A Good Clean Fight

by Derek Robinson

  Butcher experimented. His arms ached as if they had been clubbed and his fingers had precious little grip, but they moved the column. He nudged the Tomahawk up a bit and then left a bit, until he reckoned he was on course for home. The Allison engine roared steadily. For fifteen miles, twenty, thirty, he kept turning his head to make sure nothing was chasing him. While he was doing this he saw his shadow on the sand. A long thin scarf spilled out behind the silhouette. It was coolant. The engine was losing coolant, a lot of it, fast.

  The needle on the dial that measured engine temperature was already edging its way into the red. Butcher put the undercarriage down before the engine boiled dry and seized up solid. The desert looked helpfully flat and there was no lack of it. He switched the engine off as the wheels touched. Immediately, he tried to call LG 181. All he could hear was a thick hum and his ears were manufacturing that. The radio was dead. Killed in action.

  The Tomahawk ran and ran until finally its tail sank and it trundled to a halt.

  Butcher undid his straps and stood on his seat-parachute. His back felt like a rucksack full of hot rocks. He turned slowly through a full circle and in all that space he saw nothing in the desert except his own wheel-tracks. He heard nothing but the soft sizzle and creak of his engine. He smelled nothing but the friendly, leathery aroma of the cockpit. Everything else, to the horizon and God knew how far beyond, had been baked to death a million times over.

  Butcher wiped salt sweat from his eyes. He swore until the futility of his voice depressed him, and then he climbed down and sat under a wing.

  * * *

  Skull debriefed the pilots. Once the strafe had begun, nobody had seen what became of Greek George and Butcher Bailey.

  “One is so frightfully busy,” Tiny Lush said. “You know how it is.” Skull cleaned his spectacles. “No, on second thoughts, you don’t,” Tiny said.

  Hick Hooper was in the mess tent, drinking the remains of somebody else’s tepid and dusty tea, when Pinky Dalgleish came in and said, “Your kite’s operational, isn’t it?”

  “Sure. Got a few scratches, that’s all.”

  “Right. If you’re hungry, grab a slice of bully. We’re off to look for those two.”

  “Good.”

  Dalgleish rubbed his eyes and blinked hard. “No, I wouldn’t go that far, Hick. Eleven-to-three against is what I’d offer, and that’s generous. Either they went down in the target area, or they didn’t. If they did, they’re in the bag. If they didn’t, we’ve got about five thousand square miles to search. Still, it’s worth a try.”

  “Suppose we find them. What do we do?”

  “Land, if you can. Park the bloke in your lap and take off. He waggles the stick and you work the rudder pedals. Dunno who operates the throttle and the undercarriage. Toss for it, I suppose. Highly uncomfortable, but it’s been done.”

  “And if we can’t get down?”

  Dalgleish sighed. “Make a cross on the map and give it to Fanny. He gets paid more than we do. Come on. Sooner we go, sooner we get back.”

  * * *

  Fanny Barton sat in the shade of an awning fixed to his truck and watched his intelligence officer approach. The awning was canvas, so bleached and baked that the next sandstorm would split its fragile seams. Barton hoped that Skull’s giant golfing umbrella would go too. He was sick of the sight of it. If Skull’s great brain was too sensitive for the sun he shouldn’t be here.

  “I’ve debriefed them,” Skull said. “D’you want to tear up my notes now or later?”

  “Just tell me.”

  “Right. As usual, the significant item of intelligence is what did not happen. No burning vehicles, for instance. Every pilot reported hitting a truck, or several trucks. No pilot saw flames.”

  “So what?”

  “Well, the target was supposedly a German army vehicle park. Normally German trucks are fueled-up. When strafed, a fueled-up truck should burn. These didn’t.” He twirled his umbrella.

  “You’re paid to be so bloody clever,” Barton said wearily. “Go on, amaze me.”

  “I think the target was phony. All those trucks were cripples, probably British, probably abandoned in the last retreat. There must be a thousand of them scattered about out there. My guess is the Germans collected a couple of hundred, lined them up in a neat square, maybe painted the ones on the outside, planted a few flak batteries all around, and waited.”

