by Zach Neal
The Desert Raider
Zach Neal
Copyright 2014 Zach Neal and Long Cool One Books
Design: J. Thornton
ISBN 978-1-927957-60-8
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The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person living or deceased, or to any places or events, is purely coincidental. Names, places, settings, characters and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. The author’s moral rights to the proceeds of this work have been asserted.
Table of Contents
Act One
Act Two
Act Three
About Zach Neal
The Desert Raider
Zach Neal
Act One
Corporal White tapped carefully at his door. A lean, ascetic figure, hairline receding at twenty-six, he gave his habitual, dry little cough as if to underline this fact.
Bullen was a military policeman, one small cog in a larger machine that provided security to Headquarters staff and premises. This duty largely consisted of making up duty rosters, shift scheduling, and all routine matters of an administrative nature involving the regular army guards.
There were a few spooks around too, more than enough in his opinion, but they reported to someone else.
The Sergeant Major was known to be the crusty type, before and after he’d had his morning tea.
It was coming up on nine-thirty.
A stolid bull-dog type, Sergeant Major Bullen was just inserting a fresh sheet into the machine. Thick about the neck and shoulders, he gave an impression of size belied by his actual five-foot eight stature.
There were some quick and fancy typists in the building but their spelling was atrocious in some cases and good grammar wasn’t enough to save it. A letter from General Harold Alexander, General Overall Commanding, to the Head of Military Intelligence, Near East must observe certain forms—not least of which was readability. It was one of those formal letters produced by certain junior officers and Alexander himself might never see it. That was hardly the point.
Bullen was a very tired man, on days like this.
He was getting damned tired of showing the young fools how it was done. Never a man to be rushed, especially not by corporals, he typed in the first line, the general’s name on the left and the date as far over to the right as he could get. He hit the return lever and looked up.
“Yes?”
“There’s a lady here to see you, Sergeant Major.”
Bullen stared open-mouthed.
“A lady?” In his worldly experience this could only mean one thing—an actual lady and there weren’t too many of those around.
There might be one or two, he supposed, but what were they doing way out here? There were VIPs in from time to time.
“What, Vera Lynn’s popped in to see me?” His eyebrows rose and his half-glasses seemed to slide a little further down his nose.
White almost laughed aloud, but this was a kind of game and to laugh was to lose.
Stifling any overt reaction at the picture presented, with Bullen being a bit of a rock-like figure and all, certainly the thought of him with anyone other than Mrs. Bullen was, well, almost horrifying, really. The corporal nodded.
“Yes, Sergeant Major. Ah, no, it’s not Vera Lynn. A young woman. An Arab girl. She’s asking questions about one of our servicemen.”
Comprehension dawned. Bullen sat up in his seat, the letter forgotten.
“Aw, bloody hell.”
That was the trouble with weekend duty. Shit flows downhill, as every soldier knew. Trouble, on the other hand, got passed up the ladder. White would just ball it up anyway.
“All right. Send her in. No, wait. Hold on. How old is she?”
“She’s pretty young, Sergeant Major.”
“All right, see if you can get that lady captain—” Bullen was referring to the one and only uniformed female seen regularly in these parts. “I will not be alone with the girl—make sure we have a woman in here that understands this sort of situation and can interpret.”
“She speaks English.”
Bullen gave a twitch of his head and White departed to find some sort of female chaperone for their visitor. The corporal couldn’t really blame Bullen for taking precautions. All sorts of people showed up on all kinds of hair-brained quests. His stories of his service in India were legendary. It wasn’t all administrative stuff either.
The Sergeant Major stared and stared at the typewriter. While he was waiting he filled in the addresses and sat there thinking inconsequential thoughts. Truth was, he had daughters of his own.
***
Her name was Mariyah Khoudry. She was twenty years old according to her identity card.
The eyes were big, black and beautiful above the veil.
Capitaine Lorraine Pruitt, a liaison officer with the Free French forces in the theatre, sat calm, cool and collected in her smart skirt and with her fresh, open features. Unruly blonde hair peeked every which way from under the tiny service cap and her wide brown eyes looked jaded, possibly even a bit bloodshot. The Arab girl might look on her as a friendly figure. She seemed terribly shy, but the Bedouin had their ways and the women were extremely cloistered. It must have taken a lot to bring her in today.
Lorraine leaned forward, sitting sort of angled on the chair beside Mariyah, clasping her hand in reassurance.
“Please tell us a little bit about it.”
“He is a private in the army. Owen Foster. He has been gone for an awfully long time.”
Lorraine bit her lip. She was just about to ask a question—
The girl was unconsciously wringing her hands, and with the featureless black outfit, the hood and the veil, that and her eyes were the only clues to her feelings or state of mind. She was twisting a gold ring around her finger.
