ONE
26 MAY, 1942
Dale Parker wheeled the jeep up to the oasis, brought it to a stop, looked around and said, "Where's Rudolph Valentino?"
"Who?" Bert Crimmens asked. "Oh, you mean the American movie star."
"Well, I'm not so sure he was American. He always looked kind of foreign to me. The women sure did go crazy over him, though." Dale waved at the cluster of palm trees around the small pool of water in the middle of a vast expanse of burning sand. "This looks like just the kind of place he'd ride up to on a camel, wearing that sheik outfit."
"I believe you're thinking about Arabia," Bert said with a frown. "This is Libya."
"Oh, yeah."
On the far side of the oasis, which had no name as far as Dale knew, a dozen tanks were parked in the circular formation known as leaguer. Though they belonged to the British Eighth Army and were part of the Third Royal Tank Corps, the tanks were American-made, the M3 model they called the General Grant. The British tankies were so taken with the M3s that they referred to the tanks as Honeys. The name had originated the previous autumn when the 3RTC had been using the earlier model General Lee tanks during Operation Crusader. When the Grants had arrived in December 1941 and January 1942, the nickname had been transferred to them.
Dale Parker was American-made too, a tall, blond young man from the South Side of Chicago. He wore the uniform of a sergeant in the United States Army, and a member of the Army Services Force that had come here to North Africa along with the General Grant tanks, to serve as instructors for the British. Today, since he was on the front lines in Libya, he wore a steel helmet instead of a fore-and-aft overseas cap.
He swung his long legs out of the jeep and stood up, stretching weary muscles. It was a long drive from Tobruk down here to this oasis near Bir Hacheim, the southernmost end of the Gazala Line. The British had been dug in along this defensive front since the spring, when they had stopped the advance of General Erwin Rommel and his Deutsche Afrika Korps. The line stretched from east of the town of Gazala, on the Mediterranean coast, south to Bir Hacheim, and then curved back to the north in a fishhook shape. East of the line, also on the coast, was the stronghold of Tobruk, which really wasn't all that strong from what Dale had seen of it during his brief visit there the day before. The British had held off Rommel once before by forting up inside Tobruk, but Dale wasn't sure they'd be able to do it again.
He followed Bert toward the circle of tanks. Bert Crimmens had been a good friend to Dale and his brother Joe ever since all of them had been at the British Armour School at Bovington, south of London. That was where Dale and Joe and the other American instructors had begun teaching the British tankies how to operate the General Grants. Dale was an expert on the tanks' engines while Joe knew everything there was to know about the radios (British Wireless Set No. 19) that were installed in the M3s. They had learned all about those things during their training at Camp Bowie, Brown-wood, Texas, during the spring and summer of'41.
They were a long way from Texas now, a long way from their home in Chicago. A long way from the United States, period. Just going to England had been quite an adventure, and now they found themselves in Africa, lending a hand to the British Eighth Army. President Roosevelt had started the Lend-Lease program to help out the British, back in the days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States's entry into the war itself, so Dale supposed he was on loan to the Brits. Or maybe they were leasing him. He wasn't sure which.
A rugged-looking, brown-haired man came out from the tanks to greet Dale and Bert. He wore laced-up boots, khaki shorts, and a sweat-stained khaki shirt with pips on it indicating that he was a captain. The brown hat on his head had the left side of the brim pinned up. He was an Australian, though officially he was a member of the British Army.
"There you are, Bert," he said. "I was afraid you weren't going to make it back in time."
Bert came to attention, clicked his heels together, and saluted. "Corporal Crimmens reportin' for duty, sir," he said, then added in a less formal tone, "In time for what, sir?"
"To go foxhunting," Captain Neville Sharp replied.
Dale and Bert glanced at each other. They both knew what Sharp was talking about: General Rommel was known as the Desert Fox.
"Goin' on patrol, are we, sir?"
"That's what we're here for." Sharp looked at Dale. "And why are you here, Sergeant Parker?"
"I'm just a taxi service today, Captain," Dale replied. "I ran into Bert in Tobruk and he said he needed a way back out here, so I volunteered to bring him."
"I see. The possibility that you might wind up in the turret of a tank again never occurred to you, I suppose."
Dale grinned. "Well, not really, sir. But you never know what might happen."
"Don't get your hopes up," Sharp said. "Much as I appreciate what you did last time, Sergeant, I believe I'll command my own tank today, thank you."
"No problem, sir."
