The Sand Panthers (3 page)

The Brigadier shuddered in spite of the heat. ‘Call out the tribes,’ he exclaimed. ‘My God, you know what the desert Arabs do to a white man!’

‘I do! But it’s either that or the Germans will get through into the Delta.’

The Brigadier sighed, and ringing the little bell on his desk, said, ‘You know, Slaughter, you’ve been too long in this damned country. It has corrupted you.’

Slaughter’s dark brown eyes gleamed momentarily. ‘I expect it has, sir,’ he said calmly enough. ‘Now do I get the Horsemen of St George?’

‘You do, Slaughter, you do…’

*  *  *

Five minutes later an observer of the entrance to Alexandria’s Mustafa Barracks would have been treated to the sight of a burly sergeant-major sending a skinny little wog flying out of the gate, propelled by the gleaming toe of the NCO’s size eleven ammunition boot.

The little wog glared malevolently up at him from the dust, but he said and did nothing, until the NCO had turned and stamped back into the barracks. Then he struggled to his feet, hawked, and spat defiantly onto the baking ground. Limping badly he struggled back to his waiting donkey. With a grunt he slung his new burden over its back. The pathetic creature brayed in protest. The wog dug his nail-tipped goad into its hide and it moved forward, back into the desert, bearing with it the exact price of two hundred dead Germans.

Notes

1.
  Long-Range Desert Group.

2.
  The British Minister to Cairo.

Sergeant-Major Schulze, Assault Regiment Wotan’s senior NCO, cursed and thrust his peaked cap to the back of his shaven head, ‘What’s this? The feeding of the bloody five thousand?’

He stared across at the hundreds of men milling around the soup kettles, waiting for their breakfast, while cooks, stripped to the waist, the sweat running off their naked arms into the food, tried to feed them. ‘How can I be expected to grub up my guts with that mob rushing the goulash cannon, eh?’

Corporal Matz, Schulze’s crony, glanced up at the big blond ex-docker, a look of contempt on his wrinkled, leathery face. ‘You are the senior NCO in the senior regiment of the senior division of the SS, ain’t yer?’

‘Agreed, my horrible little wet dream,’ Schulze said.

‘Then what are you standing there for – like a big fart in a trance? You go automatically to the head of the queue. It’s your right. After all, we are the Wotan, you know.’ Matz jingled his mess tins in anticipation. ‘Well, what are we waiting for? Come on!’

Brutally the two SS noncoms pushed their way through the disgruntled
Afrikakorps
men, crying ‘Make way for a naval officer!’ Here and there a soldier turned and began to protest, but their angry comments died on their cracked lips when they saw the black and white armbands of the Armed SS on the two NCOs’ sleeves. Not even the veterans of Rommel’s
Afrikakorps
wanted to tangle with the SS.

The first cook looked up at them dully. ‘First canteen – nigger sweat; second – rations.’ Schulze accepted the steaming black ersatz coffee in his first canteen and soup in the other. Together he and Matz pushed their way through the sullen crowd and walked across the desert to a halftrack, its bogies almost half buried in drifting sand, a little outpost of blackness in that gleaming white. It offered shade, but no coolness.

With a sigh, Schulze and Matz dropped to the burning ground. Schulze put down his canteens and pulled out a can of the British beer he had looted from Rommel’s supply truck the previous day. Taking his bayonet, he punched a hole in it, thrusting the can to his lips swiftly before the warm beer had a chance to spurt out.

He took a few sips, then he dropped the can in disgust. ‘Bloody sand – it’s half full of sand,’ he snarled. ‘This desert! God knows why the
Führer
wants it! There’s sand in the food; sand in the coffee; fucking sand in everything. If there was any nooky in this damned desert, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was sand up there, as well!’

‘There ain’t, yer know,’ Matz said, greedily finishing the last of his soup.

‘Ain’t what, you asparagus Tarzan?’ Schulze asked morosely.

‘Sand up there,’ Matz replied easily. Schulze’s bottom lip trembled. ‘You mean…you mean,’ he breathed in awe, ‘that…that there’s
that
here?’

Matz finished the last of the soup with a flourish and wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve. ‘What?’

‘Tail, pussy, nooky, something to snake.’ He grabbed Matz’s jacket and pulled the little corporal to him eagerly. ‘
THAT!
’

‘Oh, that,’ Matz said casually. ‘Course there is.’ Schulze released his hold and breathed out hard, a sudden gleam in his eyes. He crooked his big forefinger at Matz and said: ‘Give!’

