* * *
The two jeeps sat in a dark corner of the twisting wadi. The sound of the engines of the Italian biplanes rolled around the sky like an endless echo. The survivors of Lampard’s patrol ate dates, sipped water, cleaned weapons, filled petrol tanks and treated the wounded. Apart from the man with a bullet-hole in his leg, two men had been hit by the CR42s: one in the arm, one in the stomach. The arm was broken. The stomach wound was very bad.
Lampard and Sergeant Davis walked back to the entrance to the wadi, keeping in the hard shadow all the way. The burning jeep lay in clear view, on its side, sending up smoke as rich as black velvet. They counted three bodies, none moving. Davis thought he could see the leg of the fourth man sticking out from a patch of camel-thorn, but Davis had banged his head on one of the Vickers when his jeep swerved sharply and he got double vision if he looked at things too hard.
“They’ll see us if we go out there,” he said.
“Somebody might be alive,” Lampard said. “I hate to just leave them.”
“Even if he’s still alive he’ll be half-dead. Best let the German medics have him. They can’t be far away, can they?”
They walked back to the jeeps. No need to discuss the situation. It was all too stark. Impossible to move while the Italian aircraft were overhead; yet every minute they waited brought enemy infantry nearer, guided by the marker of smoke.
* * *
“How interesting,” Skull said. “How very interesting.” He read on. “My goodness,” he said. In the distance a Kittyhawk’s engine turned over, coughed and died. “Yes indeed,” he said, with a suppressed chuckle, and turned a page. “All too true.” He read on, eyebrows up, spectacles down. An overheated breeze came out of the desert, rattled the canvas sunscreen like a bad-tempered child seeking attention, and moved on, ignored. “Mmmm,” Skull said.
“Some of us are trying to sleep,” Prescott muttered.
“What’s that?” Hooper asked Skull.
“This? Oh . . . nothing special. Pinky Dalgleish’s diary. I took it off Uncle when he was doolally, because it seemed to upset him. Mind you, I can see why.” He began reading again.
The Kittyhawk coughed, started, lost interest, died.
“Why?” Barton asked.
Skull finished reading a sentence and looked up reluctantly. He took a long time to find Barton. He pushed his spectacles up his nose and frowned. “Oh, you wouldn’t be interested,” he said, and turned back to the diary.
“Yes I bloody would,” Barton said.
Skull sighed, and turned back a page. “Let’s see . . . Here it is. Fanny, through sheer determination, has become the perfect fighter leader.”
They waited. “Is that it?” Prescott asked.
“What? Oh no, there’s more. He doesn’t care who he kills. If he can’t find an enemy he invents one. To defend decency and freedom he has become a thoroughly unscrupulous bastard. If he couldn’t fly for us I’m sure he’d be perfectly happy in the Luftwaffe.”
“Bollocks,” Barton said.
“Pinky had some funny ideas,” Prescott said. “I remember—”
“Utter bollocks!” Barton said. “Crap, turds and bollocks! It’s all pure bollocks.”
“Of course it’s just one man’s opinion,” Skull said. “I’m sure if you were to ask the rest of the squadron . . .” He broke off, and shook his head. “What am I saying?” he murmured.
“He can write what he likes,” Barton growled, “it’s bollocks from start to finish.”
“Anything there about me?” Hooper asked.
“As it happens, yes, I did come across a remark.” Skull searched the pages. “Just a line: Hooper is a typical American. He believes God invented the gun, and vice versa. Quite terse.”
“God did invent the gun,” Hooper said. “America is God’s own country and the gun is God’s own weapon. It says so in the Bible.”
“Bollocks,” Barton said doggedly.
“Well, if it doesn’t, it ought to.”
“What’s wrong with those kites?” Barton stood up and glared at them. “Come on, Hick. I want to get weaving.” He and Hooper walked toward the aircraft.
“Let’s have a look at that,” Prescott said.
“Oh . . . it’s awfully tedious,” Skull said. “Not worth the effort.”
“Didn’t sound tedious to me.”
“And classified, strictly speaking. Top secret. I’d better lock it up.”
