She pouted her lips. “How you’re the intelligence chief, I’ll never understand. The Army sure loves its practical jokes.” Kat kicked the desk, knocking him out of his South Pacific fantasy world.
“Seriously, there’s nothing new in these radio intercepts — just boring old routine. The Wehrmacht is a thousand times more organized than the Italians, so if they’re having any issues, then they’re fixing them locally. Nothing on the net for your Enigma machine to decipher.” Lyons bulged his eyes and jerked his head around the crowded Command Tent. “First, no such machine exists. Don’t know what type of propaganda you’ve been reading.” He dropped his booming voice like a depth charge.
“Remember, you’re just an old man’s folly—my little pet civilian auxiliary. Except for Major Trufflefoot and me, no one here knows about your family. And even he hasn’t heard about your previous… freelancing work. I owed you a chance at a clean slate… Now we’re even. So don’t muck it up, or its both our asses on the firing line.”
Kat rolled her eyes. “I wonder. Tell me how rusting away behind a typewriter is any better than behind bars? If you really want actionable intel, then let me back in the field.”
“That’s not what His Majesty pays you for anymore. Just stick to giving me the cultural context of these transcripts. Believe it or not, you’re killing more Fascists with these reports than you ever did with that pig sticker of yours.”
He hushed her as she crossed her arms and tried to pout. “I’m serious. All the best translators spent so long in Germany they bleed Bratwurst, and the rest are just scared draftees that think knowing ein Bier, bitte is enough to land them a cushy job behind the lines. You’re the only ‘terp I’ve got that truly understands these Jerry’s, especially the SS psychopaths, yet still hates them enough to be trustworthy.”
Kat narrowed her eyes, fighting back the sting of all those pre-war years in Der Vaterland. “Yeah, something like that. You promised when you burned my file that you’d never mention him again.”
Lyons shook his head and dropped the matter as her eyes flamed up in that old, seething rage. “Sorry. Just give me your thoughts on what’s going on.”
She puffed out her cheeks and tamped down her fire. “No, I’m sorry. You did far more than even the score. I still owe you big-time. Jack, darling, if you really want my opinion, I’d say the NAZIs are way too confident. There’s a strong undercurrent of, well, in German we’d just say order. It means a lot more in their culture. I’ve got nothing to back this up, but these reports sound more like an army preparing for a grand offensive. Not one simply holding the line, like Command keeps assuring us.”
Lyons grunted and stared off at the massive map board in the middle of the tent. Ever since repulsing the haphazard Italian invasion of Egypt, the Allies had been tearing the Axis forces a new Stronzo. In barely ten weeks, British and Commonwealth troops went from digging last stand trenches in the shade of the Pyramids of Giza, to trapping an entire Italian army in the middle of Libya. The tide was finally turning.
Until some elite German panzer division and its mysterious General washed up on the coast.
“This Rommel chap is supposed to be pretty clever. Sure gave the Aussie’s a bloody nose last week up north. Still, there just aren’t enough Germans down here to make a real difference.”
Kat snorted. “It’s not the numbers that matter. It’s the enemy’s attitude. The Deutschies aren’t simply backing up the Macaronies. They’re giving the Italians a reason to fight. Just a little fresh blood is bringing the whole Italian army back to life. I’m telling you, these guys are acting like the war is already over. As if it’s all a mopping-up operation from here on out.”
Lyons tapped his TOP SECRET folder against his knee and bit his lip. “You might be more right than you even know. Look, I came across the wildest gossip about a Wunderwaffen while interrogating a couple of downed Luftwaffe pilots. I haven’t even briefed the General on this yet, but... well, take a look. Tell me if these guys were sincere. Please say I’m jumping at shadows and there’s no—”
A brain-melting siren wailing from heaven drowned him out. Someone screeched, “Stukas!” Kat ran out the tent flap, with Colonel Lyons nipping at her heels. In one bound, she leaped over the slit trench ringing the HQ and made a beeline for the nearest anti-aircraft gun pit.
“Damnit, stay down!” Lyons tackled her from behind and rolled them both back to the trench. He landed on top of her just as the world erupted around them.
