The Sand Panthers

by Leo Kessler

  ‘Come on,’ the big Corporal said. ‘Let’s beat it before the Gippo rozzers turn up!’

  They ran out of the open door, leaving behind the silence of death.

  * * *

  ‘But I am a doctor,’ the Egyptian protested across the metal table, littered with gleaming instruments of his calling. ‘I am not interested in politics. None of us here is interested in politics, simply in medicine.’

  Hastily Slaughter checked his list. ‘You are all traitors and terrorists,’ he announced. ‘You, Dr Ali Hamshari, Dr Abdel Shibi and Dr Mustafa Hafez.’

  The young bespectacled Egyptian doctor knew he was trapped. The clinic was packed with illegal explosives and by now the British rummaging around below must have found them. ‘We are patriots,’ he declared proudly, ‘whose sole aim is to throw you English out of our –’

  A SAS man rammed his rifle butt into the doctor’s stomach and his words ended in a startled gasp of pain. ‘Outside with them,’ Slaughter ordered, putting away his list till the next house, ‘shoot ’em!’

  * * *

  The Egyptian, whose playboy image had concealed his work for the revolution, suddenly jabbed his elbow into the stomach of the SAS man holding him, while Slaughter checked his list. The SAS was caught off guard and the Egyptian dived for the door.

  The SAS corporal was quicker. He fired from the hip. The luxurious penthouse apartment stank of cordite and the fugitive screamed and dropped to the thickly carpeted floor. Blood pouring from the gaping hole in his back and dripping onto the white sheepskin carpet, he continued to crawl to the door.

  Slaughter nodded to the boy, whose eyes gleamed. He pulled out his knife and crouching over the crawling man, drew the wicked curved blade across his throat, as if he were slaughtering a sheep. The boy looked up and grinned, he wiped his bloody knife on the Egyptian’s immaculate Savile Row suit.

  ‘Miserable bastard,’ Slaughter said and ticked the playboy’s name off his list. ‘Come on, all of you.’

  * * *

  That afternoon, Slaughter and his hardened SAS carried out their bloody task. Blinded by hatred of the ‘gippos’ and the ‘wogs’ and brutalized by their years of hard fighting and hard living in the desert, the troopers under Slaughter’s command rushed from house to house all that long October afternoon, murdering those suspected by the Major of belonging to the organization which was ready to rise up and throw the British out of Egypt. Twice they bluffed their way into Egyptian Army barracks and before the eyes of hundreds of Egyptian soldiers, shot down young officers who belonged to the group around Nasser. They told the provost marshal permanently stationed outside Dolly’s House, the capital’s most expensive brothel, to disappear, and in the heavy luxury of that perfumed place, stabbed the Egyptian General to death, as he lay in the arms of his black girl.

  But slowly the plotters in the capital found out what was going on. The telephone lines buzzed with rumours and warnings. Nasser went underground. The King ordered his palace to be locked and shuttered, and called out the Palace Guard. One by one the survivors, so confident that morning that nothing could go wrong with their plan, fled like the rats they were, and as that terrible afternoon drew to a close, Major Slaughter began to feel that he had crushed the revolt before it had really started.

  But Major Slaughter was wrong for once. For just before the death of the young Egyptian Army Captain, standing ashen-face with fear in his bedroom, he had the presence of mind to call a number in Alexandria and give her the alternative code-word. She gasped an anxious query.

  ‘Pomme,’ he began, just as the Englishmen broke into his bedroom, stens blazing. He went down, his stomach ripped open in a welter of blood and entrails, with her name on his dying lips. ‘Pomme…’

  FOUR

  The clatter of the tracks alerted the whole oasis. Von Dodenburg, who had been dozing in the shade of a palm tree sprang to his feet in alarm. But Schulze beat him to it. ‘All right, you crappy wet-tails,’ he bellowed, fumbling furiously for his machine-pistol, ‘get the lead out of your asses! We’re getting visitors!’

  The tankers ran for their vehicles, carefully camouflaged by palm fronds, while the half-naked panzer grenadiers doubled for the slit trenches they had dug all around the oasis.

  Von Dodenburg ran across to Major Mustafa’s tent. For once the fat Egyptian Major, who seemingly spent most afternoons dallying with his handsome young batman, was not in his bunk. Von Dodenburg had no time to ponder his disappearance. ‘Come on, the lot of you,’ he yelled to the crew of his command tank. ‘Let’s see what’s going on!’

