D-Notice by Bill Walker (big ebook reader txt) 📗

one other man to keep an eye out—watch your back, for cryin’ out loud. You’ll both be occupied, him with the radio, you listenin’. What if you’re spotted?”

“Then it’s better that only two are captured.”

“Killed, you mean.”

Michael didn’t respond to that, preferring not to think of the worst case. “It’s not up to me, Corwin.”

Brady slouched back into his seat, disappointment and frustration plainly evident on his face. “It never is, Mikey. We signed on for the duration and they’ll do whatever they want with us, even if it’s the stupidest thing possible.”

Brady finished his drink and they both stood up, Brady leaving a few Egyptian coins on the table. After dinner that evening, all those patrols not already out in the field met in Rest House, and each was briefed on its assignment. When it came to their patrol, Thorley kept his eye on Brady, afraid the headstrong Irishman would voice his protest about his mission. Fortunately, he kept his own counsel, but Thorley could tell it was eating his friend up inside. Strangely, a part of him wanted Brady along, figuring the man’s presence would bring him luck. His practical side knew it was a foolish thought. Two men would travel faster than three.

Everyone turned in early. After making sure the letter to his child remained secure in its hiding place, Thorley went to bed. It took him a while to find a comfortable position on the hard floor. His head throbbed from the date beer and his mouth tasted musty. After a while he drifted off, the sound of the desert wind in his ears.

Chapter Twenty-One

The patrol left Siwa at six a.m. heading northwest toward Giarabub, which they reached late in the day. The town lay in a small depression on the edge of the Great Sand Sea, and where Siwa was pleasant, Giarabub was dismal. Aside from the domed mosque where the founder of the Muslim Senussi sect lay buried, there was little else, a collection of squat buildings that appeared ready to collapse at any moment. Flies and mosquitoes were everywhere, buzzing their faces relentlessly.

The patrol found sanctuary in an airplane hangar abandoned by the retreating Italians some months before. Fitzhugh hopped off the lead truck. “We’ll stay the night here. I want everyone to stay close at hand and for God’s sake don’t even think of drinking the bloody water.”

While others went to the oasis, Thorley used the time to get to know Byron Wilson, the radioman who would be trekking across those last two miles to Rommel’s base near Hatiet el Etla.

A warm and humorous man, Thorley took an immediate liking to him. After small talk, Wilson showed him the radio. It was remarkably compact, arranged in a backpack format for ease of carriage, yet it weighed almost fifty pounds. “It’s the batteries, you see. They’re more than half the weight of the blighter.” He then went on to show how both he and Thorley would have a pair of headphones to listen in. Wilson would home in on the frequency of the signal and Thorley would verify that it was the correct one. “The last we’ve been told is that the tanks are using 27 megacycles. It’s a low frequency on the 11-meter band and it has to be ‘line of sight,’ or we’ll never hear it. That’s why we’ve got to be up their bums on this one.”

“How long do the batteries last?”

Wilson shrugged. “Oh, if you left it on continuously...about half an hour. The valves suck up a lot of juice.”

That meant they would have to be judicious about the radio’s use, survey the situation, and wait until the traffic became heavy. That might take hours, and they would be vulnerable to detection the longer they remained in position. “What about spare batteries?” Thorley asked.

Wilson shook his head. “We’ve got a total of four. Two will go with us; the other two stay with the patrol. We can’t risk taking them all because these same batteries run the main wireless. Without them we’ve lost our ability to report back to Siwa. If that happens, we might as well turn tail and head back.”

The rest of the day crawled by and the men grew anxious. Fortunately, someone had a deck of cards and they all occupied themselves playing Whist and Old Maid until nightfall. Dinner was another stew and quite forgettable.

The next morning, the trucks pulled out of the hangar and continued the journey north. An hour out of Giarabub, one of the trucks broke an axle in a sink hole, and the stores and men had to be redistributed to the other five trucks, necessitating a delay of several hours in the broiling sun.

It was noon when they began moving again. They were now in Libya proper in the area known as Cyrenaica. Vast and trackless, it seemed to Thorley that this is what the moon would look like if it had an atmosphere. Hot, dry, lonely, and silent. The trucks found a flat area, picked up a bit of speed and Thorley eased himself down into the stores, prepared to sleep away some of the monotony.

The Macchi C.202 fighters came out of nowhere, streaking overhead at what would have been treetop level. One moment the desert had been as quiet as a grave, the next the two planes roared overhead, banking to get a better glimpse of the patrol. Several of the men waved, but something about the way the pilots flew their aircraft gave Thorley a bad feeling. He turned to Wilson, who lounged next to him. “Get the Vickers out.”

Wilson scrambled to his feet and tore off a tarpaulin. The Vickers Gun was a relatively light tripod-mounted