The Rat Patrol: Five More Graves to Cairo ( 2010)

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The Rat Patrol: Five More Graves to Cairo, I

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The Rat Patrol: Five More Graves to Cairo

For Escrecito Scofifitto

By Cardenio1611

Rommel’s tanks had driven the Allied troops into retreat this August day in North Africa in 1942. The sky was red with heat and warmer from the blood. The virtual parade of tanks across the desert was flanked by the infantry. A German soldier saw what looked like a staff car squashed and discarded against a dune. He raised his rifle when he saw some movement.

“Halt! Wer ist da? Komm raus, oder ich schieße (Halt! Who is there? Come out, or I will shoot!)” he shouted. From behind the car, two sets of feminine hands immediately shot up. Quickly, two tall women dressed in fatigues with armbands carrying the symbol of a cross on their sleeves ran out. “Stoppen! Stoppen! Wir sind Schwestern. Wir sind amerikanische Krankenschwestern (Stop! Stop! We are nurses! We are American nurses!” cried the blonde, trembling.

Very soon, the two women were in the back seat of a jeep, holding each other, as an officer in an SS uniform pointed his luger at him. “Sind Sie Spione? (Are you spies?),” he asked quietly. When they stared at him, he suddenly shouted, “Sind Sie Spione?”

The blonde, still trembling, said, “Listen, buddy. As to that German back there, I just picked up some words, you know, phrases, ‘Sätze,’ from my pop’s bar back in Philadelphia. After that, I could talk to you in Irish better than I could German. ‘Cause, you know, my family’s Irish.”

He stared at her, not understanding. Struggling to find the words, she said, “"Ich irischen bin!”

The officer looked amazed. “Irischen?” He said, confused, since he did not know that Ireland had an army in the war.

Soon, the jeep pulled in front a long stone building that bore the sign, “Empress of Britanny.” The SS officer escorted them at gunpoint into the building where they were greeted by a fat, mustached man wearing a turban. “Welcome, welcome. I am Fasid. This is my hotel.” But his mouth dropped when he saw the gun and he backed away, pointing the officer to Fasid’s right.

They were brought to what appeared to be the kitchen. A screen door led to the outside. There were two tall women wearing SS uniforms and caps leaning against cabinets. In the center of the room, seated at an oaken table that would have been better suited to a conference room than a kitchen, sat a tall, distinguished man wearing a pale tunic that had red epaulets. He was eating sausage and onions from a plate. “Ich bin Rommel,” he said without looking up.

“Rommel,” said the blonde. “Field Marshall Rommel?”

“Generalfeldmarschall Rommel,” he corrected her, looking up. “I am sorry. I was told you spoke German.”

“Just a little. I am Jane Morrow, R.N. That means Registered Nurse, and this is Patty Vance, she’s a nurse too. I was telling this man with a gun that we were being transported, our group was attacked, and they left us behind!”

Rommel returned to his sausage. “That is the type of story that a spy would tell, of course.”

Patty summoned enough courage to speak up. “We are not spies. We are nurses.”

Rommel glanced at the new speaker but then noticed that Jane was staring at one of the SS women. “Ah, I see you are surprised to see women who are in the SS. We have them, mostly guarding the camps that have the Jews. But Hilda is special. Step forward, Hilda.”

She was slender but muscular, sleek in her black tunic, tight pants, and boots. She seemed to reluctantly leave the cabinet she was leaning against and moved slowly forward. “Hilda, and Greta too,” he said, alluding to the second women, who had a fuller figure,” is special, and I brought her here to do the things that are too unpleasant for me to even think about. Hilda,” he said, conveying an unspoken order with his voice.

Hilda walked over to Jane and began to frisk her. “Oh, but we were searched outside—“

Hilda slapped Jane hard with the back of her hand. “Why—“ Jane cried out.

Hilda slapped her again, and tears came to Jane’s eyes as blood tricked from the side of her mouth. Hilda reached up and unbuttoned Jane’s blouse and placed her hands firmly on Jane’s bra. She patted her there and then brought her hands, still patting, down to her hips and then jammed her right hand up Jane’s crotch, causing to wince but not cry out. Smirking, Hilda reached up and read off Jane’s dogtags. “Jane Morrow. It says she is a nurse,” she reported with heavily accented English. Behind them, Patty was searching Patty in a similarly rough manner. Hilda turned to walk away. Jane started to button her blouse, and Hilda whirled around and slapped her again.

“"Das ist genug!" Rommel said quietly, declining to look up at the frightened woman with the open blouse. “Where was your ‘group’ going?” he asked Jane.

“I don’t know!” she said, her voice high and cracking. “We go where we are told. We are just nurses.”

“I see,” Rommel said quietly. “This is what will now happen. Hilda and Greta will take you and her friend to a special place of hers. If when she is finished she decides that you are what you say you are, you will be sent to a camp for prisoners. If she decides you are a spy,” and with that, he shrugged. “In either case, I will not see you again. Abschied,” he said, returning his full attention to his meal.