‘Down by the Quay near the cranes.’

‘And you mean you didn’t tell your old pal, Matzi!’

‘
Officers only
,’ Matz answered and finished the last of the beer.

‘Officers,’ Schulze barked contemptuously, ‘I’ve shat ’em!’ His blue eyes sparkled. ‘All that good Tommy bully beef yesterday really put me on. It put so much lead in my pencil, I don’t know who to write to first!’

‘Whores from spaghetti-land. Last month the Tommies dropped a bomb on the place and that little garden dwarf of a king of theirs awarded the ones wounded a medal for bravery. Our officers who were killed were listed as K.I.A.
1
’

‘What a way to go – knocked off on the job!’ The big Sergeant-Major rose hastily to his feet. ‘Well,’ he demanded, ‘what are you sitting there for, growing corns on your ass. Let’s go. I’m limping already, just thinking about it…’

*  *  *

Von Dodenburg, smoking his post-breakfast cigar, smiled and watched the two NCOs plodding away through the thick sand to the coast, telling himself that it would take all their celebrated ingenuity to get them into the brothel, which was reserved for ‘golden pheasants’ and staff officers over the rank of major. Then he dismissed the two NCOs from his thoughts, and grinding out the cigar, walked to the operations tent for his first meeting of the day.

Captain Professor Dr Hans Reichert was already waiting for him inside. The elderly Captain who rose to salute von Dodenburg seemed as cool as a spring day despite the intense heat. There was not a trace of perspiration on his face. ‘The man must have ice-water in his veins,’ von Dodenburg told himself a little angrily as he motioned the Captain to a seat.

‘I’ve been told by Field-Marshal Rommel that you will brief me on the difficulties of the operation, Captain…er…Professor Reichert?’ he said.

Reichert, who had once been the University of Heidelberg’s leading Egyptologist, cleared his throat importantly, as if he were now about to deliver a lecture. ‘That is so, I believe, Major.’

‘I know, Reichert,’ von Dodenburg snapped, irritated by the heat and the man’s academic manner. All the same he knew that he had spent half a lifetime in the desert and was the
Afrikakorps
’ foremost expert on it. He needed his assistance badly. ‘Now this is the problem. I have been ordered to take my Mark IV tanks and my halftracks through the Sand Sea into Egypt. Ten tanks, ten halftracks and 150 men. Now what am I going to be faced with?’

Again the ex-Professor cleared his throat. ‘There are many problems,’ he said carefully. ‘Very many.’

‘All right, tell me them,’ von Dodenburg snapped. ‘Come on get on with it!’

Reichert’s face flushed like that of a maiden lady who had just felt a man’s hand thrust up her skirt. ‘There is the question of navigation for example,’ he began. ‘The Sand Sea is featureless – rather like the Luneburg Heath with no outcrops of rock. You’ll have to use the sun compass.’

‘Sun compass?’ von Dodenburg questioned.

‘It is a very simple way of navigating. It depends upon knowing the exact sun time. From this we can determine the sun’s bearing throughout the day. I have personally always found it easier to remember that at midday, when the sun is due south, the shadow falls due north. Hence the direction of movement at right angles to the shadow will obviously be either due east or west. Once one has absorbed that fact, one needs only to note the distance one has travelled to determine to within a few hundred metres one’s position in relation to the starting point. Is that clear, Major?’

Reichert did not wait for the Major’s response, but carried on as if he had reached a particularly important point in one of his
Hauptseminars
and did not want to be stopped by some foolish question. ‘Then there is the problem of driving. Once the sand has dried after dawn, one finds that each vehicle is followed by a huge plume of sand which not only gives one’s position away for kilometres, but also–’

Major von Dodenburg held up his hand. ‘Hold it, hold it, Professor!’ he commanded. ‘Let me ask you one question – and one question only. Do you think we can make it?’

‘From Cufra, our last outpost in the desert, you will have to cover virtually one thousand kilometres of uncharted desert with one hundred and fifty men who are not yet acclimatized, plus twenty heavy vehicles which will eat up tremendous amounts of fuel and water – where there is not one solitary well.’ Reichert paused and stared up at the young officer. ‘With luck, you’ll make it, Major,’ he concluded.

‘Excellent,’ von Dodenburg exclaimed. ‘And I am especially glad. For your sake, Professor.’

‘My sake?’

