The Rat Patrol 3 - The Trojan Tank Affair (6 page)

"Stay put," Buck shouted and leaped over the tailgate. 

Troy pressed his face against the window of the cab. Buck and Dorsky, both with tommy-guns, were out of the truck and crouching as they moved up either side of the track toward rocks that flanked the trail. It was a good place for an ambush. 

"Jack, Hitch, Tully," he turned and called. They scrambled to the window. "Those two rocks on top of the hill. Doctor, you and Hitch take the one on the left. Creep around and go in from behind. Tully, we'll take the one on the right. Easy over and out of the truck. If anybody's up there, they'll be watching Dorsky and Buck."

"Right-o," Moffitt said, looking at his hands and smiling quickly. "I believe this calls for a bit of karate." 

"Hell, don't get fancy," Troy said with a grin. "Pick up a rock and bash their heads in."

Moffitt and Hitch piled over the tailgate and wriggled on their bellies off the track and onto the hillside to the left. Troy and Tully went up the right hillside prone. Tully had his Bowie knife in his right hand and Troy picked up a fist-sized rock as they advanced. Dorsky and Buck were probably being overly cautious, but Troy could feel the tingling of his nerves and the sharpening of his senses that always preceded combat. The old, eroded gray rocks that littered the hill showed him pock marks in their faces, and the smell of age rose heavily from the ground. With Tully, he worked around the hilltop and started snaking toward the rocks on the rise. If anyone was up there, he was in a declivity, because neither man nor weapon showed.

There was the abrupt stacatto chatter of a rapid-fire machine gun, joined at once by a second. They were German MG-42 light machine guns. Troy recognized, and with their fantastic rate of fire, they'd pin Buck and Dorsky down. The MG-42 could expend its fifty-round drum in a matter of three or four seconds. Answering tommy-gun fire came from the slope but stopped abruptly when the MG-42s took up the challenge.

"At them, Tully," Troy whispered, getting to his knees, "The next time the tommy-guns start up."

Tully nodded and crouched. Troy looked up at the rock. Although within fifty feet of the position, he still could not see the gunner.

A burst from the tommy-guns, another and another. Troy and Tully were up and running. The German light machine gun sprayed downhill, round after round in zipping bursts. Troy and Tully reached the declivity at the same moment. One man in dark robes was lying on his stomach firing the tripod-mounted gun through a fissure in the rock. He couldn't have swung his weapon if he'd heard them. Troy let Tully take him with his Bowie knife. When the gunner lay still, Troy pulled back the gun and held it in the air above the rock. The tommy-guns fired at it.

"Your helmet," he called to Tully who had rolled the man he'd killed on his back and was going through his clothing. He raised the machine gun again with the GI helmet on its barrel. The firing had ceased from the position on the other side of the track and Troy called out, "Everything in order, Doctor?"

"Patient succumbed to treatment," Moffitt called back. 

"Buck, Dorsky," Troy called, still waving Tully's helmet. "It's us up here. Can we show ourselves?"

"Yeah," Buck shouted. "Come out and explain yourselves."

Troy climbed on top of the rock. Buck and Dorsky arose from the boulders behind which they'd taken shelter. Tully joined Troy and Moffitt and Hitch sat on the rock across the track.

"You'd better come up and take a look," Troy called. "Maybe these dead men will mean something to you." The two G2 officers came up on the run. Dorsky took the position on the left while Buck examined Tully's victim.

"Anything on him?" he asked Tully.

"Not a thing, not even a coin," Tully said.

Dorsky came across the track with Moffitt and Hitch. "A blank," Dorsky said. In the daylight, he was a young man with an old face. He glanced at the gunner Tully had knifed. "Arabs, that's all." He examined Troy's face for a long moment. "Just who are you men?"

The answers were to the point.

"Sergeant Troy."

"Sergeant Moffitt."

"Private Hitchcock."

"Private Pettigrew."

"Thanks," Dorsky said dryly. "I should have known better than to ask. Some special kind of commandos." 

"They had us pinned down," Buck said, laughing. "I told you to stay put, but I'm glad that was an order that was disregarded."

Dorsky snorted. "And they assigned us to take care of them."

"Let's move," Buck said, starting down the track. He smiled at Troy and then Moffitt, both of whom were carrying light machine guns and drums of ammunition. "Now that you have weapons, I assume you're ready to take on a company."

