The old trimotor Junkers Ju52/3m transport aircraft droned south just skimming the waves of the Mediterranean Sea, using the darkness to avoid the roving British fighters based on the island of Malta.

Somewhere inside the rattling fuselage of the Iron Annie, a Luftwaffe Herferinnen; a member of the Women’s Air Force, in a blue, open-necked uniform under a leather jacket to keep out the biting cold, huddled deeper into a pile of sacks and boxes. Terribly air-sick after two hours of enduring the shaking and the vibration caused by the aircraft’s unsynchronized engines, Elsa was already regretting her decision.

Elsa Frick had boarded a train at Berlin and traveled in some comfort to Rome via Switzerland thanks to the cozy arrangement the Reich had with the Swiss. Smartly transferred to another train in the Italian capitol, although with just enough time to send a brief, cryptic message on a postcard to her friend Greta, she ended her long and tiring journey at a military airfield in Southern Italy near the straits linking the mainland with Sicily, where she was added to the manifest for an immediate flight to Tripoli, together with half a dozen other replacements, several bags of mail and other more mysterious, though no doubt vital, parcels and boxes. Elsa had never flown in an aircraft before and it turned out that her stomach was not well-suited to the activity, and her fellow passengers thought it quite amusing to see an air force auxiliary throwing up. At least it took their minds off the distinct possibility that they were likely to end up in the drink after being riddled by British bullets and cannon shells.

The proposition Thomas Kolb had dangled before Elsa that night barely a week before at Schloss Wewelsburg had been the putting into action of a scheme devised by the Abwehr to assassinate General Charles de Gaulle. As the self-proclaimed leader of the Free French forces, after having escaped to England after the fall of France in 1940, de Gaulle had already been sentenced to death, in absentia by a French military court for treason. There were many Frenchmen who saw the general as a traitor rather than a patriot, and the Abwehr was keen to exploit these rifts in Allied solidarity while the rival SD, for the moment, seemed to have less interest in the matter.

At last the transport aircraft bumped down at Castel Benito airfield near Tripoli, and thankfully Elsa disembarked, her dignity in tatters and her legs wobbly. She was given little time to collect herself before she found herself sitting next to an Italian driver in the cab of a dusty, overloaded Lancia 6-ton truck moving slowly eastward along the coastal road towards Benghazi. The convoy she was a part of was fortunate to avoid being caught up in the activities of the British SAS and Long Range Desert Group raiders who were active in the area at that time. They crossed the bridge at the Wadi Tamet nervously but safely. The night before the airfield at Tamet had been attacked and a number of parked bombers destroyed by daring raiders placing timed bombs onto the tails of the aircraft, and they could see the Italian Ghiblis reconnaissance aircraft flying over the low hills to the south in search of the fleeing British. There were even raids by British patrols along the coastal road at night, with machine-gun fire poured into the roadside bivouacs and supply dumps. As a result, everybody seemed nervous and trigger-happy. There was an enforced halt at Nofilia for no apparent reason with the truck being directed to the side of the road by a military carabiniere. In the rear areas the Germans seemed to be heavily outnumbered by their Italian allies. Elsa grew hot and bored sitting in the cab, unlike her driver who was soon settling back to catch up on his sleep. As nothing seemed to be happening, she clambered down from the truck to stretch her legs and take a closer look at the white, sandy beach stretching out along the shore to her left. In the peaceful, sparkling blue-green waters of the Gulf of Sirte there was a compagnia of Italian bersaglieri splashing about happily. Their naked bodies, apart from their deeply tanned legs, heads and lower arms, were a stark white. Their clothes, weapons and sun-helmets, with their distinctive decoration of black cockerel feathers, lay in disorderly piles on the sand where they had been discarded.

