Chapter 2 Unlikely Allies

"Moffitt said he was coming here to look up an antiquities dealer for an old friend in England!" said Sgt. Sam Troy with some emphasis. Troy was the leader of the Rat Patrol, but in rank, he was Moffitt's equal.

Tully and Hitch looked at him, Tully saying, "Well, he ain't here. We've searched every antique hole in this town and no sign of him."

"Yeah, Sarge, no one remembers him," said Hitch. "He's not hard to forget, either. Tall, English, a good talker."

Troy rubbed his hand on his pants leg, sweating in this desert heat. He took off his slouch hat and ran a hand through his hair, then put it back on again. "Now, we have to talk to the Arabs in charge. That won't be easy. They're a close-mouthed bunch of guys. Come on." Both Pvts. Tully and Hitch followed without a qualm, knowing that Troy would find Moffitt even if it killed all of them. The pair had bonded through many an adventure together, heck, they all had, thought the younger men.

Finding the town leaders wasn't hard, but getting anything out of them was. At the city hall, Troy found what passed for a mayor and town council. He went abruptly into their office, dragging an interpreter along. Not one of the other three Rats knew the Arabs' many dialects like the missing Moffitt did. Many years on digs with his father, a renowned archaeologist, and then on forays of his own among the Arab ruins had been rewarding in many ways, not least of which in teaching him their tongues.

"We haven't seen your friend," said the interpreter to Troy's question, which he had posed again in a different way, hoping to catch the Arabs up. These men wouldn't have told where they had hidden a first aid kit, even if it would save their lives.

"He came here just one," said Troy, "no, two days ago, looking for a certain shop on the main plaza. It would have been hard to overlook him. Tall, dark, British accent. Black beret."

Again, the interpreter spoke with the 'mayor,' receiving only a negative in return. He shrugged at Troy and said, "He does not know this man. Maybe you will find him, maybe not."

Troy showed his impatience with a swift head shake. He pointed a finger. "Tell him, if he's holding out on me, if he knows anything at all – I'll be back for him and the rest of his council! And they won't like it!"

"I will tell him, Sergeant, but he will only say the same thing. You cannot force him to change his story."

"A story it is!" blew up Tully from the background. Hitch, rapidly chewing his wad of gum, waved him to be quiet.

As they exited the building by a side door, leaving the shady office of the mayor behind, Troy said to his men, "Go get the jeeps. Bring them here. I'm going to take this overpaid interpreter back inside and look around again. There's got to be something they're hiding!"

But before any of the four men were able to move, they were startled by a voice coming out of nowhere. "Pardon me," it said. All the men looked in different directions for the speaker. Stepping into their midst, a small-built man with a squinty eye spoke again. "Pardon me," he repeated. Those were his last words in English, so the interpreter was called back into play. In Arabic, their new friend said, "I know who you're looking for. The tall one in the black cap." The man dropped the bombshell and then didn't seem to want to go on.

Troy sized up the speaker quickly. Another hand-out kind of guy. Once the interpreter had finished, he asked, "Well, what do you know?"

"I think I may know where he is, but my family sits and starves. Many days we have only soup made from the bones of a she-goat."

The interpreter laughed as he interpreted that. Troy didn't think it was funny. "How much does he want?" An amount was reached through the expected haggling and Troy handed over the correct number of coins. "Talk," he urged. Was that a threat in his voice? Both privates looked at each other, sharing the same thought.

The Arab did a heap of talking and finally the interpreter could begin. "A big secret, even though the whole town knows what happened. This morning, your friend was put up for sale –"

"Wait a minute," said Troy. "Put up for sale?"

"Let him get it all out, Sarge," said Hitch, Troy's driver. "Go on, sir," he said to the interpreter.

"Well, he was sold to a German captain – no one knew his name, but he said he was an agent for a German general. He took your friend in a big car and headed out onto the desert, that way."

The interpreter pointed. All eyes swung that way, east towards where at least three German bases were situated, one of those commanded by Capt. Hans Dietrich.

"Was this man tall, about my age?" asked Troy. He waited for the lengthy reply made by the informant to be translated and then said, "Dietrich!"

"Yeah, sure sounds like him," said Tully, now chewing on his matchstick again. He had resisted the urge to chew on it in the administration building out of some respect for the seat of government.

"I might have known we'd run into him. But how?" Troy was flummoxed. "How did he know Moffitt was in town? Jack's too smart to advertise his whereabouts."

