The Rat Patrol 2: Desert Danger (29 page)

He took them for dinner to a place up on a roof. It was posh with soft lights and lots of pillows and skinny little men in turbans like the CO's, sitting crosslegged and making peeping sounds with pipes. The food was good and tasty—caviar, pigeons baked in cream with rice followed by minced meat and eggplant in tomato sauce. Moffitt kept calling them names like
hamam fil tagen, mussaka
and other things, but that did not spoil anyone's appetite. They all could understand the name of the drink. The manager of the roof place had brought it over from Cairo where it had been famous for a long time. It was called the "Suffering Bastard," which they all thought was quite appropriate, and was made from gin, bitters, fruit juices and mint.

There even were belly dancers, lithesome girls who squirmed and wiggled and wore bright baubles and bangles and did not look too tawdry. They should have enlivened any place but in spite of them the atmosphere seemed subdued. Maybe it was because the belly dancers insisted on dancing alone although they could have had any member of the Rat Patrol for partner. So they dragged Wilson off to a rowdy joint called—could it be possible?—The Oasis. There the lights were bright and the music from the jukebox loud and U.S.A., if very ancient.

Here were partners. Along the garishly lighted bar built of glass blocks someone had slipped in on some kind of high priority shipment, there were half a dozen girls with bare shoulders and tight-fitting, shiny black and red dresses, floppy black hair and very red lips. Not Arabian girls, or at least not entirely Arabian, but the products of a dozen races who had mingled for a thousand years along the waterfronts of the Mediterranean. Not exactly the kind of girls you would introduce to Mother, but sure enough right for dancing partners in the joint called The Oasis at Bir-el-Alam in North Africa. And what would Mother be doing here anyway?

They were getting plenty of attention, swamped and overwhelmed by the free-spending GIs who would spend ten bucks for nothing more than ten minutes of conversation. Females were scarce in this part of the world. Some GIs had even married girls from The Oasis. So gangs of soldiers surrounded the half dozen girls and for a while it looked as if the CO would have to pull rank, not that it would have done any good if he had been foolish enough to try; but then Troy, backed up by Moffitt, Hitch and Tully, made a flying wedge that somehow enclosed a girl when they flew back to their table.

She said her name was Oola and that she was French and maybe she was and maybe again all the French she knew was Oo-la-la. But who cared? She had washed her face before she painted it and she was willing company as long as the CO shelled out for the thimbles of vermouth they passed off for Scotch. She even was willing to dance, but that cost extra because it cut down on the number of those thimblefuls she could toss off in fifteen minutes. It was astronomical. Troy once had seen a GI fall off a bar stool when he had tried to down a one-ounce shot of beer every minute for an hour and here she was nearly equaling that challenge with vermouth.

By the time the CO got around to dancing with her, she was kicking her heels in fine fettle. He seemed to like it, really enjoy it, although he did not hold her quite so close as Tully did but that meant nothing. Maybe that was his regular style of dancing which was probably more than you could say for the way Tully handled her.

They had to call a halt finally to this bottomless jug or the CO would have run out of spending money, so Oola trotted back to the bar and for a few minutes, until they got their breath back, the Rat Patrol relaxed. Some of the West Point seemed to be coming out of Wilson that night, or perhaps it had been coming out for several days and no one noticed it. He kept asking questions, curious but friendly, about home and girls and what their plans were after Jerry had given up. Not quite all of West Point had washed away though. For one thing, he could not understand why an enlisted man would not want to be an officer. What was Moffitt, a Doctor of Anthropology at Cambridge, doing with the Rat Patrol as a sergeant?

"Lucky," Moffitt said with that amused smile of his.

"And you, Troy, you'd make an excellent officer."

"Couldn't stand the restrictions on my freedom," Troy answered with a flashing smile and a jaunty cock of his bush hat.

"Well, now, Tully," Wilson began.

"Be like putting pants on a Billy goat," Tully drawled.

"Hitch—" the CO started.

"What! And give up all this fun?"

About then the music blared again and Wilson gave up trying to understand enlisted men, but even if he couldn't understand them, he was willing to get in on their act. Some new GIs were in the joint, fresh from the States, and they did not quite comprehend. They made a couple of loud and uncomplimentary remarks about the jerks in the dopey hats, and Wilson rose, majestic in his boozy fury and sultan's bath towel, and wanted to bat down half a dozen of them.

Moffitt explained why that just was not cricket while Troy, Tully and Hitch attended to the situation. The CO beat it out the back door with them as the MPs streamed in the front.

They wove into another place where GIs congregated, drinking beer, telling lies, getting nostalgic or just plain homesick, wishing they had women, any kind of women.

"When we going to get Dirty Gertie from Bizerte?" Troy asked, swaying like a snake charmer.

"When we change the spelling," Moffitt said, smiling. "Jerry spells it with an 'a'—Bizerta."

"Things are tough all over," Wilson said sympathetically to Troy. "I guess you'd settle for a WAC or WAAF."

"Why sure," Troy agreed, "any old waif."

"There's nothing here, that's for certain," Tully complained.

"Hey, Wilson," Troy called, remembering. "Can we go to Algiers, the four of us?"

"Why not the five of us?" the CO asked, laughing. "You can go when the rains come, that's a promise."

They roamed on, another hour, another place, or maybe they were back somewhere near the place they started. Bir-el-Alam could not have as many places as they had been in. The evening was running out in slow motion. They were an itchy bunch, built for action. They could not sit still long. A night on the town was beginning to smother and stifle them. They were not built to roll from joint to joint. They were meant for two jeeps mounted with machine guns that raced across the desert, lunging from rolling dunes toward the enemy. The scorching sun nourished them and revealed their enemy behind the glittering facade of glinting desert sands. The desert night invigorated them and cloaked their stealthy movements. Their life was swift pursuit and deadly combat and the reward of a lovely woman's caress until the long sun brought tomorrow, the enemy and the chase.

Moffitt sighed and swished the drink in his glass. He looked into it, silent and bemused. Tully raised his eyebrows at him and Hitch blinked behind his steel-rimmed glasses.

"Is it something profound, Doctor?" Troy obliged by asking. "Or would we understand?"

"Not in the least profound, old chap," Moffitt said and the amusement crept from his lips into his eyes. "I was just thinking, I'm happy that Dietrich escaped."

"You know," Troy said with the flash of a smile white in his dark face. "I've often wanted to kill that Jerry, but I'm glad too."

"Uh-huh," Tully said succinctly.

"I'm in on that," Hitch agreed and popped a bubble for emphasis.

"But why? In the name of heaven, why?" Wilson demanded, aghast.

"The desert just wouldn't be the same without him," Moffitt said and laughed.

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