In the truck, Buck came back to smoke a cigarette with Troy.

"Does this kind of action always follow wherever you go?" Buck asked.

"Generally we have to look a little harder for it," Troy said grinning. Then he was quickly serious. "It was not supposed to happen on this phase of the operation. Everything was done to ensure secrecy. I think you'd better ask that a report of this ambush be passed on up as fast as possible. At first I thought the fighter attack and the sabotage at the dump were coincidences, but this last couldn't have been. There's a hole in security somewhere and it ought to be plugged."

The truck slowed and Troy saw behind them a huddle of mud and wattle huts and a dirty water hole. Beyond the community, the truck stopped.

"Soluch," Buck said, standing and shaking Troy's hand. "End of line. Here's where you make your transfer. Stay put, and this time I mean it."

Buck went to the back and dropped the flap. Troy could feel the truck pulling off the track, reversing and moving slowly back. There was a gentle thud as the rear bumped into something. Buck lifted the flap. Through an inch or two of daylight, Troy could see they were backed against the rear of another, larger truck.

"Hop in," Buck said. "It looks as if everything you'll need is here. As soon as you're inside, let down the flap and leave it down." He grinned. "Good luck. I never saw you and I don't know where you went."

It was the enormous van of a ten-wheel truck and nothing had been spared for their comfort. Troy thought, looking about in surprise. At the front, two rubber air mattresses, one on each side, were piled with GI blankets, and two more mattresses and blankets were on the sides at the rear. In the middle of the trailer were two hinged tables with an aisle between. Four folding canvas camp stools were arranged around one table and on the other was a two-burner camp stove with a pressure tank. An acetylene lantern swung from the roof between the tables. Wooden boxes of U-rations and several five-gallon cans of water were under the table with the camp stove and ranged against the walls between the tables and the mattresses were labeled boxes and cartons.

When the others were in the van, Troy let down the flap and fastened it. There was a second blackout curtain but he left that up. No one would see the light from the lantern in daylight. Moffitt lighted the lantern and looked about with satisfaction. Hitch and Tully were prowling and pawing.

"The Army was never like this," Hitch exclaimed. 

"Home was never like this," Tully corrected him, swinging around to Troy. "Hey, Sarge. We got them new U-rations. Can I be the cook?"

"Sure," Troy said, laughing. "Look around and see if you can find some messkits."

Troy and Moffitt laid their captured MG-42s and drums of ammunition on the two air mattresses at the tail of the van and sat on the camp stools by the table while Tully opened a wooden box of U-rations and Hitch looked for messkits.

"What do you make of it, Sam?" Moffitt asked, pulling his beret from his belt and putting it on his head. "You think they're on to us?"

"I do and I don't," Troy said, sailing his bush hat back to the mattress where he'd left the light machine gun. "It could be they were really after the ammunition trucks to cripple any planned Allied action. But I think we'd better take Blakely's advice and wear GI helmets for a while." Gears meshed and the ten-wheeled van started to move slowly. Troy looked around the van and suddenly he was irritated. Comfortable as it was, it was confinement and he felt he couldn't breathe. He took a deep breath, but it seemed there was no oxygen in the air. He chafed at the overly precautionary steps G2 had taken. All this secrecy was nonsense. All that had been necessary to conceal the movements of the Rat Patrol was to put the four of them in helmets and fatigues and throw them in with the troops. All dogfaces looked alike.

After a breakfast of canned peaches, scrambled powdered eggs, biscuits with strawberry jam and coffee, Moffitt, Hitch and Tully relaxed with their cigarettes while Troy broke open the labeled cartons and boxes and handed out equipment. There were steel helmets, tommy-guns with extra clips of ammunition for each and forty-fives for Moffitt and Troy, web belts, canteens, shirts and trousers, even socks and shorts. HQ or G2 or whoever it was who'd planned the operation had been thorough to the last detail. They laid their equipment beside their mattresses and Hitch and Tully stretched out to sleep.

Moffitt took the code book from Troy and started to study it. Troy got out the map Major Blakely had left with him. As nearly as he could figure it, the convoy would move southeast on the track to Antelat and then strike out across the desert, crossing the El Abd trail and thence to Bir-el-Alam. It was about a hundred miles from Soluch to Bir-el-Alam and then another fifty miles to the southernmost point on the defensive perimeter. So they'd be shut up in the van for about a day and a half. If all went well. Which was problematical. He glanced at Moffitt who was tearing the pages from the code book one by one and burning them in the peach can that they'd used for an ash tray.

