World War 2 Thriller Collection

by Len Deighton

  Mann was out of the car before I was. The rain-soaked grass was high, and the twisted body of a man was tangled into it. We crouched over him and Mann picked up his limp arm and sought his pulse.

  ‘The driver from the Trade Delegation – looks like a Russkie, eh?’

  ‘Poor bastard,’ I said. The man groaned and as he opened his mouth, I saw that his teeth were stained with blood. ‘They’ve dumped him to lighten the weight,’ I said. The boy vomited. It was mostly blood.

  ‘Looks like it,’ said Mann. To the boy he said, ‘Which of them did it?’ but he got only a whimper in reply.

  ‘What kind of people are we dealing with?’ I said. I wiped the boy’s face with my handkerchief.

  ‘Got to go,’ said Mann getting to his feet.

  ‘We can’t just leave him here,’ I protested.

  ‘No alternative,’ said Mann. ‘Jesus, you know that. They are just counting on us being soft-hearted enough to stay with the kid.’

  I got to my feet. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I think they meant to slow up enough to let him out safely but misjudged things.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Mann. ‘And there really is a Santa Claus – move your tail, baby.’

  There was a growl from the engine as Percy flipped the accelerator pedal. The dying boy looked at me pleadingly but I turned away from him and followed Mann back to the car. Percy pulled away before the doors were closed.

  ‘Catch up!’ ordered Mann.

  ‘That’s not the problem,’ said Percy. ‘The problem is finding them again if they pull off the road and hide.’ I realized then that both these men had the sort of honesty and devotion to duty that enabled them to disregard the dying boy. I did not admire it.

  ‘There, there, there!’ said Mann.

  The dark-green Land Rover was no larger than a toy and difficult to see amongst the pine trees, the scrub and mud-spattered rock. But now that Mann had pointed it out, I saw it skittering behind the trees and kicking its heels as it leaped over the hump-backed bridge that marked the bottom of the valley.

  Now it was a different sort of driving; steeply downhill in places, with more and more people on the road, and horses too. At one point some soldiers tried to wave us down. Percy blasted the horn and they jumped aside.

  ‘Was that a road block?’ asked Mann.

  ‘Hitch-hikers,’ said Percy.

  ‘Let’s hope you’re right,’ said Mann.

  We could no longer see the Land Rover. It must have been a mile or two along the valley by this time. Percy pushed up the speed until we were slipping and sliding in the mud and gravel. Then the road climbed again. It climbed a thousand feet, and here it was drier, except for the rainwater that spewed across the road from overflowing gullies. We crossed the brow of the next hill to face a bleak sky, glassy like a pink-tinted mirror. Percy screwed up his eyes to see the road that twisted away along the side of a spur. We could no longer see the other car and Percy went faster and faster. For the first time in my life I felt car-sick.

  Percy had an amazing technique for hairpins: he went into them at full speed, and, shortly before the bend, turned the wrong way – to lose speed – and then steered the other way. The pendulum effect flicked us round the curve of the hairpin. And Percy was plunging his foot down on the accelerator even before the car had slewed far enough to face the next stretch. We were cannoning forward so fiercely that the seat-back jarred my kidneys. There wasn’t room to make a mistake. To the left side of the road there was jagged cliff, and on our right a precipice. All the windows of the car were now plastered in watery mud and only the area covered by the wipers was clear.

  Thin rain continued to fall but it was not enough to wash the mud from the side windows and only just sufficient to lubricate the wipers. The next bend brought a tidal wave of mud and loose grit. Percy wound his window down to provide better visibility and on my side I did the same. The cold wet wind howled through the car.

  We were doing one hundred, over a blind hump, when we saw it.

  The theory says that if you hit a flock of sheep at that sort of speed, you ride over them like an ice-skater in an abattoir. It isn’t true. ‘This is it,’ shouted Percy. There was no chance of avoiding them; they were all over the road, there must have been hundreds of them, baa-baaing, running or staring at us transfixed by fear.

  Percy jabbed the accelerator and steered directly at the rockface. We hit it with a spine-jarring bang that made the car body sing like a tuning-fork. Then a mess of suspension and metalwork sheared away from the rest of the car. The front dropped and chiselled into the road surface, producing a torrent of small stones that took out the windscreen, like the fire from a heavy machine-gun. We were ‘rubbing off’ speed and, as the car slowed, its back whipped round until we were facing the way we had come.