  With the ‘Prof’ trailing behind, von Dodenburg, Schulze and Matz doubled through the burning sand to where the command tank was hidden at the edge of the northern side of the oasis. Von Dodenburg focused his binoculars on the lone vehicle ploughing its way through the desert.

  He had never seen anything like it before. The top seemed to belong to a large civilian car, vintage 1920, or thereabouts, but instead of the wheels one would expect on such a vehicle, they were replaced by tracks.

  Swiftly he handed the glasses to Matz. ‘What do you make of it, Corporal?’ he asked Wotan’s vehicle recognition expert.

  Matz surveyed the vehicle in silence for a while, as it came ever closer, his leathery face creased in a puzzled frown. ‘I don’t know exactly, sir. But I think it’s a ’twenties Rolls-Royce mounted on probably a Berliet track chassis. The Tommies and the Frogs used them on their trans-Sahara expeditions in the ’thirties.’

  Von Dodenburg’s face hardened. ‘Allies eh?’ Blowing three shrill signal blasts on his whistle, he cried: ‘Stand by everybody! This might be trouble!’

  Throughout the oasis, the camouflaged tanks swung their long hooded guns towards the strange vehicle which seemed to be walkmg straight into their trap. Tensely the half-naked crews waited for the order to fire.

  But for once, Wotan’s muscle was not needed; for to von Dodenburg’s surprise, a familiar figure plodded stolidly into the bright circle of his lenses and approached the slow-moving vehicle. It was the Egyptian Major. As von Dodenburg watched in complete bewilderment, the tracked vehicle stopped. The major clicked to attention and saluted, before crooking his arm around the cab support and waving the unseen driver to proceed. ‘Now what the devil is that fat fool up to now?’ the Major hissed.

  ‘Let’s go and see, sir,’ Schulze suggested, already dropping to the ground and waving his arms back and forth to indicate that the gunners should not shoot in anticipation of von Dodenburg’s expected order.

  Together, followed by Matz and the ‘Prof’, they thrust their way through the palms towards the strange vehicle, watching the Major busily chatting to the car’s passenger, who was still obscured by his body.

  With a groan and a hiss of escaping steam from the boiling radiator the ancient conveyance came to a halt. The Major dropped into the sand and with a great flourish opened the squeaky rear door, which they could now see was adorned with an elaborate coat-of-arms containing enough heraldic animals to stock a small zoo.

  Schulze caught a glimpse of an elegant, silk-clad leg beyond the Egyptian Major’s bulk and nudged Matz excitedly in the ribs. ‘Shit!’ he whispered.

  ‘Impossible,’ Matz breathed. ‘It’s a mirage!’

  ‘Shut up!’ von Dodenburg began and then his mouth fell open with surprise when he saw the woman who emerged from the back of the ancient Rolls.

  She was a small woman, who stepped out of the car like a jewelled bird, all fluttering hands, her bright eyes darting along the faces of the staring soldiers, her raddIed cheeks rouged and her dyed canary-yellow hair aglow. ‘Hello, boys,’ she cried in a husky American voice and waved a hand at them, the fingers of which looked as if they had just been dipped in bright-red blood. ‘I must look a sight. My maid didn’t have time to arrange my eyelashes in Alex.’ She giggled at her own joke, which meant nothing to the gawping German and Egyptian soldiers.

  The beaming Egyptian Major turned to von Dodenburg. ‘Major,�
�� he said with smirking formality, ‘may I present you to your contact from our glorious Movement, Madame –’

  The strange woman beat him to it. She extended her skinny, hand to von Dodenburg to be kissed and said: ‘They call me Pomme,’ she breathed, fluttering her false eyelashes madly, ‘because I’ve been eaten so much, I guess.’ And with that she went off into another peal of shrill laughter…

  * * *

  Sue-Ann ‘Appleblossom’ Keppel had been born in Austin, Texas. Her voice as a long-distance telephone operator had so charmed a Texas cattle baron that he had made a blind date with her and within the month they were married. Six months later, he was dead – ‘She plum screwed him to death,’ the neighbours said maliciously – and suddenly she found herself the heiress to a fortune of fifty million dollars.

