Disclaimer: The Rat Patrol doesn't belong to me, I suppose.
Bite the Bullet Raid
by tallsunshine12
Chapter 1 Lt. Gerhard Fritsch
Tucked into the coastal hills of the Mediterranean lay the Axis base of al-Qarah. A picture postcard of a town on the desert edge, a part of the Wadi Qalil, or Sunken Valley, al-Qarah was a transit point for ammo, weapons, vehicles, and medical supplies offloaded from ships out of Sardinia, and then convoyed east to the German front lines.
And it was in this pocket of sea and sand, from the Mediterranean Sea to al-Qarah to the tank battles on the border of Egypt, that the Rat Patrol, armed with .50 cal. machine guns, raided those supply convoys. They were a never-ending headache to the man who ran the base, Hauptmann Hans Dietrich.
Currently, though, he was away at a strategy meeting at a sea-facing town known as Bardia, about twenty kilometers north of al-Qarah. A port city where the Germans maintained a large POW camp, Bardia was one of the hubs for supplies from the sea.
In his absence, Hauptmann Dietrich had left his adjutant, Lt. Gerhard Fritsch, in charge. Two days after Dietrich left, a convoy of trucks was slated to come through al-Qarah for processing. Just to make sure the Rats didn't interfere with it, Fritsch took a scout column out to nose around.
His vehicles didn't get far. In their outrageously driven jeeps, the Allies were successful in destroying almost the entire scouting party, zipping in and out of range, forcing his men to shoot at one another across the open gaps. Except for losing Troy, they could count it as a hundred percent win.
Grenade blasts, bursts of machine gun fire, the whistling of German mortars—the firefight between jeeps and half-tracks was going splendidly until a lucky shot ended the Rat Patrol's parade. Troy, creased by a bullet, crumpled against the .50 cal. Browning, lost his grip on the handles, and tumbled out of the jeep.
Eerily, it had happened before. A couple of months prior to this day, the Rats attacked Fritsch's convoy of supply trucks and utterly destroyed it. But their luck was tainted by the fact that a piece of shrapnel or a rock had hit Troy and knocked him flat on the sand, out cold. He got away that time. Fritsch, however, in a fit of rage, had trailed the Rats across the desert, hoping to return the favor and destroy them. His luck was to get stuck in some 'dry' quicksand, a specialty in a land without water, and miss his chance to send the Rat Patrol into well-earned oblivion.
Just like then, Hitch, driving madly, but not hearing Troy firing anymore, looked back over his shoulder. Again, to his horror, he saw his sergeant lying in the sand, not moving. But before Troy could be reunited with his driver and escape capture, an 81 mm shell from a mortar on Fritsch's half-track shrieked through the air. Not more than a dozen yards from the jeep's tires, it exploded.
In the split second before the explosion, Hitch veered off across the sand, leaving Troy. Luckily for the prone sergeant, he was on the other side of the jeep when the shell exploded. In addition to this setback, a second shell whistled in and drove off the other half of the team, Moffitt and Tully. Tully had to execute a rapid 180 degree turn to keep the jeep he shared with Sgt. Moffitt out of the blast zone. He didn't wish for his beloved jeep to become a piece of twisted metal scrap.
As eight pound shells continued to trail the two jeeps into the nearby rocky hills, Fritsch saw Troy lying face-down in the sand and ordered his driver to stop in front of the American sergeant, then he motioned him to exit the half-track. Cautiously, the driver, unarmed, approached Troy and bent over him. Turning him face-up, he shook his arm until he awoke.
With the driver's help, Troy sat up in the sand, his head ringing, his limbs vibrating like aspen leaves. He glanced up as Fritsch got down from his high perch on the half-track and walked over, his sidearm out.
As Fritsch, stocky, well-made, German through and through, with a deep voice and hard, pinpoint eyes, approached him, the commando struggled to his feet. "You will surrender," said the Oberleutnant, or 1st lieutenant. He held his gun steady.
Wiping sand off himself, Troy nodded quickly. "Okay, lieutenant, you win."
Fritsch looked around at the Rat Patrol's devastation of his column. Smoking hulks greeted his own smoke-enflamed eyes. "This makes two," he said, referring back to their last meeting. "I wonder how you can call this a win, Sgt. Troy."
Troy leaned into his wound. Coughing on the blackened air, air which he had helped blacken with his hand grenades, he said, "Yeah, first the listening post, then the supply convoy you were supposed to guard. You don't seem to have any luck around us, Fritsch."
"No? Maybe not, Sergeant, but I do have a long memory." Fritsch tried to raise his right arm, but stopped midway, wincing. "You're going to find that out."
