The Old Trade of Killing

by John Harris

  Phil looked at me with a haggard appeal in her eyes. No more, she seemed to be saying. Let’s, for God’s sake, stay here and rest.

  I ignored the look and we packed up slowly, but not easily. Nimmo and Phil, not realising the importance of meticulous care, kept dumping things down carelessly and we had to keep unpacking so that the things we would need first or quickly would be on top.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she kept saying in a low desperate voice as I changed things round again and again. ‘I didn’t realise.’

  ‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘But we need the rifle on top, don’t we? And it’s no good putting the water under everything else.’

  She nodded, not replying, stumbling around with weary limbs, trying to find the lost equipment while I was on edge all the time, wondering when Ghad Ahmed would appear.

  ‘How about a drink?’ Nimmo asked as we finished, but I shook my head, in spite of the appeal in Phil’s eyes.

  ‘Not now,’ I said. ‘Later.’

  He glanced at Phil, his eyes concerned, and in the end I shoved the water bottle at her.

  ‘Take it easy,’ I warned. ‘There isn’t a tap just round the corner.’

  The sun seemed to be hotter in the shining arch of the sky than on the previous day and we were all dirty and dry-throated, and none of us had washed since we’d left the camp in the Depression. Phil handed the water bottle back unwillingly and I knew she was longing to wet a handkerchief and rub it across her face, but I took it firmly and put it in the cab, because Morena hadn’t been able to plug the leaking radiator completely and we had a long way to go. I was taking no chances. It was possible to be dehydrated in the wasted plains of the desert in a very short time.

  Phil made no attempt to climb in the driver’s cab with me. She walked silently to the back of the lorry and Nimmo put down a hand to pull her up, helping her over the equipment with his hands on her waist. I didn’t say anything. Strangely, I was glad it was Morena’s reassuring bulk alongside me in the cab, though he seemed in pain and a little depressed still.

  ‘Makes you think, doesn’t it?’ he commented. ‘It takes a war, with bloody murder and sudden death, for human beings to have any regard for each other. I never had a very high opinion of Tiny Leach but I never thought he’d do this to us.’

  ‘You were lucky,’ I said. ‘I’ve been expecting something of the sort ever since we left.’

  ‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘Why did he do it?’

  ‘Because he isn’t the same Tiny Leach,’ I said. ‘The other one was still young and hadn’t been in clink and probably still found something to admire in the world.’

  He nodded. ‘I suppose so,’ he agreed. ‘I expect that’s it.’

  I started the engine, and we moved off, with Nimmo in the back keeping watch.

  We pushed out of the valley, wondering all the time if we’d find Ghad Ahmed on the other side of the slope. Though the plain was clear, I didn’t try to fool myself that he wasn’t somewhere in the vicinity, waiting for his chance. There was plenty of time before we reached Breba.

  I had decided now to head towards the road and chance it. We’d given a good enough account of ourselves the night before, thanks to Morena’s steadiness, and Ghad Ahmed’s men had been such rank amateurs I was prepared even to shoot it out with them if necessary.

  I was still busy with my plans when the engine coughed and died and the lorry lurched to a stop.

  ‘Oh Christ, no!’ I said.

  Morena glanced at me and began to climb out of the cab. As I joined him, Nimmo jumped down, too, and landed in a flat puff of dust.

  ‘Better get back up there,’ I said.

  ‘He’ll need some help,’ he pointed out.

  ‘I’ll help him.’

  ‘I can do it.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ I snapped. ‘Just because our vehicle’s packed up, it doesn’t mean Ghad Ahmed’s have, too. Get back up there and keep your bloody eyes skinned.’

  As he stared at me, I caught a faint flicker of defiance in his gaze, then he climbed back into the lorry and I noticed that all the time he was sweeping the horizon he was talking quietly to Phil.

  By the time I had joined Morena he had opened the bonnet and I caught a glimpse of the engine, caked with sand and oil and spattered rust, then he lifted his face to me, his eyes puzzled and red-rimmed after the storm.

  ‘Petrol,’ he said. ‘Carburettor’s empty. Pump’s probably not working.’