"Another informant? Someone who knows about us?" asked Tully.

"They do seem to raise a big crop of storytellers here," said his fellow driver, Mark Hitchcock.

Troy gave the interpreter and the squint-eyed man some extra coins to keep them quiet and gathered up his men. "Let's go get the jeeps."

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It was a long, brutal, hot ride to the desert wadi, an oasis, where a camp was made for the night, a desert night that pulled its usual trick. As it grew darker and darker, it got colder. Half-clothed in his torn shirt, Moffitt's shivers increased until his teeth chattered. His bruised ribs ached from the endless pounding over the sands, and he was so empty inside, he felt that if he didn't see food in the next few hours, he would die.

Nothing but water was forthcoming. His last meal, such as it was, consisted only of tiny curb of bread, and that had been yesterday afternoon. He laid his head back on the bole of a palm tree and sighed. This was not how he had wanted to spend his forty-eight hour pass. Last night, he had missed the required check-in with Troy over the radio he had stowed away in a third jeep, borrowed just for the purpose of his visit to el-Zuwara. He knew that by now his friends were out looking for him, possibly already in town as Tal Yata, the Allies' base, was only about sixty-five kilometers away from el-Zuwara.

In the Medina, the ancient Arab core of el-Zuwara, he had found the antiquities dealer he had been sent to meet, concluding a purchase of a rare coin his friend in England had been hoping to get for his collection. After making the transaction, his part was over. The dealer would invoice Moffitt's friend and, upon payment, ship the coin. Now he could wander about and savor some of the sights and smells of the market, tasting the food in the various stalls and relaxing as the sun went down.

He'd been sitting on a couple of crates with a bowl of something spicy in hand as he watched the last rays depart when he was attacked by two men, the peddler's two henchmen. He had chosen an out of the way spot to enjoy his dinner, so there were no witnesses to the deed. With swift moves, he laid one of them low, but fell to the sand as the other clobbered him with a gun butt. After that, he woke up in a cellar of sorts, his head pounding and his arms tied behind him to a wooden rail. The next day, when he was untied to be taken to city hall, he had tried to escape and was knocked about for his efforts, with the whipping the cream on top.

Then Dietrich with his fictitious general had shown up, arranged to purchase him and hauled him out onto the desert towards a German base. He'd been captured again, but now by mysterious Arabs who didn't talk much. For instance, he wasn't sure who these men belonged to and they were silent on that score.

"It hasn't been a good vacation," he said to himself, before falling to sleep tied to the palm tree. One of the men woke him up to give him a piece of goat cheese, untying his hands long enough for him to wolf it down, about three seconds. Then he found himself tied again and, sleepy, dropped off once more. He didn't anticipate the ruckus that was about to befall the Arabs' camp.

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Incredibly, just as the sun slipped further into the hills, the three members of the Rat Patrol met up with the returning Dietrich. No shots were fired in this instance, even as the maniacal staff car pulled in front of Hitch and Troy's lead jeep, stopping both jeeps abruptly. Without being able to see under the roof canopy, in order to determine who would have stopped them in this way on the open desert, Troy mounted the 50 mm gun in the back of his jeep and Tully, driving alone in the second one, climbed over the seat and mounted his.

Dietrich of all people exited the car along with his quite-nervous driver. Kurt Hilfer wanted to live to see his twenty-second birthday, and looking down the maws of 50 mm guns was not, in his view, the way to get there.

"Ah, Dietrich," said Troy, coming down off the jeep to meet his arch-foe, knowing that Tully still had the two men covered. "Have you got Moffitt inside that car?"

"Would that I did," said the deep-voiced German in his unapproachable English. The gymnasium, or high school, he had attended in his own country was to be praised for its language teacher. "But I'm afraid we're both out of luck. I thought I had a prisoner, but earlier today the Arabs took him from me."

"Arabs?" asked Troy. "I heard there was the matter of a sale. Was it one of those bidding on him?"

"It could have been," Dietrich conceded. "The strong men who took Moffitt from me could have been working for the rather fat Arab who bid against me."

"How much did Moffitt go for?" asked Hitch, speaking up for the first time, after moving to take Troy's place at the gun.

"Five hundred francs, young man! A goodly sum."

"Well," said Troy, "I'm sure he appreciated you laying out so much for him. But now we've got to find him."