  Barton thought of the reconnaissance photographs of the target he had studied. No sign of flak batteries on those pictures. He had known then that there must be flak, that it must be hidden, camouflaged, and anyway the recce aircraft was two miles high when it flew over. What he hadn’t expected was such a savage barrage of flak. It had totally boxed the squadron and shaken it like soil in a sieve. “Bad luck,” he said.

  “I think not,” Skull said. “You have said you will fox the enemy. On this occasion the enemy has foxed you.” Barton was silent. “I take no pleasure in reaching that conclusion,” Skull said. “Butcher Bailey and Greek George are not going to return, are they? Both must be out of fuel long ago.”

  “It’s a setback,” Barton said. “It’s not a defeat.”

  * * *

  Ninety minutes after they had taken off, Dalgleish and Hooper landed. Skull came to the door of his tent and looked. Dalgleish shook his head. Skull went back in.

  They ate cold stew in the mess tent. Tiny Lush was there, feeding bits of biscuit to Geraldo. “I’m trying to teach him to sing ‘Lili Marlene,’” Tiny said, “but he only speaks Greek.”

  Hick watched the flies operate standing patrols beneath the canvas. His muscles were weary. He felt pleasantly scruffy: he hadn’t shaved, his clothes were crumpled and sweat-stained, he no longer noticed Lush’s ripe body smell. On the outside, he was comfortable. Inside, part of him was so discontented that it twitched like a bucket of eels.

  “Plenty of light left,” he said. “Maybe we just missed them.”

  “Yes,” Dalgleish said. “Or maybe the whole squadron could search for a week and find nothing.”

  Hick shook his head.

  “Why don’t you go and read a good book?” Tiny said. “Fido Doggart’s got half of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The fucking’s fucking awful, but the weather’s good. Lots of lovely rain.”

  Hick got up and went out. Geraldo followed. They walked to the orderly room, but the adjutant was not there. Hick found him a hundred yards away, watching two airmen dig a hole. Geraldo strutted around the scene, scratching and pecking at the loose sand.

  “What’s the form about George and Butcher, Uncle?” Hick asked. “I mean, what happens now?”

  “Keep up the good work, chaps,” Kellaway encouraged. A pickaxe struck stone. The airman using it cursed softly and Kellaway winced. “Well, do your best, anyway,” he told them. He led the American away, out of their hearing. “Bloody rock everywhere,” he said. “I can’t get any damn depth . . . Look, old boy: as far as any search goes, ops aren’t my pigeon. You really ought to see Pinky, or Fanny. But I can tell you what they’ll say.”

  “Those guys might be alive.”

  “And then again they might not. Even if they are alive, and supposing we found the kite, it might be empty because the pilot had buggered off fast before the Hun turned up and popped him in the bag.” Kellaway’s voice was gently calm and reassuring, the voice he had used a hundred times at Guest Nights when a blotto officer needed to be steered to his bed before he broke something he couldn’t afford, such as an arm or a leg. “See what I mean?”

  “I hear what you say,” Hick said. He scratched his stubble, hard, using both hands. “It’s still hard to take.”

  “Hick, old boy, everything’s hard in this war. You’d think in all of Libya a chap could find a place for some proper latrine pits, wouldn’t you? Honestly, I don’t know where to dig next.”

  They walked back to the hole. The American still felt stung by everybody’s apparent indifference. He had braced himself to face death when he came into
the desert, but he had assumed that death would stiffen resolve, or even revenge. When they got one of yours, you got two of theirs, or five, or ten: that’s how a war was won, you kept knocking the bastards down. Not here. On this squadron, two good pilots failed to return and everyone behaved as if they’d simply missed the train.

  “Hard as bloody concrete, sir,” one of the airmen said. He was standing on bare rock. The hole was less than knee-deep. He swung his shovel like a tennis racquet and a dozen flies pinged off its blade.

  “You see my problem,” Kellaway said to Hick Hooper.

  Geraldo climbed onto a small heap of excavated sand, looked about him, and thoughtfully made a tiny deposit of shit. “And you’re not helping neither, mate,” the other airman told him.

  “Well, let’s try somewhere else,” the adjutant said.

  Hick left him. It was late afternoon. Yet again Skull was playing “Empty Saddles in the Old Corral” on his gramophone. Skull sang along with Al Bowlly.