  There was something in his face that worried me.

  ‘There was nothing wrong with the pump yesterday,’ he said.

  He walked round the lorry to where the petrol tank was situated, just under the chassis. The metal was coated with sand and dust which had stuck to the inevitable film of oil, but the hole in the tank was clear enough.

  ‘Bullet,’ he said, wiping away the sticky grit with his thumb. ‘The bastards must have hit it yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘Can we patch it?’

  He shrugged. ‘We can plug it,’ he said. ‘But it won’t last long. Not on this sort of ground. Too bumpy. It’s bound to leak.’

  He got out one of the tent poles and cut a short length from it, and as he worked with his knife I opened the map and stared round at the desert, tawny-grey and arid and littered with flinty stones.

  ‘Changes things a bit,’ I said. ‘Doesn’t it?’

  Morena looked up from where he was pushing the rag-wrapped plug into the hole in the petrol tank. He pulled a face and, taking out his hammer, hit the plug hard. He gave it a few more taps then straightened up.

  ‘Tell us the worst,’ he said.

  ‘I was going to head east to find the road,’ I told him. ‘But it also swings east about here and I reckon now we’d better press on due north. Shortest distance between two points. This way we go up near Karabub where the Jerries caught the Yeomanry on the way back to Benghazi.’

  His eyes lit up. ‘Any wrecks there?’

  ‘Might be. Too far south for the scrap merchants to come collecting. Why?’

  ‘Might find a petrol tank we can use.’

  ‘After all these years?’

  His face fell and he gave me a wry smile. ‘Not very likely,’ he admitted.

  We found Leach with the sun like a brass eye in the heavens and without a scrap of shadow anywhere. He was lying face up on the sand, his arms and legs spread-eagled.

  Morena, who was driving at the time, stopped the lorry short of the body, and walked forward. As I climbed down to follow him, I could see Nimmo’s face, narrow-eyed and shocked, and Phil’s, sick-looking and grey with horror.

  The metal chest that had once contained the money lay on its side, the rope cut, the sand and stones with which it had been filled spilled out among the scattered equipment and the camping gear that had been on the Land Rover.

  Nimmo stared at it, his eyes narrowed. ‘Christ,’ he breathed, ‘there never was any money in it!’ and I suddenly remembered I’d never told him what we’d done with it.

  I jerked a thumb at the tin trunk he was sitting on. ‘Don’t let it get you down,’ I said shortly. ‘It’s in there.’

  He stared downwards at the trunk and then at Phil, and then at me again.

  ‘You crafty bastards,’ he said. ‘You thought we’d run off with it.’

  ‘Not you,’ I said patiently. ‘Only Leach.’

  Morena was a little way ahead, bending over the corpse, and as I walked towards him, I stared round me at the empty illusive desert, with its tawny ridges, conscious again of eyes watching us. The silence was immense and threatening.

  ‘The bastards must have got ahead of us,’ I said.

  ‘They’ll not rush us again in a hurry, though,’ Morena growled. ‘We gave ’em something to think about last time.’

  He straightened up and stared with me, aware like I was that any one of the folding dunes around us might hide men and vehicles.

  For a long time we stood in silence, our eyes screwed up against the glare, then I
heard Morena catch his breath with the pain of the cuts on his chest as he bent over the body again.

  They’d obviously tortured Leach and he’d been unable to answer them because he’d been as surprised as they had to find the money they were looking for was not in the chest. I could just imagine his fury and then his horror that he couldn’t escape his painful death because he knew only as much as they did about where it was. Ghad Ahmed would never have believed that he was not a decoy to lead him away from the rest of us.

  Morena’s eyes lifted to mine. His face was taut and grim under its coating of dust and half-grown beard.

  ‘The bastards carved him up,’ he said in a low voice.

  ‘He asked for it,’ I growled, trying to find a little sympathy in my soul for the treacherous Tiny.

  ‘He was one of us,’ Morena went on in a grieving, chiding voice, and I knew what was in his mind. First Bummer Ward and Gester, then Pike in Normandy, then Nimmo, senior, in his car accident. Then Houston, and now Leach.

