Chapter 5 Rescue
Moffitt left the radio on in case there were further developments, and then went to join Hitch, who was spying on the Arabs, dark, long-robed forms moving wraith-like on the streets of the town, at the top of the dune again.
Hitch handed his field glasses to Moffitt, who saw that Troy and Tully were wordlessly making their own plans. Under heavy guard, but in full view of the desert's 'eyes,' the two bound commandos moved closer to the edge of the parapet, step by step, Troy first, with Tully following not too many feet behind.
When they reached it, after taking a big chance of being shot, they looked over the wall and it seemed to Moffitt that both were simultaneously determining the distance to the sands below.
"About twenty, twenty-five feet," Moffitt said to himself, in regards to the height of the wall. He saw the silent look Troy gave to Tully, even if he couldn't read his expression or see if he mouthed any words. To Hitch, he said, "Get the Thompsons, Hitch. We're going to need them in about half a mo'."
"Half a mo'?"
"Half a moment! Troy and Tully are about to go over the wall. Go get them!"
Hitch sped as dust in the wind down to the jeeps again and after checking that both SMG's were loaded with a stick magazine, returned and handed one to Moffitt.
"How do you know they're about to jump?"
"I just know. Let's go! We have only seconds to spare!"
With one leap, Moffitt was on his feet and running down the still-dark dune, Hitch close at his heels, then across the barren plain to a few sheltering bushes about a hundred feet from the wall. He readied the gun by flicking the safety off to 'fire.'
Hitch did the same with his. Now they knelt in the sand behind their protective cover, scant though it was, and waited for Troy and Tully to jump.
They had indeed only 'seconds' to wait. Troy threw himself off first, having voiced the words, "Shoulder roll," to Tully beforehand.
He showed him how it was done, leaping off the wall and hitting the ground with most of his weight on his upper shoulder and back. He rolled with the fall. Stunned for only a moment, he came to one knee, stood up, and then darted back under the overhang of the parapet. Tully was already in the air before Troy hit the mud-brick wall with his back.
Moffitt and Hitch sprang out of their cover and ran forward, blazing away with the Thompsons at the Arabs on the roof, who were attempting to shoot the two escaped commandos with their Schmeissers. Two or three Arabs fell to their deaths below, riddled with .45 caliber rounds from the tommy guns.
Under Moffitt and Hitch's cover fire, Troy and Tully darted out, but a stray 9 mm bullet from the wall above hit Troy in the upper leg and knocked him off his feet. He tried to struggled to get up on his own, but found that he couldn't make it without help. He soon enough had that help. While Moffitt steered the still tied-up Tully to the brush they had hidden behind, Hitch reached down, scooped up his sergeant, and supported him around the back as they ran to cover.
Once in the shelter of the brush again, Hitch pulled out his knife and cut Troy and Tully loose, helping to pull their hands free of the clinging cords. Troy had to rotate his shoulder a few times to get the stiffness of landing on hard sand out of it. Tully seemed to have no injuries at all.
While Hitch was freeing Troy and Tully, Moffitt and the Arabs continued to do battle. A number of times, Moffitt rose partway, aimed, and fired at the Arabs on the walls, and then ducked back down again. He was shortly out of ammo. He knew then that a full retreat was in order.
"Let's go back!" he cried, and while Hitch and Tully got a hand under Troy's arms, running for the dune they had parked the jeeps behind, Moffitt grabbed Hitch's gun and, firing continuously, ran backward in the others' wake.
The had made it to the top of the dune, when Troy, thoroughly spent, went down on his knees, pulling Tully down with him. Since they were on the exposed ridge, the privates had no option but to drag him down the other side of the dune, Moffitt trailing behind in long strides with both Thompsons, one empty and the other nearly so.
Even in Hitch and Tully's capable hands, Troy fell against the side of one of the jeeps, covering his leg as blood continued to gush around his fingers. Moffitt scrounged up the medi-kit and helped Troy to sit down against a tire. While Moffitt was dressing Troy's wound, Tully mounted the fifty of the second jeep. Hitch, behind the wheel, started the engine and rolled out from behind the dune and onto the plain that lay just before the walls of the town.
