A Good Clean Fight

by Derek Robinson

  Skull dodged and eventually ran. He had never known the adjutant lose control like that. It shocked Skull, and it made him wonder what he had done to cause it. Maybe he was wrong about Barton’s strafing campaign. The adjutant was a mature, sensible man. If he was upset, something was very seriously wrong.

  * * *

  After two days in another cave, the Arabs moved Greek George to some tents in a long, very wide wadi that actually had grass growing in it. By now he could walk, although his right knee soon swelled and locked solid if he worked it hard. And his ribs still weren’t happy. If he coughed or sneezed they caught fire. He guessed that something had snapped or cracked and probably the bone was setting wrongly. Nothing he could do about that. Or about the many scabs and desert ulcers that marked his violent argument with the sharp bits of the Tomahawk’s cockpit.

  He walked a bit, collected scraps of desert thorn for the fire, sat in the sun until it burned his skin and then sat in a tent and played games with the serious little girl. She liked cat’s-cradle; it fascinated her; her eyes would follow his fingers working the web of thread and finally she would look up at his face with such open admiration that his heart was touched.

  Now that they could cook, the food was better. They gave him eggs, small but good, and meaty black olives. Sometimes they killed a goat or a sheep, and there would be a long, silent feast.

  George could feel himself getting better. He learned some words. The sour milk was leben. A kind of porridge of barley flakes soaked in butter was esh. A guide was a khabir. Nasrani meant “enemy.” A basas was an informer. Some words he knew already: a bir was a well, kebir meant ‘big,’ a gilf was a cliff or sometimes a plateau. As the days went by he picked up more words. The one word that was always in the back of his mind was basas. He never used it but he couldn’t forget it either.

  * * *

  Skull looked out the information concerning enemy wells and water points and sent it across to the CO. That left nothing to do. He put a fresh needle in the gramophone and played “Empty Saddles.” Geraldo appeared, circled the apparatus a couple of times and stood with his head on one side, gurgling and clicking, watching the record go round. Empty boots covered in dust . . . Geraldo pecked the record. The voice hesitated but did not stop. Empty guns, covered in rust . . .

  “Silly bird,” Skull said. Geraldo strutted away. His philosophy was if you can’t eat it, fight it, or fuck it, then it’s not worth your attention.

  At 1100 hours Barton summoned Skull to attend a flight commanders’ briefing.

  “Takeoff in half an hour,” he told them. “I’ll lead ‘B’ Flight with Sneezy as my number two. When we get there we’ll split up into sections and go looking for ration convoys and water-carriers. Pinky, you take what’s left of ‘A’ Flight and hit this bloody great fuel dump, here.” He showed Dalgleish a cross on the map. “The troops are changing your ammo,” he said. “You’ll have three rounds of incendiary to one of armor-piercing. No tracer, you won’t need it, the dump’s too big to miss. Set the bastard on fire, it’ll burn for a month.”

  “Not Sidi Zamzam again,” Dalgleish said. “Not that damn dump again.”

  “This is a freelance sweep, right?” Patterson asked. “I mean, each section is on its own?” Barton nodded. “What if a section can’t find any water-tankers? Is there an alternative target?”

  “No!” Barton said. “Find them! Look harder.”

  “Are you absolutely sure about this, sir?” Dalgleish asked. The “sir” made Skull and Patterson turn.

  “Sure I’m sure. What’s up? Not thrilling enough?”

  Dalgleish swiveled the map and leaned on his knuckles, arms stiff and straight. The hairs on his arms were so black that even the desert sun could not bleach them. He had shaved that day, which was unusual, and a fine sheen of sweat coated his face. Skull, looking at his profile, guessed his age as twenty-four. That was old for a flight leader. By twenty-four you were either dead or promoted. Skull lowered his head to get a better view and saw that Dalgleish was not looking at the map, he was looking through it: his eyes were out of focus. How odd. “We’ve been to Sidi Zamzam before,” Dalgleish said, his voice as flat as glass. “We’ve been there . . . how often?”

  “Three times in the last week,” Barton said jauntily.

  “Three times in five days, actually,” Skull said.

  “They’re bound to be waiting for us,” Dalgleish said.

