A Good Clean Fight

by Derek Robinson

  They sat and looked at it.

  “Right,” Lampard said, and got out quietly. He found Sergeant Davis in the back of the Ford. “Take two bombs,” he said, “and plant them on the other side of the road, as near that roadblock as you can get. We’ve got some short fuses, haven’t we? Good. You’ll have to work out the timing. The point is, I want you back here so we can drive there and arrive just as they explode.”

  “Ah. Not too near the roadblock, then,” Davis said. “You don’t want us to get blown up. It’s a whatsit.”

  “Distraction.”

  “That’s the word. Destruction.” Davis stuffed bombs inside his battledress blouse, picked out some pencil-fuses, and disappeared into the night as if he had fallen down a well.

  He was back in six minutes, breathless and pleased. “Five-minute fuses,” he said. He checked his watch. “I set them exactly . . . um . . . three minutes ago . . . now. You don’t need to start yet. Give it a minute.”

  “Have some chocolate,” Dunn said.

  They got back into the trucks. “They’re listening to the bloody radio,” Davis said. “Lili bloody Marlene again.”

  Lampard watched the second hand nibble its way around the dial. “Go,” he said. “Nice and steady.”

  A guard came out of the hut, carrying a hurricane lamp, as the Mercedes trundled up to the barrier pole and stopped. Two more men followed. All were armed. One had a clipboard. He put a boot on the step of the cab and asked a question. Lampard began scrabbling through a bundle of papers he had found clipped to the dash, and muttered an answer, but the pencil gripped between his teeth turned it to gibberish. When the man said something else, Lampard turned to the driver and made an incoherent inquiry. The driver looked at him and shrugged. Lampard almost handed the bundle of papers to the guard, changed his mind halfway, and went back to scrabbling and muttering. Saliva dripped from the pencil. The guard banged impatiently on the door with his fist. The first bomb exploded with a blinding crack that swayed the truck on its springs. The guard fell on his backside. Lampard was briefly stunned and deafened so that he couldn’t hear himself. More guards poured from the hut. A machine gun opened up but its rattle was lost in the second explosion. At last Lampard heard his voice shouting, “Drive drive drive.” The Mercedes was already moving. The barrier pole snapped like a breadstick and bits flew everywhere.

  The guards let them go. The place was under attack—bombs, mortars, shells, who the hell knew what?—and the safest place for two German trucks was obviously elsewhere. As the Ford charged after the Mercedes, Dunn saw in his wing mirror a spurt of tracer fire. It was not aimed at them, and he watched with interest until it was lost behind a bend.

  After all that, Lampard missed the turn-off to Beda Fomm.

  He knew it as soon as he heard the wheels rumble over the metal planking of a bridge. There had been no bridge between the roadblock and the turn-off. “We’ve overshot,” he said. The driver made a U-turn and the bridge rumbled again. Lampard was puzzled: how could he have made such a mistake? He must have been daydreaming. “Go slow,” he said.

  A side road appeared, a soft and dusty gray-white in the blackness, and they pulled over. It didn’t look right. Lampard took Sergeant Davis and went to investigate. The others sat in the trucks and kept silent.

  After a couple of minutes a truck howled past, towing a small piece of artillery. An army ambulance followed. The guards had called for help. A car raced by, evidently trying to catch up. It braked hard and stopped. It reversed fast, the gearbox whining like a violin, and parked in front of the Mercedes.

  A German officer got out. He was big; bigger than any man in the patrol. He shone a flashlight at the trucks and shouted at them. It was the voice of a man who is accustomed to being obeyed.

  Dunn got out of the Ford and did his best to look like an Italian soldier who has just woken up. “Buona sera, signor,” he mumbled. He saluted and did up his buttons at the same time. “Italiano militari,” he said, bobbing his head deferentially. “Benghazi regimento.” He saluted again. He had exhausted his Italian. Now it was up to the other man.

  The German shone his light on Dunn’s face and saw a week’s growth plus a lot of dirt. He said something which sounded more like a comment than a question, so Dunn merely grinned and saluted. The light traveled over his uniform, and that definitely provoked a question. Dunn saw a pistol in the other hand. “Inglesi!” he said, suddenly inspired. “Inglesi, signor” He scratched at a stain on his sleeve. “Spaghetti,” he said apologetically. This wasn’t working. He could smell suspicion. He could also smell his own sweat.

