A Good Clean Fight

by Derek Robinson

  At the approaches to the Jalo Gap, Lampard called a halt for a brew-up. The rambling, uneven terrain that spread south of the Jebel was behind them now; they were back in desert, pure and simple, and the land was almost featureless. Heat hit the sand like a punishment and the sand just lay there and absorbed it, too dead to be killed any further.

  The flies flew in from all quarters, buzzing with approval. These were the first white men for a week to sweat here. Lampard took a shovel, walked a hundred yards, dug a hole and squatted over it. His personal bodyguard of flies went berserk. He ignored them; he had long ago learned that you could never win the battle with the flies; the only sane thing was to forget them.

  He was pleased to note that even from here the vehicles looked slightly soft and vague. The heat-haze that settled on the desert at midday was doing its stuff. It would get worse than this, until visibility fell to less than half a mile. Splendid. He filled in the hole and five hundred flies went to an early grave.

  Sergeant Davis gave him a mug of tea, black as tar. Lampard added condensed milk, lots of it, and watched the colors swirl and jostle and blend. He drank. It tasted wonderful. “In the words of the poet,” he said, looking into his mug, “Earth has not anything to show more fair.”

  “Oh, I dunno,” said Davis. “I knew a girl in Rotherham. Tits like coconuts.”

  “What, all brown and hairy?” said Blake. He wrinkled his nose. “That’s not very nice.”

  “How did he know?” Corporal Pocock asked Lampard.

  “How did who know?”

  “This poet bloke.”

  “The name was Wordsworth,” Tony Waterman said.

  Davis shook his head. “Not her in Rotherham, no. Her name was Prendergast, Maureen Prendergast.”

  Dunn said: “Jerry must have told the Eye-ties at Jalo to watch out for us in the Gap. It’s the obvious thing to do, isn’t it?”

  “How did Wordsworth know?” Corporal Pocock persisted.

  “Jerry must have told him too,” Blake said.

  “If the Eye-ties come out from Jalo to get us, we run for it,” Lampard said. “Flat out.”

  “I mean, it’s just his opinion, isn’t it?” Pocock said. “Just Wordsworth’s opinion, that’s all. I mean, he didn’t know everything, did he? Earth has not anything to show . . . How the hell did Wordsworth know what Earth had to show? Probably never been east of Hackney in his whole life.”

  “They wouldn’t see anything from Jalo,” Dunn said. “Not this time of day.”

  “I bet Wordsworth hadn’t seen Jalo, for a start,” Pocock said.

  “I tell a lie,” Davis said. “Her name was Pickering. Her in Rotherham. Maureen Prendergast lived in Barnsley. I preferred Muriel Pickering, myself. Tits like melons.”

  “People shouldn’t make sweeping statements,” Pocock said. “Not unless they got proof.”

  “I suppose we ought to make allowances for Wordsworth,” Waterman said. “He never knew when to stop. He was the bloke who wrote: ‘and then my heart with gladness fills and dances with the daffodils.’”

  “He wouldn’t have liked it here,” Davis said. “Too hot to dance.”

  “I knew a Pickering once,” Blake the fitter told Davis. “Not Muriel, though.”

  “I reckon anyone who dances with the daffodils must have a few tiles off his roof,” a trooper called Smedley said.

  “You’re thinking of Doris. Muriel’s sister. Went to live in Pontefract. Doris Pickering,” Davis said. “Tits like turnips.”

  “Let’s go,” Lampard ordered. The fire was out, the gear was loaded.

  “Tell me, sergeant,” Gibbon said. “Purely for my information: given the choice, would you prefer tits, or fruit and vegetables?”

  “That’s what I ask myself every night, before I go to sleep,” Davis said. “Tits or turnips? Turnips or tits? I could murder a nice juicy turnip now, but on the other hand . . .” He stopped because they had all stopped.

  Airplane.

  Nobody spoke. The easy-going buzz, too thin to be a bomber, too slow to be a fighter, could only be a Storch, dribbling along at three or four hundred feet, and it had to be looking for them.