  Percy was doing it all according to the book. He kept his foot hard down on the gas, and the spinning wheels began to slow us a little, tearing their rubber into shreds, and making a cloud of black smoke that eclipsed the world. But it didn’t slow us enough, and with the engine still screaming its protest we raced backwards at seventy miles an hour.

  I ripped at the door to open it but couldn’t find the catch. My seat snapped, and my head hit the roof as we plunged off the edge of the world. The engine shrieked, and the earth turned askew, and we slid down the precipice with a thunderous bombardment of car components and a green snowstorm. Twice the car was almost halted by trees and scrub and twice it ripped its way through them. But now, with the suspension torn loose and a wheel missing, we were furrowing soft hillside. We slowed, lurched, tipped and finally stopped at a steep angle, embraced by a tangle of thorns, rocks and bushes. I was sprawled back in my broken seat, listening to the gurgle of escaping liquids. The air was filled with the stink of fuel and I would have gagged on it but for the way in which I was being strangled by my seat-belt.

  Percy’s eyes were closed, and there was blood on his face. I couldn’t turn enough to see where Mann was. I tried to pull my leg free but it was trapped in the mangled metalwork, between the smashed instruments and the steering-wheel. I tugged at my leg. Someone was shouting ‘fire’ but the voice soon softened to a whisper and drifted away into the darkness. It was cold, very, very cold.

  22

  A blinding light flashed in my eyes and, as I came more fully conscious, I saw its beam flicker across the ceiling, and backwards and forwards over the brightly coloured Islamic texts that were pinned to the wall. The iron bedstead creaked as I moved under the rough blanket which covered my legs. Only slowly did I focus on the man. He was sitting motionless in the corner, a fat man with an unshaven face and heavy-lidded eyes. Behind him there was a broken clock and a heavily retouched colour lithograph of a uniformed politician.

  The fat man spoke without moving a muscle and almost without moving his mouth. ‘The man with the hat awakes.’ His Arabic was from far to the east of here; Egypt, perhaps, where the man with the hat – charwaja – is the non-believer, the infidel, the enemy.

  A voice from the next room said, ‘It is the will of God,’ without endorsing God’s decision enthusiastically.

  ‘Get him,’ said the fat man.

  I heard movements from the next room, and with difficulty I moved my head round until I could see the doorway. Eventually Percy Dempsey arrived. The blinding light met my eyes again, and I saw that it came from a small wall-mirror moved by the draught from the door.

  ‘How do you feel?’ said Percy. He had a cup of coffee in his hand.

  ‘Lousy,’ I said. I took the coffee he offered. It was strong and black and very sweet.

  ‘Your friend got another crack on the head,’ said Percy. ‘He’s conscious but he’s sleeping. You’d better come and look at him. I say! steady on with my coffee.’

  I got out of bed and found I was fully dressed except for my shoes. I put them on and, as I bent down, suffered pain in a dozen muscles that I never knew I had. ‘You did a good job, Percy,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’

&nbs
p; ‘If you’ve got to hit anything: hit it backwards. My old dad taught me that, and he won the Monte two years running.’

  ‘Well, he should have tried it driving,’ I said.

  Percy smiled politely and showed me to the little bare room where they had laid Major Mann. Someone had removed his tie and his boots, and folded his jacket to go under his head. His hair was ruffled and his face unshaven, and the bruising from the bullet nick had now turned one half of his face into a rainbow of blues, pinks and purples.

  I leaned over him and shook him. ‘Waaaw?’ said Mann.

  ‘Coffee, tea, or me?’ I said.

  ‘Beat it,’ said Mann, without opening his eyes. ‘Go away and let me die in peace.’

  ‘Don’t be a spoilsport,’ I said. ‘We want to watch.’

  Mann grunted again and looked at his wrist-watch. He moved his arm backwards and forwards, as if to get it into focus. Finally he said, ‘We’ve got to get on the road.’

  ‘Get what on the road?’ I asked. ‘Our car is wrecked.’

  Percy said, ‘You want to buy a car? Eighty-five thousand on the clock, one owner. Never raced or rallied.’

