Buffy had been operating out of Cyprus. By a historical quirk, the British still had bases there and every so often the U.S. used one of them. Now, Buffy was circling off the Sinai coast, with one simple job. Listen for the beacon signals from the crew of Marisol, plot their position and steer the SEAL rescue team in to pick them up. Of course, that assumed the crew had survived the shoot-down, hadn’t been taken prisoner or simply been killed by the first enemy troops to the area. If the latter had happened, it wouldn’t be a job for the SEALs any more. SAC avenged its own.
“Got them!.” One of the electronics technicians was manipulating his antennas, trying to get the finest possible directional cut. Meanwhile, the pilot had broken out of the circle and was flying parallel to the coast as fast as the aircraft could manage, six miles a minute. Doctrine was that the people on the ground would transmit for two minutes in twenty. The longer the baseline that could be achieved in those two minutes, the more precise the position. That two minutes seemed like twenty.
“OK Boss. Got a fix. Not brilliant but it puts them eight miles west of the crash site. Sensible guys, looks like they’re heading parallel to the coast before trying to get to the sea. We’ll patch through to SEAL Team Two and get them going the right way. Pell them we’ll get a movement bearing with the next hit.”
Sinai Desert, south of Gaza.
The sun had gone down hours before and the night was pitch black. Kozlowski and his crew had grown up in an America where electricity was plentiful and cheap, even far from large towns, there were street lights and neon signs. They polluted the sky, lightened the darkness and dimmed out the stars. Here, there was none of that, the sky was jet black, the stars shone with ferocious brilliance and the shadows on the ground were as dark as pitch.
The three airmen were resting, they’d been moving as fast as they could manage, trying to put as much ground between them and the crash site as possible. By their reckoning, they’d moved a good five miles, perhaps even six. But, trying to move fast in the soft sand was deadly tiring, their lungs felt red-raw and their legs seemed to have turned to rubber.
“Oh Damn.” Kozlowski whispered as if the desert was listening. He tapped Korrina on the arm and pointed. In the distance, hardly visible but quite distinct nonetheless, there were lights behind one of the lines of dunes. Either vehicle headlights or men on foot with powerful torches. Either way, they were clearly following the tracks left by Marisol’s crew.
“Up guys, we’ve got to move. They’re after us. Keep heading west and hope they’re trying casts. If we go far enough west, they may try north. And, whatever else you do, don’t forget to keep the beacon going.”
Sinai Coast, south of Gaza.
Captain Ivan Jaeger thought of his command as being the 23rd Panzer Armee. It pleased him to give the outrageously exaggerated designation to what was barely more than a company combat team. He had nine Walid armored personnel carriers, at first glance they looked like the old SdKfz-251 half-track but they had wheels at the back, not tracks. The Caliphate didn’t have the industrial ability to produce the elaborately engineered interleaved suspension of the older vehicles so they’d given the Walid four wheels at the back and a transmission that powered all six. The carriers were for his infantry, two platoons of them.
In addition he had a platoon of Chi-Teh-Kai tanks. They weren’t bad, they were fast, lightweight and heavily-gunned with a 100 mm cannon. For artillery he had a mortar section, a pair of 120 millimeters, also mounted in Walid carriers. Not a bad command for an officer. Mobile, it had lots of hitting power and his German veterans were more than a match for the tribal warriors they faced, most of the time anyway.
They’d had a report that there were large numbers of infidels in the bay ahead. The conclusion was obvious, they’d come to get the crew of the American bomber some damned fools had shot down earlier. As if they didn’t have enough to worry about, picking a confrontation with the Americans was the last thing they needed. Still, it might be just a bunch of refugees or even some real smugglers. It was time to find out. Fortunately, they had just the right people to do it.
Attached to his little command was another Caliphate vehicle, a small Safra armored car, barely more than a jeep. It had an officer and three men as its crew. Perfect for the job. Jaeger greeted the Caliphate officer effusively.
“My dear friend, I have not yet had a chance to tell you how much I value your services to my unit. Truly you are a great warrior. As such, I am going to ask you to accept the honor of leading us tonight. Surely, with such as you at our head, we cannot fail in our duty.”
The Caliphate officer jerked to attention with a crisp salute and his little Safra started off down the track towards the bay. In the shadows behind one of the tanks, a German Sergeant grinned nastily and ostentatiously put his fingers in his ears. Everybody else paused and waited silently, the air full of amused anticipation. They didn’t have to wait long, there was a flash of light then, a few seconds later, a dull boom and a brief crackle of rifle fire.
“Well, it appears we do have hostiles over there after all.” Jaeger eased up to the top of the tune and looked down the goat track. The little Safra was on its side and burning about fifty or sixty meters from where the track entered a jumble of rocks. If he looked hard he could see the bodies of the Caliphate officer and his men surrounding the destroyed vehicle. The explosion had been one of the American 3.5 inch rocket launchers, a big clumsy weapon. Jaeger couldn’t understand why the Americans kept it when they could have the much smaller, lighter and more effective RPG for the asking.
The rifle fire, now that was curious. It had been short, flat cracks, not the yapping noise of the Arisaka or the rhythmic jackhammer of the AK-47. All of Model’s Germans knew the sound of the AK well, not a few of them had nightmares featuring it. Jaeger was one of them. His second worst nightmare was waves of Russian infantry running at him, firing their AKs from the hip and screaming their ‘Urrah! Urrah!’
He preferred that to his worst nightmare. In 1947 he’d left his fiancée, a Luftwaffe telegraphist, in Berlin, they’d planned to marry in six months, that’s when he would have come back on his first leave from the front. But before that could happen, the Americans had dropped a dozen Hellburners on the city. And two hundred more on the rest of Germany. Ever so often, in his nightmares, he saw his fiancée holding her arms out to him for help as she melted in the fury of the American attack.
No, this rifle sound was new. It wasn’t even the deep thud of the American’s Garand. Well, it didn’t matter, he and his men would solve the mystery soon. The Battle of the Goat Track was about to start.
Sinai Desert, south of Gaza.
They couldn’t fool themselves any longer. The men with the lights were chasing them. For three hours they’d slowly but steadily closed the distance and now they were just the other side of the previous dune line. What had been a vague hint of lights was now a bright glare. It was over, there was no point in running any more. Kozlowski checked his inventory of weapons. Three .38 Small and Weak revolvers with 12 rounds each, three M-6 survival rifles with 20 rounds each - of .22 long rifle. They could put up a small fight, that was it.
“OK guys, this is it. We’ll hold here, it may just be a couple of guys and we can finish them before they realize we’ve stopped.”
That was nonsense, it wasn’t a case of vehicles or men with flashlights, it was vehicles and men with flashlights. Then, a miracle happened, without a sound to explain it, the lights went out. The men chasing them must have decided to turn back.