Eliminating Arabs was the privates' plan. They had many opportunities. Fully half of the multi-tribal gang of Arabs poured out of either a sally port in the outer wall or the main gate. Unfortunately for these hardy souls, they met the same fate with a .50 cal. Browning M2 as their compatriots had on the roof with the .45 cal. Thompsons.
A half-hour had come and gone since Dietrich and Pvt. Hilfer had ridden into Dar el-Tanri in Dietrich's scout car. Since his CO had not radioed in, his second-in-command, a Lt. Georg Myer, order the half-tracks and troops to attack Arab escapees as they fled the town. The half-track crews fired machine guns in addition to lobbing mortar shells over the wall and the troops shot off their Kar98 k's, or carbines.
Overhead, another noise appeared. This one came out of the sky. Responding to their summons for aid, a B25 Mitchell, if Moffitt guessed the type of plane correctly, was zeroing in on the well-lit target of a large building in the middle of town, one which he didn't know had hosted Hamdi's 'conference' with Hauptmann Dietrich about the two captives. A good portion of the building blew into the sky with just one bomb. Precisely dropped, that is.
While the rafters crashed around him, Dietrich pulled out his sidearm—it had never been taken away—and shot Hamdi in the heart. Kurt Hilfer was wrestling with his guard, trading blows, both to the face and gut. He, Hilfer, had not had so much fun since his high school boxing matches four or five years before.
A second guard shot out of an alcove and put a 'bear hug' on Dietrich, both men toppling into the wall. Dietrich managed to elevate his gun to the Arab's midsection, trying to pull the trigger in the struggle. Hilfer, still fighting for his own freedom, heard the gun go off and whipped his head around to see which man had been hit.
He looked back at his opponent and met a fist that would have knocked out a bull. Instead, it only further enraged Kurt Hilfer. He balled his fists together, screamed an ear-shattering "Gott mi tuns!" and came down hard on the back of the Arab, sending him sprawling to the tiled floor, out of luck and out of consciousness.
Having put all of his Bavarian might into the blow, Hilfer staggered back. Catching himself against a support post, he turned and saw his CO on the ground, holding his reddening side. Herr Hauptmann's Arab assailant was just about to deliver the coup de grace, a shot to finish him off, when Hilfer's leg shot out and knocked the gun flying out of the Arab's hand.
With a roundhouse punch—a wide swing of his ham-sized fist—he put out the lights of that particular Arab, too. Afterwards, all gentleness, he bent down and retrieved the arm of his captain and lifted him up.
As the B25 dropped a second bomb on the town, the shelling rocking the huge hall, Hilfer walked out with Dietrich into the night. Both men stumbled over bricks and rafters in the way, but with Hilfer's strength, he and his CO were soon up again, Hilfer guiding him over the rubble towards a similarly debris-strewn gate. Once outside the walls, he and Dietrich rested in the lee of the parapet above.
The Allied bomber, ready to fly off now that it had dropped its two-bomb 'load,' didn't see the two German soldiers in the shadows of the outer wall, but if their gratitude could have reached the sky, he would have dipped his wing in acknowledgement.
Hitch and Tully, now on mop-up duty, drove around the outer perimeter of the town and in short order spotted the two men. One had to be the broad-shouldered private, Kurt Hilfer, Dietrich's favorite driver, and the taller man, leaning against the wall, could only have been Herr Hauptmann Hans Dietrich himself. He was clutching his side and seemed ready to drop, and if it hadn't been for Hilfer's steadying hand on his arm, he would have.
Stopping before them, Hitch invited them into his jeep. "Come, be our guest, Captain Dietrich," he said to the older of the two men. "You, too, Pvt. Hilfer."
"What have we got to lose?" said the captain in German to Hilfer and Hilfer nodded in reply, helping to stand his captain up and move him over to the jeep. Dietrich got into Troy's seat and Hilfer fell in the back with Tully. Strange bedfellows!
