A Good Clean Fight

by Derek Robinson

  What everyone needed was action. They were getting bored with making long sweeps across the serir, which was so flat and empty that no matter how far you drove you always ended up feeling you were back where you’d started. Action would be the test and the reward. It was time for some blood to justify all this sweat.

  And then, in the middle of the afternoon, when they had paused to rest and refuel, the radio truck picked up a signal from Benghazi. It was the message Jakowski had not expected. It said that radio-traffic intercepts by Luftwaffe Intelligence indicated the possible presence of an enemy patrol at the following map reference.

  He looked up. The sky was a soaring, intoxicating blue. Anything was possible under such a sky. Forget the Tomahawks! This enemy patrol was his real target. Let the airplanes wait!

  He summoned his officers. “Where are we?” he asked Lieutenant Schneeberger. “And where are they?”

  Schneeberger was the column’s navigator. He had trained as a Luftwaffe navigator for a few weeks until a defective eardrum made flying too painful and he had transferred to the army. Since the column set out, Schneeberger, with the help of a sergeant, had plotted its course by dead reckoning. They recorded the compass bearings it followed and the distance in kilometers it traveled on each bearing. Now Schneeberger unfolded his map and aimed his pencil at the end of the wandering line. “I calculate that we are here, sir.” He looked at the signal. “And the enemy is . . . um . . . let’s see . . . here.”

  Nobody spoke, but Captain Lessing gave a small, amused grunt. Schneeberger looked again. He was pointing at the middle of the Calanscio Sand Sea. “That’s where the signal puts them,” he said defensively.

  “Ludicrous,” Lessing said.

  “The English are mad but not suicidal,” Captain Rinkart said.

  “Good, good.” Major Jakowski liked an argument; it gave spice to his decision. “Be more explicit, gentlemen, please.”

  “Well, the dunes in the Sand Sea are too high and too steep,” Rinkart said. “And there are tens of thousands of them.”

  “You can’t get a truck across the Calanscio,” Lessing said. “Even the Arabs have more sense than to go into it.”

  “No water anywhere,” Rinkart said. “Heat like a furnace.”

  “You’ve been there, of course,” Jakowski said.

  They waited for each other. Eventually Rinkart said: “I’ve seen aerial photographs. If I’d been there, I wouldn’t be here, sir.”

  “The English seem to have managed it.”

  “This map reference may be wrong, sir,” Lessing said. “Benghazi says it got some intercepts. That just means a couple of our direction-finding stations took bearings on an enemy transmission and the bearings crossed in the Calanscio. Maybe the transmission was too short to give a good fix. The bearings might easily be a few degrees out. That can alter the fix considerably. Ten kilometers? Thirty? Fifty?” He took his cap off and shook it. The answer was not there. All it held was a little sand.

  “Heat makes radio signals wander too,” Lieutenant Schneeberger said.

  “When were these intercepts made?” Rinkart asked. “Benghazi doesn’t say. Could be last night. Yesterday, even. The enemy’s moved since then.”

  Jakowski clasped his hands behind his back and squared his shoulders. “And on the positive side?” he said.

  Another lieutenant, whose name was Fleischmann, said: “If the enemy is in the Sand Sea, and we can catch him, he won’t be able to escape easily, sir.”

  “Anyway, we can always call up the Stukas,” Schneeberger said. Jakowski sniffed. Schneeberger added: “As a last resort, sir, of course.”

  “We’re going in,” Jakowski decided.

  “It might be a decoy, sir,” Rinkart said. “A couple of men planted in the Calanscio with a radio to distract us from their main patrol.”

  “I’ve considered that. I shall divide the column into Force A and Force B. Rinkart and Schneeberger will come with me as Force A into the Sand Sea. We’ll take twenty vehicles and fifty men,” he told Rinkart. “Go and pick the best.” To Schneeberger he said, “Leave your sergeant-navigator with Fleischmann. He can teach him how it’s done. Lessing, you’re in command of Force B. Keep up the hunt. We all rendezvous here in forty-eight hours precisely. Right, let’s see some action.”