  “Let’s knock it down if we can,” Lampard said, “but if anyone fires he’s got to hit it. Otherwise we leave it alone.” The men hurried to their vehicles and peeled the dust covers from the Vickers twin machine guns.

  The buzz approached, altered its tone, faded, returned, changed tone again. “Box search?” Gibbon said to his driver. “Sounds like it,” the driver said. In a box search the aircraft flew a series of rectangles, each one butted against the last, slowly working its way along a route.

  And then they saw it, soft as a moth, all detail fogged out by the heat-haze.

  “Too high,” Lampard said to Dunn. “He can’t see anything from up there, not through this soup. That’s blindingly obvious.”

  The noise dwindled and the silhouette dissolved to nothing. “Fathead,” Lampard said. “Right, off we go. Five miles an hour and keep it quiet.” The patrol moved off.

  * * *

  In the Storch the passenger sat behind the pilot. Paul Schramm leaned forward and pointed at the altimeter. “Lose some height,” he said. “Lose a lot of height, in fact. I’ll never see anything from up here.”

  “You’ll see even less if I go into that muck.”

  “Let’s try, anyway.”

  The pilot turned the plane through a right angle as easily as if he were swinging on a lamppost, and leveled out, but he did not lose height.

  “They’re down there somewhere,” Schramm said. “I know it. What are you afraid of?”

  “I don’t trust this squalid altimeter,” the pilot said.

  “For Christ’s sake! It got us over the Jebel! Besides, there’s nothing near here to fly into. It’s all just desert.”

  “Maybe. This wreck was being pulled apart in a hangar only an hour ago. I bet they bust the altimeter. Bet they forgot to reset it.”

  “Looks good to me.”

  “Anyway, there’s desert and desert. I’ve seen dunes a hundred meters high in the Calanscio.” He meant the Sand Sea that formed the eastern side of the Jalo Gap. It did indeed look like a sea: a succession of monstrously heaving waves and swells.

  “We’re nowhere near the Calanscio,” Schramm said. “We’re in the Gap, aren’t we?”

  “I don’t trust that squalid compass,” the pilot said. “There’s something peculiar about it.” He swung onto another leg of the search and watched the compass react. “Damned mechanics,” he muttered. “First thing they do is bust the compass.”

  Schramm lost patience. “Get down there,” he ordered. “Or I’ll have you court-martialled.”

  The pilot sighed and eased the control column forward. The haze gradually thickened until it was like flying through industrial smog, yellow-brown, quivering with dust. Visibility was so bad that it was impossible to tell where the haze ended and the desert began. The horizon wasn’t much help: just a blur where brown-yellow turned to yellow-brown. “We’re down,” the pilot grunted. “Hope you like it.”

  For ten minutes they searched and saw nothing. By then they both knew they were through the Gap and on the edge of the open desert, with the Calanscio receding to their left and Jalo Oasis falling behind to their right. Schramm realized now what a barren idea this search had been. Guessing where the enemy was didn’t necessarily mean you could do anything about it.

  “You know this wreck flies on fuel, don’t you?” said the pilot.

  “I know.” Schramm glanced at the gauge. Low.

  “You can’t trust that,” the pilot said. “First thing they do is bust the fuel gauge.”

  “All right. Since we’ve got to go back, let’s stay down and look for wheel tracks.”

  “Is that all you want? Christ, if that’s all you want I can show you dozens of them, hundreds. It’s like an autobahn down there, next exit five hundred kilometers south, Kufra. Our Latin comrades used to have a garrison down at Kufr
a, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “That was before the British turned up.”

  “I know that too.”

  “First thing the British do is bust the Italians.”

  “I’ve heard enough from you,” Schramm said. “Just drive the bus.”

  The plane flew north. The pilot had been right: tire tracks were everywhere. Some were obviously old, partly smoothed by the wind, but many were new. Or looked new. Schramm despaired. A month, a week, five minutes; who could tell the difference? Then the pilot nudged him. Schramm looked where the pilot was looking, away to the left. Five square blobs on wheels. “Get closer,” he said.

