D-Notice by Bill Walker

Author:Bill Walker [Walker, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: DeLarge Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-One

The patrol left Siwa at six a.m. heading northwest toward Giarabub, which they reached late in the day. The town lay in a small depression on the edge of the Great Sand Sea, and where Siwa was pleasant, Giarabub was dismal. Aside from the domed mosque where the founder of the Muslim Senussi sect lay buried, there was little else, a collection of squat buildings that appeared ready to collapse at any moment. Flies and mosquitoes were everywhere, buzzing their faces relentlessly.

The patrol found sanctuary in an airplane hangar abandoned by the retreating Italians some months before. Fitzhugh hopped off the lead truck. “We’ll stay the night here. I want everyone to stay close at hand and for God’s sake don’t even think of drinking the bloody water.”

While others went to the oasis, Thorley used the time to get to know Byron Wilson, the radioman who would be trekking across those last two miles to Rommel’s base near Hatiet el Etla.

A warm and humorous man, Thorley took an immediate liking to him. After small talk, Wilson showed him the radio. It was remarkably compact, arranged in a backpack format for ease of carriage, yet it weighed almost fifty pounds. “It’s the batteries, you see. They’re more than half the weight of the blighter.” He then went on to show how both he and Thorley would have a pair of headphones to listen in. Wilson would home in on the frequency of the signal and Thorley would verify that it was the correct one. “The last we’ve been told is that the tanks are using 27 megacycles. It’s a low frequency on the 11-meter band and it has to be ‘line of sight,’ or we’ll never hear it. That’s why we’ve got to be up their bums on this one.”

“How long do the batteries last?”

Wilson shrugged. “Oh, if you left it on continuously...about half an hour. The valves suck up a lot of juice.”

That meant they would have to be judicious about the radio’s use, survey the situation, and wait until the traffic became heavy. That might take hours, and they would be vulnerable to detection the longer they remained in position. “What about spare batteries?” Thorley asked.

Wilson shook his head. “We’ve got a total of four. Two will go with us; the other two stay with the patrol. We can’t risk taking them all because these same batteries run the main wireless. Without them we’ve lost our ability to report back to Siwa. If that happens, we might as well turn tail and head back.”

The rest of the day crawled by and the men grew anxious. Fortunately, someone had a deck of cards and they all occupied themselves playing Whist and Old Maid until nightfall. Dinner was another stew and quite forgettable.

The next morning, the trucks pulled out of the hangar and continued the journey north. An hour out of Giarabub, one of the trucks broke an axle in a sink hole, and the stores and men had to

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