Prescott, who was tall and muscular, took the diary from him. He skimmed through it. After a couple of minutes he said, “Where’s all that stuff about Fanny?”
“Nowhere. I invented it. And the bit about Hick, too. Quite good, wasn’t it, for the spur of the moment?”
“Look.” Prescott tossed the diary back to him. “I like Fanny. I respect him. I don’t go much on this sort of practical joke.”
“No joke,” Skull said. “Deadly serious. I meant every word.”
Prescott was shocked and offended. “You honestly think Fanny would fly for the Luftwaffe?” he demanded. “That’s insane.”
“Of course it’s insane. Fanny forgot which side he’s on long ago. There aren’t any sides in his war. There’s just the desert and the enemy. He doesn’t want to win, for God’s sake. He wants to fly and fight forever. This desert is fighter pilots’ heaven.”
“Not much of a heaven for Pinky Dalgleish.” Prescott was still angry.
“That’s the pity of it,” Skull said. “You can’t have a Fanny Barton without a Pinky Dalgleish. Don’t tell him I said so. He’ll hit you.”
* * *
The Arabs had learned a new word: jip. They were proud of it, and when George the Greek showed no enthusiasm they were disappointed. One of them drew a picture in the sand. It was a box on wheels. “Jip,” the man said.
“Oh, jeep” George said. The Arab nodded wisely and held up three fingers. “Jip-jip-jip,” he said, and much more.
George got the message. There were three jeeps somewhere in the Jebel and these jeeps would carry him home to his friends. Until this could be arranged he must be patient. The idea of walking home was out. Too many Germans in the area.
This he believed, for he saw German patrols almost every day. Once, he even sold some eggs to a foot-patrol that came by at the end of the afternoon, looking very weary. They treated him exactly like the other Arabs. When he tried his few words of Arabic on them, they shrugged or looked away. The soldier who gave him sugar for the eggs, snapped “Imshi!” when the deal was done. Literally it meant “fast” or “speedy”; there was a British fighter ace in the desert called “Imshi” Mason. But every Allied soldier used “Imshi!” to mean “Get out!” or “Buzz off!” George was amused to hear it from a German in the Jebel, but he did not smile. He imshied.
It was late in the morning and he was sitting on a rock, picking the last flaking traces of dead scabs off his ribs, when a German truck came round a bend and drove up to the camp. It was in no great hurry, and the troops who got out of it took their time assembling the dozen or so Arabs. No force was used; indeed the soldiers were quite courteous. They merely pointed where they wanted everyone to go, which was into the big tent. There was just enough room for them all to sit in a semi-circle, facing the door.
After a while a young German officer came and stood in the entrance. He looked to be about twenty-three. He had freckles. George noticed this because he hadn’t seen any freckled men until he left Greece. Freckles usually went with very fair skin. He wondered how this man survived the desert sun.
The man appeared to be waiting. He said nothing and did nothing. He just stood, looking calm and pleasant, and waited.
The tent got hot. It would be hot in any case, of course, with the sun almost directly overhead, but now the body-heat from a dozen people pushed the temperature even higher.
This was no great problem for the Arabs. They never allowed heat to disturb them. They accepted it, suffered it passively, survived it. George had learned the trick. He simply sat
and let time pass. If the flies could tolerate it so could he.
The officer stood and waited. Occasionally he shifted his weight from one leg to another. George looked at the officer’s boots until they gently went out of focus. It was a restful way to do nothing.
Ten minutes passed. Or it could have been twenty. Or thirty. Nobody moved. The flies made the rounds of hands and feet and faces. Flies were eternal optimists. They landed on ears or eyelids or lips or nostrils as if they were the first explorers and hidden treasure awaited them. Then they flew away. They never learned, and they never gave up.
George became drowsy. Falling asleep might be dangerous, he warned himself, but it was impossible not to be drowsy in this bakehouse atmosphere. For some reason a memory surfaced in his sluggish mind. It was Billy Stewart, back in LG 181, sitting in the sun outside his tent, motionless, watching the flies. Billy could sit like a statue and watch and watch and watch until suddenly . . . clap. He never missed. Good old Billy. George brushed the flies off his lips. The officer straightened up. “Hier ist der Mann” he said.
