“That’s the point,” he said quietly. “I wasn’t there for you. And I should have been. He shook his head. “How could I let you down like that? You’re my friend, and I wasn’t there.”
He slumped down on the bed again.
After a moment, she sat down beside him.
“I’ve lost so many friends,” he said quietly.
“We both have,” she told him. “So we ought to be making damned sure we keep the ones we’ve got. There’s a war on, in case you hadn’t noticed. A war, and whatever else we’ve gotten ourselves into. There just isn’t time to beat ourselves up when things go badly.”
“Stick together and see it through?” he said. There was a hint of a smile on his face now.
Sarah took his hand, holding it between both hers. “That’s right. And you were there for me when I needed you. You did what you could in Wewelsburg. And just hoping I’d see you again helped get me through. But we have to trust each other to survive. So quit blaming yourself. I went through hell but I survived, OK. So you do the same for me tomorrow and come back from this safely.” She stood up. “I have to go now.”
He stood up too. “Why?”
“Because Leo will be back in a minute. Because it’s been a long day and I need some sleep. And because I‘ve probably said too much. I usually do.
He caught her arm as she turned, and pulled her back round into an embrace. They held each other tight for several moments. So tight Sarah could feel her heartbeating against his chest. Then they stepped away from each other.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Guy said.
“Sure.” She wiped at her eye with the crook of her index finger. “Stay safe.”
* * *
“Did you kiss her?” Davenport asked next morning as they loaded up the Long Range Desert Patrol Group’s trucks and said their good-byes.
“What?”
“Last night—did you kiss her?”
“Of course I didn’t kiss her,” Guy retorted.
Davenport shook his head sadly. “You should have kissed her.”
“Well, thanks for the advice.”
“I don’t know, I leave you alone for ten minutes and you can’t even misbehave yourself.”
The thirty-ton trucks were loaded and they were ready to go. Guy and Davenport were in the lead truck with Maguire. The second truck carried Henderson and some of his men, together with the radio operator. A third truck was empty apart from the driver and one SAS soldier—ready to be packed with whatever Vril artifacts they could recover from the site. The rest of the SAS traveled in the fourth and final truck.
The trucks were Chevrolets, which Maguire had explained were being phased out in favor of four-wheel-drive Fords. “But these are two-wheel-drive so they’re lighter and use about half the fuel. For the distance we’re going that’s a major factor.”
The doors and all excess weight had been stripped off, and the vehicles were fitted with enlarged radiators and condensers to cope with the desert heat, though in late January that was less of an issue. The only other extra weight, apart from the passengers, and extra tanks of fuel and water, was a .303 Vickers machine gun mounted on the back of the radio truck.
Captain Henderson hurried up to the lead vehicle for a final check with Maguire and Guy before they started off.
“We should be all right,” he said, “but word’s coming through that the Afrika Korps are on the move. Rommel’s advancing from El Agheila toward Agedabia.”
“How close is that to where we’re going?” Guy asked. The names meant nothing to him.
“Way over to the east,” Maguire said. “Nothing to worry about, except that we might get called back if things get hairy.”
“And you can probably forget about any chance of reinforcements being sent after us,” Henderson said. “Right, let’s get the show on the road.”
He banged twice on the hood of the truck and waved Maguire’s driver on.
“That should be my line,” Davenport said as they pulled away, kicking up a plume of sand and dust from the low-pressure desert tires.
* * *
They didn’t stop when night fell, the navigator sitting beside the driver in the front truck switching from using the sun compass to astronomical position tables. To Guy, the desert all looked the same. But Maguire assured him they were making good progress and would reach their destination the next day.
His confidence was well placed. It was mid afternoon of 23 January when the driver suddenly slammed on his brakes just as they crested a rise. The Chevrolet slewed to an abrupt stop. The navigator was standing up and waving to the vehicles behind to halt, as the driver reversed rapidly, wheels spinning and sand spraying out from under them.
“What the hell?” Maguire demanded from the back.