  The widow, clad in black from head to foot, flew immediately to New York, where she dumped the expensive widow’s weeds in a hotel room, changed into an outrageous red costume, picked up the first man she found in the hotel bar, went to bed with him for the next forty-eight hours and left for Europe the day afterwards. She bought her way into London society, or that part of it which suited her own tastes – ‘dope, drink and niggers’, as they were in those years But there were those in London society who felt she was ‘common’ with her vulgar American accent and her painted face. In 1930 she gave it up and moved to the Riviera, where the local ‘set’ were more to her own wild taste.

  There were naked luncheon parties on board the flat-bottomed boats anchored off their gleaming coastal villas; drunken speed-boat trips; long hours of naked, doped sunbathing; masked balls that invariably ended in an orgy. For half a decade she drifted in drunken, drugged ecstasy through the decadent pleasures of a glamorous society which was doomed to extinction in 1940.

  In 1935 she met Ali, an Egyptian who was half her age, a ‘simply divine dancer’, as she described him to the set. Ali swept her off her feet and when he learned that the middle-aged woman was a multi-millionairess, his ardour increased tenfold. He promised her the Pyramids, the Nile, the Desert. Pomme’s romantic imagination, which had been moulded as an adolescent by Ramon Navarro, blossomed. She told the set she was going to Egypt on her ‘honeymoon’. When they replied that she was not yet married, she told them that ‘Pomme never buys a pig in a poke. You know these Eastern guys – very exotic, but no endurance. We’ll get hitched later.’

  But the ‘honeymoon’ on the Nile had never taken place. At Alex the British security police were waiting for Ali. Not only had he stolen five thousand Egyptian pounds from the Cairo bank where he had worked, he had also used half of it to buy weapons for the illegal Egyptian terrorist movement. Ali disappeared behind bars; she never saw him again.

  Pomme stayed in Egypt. She discovered that Cairo and Alex were full of ‘Alis’. A succession of them comforted her, and her sexual desires were replaced by political ambition. As she told visiting members of the set who wondered why she had buried herself in Egypt: ‘Peggy Guggenheim collects paintings. I collect revolutionaries – they’re much more stimulating!’

  But the slaughter of the Cairo underground movement the previous day had made her realize for the first time in a long life of pleasure that she was in danger – real danger. The game – playing at revolution – was over. Either the Egyptians pulled it off and kicked out the English, or the limeys would throw her into jail. All her money wouldn’t save her, she knew that. The English had shown just how cruel, how ruthless they could really be when the chips were down. On this October afternoon in the desert Sue-Ann Keppel was scared!

  * * *

  She rapped her hard bony fingers on the table, as if she was wearing tiny ivory thimbles and announced ‘Major von Duisburg–’

  ‘Dodenburg,’ von Dodenburg corrected her, half amused and half alarmed by this flamboyant woman whose orders he was – apparently – to follow.

  ‘Now there has been serious trouble in Cairo, very serious. The Limeys must have tumbled to what was going on there. All day yesterday, they sent out their killers…’ In a hectic, breathless flow of words, she explained the events of the past twenty-four hours in the Egyptian capital, and how Slaughter’s murderous methods had crushed the planned revolt in that city. ‘Sadat and Nasser,’ she said, mentioning names which meant nothing to von Dodenburg, but which earned the fat Egyptian Major’s enthusiastic praise, ‘have gone underground. We can count them out of what is to come. But the Limeys have not reckoned with yours truly. Pomme managed to get out from under and warn our organization in Alexandria. Our group is still pretty well intact there, and Pomme still has a couple of surprises for the Limeys up her knickers. If she wore any, which she don’t!

  ‘Before I discuss any plans, young man,’ Pomme went on, ‘let’s have a drink. My tonsils are shrivelled.’

  ‘Coffee?’ von Dodenburg suggested.

  ‘Coffee!’ she exclaimed in mock horror. ‘Coffee is for peasants. I only drink champagne.’ She looked up at Schulze, his enormous chest gleaming with sweat. ‘Sonny, you go over to my vehicle and get the key from that nigger at the wheel. You’ll find a chest of iced champagne in the boot.’