A soldier came in, took George by the arm and helped him up. His legs were stiff and he wobbled a bit as he was led out. “You are a spy,” the officer said in English. “An English spy.” George pretended not to understand. “You are not an Arab,” the officer said. “An Arab never does this.” He brushed his fingers across his lips. “The flies gave you away,” he said.
As they put him in the truck he looked back and saw the serious little Arab girl standing by the tent. Nobody else had come out. George raised his hands and created something that only she could recognize: an imaginary cat’s-cradle. She nodded. It didn’t mean anything. It was just something they shared.
Later that day he was taken to Benghazi and for a week he was interrogated, sometimes brutally, sometimes not. There was little he could tell them, and nothing about spies or raids or sabotage or intelligence. At the end of a week they shot him. First he had been tried and found guilty. It was all perfectly legitimate.
* * *
Lampard decided to make a run for it. His patrol was down to seven men and three of them were wounded. Some of the others had taken a few knocks.
Before he could tell them his decision, the CR42s left. Their engines faded; within seconds it was hard to hear them.
“No stamina,” someone said. “Gone to lunch.”
“Let’s go,” Lampard said.
He drove the first jeep, not fast, always approaching the bends with caution in case the enemy had somehow sneaked into the wadi. Its narrow walls reflected the rumble of the jeeps and revealed only a narrow strip of sky; which was why none of the patrol heard or saw the Stukas until the first bomb fell. It created a high brown fountain of earth somewhere ahead, followed by a thundercrack of a bang, and then, much later, a shove of air as the blast found its way up the wadi. Lampard stopped. He looked up, and saw the Stuka soaring as if it were performing at an aerobatic show.
Sergeant Davis appeared beside him. “Now what are the buggers up to?” he said.
They waited, and caught a glimpse of a second Stuka in its dive, and they heard the steady scream of its air-brakes. Again, the explosion was far ahead.
“They’re bombing that end of our wadi,” Lampard said. “They’re trying to box us in. They can’t see us but they know we’re in here.”
“Stukas this end, troops the other.”
“If they’re bombing that end, it means there are no Hun troops in front of us,” Lampard said. “It also means the air’s going to be thick with dust, I hope. It’s worth a try, anyway.”
They drove hard, and saw the mouth of the wadi just as another Stuka pulled out of its dive and they could actually watch its bomb continue the plunge until it vanished into a fog of dust and smoke. The explosion radiated dirt and debris around a sullen flash of red, and its blast made the jeeps rock on their springs. Lampard counted to five and charged into the muck before another Stuka could drop its load.
The exit was not blocked: no bomb had toppled its walls; but it was badly cratered. Davis lost sight of Lampard’s jeep almost at once. He squared his wheel to dodge a rock the size of an anvil and ended up slithering into a crater that steamed with a choking chemical stink. The other side looked too steep but he charged it, and it was too steep. The jeep got halfway and spun its wheels. “Out and shove!” he bawled. They manhandled the jeep, its tires smoking with effort, and it climbed out of the hole. Another crater came out of the dust. He swung away from it and his wheels began bouncing off rocks. There seemed to be a hundred. But his double vision was now permanent, so maybe there were only fifty. Too many, anyway. He backed up and tried the other side of the crater. Both craters. And they both had two edges. So what? He had four hands. He chose the wrong edge and felt the jeep lurch and wander like a drunk. He stamped on the brake, set the handbrake, got out. “You drive!” he shouted. The jeep was teetering, as ready to fall as to stay. He joined the manhandlers, twice as powerful now with his four hands, and they coaxed the thing back onto safe ground. By now they were outside the wadi, and there was more space to work in. They ran alongside the jeep, pointing at rocks and potholes ahead. Davis heard an old familiar scream in the sky. “Get in!” he shouted. They were already scrambling aboard. The driver glanced back once and put his foot to the floor. The fog of dust was thinning. The bomb-blast seemed to urge the jeep on its way.
