So it was that the famous Hungarian explorer would come to make a new discovery that morning, and see a strange group of men, tall, strangely attired, and with weapons the like of which no man alive in his world had ever known. The sun rose, painting the stark desert terrain in a rosy hue, and the light soon illuminated the whole valley floor to the south. To his amazement, there, stretching for many kilometers in a long dark column, was a large mechanized force. He could clearly make out eight wheeled armored cars in the vanguard, and behind them he could see tanks. There were other odd looking vehicles, topped with strange metal discs spinning fitfully, and whiskery antennae waving in the morning breeze as the column slowly came to a halt.
What he had seen was actually Reeves 12th Royal Lancers, the eight wheeled Dragons and a line of Scimitars in 2nd Squadron that was now following. The Scimitar was a vehicle that bore some resemblance to what Almasy would conceive of as a tank of this era. Even the 30mm RARDEN cannon looked to be about the size and scale of a typical 2 Pounder. Had he seen a Challenger II, his mind might be on other things now, but as it stood, the presence of this force was enough to get him moving again.
Good god, he thought. What unit was this? It looked to be at least another full battalion in strength, and he could already begin to hear the rattle of the tanks rolling over the cold desert ground. I have to get word of this to Rommel!
“Hans!” he rasped. “Get to the nearest radio. No time to get back there. Tell Rommel we have visitors! That looks to be a battalion of British armor out there, and it’s heading north, right on our exposed right flank!”
Laszlo Almasy had never really found the lost realm of Zerzura, but he had just discovered something that was about to change the entire history of the Second World War. And his fate, in the maelstrom that was now emerging from the vermillion shadows of a distant ridge, would be the least of things to be taken by the storm.
Rommel reacted to the news with great surprise. A British armor battalion? Behind him? Yet the evidence was plain for him to see. The lone scout car from a small oasis patrol had come barreling in on its last legs just moments ago. The back end of the vehicle was shot to pieces by what looked to be a round in the caliber of a twenty to thirty millimeter flak gun. It might have been exactly that, he thought. The British had been throwing together small ad hoc columns, like a German kampfgruppe might be formed. They would scrape together whatever they could find, trucks, stray tanks, a few flak guns, or a single towed artillery piece.
They must have run into one of the British Jock Columns, he thought, smiling. His signalmen had picked up the phrase on radio intercepts, though he did not yet know where the handle came from. The men of the Oasis patrol were wide eyed with reports of new, fast moving British tanks that could engage from very long ranges and seemed to have eyes in every direction.
“Their optics must be superb,” one man had reported. “They hit us from well over two kilometers-and well before dawn! The moon was down and it was still very dark. We lost three vehicles in the first minute, and I was only lucky to have escaped because I was at the back of the column and had the good sense to get here with this report!”
Almasy’sreport had come in soon after, a battalion sized force of tanks and armored cars was on his deep right flank. How could this have happened without him knowing about it earlier? That damn sand storm, he muttered inwardly. It had prevented him from getting airborne in the Storch to make certain he would not suffer a surprise like this. Thank god I had the foresight to send that Hungarian out last night. It seemed his enemy had more forces at his disposal than Berlin claimed. The German spy network in Cairo had informed him of the arrival of the 2nd New Zealand Division, but not this other formation. Angry at himself as much as anything else, he stormed out, leaving his adjutant standing there with two staff officers. They had seen him do this many times, and knew the General was going off to war, and might not be found again for hours.
