3. THE SCARLET RIDERS
Chapter 1
THE STRANGERS
“This is all utter nonsense,” grumbles Fritz Mundt, the German, the largest and strongest man in the French Foreign Legion, as he pulls out an enormous red silk handkerchief and wipes the sweat from his broad neck. He supposedly received this garish handkerchief once in Algiers from a cheerful Algerian widow, who subsequently relieved him of all his holiday pay after he had downed a third bottle of sour wine. “A medal has to be given to some old Arab, and then we have to slog for miles through the sand and heat to go give it to him. Why couldn’t D’Arlan just take a horse and deliver the lousy medal himself?”
“You’ll complain yourself to death yet, big fellow,” says Teuns Stegmann, the tall, blond South African slogging through the searing Saharan sun beside the German. “You ought to feel honoured that the Capitaine chose a few of us to accompany him on this mission. This is a special assignment, and old El Abbas deserves to receive a medal from the French government. You can almost count loyal Arabs on one hand, and old El Abbas is one of them. Tomorrow he turns seventy, and he has never caused the Foreign Legion any trouble. He is a good friend to France, so give the devil his due.”
“What about the colonel, couldn’t he perhaps have delivered this wretched medal too? He could just take a horse.”
“Because Colonel Le Clerq has other duties,” mocks Jack Ritchie, the Englishman walking on Fritz’s other side. “The colonel has more to do than hand out medals. That’s why he sent D’Arlan. Besides, who knows what pretty little thing you might not run into tonight in the oasis El Wadak...”
Fritz just snorts, and it is perfectly clear that all this talk does nothing to alleviate his concerns. He walks on silently, staring ahead through the heat. He sees Captain D’Arlan’s kepi’s long white neck-cover fluttering in the light breeze, where he strides at the head of his small column of twenty men through the burning sand.
“Just take a sip of water, Marshal Rommel,” jests Podolski the Pole from behind Fritz, offering his water flask. Fritz’s own flask had been empty for an hour already, as it takes a lot of water to keep his large frame going.
Fritz snatches the flask from Podolski’s hand and takes a large gulp. The next moment, he jerks forward, coughing and sputtering, because Podolski had laced his water rather strongly with brandy. Fritz practically bellows as he coughs and chokes, and D’Arlan, the small, sunburnt man at the head of the line of men, is just about to turn around to see what is happening, when his eye catches something else...
“Halt!” calls the captain commandingly, and the men need no second invitation to stop. They lean on their long rifles and then, for the first time, truly look up. The sun hangs low above the western horizon, and a cool breeze has risen from the direction of the Atlas Mountains, which tower far to the right through the blue haze.
“What the devil,” says D’Arlan, raising his binoculars to his eyes.
They are on a large sandy plateau, as flat as a tabletop. But near the southwestern end of the plateau lies a long, steep dune, formed during last week’s sandstorm.
D’Arlan walks a few paces forward as if thinking he might see better that way.
He quickly adjusts his binoculars.
Is he seeing things, dreaming dreams?
It simply cannot be! No, his senses must be deceiving him.
Legionnaires... No! And yet it is... What on earth is going on?
The men all see it with their naked eyes, although they cannot discern the details as well as D’Arlan. Bent far forward, Fritz Mundt walks quickly towards the captain, stops beside him and says, “Mon Capitaine, what on earth