  Empty saddles in the old corral,

  Where do you ride tonight?

  Are there rustlers on the border,

  Or a band of Navaho?

  Are you heading for the Alamo?

  He saw Hick walking to his tent and waved a lazy hand. Hick nodded. A slick crooner and a smooth dance band scratching out a phony cowboy song in the middle of all this endless African godawfulness. For the first time he began to realize that the Desert Air Force was slightly off its head. Not completely mad: survival in the desert demanded self-control. Just mad enough to score a point or two against the sky and the Sahara. That was the real war. You couldn’t win, of course. The trick was to lose with style. Like Skull.

  * * *

  Paul Schramm went back to see Dr. Grandinetti in Benghazi hospital because his sores were not healing and he didn’t trust the medical officer at Barce airfield. Also there was something wrong with his liver, or perhaps his kidneys: his blood felt thick and sluggish. Food had no appeal. Twice he had woken up, slick with sweat, unable to breathe, heart pounding. His feet itched and ached all the time. Something had to be seriously wrong with him. All this he told her, in clipped and gloomy phrases. “No energy,” he said. “Teeth hurt.”

  “Take your clothes off.”

  He stood in the middle of the room while she worked him over with her chilly stethoscope and her warm, strong fingers. She did not hurry. At first he was impatient; then he conceded that she was in command and he relaxed. The coolness of the marble floor helped. His sexual organs, briefly aroused by contact with the fresh air, soon lost interest and withdrew. He wondered about this. She was, after all, an attractive woman. Perhaps it was an additional symptom that he ought to mention . . .

  “Get dressed,” she said. “Your age?”

  “Forty-four.”

  “You have a problem.” She began washing her hands. “One leg is much longer than the other.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong. The other leg is too short.”

  His fingers were making such hard work of fastening his shirt buttons that he gave up.

  “I am a surgeon. I could operate.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Don’t you want to be a balanced, upright citizen?”

  “I want to be able to eat and sleep, so that I can do my job properly.”

  She dried her hands and watched him put his shoes on. “Come,” she said. “You can see how this hospital works.”

  Schramm wanted to know what was wrong with him, but if she persisted in being mysterious he was damned if he was going to ask. “I’ve seen hospitals. Hospitals stink.”

  “Ah, but I have to do my rounds of the wards. And I might need you to translate. My German is not perfect. Come.” She took his arm.

  An hour later they were back in her office and he was standing at her handbasin, splashing cold water on his sweaty face. “Men are just meat to you, aren’t they?” he said.

  She sat on a windowsill where she knew there was a pleasant draft and watched him dry himself.

  “Let them all die,” he said. “Who cares? You don’t really care. This is just a dump, isn’t it? Just a dump for the useless by-products of war. You’ll never catch up, you know. The war’s faster than you. Anyway, let someone else sweep up after the stupid generals. Why do you bother?”

  “It’s your war,” she said. “You tell me.”

  He flung the towel into a waste basket. “I’d better get out of here before I damage something,” he muttered.

  “Come back tomorrow,” she said. “If you like.”

  * * *

  Malplacket was in Groppi’s, treating his hangover, when Lester brought in a fellow-American. “Oscar Flynn, flight lieutenant,” he said. “One of those gung-ho types who likes the RAF so much he won’t leave it.” They shook hands. Flynn was thin and balding, aged about twenty-five, elegant in two-tone shoes and a seersucker suit. “Is that black velvet?” he asked.

  “It claims to be,” Malplacket said. “Alas, the stout is not Guinness and the champagne is not French, and the mixture is not strong enough to knock the pennies off the eyes of dead Irishmen, as it should. But it is infinitely better than Egyptian gin.” They ordered another jug.

  “Oscar has flown virtually every type of Allied plane in the Middle East except a Halifax bomber,” Lester said.

  “Just a matter of time,” Flynn remarked.

  “Admirable ambition,” Malplacket said. The speech about black velvet had taken all his strength.

  “And he’s flown everywhere,” Lester added. “Abyssinia, Palestine, Aden . . . All over the place.” He seemed paternally proud.

