The Rat Patrol 3 - The Trojan Tank Affair (21 page)

Moffitt's smile was amused. "Did you know that some of our British generals have forbidden us to sing, whistle or even listen to that tune?" he asked.

"Why?" Troy said.

"They say it's bad for morale," Moffitt said. "Claim it makes strong men weep."

"It's a funny damned thing," Troy said, smiling wryly. "Some of the sentimental twaddle from the U.S. gets under my skin but I like this Jerry song. I guess it's because it doesn't have any associations for me."

Moffitt stared at him for a moment, as if in disbelief. Then he smiled warmly. "You know, Sam," he said, "you can live with a man, fight beside him day after day for a year. And then one day you suddenly wake up to the fact that you've never known him."

"Yeah, sure, Jack," Troy muttered. "Shall we load the Volkswagens?"

"Let's check them first," Moffitt suggested. "No point carrying anything suspicious if we don't really need it."

The hot breath of the desert staggered them and Troy gasped as they stepped from the cool, dark cavern into the dazzling sun.

"Hitch will fry up there," he rasped. "I'd better relieve him."

"I'll go," Moffitt said. "You know better than I what ought to go in the patrol cars."

Troy crawled under the net that draped the first car, turned on the ignition and checked the fuel gauge. It registered half full. He found Jerry's gas can, emptied it in the tank and rechecked. The gauge showed almost full. He checked the dip stick for oil, saw the level was down and went to the second car. Hitch walked by, cheeks moist and flushed. His Jerry uniform looked properly limp and soiled.

"Doc's under the robes now," Hitch said. "I thought those things were supposed to keep out the heat."

"The Arabs don't wear uniforms under them," Troy said, coming out from the net. "Anything stirring?"

"Not a thing anywhere," Hitch said as they stepped onto the ramp and Troy lowered the lid. "You'd never know there was a war on. It's so peaceful it makes me nervous." 

"I know," Troy said.

He filled the crankcases of both cars, refilled the Jerry cans with gasoline, poured out the warm drinking water and refilled the containers with cool water from the cave. Jerry had at least one advantage, he thought: the Volkswagen motors were air-cooled and didn't constantly require water in the desert.

He left two MG-42 light machine guns in each car with extra drums of ammunition and discovered there was a box of stick grenades in the back seats. He removed potato mashers from the boxes and laid a layer of GI pineapples on the bottom. The German stick grenade was a high explosive weapon, but Troy had not used them often enough to build up confidence. When he pulled the pin and threw a GI grenade, he knew it was going to explode.

Smoke bombs, the rations Tully had provided, a loop of braided, slender but heavy-load-bearing nylon rope, plastic demolition charges, flashlights, compasses; he ticked the items for each car off on his fingers.

The bottle of Scotch, he reminded himself. It was almost full, down just about an inch below the neck. He shrugged and filled it to the cap with bourbon. If Jerry noticed at all, he'd think it was bad Scotch. He washed the broken seal off the neck and screwed the cap on tight. There it was, good as new. Might be handy. He placed the bottle of Scotch in the car Moffitt had driven and the opened bottle of bourbon in the other. Then he went into the cave and got the box with the wire recorder. He looked at it and hesitated.

"I'm going to send Moffitt down," he told Tully. "After you've eaten, come up and see if I'm done."

The dust-laden heat choked him and he gagged as he moved along the rock.

"Jack," he called softly as he neared the end.

Moffitt dropped lightly beside him and pulled the burnoose from his head. He shut his eyes and wiped the moisture from his lids.

"The desert looks like the Dead Sea today," Moffitt said, "With that briefing scheduled for tonight, I'm beginning to think Dietrich has pulled in almost everything and will attack tomorrow."

"He'd have scouts out," Troy said.

"Maybe he has," Moffitt said. "We wouldn't be likely to see them here. He did have two patrol cars in this area which he certainly must have assumed were adequate." 

"We'll soon find out," Troy said, checking the time. It was fourteen-thirty hours. "I think everything is ready but you'd better check out the wire recorder and take any tools or equipment you think you might need."