  ‘Well, rent another car,’ said Mann.

  ‘I did,’ said Percy. ‘I did it about five hours ago, when you were fast asleep. It should arrive any time at all.’

  ‘Well, don’t sit back waiting for a round of applause,’ said Mann. ‘Get on the phone and hurry them up.’

  ‘Don’t fret,’ said Percy. ‘I’ve made contact with my chap down in Ghardaia. The Land Rover filled up there. He’s following, and will leave messages along the route.’

  ‘How?’ said Mann.

  ‘This isn’t Oxford Street,’ explained Percy. ‘This is the Trans-Sahara Highway. Either they have to go south through In-Salah, or they take the other route down through Adrar, Reggane and eventually to Timbuktu.’

  ‘The way we came last time,’ said Mann. He wiped his face with a hand, and touched the puffy bruising of his chin and cheek. Then he heaved himself into a sitting position, and unfolded the jacket that had been under his head. He looked at me. ‘You don’t look so good,’ he told me.

  ‘And I don’t feel so good,’ I admitted, ‘but at least my brain is still ticking over. Do you two think Mrs Bekuv wanted a Land Rover because it matches the colour of her earrings? Or because they were discounted this week. I prefer to guess that she radioed Algiers from the plane, and specified that car.’

  ‘Why?’ said Mann.

  ‘Ah. Why indeed? Why choose a car that can be outpaced by anything from a housewife’s Fiat to a local bus. We’ve been breathing down their necks as far as this – so why didn’t she ask for a tweaked-up car. Keep to the macadam and you could do the trip in a Ferrari, give or take a couple of sand filters and a sump guard.’

  ‘But they couldn’t have got past the end of the macadam,’ said Percy. ‘The made-up road ends in In-Salah on one route, and south of Adrar on the other. After that it’s only one track.’

  ‘Brilliant,’ I said sarcastically. ‘You think she’s not bright enough to have a desert-worthy vehicle waiting down south. She waves goodbye and they get the best of both worlds.’

  ‘This is not my day for riddles,’ said Mann. ‘Give it to me.’

  ‘They will leave the road,’ I said. ‘Whatever they are going to do isn’t going to be done at the poolside of some government hotel. They are going to drive off into the desert. And if she is as bright as I think she is, they will leave the road at night.’

  ‘And that’s why Bekuv came north to meet us driving that GAZ,’ said Mann. ‘It was such a conspicuous vehicle – that’s the only GAZ I’ve seen in the whole of Algeria – he took it so that, before meeting with us, he could detour out into the desert and bury whatever it is they are going to collect.’

  ‘It’s too big to bury,’ I said. ‘I’ve told you that.’

  ‘If you’re right,’ said Percy, ‘we’re going to need a Land Rover too.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Or a big truck,’ Percy said. ‘A lightly loaded truck is as desert-worthy as a Land Rover.’

  Mann turned to Percy and prodded him in the chest with a nicotine-stained forefinger. ‘I want to follow them across that desert wherever they go,’ Mann said. ‘You fix it so that we can travel across the sand, wadis, rocks – any damn where.’

  23

  Men become mesmerized by the desert, just as others become obsessed with the sea; not because of any fondness for sand or water, but because oceans and deserts are the best places to observe the magical effect of ever-changing daylight. Small ridges, flattened by the high sun, become jagged mountains when the sunlight falls across them, and their shadows, pale gold at noontime, become black bottomless pools.

  The sun was high by the time we reached the desert. A man could stand in his own shadow, should he want to brave the heat of noon. Not many did. No goats, no camels, not even snakes or scorpions move at that time of day. Just mad dogs, Englishmen and Major Mann of the CIA.

  Through the car’s ventilator there came a constant rain of fine sand. I closed the vent and opened the window – the wind blew hot. I closed it again. Percy mopped his brow. Ahead of us the road shimmered in the heat. The sky was not blue; it was a hazy white, like the distant sand. There was no horizon. The glaring sunlight conjured up great lakes which disappeared only a moment before we plunged into them.

  The road south is built along the edge of a sand sea as large as England. The dunes were like scaly, brown, prehistoric monsters, slumbering in the heat and breathing the puffs of sand that twisted off their peaks. And across the road writhed more sand, phantom snakes of it that hissed at the underside of the car as we sliced through them. In places the drifting sand settled on the road, making ramps that were difficult to see. We all had our seat-belts as tight as they would go but they didn’t prevent us striking the roof or window when our suspension hit a big one.

