The Wolf's Hour

Начало книги

"And then the clouds were coming after him, about to engulf him. He ran, but he couldn't run fast enough. Faster. Faster. The storm roaring on his heels. Faster. His heart, pounding. A banshee scream in his ears. Faster…."

Prologue

1

The war went on.

By February 1941, it had leaped like a firestorm from Europe to the shores of northwest Africa, where Hitler’s commander of German troops, a competent officer named Erwin Rommel, arrived in Tripoli in support of the Italians and began to drive the British force back to the Nile.

Along the coastal road from Benghazi through El Aghelia, Agedabia, and Mechili, the Panzer Army Africa’s tanks and soldiers continued to press across a land of torturous heat, sandstorms, gullies that had forgotten the taste of rain, and sheer cliffs that dropped hundreds of feet to flat plains of nothing. The mass of men, anti-armor guns, trucks, and tanks marched east, taking the fortress of Tobruk from the British on June 20, 1942, and advancing toward the glittering prize Hitler so desired: the Suez Canal. With control of that vital waterway, Nazi Germany would be able to choke off Allied shipping and continue the eastward march, driving into the soft underbelly of Russia.

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