Winds of Change (Empires Lost Book 2)

by Charles S. Jackson

  Witzig had also remained exposed throughout the battle, although in his case it had been purely for the purposes of better vision, and his severe expression hardened dramatically as he caught sight of Schreiner’s activities upon passing through the destroyed enemy column. As he raised a pair of field glasses to his eyes, Witzig noted that while it was in theory quite commendable that his 2IC was still able to direct relatively accurate fire against the enemy from the hatch of a moving vehicle, the commander of 1FSK was also fairly certain that some of the targets Schreiner was shooting at were men who were either wounded or unarmed or both… he was also fairly certain that some of those men had their hands raised in surrender.

  His unit was in no position to take prisoners – they had no room to transport them even if their mission had provided for such eventualities in their tight schedule, which it did not – but that didn’t mean he approved of men under his command applying a more extreme approach to the problem. There was no reason Schreiner or any other member of 1FSK would have any need to shoot prisoners out of hand – it was an act Witzig despised and considered dishonourable – and there was also the far more pragmatic reality that his 2IC had allowed himself to be far too dangerously exposed to the possibility of return fire into the bargain. Whether he agreed with Schreiner’s methods or not, the man was far too valuable to lose and Witzig knew it. Once the battle was all over, that was something he would need to make clear to the SS officer in no uncertain terms.

  1FSK roared on across the desert, leaving the battle behind as nothing more than a rising pall of smoke against a shining desert horizon. The unexpected encounter had been unfortunate, but their losses had been extremely light for all that – incredibly so, all things considered – and their primary mission lay elsewhere. With any luck, they’d hit the British column hard enough and fast enough to prevent the broadcast of any warning. With any luck, even if they had, the inertia of command structure – being what it was the world over – would mean that any effective response the enemy could organise would come far too late.

  “Contact report, sir!” Wickenby declared excitedly, half rising from his chair at the radio table as all eyes turned in his direction. “Small-scale engagement… units of the Seventh Armoured have encountered a small, fast-moving mobile force south-west of RAF Shallufa. Communications were cut off following reports they were under heavy fire and taking casualties…!”

  “Where’s Shallufa…?” Thorne asked quickly, throwing a glance at Anderson. Good as his general WW2 knowledge was, it didn’t extend to the locations of minor North African airfields.

  “Right about here…” The LTCOL answered quickly, pointing it out on the map “…about four miles or so this side of the canal…” Upon hearing this information, the man’s frown became severe to say the least “…But that’s bloody miles behind out lines! How in God’s name has Jerry broken through and pushed that deep into our territory already…?”

  Thorne stared carefully at the map for a few moments, furrows developing in his own brow as he the new information whirled about within his mind. His eyes instinctively drew an imaginary line from the airfield to the ferry landing to the western opening to Mitla Pass and then continued to flick back and forth between those three points. Almost unconsciously, his mind began to make the leap required to extend that straight line further west and suddenly he really didn’t like what he saw.

  “Colonel…” he said slowly, his gaze not leaving the map for a moment “…have you ever known the Krauts to be so way off in their placement of artillery as to miss the front line by this much… by accident?”

  “Hardly,” Anderson replied quickly, frowning too as he realised something important was going on behind the man’s eyes.

  “…And reports from the rest of the front indicate they’re dropping them right on target everywhere else?”

  “So it would appear…”

  “So… what do you think would make the Wehrmacht want to drop a bloody great barrage into our rear on purpose and not touch the front lines…?” Thorne jabbed his finger down at the map, again pointing out Mitla Pass and the ferry crossing. “Contact with our eastern OPs everywhere except for here and here…” he continued, his voice building in intensity as he pointed out Mitla Pass and the ferry crossing “…and now we have reports of a military engagement well behind our lines here…” he straightened and turned a steely, expectant gaze upon the communications officer.