  Twenty minutes later, Force A detached itself and drove eastward. Soon the vehicles were dots on the desert. After that, only their dust-cloud proved that they existed. Eventually it too was swallowed by the boiling horizon.

  “So here we are,” Captain Lessing said. Lieutenant Fleischmann and Voss, the sergeant-navigator, stood waiting for orders. It was too hot to sweat; the sweat dried as soon as it formed on the skin. “Sergeant: if we leave here, can you guarantee to bring us back? I mean, to this very spot?”

  “Do my best, sir.” But Voss had been a lay preacher at home in Saxony and he could not tell an outright lie. “That’s not to say you’ll get an actual rendezvous.”

  “No? Why not?”

  “Hard to explain, sir. You see, Lieutenant Schneeberger and me, we each had our own compass and we traveled in different trucks and we made separate records on separate maps. The idea was to keep a check on each other in case one made a mistake.”

  “Admirable.”

  “Yes, sir. Trouble was, it didn’t work, sir. End of the day, the route on my map didn’t look a bit like his route.”

  “Faulty compass,” Fleischmann suggested.

  “I changed my compass, sir. Changed it twice. Made no difference.”

  “So Schneeberger’s compass was wrong.”

  “He changed his, sir. We still didn’t agree.”

  “And by how much,” Lessing said, “did you not agree?”

  “Seventy-three kilometers, sir.” Voss opened his map. “Mr. Schneeberger reckons we’re here. I reckon we’re there, seventy-three kilometers to the southeast.”

  “It could be worse than that,” Fleischmann said.

  “Don’t be bloody silly,” Lessing told him. “How could it be worse?”

  “Maybe they were both wrong. Maybe the truth is we’re neither here nor there, but somewhere else.”

  Lessing stared at him. Fleischmann was right: it could be far, far worse. The implications spread through Lessing’s mind like shock waves. “So that water-tanker we sent to Jalo,” he said. “Maybe it wasn’t late at the rendezvous yesterday.”

  Voss said: “By my reckoning, sir, the column stopped about twenty-five kilometers east of the real rendezvous point.”

  “How can all the compasses be wrong?” Lessing said.

  The three men stood and worried, while the desert wind hunted tirelessly up and down the musical scale.

  * * *

  Captain Kerr liked to start work at six a.m., when the telephone was silent and he could concentrate on signals that had come in from the patrols during the night. Thus he was surprised to find Lampard waiting outside his office and looking, Kerr thought, weary and a bit anxious. “Come in, park yourself and get it off your chest, whatever it is,” he said.

  “I want to leave now. Today,” Lampard said.

  “You’re not due to go on patrol until—”

  “I know, I know. But everyone’s fit, the vehicles are ready, we can draw stores in an hour. I want to go.”

  Kerr brushed some dead flies from his desk onto his blotter. “They got clobbered by the fan,” he said. He opened a window and tossed them out. “Never learn, silly creatures. A lesson to us all to watch where we’re going and to stay out of trouble.”

  “I know the colonel’s in the desert, but you don’t need his permission,” Lampard said. “You can do this off your own bat.”

  “Has someone in your patrol not watched where he was going and got himself into trouble?” Kerr asked.

  “No. Nothing like that. I just want to get in an extra couple of days’ training. We can do it en route. More realistic.”

  “Ah.” Kerr sat at his desk and folded his arms. He thought for rath
er a long time. Lampard watched. He yawned, once. Then his face resumed its old expression: hard, serious, tired.

  Kerr unfolded his arms. He scrabbled through some papers, found what he wanted, read it, put it back. “No trouble, then,” he said.

  “There are too many mouths and ears in Cairo. Security’s a joke here. I never feel safe until I’m in the blue. Sooner the better.”

  “The thing is, you see,” Kerr said, “if somebody had got into trouble, it would be bound to come out. You wouldn’t be here, but I would. And here is where the trouble would land.” He took out a piece of chalk and marked a cross on the middle of his desk. “Here.”

  Lampard frowned at the cross.

  “You’re not the first patrol leader to do this,” Kerr said. “Others have turned up here with a sudden craving for heat, thirst, sand, flies and all the delights of the desert.” He worked hard with the chalk.

