Before The Brightest Dawn (The Half-Bloods Trilogy Book 3) by Jana Petken

Author:Jana Petken [Petken, Jana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-06-14T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirty

Max Vogel

Tunisia, North Africa

25 March 1943

Max arrived at the front immediately after the Allies’ failed assault on the German defensive lines at Mareth. The British Eighth Army had managed to establish a bridgehead west of Zarat, near Tebaga Gap in eastern Tunisia. It was close to a low mountain pass located in rocky, broken terrain that led to the northern and eastern coastal plains, much of which were uninhabited. It was not where they had expected to halt, however, and the mood was grim.

Since his return to North Africa, Max quickly learnt the differences between operations in the field and raw combat. The intelligence services were involved in a more subtle and cohesive conflict where one sought to outdo an enemy on a mental rather than physical level and defeat foes by using information as its primary weapon. The chaos and violence of open warfare had taken him to a place he had only experienced briefly once before; the long twenty-four hours he’d spent in Poland on the day the Germans invaded that country. Here in Tunisia, there were no made-up names or nationalities to hide behind, no hotel rooms in which to sleep peacefully, no games or trickery, and no retreat. This was not the civilised, although at times dangerous, war he was used to, and his fear was palpable in his dry, scratchy throat.

On his second day there, Max was summoned to Command Headquarters, which was located inside a subterranean cavern dug into the side of a rocky hill. He had seen many such dwellings in this area, for west of the Matmata Hills, harsh temperature changes and lack of moisture forced the indigenous people to live in rock-cut or quarry caves, as they had for thousands of years. Now, these former Tunisian homes were being sequestered for the Allies’ needs. Staff officers slept in them, men from the army signal and administration branches worked in them, and some were being used as temporary field hospitals until the army’s next major advance.

Max squeezed his eyes shut and then slowly opened them to adjust to the dimness inside the cavern. The air was fresh with a strange light breeze that entered from some unseen orifice in the rock and circulated sufficiently to dry his sweaty face. He removed his hard helmet, tilted his head back to the aerated spot above him, breathed deeply, and enjoyed the heaven-sent respite. He had not been given a temperate cavern to work from; instead, the intelligence branch had tents that were unbearably hot during the day and freezing cold at night. On missions, he was usually the senior officer, but here, with every man and his dog present, he was a small toad in a large pond.

In the first cavern, a soldier sat on a stool banging furiously on the keys of a typewriter that sat on a rickety wooden table. Another British private leant against a granite wall watching the man work. His helmet, tucked under his arm, was white with

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.