  “Lieutenant Wickenby…” he asked slowly, already utterly certain of the answer he was going to receive. “In what direction was that enemy force near Shallufa reported to be travelling…?”

  “Heading west, sir…” the young man replied, emphasis rising in his words as the implications struck them all simultaneously. “They were moving west…!”

  Thorne had held his index finger steady in place at the point on the map where reports placed the engagement near Shallufa the whole time he’d waited for Wickenby’s response.

  “Now, colonel, if we extend a direct line from Mitla Pass, run it through that ferry crossing and the firefight at Shallufa, and continue to take it due west, we end up…?” He now used that same finger to draw an invisible straight line right across the map through those two points from east to west. It finally came to rest at a point on the Cairo-Suez Road west of Suez, roughly eight kilometres east of their position at the CP. “Straightest line between two points…” he added pointedly, staring straight at Anderson as unwilling realisation began to spread across the man’s face “…and an uprising at Suez has very conveniently taken out the port, cutting off our only avenue of escape by sea…”

  “Everywhere else they hit the lines with everything they have, but here they just sit on their arses while their artillery makes it impossible for us to withdraw east.” Anderson exclaimed as the penny finally dropped. “They’re not trying to weaken out defences… they’re trying to stop us leaving!”

  “How long ago did those posts lose contact, Lieutenant?” Thorne asked, nodding at the LTCOL and giving a humourless grin of recognition.

  “Mitla Pass was reported down about an hour ago, sir, but how long it took to realise there was a problem is anyone’s guess…” Wickenby shrugged, being realistic. “Contact with the ferry was lost about thirty minutes ago, and the Shallufa engagement’s happened within the last ten.”

  “Not likely to be on us yet, but still way too close for comfort…” Thorne mused, glancing down at the map once more before fixing Anderson with the steely gaze of inspired certainty. “You need to think about pulling out, colonel… their main force isn’t going to hit our lines until we’re completely bottled up, and by that stage it’ll be too bloody late to do anything about it.”

  “They’re going to trap us here!” Anger was rising in the man’s tone now to match his initial surprise.

  “Not if we can bloody help it!” Thorne snarled with certainty, before another completely unrelated thought flared in his mind. “Fuck me... Eileen…!” He stepped away from the table once more, fumbling with the radio at his belt as another shell landed somewhere far too close, rattling the walls and causing more dust to fall about them as everyone inside flinched noticeably. “Lieutenant…! You’re lines still open?”

  “Haven’t found us again yet, sir…”

  “Outstanding!” Thorne growled with only partial sarcasm. “I need you to get on the horn to Formidable and ask them to patch me through to someone who can get an urgent message to Australia for Group Captain Alec Trumbull at 1ARDU. I need to speak to him immediately!”

  “Yes, sir…!” Wickenby snapped eagerly in return, snatching up his radio headset and getting to work.

  Thorne took a few moments aside and moved to the bunker’s entrance and was immediately greeted by a momentary but nevertheless quite hot and powerful gust of wind that flooded through the trench and eddied quite violently about the entrance to the bunker itself. Needless to say, it also carried a substantial amount of infuriatingly ubiquitous grit and dust with i
t that stung his eyes and forced him to shield them momentarily against the onslaught.

  Thorne lifted the speaker/mike from his belt the moment the gale had died down and raised it to his lips, moving to a position just far enough outside the entrance to allow decent reception for his radio transceiver.

  “Magwitch… uh… Polonius… ah… fuck it…!” He snarled, unable to remember his appropriate codename for that day and giving up in frustration. “…Thorne calling Donelson… come in for fuck’s sake… over…!” There was a moment’s pause that seemed like an eternity before a response finally came back through his speaker/mike.

