moffitt and Hitch slipped around the dune and bent their heads against the stinging gusts.

"Sandstorm,
Ghibli
country east and south," he told Hitch.

Moffitt felt a strange urgency this night, but he restrained himself against an impulse to hurry. The mission had been painstakingly prepared to the smallest detail, but it was not going well. There had been too many near things. Jerry had been too well informed. Moffitt did not think the enemy was aware that the Rat Patrol was in the area on a mission, but he did know there was Allied activity behind his lines. Enemy agents had been operating all the way from Algiers to Bir-el-Alam and Jerry would have informers planted among the Arabs at Agarawa despite the fact that he controlled the town and all the surrounding territory.

Moffitt fretted at the fate of Cobble and Damon. They were decent chaps and if they'd been captured, something ought to be done about rescuing them. He smiled briefly. It was not entirely an unselfish thought. It wouldn't do to have them placed under compulsion. Jerry had persuasive ways of eliciting the information he desired. Intelligence had anticipated this and no man in G2 knew more about this mission than was essential for his phase of the operation. All that Cobble and Damon could reveal to the enemy was the Rat Patrol's rathole.

It was no more than two miles from the wadi where they'd concealed the jeep to the town. Within the first mile, Moffitt and Hitch had gradually moved up and they trudged the last mile as a part of the ragged group of Arabs. Aware that their fresh robes made them conspicuous, Moffitt bore himself proudly, aloof from the dispirited tribesmen.

Even from a mile off, Moffitt began to recognize familiar landmarks within the town. He'd visited it once briefly with his father on a trip to the Great Sand Sea and he sought and found the gracefully spired minaret of the mosque, the old prayer tower at the eastern comer of the white mud-brick wall that surrounded the town, the strange domed roofs of many of the buildings, even the tall white palace that towered proudly above all other structures except the mosque. There was not the air of gloom about Agarawa that seemed to descend on every community where Jerry laid his heavy hand. Moffitt decided that Jerry could not have occupied nor contained this place.

The moon had bloomed full and palely yellow and the wind had died. He watched the town emerge white and glistening from the haze and tried to remember Agarawa as it had been—what was it? good Lord—nine years before. It had been the year he'd entered Cambridge and there had been a girl, yes, a girl here at Agarawa. He'd been smashed on that silly bit of froth, that French girl whose father was an archaeologist—what was her name? Something strange yet meaningful, a name he'd thought he'd never forget. Ophelie? Octavie? Almost but not quite. Olympe, that was it. Olympia in English, although he preferred the French, Olympe. So, while her father, the archaeologist, and his father, the anthropologist, compared their notes on ancient forms and cultures, Olympe and he, teenagers who shared similar backgrounds and cast together in an alien civilization, found themselves in the agonizing throes of adolescent romance. Neither, they thought, could endure without the other, and they had sworn undying fealty. Which they each had promptly forgotten. Olympe Dalmatie, he suddenly recalled, remembering that he'd found the rhythm of proper name and surname irresistible and written impassioned poetry to her. While he was in the desert.

He smiled briefly and, he admitted, a little tenderly. He wondered what Fate, or the Jerries, had done with Olympe. The fate of all the French, he was afraid. The Dalmaties, father and daughter, had been living in Agarawa in those halcyon years before the war while Dalmatie
père
pursued his endless diggings. They'd lived in that towering white palace with the blue and gold fretwork and the mosaic tiled courtyard. Agarawa was the modem outcropping of several ancient cities built one atop the other, Olympe had told him, and you could descend through a tile in their kitchen into another world. It was true. Hamstrung by religious tenets and superstitions about disturbing the dead, Professor Dalmatie had leased or purchased the great and quite beautiful palace and undermined it with passages. At least the place had the distinction of being the only Arabian house of which Moffitt knew that had a basement.

His thoughts ran on about Olympe, released now in a flood after nine years during which he'd forgotten she existed. Of the nights they'd stretched on the tiled roof and marveled at the brilliance of the stars in the desert sky; and other times when they'd slipped secretly in and out the gate in the wall of the service yard by the kitchen. The gate was barred from the inside by an iron arm that fell into a bracket when the heavy wooden door was shut, but Moffitt had shaved an imperceptible slit in the joints between the planks that enabled him to insert the point of his knife from the outside of the door and lift the bar from the bracket. Olympe and he had prowled the bazaar and oasis in the center of the town unhampered long after Professor Dalmatie and Doctor Moffitt had thought them safely in their chambers.

He jerked from his reverie and found they were at the wide arched opening in the white wall of the town. A beady-eyed guard wearing a blue-banded white burnoose and blue tunic over his white robes, with a Mauser rifle and a leather bandolier slung from his shoulder to his waist, was subjecting each of the nomadic Arabs to a searching scrutiny as he passed through the gateway. The tribesmen bowed their heads and wrung their hands in dismay even after they'd been passed. Moffitt stood a little taller, lifted his chin and stared down his nose at the guard.

"Sabdh-el-Kheir,"
he said with sonorous dignity.

"Mass'-el-Kheir,"
the hawkeyed guard responded, touching his forehead as he inclined his head.

Hitch threw his shoulders back and walked past the guard without looking at him. When they were within the walls, he stopped and looked curiously at Moffitt.

"What did you say to him?" he asked.

"No more than good evening," Moffitt said with a quick smile. "It isn't what you say. It's how you say it. Or carry it off, the way you did. No more conversation, mind? I know of no Arab dialect that faintly resembles English. Now, let me see whether I can find my way about."