"That's what I was hoping you'd say, Sgt. Troy. I'd like to help. I don't like to think of Moffitt, an educated man, being the slave of such a man."

"What did he want him for, did he say?" asked Troy.

"He owns a piece of property in the desert, his home base. It lies near some ruins that I've seen before. Perhaps he wanted to use Sgt. Moffitt's skill in excavating them."

"I knew that education would get him in the end," threw in Tully, smirking over at his fellow driver and rolling the matchstick between his lips.

"I know that area a little bit, too," said Troy. "You won't be able to use your staff car to get there."

"So I figured," said Dietrich. "If we go with you – and I really mean I'd like to help – we'll need to ride in your jeeps."

The thought of having Dietrich and his Kraut driver riding with them made flesh slightly crawl in the two younger men, especially Tully, as he would be the most likely one to host them in his jeep.

"Get your gear," said Troy, curtly. "We'll pulling out now." He looked up, squinted at the sky. "We've got maybe one hour of sun left. Let's shake it!"

Kurt Hilfer pulled his weapon from the staff car, reaching for Dietrich's too, then rather apprehensively, he took a seat in the back of Tully's jeep, while Dietrich got in beside the driver. Red-headed, helmet-wearing Tully looked over at him, rolled his matchstick around once, and gave him a meaningful look, as if saying, "You try anything with me, Capt. Dietrich, and it won't go well for you."

Dietrich put on that cat-got-the-cream smile of his and faced forward, jerking slightly as Tully rammed the jeep in gear and took off. He knew the acrobatics these two drivers could perform with their jeeps and was actually looking forward to the thrill ride ahead of him.

They found the camp by following the tracks left by the Arabs' Kubelwagens. Halting out of eyeshot behind a dune, Troy climbed it and manned the field glasses, while Hitch stood beside him, waiting for orders. Tully, a trifle sullen-acting, still sat in the jeep with his two new 'friends.'

Returning, Troy described the layout of the camp. "Several Arabs are lying on their blankets next to the fire and three others are on guard duty – if you can call it that. They're all asleep, heads nodding. Moffitt is tied to a tree about thirty yards from the fire. He's asleep, too."

"I don't expect he'll be much help to us, Sergeant," said Dietrich, not exiting the jeep just yet. "Not with the condition he was in."

Troy nodded, then said, "Hitch, you and Dietrich get on the 50s. Hilfer – that's your name, right? – you and Tully will drive. Make sure you follow Tully's lead. He'll circle the camp. I'll mop-up whatever's left. Any questions? Last minute thoughts? Dietrich, are you still game to do this?"

"Ready when you are, Sgt. Troy. Lead on." He slid out of his seat, then climbed up behind the machine gun mounted on the back. After making some adjustments to it, he knew that it was ready to fire.

For a fleeting moment, he had the urge to end the meddlesome Rat Patrol right then and there. A few well-aimed 50 mm shots and the men who had muddled his life any number of times would be eating dust. But he was, if anything, a man of Teutonic honor and however much the demon inside might urge him to, he refused to betray them.

The battle was over quickly. The surprised Arabs died on cue. Hitch and the German captain filled their blankets with lead as the drivers swept around them in circles. Troy waited to see whatever remained of life in the Arabs and fired his tommy gun to quench it in three-shot bursts. Suddenly, all was still. A pair of tired eyes watched them from the lone palm tree as the jeeps came to a halt and the men descended from the guns.

Troy walked over and knelt down to his friend, looking him in the eye. "In a bit of sticky wicket, old chap?" he asked, broadly smiling. In the bright light of a half-moon, his teeth shown whitely.

"Troy, get me untied. And feed me! I'm glad it's you and not – Dietrich!" He looked up as the tall German officer approached. "You brought him to my rescue?"

"He volunteered. Said he couldn't stand the idea of you being a slave of some 'fat' Arab, as he put it."

"Well, I'll be," murmured Moffitt. "Are we his prisoners?"

Troy coughed. "No, much as I hate to say it, we have to drive them back to Dietrich's staff car. Then, if he's smart, he'll be on his way back to his base and leave us alone." He turned on his heels to cast an eye on the man who was their chief enemy in the desert.

"Absolutely, Sergeant!" said Dietrich, smiling coolly again. "Until we meet again, that is."

The cold stars in the sky blinked on and off, watching as they had for a thousand thousand years the exploits of men at war.

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