A couple of months earlier, during another visit to the front, Dale had happened across Captain Sharp's tank and had taken command of it when he found that Sharp had been wounded and knocked out during a fight with a German armored car. The rest of the crew—radioman Bert Crimmens, gunner Jeremy Royce, and driver Tom Hamilton—had been doing the best they could, but they were lost and probably would have been easy prey for the Panzers clanking across the desert if Dale hadn't stepped in to help. While he was in command of the tank, they had traded shots with and ultimately destroyed one of the German behemoths. Dale hadn't been able to claim any credit for his actions because as an advisor he wasn't supposed to be anywhere near the front lines, but the members of the British tank crew knew what he had done. He suspected that Captain Sharp—Hell-on-Treads Sharp, as he was known in the Royal Tank Corps—had had something to do with the promotion to sergeant that he had received soon after that, but Dale couldn't be sure.
"My God, who's that?"
Dale turned to see a rawboned, dark-haired man walking back toward the tanks from the pool at the center of the oasis. He had a wet shirt in his hands. Dale assumed the man had been washing out the garment. He said, "Hello, Royce."
Jeremy Royce grunted. "Can't we get rid of you? I thought all you bloody Yanks were back in Cairo."
"You've got a couple of tanks in Tobruk that your mechanics couldn't fix," Dale said. "The brass sent me over to take care of them for you."
Royce glared and said, "Should've sent me back there. I know more about those engines than you do."
"Everything you know about those engines you learned from me," Dale pointed out. "And you're such a good mechanic they made a gunner out of you."
Royce took a step toward Dale, his hands bunching into fists as he held the wet shirt. Sharp moved between them, saying, "That'll be enough of that, you two. You can refight your old wars some other time." He turned back to Crimmens. "Bert, how's the leg?"
"Dandy, Captain. The medical blokes at hospital sewed up that gash and pumped me full of sulfa. I've got the all-clear to return to duty."
"Good. We can use you." Sharp clapped a hand on Bert's shoulder. "We're pulling out in ten minutes."
"What about me?" Dale asked.
Sharp shrugged. "You can drive back to Tobruk, I suppose."
"It's eighty miles. I'm not sure I can make it before dark."
"Stay here, then, and start back in the morning."
Bert asked, "Are we coming back here, Captain?"
"Yes, I intend to make leaguer here again when we get back from our patrol. We won't be gone long. I just want to take a run down to that box manned by the Third Indian Motor Brigade and see how they're doing."
"I'll hang around, then," Dale said. "That'll give me and Bert a chance to visit some more. We didn't finish catching up on old times."
Jeremy Royce snorted. "Old times? It's only been two months since you saw each other. Gotten sweet on each other, that'd be my guess."
Bert's face darkened with anger. He faced Royce and said, "Shut up that bloody nonsense, Royce. I won't stand for it."
"I'm near twice your size," Royce said with a sneer. "What're you goin' to do about it?"
"I'm going to do something about it," Sharp said. "Royce, get back to the tank. That's an order. And both of you, can the chatter."
Dale grinned. "You're starting to sound like an American, Captain."
"If you're going to be insulting, you can just toddle on back to Tobruk, Parker."
Still smiling, Dale held up his hands, palms out. "No offense meant, sir."
Chuckling, he strolled over to the oasis while the British tank crews climbed into their tanks. With a rumbling roar, the engines started. Dale listened to the sound with a professional ear and was satisfied with what he heard. All the engines seemed to be running fine.
He sat down under one of the trees, reached into the pocket of his fatigue shirt, and brought out a candy bar. In this heat, the chocolate was soft, of course, but he unwrapped it and ate it anyway, licking the last of the sweet, sticky stuff off the wrapper. He watched the tanks disappear over a sand dune in the distance and wished he were going with them. He'd had a taste of combat, and while only a damned fool would ever say that he liked being shot at, Dale had found the whole experience exhilarating. He'd been scared when that Panzer was chasing them, sure. His heart had pounded like mad and his shirt was soaked through with sweat by the time the brief fight was over. But he had accomplished something that day, and he was proud of it.
Late afternoon was the hottest time of the day here on the edge of the great Western Desert. As the air grew hotter, Dale found himself nodding off. He shifted around a little, getting his back into a more comfortable position against the trunk of the tree, and he tilted his helmet forward to shade his eyes from more of the sun's glare. He'd been in the army for more than a year, and he had developed the same skill as most soldiers had: He could fall asleep quickly, just about anywhere, and snatch a few winks whenever possible.
He wasn't sure how long he slept, but he knew what woke him. It was the rumble and clank of tank treads. Captain Sharp's squadron was back already, he thought as he sat up and rubbed his eyes. He turned around and looked toward the approaching tanks, realizing only then that the sounds were coming from a different direction than they should have been. Sharp's squad had gone the other way when it left the oasis. That meant—
Dale shot to his feet as four German Mark III Panzer tanks rolled into view, topping the crest of a sand dune.
Copyright © 2003 by James Reasoner