  The pilot circled, edging slightly inwards. The vehicles were moving very slowly.

  “Could be an Italian patrol,” Schramm said. “I can’t tell from here.”

  “British trucks. Look at the silhouettes.”

  “That proves nothing. We captured hundreds of them. Get closer.”

  “If I get any closer and they’re not Italian, we’re dead.”

  Schramm tried to focus his binoculars on the hazy shapes, but all he got was bigger hazy shapes. “It’s got to be them,” he muttered. “I’m not going back without . . .” But he couldn’t complete the sentence. He felt slightly sick. Maybe the doctor’s injection was wearing off; certainly the pain had come back, as if an electric fire had been brought too close to his feet. Or maybe the sickness was the effect of all this circling with no clear horizon to cling to. For a wretched moment, Schramm suffered the illusion of hanging motionless while the rest of the world swung hugely and helplessly around him. He shut his eyes.

  “Fifty-fifty that’s an Italian patrol looking for your British friends,” the pilot said. “Fifty-fifty it isn’t.”

  “All right.” Schramm was too weak to argue. “We’ll report it to Barce as a possible target and go home. Let them make the decision.”

  “Send the message now?”

  Schramm opened his eyes. “Yes, now.”

  “I’ll have to take her up five hundred meters. This isn’t the greatest radio in the world.”

  “So do it.”

  Schramm’s body was angled back as the nose came up, and his head got gently tilted until it rested on the seat top. The position was soothing. Nothing more to be done. Over to the professionals now. “Oh, you bitch,” the pilot muttered. Schramm compelled his mind to alert itself, and grudgingly his mind responded. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  The nose was going down again. The pilot was fussing with the controls, nudging the throttle a fraction forward and half a fraction back, cocking his head to test the engine note as he glanced up at the wings. “She won’t climb,” he said. “We nearly stalled. I can’t get any lift.”

  “You mean there’s a fault somewhere?” Schramm heard the foolishness in his words and struggled to recover control of himself and his situation. “Forget the signal,” he said. “Make for Agedabia. We can land there.” Agedabia was about a hundred kilometers south of Benghazi. The land between Jalo and Agedabia was fairly flat. The pilot was shaking his head, not in answer to Schramm but as a verdict on the performance of the Storch. “She is not a happy airplane,” he said. “People have not been kind to her, and now she doesn’t want to fly any more.”

  * * *

  The five vehicles of the patrol had stopped and their engines had been turned off. Nobody spoke. They all sat and looked at the haze, which was beginning to lift, but still it was like looking at a hot and hazy nothingness. They listened to the sound of the desert, but this was a hopeless mismatch because the desert had been practicing its silence for tens of thousands of years. The desert was a master of silence. They were novices.

  Dunn got down from his truck and walked over to Lampard’s armed jeep. The scuffing of his boots was noisy. Lampard sat upright, only his head moving as he hunted for sound. Dunn waited. He could feel sweat trickling inside his ears.

  “That’s never happened before,” Lampard said. “Normally, when a shufti-kite flies away, you can still hear it for a minute or two. Especially if it’s climbing.”

  “Beats me,” Dunn said.

  Lampard stood up and rubbed his backside. “If we didn’t hear it fly away,” he said, “that means it hasn’t flown away.”

  “Logical,” Dunn said.

  “If it hasn’t flown away, it’s on the ground. Nearby.”

  “Fancy that,” Dunn said.

  “I do fancy it. Go due west one mile,” Lampard told his driver. “That’s where he faded out.”

  * * *

  The pilot switched off the engine before the Storch had rolled to a halt. Already the desert heat was hammering at the cockpit and Schramm was sweating hard. Part of this was panic. “That was a very stupid thing to do,” he said. “What if we can’t get it to start again?”

  “If I have to crawl over this wreck,” said the pilot, “I would prefer not to do it behind a prop that is throwing desert at me like a small sandstorm.” He opened the door and stepped down. “Don’t touch anything,” he called. “It might be booby-trapped.”

