Goodbye Note
by
tallsunshine12
Part I
A/N: Whumptober 2023; prompts are in bold.
June, 1942
Clutching the note in his hand, he walked down the bluff to the sea again, to the shore where he had last seen Amalia, her dark hair escaping the scarf she wore and blowing in the sea breeze. She stood clutching the hand of her little girl, Lamis, a name meaning 'soft to touch,' as they waited for the boat to arrive.
Even though they were worlds apart, in language, culture, heritage, Troy bent and kissed Amalia on the cheek, causing the red to rise in her face.
He thought back over recent events.
It was Moffitt, who, dressed as an Arab, had gone into Italian-held Benghazi to spy on the enemy, and who had first alerted Troy to the civilians being loaded into trucks by a cadre of young Italian soldiers, mostly privates with one or two sergeants.
From his Arab contacts, Moffitt had discovered that the convoy of four trucks and three half-tracks would be pulling out at noon, its destination the Italian-run concentration camp of El Magrun, 50 miles to the south of Benghazi.
The detainees were Jews who had aided the British in Benghazi in their fight against the Italians, but when the ousted British forces had begun a retreat to Egypt in May and June, in revenge the Italians began rounding up the Jews—any Jews, even those who had not taken part in the fighting—and shipping them to El Magrun, a camp fifty miles south.
The Rat Patrol's four-man unit might have been considered too small to challenge armored vehicles, even those transporting mostly old men, women, and children to the camp, but Sgt. Troy had other ideas.
"Well, it's not going to happen this time," said Troy.
"There's very little time," Moffitt added, "if we want to save them."
Troy turned to the bespectacled Hitch, his driver, who was on the radio headset monitoring Allied transmissions. "Hitch! Radio HQ. Tell 'em we have a live one here and want to do something about it. Please advise."
Hitch tuned in to the Allied Headquarters' frequency at Tal Yata, the Allied base, and relayed Troy's rather obscure message, word for word. He didn't even need to code 'a live one.' Waiting for a reply, he turned up the radio volume, so his friends could hear.
When HQ asked Hitch what a 'live one' was, Hitch now used code. "Apples in trucks going to market at El Magrun. Want to stop apples from reaching market. Please advise. Over."
As Troy and Moffitt hung on every word from HQ, as Moffitt translated HQ's message with the code book.
Bee swarm in the sky. Strafing attack on half-tracks.
Fly in ointment. Air attack to keep the Italians busy, so Rat Patrol can rush in.
Second bee swarm. Now, the Rat Patrol begins its own offensive.
Even with HQ's permission to rescue the four truckloads of detainees, Troy knew they still had some planning to do. The bee attacks, or strafing runs, would take place near Wadi el-Harq, an hour's drive outside of Benghazi. The Hawker Hurricane's pilot would strafe the half-tracks, but steer clear of the trucks carrying the detainees.
Minutes after the first, and then the second, strafing run, the Rat Patrol would move in, shoot up the remaining defenders (piece of cake), and seize the convoy.
Hidden in the desert scrub at Wadi el-Harq, Troy and his men waited for the convoy to arrive. Tully, lying flat on a nearby dune, scanned the road with binoculars. As soon as he spotted the convoy, he pumped his fist to let Hitch know it was on its way. Hitch, below in the wadi, radioed HQ that the convoy was in sight. At that time, a RAF Hurricane was scrambled from a nearby Allied airfield, at Buq Buq.
Troy let the convoy get a few miles down the road, then the jeeps pulled out of the wadi and gave chase. Just as they caught up with the rear of the convoy, they heard the whine of the Hawker Hurricane, as the single-seat fighter flew over.
The strafing attack was a success, even with the half-track crews firing their machine guns up at the nuisance in the sky, but the Hawker Hurricane, with a fantastic pilot, dodged every bullet. One of its 20 mm shells struck the engine of the lead half-track and the vehicle exploded.
At the sound of the approaching plane, the drivers of the detainees' trucks jerked to a stop behind a high dune, two of the four drivers exiting the vehicles as the Rat Patrol's two jeeps rolled past and split up, firing into the remaining half-tracks.
Crews stood in the beds of the vehicles one minute, shooting up at a roaring plane; the next, they were falling over each other, gasping their dying breaths.
The thirty-five or forty detainees crammed into the four trucks were in a panic. Should they step out into the firing zone, or stay huddled on the floor of the trucks?
Once the strafing was at an end, the Hurricane dipped its left wing at the commandos on the sands in acknowledgement of a job well done, then flew back to its field at Buq Buq.
Troy pulled off and waved his bush hat at the fighter. "I wonder if I know that pilot," he said, thinking it could have been his brother, David. Once all of the detainees were safe and sound at Tal Yata, he hoped to find out, by radio, if it had been him.
While Moffitt and Tully 'mopped up,' checking the dead and wounded, Troy and Hitch took the surrender of the truck drivers, who were armed only with rifles. All four were eager to surrender to the higher firepower of the .50 cal. machine guns mounted on the jeeps. They were spared.
Troy then turned to the first truck and stood by while Hitch opened the rear flaps of the tarp over the truck bed. Moffitt and Tully were standing guard over the little knot of drivers.
