A Good Clean Fight

by Derek Robinson

  Their second approach was better, and di Marco bombed after only a few corrections. They all felt the Heinkel bounce a little when the load detached. Schramm turned and looked back as the Heinkel banked and climbed. Di Marco’s aim had been precise. One instant the Hurricanes stood like perfect reproductions of each other; the next instant the stick of bombs rapidly flowered along their line, so quickly that it looked like a magician’s trick, a string of silent blossoms of energy destroying the fighters and flinging the bits high in the air.

  “Well done,” Schramm said. It seemed inadequate.

  “Make a circuit,” di Marco said.

  More people were out on the airfield now; quite a crowd. Schramm thought he could see men with rifles, but of course the range was hopeless. Smoke and dust were thinning over the Hurricanes’ graveyard. Recognizable pieces lay all around: wingtips, wheels, rudders, propellers. Several wrecks were burning.

  They flew around the field. “I think I see some machines inside that hangar,” the pilot said.

  “Not fighters,” di Marco said. “There is a fuel dump in the northeastern corner of the field. We should bomb that.”

  They made their approach. Schramm saw a stack of square tins that looked as big as a small house. “Right . . .” di Marco said. “Steady. Right . . . Steady. Now left . . . Steady. Good. Good. Good. Bombs gone.” Again the Heinkel bucked a little.

  The stick straddled the fuel dump. It set off a series of explosions, each greater than the last, each pumping a rush of flame that burst like a balloon to release a bigger, fiercer upsurge. Rich black smoke boiled into the sky. Within a minute it was twice as high as the bomber. Schramm had nothing to say. This was more than a fire. It was an act of God. It was beyond words.

  The pilot made half a circuit so that di Marco could take photographs. Then he put the nose down, crossed the field low and flat out, and beat up the crowd. Most of them ducked; Schramm did not blame them. The Heinkel climbed steeply over the hangars and cruised away. “Steer zero-two-zero,” di Marco told him.

  “I know,” the pilot said.

  “Well, that was fairly successful,” Schramm said.

  “That was the easy bit,” the pilot said. “That was like going to the bar on the corner for a beer.”

  “How much fuel have we got?”

  “Not enough,” the pilot said. “But we all knew that before we left, didn’t we?”

  * * *

  The first signal reached Cairo while the Fort Lamy fire crew was still hosing down the remains of the Hurricanes.

  There was nothing they could do about the fuel dump. The heat was so intense that you could make toast a hundred yards from the flames, if you were stupid enough to stand there. Much of the fuel had been stored underground. The fire was only beginning when the bomber left the scene. Sixty thousand gallons of aviation fuel takes a lot of burning.

  News of the raid hit Middle East HQ like a fox in a chicken house. Quite senior officers were seen running in its corridors. Even more senior officers were tracked down to Shepheard’s, or the Gezira, or a seat in the stalls for Gone with the Wind, and rushed back to their offices.

  At first some people refused to believe the report. Fort Lamy bombed? Don’t be absurd. Some radio operator’s got himself blotto on the local hooch. Signals bounced back and forth. The raid was confirmed, clarified, expanded, personally witnessed and endorsed by the Fort Lamy station commander. A solitary Heinkel had taken out twenty-three Hurricanes and three months’ fuel supply.

  A brash young squadron leader, freshly arrived from England to fetch and carry for an air vice-marshal, couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. “It’s a bit cheeky, I agree, sir,” he said, “but we often lose more than that to the U-boats in a single convoy, so . . .”

  “Don’t be a bloody idiot all your life,” the air vicemarshal growled. They were pounding along a corridor to a suddenly urgent meeting. “The Takoradi Trail’s an artery. In fact it’s the artery, there isn’t another, and we’ve been getting fifty Hurricanes a week pumped up it. Now this cocky Hun stooges across from God knows where and chops the artery! There’s blood all over Chad, and our hopes of air superiority up the blue have gone down the bog! Got it now?”

  “Yes sir.” The squadron leader put on a spurt and opened the door to the room inside which sudden urgency was already loud.

  The meeting made some fast decisions. Within minutes, signals went top secret, top priority, to the station commanders at Maiduguri, Geneina and El Fasher—stages on the Takoradi Trail to the west or east of Fort Lamy—ordering all aircraft to be dispersed immediately. Ditto fuel supplies.

