Free The Rat Patrol 2: Desert Danger by David King Page A

with."
    "In a box like this we're still going to bust out the CO?" Tully asked doubtfully.
    "That's what we came for, isn't it?" Troy said sharply.
    At the bottom of the steps, Troy opened the door a hair at a time until the crack was wide enough for the pupil of his eye. Fuzzily he saw the guard who had been sleeping at the cell door standing erect at rigid attention. The other guard stood beside the door to Dietrich's office. He was faced straight down the hall. The door to Dietrich's office was still open and through it Troy had glimpses of Dietrich striding back and forth and heard his wrathful voice. With a steady, patient hand, Troy closed the crack in the door and led the silent way back to the roof.
    "No good," he told Tully. "They'd shoot the minute the door opened."
    "What you aim to do, Sarge?" Tully asked hopelessly.
    "Give me the rope," Troy said. He fixed a loop around his waist and walked to the parapet on the bazaar side of the building, leaning over at the point he positioned the room on the hallway below. He squinted into the night until he thought could discern a blacker darkness that indicated a window ledge a few feet to the left. "You're going over the side," he told Tully, sitting with his feet braced against the parapet. "You're going to see how they've got the shutters on Wilson's room fixed. If we're lucky, you're going to open that room with your Bowie knife."
    "I was afraid you'd think of something like that, Sarge," Tully moaned. "What'll I do if it's nailed shut?"
    "Pick out the nails with your knife," Troy said.
    Tully dropped his burnoose and robe, gave his belt a hitch to the side so his knife rode well to the front. He grasped the plaited nylon rope with both hands and eased himself over the parapet onto the wall.
    Troy leaned back, legs riveted to the parapet and grabbed the rope, pulling it toward him to ease the strain around his waist. He felt the dead and dangling weight of the lanky Kentuckian in his arms, on his back, against his legs. He closed his eyes against the stinging sweat that streamed into them as the weight grew almost unbearable. And then, while the line remained taut, the weight on it lessened. Good boy, Troy thought, his toes have found the ledge.
    Troy let out his breath and flexed his muscles briefly. From below he heard the rasp of metal and the screak of a shutter swinging on its hinge. It was strange, Troy thought, and then so abruptly that he fell backward on the paved roof, all the weight left the line. He sat up in his old position at once and almost immediately the line was tight. Now the weight was greater than he could resist and he felt himself being pulled forward and his knees buckling. He tugged at the rope until the muscles in his forearms and biceps knotted and cramped and then all the tension was gone and he fell flat on the roof. When he opened his eyes, a figure was clambering over the parapet.
    "I knew I could depend on the Rat Patrol," Colonel Dan Wilson said. "Shove over and let me help on the rope."
    Troy braced his feet flat against the wall again and Wilson grasped the rope ahead of his hands. Together they heaved back as the line grew heavy. Tully was laughing when he tumbled onto the roof.
    "What's the joke?" Troy gasped and lay back, breathing deeply and trying to pump some air back into his tortured lungs.
    "Take a minute," Wilson said soothingly. "Get your wind."
    Troy bit back the words that sprang from his throat. "Let me tell you, Sarge," Tully said, lying beside Troy. "That window had been barred from the inside just like that garden door. When the Jerries fixed it up for a cell, they just moved the brackets and the bar to the outside." 
    "That was a break," Troy agreed, sitting up and winding the rope around his wrist. "But I don't see it's belly-laughing funny."
    "Look, Sarge," Tully said, still laughing. "I barred it again from the outside when I left. It's like magic. How did the prisoner escape from the barred, locked and guarded