  ‘It will only need one slightly bigger than that,’ I said after one particularly violent bump from a sand-ridge, ‘to write us off.’

  ‘Patrols clear them every week or so, at this time of year,’ said Percy. ‘It’s worth a gamble while the wind stays where it is.’

  ‘And is the wind staying where it is?’

  He lifted a hand off the wheel for long enough to show me the smudge of duststorm that he had been watching. ‘She’s coming to meet us, I think,’ he said.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Mann, ‘that’s all I need.’ We watched it without speaking, until Mann said, ‘Is that a village ahead, or an oasis?’

  ‘Neither,’ said Percy.

  ‘Stop anyway,’ said Mann. ‘It’s time for a leak.’

  What had looked like trees were a dozen thorn-bushes, strung out in such a way as to suggest that they marked an underground watercourse, if only you dug deep enough. There was an old Renault there too, stripped of everything so that only the steel shell remained. The outside was polished shiny by the windblown sand, and the inside was sooty. It would make a convenient place for travellers to build a fire. I looked inside and found some burned chunks of rubber tyre – the nomad’s fuel – and some broken bottles, the pieces scoured and white. There was a screwed-up cigarette packet too. I picked it up and flattened it – Kool Mentholated Filter Longs, the cigarettes that Red Bancroft smoked. I threw it away again, but I knew I was still not free of her.

  ‘A leak, I said! Not a shit, shower, shave, shampoo and set.’ It was Mann treating us to a favourite sample of his army witticisms as he stood by the car door, tapping his fingers impatiently. ‘And I’m driving,’ he said as I got in.

  ‘Very well,’ said Percy. ‘We’re not in a hurry.’

  I stretched out in the back and dozed. Now and again there was a sudden jolt that rocketed me up to the car roof. The sun dropped and went yellow and then gold. The sky turned mauve and the dunes seemed to arch their backs as they spread their shadows. There were no flies on the windscreen now, and the air was dry and the temperature cool
ed enough to make it worth opening the window. The sand hissed at us and our registration plates were by now raw metal, with no letters or numbers visible, it was the mark of cars that went deep into the desert and in the villages people noted us.

  I slept fitfully, awakened sometimes by oncoming vehicles that forced us off the track, and at other times by falling weightless through terrible dreams. The sun dropped out of sight and there was only the tunnel that our headlights bored through the limitless night.

  ‘My fellow will be waiting,’ said Percy. His voice was cold and distant in the manner that all men’s voices assume at night. ‘He’ll have camels – if we need them.’

  ‘Not for me,’ said Mann. ‘I’m trying to give them up.’ He laughed loudly, but Percy didn’t join in. Soon after that I must have gone to sleep.

  ‘You can put both the USA and China into the continent of Africa and still have room to rattle them about,’ said Percy Dempsey. He was driving.

  ‘I know some people in Vermont who wouldn’t like that,’ said Mann.

  Dempsey gave a perfunctory laugh. Ahead of us the road stretched as straight as a ruler into the heat haze. Only the occasional drifts of sand made Dempsey moderate the speed. ‘A convoy … parked, by the look of it.’ Dempsey’s eyes seemed myopic and watery when he was reading the newspaper, or one of his favourite Simenons, but here in the desert his eyesight was acute and he could interpret smudges on the horizon long before Mann or I could see them. ‘Not trucks … buses,’ he added. ‘Too early for a brew-up.’

  The gargantuan trailer-trucks rolled south to Timbuktu in convoy, enough drivers in each rig to eat and sleep in relays. When they did stop, it was usually for only as long as it took to boil water for the very strong and very sweet infusion of mint tea that the desert Arab needs even more than sleep. But as we got nearer I saw that Percy was correct. These were the same giant chassis, the wheels as high as a man, but they were buses – fitted with chromium trim, and dark-tinted window-glass, and their coachwork bore the name and address of a German tourist agency. A small orange tent by the side of the track was marked with a sign ‘Damen’, but there was no similar facility for the men, most of whom were arranging themselves into a group for a photo.