Sergeant Davis got off the first shot. The act of drawing his revolver left him sprawling awkwardly and he missed. Harris fired next, but he had been staring at the plane and he couldn’t focus fast enough on the shadowy figure and he too missed. Dunn got closest. Dunn got a bullet between Schramm’s feet. By then Schramm was twenty yards from the foot of the cliff and dodging briskly, not to make himself a more difficult target but because the stony floor of the wadi hurt his bare right foot, and in any case his boot made him lopsided. He stumbled, almost fell, saved himself with both hands and kicked forward like a sprinter in his blocks. Ten strides took him out of the shadow and into the sunlight, both arms waving like a shipwrecked sailor at a passing sail. Lampard was bellowing: “Hold your fire! Stay where you are! Cease fire! Do not move! Let him go!” Schramm heard nothing. He was prancing along the valley floor, strenuously signaling his existence to the Storch, forcing his limbs into violent action despite the pain in his lungs and the fiery protests of his damaged bare foot. The Storch dipped. Schramm cheered and waved his handkerchief. The Storch lost a hundred feet and circled.
Davis called: “There’s a rifle in the jeep, sir. I can get him with that, easy.”
“No, sergeant. Now everyone listen to me. I don’t want that prisoner killed until the airplane has gone. I don’t want him touched.”
By now Schramm was a hundred yards away, heading for the mouth of the wadi.
“You know best, Jack,” Dunn said quietly. “Personally I’d put a bullet through the bastard p.d.q. That little shufti plane can’t land here, and it wouldn’t even if it could.”
“Think,” Lampard said. “The pilot sees a man. The man wants to be seen. He’s not an Arab. He could be this Luftwaffe major the pilot knows is missing, probably pinched by enemy raiders. And all of a sudden—bang!—somebody shoots the bloke. Now what does that tell the pilot?”
“See what you mean.”
“If you got a radio message from that Storch saying, ‘Here’s a funny thing: I’ve just found your missing major, but would you believe it, somebody down there’s just shot him,’ what would you do?”
“I’d say . . . um . . . ‘Give me the map reference and I’ll send a dozen Stukas to work it over.’”
“Right. Think how many airfields Jerry’s got within range of here. There’s time for him to make an attack before the light goes. Ever been Stuka-ed.?”
“Once. Bloody murder.” Dunn and Lampard watched Schramm trotting away down the wadi, while the Storch made wide circles above him. After a while Schramm turned a bend and was lost to sight. “The sensible thing for that Storch to do would be to go home and refuel,” Lampard said. But the Storch continued to circle for several minutes. “Buzz off, for heaven’s sake!” Lampard said. And this time it did, climbing to a thousand feet, leveling off and flying north.
“Harris!” Lampard called. Harris trotted over. “He’s crippled in one foot and by now he must be half-maimed in the other, so he can’t have got far. Go and kill him, fast. Get back in ten minutes and I’ll make it double egg and chips for a week.” Harris was already on his way. They watched him go. He ran leaning forward, as if into a stiff breeze.
Gibbon the navigator had joined them. “Given a million soldiers like Harris,” he said, “the war would be over in a week.”
“No, you’re wrong,” Lampard said. “Given a million soldiers like Harris the war would never end.” That made no sense to Gibbon, but he didn’t care enough to argue. “Sarnt Davis!” he called. “Just time for a brew-up, I think.”
* * *
Schramm had been limping to spare his right foot. Occasional smears of blood showed behind the toe-prints, while the left boot kept stamping its pattern in the dust.
One stride by Harris covered two by Schramm. Harris reckoned the German must be slowing all the time. Schramm was twice as old as Harris, unarmed, slightly disabled and almost certainly not trained in hand-to-hand combat. If Harris had been capable of pity he might have felt sorry for him. As it was he looked forward to the pleasure of a quick knifing and then the reward of Captain Lampard’s praise.