  “It’s not really trouble,” Lampard said. “It’s just a sort of an awkward coincidence. It involves a lady who is the widow of an officer killed in action, a Mrs. d’Armytage. I called on her last evening to offer my sympathy. He was an Old Boy of my school, you see.”

  “I see nothing awkward so far.”

  “She lives in a block of flats. While I was there, an Australian major fell from the balcony. Broke his neck.”

  “Her balcony?”

  “Heavens, no. Balcony at the other end of the building.”

  “Careless.”

  “Drunk. I mean, that’s my guess. You know what these Australians are like.” He had a short staring-out match with Kerr which ended in a draw. “I found the body when I was leaving. In a rosebed. If there’s an inquiry they’ll question me and then Mrs. d’Armytage will get dragged in, and she’s really not strong enough.”

  “You found this unfortunate Australian major lying in a rosebed,” Kerr said. Lampard nodded. “How did you know he had fallen from a balcony?” Kerr asked.

  “It was obvious.”

  “It was pitch-black.”

  Lampard turned his head, deliberately, and looked out of the window.

  “All right, let’s put that aside for the moment,” Kerr said, “while we take another look at Tony Waterman’s death.” That brought Lampard’s attention back with a snap. “Refresh my memory,” Kerr said.

  “It’s all in my report. The Stukas got him.”

  “Yes? Describe the scene.”

  “Oh, don’t be so bloody silly.” Bad move, Lampard realized. He got his temper under control. “They caught us in the open. We did the usual—spread out, dodged about, ran like hell. Most bombs missed. One didn’t.”

  “A direct hit?”

  “Probably. The truck got blown to bits, I know that.”

  “Small bits?”

  “I didn’t measure them.” Lampard was having trouble with his temper again. “Yes, of course small bits.”

  “Including Waterman? No point in looking for his body?”

  “He was dead. The Stukas were still very lively. If anyone had stopped to poke through the wreckage I’d have court-martialled him.”

  “Of course. But next day?”

  Lampard sighed. “Nothing worth burying. Maybe the vermin got there first.”

  “Ah.” Kerr seemed satisfied at last. He reached into a drawer and placed two small discs on the chalk cross. “Tony Waterman’s dog-tags,” he said. “As I believe the Americans call them.”

  Lampard examined them. One disc was scorched and twisted, the other was intact. He held the intact disc between finger and thumb, as if it were a rare coin. “Someone found these lying in the desert?” he said. “That’s amazing.”

  “No. Someone found them in the cab of a burned-out truck on the edge of Jalo Oasis,” Kerr said. “Which is more than amazing. It’s staggering.”

  “If true. I don’t believe it. Who says he found them?”

  “An Italian officer of the Jalo garrison. He sent them to Benghazi. One of our agents there arranged for them to be stolen, and he posted them here via the next Long Range Desert Group patrol, together with an order for a sack of tea. Apparently the Arabs will do anything for tea. Did you know that?”

  Lampard carefully replaced the discs on the chalk cross.

  “You had no orders to attack Jalo,” Kerr said. “If Tony Waterman died on the edge of Jalo Oasis you have some serious questions to answer. Such as what you were doing there, how it went so sadly wrong, and why you invented a Stuka attack fifty miles away to cover it up. Compared to all that, the violent death of an Australian major is like an overdue library book.”

  Lampard said nothing. His eyes had the sullen, uncooperative look that Kerr had seen many times before, the look of someone who had been caught with his hands in the petty cash.

  “I don’t understand you,” Kerr said. “Why do such a stupid thing? I don’t mean the Jalo attack. I mean lying about it. We all make tactical mistakes, we all lose men, nobody gets upset about that, it’s war. But a patrol leader who comes back and tells outright, downright lies, who pretends the losses were not his responsibility . . .” Kerr shook his head. “The British army takes a very dim view. That sort of thing simply cannot be ignored. You must know that.”

  Lampard mumbled: “I did my best.” His shoulders were hunched defensively. Kerr had the feeling that if he shouted suddenly, Lampard might cry.

  “Spare me your self-pity,” he said. “It doesn’t suit an officer of this regiment. If you’re not strong enough to lead, then resign your commission and let better men lead you.” He poked at Waterman’s discs with a pencil. “And, who knows, maybe kill you too.”