While Fritsch's men scrambled to do what they could for the wounded and the dying, Troy pondered a moment. He had his own 'memory' of those two previous encounters with Oberleutnant Gerhard Fritsch. Almost a year earlier, the Rats had blown up Fritsch's radio installation adjoining the tomb of an ancient Roman princess, a girl by the name of Mariket. On a hill above the tomb, in an exchange of bullets and grenades, Troy had shot him.
Fritsch's arm had stiffened up, and that made Troy now very wary of him.
Troy's thoughts snapped back as Fritsch went on. "You wounded me, Sergeant." Lowering his arm, he added, "I've wounded you. Your men are gone and you're now my prisoner. Can it get any better than that—for me?"
Troy smirked and didn't reply. Out in the sun, with temperatures hovering beyond a hundred, his side bloody, he didn't feel like talking much.
"I won't kill you outright, Sergeant," Fritsch went on, "but you'll wish I had."
Biding his time until the jeeps showed up again, guns blazing, he again looked at the hills where the jeeps had gone, forced to flee to escape the shells from the mortar on Fritsch's half-track. No sign of them.
"Search the prisoner and disarm him, then help him into the half-track," Fritsch told his driver, who leapt to obey his command.
Troy's ammo belt, sidearm, and even the knife in his boot found their way into German hands. He was allowed to keep his watch, as if a prisoner needed to keep time. With the driver's help again, he climbed aboard Fritsch's half-track, the sole vehicle in Fritsch's column to have escaped relatively undamaged from the fight. The Rat Patrol's fifties and frag grenades had accounted for the rest.
These included two additional half-tracks and a couple of armored cars. The top turrets of these stout, four-wheeled vehicles each carried a 20 mm cannon, a weapon powerful enough to bring down a low-flying plane.
He moved to the front of the half-track, passing the 3-inch mortar that had fired upon the jeeps. A long, hollow tube on a tripod, bolted to the bed of the half-track and fed with HE, or high explosive, shells, it was as deadly as the MG 34 projecting from behind a gun shield. The machine gun was fed with two-inch, 8 mm projectiles. One of those 8 millimeters, Troy was sure, had wounded him.
Gripping the bar behind the driver's seat, and holding his side with his other hand, he gazed out again. Still nothing. He couldn't see them, but he knew the jeeps were there, hidden in a pocket in the rocks where even a scorpion couldn't hide—but his men could.
Fritsch's men—those able to walk—lay the wounded and the bodies of the dead alike on the floor of the half-track. Hugging the corner of the huge transport, Troy met with no outright aggression, but as they loaded their dead comrades aboard, their glaring looks told him how the soldiers felt about him. Though they couldn't hide their feelings entirely, yet Dietrich, the man Fritsch answered to, had trained them too well to hurt a prisoner.
Bumping along as it got going, the single half-track moved out, heading in the direction of al-Qarah. A team of mechanics would return to the battle site the next day with the intent to cannibalize what it could of the wreckage and bring it back to the base.
Troy wondered if Dietrich would be there. He also wondered why Fritsch hadn't killed him. His death might mean a promotion for Fritsch, and a black stain on Dietrich's record. Fritsch might even be given Dietrich's command. All the more reason not to 'stick around,' if he, Troy, could help it.
A low-slung town of mud-brick, no building over three stories, al-Qarah appeared as a mirage at first, rising lopsidedly out of the sands. As he looked at his watch—thirty minutes since his capture, he frowned. Dizzy with loss of blood, he looked out again. No jeeps.
The half-track, limping a bit, pulled into the gate and stopped at the sentry's hut. It was a short stop. Fritsch fired off orders, and his men scurried to carry them out. From his high perch, Troy gazed at the inquisitive, but suspicious faces of the soldiers on duty. In this whole town, he was likely the only man who didn't have a weapon. Even the milling Arabs, looking up at him with the same dark malice as the Germans, carried long knives in their sash belts.
Rumbling to life again, the half-track rolled down the street and stopped at HQ. Troy was helped out and taken to a rear entry, then down to a basement cell. Fritsch had not come along, but shortly a medic appeared and deftly, but wordlessly, cleansed his wound, dusted it with sulfa, and bandaged it. The machine gun had deeply scored his side, like the lash of a whip, only ten times more painful.
When the medic was through, Troy pulled his shirt back together and buttoned it. Feeling better now that the air wasn't getting at the wound, he said, "Thank you. Danke," as the medic put away his things and got up to leave.
The medic nodded curtly. On his way out, he said to one of the two guards, in German, "Give him some water. Let him rest."
With that, the medic was gone. So efficient, so silent and unassuming. Troy wished he could have understood those quiet orders. Speaking Germans wasn't one of his skills, he was afraid.
He found the cot and lay back on the mattress, sighing. He'd really bought it this time—what with Lt. Fritsch apparently in charge of the base. In a mood for revenge, Fritsch would temper his anger now for a chance to use it at some later time.