  “No, it’s the last thing they’ll expect us to do,” Barton said brightly. “They’ll never believe we’d come back again. Not with a hundred other targets waiting to be hit. We’ll fox ’em. You watch.”

  “That dump . . .” Dalgleish heaved himself upright. “That dump is going to be filthy with flak.”

  “Not a chance,” Barton said. “They’ve moved the flak. Now it’s there, there, there, there and there.” His forefinger stabbed at the map.

  “The fourth strafe in six days,” Dalgleish said. “It’s not going to work, sir.”

  “It’s a glorious opportunity, Pinky. One good kick in the slats and they’ll burst into tears.”

  “Lousy with flak.” Dalgleish’s voice was still dead level. “Four strafes in six days. It won’t work.”

  “If you’re not tough enough for the job,” Barton said, “then say so, but don’t go on bleating at me.” Dalgleish was silent. “Are you tough enough?” Barton asked.

  “I don’t know, sir.” Dalgleish raised his head and looked Barton in the eye. “I suppose I’ll soon find out.” There was more sweat on his face, and for a moment Skull thought the wetness below his eyes was tears. Then Dalgleish went out.

  Ten minutes before takeoff he walked into the orderly room and handed the adjutant a small bundle of papers. “That’s my diary,” he said. “You’d better burn it, Uncle.”

  “Diary,” Kellaway said. He recognized that empty, stony look on Dalgleish’s face; he had seen it before, on other pilots. “Burn the diary. Right-ho, Pinky.”

  “Six blank checks, all signed. I’ve got some debts in Cairo and there’s my mess bill to be settled.”

  “I’ll see to them all.”

  “Three letters, all for England. I suppose they’ll need stamps. Here are some snapshots. Pilots’ names are on the back. Might be handy for a squadron history some day.”

  “Yes indeed.”

  “Everything else is packed. I want you to have this, Uncle.” It was a small silver penknife.

  “My stars! Thanks awfully. It’s . . .” But already Dalgleish was walking away.

  The ten Tomahawks got airborne with the usual massive battering of noise, made one thunderous circuit of the landing-ground and flew west.

  Kellaway and Skull watched from their separate tents. When the last weak rumble had soaked into the sky, the adjutant strolled over to Dalgleish’s tent. All his kit was neatly packed, his bedding rolled up and stowed in a corner. The tent looked very empty. How can he be so sure? the adjutant thought. Yet this was not the first time a pilot had come away from a briefing and put his affairs in order. By now, Kellaway knew better than to try to reassure the man, or try to turn it into a joke. A fighter pilot should know his own business.

  He thought of asking Skull about the briefing, and he was actually walking toward his tent when he heard the melancholy opening bars of “Empty Saddles.” He turned and went back to the orderly room.

  * * *

  For once, navigation was not a problem for Lieutenant Schneeberger. He steered by the sun. The map said the Calanscio Sand Sea ran north and south, so he made his little group follow the sun, westward. Once clear of the Sea he would turn north and run for home: simple.

  Schneeberger’s problem was getting his drivers to rush the dunes bravely enough to reach the top. It took strong nerves to keep the accelerator flat to the floor as the gradient grew worse, with the crest only seconds away; and everyone’s nerves were still suffering from the memory of catastrophe. Schneeberger pointed out that they were retracing their tracks, so there
could be no danger. His drivers agreed, but all too often they ran out of momentum short of the top and had to reverse, slowly and awkwardly, all the way to the bottom.

  They were losing time and wasting fuel. Some of them abandoned the trail of tire tracks and attempted to climb a lower dune, which looked easier. Each time they discovered, as Sergeant Nocken had, that the sand on a moderate slope gave a poor grip. Wheels spun and speed died. More fuel had been burned, more time used up.

  The roller-coaster style of driving was not kind to the two surviving wounded. They died within minutes of each other and were buried together. Schneeberger read the brief form of words from his field service manual, and as he shut the book and looked up at the soaring arcs of silent sand that trapped him, he despaired.

  Such bad luck could not go on forever, and they all felt a huge sense of relief when they came across the water-tanker which had been abandoned on the outward journey. With so few mouths left to drink, they could afford to swig as much as they liked. It was a gloriously drunken, orgiastic quarter of an hour. Men grinned and shouted and sang. Some even threw mugs of water at each other. Schneeberger did not interfere.