By now the wadi had taken a bend to the left and another to the right. Still the footprints limped ahead. Harris wondered where the hell the German thought he was going: not to a landing strip, that was certain; too many rocks everywhere; the wadi was strewn with them, many as tall as tombstones. Now the smears of blood were getting bigger. Something lay on the ground ahead: a handkerchief, or part of a shirt. Maybe Schramm had tried to bandage his foot and failed. Harris put on speed until he was running hard, chasing his own shadow. That shadow was Schramm’s piece of good luck. Schramm was squatting behind a rock, hearing the running footsteps get louder and watching the shadow magnify until he took the only chance he was ever going to get and he dived at Harris’s legs. A boot smacked Schramm’s mouth and pain flowered through his head, but Harris suffered much more because he was traveling fast when he tripped and his face skidded along the wadi floor. Schramm lurched to his feet, a rock in each hand, missed with the first and cracked Harris’s head with the second. It was a sharp rock and it dented his skull like a badly parked car. Schramm turned to see who was following; who would fire the squirt from the tommy-gun that would cut him down before the rattle could reach his ears. Nobody followed. Bloody fools, he thought. They don’t deserve to win.
Harris’s right boot was too big for Schramm, so he pulled off Harris’s socks as well, both of them, and took his tunic and his revolver and grenades and knife, then he scuttled down the wadi until he was safely around the next bend. His fingers trembled and his lungs heaved as he dragged on the socks and laced up the boot. He heard himself laugh and didn’t like the sound: too shrill, too triumphant. He had never killed a man before. He stamped his right foot. The boot felt good. He grabbed the weapons and ran.
* * *
After fifteen minutes, Sergeant Davis and Corporal Pocock went to find out what was keeping Harris. Davis brought back the body, carrying it slung over his shoulder, the head wobbling and the hands flapping at every stride. Behind him came Pocock, carrying the left boot and walking backward in case the German had decided to follow them and fling a grenade.
Lampard went forward and met Davis. “This was all my fault,” he said. The body slipped a little. Davis shrugged it back into place.
The rest of the patrol came to look. All they could see of the back of the head was a thicket of flies. Nobody spoke. Someone got a blanket and spread it on the ground. Davis knelt on the edge of the blanket and let the body fall. The flies rose in fury, and at first everyone thought the strange, high-pitched sound came from them; until they realized that Lampard was weeping.
Some men were surprised, but no one was embarrassed: Captain Lampard commanded the patrol, it was his privilege to weep if he wanted to. They withdrew and left him to it.
“What d’you think happened?” Lieutenant Dunn asked Davis.
“Harris must have took his boots off to kick the Jerry officer to death,” Davis said, “and he got a whiff of his own feet and dropped dead.”
“It’s no joke, sergeant.”
“Course not, sir. It might have happened to any one of us. I shared a tent with him, I should know.”
Captain Gibbon strolled over to them. He nodded at the sky, which was primrose-yellow fading to blue-black. “I hope he gets a move on,” he said softly. “Dark in ten minutes.” They glanced at Lampard, who was standing motionless beside the corpse, his arms folded and his head bowed. “Attitude to be adopted, other ranks, for the mourning of,” Gibbon said. “Brigade of Guards drill book, Appendix “F,” Active Service, Foreign Parts, matinees Wednesdays and Saturdays.” Dunn turned away. He, like Lampard, was a Coldstream Guard, and so he felt a loyalty to him; yet now that Gibbon had pointed it out, Lampard’s attitude did look too formal, too posed. There was a lot of Lampard—he had powerful features, an icebreaker of a nose, wide and determined lips, a thrusting jaw—and merely arranging his hefty limbs, finding place
s to put those considerable hands and feet, gave him mannerisms and attitudes that might seem posed. Dunn was sure that none of this was for effect; Lampard just behaved naturally and it ended up looking like an act.
Lampard knelt and neatly folded the blanket over Harris. “Right, gather round,” he called.
They gathered round.
“Schramm has gone,” he said. “Question is, how far and how fast? Mike: what would you do if you were Schramm?”
“Beat it for home,” Dunn said. “And hope I ran into a search party on the way.”
“You wouldn’t lie up and wait for daylight?”
“Not bloody likely. Sooner I get back to base, the sooner base can scramble some Stukas to catch us in the desert.”