“They’re only targeting the radio antennae. We put them up 500 yards away. You’re safe!”
Kat spit out the sand and wiggled out from under him. Biting down her churning stomach, she hissed. “And so are the damn planes. Haven’t those idiots learned how to hit a dive bomber yet? Doesn’t anyone else read the new manuals?”
Both Stukas plunged groundward with the blazing desert sun perfectly centered behind their tails. Neither budged from their collision course with the ground as a dozen AAA guns scrambled to catch up with their incredible speed. The first dumpy winged Ju-87 rolled out of its dive and raced off west through the billowing smoke cloud from its flaming target.
As the second screamed in for a finishing touch, Kat jackrabbited out of the trench and flashed across the motor pool. She ripped her shorts, sliding into the AAA gun nest, and scorched her hand batting away spent brass. “Wait!”
A loader hopped over her and fed another belt of shells into the gun, without even a sideways glance. Kat clamped her hand over the 40mm Bofors gun sight and shook the gunner out of his seat.
“Check fire for a second. Don’t piss away your ammo when they race in at 400 miles an hour. Wait until the auto dive brakes deploy, and they start to pull up. Then the pilot’s busy trying not to blackout. He’ll be a sitting duck!”
He shrugged her off and kept firing, while the gun team’s Sergeant bounded over and yanked Kat back with one beefy arm. “Get your scrawny butt back to the aid station, nurse. We got this—”
Against all odds, the gunner’s spray and pray approach clipped the falling warbird...
Just as it released a 1,000-kilogram bomb, the out-of-control warhead missed the empty decoy headquarters by half a mile and instead plowed into the nearby ammo dump. A couple thousand more kilograms of carefully stacked artillery shells joined the party and atomized everyone within five hundred yards.
“Don’t stop shooting!” The gun crew ignored the hysterical woman and whooped as the smoking Stuka erupted into flames. Someone wrapped an arm around her waist and shoved her backward.
“Run!” Colonel Lyons skipped with her a few paces before tackling her yet again.
Behind them, the gun team was still cheering as their “kill” cartwheeled into the ground just feet away and gave them a hero’s goodbye.
“I guess I owe you another one, boss…”
Lyons kept her pinned face-down in the sand, not making a sound. Her throat went dry as something warm and wet soaked her.
“Medic! Oh God, Jack!”
She rolled him off, not having the energy left to stand. Kat ground her teeth and straightened out the Colonel’s jerking body. A long, jagged shard from the AAA gun’s sight jutted out of his chest. The bloody end stuck through a mysterious and completely shredded and scorched TOP SECRET folder peeking out of his breast pocket.
“Damn, why didn’t you stay in the trench? I didn’t ask for you to do this, you macho fool!”
Kat ripped off her blouse and tried to stem the bleeding with her makeshift dressing. She kept barking for a medic while applying pressure to the wound. For the first time in years, rivers of something salty streamed down her face.
The Colonel flicked his eyes open and gave a lopsided grin.
“You never have to ask, babe.”
Kat cradled his head and kept him from looking down. “Don’t move. Just a flesh wound. As soon as the medics get here, they’ll slap a band-aid on this little boo-boo, and you can get your lazy ass back to work.”
&nb
sp; Lyons chuckled, an airy whistle coming from deep within his collapsed lungs. “Sure. Nothing a little Aspirin can’t fix.” He absently toyed with the gun sight sticking out his chest while winking one bloodshot eye.
“I was wondering what it took to get your shirt off.”
She pressed him close to her bosom and choked on something for a second. “You old goat. Stay with me, and this won’t be the last time...”
The final tinge of pink drained from his face. As his skin cooled, Lyons put his body’s remaining warmth into his voice. “What a tease. You know I’m outta time. Take care of yourself, babe. Find a way to let go of that hate before you wind up like your father…”
His final mumble was lost as the medic slid up and took the Colonel’s pulse. He shook the bloodstained cross on his helmet after ten seconds and sped off to help another wrecked body writhing in the sand.
Katelyn spent a long minute punching the sand, not even trying to fight back the sobs. A nervous cough rang out behind her. “Uh, ma’am? I’m sorry, the General needs you. I’ll take care of the Colonel. Maybe you should, ah...”