High above the others' heads, still on the fifty, Tully sent a couple more Arabs to Jannah, or their version of Heaven, as Hitch drove around the dune to rejoin Moffitt and Troy. Troy, seeing Dietrich in his seat in the jeep, struggled up from the sand with Moffitt's help and turned to face him.
"What's he doin' here?" he asked abruptly. "Does he think we're still going to play his game?"
"No, Sgt. Troy, I'm wounded, like you, I see." In the growing light of early dawn, Dietrich could see Troy's hand still clinging to his leg, bleeding even through the bandage Moffitt had expertly tied on. "I'm just 'hitching' a ride back to my troops."
"And what makes you think we won't ask for payment first?" Troy was livid over Dietrich's involvement in 'selling' him and Tully, and was not afraid to show it. "Say, for five thousand American dollars?"
Dietrich laughed richly. "I'd gladly pay that much, and more, if it would put you out of action, sergeant. Now, am I free to go? I seem to have a bullet in me."
"I hope yours came from a Schmeisser, like mine did!"
With his exercise of wit, Troy began to relax. He dipped his hand into the back of the jeep and pulled out his Aussie bush hat. A half-track sat about a hundred yards away, keeping a safe distance from Tully's Browning.
Troy waved his hat and conveyed the message that there was to be no gunfire as Hitch and Tully drove up alongside the half-track. Tully remained at the fifty, just in case, as Dietrich's men and Hilfer helped him into the vehicle.
In a short space of time, Tully and Hitch returned, without Dietrich or Hilfer. With the wounded sergeant packed into the seat so recently vacated by his arch-foe, the pair of jeeps drove off into the night. Back at Dar el-Tanri, an unnatural quiet hung over the scene, only the moans of the mostly-Arab wounded punctuating it.
With the dead bodies ready to rot in the sands and the streets of Dar el-Tanri the next day, Dietrich and Hilfer were taken to his Kubelwagen and the wounded picked up, and then the Germans too fled into the night. In time, a burial detail from Dietrich's base at al-Qarah would be sent out to bury the dead, including the Arabs.
For some time thereafter, wild-acting Berber horses, freed from the stables of Dar el-Tanri, roamed the desert, kicking up their heels at the moon, and browsing on whatever rough grass they could find. They had gone back to their ancient 'mother,' the sands of the Sahara.
Epilogue
A week went by. Troy, his wound healing slowly, but steadily, remained confined to base, but luckily for army organization, he stayed in his quarters while he recuperated. One day though, when he stopped by to visit, Captain Boggs praised him for a job well done.
"Great job you did in my office, Sgt. Troy! I've never seen a tidier, more organized desk in my twenty-year career with the army."
Troy, lying amid his pillows, and remembering the state he had left the captain's desk in, raised his eyes to him, and said, "Sir?"
"Lt. Perkins brought me your note in the hospital about the kidnapping of Pvt. Pettigrew, so I argued with my doctor and got out of bed. When I got to the office, everything was as tidy as could be. You really do have a knack with paperwork, sergeant. Do you think you'd like to make it a permanent job?"
Was Captain Boggs still on happy juice for his injury, or was he merely pulling Troy's leg, albeit gently?
"Maybe, captain, you ought to let Perkins have the job. He seems very capable. You knew it had to be him who straightened up?"
Boggs laughed. "Of course, sergeant. There's no shame in being good at one thing and not at another. Frankly, I wouldn't let you near my desk again with a ten-foot pole. Oh, I found your coffee cup upside-down in the wastebasket."
"It wasn't good coffee anyway, sir."
"The ink all over my papers was a nice touch, too."
"That was Hitch and Tully's doing, captain, not mine," Troy admitted, smiling broadly.
Boggs was soon back where he belonged, at his shipshape desk signing reports and requisition forms, as well as sending out patrols. Sgt. Troy, too, was shortly back in the saddle. Halfway across the desert, though, his Kubelwagen at the head of a new column, Herr Hauptmann Hans Dietrich, still clutching a bandaged side, was grumbling about "putting an end to desert rats once and for all."
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