A Good Clean Fight

by Derek Robinson

  “Two reasons. One, if I went through the usual channels I wouldn’t make first base. Two, if by some miracle they let me go with you, they’d make damn sure they censored the bejesus out of everything I wrote.”

  “I like the censors,” Lampard said. “They keep the enemy guessing.”

  “Guessing what? Guessing that you guys keep raiding their airfields and blowing up their Messerschmitts? I found out about that, so it’s probably reached Rommel too.”

  “That’s still no reason to give the entire game away.”

  “What game? Long before my story hits the streets, your war will have changed completely. It’s campaign season! Time for another battle! Soon the Front will be at the back, or vice versa, and this entire set-up will be history. Meantime,” Lester said, “yours is the best story of the desert war, and I want to tell it the way it deserves to be told, not gutted by some fat blue pencil. I could make you the new Lawrence of Arabia, you know that? You should be very happy with me.”

  Lampard thought about it. “And where do you fit in, Mr. Malplacket?” he asked pleasantly.

  “Um . . .” Malplacket had not been listening; he had heard it all before. He had been thinking about the way the leaves of the date-palms kept up a leathery creaking in the breeze. He thought it sounded like the cautious mating of elderly elephants; then he dismissed that as a frivolous notion; and finally he wondered if he was fundamentally a frivolous person, a question that called for serious examination, but not before breakfast . . . “Let’s see, now,” he said. “My role runs parallel with that of Lester. I too am in the market for a dashing exploit. To boost morale back home, you see. Churchill told Blanchtower to find some gallant feat of arms, and Blanchtower sent me to look in the desert.”

  “Blanchtower’s his old man,” Lester said. “He’s a lord.”

  “A dashing exploit,” Lampard said. “Well, we certainly do our share of dashing.” He was wearing a revolver in a webbing holster. He took the gun out and held it between his knees.

  “Oh no,” Lester said. “You’re not that stupid.”

  Lampard spun the chamber. He cocked the gun. “You’re very cocky,” he said. “For someone who’s an awfully long way from home.”

  “Don’t even think of it,” Lester told him.

  Malplacket said, “What should he not even think of?”

  “Killing us like he killed that Aussie major.” Lester got out of the jeep and kicked a tire, not in anger but for something to do. “Malplacket here may look like a lampshade, but his father really is in the British war cabinet. Lord Blanchtower lights Winston Churchill’s cigars. Me, I’m just a hack from the Windy City but I didn’t fly here without insurance. Before I left Cairo I wrote up your killing, and it didn’t look like self-defense to me, it looked like murder. If I’m not back there within a month, that statement goes straight to the British Army Provost-Marshal.”

  Lampard let his head fall back until he was staring at the sky. “Wild accusations from a missing American civilian,” he said. “The Provost-Marshal will file it and forget it.”

  “My lawyer didn’t think so. And he drew up the affidavit.”

  Malplacket said to Lampard, “The sequence of events would appear to be: you kill us, and the army hangs you.”

  “In a nutshell,” Lester said.

  Lampard was silent.

  “Difficult to detect any benefit to anyone in that arrangement,” Malplacket said. “But of course I may have overlooked something.”

  Lampard put the gun away. “I won’t take you on the raids,” he said. “You can join the patrol, but raiding is dangerous and it calls for skills and fitness which you two do not possess. You would almost certainly get hurt, you would quite definitely put my men at greater risk, and I won’t allow it. But, you’ll get your story, after the raid.” He started the jeep.

  “You won’t regret this,” Lester said.

  “D’you know,” Malplacket said, “I think I could persuade Blanchtower to authorize a cinema film about your patrol. David Niven, Trevor Howard, Cary Grant.”

  “Not Cary Grant,” Lampard said.

  “No, perhaps not. Errol Flynn as Rommel? Rather audacious casting, don’t you think?”

  After breakfast, Lampard called his men together and told them that two observers would be going with them, both civilians. Nobody was surprised. It was assumed that Lester and Malplacket were spies, to be left in the Jebel. That sort of thing had happened before.

  Lampard dismissed the men. The officers remained.