He wrapped himself in the dark robes and mounted his perch on the rock. The stone was scorchingly hot on his stomach and the sun burned on him from above. His eyes swam with mist as he put the Jerry ten-power binoculars to them and surveyed the limitless land. After he had examined the full sweep of the desert, he turned his attention south, listening for aircraft as he did. They'd bypass Agarawa, he decided, and pick up the old trade route east of the town. He thought they would be permitted to reach the staging area without interference.

If Dietrich had been advised of them, as Troy felt certain he had, and perhaps even the nature of their mission, he would be waiting to take them soon after they entered his camp. They would have to be ready to run at the first suspicious action, not to escape, but to break for his massed armor and blow up as much of it as they could. They might not accomplish the purpose of their mission but at least, he thought with grim humor, the Rat Patrol would go out in a blaze.

He heard Tully calling his name and glanced at his watch in surprise. Tully was relieving him after only 15 minutes. Troy was silently grateful and rapped Tully's shoulder as he gave him the robe. When he'd ducked back into the cave, he stood for a moment just inside the mouth, eyes closed, gulping the cool air.

There was hot beef hash and biscuits. Troy picked at the hash, not hungry, and after a swallow, pushed aside the coffee.

"All set?" he asked Moffitt and lighted a cigarette.

"The recorder checks out. It's a sensitive unit with an ear plug for monitoring. Plenty of wire and extra batteries. Everything we need, once the microphone is in place."

"There's three full bottles of bourbon and almost a case of beer," Hitch said. "You going to leave them behind?"

"I'd forgotten about them," Troy confessed. "If you want, put a bottle of bourbon in each jeep and divide up the beer. We'll leave one bottle behind with the rest of the rations in case we or someone else comes this way again."

Spelling one another at thirty-minute intervals on the rock, they rested until sixteen-hundred hours. The sun was getting brassy as it dropped toward the hazd horizon when they lowered the sheet over the entrance, folded the camouflage nets and started to pack them in the slant-nosed compartments at the fronts of the rear-engine cars. Troy looked west along the sandy path at the base of the rock, smiling and shaking his head.

"We were lucky no one was around this afternoon," he said, pointing out the tracks the patrol cars had left. "It just shows how easy it is to be careless and how fatal an oversight could be."

They packed one camouflage net and he sat on the front of the second car dragging the net in the sand as they backed from the rock into the desert. With the second net stored, the two cars started in file toward Agarawa. Moffitt, in the uniform of a private, drove the lead car. Hitch, minus his GI glasses, sat stiffly beside him with his arms folded over his chest. In the second car with Tully at the wheel, Troy was silent and thoughtful. He glanced once over his shoulder at the rock. He did not think they would see it again.

Nearing the white walls of Agarawa, the cars circled to the east to pick up the trade route beyond the town. Jerry would almost certainly have stopped for a drink, Troy thought, wondering whether their failure to pause would call attention to them. The desert town seemed unusually quiet just as the desert had been all day. A few men in robes loitered near the east gate which Troy observed through his glasses. Some camels were kneeling outside the walls near a piled up jumble of stone and a man with two goats was coming out of the town. A guard with a rifle stood in the entrance but no patrols were in sight.

Moffitt had said ten miles on the trade route, Troy remembered, glancing at the odometer. The path was narrow but well packed and the cars maintained a steady speed of about twenty-five miles an hour. It was hot and dry and uncomfortable, and the long flat stretch of gray desert was monotonous. They neither met nor saw anyone, which Troy thought was a little strange. After almost thirty minutes of dull, doze-inspiring driving, Moffitt slowed and Troy saw him turning his head to the side. Troy scanned the sand and soon saw tracks that left the trade route and crossed the open desert; to infinity, it seemed. Moffitt turned off the trace and followed them.

It was the last stage of their journey, fifteen miles from the trade route to the camp, and now Troy stiffened as he watched the horizon for the first outposts of the staging area. The sun was an orange globe almost touching the floor of the desert to their right when Moffitt altered his course, turning from due south to the east. He was heading straight for a mud and wattle hut that must be a guard post. He could have gone straight and avoided it, Troy thought a little impatiently, but as they neared he saw that bales of barbed wire were twisted between steel posts in an impenetrable hedge that contained the vast empty desert beyond.

A Jerry in a pot helmet, wearing a baggy shirt and trousers like Moffitt's, and armed with a machine pistol, stepped from the hut and Moffitt slowed to a stop beside him. Troy lifted the MG-42 from his lap, expectant and ready.