  He looked up at me.

  ‘It only leaves me and you,’ he said slowly.

  Two

  Late in the afternoon we came down into the Plain of Karabub, a flat stony bowl where the Panzers had pounced in 1942 as the convoys had moved back to Egypt in a long detour to the south.

  The lorry was dust-caked now and I knew the petrol wouldn’t last much longer. Morena wasn’t saying much, but I knew that he knew, too, and was worrying about it as much as I was. I’d almost forgotten the two in the back. They’d hardly spoken to us since the sandstorm and seemed withdrawn, talking quietly, as though my impatience with them in their inexperience had driven them together. I knew I had been unnecessarily sharp with them, but I was too tired with too much thinking to care much, and the knowledge of what could go wrong was constantly on my mind. They had no knowledge or experience to draw on and, though I knew they were trying to co-operate, their mistakes kept irritating me and I was unable to keep the asperity out of my voice. Somehow, it seemed now there was only Morena I could talk to, because I knew it was entirely up to the two of us if we were to escape alive.

  We’d worked well together in tight spots before, however, but we were older now and probably didn’t think and act as quickly as we once had. But Morena was Morena, and would always be Morena and that meant a lot, as I’d seen the night before. Nothing short of the last trump would touch Morena, and even then I suspected he’d be waiting for inspection before St Peter, properly shaved, his boots polished, his weapons clean, the everlasting sergeant, conscious of his own integrity and certain that whatever faults were to be held against him were well and truly overridden by his honesty.

  We saw the relics of the battle lying in groups like old camel bones in the sun as soon as we topped the rise, shabby and unlovely intrusions in the impersonal grandeur of the desert. There was no sign of Ghad Ahmed, though I knew we had to contend now with three vehicles not two. Something had to be done about that, I knew, though I didn’t know quite what. It was a thought that kept nagging at the back of my mind, but I was growing too tired by now to be able to concentrate sufficiently to produce anything intelligent to deal with it.

  The wrecked tanks and soft-skinned vehicles dotted the plain in blackened dusty hummocks, half submerged in sand. I’d lost a good friend there and I couldn’t speak at first with the choked feeling of memory as my stomach twisted at the thought of the Mark IVs rattling with squealing tracks down the slope, and the Schmeissers whistling off the ridges; and the frantic rush for drivers’ cabs as the ambush was sprung and the Grants went rocking into action. I could see it all so clearly – the toppling figures and the mushrooming dust as the mortar bombs landed; and the unexploded shells and glancing shots hopping and spinning and whirring away in great leaps; and then the smoke and the sickening stench of burning rubber and roasted flesh.

  ‘Must be just as it was left,’ I said. ‘Too far from the coast to make it worth salvaging anything.’

  It was strangely moving looking over the scene of the battle, and eerie enough in the silence to be frightening.

  ‘This is where Jimmy Bradshaw bought it,’ Morena said quietly. ‘Joined up with me. Him and that pal of his, Heck MacTavish. Jerry got ’em both.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Wop,’ I said. ‘Not now.’

  He glanced at me, but he didn’t say anything further and we stopped among the wrecks to brew up and have a meal. I don’t know why I decided to stop there. Perhaps it was because I felt somehow safer among the ghosts of those Yeomanry boys and the blond young men of the Afrika Korps than I did in the lonely desert watched by Ghad Ahmed’s tattered bandits.

  There were half a dozen Grants, their rusted tracks curled round like dead caterpillars, one of them with its turret off and lying alongside it, and a lot of lorries huddled in the sand, the remains of their tyres sagging round the wheel-hubs. There were a few cars, too, twisted and torn as though they’d leapt into the air like wounded dogs and snapped at themselves as they’d been hit, and a litter of rusting petrol tins, coils of wire, discarded bottles and cans and helmets, and even a few broken weapons lying among the sand and shaly stones.