Lampard’s jeep was waiting under the inevitable, the invaluable acacia trees. Thank God for acacias. They were like military umbrellas: high enough to get a jeep under, low enough to hide it. The jeeps moved from patch to patch of cover and the Stukas seemed not to notice. The jeeps found a stretch of cliff face and used its black shadow to hide in. They fled, separately, across a bare plateau and met up in a mile-wide wadi where they hid in some scrub. It had been hard driving: hard on the jeeps and even harder on the casualties. The man with the stomach wound was dead.
* * *
“Skull’s never flown,” Barton said. “Skull’s a fucking penguin. What does he know?”
He was still stiff with anger. He had a rifle, and he fired three rounds at the ancient wreck of the Hurricane. The last bullet hit the rudder and knocked it silly.
Hick Hooper sat on a stack of ammunition boxes and watched. The Kittyhawks were not yet airworthy: fitters and riggers were still at work on them.
“Funny thing about nationalities,” Hooper said. “I mean, Churchill’s half-American. And Hitler’s not really German at all, he’s Austrian. Come to that, the King of England’s pretty damn German himself.”
“Cock.” Barton banged off two more rounds and hit the prop. “Who told you that?”
“Skull. He said the royal family’s surname is Saxe-Coburg.”
Barton scoffed. “That’s Intelligence for you! It’s Windsor. Even I know that.”
“He said it was Saxe-Coburg until 1917. They changed it because—” Barton fired again and cut him off. There was silence while Barton reloaded. “Who gives a damn anyway?” Hooper said. “I’m half-German, if it comes to that.” Barton glanced sideways. “My mother was born in Cologne,” Hooper said. “Where the eau comes from. We nearly went back there during the slump. I was about thirteen, I guess. How about that? I might have ended up in the Luftwaffe. I might have been flying one of those nightfighters, trying to—”
“Here!” Barton tossed the rifle to him. The conversation made him uncomfortable. He watched Hooper work the bolt and take aim. “Anyway, they bloody well started it,” Barton said. “I had a cousin killed in the London blitz. Never met her, but I saw a photograph. Pretty little girl and they blew her to bits.” He blinked as Hooper fired. “They’re all shits as far as I’m concerned. They don’t know the meaning of humanity and decency and fair play. I shan’t be sorry if every German gets his stupid fucking head blown off.”
“Well, you’ve certainly done more than your share,” Hooper said.
“It’s the only way we’ll ever get back to a normal civilized kind o
f living,” Barton said, “by ripping their German arms off and beating their German brains in with the bloody German stumps. Blokes like Skull can’t understand that. They’re too busy filling their fountain pens. Are you going to fire that thing or fondle it all day?” Hooper put three shots through the RAF roundel.
* * *
A lot of the Sahara was once seabed. You can pick up fossilized fish bones five hundred miles inland. This is one reason why so much of Libya and Egypt is so flat. Although Defa airstrip was nearly two hundred miles from the Mediterranean it was only three hundred feet above sea-level, and the Heinkel 111 flew south for another couple of hundred miles before the desert floor climbed to twice that height. It was a very gradual, unexciting geography: one beige brown after another. Paul Schramm soon grew tired of it.
With di Marco sitting beside the pilot, the only place left in the cockpit was the bomb-aimer’s position, lying face-down in the Perspex nose. Schramm tried it for a while, dozed off, and woke up when the sun began to bake him. He squeezed past the pilot and sidled along the catwalk in the middle of the bomb-bay, to the space where the air-gunners usually lived. There was nothing to look at there, but there was nothing to look at anywhere.
He sat propped against a bulkhead and tried to make sense of his situation. He was a more or less superfluous passenger in a smallish, oldish, twin-engined bomber designed to raid targets a few hundred kilometers away which was trying to reach a target that was two thousand kilometers from its base. Below, for almost the entire flight, was a desert that was so lethal you might as well shoot yourself and get it over with. Assuming, of course, you survived a forced landing in a machine so overloaded with fuel that it was a flying tanker. Schramm found himself listening to the throb of the engine-roar, frightening himself with imagined hiccups or hesitations. That was absurd. The whole damned operation was absurd. He made himself reread the newspaper and he fell asleep.
A Good Clean Fight Page 49