‘Yes, my dear sir.’ Major von Dodenburg grinned at the other man’s sudden bewilderment. ‘Because you are coming with us, as our guide and mentor.’

‘Oh, my goodness!’ Professor Dr Hans Reichert slumped weakly in his chair. ‘Oh my goodness me!’

Von Dodenburg rose to his feet and reached for his cap. ‘All right then, Prof,’ he snapped, ‘let’s get our fingers out. We’ve got a lot to do today.’ Briskly he strode out into the desert’s sun burning white brilliance. Wotan had exactly forty-eight hours left before it moved out.

Note

1.
  Killed-in-Action.

The next forty-eight hours flew by. There were a hundred and one problems for von Dodenburg to solve. In the oven-hot air, the half-naked Wotan men sweated over the vehicles, preparing them for the long trek into the unknown desert. The blond Major, his face already burnt a brick-red by the sun, was here, there and everywhere, knowing that to relax for an instant would be fatal.

He strode from crew to crew, checking them and their vehicles and coming to loathe the burning-red ball of the sun, which beat down upon them so relentlessly. He thought longingly of the cool French coast which they had just left for these burnished sands and stifling opaque haze, which shimmered blindingly.

On the first day, von Dodenburg, Schulze, and Captain Reichert concentrated on checking that the tanks and halftracks were correctly fuelled up and armed. Forcing himself to walk slowly, von Dodenburg inspected the outside of each vehicle in that stifling heat, and then clambered inside the red-hot metal boxes to check the mass of dials, the speedometer, the revolution counter, the pressure gauges, the cannon-firing mechanism.

On the morning of the second day he took his own command vehicle for a hard ride into the desert, accompanied by Schulze and the ‘Prof’, with Matz at the wheel. Within two hours, each man was reduced to the state of a wet rag. Time and time again the metal pins joining the track-plates broke on the hard, stony ground of the desert, leaving them with the back breaking task of hammering in another.

At midday von Dodenburg began to call on his fellow COs of the armoured regiments all around, whose Mark IIIs and Mark IVs were equipped with specially hardened link-pins, designed specifically for the desert. But none of them had pins to spare for Assault Regiment Wotan. Fuming with rage, von Dodenburg cried to Reichert, ‘You would think we were the bloody enemy – and not the Tommies, goddamit!’

Reichert allowed himself a faint smirk, ‘But, if I may be forgiven for saying so my dear Major, you are.’

Von Dodenburg spun round on him. ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean, eh?’

The look of naked fury in his eyes wiped the smirk off the Professor’s face. ‘I meant that the gentlemen of the
Afrikakorps
think you of the SS are lowering the tone of the war in the desert. As they see it, the sooner the SS vanishes into the desert –
for good
– the better everything will be.’

Von Dodenburg slumped weakly against the burning canvas of the HQ tent. ‘Oh, my back,’ he croaked. ‘What a bloody war!’ Wearily he wiped the sweat off his dripping brow, only to feel the second wave of perspiration swamp his forehead the very next moment. ‘What in hell’s name am I going to do? By Christ, I’ll go right to the Field-Marshal about this!’

‘With respect, Major, the gentlemen of the Staff would probably never let you get within sniffing distance of His Excellency.’

Von Dodenburg slammed his clenched fist on the table violently. ‘I must have those pins!’ he cried.

‘Sir.’ It was Schulze, who had been standing at the flap of the tent all the time.

‘Yes, what is it?’

‘Sir, I think me and Matzi might be able to get those pins for you,’ he ventured with unusual hesitancy.

‘But how?’ the Major cried. ‘Come on, don’t stand around like a spare prick at a wedding. Out with it!’

‘Well, sir, perhaps you remember yesterday morning, me and Matzi went of down to the Quay – to look for supplies.’

‘You mean –
whores
,’ von Dodenberg sneered. Schulze stared down at his big dusty boots. ‘I suppose you might put it like that, sir,’ he said. ‘Well, sir, me and Matzi found out we weren’t particularly welcome at the house, sir. It seems it’s only meant for senior officers of the staff. But we thought we’d come a long way to get inside them pearly gates and it was going to be a long time before we’d be able to rip off another piece, so we had a bit of a think and we came up with this.’ He reached inside his trouser pocket and brought out a pair of epaulettes, heavy with the gilt of a full colonel.

‘You mean you put these on your shoulders and passed yourselves off as officers!’ von Dodenburg gasped.