  Spirits were high as they prepared to move on. The tanker had been left on the side of a dune and under the weight of the water its rear wheels had sunk deep in the sand. Reversing was impossible. The driver tried to climb and turn. The maneuver demanded a lot of power. The tanker lurched, and its load sloshed violently. All the weight was on one corner. There was a sharp crack.

  It was a broken half-shaft and they could not repair it. They tried to tow the tanker and it very nearly capsized. Schneeberger gave up. “Fill everything you can find,” he said, “including your bellies.”

  * * *

  It was too hot to work. The air moved sluggishly. Kellaway tried to read a list of recommended promotions among the ground crew. The sheets of paper stuck to his fingers. Skull’s distant music ended; now the camp was silent. Kellaway rested his head on his sweaty forearms for a moment, and when he woke up he had no idea how long he had been asleep. Two minutes? Twenty? His watch would tell him. No, his watch wouldn’t tell anyone anything. It had stopped.

  Well, that wouldn’t do. A chap had to know the time. The adjutant peeled bits of bumf from his sticky forearms and went out to look at the sun. Sun never stopped. Bloody reliable, the sun. He stared hard at it and learned nothing. There was nobody to ask, nobody nearby at least. Figures moved in the distance, but out there all humanity was overwhelmed by the endless waste of the desert: it turned men into feeble stick-figures, as unimportant as insects, shaped and reshaped by the casual distortions of the careless heat.

  During operations, the squadron kept observers at various points beyond the perimeter of LG 181. Airmen sat on top of small pyramids of empty oil drums and gave advance warning of anything that approached, especially if it was a Tomahawk trailing smoke. Kellaway trudged all the way out to one of these observers and when he arrived he had forgotten what it was he wanted to ask.

  “Not much of a view,” he said.

  “Bugger-all view, sir,” the airman agreed.

  He watched discreetly as the adjutant wandered all around his post and ended up staring at the simmering horizon.

  “Binoculars all right?” Kellaway asked.

  “Yes, sir. Very good, sir.” He swept a patch of sky, just to prove it. “Nothing doing except the brag school behind the stores.” He turned and focused on this. “Corporal Barber’s got three kings, lucky bastard.”

  “What?” Kellaway clambered up the oil drums. “Where?” The airman pointed. Kellaway took his binoculars. The card game leaped into view: six men in the shade of a tarpaulin, squatting around a blanket. Money got tossed into the middle. Silent laughter brightened their faces. He scrambled down and set off across the sand. The airman called out, asking for his binoculars back. No reply.

  As he marched, the adjutant talked to himself. “It’s all very well . . . I mean, it’s all very fine and good, but who carries the can? The poor bloody adj carries the can . . .” He stopped muttering when he approached the brag school and they all stood up. “Don’t give a toss for King’s Regs, do you?” he shouted.

  “Beg pardon, sir?” Corporal Barber said.

  “You’re gambling, aren’t you? Don’t deny it, I saw you!” He waved the binoculars. “The only game of chance permitted on an RAF station is housey-housey when officially organized by a senior NCO. You’re on a 252, all of you.”

  “Yes, sir,” Barber said. Nobody else spoke. It was embarrassing to be threatened with being put on a charge by the adjutant, of all people. The finer points of Air Force law got forgotten in the blue. The adjutant knew the troops played three-card brag whenever they could, and they knew he knew. Why not? The pilots played poker, and nobody tried to stop them.

  A couple of the men jerked their heads: the flies were a nuisance. “Stand at attention!” Kellaway shouted. The men stiffened.

  He walked slowly around them.

  “You are improperly dressed,” he told an engine-fitter wearing torn shorts and boots. He took a pace back and examined him, starting with his feet and working up to his head. “Your eyes are too close together,” he decided. “Get them changed.” If he heard their stifled laughter he ignored it. He was looking at their boots through his binoculars. “Foul. Filthy. Disgusting. Atrocious. Those are idle boots! Idle on parade, all of you. You’re all too idle to be charged. Corporal! Fetch me a Bren gun. I intend to shoot these men.”

  “Yes sir.” Barber hesitated. “I don’t think we have any Brens, sir.”

  “Then fetch a rifle. Six rifles. And a spade.”

  “Sir.” Barber hurried away.

