“Nothing’s focused here by the looks of it,” said Finn.
“Never can tell,” Hilts replied.
They kept moving forward until finally they reached the entrance to the canyon. The opening was barely fifty feet across, one side jutting out a little more than the other so that in anything less than full sunlight shadows would make the opening virtually invisible. Finn and Hilts continued onward into the canyon itself, the rock cliffs rising claustrophobically on either side, narrowing so that the tracks of the Hummer came within a foot or two of the enclosure.
“They weren’t first in,” said Hilts, nodding toward a number of other, fainter tracks. “Someone knew about this place a long time ago.”
A hundred feet along, the canyon suddenly took a sharp turn to the right, straightened, and then became narrower still. Looking at the sandstone walls, Finn could see definite gouges where the heavy bumpers of a truck had dug into the rock. As quickly as it straightened the canyon curved again, this time to the left. A hundred yards farther on the narrow gauntlet broadened into a small, high-sided valley. Hilts and Finn stopped in their tracks, staring into a frozen moment from events that had happened long before they were born.
“My God, what happened here?” Finn whispered, lifting a hand to shade her eyes. The valley floor before them was a tableau of horror. Hilts lifted his Nikon, popped the lens cap and began shooting.
Directly in front of where they stood was the carcass of some sort of military vehicle, an open truck riding on what must have been enormous tires if the size of the rims and the huge curving fenders were any indication. The tires themselves had disappeared, whatever was left of the rubber having disintegrated long ago. The vehicle had been crewed by three men, a driver, a machine gunner beside him, and a man operating a heavy-barreled antitank gun in the rear. The remains of those three men were still in the truck. The mummified body of the driver was thrown back in his seat, his skull grinning, still covered with a parchment of skin and a few ragged strings of scalp. The eye sockets were filled with caked grime and grit from more than half a century of sandstorms and exposure. The machine gunner was a crumpled sack of bones on the cracked leather seat beside the driver, held together by nothing more than the tattered remnants of his uniform. An old ball-shaped helmet sat askew on a headless spine. The third member of the crew might have lived a little longer than his companions; what was left of his body was crouched against the tailgate of the vehicle, head ducked down, the leathery sticks of his arms still wrapped around the empty shell of his desiccated rib cage, as though trying to fend off the chill of death throughout eternity.
Hilts stepped forward and ran his hand over the flank of the vehicle. There were dozens of bullet holes puckering the metal, the holes just big enough to poke his pinkie finger into. Forty-five caliber or less. A light machine gun. The truck was riddled like a tin can used for target practice.
“Italian,” the photographer said, stooping to inspect a faded unit designation on the rear of the vehicle. “One hundred and third Compagnie Arditi Camionettisti, a jeep scouting company. They called these trucks Sahariane. It was pretty much the first vehicle specially designed for the desert.” He stood up.
“Who shot them?” Finn queried.
“They did,” answered Hilts, pointing. A hundred yards farther down the valley was a second tableau, this one made up of two trucks, a smaller jeep-like vehicle, and a rough camp spread out on the valley floor, complete with the skeletal remains of several small tents laid out in a half circle around a built-up fire pit, a row of abandoned jerry cans, and a long slit trench. The jeep looked as though it had suffered a direct hit from the big antitank gun on the Italian vehicle. It was blasted and charred, the windshield disintegrated, the wheel rims sunk into the ground. The other two larger trucks were in better shape, their tires vanished but the camouflage markings still visible.
Reaching the vehicles and the ghostly remains of the campsite, Hilts began taking more photographs, concentrating on the work unit markings on the trucks and the old equipment scattered around the camp.
“Red and black stripes with a white scorpion. Guards unit, LRDG. The truck is a thirty hundred-weight British Chevy.”
“How do you know all this stuff?”
“I built a lot of models when I was a kid. There was even a TV series about these guys called the Rat Patrol I watched in reruns. It starred Christopher George, if you remember him. Kind of like a cut-rate George Peppard.”
“No.”
“So much for his career.”
“There’s no bodies,” said Finn, looking around the campsite. “There should be bodies.”
Hilts turned and looked back at the Italian truck. He saw immediately that the bullets that had killed the three-man crew probably hadn’t come from the direction of the camp. In the first place, the trucks and the burnt-out jeep were placed wrongly, and in the second place, the machine guns on the British vehicles were too heavy: big Vickerses and Brownings as well as an even larger Boys Anti-tank gun mounted on the rear of the second truck. Hilts looked up at the surrounding ragged walls of the steep little valley and then he knew.
“It was an ambush,” he said finally, kicking one of the old stamped tin Shell Benzene brand fuel containers with the toe of his boot. “They heard the Italians coming so they went up into the rocks and waited for them. That’s why they never got any farther into the valley. Picked them off from above.”
Finn walked through the camp, stooping every now and again to examine a rusted piece of equipment or some other faded artifact. “Two trucks and that jeep thing. How many men would that be?”
“Hard to say, as many as a dozen, but since there’s only three tents it was probably more like six-two men to each. Shorthanded. Maybe they’d lost a few.”
“Six against three and they didn’t win?”
“Who said they lost?”
“The trucks are still here. Why didn’t they leave? No fuel, no water maybe?”
Hilts shook his head. “These were pretty smart people. They had fuel dumps everywhere and they always left themselves enough gas to get to one, or back to base, whichever was nearer. And all the trucks had condensers for their radiators. Water wouldn’t have been a problem.”
“Something happened, that’s for sure.” Finn did a slow, three-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn. “It’s an interesting little mystery, but surely this isn’t what Adamson was after?”
“I doubt it,” agreed Hilts.
“We should keep looking,” said Finn. “And we should keep an eye on the time.” She looked at her watch. They’d been on the ground for almost half an hour.
Hilts looked into the remains of the tents and then climbed up on the trucks. He jumped down from the bed of the second vehicle and joined Finn, who was looking into the narrow, shallow trench that stood behind the blockading row of sandbags that faced the canyon entrance to the valley.
“Find anything?”
“Tin cans-more corned beef-condensed milk, looks like a weird Birkenstock, a stove made out of a ten-gallon drum with holes punched in it, and this.” She handed up the remains of what had once been a black beret. There was a tarnished, sand-scarred badge clipped on the front.
“A scorpion in a circle.” He nodded. “Non Vi Sed Arte-Not by Strength, by Guile. It’s an LRDG cap badge and beret.” Hilts reached out and helped her up out of the pit.
“What would have made the Italians come into the canyon in the first place? How would they have found it?” Finn asked as they made their way through the camp and continued to explore.
“Same way we did, I guess,” said Hilts. “They followed the tracks of the LRDG trucks.”
“Okay, then why did the Brits come in?”
“Looking for a place to camp?”
“Or maybe they were following someone else’s tracks as well.”