A Good Clean Fight

by Derek Robinson

  Malplacket drove over the Kasr Al-Nil bridge to Zamalek Island and turned north, into what was probably the best part of Cairo to live. The small block of flats at the end of a cul-de-sac was half-hidden by tamarisk and eucalyptus, and its balconies foamed with the red of bougainvillea and the blue of morning glories.

  “You’ll like James,” he said. “He’s a group captain in RAF Intelligence. Not awfully bright—at school I had to help him with his Greek.”

  “You check him out.” Lester slumped in his seat and pulled his hat over his eyes. “I’ll stay here and get some rest.”

  The front door opened as Malplacket approached it. “James!” he said. “How kind of you to come and meet me. But then you always were the soul of courtesy.”

  The group captain did not offer to shake hands. He was big. When he leaned against the doorframe it creaked a little, and he filled most of the space. “Philip just phoned,” he said. “You’re trying to scrounge secrets, he says. With some gloomy Yank.”

  “He’s in the car, decoding a few cables from Washington. The fact is, James, that Blanchtower wants me to report on the Special Air Service, so I came straight to you.”

  “Don’t know why. Nothing to do with the RAF.”

  Malplacket breathed deeply and tried to smile. “With a name like ‘Special Air Service’ it can scarcely be anywhere but the RAF,” he said. “Can it?”

  “Nothing to do with us. Goodbye.” The group captain stepped back, hooked his foot around the door and shut it.

  “You struck out again,” Henry Lester said.

  “It’s a delicate matter, very technical and, of course, highly confidential.” Malplacket started the Buick. “He’ll do his best. He was noncommittal.”

  “Yeah, you struck out.”

  They drove south and crossed to the mainland. Malplacket was subdued. The traffic was bad: he got behind a tram and followed it, stopping when it stopped. During one stop, Lester said: “My wife left me yesterday.”

  “Gone for good, you mean?”

  “That’s what it looks like. Took a boat to South Africa. Or maybe it was a ship. Yeah. Must have been a ship.”

  “What a shame,” Malplacket said. “I’m very sorry.”

  “Well, it’s been a long time coming, so I can’t say I’m surprised. Still . . .”

  “It’s always a bit of a shock. Always.”

  “This might be a good day for getting very drunk,” Lester said.

  “I was thinking along similar lines.”

  “Suppose we start at Shepheard’s. Then the Cecil Hotel, the Metropolitan Dugout, then Dolls’, the Excelsior and Pastroudi’s. After that—”

  “How about the Black Cat Club?” Malplacket suggested.

  “Sure.”

  “Is it a truly frightful dive?”

  “Babylonian,” Lester said. “Even the cockroaches go about in pairs.”

  * * *

  For the third day of strafing, Fanny Barton made some changes. In the dawn attack, the whole squadron flew as one unit—a different unit. Overnight the aircraft had been painted blood-red on the wingtips and nose, with a red band around the fuselage just forward of the tail. The shark’s teeth had gone.

  “Striking, isn’t it?” Barton said.

  “Reminds me of the yellow-nose 109s we used to meet over France,” Patterson said. “Very nasty, they were.”

  “Stuck in your memory, didn’t it, Pip? That’s the whole idea. Let the Afrika Korps think there’s a brand-new red-nose Tomahawk squadron operating. Gives them something fresh to worry about.”

  “I miss the teeth,” Dalgleish said.

  “Relax, Pinky. It’ll come off as soon as we get back.”

  That was in the gray of predawn.

  Barton waited until he saw the first curve of golden-orange sun nick the horizon, and led all twelve fighters in a booming, ripped-edge charge across LG 181.

  There wasn’t enough space to get everyone in line abreast, so Pip Patterson’s Flight made the second rank. Pip had never done this before, not in the desert, and he had brooded over it during Barton’s briefing. There would be a crowd of kites making a great cloud of dust, all at high speed. His Tomahawk was in the middle. It wandered to its left on takeoff unless you corrected it. How could you correct it properly when you couldn’t even see your wingtips? Fido Doggart was on his left. What if Fido wandered to the right? With full tanks and a full load of ammo, nobody would win that argument. Nothing left to bury but the fillings in their teeth. “This is a bit hairy, isn’t it?” he had asked Fido. “How can you see when you can’t see?” His stomach didn’t like the pint of tea he’d sent it, and he was sweating already.