“So maybe we shouldn’t dash off into the desert.” Lampard shut his eyes so that he could massage the lids. “Sergeant Davis looks unhappy.”
“He’s got Harris’s knife and revolver and grenades, sir,” Davis said. “And he’s got a bloody nerve, too. He might just be daft enough to come back in the night and try to do more damage.”
“He’s made a pretty good start at that,” Gibbon said.
“I’m not going to spend the night here,” Lampard declared. Grunts of satisfaction all round. “Assuming the enemy comes after us, which way will he expect us to go? South or east?”
“South,” Dunn said. “Back to Kufra.”
“Yes? Why? It’s seven hundred miles to Kufra. A thousand from Kufra to Cairo. Why should he expect us to make an enormous detour?”
“Because that’s the way we came,” Corporal Pocock said.
“Does he know that?”
“He seems to know everything else,” Dunn said.
One of the fitters broke wind. “Beg pardon,” he muttered. “Bloody cheese.”
“If he thinks we know he knows, maybe he’ll think we’ll go east instead,” Lampard said. “Run parallel to the coast. Less than half the distance. Refuel at Siwa. By far the best route. Blindingly obvious.”
“There’s only one thing wrong with the east route,” Gibbon said. “It’s lousy with airplanes, so we get shot up.”
“No danger of getting shot up,” Lampard said. “We just destroyed half the Luftwaffe, remember?”
“I’m not worried about the Luftwaffe,” Gibbon said, “I’m worried about those lousy bastard Beaufighters who used the Rhodesian patrol for target practice.”
“Human error.”
“Just as dead.”
Nobody wanted to discuss it. The Rhodesian patrol of the Long Range Desert Group had been driving across a stretch of sand so flat and so wide and so empty that you could see a lost jerrican at twenty miles, when a pair of RAF Beaufighters found them. There were recognition signals for just such a situation, but the Beaufighters kept attacking despite the recognition signals. Human error. Human dead.
“We bury Harris and then we beat it south,” Lampard said.
* * *
Paul Schramm walked all night and reached the top of the escarpment just before dawn. He stopped there and waited for daylight so that he could find a way down to the plain. His entire body ached with fatigue and his feet felt as if they had been tenderized with steak mallets, but he commanded himself to keep moving, to keep limping up and down, to stay awake.
A couple of hours earlier he had paused for a few minutes. He had stretched out on the ground and rested his feet on a bank of earth because he remembered reading somewhere that infantry on the march always did this when they fell out for a break: something to do with letting the blood drain away from the legs. Schramm was not an infantryman. He was a middle-aged intelligence officer with a bad limp, and when he tried to stand, even the limp was a lost skill. His legs were a wash-out: his feet didn’t want to take his weight and his knees disowned any responsibility for anything. It took him a long time to persuade the leg joints to bend again and the leg muscles to carry his weary body along the broken tracks of the Jebel.
His legs’ readiness to quit surprised him. Thereafter he did not trust them. He kept them working all the way to the edge of the escarpment, and then he refused to sit down, although his knees were wobbly and the soles of his feet were hot with blood.
It had been an interesting walk, probably far longer than it need have been because at first he kept losing his sense of direction in the moonless gloom. The wadis wandered and divided and tried to lead him in circles, so he climbed to the highest spot—a ruined tomb, as it turned out—and tried to identify some stars. While he was at it he decided to dump the grenades, which were heavy and awkward. He left them in the tomb. He set off, looking at the stars but thinking of some inquisitive Arab boy getting blown to bits (or, even worse, half-blown to bits). He went back and retrieved the grenades. For the first time since he had killed him, he thought of Harris.
And with pleasure. Schramm was not a violent man. He rarely allowed himself to lose his temper. Given the chance, he would sidestep to avoid treading on an insect. Yet there was something symbolic about whacking Harris on the head. Harris’s weakness had been his brain. His body was splendidly trained to do its job, but his brain was small and weak, too small to consider the possibility that his victim might have the nerve to wait in ambush.