“Sorry, sir,” the navigator said. “But the target location is just over the ridge. And we’ve got company. Someone’s got there before us.”
Guy swore. “Did they see us?”
“Harry reacted pretty fast, so hopefully not. Just a spray of sand, maybe. They’re quite a way away.”
“Let’s take a look,” Davenport suggested.
Captain Henderson joined Guy, Davenport and Maguire as they crawled to the top of the ridge. The ground sloped gently away, forming a large basin. In the middle was a huge mound, like a small hill. Lined up in front of it were several half-tracked vehicles and smaller wheeled vehicles attended by soldiers in desert uniform.
“That must be it,” Davenport said. “Bigger than the site in Suffolk.”
Guy trained his field glasses on the troops.
“Afrika Korps uniforms,” Henderson said. “But I don’t recognize the markings on the vehicles.”
“I count about twenty soldiers,” Davenport said. “They’ve dug their way into the mound, look.”
Guy moved his glasses to focus on the mound of sand. Sure enough, there was a dark hole dug into it, shored up with wooden props, sheets of corrugated metal lined the floor as it dipped away into the depths of the earth.
“That’s our objective?” Maguire asked.
“Think of it as a weapons cache,” Davenport said. “Though you should know that the weapons inside are like nothing you could imagine.”
“Nazi weapons?” Henderson asked.
“No,” Guy told him. “But they’re after them too. Our primary objective is retrieval, but failing that we destroy them rather than let the contents of that mound fall into enemy hands. Clear?”
“Crystal.” Henderson continued to survey the scene below. “They know we’re coming?”
“I’d hope not, but we have to assume the worst,” Guy said.
“We should be able to take them, assuming they’re not expecting us. They don’t seem too heavily armed, probably equipped for rapid movement like us rather than heavy fighting, and they’re just regular troops.”
“You might want to reconsider that,” Davenport said slowly. “Take a look at the figure standing just outside the entrance to the mound.”
“Officer,” Maguire said. “Colonel by the look of him. What about it?”
“I’ve met him before, that’s what.”
Guy felt himself tense, gripping the field glasses tightly as he focused on the tall standartenfuhrer. “Streicher?”
“The very same. Which means,” Davenport went on, “that those aren’t regular troops at all. They’ve been sent here by Heinrich Himmler, and they’re Waffen SS.”
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Two of Henderson’s men kept watch from the ridge, while Henderson himself together with Guy, Maguire and Davenport discussed the options.
“It’s no different from an airfield,” Henderson said. “We used to think sneaking up under cover of darkness, planting bombs, and then getting the hell out of it before they exploded was the best deal.”
“And it isn’t?” Davenport asked.
“We discovered it’s more effective to drive in at speed and make no secret of our presence. Jerry’s nothing if not orderly,
and they line the planes up neatly—just like those vehicles down there. We drive between them, machine gunning and chucking grenades both sides and we’re away before they know what hit them.”
“Take out the vehicles and they can’t come after us,” Lieutenant Maguire said. “We can pick off any survivors from the ridge with the Vickers gun.”
“Unless they retreat inside the mound,” Guy pointed out.
“We can cover that from up here,” Henderson said.
“How long do you think they’ve been here?” Davenport asked.
“They look well established,” Maguire said. “A day at least. Does it matter?”
“Probably not. I’m just surprised they don’t seem to be in a hurry to bring out artifacts. If I was Streicher, I’d want to recover everything I could as quickly as possible and get the hell out of here.”
“He doesn’t know we’re coming,” Guy pointed out.
“Even so—he’s hardly in his own backyard. It’s only a matter of time before someone spots him.”
“Well,” Henderson said, “perhaps you’ll get the chance to ask him.”
The radio truck stayed on the ridge, its Vickers gun trained on the entrance to the mound. The other three trucks hurtled over the crest and down the incline as fast as they could go. Sand kicked up behind them like smoke. The sound of the engines was a throaty roar in the still desert and the air tasted of diesel.