A flood of frightened, weeping, but ultimately relieved folk poured out of the back of the truck, spurring the other trucks to empty out, too. Some of the Jews, dressed identically to the Benghazi Arabs with whom they usually lived in cordial relations, fell to the sands, exhausted from the harrowing ride, and the accompanying fear. Lack of water, the cramped space, the odors, all of it contributed to quite a few fainting.
Water from the Rats' canteens went around, as well as the canteens belonging to the drivers. Troy walked over to one woman sitting back on the sand, holding her small daughter on her lap. Tears were flowing out of her brown eyes. The girl wasn't moving.
Troy knelt in the sand and lifting the girl's head, he just barely wet her lips to try to revive her. Unconscious, she couldn't be allowed to hold water in her mouth just yet, so as not to choke. He handed the canteen to the mother, but she brushed it away and shook her head, no.
"Give it to my daughter," she said in Arabic. Troy didn't need Moffitt to translate the words. He knew what she meant. It was in her eyes. My daughter first.
With a few light taps on her cheek, Troy was able to wake the girl. When she came to, even if not all the way, he put the canteen to her lips. The girl drank. As she sat up on her mother's lap, he smoothed her hair and talked softly to her.
Her mother reached for the girl's scarf where it had fallen nearby in the sand and put it around her head again. Pointing to the child, she said, "Lamis."
"Lamis. And what's your name?" asked Troy, more to quiet the two of them by talking rather than for the information.
She pointed at herself, raising an eyebrow, and he nodded. "Amalia," she said.
He pointed to himself. "Troy."
Time was short. It wouldn't be long before enemy recon planes flew over the destroyed convoy, especially if they didn't reach El Magrun on schedule. He helped Amalia and Lamis, his two new friends, to their feet, the girl starting to cry. He pushed a stray lock of hair out of her eyes and her mother tucked it up under the scarf.
Troy had quite a table of issues to have to deal with. The half-track crews had been whittled down to two men still alive, and two wounded. The truck drivers could pose a problem, as there were four of them, but looking at their wide, half-panicky eyes, he could see they weren't going to be much of a menace.
He planned to take the wounded with him, but leave the other men on the desert. To delay their return to Benghazi, he instructed Hitch to pull out the radios from the two remaining half-tracks, and afterward, Hitch destroyed them with a burst of tommy gun fire.
The Italians' trucks were in operable condition, as they had not been targeted, but there were the numerous hungry, thirsty, and in some cases sick detainees. A few of them, lying on the sand, looked as if they could not get to their feet again.
"Is either of the other two half-tracks in working condition, Tully?" asked Troy.
Tully popped up from the engine of one of the vehicles, having already started it on the 'road' to repair.
"This one'll run, Sarge," he said, chewing his matchstick. "But the other one's kaput. Won't go."
"I was afraid of that," muttered Troy. He turned and found Amalia watching him. So was the big-eyed Lamis, her brown eyes locked onto him, and him alone. To her, the rest of the surrounding world had disappeared.
Moffitt came up, his canteen all but empty. "Not enough water, Troy," he said, shaking it slightly before handing it to the girl.
"On our way back to base, don't we pass a waterhole?" Troy asked. "I seem to remember one."
"At Ajila, it has several sweet wells, but I'll check the maps to be sure." Moffitt then gazed at the sands where the detainees were either sitting or lying. Some had gone back into the trucks to get out of the sun. "Some of our new charges," he said, concerned, "do not look at all well."
"We'll head for the oasis then, and make an overnight camp." Now that Troy had that settled, he called over to Tully, still trying to get the single half-truck on its 'feet' again. Hitch had gone back to work on it, too. "How're you comin' on that half-track, Tully?"
He received a garbled answer, times two, from under the hood.
Moffitt laughed, slightly. "That sounds like they're nearly ready."
Lamis momentarily shifted her gaze to him, the eyes of a nine-year-old—who might have perished on the trip to the camp if not for the Rat Patrol—burning into him.
"She's watching both of us, Troy. Do you think we've sprouted horns?" asked Troy. Moffitt then translated what he said for the girl and her mother. Both laughed, experiencing their first good laugh in days.
First, uniformed men had pulled them from their beds in the Jewish quarter of Benghazi, then there was the big, overly lit room in the Benghazi police station, and lastly the cell they were put in. Two days later came this truck journey, where gas fumes added to the fetid air of sickness and unwashed bodies.
Now, while Moffitt studied his map on top of the jeep hood, Troy could turn his formidable attention to packing up the detainees. That would not be easy.
Three of the older members and one newborn had died in their loved ones' arms. It was a hard thing to do, but they had to be buried there at the place where the convoy had been stopped, an unnamed piece of sandy ground.
He sought help from Hitch again and from some of the abler men, all of them well past sixty, to help with the burying. The Jews were then obliged to reenter the trucks. Some of the sickest were given the ample bed of the operable half-track to lie down in, with their own loved ones at their side.
Amalia herself refused to get in the truck again. She had almost lost Lamis on the ride out to the desert, and she would not chance it.
Troy came up with a novel plan. "They'll ride with us," he told his men. Amalia took the passenger seat in Troy and Hitch's jeep, while Lamis got in beside Tully, both Troy and Moffitt riding in the back, their seat a spare tire apiece.
The new 'convoy' headed towards the Allied base of Tal Yata, to the north of their current position, with a stop at Ajila, a beautiful, green oasis with bubbling springs, planned en route.
