In 1942, Major Ray
Hawkins must assemble a unit of civilians and military to keep the Nazis from
releasing a desert djinn against the Allied forces in North Africa. They will
have to employ conventional warfare and unconventional witchcraft to accomplish
the mission.
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Devil in the Desert
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Office of Supernatural Directives Book 1
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by Russell James
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Genre: Historical Horror
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It is 1942 and a
secret group within the Nazi SS is on the hunt for objects of the occult,
hoping to harvest their power for wonder weapons to win the war. Its leader,
Gruppenfuhrer Karl Weitz, has more than military might behind him. He has
recruited the Ochre Witch, an Eastern European sorceress capable of adapting
what they seize to serve the Reich’s needs.
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Only one team can stop the Axis powers from winning World War II.
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Army Major Ray Hawkins is tasked with creating the Office of Supernatural
Directives to stop these fanatics. He assembles a team that includes a female
WASP pilot, an enlisted man with a passion for language and puzzles, a
mysterious American ex-pat from the French Foreign Legion, and a young Romany
woman who will need to embrace the mystic Gypsy teachings she’s spent her life
despising.
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Their first mission unfolds in Tunisia, where Weitz and the Ocher Witch plan to
release a djinn the locals call the Devil in the Desert. It wields the power to
spread debilitating fear. If Major Hawkins and his band cannot stop the djinn,
it will sow panic among the Americans and Rommel’s Afrika Korps will crush the
invasion force. But Hawkins’ new team has many weaknesses, and Weitz and the
Ocher Witch will exploit every one of them to win.
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Ray followed General Charles Vernon into a side room where an Indian British Army captain with a full moustache and beard sat at a wooden table. He wore a Sikh turban. Ray had heard that the Sikhs were ferocious in battle. He stood up, ramrod straight and stared through Ray. Ray was a fit 5’ 9”. This towering captain made him feel small.
“Major Hawkins, this is Captain Singh. He’s going to brief you on some top-secret material. None of which you can discuss with anyone once you leave this room.”
Ray and Singh exchanged nods and the three sat down. Singh’s back never strayed from being perfectly vertical. He opened a folder.
“You are briefed on the SS organization?”
“Yes, a parallel army staffed with Nazi fanatics more devoted to Hitler than to the Fatherland.”
“They are indeed fanatics, steeped in the nonsense ideology of the Aryan master race. That includes a firm belief in the occult and supernatural, which they consider the source of their superiority, a source that ‘cross-breeding’ with ‘inferior races’ has now denied them. Hitler himself is completely taken with such ideas.”
“Lunatics believe insane things.”
“There is an entire section within the SS devoted to such research. It is called the Ahnenerbe. They have agents combing the world for phenomena that the Germans can use to create wonder weapons and win the war.”
Ray laughed. “Well, good for them wasting resources chasing ghosts and Loch Ness monsters.”
“We wish that it was a waste of time.”
Singh took out another sheet of paper. This one had a drawing of a sea creature crushing several Phoenician galleys. The enormous creature looked like a hideous cross between a sperm whale and an octopus.
“Phoenicians called it a lotan. Powerful sea creatures able to destroy ships with impunity.”
Ray had read more than his share of fantasy and science fiction tales. “The kraken myth.”
“Similar, except these were no myth.”
Singh pulled out a black-and-white picture with TOP SECRET printed along one side. Despite the grainy quality, the subject was easy to make out, though hard to believe. An octopus-like creature held aloft two halves of a submarine. Tiny sailors hung on to the canted conning tower.
“The Ahnenerbe found them, resurrected them, created them. The plan was to have the Luftwaffe attack from the sky and a combination of U-boats and leviathans attack from the sea. They would starve England into surrender during the first winter.”
Ray couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He looked up at General Vernon, who was taking it all in stride and had apparently already known all of this.
“They’re animals,” Ray said. “They’d be no match for modern weapons.”
“Not animals, supernatural creatures. Impervious to conventional weapons.”
“But England survived. How?”
“The details are classified. But I can tell you that supernatural threats require supernatural remedies. That’s the best advice I can give you.”
“Advice? Why would I need advice about this?”
“We are about to jump into this war on the ground in a big way,” the general said. “The Brits had a whole section working on rooting out the Ahnenerbe and destroying whatever technology they’ve created. We’re going to start our own similar team. General Eisenhower picked you to lead it.”
“Me? I’m an infantry officer.”
“Which gives you the leadership experience. Eisenhower liked your fitness reports and your stint as company commander of that experimental light reconnaissance company. You showed the ability to think outside the box tactically.”
“Whoever runs this operation needs to have an open mind about anything the Nazis might try to find, no matter how out in left field it might be.”
“Our men stay close to the front,” Singh said. “Ready to respond to anything out of the ordinary advancing troops come across. Sometimes those clues have sent us deep into enemy territory to intervene before things got too far along for us to stop it.”
“Thank you, Captain Singh,” the general said. “That will be all.”
“Certainly, sir.” Singh collected his papers and left the room. He closed the door behind him.
“We need a unit to do what the Brits were doing,” the general said. “Your group will be called the Office of Supernatural Directives. You’ll have vague orders that give you a lot of latitude in going wherever you need to be. But you’ll have to be low-key. I think you can appreciate that your unit is best kept secret from the public and even within the military itself.”
“Yes, sir. People would think we were crazy.”
“Worse, they might think that you weren’t, and the last thing we need is a war-worried populace also starting to panic over supernatural threats. Hell, people would never sleep.”
Ray was starting to wonder if he ever would again.
“Are you up for the challenge, Major?”