  “Take off on a compass bearing. That’s what I do,” Fido said. “Treat the shit with the contempt it deserves.”

  It was like night-flying. As he raced into the deep-brown fog of dust flung up by the Flight in front, Pip stared at the compass needle and every time it twitched he corrected with a shove on a rudder pedal until at last he felt the tail come up and the jolting stopped. Suddenly the dust cloud fell away and he looked up into clear air. His Flight was neatly aligned to left and right, fifty feet off the deck, wheels tucking themselves away. Fido gave him a cheery wave. Pip nodded. He thought the red paint made the Tomahawks look like parrots. Not very warlike. At least the shark’s teeth had looked tough.

  Barton led them in the same takeoff formation, Flights astern, except that Pip let his Flight fall back so as to escape the wash of the aircraft ahead. Barton liked to cruise at a height of a hundred feet, and that left little room for error. He steered them south of west for about half an hour, then turned northwest for fifteen minutes. By now everyone knew they were deep inside enemy territory and all their heads were turning, searching for the high glint, the microscopic gleam as sunlight bounced off alloy and perspex. Earlier, Hick Hooper had asked Mick O’Hare what was the most dangerous moment in combat. It sounded like a foolish question, but he couldn’t think of a better one and he was prepared to sound foolish if he learned something. “It’s when your neck starts to ache,” Mick had told him. “So you give it a little rest. Only a few seconds, maybe ten or twenty. After all, doesn’t it deserve a little rest? A small reward for all the hard work, twisting and turning. Nobody will notice. Nothing terrible’s likely to happen in a few seconds, is it? During which time a tiny little 109 has fallen like Lucifer from the heavens above and all your worries are over, Hick.” O’Hare had squeezed his shoulder. Now, as the squadron turned north, and then northeast, Hooper’s neck ached. But his head kept turning. The sky was so vast and empty, his eyes hungered for something to focus on, a bird, a cloud, anything to cut this damned wearying infinity down to size.

  Nobody spoke. The desert skimmed below, a soft beige blur.

  Barton signaled: a quick waggle of his wings. Patterson lost a little speed. His Flight dropped further back. The target was a minute away. He widened the gap until the Tomahawks ahead were six small blobs, trembling like quicksilver against the brilliance of daybreak. Then Patterson opened his throttle. As he did, he felt sweat dribble down his spine, although the cockpit was cool and he was wearing only shirt and shorts. His Tomahawk surged forward. The others matched him. He took them down to fifty feet. Now the blur was a streak. Far ahead, red tracer stabbed the daylight.

  The target was a large tented camp. Its anti-aircraft defenses had recently been strengthened with extra flak batteries and heavy machine guns; but the Tomahawks swept in so low that most of the gunners were afraid to fire in case they blew the heads off soldiers caught in the open. The fighters smashed through a tangled net of vertical tracer and left behind a shambles of collapsing canvas and sudden death. The German gunners chased Barton’s flight, too furious now to care if any soldier was in the way, and so were surprised by the arrival of Patterson’s flight from behind. Men were picking themselves up, glad to be alive, or climbing out of slit trenches, when a second rush of bullets cut them down. Before they could fall, the Tomahawks had gone,
their bellowing engines fading to a distant drone. The entire attack had lasted twelve seconds.

  The two flights came together and Barton took them up to five thousand feet. Now he could break radio silence. “Hamlet leader to Hamlet aircraft . . . Bloody good show, Hamlet aircraft,” he said. “Piss on the Afrika Korps, right? Okay, Hamlet aircraft, we’ve spoiled their breakfast, let’s go and get ours.” All this was for the benefit of the Luftwaffe’s listening posts, who monitored the Desert Air Force frequencies. “Hamlet leader, out.”

  Skull was waiting for them, with his clipboard and his fountain pen. He knew they had fired their guns: all the canvas patches that kept out the dust had been blown away. As the Tomahawks drifted down, the air made a wistful song in the open muzzles.

  Barton landed first. “Did it work?” Skull asked.

  “Worked a treat. They never thought we’d be daft enough to arrive from the west. Not at sunrise. So they must have been squinting into the sun, looking the wrong way. Anyway, we blasted the living daylights out of them.”

  “Infantry?”

  “Used to be. Dead men now, half of them.” Barton beamed with satisfaction.

  Pinky Dalgleish strolled over, swinging his flying helmet. “What was all that crap about Hamlet, skip?” he asked.