  Schulze sprang to attention and bowing stiffly, saluted as if he were a member of the old Prussian Garde du Corps. ‘Zu Befehl, gnadige Frau,’ he snapped in his best German. Von Dodenburg looked up at him in open disbelief. ‘Nice young fellah,’ Pomme said slowly and thoughtfully, as Schulze moved out of the shade of the palms to fetch the champagne. ‘From the way his shorts grab his crotch, it looks as if he carries a nice cannon around with him.’

  Five minutes later, Pomme raised her sparkling glass of pink champagne. ‘Well, gents,’ she toasted the officers, ‘here’s mud in your eyes. Down the hatch!’ She downed the sparkling wine in one gulp, much to the admiration of a watching Schulze.

  ‘The Limeys think they’ve got everything nicely wrapped up in the Delta. Well, they might have in Cairo. All the same, old Pomme thinks she can still catch them out.’

  ‘How?’ von Dodenburg demanded.

  By way of an answer, she thrust her empty glass at Schulze. ‘Here, handsome, fill ’em up again,’ she said.

  Schulze did not understand English, but he understood that particular gesture well enough. He did what she commanded, while von Dodenburg waited impatiently for the woman to answer his question. ‘Thanks, handsome,’ she looked up at the giant ex-docker. ‘I bet you could bring a sparkle to a girl’s eyes,’ she breathed, fluttering her long false eyelashes in maidenly confusion.

  ‘Madame Pomme!’ von Dodenburg said firmly.

  ‘Oh, yes, I was saying.’ She downed the champagne in one quick gulp. ‘Alex! ... Alexandria is the place where we’re gonna screw the Limeys!’

  FIVE

  Schulze lay exhausted in the palms, next to a disgruntled Matz, watching the departure ceremonies. Idly he soothed the blood-red marks that covered his broad back. ‘What a woman,’ he breathed, as he followed Pomme’s progress to the waiting Rolls, ‘what a damn woman!’

  ‘You might have thought of yer old pal, Schulze,’ Matz said miserably. ‘I haven’t had a bit since the House.’ Schuize did not take his admiring gaze off the woman, who was now saying a few last words to von Dodenburg at the door of the Rolls. ‘You don’t share a woman like that, even with your best friend, Matzi,’ he replied in a hushed voice. ‘That would be almost… almost…’ he fumbled for a word to express the depth of his emotion, ‘…against religion. Sacrilege, I think they call it.’

  ‘Ballocks,’ Matz snapped unfeelingly.

  Schulze ignored his friend’s impassioned outburst. Out in the desert, the coloured driver had started the engine. Von Dodenburg closed the door behind Pomme. The driver engaged first gear and with a rusty squeak of tracks, the Rolls started to move off. Von Dodenburg and the Egyptian Major stiffened to attention and saluted. A white arm appeared through the window and answered their salute with a flutter of a white lace handkerchief.

  The Major caught sight of Matz. ‘Corporal,
where’s the other rogue?’ he demanded.

  ‘Sergeant Major Schulze?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He’s over there in palms, sir.’

  ‘The latrine?’ von Dodenburg queried.

  ‘No sir,’ Matz answered, completely straight-faced, though there was a malicious gleam in his wicked little eyes, ‘I think he’s collecting a few flowers – for Madame.’

  ‘You’ll have my boot up your flowery arse in a minute, you cheeky rogue,’ von Dodenburg snorted. ‘Get him over here. I want to assemble the company. I have something to say to them.’

  ‘At the double, sir!’ Matz answered smartly. He floundered through the sand to where Schulze still lay dreamily, staring after the black dot of the Rolls.

  With a reluctant sigh, Schulze clambered to his feet and cupping his hands to his mouth, he called with unusual mildness: ‘All right, you fellows, fall in in the centre of the oasis. The CO wants to have a chat with us.’

  Matz shook his head in disbelief. ‘As I live and breathe,’ he said, ‘Schulze’s in love!’

  * * *

  But Major von Dodenburg’s voice, when he spoke to the assembled company, was dry, cold and completely unemotional. Pomme was a bold, resourceful woman and the Egyptian Major had been full of enthusiasm for her plan. But to von Dodenburg it seemed not only ‘daring’ (as the Egyptian had described it the night before), but decidedly dicey. If it went wrong, the company would be isolated in the middle of a British-held town, hundreds of kilometres away from the nearest German troops.