“No! No!” Jane and Patty screamed as Hilda and Gretta dragged them through a long corridor to what appeared to be a shed that housed burlap bags of flour and grain. In the center of the shed was a chair with straps on the arm rests.

“What are you going to do?” Jane cried out.

Hilda shifted her position to being able to drag Jane into the chair as Greta closed the door. As Hilda moved a step beside her and Jane heard the door close, Jane suddenly out with her flat right hand into Hilda’s neck. The woman’s eyes bugged out and she gasped and staggered forward but Jane held her and brought her left fist into Hilda’s belly, doubling over. Greta was caught off guard, and Patty swung a haymaker into her jaw, sending her sprawling over some bags of grain, as Jane finished Hilda off by bringing both fists down against the back of her head, sending her to the floor in a heap.




The Rat Patrol: Five More Graves to Cairo, II

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Jane stood up straight, suddenly appearing two inches taller than she had a few seconds before. She kicked the fallen Hilda in her belly. “That’s for pawing me,” she hissed. Kicking her again, she spat, “And that’s for what you’ve done to people in that chair!?”

Patty held her back. “You know you can’t bloody the uniform!” Trying to control herself Jane nodded, as Patty ran to the door, looked out, and then closed the door and propped a log under the knob, which Hilda and Greta had doubtless used the same way.

Jane dragged Hilda closer to the chair and spread her out in front of it as Patty dumped Greta next to her. They knelt and started to unbutton the women’s blouses. “Just the uniforms,” Patty said, and turned to see Jane looking down in amazement at Hilda’s silk, bone-white bra.

“Look at this,” she said, unbuttoning Hilda’s pants to reveal similar panties. “Feel it! It's so smooth. If Rommel likes, Rommel likes.”

“And me with a bra made of burlap,” Patty said.

“Mine’s imitation burlap. You know, if we take these and then survive, I bet we can rent them to the girls back at camp for two bucks a night. We’ll make a fortune—“

“If we live!”

“Yeah, if we live. That gives us something to live for. Strip them down to their monkey suits.”

In a few seconds, both Nazis were naked, and Jane and Patty were stripping down. Also naked, Jane looked down for a second at Hilda. In a way, they were almost twins—tall, firm breasts, taut bellies. How are we different?, Jane wondered. We both were trained to kill—it’s just that I don’t do it to helpless nurses and Jews. She thought that it would be all right to kick her now that Hilda was naked. But she held back and dressed quickly in her uniform.

Jane and Patty dragged the two women into the corner, propped them in sitting positions against the wall, and lay Greta’s head on Hilda’s shoulder. Patty dragged sacks over to cover the women and hide them from view as Jane drew Hilda’s luger from her holster and checked to see it had all eight bullets in the cartridge. She pulled Hilda’s cap tight over her hair.

“Thirty seconds from now!” Jane said, opening the door. Patty walked behind her but then cut over to go outside. Jane continued walking, forcefully, quickly, passing male soldiers who nodded in respect, quickly moving, until she came to the kitchen. She pulled out the luger just as Rommel looked up. His eyes widened as she aimed to shoot him right between the eyes.

Someone hit her arm. The barrel moved to the left and the bullet went through Rommel’s right shoulder. It had been Fasid, shouting, “No! You will get me in trouble!” She struck him with the gun, knocking him down, turned to fire again, and saw that Rommel had fallen to the floor. At the sound of the shot, soldiers were running toward the screen door, one fired his rifle at her, the bullet piercing the screening, missing her, she fired and killed him, and then tried to go forward to find Rommel. He was out of sight, seemingly hiding under the table, hugging its base. She fired three shots through the table, and felt more bullets whizzing by her. She had no choice. She fired three shots, killing three soldiers, and her gun was empty. She threw it down in disgust, grabbed three knives from the table, and ran through the corridor to where Patty had gone.

Three soldiers were in a crouched position, but Jane threw two knives from either hand, hitting two of them between the eyes. She readied the remaining knife, but the soldier turned and ran. Sighing, Jane tossed the knife away and ran forward just as Patty drove by in a stolen truck.

Once inside, Patty asked anxiously, “Yes!”

“No,” Jane almost whispered. “I hit him, but no.”

They drove the short way to the rendezvous where they saw the plane waiting for them.

Back at camp, Jane finished telling Captain Mattingly what had happened. “I’m sorry, sir. I messed up.”

“Messed up!” the stocky, bespectacled officer repeated with variation. “Our reports are that he’s been flown to Germany to care for his wounds. The Nazis are saying he was wounded in an air strike. In just the past hour, while they floundered around in his absence, we’ve broken out, have turned, and are routing them. It’s probably better this way,” he said, patting her on the shoulder. “It’s shows everyone he’s not invincible. If you’d killed him, they would have said he’d gone on vacation.”

Jane nodded. “I still messed up, and I hope you’ll give me another chance some day.”

Walking from the briefing, Patty, trying to enliven her sullen friend, said, “And hey, we still rent their underwear out at two bucks a night.”

Jane smiled and held out five fingers. “The only thing I wonder is, when they stood Hilda and Greta against he wall and shot ‘em, did they leave them naked or dress them?”

End

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