She spun around and snarled at the soldier removing his shirt. The young man did his best to keep his eyes averted as he handed it to her.
“God protect us from our own side.” She closed her mentor’s eyes, still twinkling mischievously in death, and kissed his forehead. “Sorry, boss. Gotta go.”
The burial detail zipped the corpse up and tossed it on an overflowing cart with practiced ease.
Sand and debris lay strewn inside the wrecked Command Tent. While the officers clucked about getting their maps and paperwork in order, a detail of enlisted men stacked body bags near the entrance, giving the broken remains the dignity of at least some shade. A dead-eyed chaplain wandered over from the overflowing aid station and muttered his prayers on full automatic.
Kat buttoned up her borrowed blouse and growled as she corralled her paperwork off the ground. She shot an eyebrow up at the haggard older man now hunched-over Lyons’s desk.
“So, business as usual, eh?”
Major Trufflefoot, now acting intelligence chief, took another nip from his hip flask and slid it over. He steadied his wire-rim glasses with a shaking hand.
“Bit of bad luck for the Colonel. Fine man.”
“Just another lovely day in paradise.” Kat drowned the last swallow as the division Sergeant Major boomed theatrically behind them. “Command Group, attention!”
General Campbell blinked like a fully automatic machine gun behind the gray-haired enlisted man and clapped his shoulder. Pausing long enough to drain half a pot of coffee, he’d given up on the middlemen of cups weeks ago. The boss faced his troops.
“At ease, everyone.” The talking skeleton straightened the twin stars on his collar and fired up a fresh cigarette, forgetting all about the burning one in the ashtray at his elbow.
“The Jerry’s can’t throw us off so easily. The briefing is still on. I want all my brigade Commanders assembled in 10 minutes. Let’s stay on schedule and get back in the war!”
The General hustled off to slap his arriving Field Commanders on the back. With perfectly refined Officer manners, none of the tired men even glanced down as they picked their way through the stack of body bags accumulating by the tent’s entrance. Campbell wrapped his arm around one tanker Colonel and guided him to the intelligence section’s cubbyhole.
Major Trufflefoot popped a handful of breath mints and gave a sharp salute. Campbell twitched and cooed to the armor Colonel without even making eye contact. “Here you are. Colonel Lyons and his team are the best code breakers in the business. Show ‘em what you got, and they’ll make sense of it.”
He finally returned Trufflefoot’s salute and smiled. “Do me proud, Colonel. King and country!” The head honcho bounded off to the comfort of a fresh coffee pot without a backward glance.
Major Trufflefoot snickered and stood to shake the newcomer’s hand, but instead, fumbled to catch the leather book; the Colonel chucked his way without warning.
“That notebook is all I’ve got to show for pissing away an entire company of my lads. You better come up with something useful. We were kicking ass and taking I’talians prisoner by the truckload until that damn Afrika Korps showed up out of nowhere. Bloody panzers all over the place... and those Huns aren’t bushy-tailed draftees like Mussolini’s clown army.”
The Colonel’s hallowed out cheeks twitched wildly. He dumped a tangled mess of scorched dog tags in the nearby chaplain’s lap and slumped into a campstool.
“Tough, battle-hardened Kraut bastards been around the block...” Hugging his Sten gun tight as a teddy bear, the Colonel leaned against an ammo crate and fell asleep in seconds.
Kat snatched the paper satchel and tore the lock off with a pair of pliers. Decoding the neatly typed handwriting took only moments, thanks to her all-knowing list of crypto keys, courtesy of a magical new Ultra decryption toy in London. She squirmed as Trufflefoot breathed down her neck.
“How many times did I tell you to quit reading over my shoulder? I can’t concentrate.”
“Right, concentrate on what?” He flicked his hand at the mountain of radio intercepts on his new desk. “It’s the same old crap about Operation Sonnenblume. Just more evidence for a counterattack for the bloody senior brass to ignore.”
“Ssh, wait a second...” Kat flipped through pages of German at lightning speed while Trufflefoot paced around, bitching and moaning.