  “We’re early,” Lampard said, “we stay here tomorrow, clean weapons and so on, move out the next day.”

  “A signal just came in,” Sandiman told him. “For you. I had to decode it, of course.”

  The choice of words, his tone of voice, made Dunn and Gibbon glance at him.

  “Of course,” Lampard said. He took the piece of paper. He read the message. His head sank, but only briefly. “Change of plan,” he announced. “We move out tomorrow, early.”

  “Cairo want a reply, sir,” Sandiman said.

  “No reply needed. Don’t even acknowledge, in fact don’t send anything to anyone until I say so. Understood?” Lampard strode away, looking as grim as a general. His right fist was clenched. The signal was crushed inside it.

  “Golly,” Dunn said.

  “Better tell us,” Gibbon said to Sandiman.

  “Can’t do that.”

  “Look: Mike needs to know everything. If Jack gets hit, Mike takes over.”

  “Sorry,” Sandiman said. “No can do. Classified secret.”

  “Was it an order to move tomorrow?”

  Sandiman hesitated. “This isn’t fair,” he said, and left them.

  They watched him go. “So it wasn’t an order to move,” Dunn said, “but Jack’s moving anyway, fast, and nobody’s to know. Pick the bones out of that, if you can.”

  “Looks like a skeleton to me,” Gibbon said gloomily; but then, Gibbon said almost everything gloomily.

  * * *

  Streams of tracer pumped themselves up from the desert in brilliant red-and-green streaks, climbing easily, almost lazily, until they got a whiff of their target, when they seemed to race and bend toward it.

  I shall be killed, Paul Schramm thought, and all because Maria Grandinetti couldn’t answer the telephone.

  The tracer reached the peak of its trajectory and fell away, perhaps a couple of hundred yards short. “Awkward,” Benno Hoffmann said. “If I get any closer they’ll hit us. If I don’t get any closer they’ll never identify us.”

  “What’s wrong with using the radio?” Schramm asked.

  “The valves are broken.”

  Hoffmann was flying an RAF Lysander captured in the last British retreat from Benghazi. The Lysander was a high-wing monoplane with a rugged undercarriage, including spats on the wheels, and it was an excellent aircraft for low-level reconnaissance, bigger and far better (in Hoffmann’s opinion) than the Luftwaffe’s Storch. The trouble was it didn’t look anything like a Storch, which was why Jakowski’s column was trying hard to destroy it.

  He had found the Lysander only the previous night, on a fighter field at Beda Fomm, south of Benghazi. The fighter pilots kept it hidden at the back of a hangar, because it was thoroughly unofficial. They had painted it bright yellow with oversized swastikas, and they used it to shuttle pilots to and from Tripoli when their leave came up. The station commander at Beda Fomm was an old friend of Hoffmann’s. He agreed to lend the Lysander in exchange for two cases of Scotch whisky. In the morning someone explained the Lysander’s controls and instrument panel, and sat beside Hoffmann while he did a few circuits and bumps. Then he flew her back to Barce.

  “Biggest canary in Libya,” he said proudly. “Want to come? I’m just waiting for di Marco.”

  “You’re playing with your toys again, Benno,” Schramm said. “When are you going to grow up?” He went off to telephone the hospital.

  She did not answer. He stood and listened to
the phone chewing mechanically at the silence in her office, but nobody answered. After a while his ear hurt, so he switched the instrument to the other ear. “Come on, come on, come on,” he muttered, and he was still muttering it when the switchboard decided enough was enough and cut him off. He hung up so hard that he banged his fingers. All I want is a damned appointment, he told himself. He made the call again and failed again. All he wanted was to hear her voice.

  The Lysander was ticking over, and Hoffmann was talking to Captain di Marco. Schramm joined them. “All right,” he said. “I’ll go.”

  “Good man!” Hoffmann said. “You can help push her home if anything breaks.”

  They refueled at Jalo. With di Marco navigating and using the aerial-reconnaissance photographs, they flew on and found a cluster of trucks deep in the Sahara. Schramm, through binoculars the size of beer-bottles, saw Afrika Korps markings; but he was looking down, out of the sun, whereas they were looking up, into the midday glare. Hence the tracer.