He honestly didn’t know what to say. The whole idea was so bizarre, chasing Nazis who were chasing myths. He had an important staff job in logistics now that he was damn good at. Once American troops started taking the fight to the Axis, the soldiers who kept them supplied would be the difference between victory and defeat.
“It’s a lot to take in, sir. I think –”
The door opened. General Eisenhower stuck in his head. His eyes lit up when he saw Ray.
“General, you found Major Hawkins! Superb. Captain Singh has briefed you, Major?”
“Uh, yes, sir.”
“Outstanding. Great to have you lead this new team. I know I can count on you.”
The general disappeared and the door closed.
“Looks like the General accepted for you,” General Vernon said.
“Looks like he did.”
“Head over to G1 and start looking through personnel jackets. You need to assemble a team.”
***
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Trucks, tanks, and more!
There are a number of vehicles the OSD team comes across during their adventures in Devil in the Desert. I did a lot of research to pick specific types that would be historically accurate to the time period. Not wanting all that research and fun facts to go to waste, I’ll share them with you here.
German Army Kubelwagen
Americans had the Jeep. The Germans has a Kubelwagen.
Ferdinand Porsche, future-father of the 911 sports car, designed this inexpensive, lightweight military transport vehicle in 1938. The Volkswagen Beetle, a promised “people’s car” that the war put on hold provided the basis. Unlike the Jeep, this was only two-wheel- drive, but it still proved tough to get stuck, even with only a 985 cc engine.
Full-scale production of the Type 82 Kübelwagen started in February 1940 and continued with only minor changes all the way until 1945. By then 50,435 Kübelwagen vehicles had been produced. Only small modifications were implemented, mostly eliminating unnecessary parts and reinforcing others which had proved unequal to the task. Prototype versions were assembled with four-wheel-drive (Type 86) and different engines, but none offered a significant increase in performance or capability over the existing Type 82, so these designs went nowhere.
This interior picture show how utilitarian the interior was, and that the body was anything but bulletproof. But it had more room and more protection from the elements that the Jeep. In fact, it was captured and re-used by so many Allied soldiers that the U.S. Army even made a field manual for its troops so they could repair and maintain one correctly.
M3 “Lee” Medium Battle Tank
As entering World War II looked inevitable, American armor dated from the last big war and was hopelessly obsolete. The stopgap answer was the M3 Lee, officially Medium Tank, M3. It carried a 75 mm main gun mounted in the tank body, and a smaller cannon in the turret. It was relatively easy to build, relatively inexpensive ($55,000), and the main gun packed a decent punch against the armor rolling when it was first deployed in 1941.
But the design had some serious drawbacks. First, unlike every other tank in WWII, the main gun wasn’t in the turret. That meant you needed to spin the entire tank to aim the gun. There was a reason no other army had tanks like this. Other drawbacks included a high silhouette, the inability to take a hull-down firing position, riveted construction that could send popped rivets into the crew area when an enemy round hit, and poor off-road performance. But until the superior M4 Shermans arrived, this was all the Americans had. Production ended in 1942 after making 6,258 of them.
The turret was produced in two forms, one with the main gun on the right, like the picture for American standards, and one with the main gun on the left for British requirements. American tanks were called “Lee,” named after Confederate general Robert E. Lee, British tanks were known as “Grant,” named after Union general Ulysses S. Grant. Nearly a thousand M3s were supplied to the Soviet military under Lend-Lease between 1941 and 1943.
In the Pacific, where it was a match for the lighter Japanese Army tanks, the M3 did soldier on until 1945.
Opel Blitz Kfz 305 Ambulance
The OSD is not above using captured vehicles to get around, especially since masquerading as the 417th Medical Holding Battalion on paper, they can’t very well requisition one without getting unwanted attention. One of the vehicles they use is a German Army Opel Blitz Ambulance.
The Opel Blitz was the workhorse truck of the German Army. First delivered to the Wehrmacht in 1937, by the time bombing destroyed the factory in 1944, over 130,000 had been delivered. It could carry a payload of over 2.5 tons, travel up to 50 miles per hour, and had a range of over 200 miles. All this was accomplished with only a 74 hp engine. The truck was renowned for its hardiness and ease of repair.
There were literally dozens of variants of what was officially named the Kfz 305. One of these was an ambulance version that definitely saw service with the Afrika Korps in Libya and Tunisia. As these were the most likely vehicles to escape destruction in combat, it seemed a good choice to be the truck Major Ray Hawkins can get his hands on.
All the color pictures here I took at the American Heritage Museum in Stow, Massachusetts. I highly recommend a visit there to see their excellent collection of military vehicles from many time periods, but especially World War II. They even let you drive a Sherman tank.
Those are a few of the vehicles mentioned in Devil in the Desert. I hope they matched what my descriptions planted in your mind’s eye.
If you haven’t gotten a copy of this WWII horror thriller yet, head over to Amazon and get yourself one today.
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Russell R. James was raised on Long Island, New York and spent too much time watching
Chiller, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, and Dark Shadows, despite his parents’
warnings. Bookshelves full of Stephen King and Edgar Allan Poe didn’t make
things better. He graduated from Cornell University and the University of
Central Florida.
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After flying helicopters with the U.S. Army and a career as a technical writer, he
now spins twisted tales best read in daylight, including horror thrillers Dark
Inspiration, Q Island, and The Playing Card Killer. He authored the Grant
Coleman Adventures series starting with Cavern of the Damned and the Ranger
Kathy West series starting with Claws. He resides in sunny Florida. His wife
reads his work, rolls her eyes, and says “There is something seriously
wrong with you.”
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