  It was as we rounded the blackened shell of a two-and-a-half-tonner that we found the skeletons. There were two of them, stretched out in the sand, half buried, but the scrap of faded cloth sticking out of the sand with them was so old it was impossible to tell whether they’d been British or German. They lay together, almost side by side, one of them with one arm outflung, the bones still uncollapsed, as though it had been reaching for a weapon or for water or even for help, and I wondered if it could have been my friend and what thoughts had passed through the fading consciousness of the dying man as he lay there with his cracked lips and the smell of burning oil and rubber in his nostrils, staring at his own red blood staining the sand.

  There were probably dozens of others somewhere nearby, shovelled into the sand and forgotten, because it had been a massacre that had quieted the messes in the Eighth Army for weeks afterwards, and neither I nor Morena had anything to say as we turned away.

  Nimmo and Phil were preparing the meal as we returned, both of us silenced by memories, and I was aware of a growing feeling of resentment against us, that probably sprang from the knowledge that they were entirely dependent on us.

  ‘We’ll stop the night here,’ I said, taking a slow swig of the metallic water from the container.

  Morena looked round quickly. ‘Here?’ he asked.

  ‘Why not? They’ll never find one lorry among all these wrecks.’

  He gave me a twisted grin. ‘Might even surprise ’em,’ he said. ‘Might even knock off one of their vehicles. There are plenty of old bottles lying around and we’ve still got some spare petrol.’

  I looked at him quickly.

  ‘Molotov cocktail,’ he explained. ‘We’ve only got to bring ’em close enough. You could stop a tank with one. You ought to be able to stop a jeep.’

  As I turned away from him, I saw that Phil’s face wore a look of horror that was as far removed from her starry-eyed glances of the days before as hatred was from love. She had been bent over the food, her hair filled with sand and smears of dried mud across her face where she’d brushed away the tears and not been able to wash off the stains. She had been working clumsily over the stove, with Nimmo trying to help, but she had stopped now and was staring at me, with her lips slightly parted, a sick expression in her eyes.

  ‘It’s a good place,’ Morena was saying. ‘As good as we’ll find.’

  He glanced at the sloping sides of the shallow valley that lay like a bent dusty plate on the surface of the desert. I saw his eyes travel round him and I knew that he was thinking, as I was, that Ghad Ahmed was up there somewhere, out of sight, still waiting his chance.

  Phil seemed to guess what was in our minds and she scrambled abruptly to her knees, her eyes suddenly angry.

  ‘We can’t stay here,’ she said in a sharp high voice that sounded unlike her.


  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Jimmy says there are skeletons up there.’

  I glanced at Nimmo standing near her, holding the water container, his face expressionless. ‘Better tell Jimmy that they won’t bite,’ I said gently.

  She stared at me and I realised there was no longer an atom of warmth in her glance.

  ‘I think you’re completely at home,’ she said coldly. ‘Thinking about it – all this death and destruction – just because you were part of it once, hundreds of years ago.’

  I felt tired out, the tiredness coming heavy and urgent as the red ball of the sun fell lower, turning the dunes round the bowl of the plain into a fiery orange, but as soon as the glare had gone from the day and it was too dusky to see any distance I set Nimmo digging a slit trench at a point near the lorry where two wrecked vehicles formed an angle. We’d not discussed resistance again, but there’d been an unspoken acceptance between Morena and myself of the idea of surprising Ghad Ahmed’s thugs. Suddenly our only hope seemed to be to draw them deliberately towards us, and we’d worked ever since with the idea un-outlined but clear in our minds. Nimmo had watched us, his eyes on our faces, and I could see he resented the fact that he didn’t know what we were doing, because neither of us had said anything.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing much,’ I said.

  I indicated the hole he’d scooped out of the ground. ‘Better make that deeper,’ I said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You couldn’t hide a bloody rabbit in that,’ I said, ‘let alone a man. And make the sides more upright. That’s no shelter.’

  He pushed the spade forward. ‘Why don’t you have a go?’ he said.

  I ignored him and he returned to his original question. ‘What the hell are you going to do?’ he demanded.

  Somehow his questions jarred on my nerves and I began to wish he’d get on with what he was doing without arguing all the time.

  ‘They’ve got too many vehicles,’ I said. ‘Perhaps we can reduce the number.’