"That simple, Doctor?" Troy asked. "Maybe you ought to clue me in. Just in case."

"You're right, Sam, of course," Moffitt said quickly. "Our code name is Library. The code is simple as long as you don't lose count of the days. Today is Day One of our operation. Tomorrow, Day Two, and so on. Messages will be sent in the clear. Today the first word in each sentence would be our message. Tomorrow, the second. Example, tomorrow this innocent and perfectly understandable message goes out by wireless to Library: 'Will return books, period. Want to thank you, period. Have base send more, period. Over and out.' Do you read me, Sam?"

"Sure," Troy said and grinned. "Our message is 'Return to base.' Jerry could crack it but it's so simple and harmless sounding, he'll probably ignore it. Even if he did pick up the message, he wouldn't know who or where Library was."

"Right-o," Moffitt said. "It will work as long as they keep the messages simple. If they set out to confuse Jerry and get complicated, they'll arouse his curiosity." Troy had another cigarette and a cup of coffee. The track was rough, but the big wheels shouldered over the rocks and it was not uncomfortable in the van.

"Is it a large convoy, do you think?" Moffitt asked. "I assume we're carrying munitions."

"Let's see what our position is," Troy said. He went up to Tully and slipped the Bowie knife from its scabbard. Cutting a horizontal slit in the flap at the back, he peered out and swore at what he saw. Their van was at the end of the convoy, followed only by a jeep with the driver and one man in the front and an M2 fifty-caliber machine gun mounted in the rear. He called Moffitt to the peephole and asked, "That look familiar? They keep us under wraps, tell us to change our hats and then pin that on us."

"There's a difference, Sam," Moffitt said, studying the jeep. "That Browning is on an antiaircraft mount, but I don't think an informer would notice. He'd report a jeep with a heavy machine gun. There's your blasted giveaway."

"Stupid, fouled-up goof," Troy snarled. "They take every security measure in the book, but Jerry is waiting for us at Benghazi because a jeep that looks like ours is there. We've got to get rid of it."

"How, Sam?" Moffitt asked and smiled wryly. "It's there for our protection, you know. If we could reach Headquarters, it would take a week for an order to go through channels."

"When did we go through channels?" Troy snapped. "I wouldn't hesitate to put it out of commission with a couple bursts through the radiator, but if we're going to throw Jerry off, we've got to make it disappear or better, send it back to Benghazi with four men wearing our headpieces in it."

Troy returned to the slit in the canvas and as he watched, the van passed through another Arab community, another cluster of a dozen flat roofed mud huts with a few goats behind thorn brush fences. Black-haired, bare-legged children, women with their faces hidden, men in dirty, shapeless robes stood motionless at the sides of the track, staring after the convoy. At the entrance to one of the last huts, a dark, sharp-nosed man wearing a white burnoose and robe reached under his garments as the jeep drove by.

"Quick, Jack, the glasses," Troy called, slashing the slit in the flap four or five inches wider. He spread the gash and focused on the Arab in the doorway.

The man was running up the antenna of a walkie-talkie.

5

The convoy had crawled through the Arabian community of Antelat to avoid the interminable delays and unpleasantnesses that always attended a dead chicken or frightened goat who shut off her milk supply, and it had not yet started to pick up speed. Troy swept his bush hat from the mattress as he ran forward.

"Put on your beret," he called back to Moffitt. "The Rat Patrol is going into action."

A walkie-talkie had an effective range of only a few miles. That meant the Arab either was reporting to a relay point or that an ambush had been set up ahead.

"Hitch," he shouted, prodding him awake with his toe. "Wear your Legion cap. Tully, let's go. Bring your tommy-guns."

He whirled and ran toward the tail of the van. The blood was pounding in his veins and his eyes were burning. He felt vital and charged for action. He grabbed his loaded MG-42.

"Okay, Jack," he said to Moffitt. "They'll stop when we jump out. They won't know what hit them. I'll take the driver, you take the other. Don't try to explain. We'll just toss them out." Turning his head, he shouted, "Tully, we're taking a jeep. Get behind the wheel."