  By now an expert on the Heinkel 111 had been found and the meeting was pretty confident that the raider must have refueled somewhere in the desert. There was much stabbing of index fingers at various spots on the map of North Africa, and a short shock when it was realized that to the north of Nigeria lay the French province of Niger. Unlike Chad, Niger had remained loyal to the Vichy Government in France. Niger was therefore stiff with collaborationists, and if the Luftwaffe had set up a refueling airstrip inside Niger, that would put the field at Kano within easy range. Warning signals went to Kano, in Nigeria. Also to El Obeid and Khartoum, in Sudan. Christ Almighty, if one obsolescent Heinkel could knock out Fort Lamy, nowhere on the Trail was safe.

  Meanwhile, somebody had been talking to the Heinkel expert about the bomber’s speed.

  “Well,” he said, “given a pair of good engines, properly serviced, and assuming no headwind, I’d say a decent pilot might crank two hundred and fifty miles an hour out of her. But this chap won’t be doing that, of course. He’ll be cruising at the most fuel-efficient speed, which is somewhere in the region of a hundred and eighty miles an hour. Perhaps a hundred and eighty-five as time goes by and his tanks get lighter.”

  They returned to the map. Assuming he was flying back to Libya—and that made more sense than going by northern Niger, which was nothing but sand seas and rocks, an enormous distance from anywhere, and therefore not an easy place to stockpile jerricans of petrol—assuming he was trudging home to Libya, where was he now?

  South of the Tibesti Mountains, that’s where.

  For the first time, the meeting brightened up.

  The bugger still had something like seven hundred miles to go. At a hundred and eighty miles an hour. There was time to find him and bust him. It wouldn’t help Fort Lamy, but it might make the Luftwaffe think again.

  * * *

  The smoke from the burning truck must attract attention. Lampard led Menzies and Smedley down the wadi at a steady jog-trot. They had done this sort of thing in training many times; however, none of them had done it with a smashed jaw. The jolt of each pace caused Menzies mounting waves of pain, pain so great that it swamped his senses. He said nothing, and they were still jogging when he fainted. He fell on his face, and this damaged his injuries even more.

  They rolled him onto his back and sat him up. Lampard held his head while Smedley picked bits of dirt out of his mouth. A tooth looked so loose that they thought Menzies might swallow it and choke, so Smedley plucked it out. That provoked quite a lot of blood, and they sloshed some water in his mouth to rinse it out. After all this, Menzies was still unconscious. Lampard hoisted him carefully and carried him over his shoulder. A steady splatter of blood soaked into Lampard’s battledress.

  They got out of the wadi and walked fast for a mile. The hillside was thick with boulders. This made good cover but slow going.

  It occurred to Lampard that the intelligent thing to have done would have been to shift two of the bodies from Davis’s jeep to his own jeep. Then the Germans might think the whole patrol had been killed.

  Too late now.

  No shufti-kite. That was encouraging.

  Smedley had been watching Menzies’s upside-down face; he said he thought they should give him water. Lampard walked to the next patch of scrub, which was very spindly but it would have to do, and put him down. The limbs were slack, the eyel
ids were thick and heavy, the head lay where it flopped. Menzies looked dead. Smedley searched hard before he found a pulse.

  What amazed Lampard was the amount of blood Menzies had lost. Lampard’s battledress was drenched; it clung to his skin. “That’s because his head’s hanging down,” Smedley said. “We’ve got to keep his head up. I don’t think he’s been breathing right, either.”

  Lampard decided to carry him piggyback-fashion. He ripped a long strip from his shirt and tied Menzies’s arms in front, at the wrist. He looped the arms over his head and picked him up by the legs. Smedley shifted Menzies’s head so that it was not on the same side as Lampard’s tattered ear. They walked on.

  Smedley was now carrying three weapons and two water bottles. He was a big man; nevertheless there were times when the pace that Lampard set had him gasping. Lampard had a stride like a plowman’s. He saw the obstacles coming and stepped over them. In order to keep Menzies’s head in a safe and steady position he had to lean forward slightly and tilt his shoulders to the side. The flies had been bad before; now they were an army of occupation, claiming their tribute of blood and sweat. Menzies did not notice them. Lampard let them wander where they liked, unless it was into his mouth. Then he spat a small bundle of saliva-coated fly into the dust.