It took several moments for the SS soldiers to react. They turned toward the sound and saw the vehicles racing toward them. Streicher shouted orders, his voice lost in the sudden rattle of gunfire from the SAS men’s submachine guns as they fired from the backs of the Chevrolets.
The leading vehicle, with Henderson in the back, drove between the lined-up German vehicles. Grenades rolled under them, detonating as the small truck passed. One after another, the half-tracks and wheeled vehicles exploded in flame behind them. Dark smoke gathered in the sky above the mound.
Guy was in the second of the three vehicles, Davenport keeping his head down beside him as Guy brought his own submachine gun to bear. They headed straight for a group of German soldiers. Several of the SS men fell immediately—bodies juddering as bullets hammered into them. Others managed to unshoulder their weapons and return fire. But they were aiming at fast-moving targets.
The other Chevrolets were weaving through the remaining SS troops, picking them off. A soldier was slumped in the back of Henderson’s vehicle. There were casualties in the third truck too.
In front of Guy’s vehicle, Streicher stood his ground, raising his Luger and aiming straight at them. A bullet impacted in the side of the vehicle close to where Davenport was sitting. A second pinged off the hood. The vehicle was almost on him as Streicher fired his third shot. It caught the navigator in the shoulder, knocking him sideways.
Then the hood thumped into Streicher, lifting him off his feet and flinging him sideways. He landed in a crumpled heap. Guy fired at the prone figure, bullets stitching across the back of the uniform as they sped past. But then, incredibly, Streicher got back to his feet.
The Chevrolet swung round, passing Streicher again. This time he was on Maguire’s side of the vehicle and the lieutenant fired a long burst into the officer’s chest. Streicher stumbled backward under the impact, but remained on his feet. His cap fell away and sunlight fell across his face—revealing the sunken eyes and hollow cheeks.
“Why won’t the bastard die?” Maguire yelled above the sound of the engine.
The Chevrolet was pulling away now, but Streicher was running after it. The wheels spun on churned-up sand. The driver swerved round the body of a German soldier, blood seeping out from beneath the corpse and soaking into the desert. It slowed their progress. Not by much, but it was enough.
Streicher launched himself at the back of the truck. His hands closed on the tailgate and he hauled himself up. His deep, empty eyes fixed on Guy. Tiny orange tendrils clutched and rippled in the bullet holes across his chest.
“Ubermensch!” Davenport yelled.
Streicher’s reply was a guttural snarl, just audible above the sound of the engine and the distant percussion of more grenades. “Humans,” he said in German. “You think you can defeat us? Even destroy us?”
Maguire raised his gun again, but Guy held his hand up to stay the man’s fire.
“What are you?” he shouted back, also in German.
“You call us Vril. We are the coming race, the supermen. The inheritors of your world. We were here before your civilizations discovered gunpowder. Nurtured you, watched you learn and progress. Watching and waiting until you were ripe. Ripe and ready to pluck. And now we will emerge from our resting places and descend from the skies to harvest what we have sown.”
Guy stared back horrified. He barely heard Davenport asking what Streicher had said. He nodded to Maguire.
The Lieutenant jammed his gun up against Streicher’s chest and fired. The German was thrown back, off the truck. But as he fell, he grabbed the hot barrel of the machine gun, pulling Maguire after him. The lieutenant fell with a cry.
“Back—we have to go back!” Davenport yelled to the driver.
The Chevrolet swung in a wide arc and headed rapidly back to where Maguire was grappling with Streicher. But his blows were ineffective. The Ubermensch had its hands clasped round Maguire’s throat, throttling him. Maguire clutched and tore at the hands, gouging out skin—revealing the inhuman orange growth beneath. Weakening, Maguire’s hands fell away, reaching instead for something on his belt.
“Keep going!” Guy shouted.
“We can’t leave the lieutenant,” the driver yelled back.
“We’re too late,” Davenport said. He too had seen what Maguire had at his belt. “Keep going!”