Moffitt leaned over the side of the car and said something. The guard stepped back and saluted. Troy saw Hitch touch the visor of his cap, and Moffitt drove slowly ahead. Tully came to a rolling stop, Troy lifted his hand as the guard saluted again, and without being challenged they drove into the tightly secured area where Jerry was preparing for his new offensive. Was Dietrich playing with them? Troy wondered. Luring them on until he was certain they could not possibly escape?

"If we are jumped and have to run, head straight for the camp and the armor," he said to Tully and reached over the seat for the box of grenades and plastic demolition charges.

As they drove on, the desert tipped gradually upward. The incline was so slight, Troy did not think he would have noticed it if Tully hadn't shifted to second at the slow speed they were traveling and called it to his attention. Here as before, there was nothing in the desert, nothing except the fighter planes that droned overhead at ten-minute intervals to indicate they were near a military installation.

Ahead, the desert seemed to disappear in the sky. Moffitt stopped his car and they drove up beside him. They were at the rim of an enormous bowl, a huge hollow in the desert. The sides eroded with wind-worn gullies, sloped to the bottom that was many miles wide. Dietrich's staging area and camp spread before them, a camp city with hundreds of large pyramid tents. Far to the right was a white, barracks-like, flat-roofed structure which Troy thought must be HQ. It was apart, near the south slope of the bowl. Beyond the avenues of tents was an enormous, pavilion-like structure with a canvas top.

Troy's eyes swept the panorama quickly, coming to rest on the armor massed in the open far beyond the tents to the north. In the few moments before the shadow that was running across the bottom of the bowl covered them, Troy saw a horde of PzKw IV medium tanks mounting seventy-five millimeter guns lined in columns that seemed to stretch for miles. There must be more than two hundred and fifty of them, he thought with a cold, shrinking feeling. Then he noticed with horror the tank that loomed at the head of the column. The PzKw was a twenty-seven-ton tank, but the behemoth that was to lead this armored unit was at least three times larger and its cannon looked like a heavy artillery piece. It was the largest tank Troy had ever seen. It was, he knew suddenly and with a certainty, the monster tank that Colonel Wilson had told them was being tested at the Great Sand Sea.

15

Dusk shrouded the bowl as Tully followed Moffitt down the long, sweeping slope on a staggered track that avoided the cavities. The complex of tents and buildings, HQ and the large pavilion were more than a mile away to the right, the tanks at least a mile to the left, but for the moment they disappeared in the dark. Then Troy heard the hum of generators and lights appeared like magic in the valley. He heard an approaching aircraft and saw marker lights string out along a strip far across the hollow.

Moffitt apparently decided Jerry would use his headlights under the circumstances, and Troy saw the path ahead faintly illuminated by the patrol car's slitted lamps. Tully noticed and put his hand to the switch.

"No." Troy reached for Tully's arm, stopping him quickly. "We're going to have to turn these cars in to a motor pool. Get up to Moffitt and nudge him."

Tully tapped the rear end of the other patrol car three times lightly. Moffitt stopped and Troy ran to him.

"Unless we hide one of these cars, we won't have any way out," he said hastily, "Not only that, if they find the stuff we're carrying when you pull into the motor pool, we're sunk."

"Damn!" Moffitt exclaimed. "We're so used to keeping our jeeps, I'd forgotten. We'll transfer the equipment and drive on in. Where shall we rendezvous?"

"I think that's HQ, that flat building off by itself," Troy said. "We'll meet you at the far side in half an hour." He consulted his watch. "At eighteen-forty-five."

"Can you bring us the recorder?" Moffitt asked.

"And my rope," Hitch added.

Quickly but carefully they removed all contraband including the camouflage net from the first car and Moffitt drove on down the trail. Tully angled uphill along the slope in the dark. After a few minutes, he stopped.

"I can't see where I'm going," he said. "I'm afraid we'll drop into one of these holes and get stuck."

"All right, stay here," Troy said and hopped from the car. "I'll explore on foot and come back for you."

He walked ten paces and fell into a sandy ravine. Checking its width, he found that it was wide enough and crawled forward to the mouth. A tongue of sand extended to the slope. He turned left and walked back to the car.