  The German poked him with the pistol. They walked to the back of the truck. As the German parted the canvas cover, Trooper Smedley’s large hands seized his throat and strangled him. The weight of the body pulled Smedley down until he was kneeling. Dunn held the German by the armpits. “Bye-bye, birdie, bye-bye,” Smedley said. He took his hands away. Dunn lowered the body, found the pistol, turned off the flashlight. “You could have used your knife,” he said. “Would have been just as quiet.”

  “I wasn’t sure it was him,” Smedley said. “It might have been you.”

  “How could you tell it wasn’t?”

  “Wrong collar size. He must be seventeen-and-a-half, at least.”

  Lampard and Davis returned and examined the body.

  “Oberst,” Lampard said. “Equivalent to a colonel. Well, I hope that teaches him a lesson.”

  “What?” asked Davis.

  “Real colonels don’t play at being policemen, do they? That’s blindingly obvious. Real colonels delegate. They tell someone else to . . . to . . .”

  “Get strangled.”

  “Exactly. Right, chuck him in his car. You drive it, Smedley. This is the wrong turning. Let’s go.”

  They found the right turning and hid the vehicles. There was sporadic traffic going to and from Beda Fomm, and Lampard was glad to get off the road. Now that the hard work of the journey had been done it would be a relief to get some exercise. Dunn made a final roll-call. Davis checked that each man had a rucksack of bombs, a pocketful of fuses, benzedrine tablets, a full water-bottle and a loaded weapon. He had checked all this before they left the Jebel, but Davis was a good NCO.

  The evening was pleasant. Lampard led. He walked between the pines and the cactus as if he were out for a stroll round his estate after dinner. He rarely heard a footstep behind him: hard training and rubber-soled boots paid off. Once, when he stopped suddenly, just to keep the men alert, he looked back and saw nobody; nobody at all; which pleased him. And the knowledge that at any moment a German sentry might blow one’s head off added a certain spice to the whole experience.

  They were perhaps ten minutes from the edge of the airfield when he first began to think there was something wrong.

  It was too noisy, and the noise was not aircraft engines. The stolid chugging, the intense revving of big diesels, the bass throb: it all signaled heavy machinery at work. Then he noticed a glow in the sky. When the patrol reached the perimeter, Beda Fomm was floodlit. Not the entire field, but the working area: the hangars, buildings, aircraft. The racket came from caterpillar tractors, dump trucks, mobile cranes, generators, earthmovers, winches. Men were everywhere, more men than Lampard could count. “Oh dear,” he said. “They’ve got the builders in.”

  Sergeant Davis had a pair of Zeiss binoculars, looted from the kit of Captain Lessing. He found a wrecked hangar, still smoking. He found the broken carcasses of several airplanes, now unidentifiable. He found large holes in the ground. “Look at those blokes with the big tripod in front of the control tower,” he said.

  Lampard focused. The workers were doing things to a block and tackle over a small crater. “Unexploded bomb,” he said.

  “Blindingly obvious,” Davis said. “Especially if they don’t get their finger out.”

  “We’ve been fucked,” Trooper Peck said. “Fucked by the fucking Desert Air fucking Force.”

  “Well, I’m fu
cked,” Smedley said.

  “Didn’t you make a reservation?” Dunn asked Lampard. “You know what it’s like on a Saturday night.”

  “Today’s Tuesday,” said Davis.

  “Fuck me, we’re four days early,” Peck said. “No wonder the place isn’t ready.”

  “Hopeless,” Lampard said. “Quite, quite hopeless.”

  They walked back to the vehicles. Everyone felt the flat fatigue of anti-climax. In an hour it would be midnight. They’d come all this way for nothing. The useless load in their rucksacks felt heavier and they were glad to stack them in the trucks. A dull rumble of thunder reached them from the north. It might have been naval guns, or mines, or bombs, or even thunder. Nobody cared. It was somebody else’s problem.

  Lampard and Dunn sat on the ground, leaning back-to-back, and ate some malted-milk tablets. “What’s our secondary target?” Dunn asked.

  “Mersa Brega. Know it?”

  “No.”