“I mean, we had the Axis powers on the ropes, then what? Instead of finishing them off, oh no, Command tells us to sit in the sand and play with our tallywackers. And as soon as we get word the damn NAZIs are sending this Rommel bloke and a veteran panzer division down here. They yank a third of our most experienced troops off to Greece. The ass-end of nowhere. Do they have oil wells hidden in the Acropolis or something? I swear to God, the Generals are trying to keep this thing going until they can retire and hand it off to their kids. War shouldn’t be a family business! I swear, I—”
Kat shot out her hand and pinched his lips shut. “Well, then you’ll be happy to know that this German unit sure expects the operation to end soon.”
He opened his mouth again, as Kat spoke for him. “It’s weird. Usually, German records are about as imaginative as a eunuch accountant. But this is something new. All their future goals and timetables are hidden away in a bunch of pop culture references. Backward measurements of some NAZI starlet’s curves, cutesy stuff like that. One thing’s clear, though.”
She held the book over her head and rapped a long finger against the last page. Trufflefoot shoved down his reading glasses and handled the offered notebook like a pregnant cobra.
“Somehow, they break our lines tomorrow. In two weeks, they expect to be camping at the Persian Gulf. In only a month, they can open up a second front in Russia’s south, through the -Stans. It seems like pure fantasy, even if they can beat us here, except they’re ordering supplies and cold-weather clothing. They also keep referring to some Wunderwaffe like a bunch of gushing teenaged boys. That could be a red herring…”
“Bugger me!” General Campbell stuck a hand in one ear and shoved the field telephone handset deeper in his other, shutting up the whole tent. “How long now? Copy that. No, no. I’ll be right over there. Just keep him talking.”
The General slammed his phone down and yelped like one of those American cowboys he always mocked for staying out of the war. “Hot damn, we finally caught a break! Our scouts just had a little argy-bargy with German Commandos and captured an Officer. He’s too seriously wounded to move. The medics have him doped up on pain meds, and he’s telling all kinds of wild stories. The doc says we can ask him anything, and he’s an open book, except doesn’t speak a lick of English. Except for every cussword in the book, apparently.” He downed the rest of his coffee pot in one gulp.
“Sergeant Dore, get my jeep and security detail ready. We’re taking a little field trip to the front.”
Hal
f a dozen annoyed staff officers clucked about and threw up their hands. One stabbed a pushpin into the map board so hard that he ripped out most of El Agheila.
“Sir, what about the defense of Cyrenaica? We’ve been planning this op ever since the Wehrmacht showed up. Everyone’s waiting on your briefing.”
“For Christ’s sake, fine. Colonel Lyons! I need you here on the double.” He snagged a map case out from under his overturned desk and brushed the bloody sand off. “Colonel Lyons! Where in the confounded hell is that spook?”
At the far end of the tent, Private Atkins dropped a rucksack and surreptitiously slipped the Colonel’s half-empty bottle of Glenlivet in his cargo pocket. “Uh, I think this is him, sir.” The scrawny, blonde private gave the body bag a respectful nudge with his boot. “Poor bugger’s been here all along. Let me see if he needs his last rites...”
Sergeant Dore snatched the soldier’s fast hands, primarily the one slipping into the dead Colonel’s wallet. The massive, hairy Scotsman squeezed Atkins’s wrist until the boy winced. “How ‘bout ye git yer ass outside and see if the General’s lorry is still in one piece, Private.”
Like a good Officer, Major Trufflefoot stayed in his lane and ignored the enlisted men’s squabbling. “I’m afraid Lyons is out of commission, sir. I’m running the shop now. What do you need, sir?”
“Twenty years of wet work and dropped by a bomb… what a shame.” General Campbell shook his head so hard he spilled half his coffee pot. He took a twitchy breath and squinted at the quiet, bespectacled gentleman materializing at his elbow.
“The show must go on, Major. Haul yourself and your best translator over to 4th Brigade’s field hospital ASAP. These staffer sods are always ruining my fun, so I guess you can take point on this one. Get me some answers from this Kraut bastard. Units, strengths, dispositions—the usual stuff. The most important of all, I need to know if Rommel is really going to violate his orders and take the offensive. Bring me back some hard proof, and just maybe I can shake some reinforcements loose from the General Staff.”
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