  “This is Beatrice reading you loud and clear, Dogberry,” Eileen answered, the faint hint of amusement over his inability to recall codenames clear in her tone in spite of the situation at hand. “Benedick and the rest of the ‘cast’ are waiting for the final curtain right now. We’re in the clear of hecklers at present, but situation is subject to change at any moment. What’s the situation there right now, Dogberry, over…”

  “Bloody Shakespeare again…” Thorne growled, exasperated over his unit’s predilection for drawing on English literature such as Dickens or The Bard for inspiration when it came to daily code words. “Would it fuckin’ kill the uppity bastards to use ‘Maverick’ or ‘Iceman’ once in a while…?” Hey keyed transmit once more. “Situation here is shithouse, Beatrice…” he over emphasised the code name this time “Suez is no go… reports of uprisings and the port is out of action…” he paused for a moment to let that sink in. “Massive assaults along all fronts except ours, and reports of a mobile enemy force moving in our direction from the east… there may be danger of an encirclement… over…”

  There was stress rising at the edge of his tone now – stress both as a result of the building situation and due to the images left lingering in his mind of wounded and dying men he and Morris had passed earlier on the way to the bunker. Not far away, he could still hear someone screaming now as he stood outside the bunker.

  With the transmit key off once more, he added sourly to himself and no one else in particular: “Don’t think I don’t know who bloody Dogberry’ is either, you bastards… I’ve seen that fuckin’ Branagh film…!”

  In the Shakespearean play Much Ado About Nothing, the character of Dogberry was one of an oafish police constable often prone to foolish malapropisms, and Michael Keaton’s memorable portrayal in Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 movie adaptation was something that came quickly to Thorne’s mind. His remarks were intended as a light relief to settle his own nerves as anything else but had little positive effect.

  “Understood, Dogberry…” Eileen’s next reply was one with a decidedly less amused and nervous tone. “What are your orders… over…?”

  “Nothing I’d care to discuss on an open channel, Beatrice… you just stay put and I’ll be there shortly… I’m trying to get through to Harbinger at the moment to organise an alternative means of egress, although we could well be pushing shit uphill anyway… Dogberry over and out…”

  ‘Harbinger’ was an old code name that had been rarely used in the last two years, but he knew that Eileen would recognise it instantly all the same and know exactly who he was referring to. It wouldn’t be much of a chance if the Germans really were trying to trap them rather than attack, Thorne knew, but with the massed forces the enemy was likely to turn loose on them, it might well be the only hope they had.

  Reuters, Schiller and Nehring now stood together by the rear of a Marder command vehicle, watching through shaded eyes as the first wave of the western assault force began to move off, heading directly into the glare of the rising sun. The Puma armoured cars they’d arrived in stood some distance to the rear, while a Wirbelwind mobile flak stood off to either side, the small ranging radar atop each vehicle’s broad, flat turret deployed and ready for action.

  A few kilometres further west, the larger dish of a mobile search radar rotated steadily atop the cargo tray of a Brussig 12-tonne flatbed truck, powered by an equally-large diesel generator carried on the rear of an identical vehicle. Lessons had been learned from the 133rd Littorio’s abortive attack of the previous week. RAF fighter-bombers would find it hard going if they attempted a similar ‘stealth’ attack as they had that day.

  As if to reinforce that point, a rotte of new J-16A fighters thundered past overhead, the pair of shark-like, swept-wing jets circling around toward the north on BARCAP (BARrier Combat Air Patrol). It was intended that no enemy aircraft would get within striking range of the assault’s CP that day without the Luftwaffe knowing about it well beforehand.

  Just a kilometre or so east, the bulk of the western assault forces waited patiently for the order to advance. A steady stream of long-range artillery shells had been screaming overhead now for at least half an hour or more, fired from so deep in their rear that the Allies had no hope of bringing counter-battery fire to bear upon it. Tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and assault guns of the Waffen-SS and elite panzer units were lined up, row upon row, and interspersed with the trucks and older half-tracks now used by regular infantry.