  After a while, Kellaway noticed that the men were standing at attention. “At ease, you chaps,” he said. “Stand easy. No need for any bullshit here. I’m only the adj, after all. Only the poor old adj . . . Looking for Flight Lieutenant Dalgleish.”

  “He’s flying, sir,” one of them said. “They all are.”

  “Oh.” Kellaway absorbed this unexpected piece of information. “Well, it’s bloody inconvenient. How can I give him his letters if he’s fart-assing about the sky?”

  “Red flare, sir,” one of the men interrupted, and pointed to the west.

  High over the distant desert a scarlet blob fell in a slow curve. It was the signal that an observer had seen an unidentified vehicle, possibly hostile.

  “Can’t hear anything,” the adjutant said.

  “I can, sir. It sort of comes and goes.”

  “Oh, well. Better prepare for the worst.” It was impossible to defend a place like LG 181 against even a small enemy force, so the standard procedure was to prepare to blow up all fuel and ammunition and get out fast. Already, trucks were being started. The brag school faded away, leaving Kellaway to search the horizon.

  Corporal Barber found Skull and warned him that the adjutant was in no condition to give orders. Skull took command. A look-out on the roof of Barton’s trailer reported that the desert was empty of all activity except one very small, slow dust-cloud. Skull sent Barber to call off the demolition parties.

  Two minutes later a German motorcycle combination came to a halt beside the adjutant. “Hello, Uncle,” Butcher Bailey said. “Look, I’ve captured the entire German army. Well, the first two, anyway. It’s a start, isn’t it? This is Hauptmann Winkler.”

  “How do you do?” Kellaway said. “Could you by any chance oblige me with the right time?” He got no answer; Winkler merely shook his head, overcome by dismay. By now everyone was hurrying to see the exotic arrivals. Entertainment was scarce at LG 181: this was like a three-ring circus. “Tell you what, Uncle, I could do with some tea,” Bailey said. “Quite a lot of tea, in fact.”

  “Well, you certainly can’t go into the mess looking like that. You’re improperly dressed, man. Where’s your hat?”

  “My hat?” Bailey was, for a moment, baffled. “My flying helmet? I lost it, Uncle. It’s back there, about a hundred mi
les away.”

  “Then you’d better damn well go back and get it, that’s all.” The adjutant was suddenly stiff with anger. He noticed a man with a rifle and took it from him. “You know the penalty for being improperly dressed in the face of the enemy, don’t you?” He worked the bolt and cocked the weapon.

  “Steady on, sir,” a sergeant warned. “That’s loaded.” Men fell back on all sides.

  That was when Skull and the MO arrived.

  “Hello, Uncle,” Skull said. “I say, are we under attack?”

  “See for yourself,” Kellaway said gruffly. He waved the rifle toward Bailey and the Germans.

  “Well, you mustn’t shoot any of them, really you mustn’t. I haven’t debriefed them yet. It’s contrary to King’s Regs. You know that, Uncle.”

  “Oh.” The adjutant looked deeply disappointed. “I’ll shoot him, then.” He took two steps toward the doctor and raised the rifle.

  “Tell you what, I’ve got a better idea,” the doctor said rapidly. “If you want to do some real damage to the enemy, why not shoot that ugly thing?” He pointed at the motorcycle combination.

  Kellaway turned on it and banged off five rounds of rapid fire. They all missed. The noise fled into the desert and was lost. “Well done, Uncle,” the doctor said. “That showed them who’s boss.” He put his arm around Kellaway’s shoulders.

  “Have you seen Pinky?” the adjutant asked. “I’m awfully afraid his watch has stopped.” As they strolled away the doctor took the rifle from his hands and passed it to the nearest airman.

  Skull, Bailey and his prisoners went to the officers’ mess. The Germans accepted mugs of sweet tea, but Winkler refused to answer questions. “He’s got the hump,” Bailey explained. “They were lost, and he thought that just because I’ve got a kind face I’d take them home. Now he’s going to sulk until he dies, and then we’ll be sorry, you wait and see.”

  “What a shame,” Skull said. “He looks quite bright.”

  “No, he’s an intelligence officer. Wouldn’t know how to fall off a log unless there was a set of instructions on the inside of the box. Where is everybody?”