  “Neither do I. It’s about a hundred kilometers south of here, if you go by the coast road. Too far. We’d have to do a recce, then lie up tomorrow, raid it tomorrow night and get back here again.”

  “Another hundred kilometers.”

  “Not by road. We’d hit Jerry roadblocks every five minutes.”

  Dunn pondered the problem, but it was insoluble. Lampard would not raid without reconnoitering the target first. Beda Fomm was out. Mersa Brega was out of range. “What about Al Maghrun?” he said. “That’s close. We could go and take a look, at least.”

  “Yes. I suppose so.” For a moment Lampard seemed slumped in lethargy. “Nothing to lose.” Still he did not move. “Maghrun,” Lampard said. “Doesn’t sound very thrilling. Sounds like a disease of sheep. Still . . . Nothing to lose.” At last he got up, stiffly. “Old age,” he said.

  Sergeant Davis did not like the idea of going back up the coastal road and bluffing or shooting their way through the roadblock.

  “They’ll remember these trucks,” he said. “They’ll be all of a doodah because of the bombs, and they’ll see these trucks and they’ll think ’ello-’ello-’ello.”

  Lampard was silent.

  “And you know what that’ll mean,” Davis said. “It’ll mean Auf Wiedersehen.”

  Smedley began to speak, but Dunn poked him in the ribs and he shut up.

  “You’re right,” Lampard said. “But the only other way is dirt tracks and camel trails, and you remember what a bastard that was.”

  “We only tried the tracks on this side of the coast road. The Beda Fomm side. Maghrun’s on the opposite side. I bet I can find a way through on that side.”

  He sounded supremely, disturbingly confident. “Why should that side be any better?” Lampard asked.

  “Because it can’t be any worse.”

  “I see.” Lampard tried to read Davis’s expression in the night and failed. “Well, this will either be an outstanding cock-up or you’ll get a large medal. Take Blake with you, see what you can find, come back here. Use that staff car. Better not take the Oberst. You’ve got an hour.”

  The dead officer had been left sitting behind the wheel and had begun to stiffen in that position, so he was carried to the front seat of the Ford. Davis was relieved to see that his eyelids had fallen until they had almost closed. Strangulation was all very well, but it played merry hell with the eyeballs. Davis was not squeamish; it was just that, given a choice, he preferred people to keep their eyeballs to themselves.

  The staff car left. Everyone had something to eat: slabs of bully on biscuit. Lampard was a great believer in eating whenever you could.

  A breeze had sprung up, rustling the trees. It was possible to talk softly.

  “I didn’t realize you had such strong hands,” Dunn said to Trooper Smedley.

  “It’s all in the thumbs,” Smedley said. “I used to tear telephone books in half as a sort of party trick.” He spoke mildly.

  “Anyone can do that,” Peck said.

  “Not three books at a time.” That silenced Peck. “People got tired of it, so I used different things,” Smedley said. “I tore up tarpaulins, sheets of plywood and rolls of linoleum. You can tear up anything if you’ve got the hands. I tore up a complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica once. It’s all in the thumbs. After a while it comes natural, but you got to practice. If you want to be good at anything, you got to stick at it.”

  “Rome wasn’t burned in a day,” Peck observed.

  “Corporal Harris once told me he’d killed a full-grown sheep when he was a boy,” Dunn said.

  “With his bare hands?” Smedley asked.

  “No. He said he used a knife.”

  They waited for Smedley’s reaction. “That’s all very well,” he said, “but what’s he going to do when he hasn’t got a knife?”

  “Harris always had a knife,” Lampard announced. “Harris killed two sentries with it on our last raid, perhaps more. Unfortunately one of them stabbed him in the stomach. He concealed his wound in case it slowed down the patrol. A rough diamond, but a very gallant soldier.” Lampard swallowed. “The desert is his grave,” he added.

  Nobody was going to argue, but total disbelief hung in the air like static electricity. “Bit of bully left,” Dunn said swiftly. “Anyone want the last bit of bully? Shame to waste it. Peck, have a bite.” The danger passed.

  At twenty minutes past midnight the staff car returned. “Dead easy,” Davis said.