  “Drop a message,” di Marco suggested. They did.

  Five minutes later Hoffmann put the Lysander down alongside the trucks. Captain Lessing and Lieutenant Fleischmann came to meet them. “Where’s Jakowski?” Hoffmann asked.

  “He’s not here, sir,” Lessing said. “He took twenty trucks and went to intercept an enemy unit in the Calanscio. That was four days ago.”

  They moved out of the sun and under a canvas sheet that had been rigged up to make some shade. After the coolness of the Lysander’s cabin the heat of the serir was like a foundry at full blast. Schramm’s eyes were swamped with sweat, and the salt stung.

  Hoffmann spread the photographs on a table. Lessing summarized events since the column left the Jebel al Akhdar. “Accurate navigation has caused us a lot of difficulty,” he said. “That may explain Major Jakowski’s late return. On the other hand, he may still be engaged with the enemy.”

  “Anything’s possible, I suppose,” Hoffmann said. He looked at di Marco.

  “May I talk to the navigator?” di Marco said.

  Sergeant Voss brought his maps, but di Marco gave them only a glance. “Your compass?” di Marco said. Voss said it was in his truck.

  “Fetch it,” Lessing ordered.

  “With your permission,” di Marco said, “let us go to the compass.”

  They walked to the truck. Schramm could smell cordite hanging in the air.

  Voss pointed out the compass, attached to the center of the dashboard. Di Marco tipped it slightly and they watched the gimbal mounting make it level and steady again. “Standard Luftwaffe magnetic compass,” Hoffmann observed.

  “Standard rubbish,” Lessing said. He turned to Hoffmann. “With all due respect, sir.”

  “Please start the truck,” di Marco said to Voss.

  The engine roared and the compass trembled. Di Marco took the wheel and carefully turned the truck until it was pointing north and south. North on the compass disc was exactly in line with the radiator cap. “Now we need a marker fifty meters to the north of here and another marker five meters to the south,” he said.

  Two jerricans were produced and placed as he asked.

  Di Marco turned the truck to the left, stopped, and backed it until it stood on the same spot, but at a right angle to its previous position. He checked the compass. “North has apparently moved approximately fifteen degrees to the west,” he said. “May we have another marker, please?”

  In order of rank, starting with Oberstleutnant Hoffmann, they got into the cab and peered at the compass. North no longer pointed at the first jerrican. That jerrican was now a long way to its right.

  “Ha!” Schramm exclaimed. Somebody had to say something.

  The new marker was put in place. “Now we move in the opposite direction,” di Marco said. He turned the truck through a half-circle to the right and maneuvered it onto its original spot. “North is now fifteen degrees to the east,” he said. “Or, if you compare it with the second bearing, thirty degrees to the east.”

  Sergeant Voss hurried off to place another marker.

  “So north is there, or there, or there,” Lessing said. “Every time you move the compass it changes its mind.”

  “Every time you move the truck the compass changes its mind,” di Marco said. “If I might have, say, four or five heavy machine guns?”

  The weapons were brought. Di Marco leaned them against the center of the dashboard. The compass jumped as if it had been stung.

  “North has gone west,” Schramm said.

  “Wait a minute,” Hoffmann said. “We have the same sort of problem in our aircraft, don’t we? Things like chunks of metal and electrical circuits attract the compass needle, they pull it sideways and give you a false reading. You’ve got to adjust the compass to compensate.”

  “Not all metals,” di Marco said. “Not aluminum, for instance, and aircraft contain a lot of aluminum. But iron or steel will disturb a magnetic compass, and this truck is made largely of iron and steel.”

  “Especially the engine,” Sergeant Voss said before he remembered to shut up.

  “The compass is immediately behind the engine,” di Marco said. “Point the truck north and the engine attracts the compass needle forward, so we get an accurate reading, more or less. Point the truck west and the engine is now to the left, so it pulls the compass needle left. Point the truck east, it pulls it right.”

  “Simple as that,” Lessing said emptily.

  Schramm saw di Marco hesitate. “There’s more?” he asked.