On a whim, Elsa raced down to join them, stripping off her uncomfortable uniform as she went. She was naked by the time she dived headlong into the surf. At first her presence went unnoticed as she happily swam and dived and even exchanged splashes with the men closest to her. Finally, one infantryman noticed that the figure almost waist deep in water next to him was not one of his fellow soldiers but a beautiful woman. Rubbing the water out of his eyes in disbelief, he beheld the vision as only an Italian can. Playfully, Elsa scooped up twin handfuls of water and drenched him, laughing. Soon she was surrounded by a score of female-deprived soldiers gesturing to her and urging her to likewise splash them. All too soon, an officer, himself stark naked, blew a shrill call on his whistle and reluctantly the company waded ashore. Obeying the command herself, Elsa ran dripping out of the surf and onto the sparkling white beach, shaking her head vigorously to dry her blonde hair as she went. The soldiers were presented with a magnificent view of their uninhibited and unexpected visitor, and watched appreciatively as she recovered her discarded clothes. Clutching them to her chest, Elsa returned to her transport where her now wide awake driver, as well as admiring the view, was tooting his horn to indicate that they had to move off.

Slamming the door behind her, Elsa waved and blew kisses to the bersaglieri company who enthusiastically responded in kind, then put on her clothes awkwardly in the confines of the cab, much to the distraction of the driver.

As they motored east however they noticed an increase in the amount of traffic coming from the opposite direction. In the late afternoon, after rounding Agedabia at the base of the Djebel Akhdar: the ‘Bengazi Bulge’ as the British called it, the convoy moved north towards Benghazi itself, but the town was already burning. The outlying Arab quarter had been much damaged by bombing while the port was wrecked, both by the RAF and German demolitions. The Germans and their Italian allies were being bundled back westwards by the British, and before Elsa could reach her destination at the base of the Jebel Akhdar (the Green Mountain) it had been captured by the enemy. Stocks of fuel and ammunition that had been brought over from Sicily at great cost were destroyed, and the German Afrikakorps had the job of holding off the confident enemy while the Italians and the German rear-area units pulled back towards El Agheila, with the local Senussis people once again caught in the middle of a battle. These Bedouin tribes had long detested the Italians: their colonial masters since before the First World War, and were happy to welcome the arrival of the Allies, especially after their exiled leader in Egypt, Idris Al-Mahdi, had been recognized by the British as Amir and promises of self-rule had been made after the Axis forces had been thrown out. The organization Idris led, the Sufi Brotherhood, formed a century before in Arabia, had originally been a purely religious movement, but more recently had become political in its nationalistic aims.

Meanwhile, small German garrisons left behind in the retreat at Bardia, Sollum and Halfaya Pass were quickly surrounded and obliged to surrender.

It was just another chapter in the see-saw war between General Erwin Rommel: the Desert Fox, and a succession of lackluster British generals. It was not territory that they needed to conquer, but destruction of the striking power of their foe. And in the desert it was the tank that ruled supreme.

It was at El Agheila, after two more days of confusion that Elsa finally caught up with the unit she had been brought to Africa to join.

At the start of the war the Abwehr had organized a specialist unit of troops to undertake clandestine missions behind enemy lines. Known as Brandenburg, various elements had already fought successfully in Poland and the Balkans. Now, with the Germans becoming involved in North Africa, an Afrika Kompanie had been formed to work in that theatre of operations. Part of the unit, under the command of Oberleutnant von Koenan, had been landed in Tripoli the previous October. Since then, they had begun to do some useful work behind the British front lines spotting enemy build-ups and counting vehicle numbers. Made up of men from former German possessions in East or Southern Africa, Palestinian Germans and one-time members of the French Foreign Legion, as well as the necessary experts in communications, its members were quickly adapting to the harsh conditions in the desert.

Having been forced back, together with the rest of the army, to a new base, their role was now being reevaluated.

The German army as a whole had little experience of desert fighting before 1941, unlike the British and the French who both had a long history of colonial involvement in the area. Since the 1920s, for example, British units had traveled and mapped much of the Sahara, often as a form of recreation; producing ‘going maps’ which detailed the types of terrain and its suitability for various kinds of transport. This experience had been found to be invaluable when it came to fighting the Axis powers using units such as the Long Range Desert Group, and the Germans had thus a lot of ground to make up before they could begin to match their opponents.

Despite this huge disadvantage, which extended beyond mere desert know-how to equipment, tactics and logistics, a more ambitious mission had already been assigned to the still small Afrika Kompanie.