The street they were on, really a wide, paved pathway, was the old trade route and bisected the town, Moffitt recalled. There was another gate in the opposite wall and between were stalls, shops, public houses and inns. A grassy oasis with many palms and a free-flowing well formed a park-like area in the center of town. About it were the bazaar, marketplace, and on the far side, stables.

Moffitt and Hitch strolled toward the center of Agarawa. The recent heavy rains seemed to have washed away many of the hot and heavy odors that usually lingered about Arabian communities, and Moffitt savored the heady aroma of thick, sweetish coffee, the perfume of the herbs, the masculine odor of leather. The alleyway was crowded with robed men and veiled women, and many of the shops and stalls were open for business, the proprietors sitting cross-legged on pillows under awnings. Fat lamps burned on low tables at the coffeehouses where Arabs squatted, sipping from tiny cups and nibbling at pastries. From the squalid mud huts on other streets where the townspeople dwelt came the yapping of dogs, bleats of goats, shrill voices of women and cries of children. But in all, Agarawa seemed a peaceful place. Moffitt had not seen a German. That accounted for the tranquil atmosphere, but it puzzled him. He looked about for a public house.

Opposite the oasis he found the place he sought, a communal spot where the faithful could gather across tables over coffee and tea and where other beverages were served to infidels. As they stepped inside the smoke-draped, poorly lighted room, Moffitt's eyes darted about the old place. Here the proprietor had not made concessions to the nearby Germans. There was no stage for entertainment, no bar. As Moffitt's eyes became accustomed to the murky room, he saw the only Germans present were five officers seated at a table near the middle of the house. A long-necked bottle of French brandy was on the table and the men were drinking from proper snifters.

Moffitt led Hitch to an empty table next to the Jerries, settling himself cross-legged on a cushion and motioning Hitch to do the same. He ordered coffee for the two of them and bent silently over it when it came. The Germans were speaking softly, for their race, and it seemed to Moffitt they spoke conspiratorily. It was several moments before he could tune his ears to their conversations.

"Achtung,"
he heard in hushed but commanding tones and turned his head slightly within his burnoose to see a stern-lipped captain with eyes of granite leaning earnestly across the table. He was addressing a lieutenant with a flushed, pocked face and the other three officers in the group had fixed their eyes on him. The captain continued quietly but brusquely.

"This information is classified and most secret, but since you, Reinaud, leave tonight for Rome and there are only the five of us to hear, I shall entrust you with it. I warn you on the pain of death, Reinaud, you must guard this knowledge with your life."

Moffitt tensed expectantly before the hearty laughter of the officers told him the captain just had made a joke. The captain, however, was quickly serious again. He drew a notebook from the pocket of the tunic, wrote a few lines upon it and glanced at the lieutenant called Reinaud.

"Well?" the captain said harshly.

"I accept the terms, my captain," Reinaud said, reaching his hand for the slip of paper. "Now give me, please, the address of the most shameless and notorious harlot in all of Italy."

The captain seemed reluctant, hesitated. Reinaud snatched the paper from his fingers, tilted it to the lamp and read it swiftly. He laughed uncontrollably and pounded the table with his fist as he spoke.

"My captain tells me to go directly to the palace and inquire for the mistress of
Il Duce
," he cried.

"You will then discover the only use the world has for Italians," the captain said, chuckling appreciatively with his captive audience.

"Reinaud, I take pity on you," one of the others said. "Your time is short and you cannot afford to waste a minute of it. Here." He scribbled on the back of the paper the captain had used. "She is admittedly the most expensive
Hure
on the via Torino but the most cooperative as well. Greet her for me. She will not remember who I am, of course, but you will never forget her."

Moffitt laid twenty piasters on the table, pulled himself erect and glared at the Germans as he strode disdainfully from the public house. Hitch walked with equal dignity and elbowed through the bazaar to the oasis with Moffitt.

"Find anything out?" he whispered when they stood apart.

"Yes," Moffitt said with a wry smile. "When Jerry goes on leave, he thinks about the same tiling as every other soldier. Women. Military matters were not occupying them tonight."

"They're the only Jerries we've seen," Hitch said. "You think we've drawn a blank on our visit to Agarawa?"

"Most assuredly not," Moffitt said. "We've scarcely started. Let's use our ingenuity. I doubt they walked to town. Shall we see about their car?"

It would be parked outside the eastern gateway to the town, Moffitt thought, leading Hitch across the oasis, where chubby date palms squatted, their pineapple-like trunks scabby in the moonlight. A few nomads had pitched their tents on the far side and were sitting about small cooking fires. The fat smell of goat came from the pots and there was the sharp, clean smell of horses from the sprawled, low, mud-walled stables beyond. If they were in luck, the officers would have brought a driver and he would be stationed at the car to guard it.

A tall Arab with a Mauser rifle, dressed in blue and white like the sentry at the western gate, stood erect within the gateway. Moffitt inclined his head slightly. The guard stood aside and Moffitt and Hitch walked unchallenged from Agarawa. Some fifty yards beyond the walls a patrol car was parked, facing the trade route. A thousand years of camel trains, horses hooves and plodding feet had trodden the path hard and it lay, a dark finger pointing east in the moonlight. A corporal in a great coat slumped against the high armored side of the patrol car. Moffitt first walked about the car at a distance, clucking to himself, then he approached it, kneeling to examine the wheels, running his finger over the spare tire mounted on the hood.

"Fernhalten,"
the corporal said indifferently, as if he didn't care whether the tall Arab in the dark robes kept away, even if a miracle occurred and the man understood him.

"Jawohl, herr Leutnant,"
Moffitt said, bowing his head and backing off.