  “This is the transmission we’ve been talking about, Mein Herr...” Nehring exclaimed enthusiastically as he lifted a set of headphones from his ears and passed them to Reuters, stretching the long, coiled cord almost to its limit. Connected through an open hatch above the hull, its other end was plugged into an extremely sensitive radio receiver inside the command vehicle, the operator of which had been ordered to monitor a very specific range of frequencies that were well outside those normally used by Allied forces within the North African theatre of operations. A tall, retractable antenna array rose several metres into the air above the vehicle’s roof.

  “We’ve been picking them up intermittently over the last fortnight or more,” Nehring continued. “We know from previous traffic that orders transmitted on this frequency were directly responsible for the destruction of one of our ELINT aircraft by guided missile.”

  Within seconds of slipping the headphones over his ears, Reuters’ eyes suddenly narrowed and his impassive expression hardened into one of cold and abject hatred. After just twenty seconds or so, he removed the gear once more and passed it to Schiller, who was forced to take a few steps forward to be within the cord’s reach. As the leather-bound pads slipped over his own ears, he too displayed an almost instantaneous reaction, albeit one of shock and surprise rather than outright rage.

  “Sound like someone we know?” Reuters asked pointedly, and his aide was also surprised to see that the older man was almost shaking as he spoke, such was his adverse reaction.

  “Reception is scratchy, but there’s no mistaking the voice,” Schiller agreed, nodding slowly, then added with noticeable disdain: “The complete refusal to follow correct radio procedure is characteristic also.”

  “Generalfeldmarschall Rommel has advised me that you initially brought this discovery to our attention...” Reuters observed coldly, only barely forcing a smile as Schiller handed the headphones back to Nehring. “You’ve done well, herr general... very well.” He paused momentarily to release a deep, sighing breath and allow his sudden anger to subside somewhat. “This will be remembered, I can assure you. All the appropriate preparations have been made?”

  “As you can see – or, more accurately, hear – artillery has been bombarding their rear echelon units for some time now, preventing any opportunity to withdraw,” Nehring nodded, taking great pains to conceal the pride rising within him over the Reichsmarschall’s unsolicited praise. “We’ve instituted a no-fly zone out to a radius of twenty kilometres around Agruda in deference to the air defence vehicle we suspect is present.”

  “A necessary precaution under the circumstances,” Reuters agreed with a grunt, casting a glance in Schiller’s direction. “We suspected there were at least two of their Tunguska flak vehicles at Scapa Flow, and it’d be reasonable to expect them to have brought one along for protection of such important assets. Half that distance would probably be sufficient if
it’s an original 9K22 they’re using,” he gave a non-committal shrug, as if the idea was an obvious one, “but twenty thousand metres would be far safer if they’re using one of the newer ‘Pantsir’ upgraded units. Better to assume the worst.” He turned his attention back to Nehring. “Sound thinking, keeping our airmen out of the area for the moment: if the defences there are as you suspect, anything crossing into that no-fly zone would definitely be in serious danger; far more sensible to leave things to the frontschwein in this instance. What of our special forces units?”

  “Last reports confirm they have crossed the canal and are on schedule. As soon as we have confirmation that they have engaged the rear of the Allied defences, we will launch our full assault and have them caught between the jaws of a vice!”

  “Undoubtedly…” Reuters nodded slowly, although a faint sensation of uncertainty nevertheless nagged at his subconscious “…however, I would make just one request at this time…”

  “Of course, Herr Reichsmarschall,” the general snapped instantly, coming to partial attention with a faint click of his booted heels.

  “Our enemy here is a cunning and resourceful man, and can also be an incredibly unpredictable one. I would advise immediately committing at least one or two divisions of infantry… not to mount a direct attack as such, but men enough to make contact along a wide enough front for it to appear legitimate.”

  “I shall give the order at once, heil Hitler…!” Nehring declared, giving a Nazi salute before turning on his heels and moving to the rear of the command vehicle to obtain access to a radio transmitter. “Shall I direct our jamming units to also scramble this frequency, Mein Herr?