  “Sorry,” Lampard said.

  Kerr got up and opened a wall safe, took out a heavily sealed envelope and dropped it in Lampard’s lap. “Your orders,” he said. “Open them after Kufra. I wish you a successful patrol. You may need all the success you can get.”

  Lampard left.

  Kerr picked up the discs and rubbed out the chalk cross. He took a sheet of paper and wrote:

  This officer has the potential to be an extremely successful patrol leader. He has already led raids that have inflicted great damage. (His reported score of aircraft destroyed at Barce has been independently confirmed.) He is successful partly because he is skilled and singleminded in attack, and partly because he is often totally lacking in consideration for the safety of others—or indeed himself. If he has a weakness it is that he is so obsessed with achieving success that he cannot tolerate any criticism of his failure, great or small. In future his patrol reports must be carefully scrutinized and doublechecked in every detail. On return from his current patrol the colonel should interview him. Promotion and/or decoration are due, but may not be advisable.

  Kerr found Lampard’s file, clipped the sheet to it, and tossed the file into his out-tray. On his blotter he scribbled: Send Lt. Pemberton to interview Mrs. d’Armytage a.s.a.p

  An hour and ten minutes later, Lampard led his patrol out of Cairo. They passed the Pyramids, skirted a little hill called the Gebel el Khashab, and headed into the empty sands. Lampard relaxed: his problems were behind him. The beauty of the Sahara was that you could vanish into it. He began to sing. Corporal Pocock, who was driving the jeep, thought it was something wrong with the transmission at first. Lampard had a truly terrible singing voice.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Bad Form

  Fanny Barton had briefed his squadron to strafe the target once only, break left and get out fast and low.

  Greek George broke right. Something huge and hot exploded on the ground and its blast blew his Tomahawk squarely to the right. He was dazed; for a second or two the world was black on white. Then he saw the horizon trying to stand on its ear, and so his hands and feet automatically did the right things and the airplane completed its barrel roll. Color leaked back into his eyes. Red and yellow tracer slid past the right wingtip, grew tired, fell away. George discovered that he was holding his breath, a bad habit in battle, so he let it go and filled his lungs a few
times. Better, much better. So why was he shaking like a man in a fever?

  He took the fighter up a couple of hundred feet and as it climbed he knew that he wasn’t shaking. The aircraft was. By the time he leveled off he was sure he knew why. At least one propeller blade was bent or bust. Maybe more than one. He circled and tested all the controls, and they worked, so it had to be the prop. “Fucking prop,” he said in Greek. That was a mistake: a pilot should never insult his aircraft before he has landed. Half a minute later, an angry bang came from the direction of the prop. At once the shaking became much worse. George had been trying to read his compass through the agitated blur of vibration. The frantic judder made it completely useless.

  So he was lost. The midday sun cast no shadow. He could be flying east or west, north or south. Meanwhile, his Tomahawk was shaking itself to death. For all he knew he was hurrying deeper into enemy territory. He might as well get out, before a wing came off. The fighter would not climb, so he couldn’t bale out. Too late to use his radio. Anyway, nobody would find him. He switched off the engine.

  The racket ceased, the shaking stopped. He slid back the cockpit canopy and tightened his straps. The airstream sang its tuneless song. By now the Tomahawk was seconds away from its last touchdown.

  As ever, it led with its chin. The desert came up and hit the gaping shark’s teeth so hard that the airplane bounced, twice, and then stuck out a wingtip and, showing a kind of grim, suicidal fury, cartwheeled into a heap of boulders. The last thing George knew was he was hanging upside-down in a fog of petrol fumes. He whacked the strap-release buckle and fell on his head. The day ended.

  Butcher Bailey also failed to break left.

  He machine-gunned a column of trucks, leaped the column like a show-jumper and felt a massive thump that numbed his arms and hands. Two cannon shells had battered his back armor. The steel kept them out, but his spine felt the shock. For a long while he could not move the control column. The Tomahawk flew itself until life and pain drained back down his arms. By then the rest of the squadron was out of sight.