  “New squadron call-sign,” Barton said. “Goes with the red noses. See? Something for Luftwaffe Intelligence to chew over.”

  “Not Hamlet,” Skull said. “Falstaff. Hamlet wasn’t a drunk, for God’s sake. Falstaff is the one with the red nose.”

  “Oh.” Barton tried to take it seriously but failed. “Is that what you said? All I could remember was it came from Shakespeare, and the only bloke I know in Shakespeare is Hamlet. He is in Shakespeare, isn’t he?”

  “Never mind, Fanny,” Dalgleish said. “I expect Hamlet liked his beer as much as the next man.”

  “There’s no textual evidence of that,” Skull said. “On the other hand, I suppose there’s no textual evidence against it, either.”

  He went off to debrief all the pilots. An hour later he took his notes to the CO and said, “I don’t suppose you will welcome this news, Fanny, but all the information I have collected leads me to the conclusion that your dawn strafe did much less damage than you had hoped.”

  “Don’t talk balls. It was a bloody good show, we duffed them up. Who says we didn’t? I want the bastard’s name.”

  “It’s not a question of what people say. It’s more a matter of what they don’t say. For instance, nobody remembers seeing German transport in any quantity. The most any pilot noticed was the odd vehicle. Yet a camp of that size merits a hundred trucks at least. Nobody saw any radio masts. A big infantry unit should have a signals section. Nobody saw smoke from cookhouse fires.”

  “Everyone saw smoke from flak. No shortage of that.”

  “Nevertheless.” Skull took his glasses off and cleaned the dust from the lenses. In five minutes they would be just as bad: Africa always wins. Barton watched and wondered why every intelligence officer had bad eyes. Maybe it was an Air Ministry regulation: four-eyed nit-pickers only need apply. Skull put his glasses on and saw the scowl bunching up a corner of Barton’s mouth, and wondered why every fighter-squadron commander had such a poor capacity for bad news. Maybe it went with the job: anyone who thought a lot about it wouldn’t do it. “Nevertheless,” he said again, “all the evidence indicates that the vast majority of those tents were empty.”

  “Cock.” Barton turned his back on him. “How do you know? Could you see inside them?”

  Skull counted silently to five, and asked: “Could you?”

  “I saw several hundred bodies.”

  “Half of whom were almost certainly very much alive. They fell flat when they saw you coming. Very natural.”

  “Half.” Barton’s voice was slack with contempt. “You’re very precise, Skull, considering you were safely tucked up in bed at the time.”

  “Half is generous. A quarter is more like it. I’ve been doing this job for a long time, Fanny. All pilots exaggerate. They’re excited. Who wouldn’t be? Their claims get duplicated. That’s inevitable. They multiply, I divide, we end up somewhere near the truth. Heavens above, I’ve known cases where—”

  “I don’t give a toss what you’ve known.” Barton faced him again. “I’m not interested in history. I want to scare up some 109s so we can shoot the buggers down. Nothing else matters.” He took Skull’s notes and tore them in half.

  “If they don’t matter,” Skull said, “why have you destroyed them?” He didn’t wait for an answer. Barton watched him walk away until he was just a trembling blur. A few minutes later the pleading tones of Al Bowlly throbbed across the baked air of the landing-ground, with Roy Fox and his Orchestra suavely lending support:

  When you don’t care . . .

  I’m bound in iron bands,

  When you don’t care . . .

  I’m lost in desert sands.

  In this wilderness, with none but you to guide me,

  I’m in heaven with your tenderness beside me . . .

  “Sarcastic bastard,” Barton said aloud.

  * * *

  Paul Schramm’s feet had begun to heal. He could drive a car, provided he didn’t stamp on the pedals, so he drove to Benghazi Hospital to keep the appointment which the station MO at Barce had made for him. Schramm didn’t want a second opinion, but he could do with a haircut and the Officers’ Club would have the latest newspapers.

  An orderly led him to the office of Dr. Grandinetti, who turned out to be female. Well, why not? She looked to be about forty. Her face was a slim oval, no make-up. She had short black hair, very curly, and a straight gaze, with one eyebrow slightly cocked. He did not like the look of her, and he decided to make it as brief as possible. “It’s just a few desert sores,” he said.

  “That’s not what Max told me. Max is quite worried about you.”

  “Max is an old woman.” He made a little throwaway gesture. “Sorry.”

