"Robert McCammon - The Wolfs Hour" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCammon Robert R)

should be aware that it was reported to the publisher as тАЬunsold and destroyed.тАЭ Neither the author nor the
publisher has received payment for the sale of this тАЬstripped book.тАЭ

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the authorтАЩs
imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is
entirely coincidental.

An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS



POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster 1230 Avenue of the
Americas, New York, NY 10020

Copyright ┬й 1989 by The McCammon Corporation

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce
this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
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ISBN: 0-671-73142-4

First Pocket Books printing March 1989

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Cover art by Rowena Morrill

Printed in the U.S.A.
Prologue
 1

The war went on.
By February 1941, it had leaped like a firestorm from Europe to the shores of northwest Africa,
where HitlerтАЩs 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
AfricaтАЩs 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.
The British Eighth Army, most of the soldiers exhausted, staggered toward a railway stop called El
Alamein in the last scorching days of June 1942. In their wake the engineers frantically laid down intricate
patterns of mine fields, hoping to delay the oncoming Panzers. There was rumor that Rommel was low on
petrol and ammunition, but in their foxholes dug in the hard white earth the soldiers could feel the ground