tion id="udf0e4a4b-261a-5df8-a6da-46d926b8e4f8">
Desert Raiders
SHAUN CLARKE
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by 22 Books/Bloomsbury Publishing plc 1994
Copyright © Bloomsbury Publishing plc 1994
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016
Cover photographs © Popperfoto/Getty Images (soldiers in jeep); Keystone/Getty Images (planes); Shutterstock.com (textures)
Shaun Clarke asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008155001
Ebook Edition © November 2015 ISBN: 9780008155018
Version: 2015-10-15
Contents
OTHER TITLES IN THE SAS OPERATION SERIES
‘It’s one helluva sight to behold,’ Lieutenant Derek ‘Dirk’ Greaves said, shading his eyes with his hand. ‘Very impressive indeed.’
The camp was located just outside Mersa Brega, in Libya’s vast Cyrenaica Desert. It was a sprawling collection of tents, lean-tos, makeshift huts and caravans overflowing with the men of the 7th Armoured Division and Selby Force, 4th Indian Division, 6th Australian Division, Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME), Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), sappers, a Cypriot labour battalion and the hundreds of ragged Italian 10th Army soldiers packed into POW cages near the southern perimeter. Though holding a vast array of artillery and tanks, the camp was also protected by British infantry divisions spread out in a defensive line consisting of a series of ‘boxes’ – slit trenches for the infantry, gun pits for the artillery – surrounded by barbed wire and minefields, though these were far away, well spread out, and out of sight.
The camp itself, Greaves noticed, was ringed with the 25-pounders of the Royal Horse Artillery, an equal number of British six-pounders, Bofors anti-aircraft guns, stone sangars manned by teams equipped with Bren guns and 0.5-inch Browning machine-guns, and even some captured Italian 75mm and 79mm guns to be manned by infantrymen, signallers, orderlies and cooks if battle commenced. It also contained what appeared to be hundreds of armoured vehicles. All dispersed evenly behind the line, these included the M3 Stuart light tanks of the 8th King’s Royal Irish Hussars, the Grant tanks of the Royal Gloucester Hussars, the Matildas of the 7th Royal Tank Regiment, the Bren carriers of the 9th Rifle Brigade, and Marmon Herrington armoured cars.
Beyond the perimeter, on all sides, Greaves saw nothing but the ‘blue’ – the soldiers’ term for the desert – stretching away to the dust-wreathed horizon under a brilliant azure sky. By night the desert was freezing cold, but during the day the heat was fierce, shimmering up off the desert floor, hurting the eyes, making the sweat flow and leading to short tempers and fist fights. Tempers were also sparked off by the constant dust, blowing every second of every day and night, covering everything, filling the throat and nostrils, getting into food and drink