Where was Dietrich, the man who loved to gloat over Troy whenever the German officer captured him? Troy could only speculate, but as it got later, he expected Captain Dietrich would have made an effort to visit him in his cell.
It grew dark fast. Through a high, barred window, Troy watched the stars move across the sky. Their movement was slow, even lulling, but it was not enough to quell Troy's restless heart. He was expecting a rescue that night.
He dozed a bit, but woke up as the door key turned in the lock. By the light of the single bulb outside, he checked his watch again. 0130 hours. Quite late for an interrogation.
The door, solid except for a tiny grate in its upper half, opened. With some difficulty, Troy sat up, putting his feet on the floor. Still in his dusty uniform, Fritsch stepped in. Troy looked at him and assumed, rightly, that Fritsch had been taking care of the wounded all night—as well as properly disposing of the dead—and hadn't had time to change. Both men had five o'clock shadows.
Rubbing his stiff neck, stiff from the fall off the back of the jeep—sand made a hard landing spot—Troy waited for the lieutenant to speak first. He knew when to be silent, and this was one of those times.
"Get ready to leave here, Sgt. Troy," said Fritsch, bluntly. "I'll give you five minutes, then we go."
"Where—?"
Fritsch didn't provide an answer. He turned and left. The guard closed the door, locking it again on the baffled prisoner. Troy stood up and moved over to the door. He heard talking. It was Fritsch and the guard. He listened, listened for what he wasn't sure, but Fritsch wasn't giving anything away, not even in German.
Troy turned back, got up on the mattress, and looked out of the window. Pitch-black outside, the last of the sun's giant orange rays had vanished. He could see the back wall of the town, plus a few guards crisscrossing an open space in front of the cells. No rescue in sight.
Climbing down again, he grabbed his hat, and his preparations for departure were complete. That hat, an Australian bush hat with the brim pinned up by the Rising Sun cap badge, had seen its own share of war. He had earned that badge before he joined the Long Range Desert Group. Less than two years ago, he'd been with the 9th Australian Division. So long ago, it seemed now.
In exactly five minutes, the guard forced him out. He tried to see if he was the only prisoner, but he couldn't tell for sure. No sounds were coming from any of the other three cells. In the small, outer room, smoke filled the air, and judging by the hands on the table, Fritsch's appearance must have interrupted a card game.
"I hope no one was holding a big winner," Troy said, smiling at their dumbfounded stares. They didn't understand English, any more than he did German.
In the street outside, quiet now since it was so late, Fritsch met him at a waiting Kubelwagen, the short, four-wheeled car carrying its spare tire on the hood like a gypsy nose-ring. It was Germany's answer to the all-terrain American jeep.
"What does Capt. Dietrich say about all this?" Troy asked. "He won't think too much of your idea—whatever it is."
Whisking a prisoner out of his cell in the middle of the night, Fritsch might have had some explaining to do. But when High Command heard of Troy's death, and perhaps the end of the Rat Patrol, the shoe would be on the other foot—and Hauptmann Dietrich would have to do the explaining.
"Not much, since he isn't here," Fritsch replied, truthfully. Both men standing beside Fritsch's car, he added, "I've read about Hauptmann Dietrich's losses due to your raids. He's caught you and your men often enough, yet you always manage to wrangle free. My own report will be the finale to the endless tug of war between you desert Rats and Hans Dietrich.
Troy took a quick glance at the walls of the town. No one was coming over them. Where were his men?
"If you kill me, a prisoner of war, Dietrich will hunt you down."
Fritsch showed teeth in the scant light of the stars. "He can't protect you now, Sergeant. Just as I can't have full range of my arm ever again, thanks to your bullet."
Stalling for time, Troy asked, "How do you know—with all the bullets flying around—that it was mine?"
"You aimed straight at me," Fritsch snapped. "I felt it go in, like a deep sting."
It might well have been the truth. He had aimed to take out Fritsch, who under Dietrich's authority commanded the radio center near Leptis Magna. He was only sorry he hadn't done it.
Not able to resist a parting shot, he said, "This was your first time?"
Fritsch didn't seem to be amused. He brought out a Luger and waved it at the Kubelwagen. Troy pulled the door open and got in the back, watching as a different set of guards also got in, one to drive, the other to guard him. Fritsch got in the front passenger seat.
A lone half-track, armed to the teeth with three men carrying MP 40's, took up position behind them. Deep in the Arab section of town, the party drove under a small arch in the adobe walls—a postern gate—and out into the desert night. The two guards from the basement watched them go, wondering to themselves. Had Fritsch chosen tonight—already tomorrow—for Sgt. Troy, the American commando, to take his last breath?
A/N: You can find more of Lt Gerhard Fritsch and his adventures with the Rat Patrol in these two previous stories, Mariket's Tomb and Dry Quicksand. Please enjoy!