  “I ferry stuff,” Flynn explained. “I ferry aircraft, people, cargo. Great way to see the world.”

  “Tell Ralph about Persia.”

  An hour later, Flynn left. Lester walked with him to the door, stood chatting, shook his hand, slapped his back, and returned to their table. “Great guy,” he said.

  “I’m sure Transport Command is proud of him,” Malplacket said, “but his is not exactly an epic tale of guts and gallantry, is it?” He resented having had to listen to so much tedious talk about flying.

  “Air power. That’s what this war is really about. Command of the skies.” Lester was very pleased with himself.

  “Are you going to fly to Persia?”

  “I might. I might.” He took a handful of nuts and munched them enthusiastically.

  Malplacket gave up. “Go to Persia, then,” he said. “I shall go back to my flat and lie down in a quiet room, if there is such a thing in this bloody city.”

  “Air power,” Lester said. “You watch.”

  * * *

  The Calanscio Sand Sea was by far the most impressive piece of Africa that Captain Rinkart had ever seen. It was beautiful, immense and terrifying. That night, he wrote to his wife in Dusseldorf: “Imagine a photograph of the Atlantic Ocean taken during a great storm. The Sand Sea is like that, except the waves are twice or three times as big and absolutely smooth. You climb to the top of one and what you see is more and more, to the horizon. Nothing moves. I would tell you that these dunes are frozen, but of course they are as hot as hell.”

  Rinkart did not say in his letter that the Sand Sea frightened him. An hour before sunset he had driven into it with Major Jakowski. They went only a few hundred yards, then left the truck and climbed the highest dune they could see. From the top, the view made Rinkart feel weak. As the sun went down, it washed the Sand Sea with changing colors that were so pure, so rich and so vast, his eyes were overwhelmed: how could God waste all these oceans of gold and green and red and blue on a wasteland? And yet this was no random wilderness. The dunes made a pattern that ran north and south. Jakowski would have to find a way across that pattern, working against the grain of the dunes. Rinkart looked down into the purple gloom of the valley. He realized that he was breathing deeply, summoning up strength to tackle tomorrow.

  “The SAS are in there,” Jakowski said. “I can smell them.” His head was up, hi
s eyes were bright; he was as perky as a spaniel.

  They descended the quick way, half-running and half-sliding. Jakowski drove back to camp in a blazing rush, the beams of his headlights bouncing off the dunes.

  “It won’t be easy,” he told Lieutenant Schneeberger, “but if the British can do it, we can do it better.”

  “Yes sir. I’m a bit worried about my compass,” Schneeberger said.

  “So change it. We’ve got plenty more, haven’t we?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Cheer up, Schneeberger. It’s only a piddling compass, I’m not going to dock your pay for it.” Jakowski could smell hot goulash and purple cabbage and fresh bread. He went off to inspect the weapons and came back looking pleased. “The great thing about the desert is there’s nobody to kill but the enemy,” he said. “Let’s eat.”

  * * *

  Butcher Bailey was asleep under the wing of his Tomahawk when the dust-storm reached him. He awoke in a panic, half-blind, half-smothered, all memory of his forced landing having been drowned in sleep. All he knew was what he saw and heard and felt: a blizzard of dark and dirty dust that howled with a kind of triumphant wretchedness and went after his eyes and ears and nose and mouth. There was no sky, no sun. He stood up to run and his head hit the wing. Then he remembered, and he knew it was pointless to run. He felt his way to the fuselage and climbed into the cockpit, got both hands on the canopy and kept whacking and heaving at it until grudgingly its clogged runners gave way and it slid almost shut. He was wet with sweat and the dust coated his skin like brown paint.

  Butcher couldn’t see as far as the propeller. Sometimes he got a glimpse of the exhaust stubs seven feet away. There was nothing to be done. He knew all about duststorms. They were far more common than sand-storms, they were filthy and disgusting and wearying, and you just had to wait until they went away. Once, he had sat in a tent for three days and nights with a towel over his head, waiting. He didn’t even want to think about that now.

  The dust-storm did not trouble Greek George. He was many miles away, in a deep cave, and as the wind hustled past the mouth of the cave it made a soft, breathy boom like a bass saxophone. He found the sound quite pleasant.