The Chevrolet shot past the two figures. Guy caught a confused glimpse of Maguire, with the last of his strength, bringing the grenade up between them, jamming it against Streicher’s chest. The explosion was a deafening roar. The blast wave shook the vehicle as the two figures disappeared in a sudden ball of smoke and flame.
The vehicle slewed to a halt. The other two Chevrolets drew up beside it. The German vehicles were burning wrecks. The bodies of the German troops littered the ground. Dark smoke hung over the desert like an improbable thunder cloud. The sudden silence was broken by an explosion as one of the German gas tanks blew in the heat.
Then came the chatter of the radio truck’s big Vickers machine gun. Two surviving Germans had made a run for the entrance into the mound. The .303 rounds tore their bodies apart in seconds.
“Tend to the wounded,” Henderson snapped.
“Sorry about Maguire,” Guy said quietly.
“He was a good man,” Henderson said. “But we keep losing good men in this war.”
“Is that it, sir?” The driver of Guy’s vehicle asked. He looked pale. Beside him the navigator had his hand clamped over his bloody shoulder.
“No,” Davenport said. “I don’t think this is over by a long way. Look at the ground.”
The desert was moving. The sand around the vehicles rippled, as if a strong wind was blowing. But the air was still. Something emerged from the sand—a dark, gnarled length of what might be a tree root. Except it was jointed, clutching at the air, scrabbling for a purchase on the sand.
Another tentacle thrust through beside it, clawing and pushing. A shower of sand was thrown up as the creature forced its way up to the surface. A dark bulbous shape about fifteen inches across supported by spider-like legs squatted over the desert floor. Black hollow eyes stared up at Guy and the others. A thin slit of a mouth gaped suddenly open.
All around the vehicles, more of the creatures were erupting from the sand.
CHAPTER 47
There were cries of horror and shock from the soldiers, followed almost immediately by gunshots. The Vril creature closest to Davenport exploded under a sudden storm of bullets as Guy opened fire.
Another of the grotesque creatures hauled itself up on to th
e back of the Chevrolet. A whip-like limb lashed out, catching the nearest SAS man and knocking him sideways. He was already standing up, staring out across the rippling sand. The blow pitched him over the side of the vehicle. He dropped his rifle and fell to the ground.
At once another Vril was on him. Its long limbs clamped round the man, tearing through his uniform. Blood spurted from a ruptured artery, spraying across the side of the vehicle and staining the sand.
Davenport grabbed the fallen man’s rifle, reversed it, and slammed the butt into the bloated body of the Vril at the back of the Chevrolet. The creature was knocked back, but lashed out again. Davenport ducked under the flailing limb, and rammed the rifle into the creature again. With an ear-splitting screech, it fell away. It lay on the ground, limbs curled above it, clutching at the air. Then they seemed to curl back on themselves, as if the joints were suddenly inverted, and the creature raised itself up once more.
As it braced, ready to leap back up at them, Guy fired several shots into it. The bulbous body exploded in a mess of green and orange.
Close to them, Henderson’s vehicle gunned its engine and roared across the sand. The soldiers inside were shooting at the Vril around them. Several of the creatures clung to the sides of the Chevrolet, and another was clutching the hood. The front driver’s wheel crunched over one of the creatures. It exploded in a glutinous mess.
The third vehicle was further away—right in the middle of the area where the Vril had erupted from the desert. It was covered with the creatures as they swarmed over it. The whole vehicle was engulfed by a seething mass of gnarled, inhuman shapes. The sounds of firing from inside were muffled. So, mercifully, were the screams. A side panel was ripped away. The hood discarded. The vehicle lurched forward several yards then stopped abruptly.
“They’re tearing it apart,” Davenport realized.
“Get us moving,” Guy ordered, shooting another Vril off the side of their truck.
The truck jolted and bumped forward, then stalled. The engine coughed back into life, and they lurched forward again.
“Which way?” the driver yelled.
The Suicide Exhibition Page 34