  She spent an uncomfortably long time looking at him, and then said: “Sleeping well?”

  He thought three times before saying: “As well as the British bombers let me.” She kept watching him, so he added, “I don’t need much sleep.”

  “Lucky you,” she said. Schramm thought she looked slightly amused. Bloody woman.

  “Well, if that’s it, I’ll be leaving,” he said. “Thanks for your time.”

  “Suppose I asked you to take your clothes off, major,” she said.

  “Suppose I asked you to do the same,” Schramm snapped. He felt the blood rush to his head. This is ridiculous, he told himself. She’s trying to provoke you and you’re just helping her.

  “Suppose we examine this situation.” She opened a bottle of acqua minerale and poured two glasses. “You come here for treatment. In the last three years I have seen ten times as many naked men as you have. Twenty. I see a dozen naked men before breakfast. Not all alive, of course.” She sipped the fizzing water and pushed the other glass across her desk. “So why are you in such a rage?”

  “I’m not in a rage, for God’s sake. It’s just that . . .” He shrugged. “This is all such a waste of time. Mine and yours.”

  “Don’t concern yourself with me,” she said sharply. “Be honest: you don’t give a damn about me. Do you?”

  Schramm felt trapped. If he agreed, she scored. If he disagreed, she scored double. Bloody woman. “Agreed,” he said. “I think you stink.” It was such a childish remark that he surprised himself. On the other hand he enjoyed it. “Don’t feel offended,” he said. “I think the whole damn world stinks.”

  “In that case it’s no wonder you’re depressed,” she said.

  “Who says?” He was peeling bits of dead skin off his fingers. He hunched his shoulders. He stared at a corner of her desk, analyzing the joinery, the way the various pieces of wood fitted together. His eyes felt tired, his eyelids were heavy, he had to keep blinking. This wasn’t right, it wasn’t fair. He’d come in
for somebody to check his desert sores, that’s all, and now he’d be lucky to get his haircut . . . Bloody, bloody woman. What the hell was the matter with her? “Maybe I got a touch of sunstroke a couple of weeks ago,” he said wearily. “There’s really nothing wrong with me.” He looked up. How could she be so cool? Why didn’t she speak? Why didn’t she tell him what was wrong with him?

  “Sunstroke,” she said. “That was careless.”

  “I got captured by the British. That’s all I can tell you, and I shouldn’t even tell you that.”

  “But you escaped.” She made a fist of her left hand and propped her chin on it: a small but touching gesture. “That’s not a secret,” she said. “I worked it out by myself.”

  “I escaped.” Schramm didn’t want to think about all that. “I escaped, that’s that, it’s over, happy ending, welcome home, Paul. Have a medal, take two, take a dozen, give them to your friends if you can find any.” He got up and took off his tunic. There was sweat on his face. He wiped his face with his hands, wiped his hands on his trousers. “Brilliant. Everyone’s proud of you.”

  “But the whole damn world stinks,” she said flatly.

  “You’ve noticed it too, have you?” he said. “That’s reassuring.” He slung his tunic over one shoulder. “You don’t want to look at my sores, and I don’t want to look at you.”

  “Come back tomorrow, please,” she said. “Same time.”

  * * *

  David Stirling created the Special Air Service in 1941. At a time when everyone else regarded the vastness of the Sahara desert as an obstacle, and an impassable obstacle at that, Stirling saw it as an opportunity: a golden opportunity. The war was being fought up and down the coastal strip because that’s where the road was, plus the occasional length of railway. Thus the battlefield was a thousand miles long but only fifty miles wide, and most of it was empty desert. No civilians to worry about. No property to protect. No pernickety neutrals whose borders had to be respected. It was a tactician’s delight and a quartermaster’s nightmare. Given enough supplies, you could fight wherever you liked. Given enough supplies: that was the rub. Harbors were few, so the man who allowed commanders to fight was the truck driver. Tens of thousands of truck drivers, German and Italian, British and Commonwealth, brought food and water, ammunition, medicine, mail, petrol and spares and God and the quartermasters knew what else, and hauled their loads hundreds of miles to the Front (which of course did not exist in the traditional sense, being only an interim stretch of desert where you were perfectly free to walk if you didn’t mind getting your head blown off by some invisible gunner). At the time of the stalemate in May 1942, each side was trucking its supplies five or six hundred miles.