  Schramm slid his side window back and felt the desert breathe its heat at him. He hated it for wanting to bake him to death and hated it even more for being such a faceless murderer. There was nothing out there to focus his hatred on. Everything to see and nothing to look at. Just a trembling blur of sand. After a while Schramm realized that his head was doing the trembling and he closed his eyes. Slashes of purple and scarlet flickered and merged, vanished and popped back. His imagination repositioned him high in the sky, looking down on himself, a speck inside a bigger speck lost in a flat wilderness that didn’t give a damn for either of them.

  When the pilot climbed in and shook him awake he was sunk in such a deep fatigue that the man’s words meant little. “Trouble with the elevator. Maybe a pulley’s jammed somewhere and trapped a cable, I don’t know. All I know is the elevator won’t elevate us. Also the engine hasn’t been giving full power. I found a cracked fuel line, which means dust and dirt got in, so now we’ve got dirty fuel. I told you this wreck was a wreck.”

  “Yes,” said Schramm, and felt pleased with his achievement.

  “If they’ve got any brains in Barce they’ll come looking for us.”

  “I’m the brains in Barce,” Schramm said.

  The pilot sighed. “I think I’ll have a little sleep,” he said; but instead he put his head out of the cockpit. “Hear that?” he asked. Schramm held his breath and listened. Beyond the thump of his own pulse he heard the low mumble of engines.

  “Nothing in sight on this side,” the pilot said. All the cockiness had left his voice. Schramm squinted at the haze, much thinner now, saw nothing and said nothing. The pilot heaved himself across the cockpit and got his head out of the other window.

  Five seconds later he dropped back into his seat. “The trucks we were chasing seem to have found us,” he said. Already he was priming the engine, setting the throttle, thumbing the starter.

  The Storch was still hot: she fired instantly, dirty fuel or not. Within thirty yards she was flying. The pilot got her ten feet off the ground and failed to make her climb an inch higher. “Any idea how fast they can go?” he asked. Schramm took too long thinking. “Never mind,” the pilot said. “We’ll soon know.”

  * * *

  Lampard led the patrol at a brisk, bumpy twenty miles an hour through a shallow depression and around a patch of rocks, and stopped. Before he could raise his binoculars he saw the Storch, half a mile to his right, just as it left the ground. “Tally-ho!” he shouted. “After the bastard!” But his driver had already seen it and Lampard’s words were lost in the bellow of the engine. The jeep jumped away from its own dust.

  The rest of the patrol joined in the chase with more or less enthusiasm. Mike Dunn, in the armed truck, urged his driver on. He knew the contest was absurd: any plane could outrun a truck, never mind out-climb it, but where Lampard led, Dunn followed: simple as that. Sergeant Davis, in the other arm
ed jeep, did the same. In the wireless truck Tony Waterman left it to his driver to decide the pace. Waterman’s job was to remain operational, send and receive signals, not get mixed up in combat. Captain Gibbon, the navigator, had taken over the Alfa-Romeo, and he made no great effort to keep up. The desert surface was patchy and in parts treacherous, the Alfa’s tires were losing their tread, and Gibbon believed that Lampard was simply frightening the German plane away, so why take chances?

  After a quarter of a mile Gibbon saw that he was wrong. The Storch was flying, but only just. It was not climbing and it was not escaping. As the Alfa bucketed over some unexpected corrugations, Gibbon saw the red pulse of tracer leap from the machine guns in Lampard’s jeep and arc high toward the plane. The burst fell short. But not all that short.

  Schramm heard the stammer of the guns. He felt curiously unworried. Flying like this was like traveling on a gentle fairground ride, dipping and rising and dipping again. It took his mind off the pain. “Can you see them?” he shouted.

  “Ever been to Jalo?”

  “No.”

  The pilot saw the glint of an outcrop coming toward them and he nursed the machine over it. “Oasis, right? Palm trees, yes? Hundreds. Thousands, probably.”

  “Are you going to Jalo?” Schramm asked. It was you, not we. Schramm was just a passenger now. Excess baggage.