  Lampard let him lead. There were salt marshes on the seaward side of the coastal road and Davis had found a causeway that flanked them. It was narrow and in many places broken, so the trucks went very slowly. The best part of an hour had passed before Davis turned right, into a wandering track that eventually found the perimeter of Al Maghrun airfield. It was big and black. The only noise was the distant rumble of traffic on the coastal road.

  Lampard sent Dunn and Peck to recce. “No bombs,” he said. “If you get bumped off I don’t want them to know why you’re here. Make it snappy.”

  The snappiest they could make it was thirty-five minutes, by which time they had searched Al Maghrun and found it empty of aircraft. “There’s some blokes asleep in a billet and a lot of oilstains on the grass,” Dunn said. “That’s all.”

  Another disappointment. Sometimes a raid seemed to be jinxed; sometimes a leader seemed cursed with ill-luck. Lampard sensed a slump of spirits and responded instantly with the British army’s answer to all misfortune. “Time for a brew-up, sergeant,” he said. Long experience had shown that there was no reverse that did not look better after a mug of hot tea. When the operation was a shambles and the situation seemed hopeless, it was time for a brew-up.

  They had brought the makings with them. The desert stove—a tin of petrol-soaked sand—was placed where it was hidden between the trucks. There was still a risk of its being seen, but Lampard reckoned that if Al Maghrun really was not operating the risk was worth taking. “We should be flattered,” he said. “Obviously the enemy’s moving his planes from place to place to try and baffle us.”

  Nobody said anything. What they were not saying was quite clear: tonight the enemy had succeeded.

  The water boiled. A handful of tea was thrown into it. The brew foamed and seethed.

  “I suppose there’s nothing to stop us going back to camp now and trying again tomorrow night,” Dunn said.

  “I hate to do that,” Lampard said.

  Dunn immediately thought: His brakes have failed. He can’t stop himself.

  A tin of condensed milk and half a pound of sugar got stirred in. The result was strong, sweet, hot and immediately cheering.

  “Dawn in four hours,” Dunn said. “Not much time to recce somewhere else and raid it and still get into the Jebel.”

  “Of course there’s one place we don’t need to recce,” Lampard said. “We’ve been there before.”

  “Barce,” Davis said.

  They finished their tea in silence; not because they disliked the suggestion but because it was the pa
trol leader’s idea and his decision. “What d’you think?” he asked Mike Dunn.

  For the first, and last, time, Dunn did not answer him.

  “Hello?” Lampard said. “Anyone at home?”

  “Does it matter what I think?”

  “How can I tell till I hear what you’ve said?”

  “All right.” Dunn threw his dregs into the dying fire. “I think we should return to camp and try again tomorrow night. I think we ought to recce Barce first because the defenses have almost certainly changed since the last time. I think if we try to hit Barce tonight we’ll run out of darkness before we’re safe.”

  “Ah. Any more?”

  “And I think I’m wasting my breath because you’ve made up your mind.” Some of the men laughed at that, although the harshness in Dunn’s voice was surprising.

  “As to being safe,” Lampard said, “we’re never going to be that. We left our calling card on the enemy with those bombs at the checkpoint. Also he’s missing one large colonel. And Barce is the ideal target because they’ll never expect another raid so soon.”

  “You’re guessing,” Dunn said.

  “If you want to live by a timetable, old chap, you should have joined the GWR, not the SAS.” Lampard spoke gently, and won more laughter. “I’ll give you one cast-iron certainty. If we hit Barce twice, the Hun will definitely wet his knickers.”

  “Not half,” said Trooper Smedley.

  “How far is Barce from here?” Lampard asked Dunn.

  “Couple of hours.”

  “We’ll dump these trucks and take the jeeps. Off we go, then.”

  As they dispersed to the vehicles, Peck nudged Blake and muttered, “What’s up with old Dunn, then?”

  “Time of the month.”

  “Don’t be so bloody daft.”

  “Well, don’t ask such bloody daft questions.”

  Davis navigated them around the perimeter of Al Maghrun until they reached the coastal road; then Lampard took over. He decided he wanted the corpse of the Oberst beside him, in the passenger seat of the staff car. It was fetched from the Ford, the tunic was removed, and the body was lashed to the seat with a length of cord under its armpits. The tunic was slit up the back and replaced on the body, all buttoned-up and tucked-in so the cord was invisible. With its cap on and its hands in its lap, the corpse looked very convincing.