  They heard the shufti-kite, once, but it was far behind them. They heard the clatter of half-tracks, once, but it was faint and grew fainter. They met an Arab herding a dozen goats. He pointed to the north and said: “Tedeschi,” which meant Germans. Lampard and Smedley were going south of west, but they thanked him all the same. He looked sadly at Menzies’s shattered face and murmured a Muslim prayer.

  Almost twenty-four hours after his patrol had left it, Lampard carried Menzies into the wadi where the base-camp party should have been waiting. It was empty.

  Smedley helped him to lift Menzies down and lay him out. Lampard’s hands were locked into the shape of hooks: the fingers refused to relax. But his body felt as if it was floating.

  “And here I was, looking forward to a brew-up,” Smedley said. “Just goes to show. You never can tell.” His voice sounded thin and husky; nevertheless it brought one of the fitters running down the wadi. He had been keeping look-out from a nearby cliff top, and had somehow missed their approach. Gibbon and Sandiman, he said, had decided to move base camp to another wadi when this one began to attract too many curious Arabs.

  The doctor drove a truck around, treated Menzies where he lay, then drove him back to the new camp. Lampard and Smedley rode in the truck. Corky Gibbon had a brew-up ready for them, “Just the two of you?” he said. He added rum.

  “Just the two of us,” Lampard said. “And Menzies, but he’s not drinking.”

  Gibbon was startled and dismayed, but he hid his feelings and he knew better than to ask questions. There was plenty of tea to go around. Lieutenant Sandiman had an urgent signal for Lampard to read; however, he decided to let him get a good drink inside him first. The day’s work was not over yet.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Most Urgent

  The order came down the chain of command at Desert Air Force, gaining force at every stage like a ball bouncing down a staircase, until it landed at LG 250. Prescott decoded it in two minutes. Barton read it aloud. “Movement order canceled,” he said. “Operation imminent. Bletchley will brief.” He cheered up enormously. “See, Skull? The game’s never over till it’s over.”

  “I’ll write that in Kit’s book,” Skull said. “I think there’s room.”

  Baggy Bletchley flew in half an hour later, in the Brute.

  “By a remarkable stroke of luck, Fanny,” he said, “you’re in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.”

  “Luck is very important, sir,” Barton said. “Some have it, some don’t. Let me carry those maps.”

  They went to the mess tent. Hooper, Prescott and Skull were already there. “I thought you’d gone,” Bletchley said to Skull.

  “I do the cooking and some light dusting. My bully fritters are well spoken of.”

  Bletchley was not listening. He unrolled a map and said, “The most extraordinary thing happened a few hours ago. A Heinkel 111 flew down to Fort Lamy and cut the Takoradi Trail, just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “Not only did the rascal destroy a whole lot of brand-new Hurricanes, he also set fire to so much aviation fuel that we shan’t be able to get another Hurricane through Lamy for weeks. Very imaginative, thoroughly courageous, and he cannot be allowed to survive. You’re nearest. Go and kill him.”

  “Where is he, sir?” Barton asked.

  “We know where he’s going. Or rather, we know where he’d like to get to. Defa.” Bletchley circled it on the map. “Little Luftwaffe airstrip. That’s where he refueled on the way out.”

  “Defa.” Barton cocked his head and looked from Defa to LG 250 and back again. “Three hundred miles.”

  “We have reason to think he will never reach Defa. Two reasons, in fact. One is he simply hasn’t got enough fuel. Normal range of a Heinkel 111 is sixteen hundred miles, by which time it’s flying on fumes. From Defa to Fort Lamy and back is twenty-two hundred miles. If you put enough fuel in the machine to fly that distance it would be so heavy, it could never take off.”

  “Especially with a load of bombs.”

  “Exactly.”

  “You said there were two reasons, sir.”

  “I did indeed. The second is a headwind which the pilot is now facing on his return leg. Out of the northwest, twenty to thirty miles an hour. Just what he doesn’t want.”