Sergeant Major Bullen had seen it too, that and the sheen of tears in the young woman’s eyes.
He picked up a pen and slid a writing tablet into position.
“I’ll just take down a few details.” His eyes came up, and then he looked at Lorraine.
He stopped, chewing on a lip and looking helpful.
She would be so much better at this sort of thing.
“So, how long have you known Owen?” Lorraine pursed her lips in empathy and tried not to blink too fast but this wasn’t her line of duty at all and it looked like a tough situation where no good could possibly come of it.
The English had an expression for it. Something shitty was about to happen.
“About a year.” Mariyah’s face fell.
She knew what they were thinking, of course.
***
With Lorraine and the girl conversing in low tones, patiently awaiting his return, a not very happy Sergeant Major Bullen went looking for the file. This room always had somebody in it, but his clearances were sufficient, everybody knew Bullen and no one had the nerve to ask his business. They were smart enough to attend to their own.
With a rumoured six hundred thousand or more men in theatre, something they weren’t supposed to know or talk about, their file-card system was nothing if not extensive. There were bound to be several hundred Fosters in there. Everyone had to be paid, everyone had to be fed, and assigned a billet, and every one of them must appear on a roster somewhere. Otherwise men would just walk off and not come back. What a really deep a
udit might reveal was a good question. There were probably companies, regiments of forgotten men living quietly on the back streets of Cairo, not too worried about the fact that no one had contacted them in quite some time or ever assigned them a unit…he smiled tiredly at the notion.
Assuming you could get paid or had money of your own, it really would be the life of Riley.
At least for a little while, and such ideas had sucked in some pretty good men over the years.
Replacement troops were especially notorious for getting into trouble right out of the depot. Men with a unit simply didn’t have the free time. Their corporals and their mates took care of the stupider ones, at least to a certain extent. In a proper unit, when one got in trouble, they were all in trouble. This kind of discipline was tough to impose on the depot mentality, where some, possibly even most of the men kidded themselves that it would be over, hopefully before they got into action and most likely killed. Six months in the stockade and an eventual dishonourable discharge might just be seen as a blessing in disguise.
His own stiff, slightly lopsided gait resulted from a rifle bullet through the left tibia at Sidi Barrani.
He found the section for surnames beginning with F.
“Foster, Foster…Foster.” Here we are.
His blunt fingers riffled through the file with surprising ease, but he was still a young man—and a bit of a shark with those other, more brightly-coloured bits of pasteboard. What was more troubling was that his eyes were going.
Foster. Owen.
With a bit of reading, holding them up to the light one by one as he nipped through the details, he came up with a good baker’s dozen of Fosters who might fit. He quickly discarded Olivers and Oswalds, an Ogden, one Odysseus and an Orville or two.
Four Owen Fosters. One was dead at Tobruk. August 3, 1941. That was quite some time ago, and Bullen thought they could safely rule that one out.
Taking the remaining three cards with him, he went back to his office to see if they could figure out which one the girl was talking about.
According to her story, he’d been gone for over five weeks. He’s either been reassigned, or he was with his unit, or he was absent without leave.
Either that, or he was simply avoiding the girl, who claimed she was legally his wife. All a Muslim wedding took was a pact, the Nikah, and any male Muslim could perform the ceremony. It also required the permission of the commanding officer in the case of enlisted personnel. If the girl was under twenty-one, she required written permission for any civil ceremony from her parent or guardian…whoever was giving her away.
There was something about the way the girl sat, one hand across her abdomen.
Sergeant Major Bullen wondered if she was pregnant. It wouldn’t be the first inquiry of that nature.
If anyone could worm that kind of personal information from Mariyah, the capitaine could.
Better her than me, he was thinking, but the Bedouin, especially the women, would never open up to a male, and a foreigner at that.
How in the hell Foster had managed it was an interesting question. The lady didn’t look much like the sort of working girl that hung around in the bazaar or haunted some of the back alleys in the less prepossessing parts of town.
Her English was unusually good.
Act Two
It was bloody cold in the desert at night. He’d bundled on everything he could, sitting there stiff with cold and his teeth chattering. There was the usual quivery feeling in the midsection, but one was never sure—it could be the cold, it might just be a small case of the jitters. He had the usual shitty taste in his mouth, and they all smelled. His nostrils were thick with dust and he craved tobacco.
There was nothing else like it—being out there under the moonlight with a few good mates and a desperate plan.
There was the usual question—what else one might be doing if you weren’t stuck out here.
That was hardly fair. Owen had volunteered, at a time when there was not much action to be had. He couldn’t remember yesterday, let alone what the hell he was thinking back then.