Elsa was not welcomed warmly, as she was not the only complication for their operations early in 1942, but at least the unit was learning some lessons, and so Elsa was provided with an Italian desert field-blouse to wear in place of the hot European Luftwaffe uniform which had been her ‘cover’ so far. The Italians might not have been as effective in combat as the Germans, but their uniforms, including the sahariana had been developed after much time spent in North Africa. Almost as popular, and especially useful for a unit destined to spend much of their time behind enemy lines, was the Luftwaffe’s tropical uniform, which closely resembled British khaki in color and cut. Now suitably kitted out, all Elsa had to do was await the go-ahead for the task ahead.

It was to be a breathtakingly ambitious mission. Alongside Elsa, the contingent included two male Abwehr agents, also recently flown out from Germany, whose job it was to infiltrate Cairo and radio back information on Allied preparations and strength to their German masters. Now that the British had recaptured Benghazi, it was no longer possible to simply parachute them into Egypt, as had been originally intended as it was beyond the range of all suitable aircraft, and so a long overland journey had to be planned and undertaken. At the same time, Elsa was to also travel to the Egyptian capital to make contact with the man who could assassinate General de Gaulle.

A military associate and friend of the French general before the war, his name was Reny Parelle, and he had been posted to Syria, then a French Protectorate, in 1939, and had, for personal and political reasons, sided with the pro-German Vichy Government rather than de Gaulle’s embryonic Free French. He had been assumed killed when Allied and Free French forces had invaded and taken over Syria in May 1941 but had resurfaced later that year in Egypt and been persuaded, with the inducement of a large cash payment, to eliminate de Gaulle.

Parelle was prepared to meet a German representative in Cairo, where some of the payment he had been offered would change hands. He would then travel back to Tripoli and from there to Algeria where he would announce a conversion to de Gaulle’s cause and from there to London where he was confident of again getting close enough to de Gaulle in order to assassinate him. It was a typically wild Abwehr scheme, and it was Elsa’s task to lubricate the negotiations in Cairo after handing over an amount in gold. Parelle was understandably paranoid about betrayal and it was felt that a female with a genuine swastika brand on her breast would be proof enough of her credentials. The fact that Elsa spoke perfect French, and passable English, was a bonus.

The operation was codenamed Salam.

Elsa had found herself attracted to the affair partly because of the sheer romance of the proposition as much as Thomas Kolb’s insistence that it was an operation vital to Germany, and one, moreover, which required Elsa’s particular talents. The fact that the mission was a huge gamble at best and would involve her in great personal risk did not enter her head.

Hauptmann von Steffens, an experienced Africa-hand, was to be the military leader the group, with Hauptmann Count Almasy the man responsible for getting the party to the Nile and back. Count Almasy was one of the few Germans who had traveled in the Sahara before the war. A wiry sun-burnt veteran, he was hardly typical of the Prussian aristocrat. He had profited greatly from the Nazis in the years prior to the outbreak of hostilities in 1939. Hitler had vigorously pursued and supported any number of crackpot schemes of his own creation or those suggested by others in the Party, and Count Almasy had received generous payment to lead an expedition into parts of Syria and the Palestine Territories in search of the ancient Ark of the Covenant. Not surprisingly, nothing came of the venture, but it was typical of a host of similar officially sanctioned ventures in the Middle East, Asia Minor and beyond. Substantial university backed and government funded digs sprang up overnight to find evidence of what were in reality little more than myths. The Holy Grail was another of a number of relics that consumed the Nazis. At least Count Almasy was spared involvement in some of the other more occult researches which the Nazis became obsessed with. The department responsible for such activities was the Deutsches Ahnenerbe, or German Ancestral Society. With its headquarters at Dahlem, outside Berlin, its main responsibility was to prove the superiority of Aryan Man and collect Germanic antiquities for study and display. After the war it was estimated that such fringe activities cost the German treasury more money than the Americans spent developing the atomic bomb. But Count Almasy was hardly complaining. Such work financed his other, more practical, activities.

Von Steffens interviewed Elsa in his tent on her second day in the Brandenburg camp. He was not impressed by the presence of a woman in the party.

“I can take care of myself, captain,” Elsa informed him, although if that reassurance was intended to convey her military competency or her ability to defend herself from the attentions of his men, she did not specify.

Von Steffens knew nothing of Elsa. To him she was just one more potential source of trouble for an expedition he already knew had the odds of success stacked against it.

“Your presence alone will not be good for morale,” he insisted.

“Disciplining your men is your job,” Elsa pointed out to him. “But if it is of any consolation: I only fuck officers.”