Now, as he trudged away from this high and lonely tomb, wearing Harris’s right boot and stuffing Harris’s grenades back in the pockets of Harris’s tunic, Schramm was amazed at, and appalled by, his own audacity. One attack: one chance. If he had failed, Harris would have caught him in ten seconds and knifed him in twelve. But he hadn’t failed! And how many unarmed middle-aged gammy-legged German officers had cracked the skull of a young thug of a Commando? Schramm shivered with pride. Then, almost at once, he sneered at himself for being such a caveman. To celebrate killing Harris was to come down to Harris’s level.
Ah, but there was also Captain Lampard. Schramm had made a fool of Lampard, too. Furthermore, he had discovered a few useful things about him. Lampard was quickwitted and intelligent: he had let Schramm run away rather than alarm the Storch. He was cocky to the point of arrogance: he should have kept Schramm blindfolded or at least shut away in a cave, instead of allowing him to watch the patrol at work. And the decision to send only one man to catch him was significant. It was as if Lampard had been showing off to Schramm, minimizing his escape. Lampard’s nerve was strong, but sometimes his judgment was weak. That was worth remembering.
Soon Schramm forgot Harris and Lampard and the rest of them. It took all his attention to concentrate on walking north. He was not convinced that he was steering by the right stars. Then he had a stroke of luck. The British began bombing somewhere—probably another airfield, maybe Benina or Berka, which were near Benghazi; it was unlikely they would go for Barce again so soon—and he saw the wandering stab of searchlights, which he used as a guide. The raid ended; he trudged on and had a stroke of bad luck: he blundered into an Arab camp and set the dogs howling. He backtracked and made a wide detour. Too wide: he roused another camp. The alarm spread and every dog aroused another dog. The night was slashed with howling. Schramm zigzagged miserably through it all, wishing he had a stick to defend himself; Harris’s revolver wouldn’t be much use if some rabid cur tried to savage his legs. Then, for no reason, someone on a hilltop fired at him. The flash and bang so startled Schramm that he stumbled, fell, and cut his knee. Indignation and pain made a powerful cocktail. He dragged Harris’s revolver from its holster and exploded three colossal, deafening shots at the night. He sprawled on the ground and massaged his right wrist, which had suffered from the recoil. The echoes died and even the dogs were silenced by his fit of rage. He crawled away, cursing. But not loudly.
The rest of his trek was a blur of memory. Sometimes he couldn’t remember where he was going, sometimes he remembered where but not why. Fatigue fogged his brain and left his body plodding on in a state of pointless, pigheaded obstinacy. In the end, arrival at the escarpment came as a small shock.
Then dawn, too, came with a speed that su
rprised him; or perhaps he had dozed off as he ambled up and down. Anyway, there was no sign of a track down the hillside and no sign of Barce airfield below. He was miles and miles off course.
Full daylight arrived before he found a track. Going downhill made his knees ache and cramped his thighs. He told his legs to stop complaining, they should think themselves lucky they weren’t going up. Somehow or other he reached the bottom. Feeble and wet with sweat. He knew the sun was shining because he couldn’t see it. Already the whole sky was one great roasting dazzle.
The obvious thing to do now was to walk across the plain. Schramm squinted and saw no end to it. His legs got this message and threatened mutiny. Everything he looked at shimmered in the heat. Even he was shimmering; trembling more and more violently. Come on, he told himself petulantly, you are an officer, now demonstrate your powers of leadership, you idiot. He demonstrated his powers of leadership. He got rid of the hand-grenades. One by one he pulled the pins and flung the grenades quite a long way. They exploded with very impressive cracks and crumps and pillars of smoke. Total waste of time and effort, he told himself, by now in a thoroughly bad temper.
As it happened, the grenades did a lot of good. A battalion of infantry, eating breakfast at the roadside a mile away, heard the bangs and sent a squad of men to investigate. They found Schramm trudging unsteadily in the wrong direction. An hour later he was on a bed in the hospital at Barce airfield and a Luftwaffe doctor was extracting bits of sock from the ragged soles of his feet. “How far did you walk?” he asked.
Schramm opened his eyes, then shut them. “Only the first two meters,” he said. “I skipped the rest.” He groaned as more skin came away.
A Good Clean Fight Page 4