We’ve certainly remedied that…
Owen Foster was driver of jeep number three, with all the odds on the right. The even-numbered jeeps were on the left of Captain John Easton’s lead jeep.
With five jeeps on the left, and six on the right, their V-shaped formation centred on the captain. Each jeep had two pairs of .303 machine guns on coaxial mounts and three men per jeep. Owen sat there with his feet on the pedals, hand on the gear lever, listening intently. All engines were off. Mick Scranton, their navigator, directly to his left on the passenger side of Easton’s machine, was insisting that the aerodrome was only a mile to the north. He had a reputation for being right about such things.
A droning noise up in the sky got louder. It was clearly a multi-engine aircraft judging by the harmonic thrum of its motors. Something extraordinary happened.
Foster’s heart just about jumped out of his chest.
The horizon lit up on an instant and their target aerodrome was revealed in all of its splendour. It was unbelievable, but they were a hundred miles behind the front and the R.A.F. had already paid their obligatory visit, somewhere in the area. They’d seen the flashes on the horizon. That attack couldn’t have been too far from here, although there were no signs of damage. There was no smoke, no fire. Hangars stood out as low black boxes. The shapes of aircraft and their tail empennages made a lumpy mass of uneven shadow to the left of the administration and repair buildings. They would enter from the left and depart to the right. That’s all he needed to know at this exact moment.
Scranton was smug.
“I told you so.”
He looked over and grinned at an impassive Owen Foster, features almost invisible with the garish headgear wrapped tightly around his face and neck.
Easton didn’t lose a moment. If there was anyone behind them, they would be perfectly silhouetted. There was a road back there and they were sitting ducks if they didn’t move.
“Engines on.”
His driver hit the starter button and she fired on the instant.
Foster had his own little motor tuned to the nines, just one of many skills he had picked up along the way. He hit the button and she fired first turn.
The sound of .303 Browings being cocked all too close to his ear was all the reminder Owen Foster needed to keep as still as possible and drive carefully. Other than that, the engine sounded good. His was damned quiet compared to some of the other machines. He let out the clutch and tried to keep the front end roughly even with the tail end of the lead jeep.
“Would you look at that!” Daniel was ecstatic.
“Sure.”
An Italian Savoia bomber was coming in to land, an attractive three-engine design that was capable of night-bombing as well as launching torpedoes against shipping. A juicy target, the lead jeep, out on his left front, changed gears and began to accelerate. They were within a hundred yards of the runway when the dark hulking aircraft shape touched down right in front of them, and Easton was going like a bat out of hell now.
They came onto the weedy apron to the immediate left of a line of aircraft, mostly the angular Ju-52 transports, and the jeep on his right spurted fire in their direction. The blast of their own guns deafened Owen and it was all he could do to watch where they were going and not hit anything looming up in the darkness.
“Hang on!” He had no idea if they heard him or not, but he dodged some sort of electrical ground-starting trolley, and their fire slackened because they were bouncing around too much. Corporal Pat Mitchell was in the rear and another private, Daniel Kinlan, was on the front guns.
Easton fired a green Verey light, the lead jeep bounced big-time, and then turned right onto the runway on screeching tires. They raced along as the enemy aircraft, totally oblivious to the goings-on, slowed to a crawl with flaps trailing and brakes on. Their own jeep crunched over flare-path lights or something and then the ground was much smoother.
The coloured runway lights on the right and left were blinding now, and there were glaring white ones interspersed at four-light intervals.
Daniel took careful aim at the Savoia-Marchetti.
Bullets peppered the fuselage full of holes. Thin and shiny liquid began spilling out of her at the wing-root and then she was a ball of fire, rolling to a stop and turning abruptly ninety degrees to the left when the pilot was hit or abandoned his station.
The jeeps roared alongside, going past with all guns on the left side firing at the plane, and with all gunners on the right raking the line of aircraft to their right. Someone fired a red flare.
Foster slowed to a disciplined crawl, keeping the revs high in first gear as they torched plane after plane. When he saw a gaggle of Afrika Korps troops running out from between the hangars, he grabbed Daniel’s arm and showed him.
Daniel quickly obliged him by taking them on and they dispersed just as quickly as they had come. Daniel kept their heads down with occasional bursts as they were much more dangerous when they were under cover.
The noise was horrendous, the only relief when the men on the guns stopped to change the belts.
Easton or somebody in his jeep fired another flare, a red one again this time, and the last jeep in the line broke off from the blazing bomber. No one got out, Foster was sure of that much. Someone too far off to the east was firing flares, green ones. It was the enemy for sure. Captain Easton’s jeep suddenly broke right directly in front of him, and he cursed, dropping it down a gear, hitting the brakes. He cranked the wheel hard as the boys swore and desperately tried not to shoot their own men.