  “The load also may exert a magnetic effect,” di Marco said. “Different engine speeds can make a difference too. And if another truck is driving alongside, or just ahead . . .” He shrugged one shoulder.

  “So the compass is good after all,” Lieutenant Fleischmann said.

  “The compass is excellent,” di Marco told him. “It is useless, but apart from that, quite excellent.”

  They went back to the canvas shade. Schramm felt limp from the heat, and Hoffmann’s shirt was soaked in sweat to a deep chestnut brown. Di Marco, Schramm noticed with weary envy, seemed quite comfortable, but then di Marco had once made his home in this dreadful place.

  Each man got a mug of lime juice and water, and a mess tin of dates. There was a bowl of salt for anyone who felt the need.

  “That explains it,” Lessing said. “That explains why we’ve been zigzagging all over the damn desert.”

  “How do the British do it?” Schramm demanded. “They travel about the Sahara as if they were taking a taxi across London. How do they do it?”

  “I suppose a magnetic compass is reliable if it’s not in a truck,” Lieutenant Fleischmann suggested. “Take it, say, twenty or thirty meters away and—”

  “Stop-start, stop-start. I can’t see an SAS patrol jumping out every five minutes to check its bearings. Can you?”

  Benno Hoffmann took a fat pinch of salt and washed it down. “Captain di Marco knows,” he said.

  “The sun compass is what you should have,” di Marco said courteously. “It is the reverse of a sundial. A sundial tells you the time according to the position of the sun. A sun compass tells you the position of the sun according to the time. If you know the time, you can very quickly find north.”

  There was silence while they got their minds around this idea.

  “Sorry,” Captain Lessing said. “I don’t follow that last bit.”

  Di Marco took a pencil, drew a circle on a sheet of paper, and marked north, south, east and west. “Imagine that this is a compass face, divided into 360 degrees,” he said. He stood the pencil upright in the center. “The sun makes a shadow which is always moving. We know the exact angle of the sun for every hour of the day, every day of the year.”

  “Do we?” Lessing said. “I don’t.”

  “There are tables which give this information. Using these tables, we find the known angle—the azimuth, as it is properly called—for the present time and we rotate the compass, so, until the shadow falls on the given
bearing. The compass is now set. Its north points to true north. You can navigate accurately anywhere at any time of day. Except noon, when there is no shadow.”

  “Has the enemy got sun compasses?” Lessing asked.

  “Yes,” di Marco said.

  “And no problems with magnetism,” Fleischmann said.

  “No.”

  It was time to think about getting airborne. Hoffmann had no authority over Lessing, but his advice was to pack up and go home immediately. Jakowski was almost certainly lost and incapable of making the rendezvous. He was two days overdue already and his radio truck was silent. It would be suicidal to send men into the Sand Sea to look for him. Lessing’s best course now was to cut his losses and get out before his water supply ran dangerously low.

  Lessing listened in silence and said he was staying. He had his orders. Major Jakowski might turn up at any time, might be just over the horizon at this very minute, might arrive needing help, water, firepower, who knew what? Lessing couldn’t leave. Not yet.

  “If you wish,” di Marco said, “we could carry out a reconnaissance, now. We could fly halfway to the edge of the Calanscio and then make a wide circle around this position. If Major Jakowski and his men have left the Calanscio, we should be able to see them.” Lessing accepted the offer.

  “I’m not sure what the fuel consumption of this machine is,” Hoffmann told him, “and I don’t want to take any chances. So unless we have some news for you, don’t expect us to come back.”

  The yellow Lysander took off. They reached five thousand feet and searched in every direction and found nothing. Captain di Marco gave Hoffmann the course for home. When they were still a long way south of Jalo they saw two vehicles that might have been the pair that Jakowski had ordered to rendezvous with the water-tanker. On the other hand, they might not. The war had left plenty of broken vehicles scattered about the desert. Hoffmann circled, going lower and lower until finally he buzzed the trucks, but nobody emerged to wave. Schramm thought he saw a body lying in deep shadow. He said nothing. The ground was thickly dotted with boulders. No place for a landing.

  Back at Barce, what everyone wanted was beer, chilled beer. They drank, and ate salt peanuts, and ordered more beer.