  “Presumably the pilot knows all this,” Skull said. “And presumably the Luftwaffe knows it too.”

  “We must assume that,” Bletchley said.

  “So they’re waiting for him to come down in the desert,” Barton said, “and then they’ll go and pick him up.”

  “Not if you get there first. Our Signals Intelligence people are listening for his transmissions. The instant they get a map reference they’ll flash it to you, here, and you can be on your way.”

  Prescott went off to sit beside his wireless set. Barton and Hooper talked to the ground crew. Both fighters were airworthy again: the fuel problem had been solved. The guns were armed, the windscreens cleaned, the radios checked, the entire skin polished with dusters. An unclean aircraft could cost five miles an hour.

  “What sort of range has your Kittyhawk got?” Bletchley asked.

  “According to the book, nearly six hundred miles. That’s at three hundred miles an hour. If we flew slower I suppose we’d go further.”

  “You must get there as fast as you can,” Bletchley said. “You must kill the crew of that Heinkel. The Luftwaffe must not get a taste for the Takoradi Trail, or the whole desert war could be in jeopardy.”

  “If you put it like that, sir,” Barton said, “I suppose we’d better get weaving.”

  But Prescott still sat in his tent. Bletchley had brought some bread: a rare luxury in the blue. They ate jam sandwiches and waited while the shadows lengthened.

  “I’ve been thinking, sir,” Hooper said. “Presumably the map reference locating this Heinkel pilot will apply to a Luftwaffe map. What I mean is, the Luftwaffe grid may not be the same as ours.”

  “It’s not,” Bletchley said. “I brought Luftwaffe maps.”

  “Oh.”

  Skull came over with a jug of tea. Barton felt thirsty, but he was worried about drinking just before a long flight. Hooper drank a pint, and Barton worried about that. Then he remembered that the Kittyhawk cockpit equipment included an exit tube for the pilot’s relief. Trust the Yanks to think of that. He filled a mug and drank.

  “In the circumstances,” Skull said thoughtfully, “it rather looks as if Signals Intelligence has broken the Luftwaffe code, sir.”

  “I try not to speculate,” Bletchley said. “That way madness lies.”

  “Really, sir? You’re missing half the fun.” Skull went away with the empty jug.

  “Awkward sod,” Barton said.
/>   “Yes. He makes a good brew-up, though. How does he keep the sand out?”

  “Strains it through his socks, I think.”

  “Ah.” Bletchley took another sip. “Touched by the foot of God,” he said. “Hello, we’re in business.”

  Prescott was hurrying toward them with a slip of paper. On it was a six-figure grid reference. When Barton plotted it on the map, his finger ended up a long way south of Defa. “Start up!” he shouted. Hooper was already running to his Kittyhawk. An engine turned over, a propeller jerked. “No, I’m afraid not,” Bletchley said.

  Barton turned and stared.

  “It’s not on, Fanny,” Bletchley said. “We’re about fifteen minutes late. Before you get there the sun will have gone down and you’ll never find him in the dark. Work it out for yourself.”

  “It’s worth a try,” Barton argued.

  “It’s not worth a failure. Forget tonight. Try at dawn tomorrow.”

  The engines died. The evening breeze sent the usual colonies of snakes of sand skittering across the landing-ground. The ground crew tied dustsheets around the noses of the Kittyhawks and locked the rudders. Skull began opening tins of bully.

  * * *

  Lampard was sitting on a box, having his ear stitched together by the doctor, when he saw Sandiman watching him. “Any signals come in?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me, then.”

  Sandiman took out a piece of paper. “I got this a couple of hours ago. It’s marked ‘Most Urgent’ but there was nothing we could do until—”

  “Just tell me what’s in it.”

  “It’s an order to move immediately and with all speed to a map reference deep in the desert where we’ll find a Heinkel bomber that’s come down. We’re to capture or kill the crew.”

  Lampard laughed, hurt his ear severely, apologized to the doctor, and sent for Gibbon. “How soon can we get there?” he asked him.

  “It’s a hell of a long way, Jack. Halfway to Kufra and off to the west. If we leave now, and if we don’t have any tire trouble . . . We might make it some time tomorrow morning. That’s provided we don’t get Stuka-ed. on the way.”