A Good Clean Fight

by Derek Robinson

  Lampard thought, while the doctor made the last stitches and knotted the silk and trimmed the ends with his scissors. He looked at the sun: it hung heavily in the west. An hour to dusk. “If we go now,” he said, “you can get us through the Jalo Gap before midnight, can’t you?” Gibbon shrugged, but he did not argue. “Then we’ll be in the serir,” Lampard said. “The serir’s really fast. Maybe we can find this Heinkel before dawn.”

  “Maybe. I can try. What’s the tearing hurry?”

  “Corky, if we want the aircrew, that means they’re important, so you can bet the Luftwaffe wants them too.”

  “Yes.” Gibbon scratched his beard with his usual ferocity. “You’ve just had two rough nights, and a bloody rough day too, by the look of it. You sure you’re up to this?”

  “No.” Lampard stood, but his head was twitching and one hand was trembling. Gibbon had never seen that before. “I didn’t expect it would be like this, Corky,” he said. “I thought I’d get killed first. This isn’t how I expected it at all.” Gibbon shrugged.

  The trucks were already loaded. Lampard got into the back of the one where Menzies was lying. Smedley got into the other. Sandiman sat next to him. “What went wrong?” he asked quietly.

  “Not for me to say, sir,” Smedley said.

  The trucks moved off.

  * * *

  The pilot had not been joking when he said the crusts had been cut off the sandwiches. There was ham, cheese, or egg mayonnaise; also an apple each; and iced coffee. The atmosphere in the cockpit was one of well-earned celebration.

  “When did you learn to be a bomb-aimer?” Schramm asked.

  “Yesterday,” di Marco said. “If General Schaefer said yes, I wanted to be ready.”

  “Very professional.”

  “When you can fly low, and there is no wind and no flak, it is not difficult.”

  “What about me?” the pilot said.

  “You were very professional too,” Schramm said.

  “I was, wasn’t I? We didn’t collide with anything, not even those enormous mountains. That’s the first thing they tell you at flying school: don’t collide with the mountains.”

  “Watch out,” Schramm said. “Here they come again.”

  In fact the Tibesti range was still more than two hours away. When it came in view the pilot said he needed another break, and Schramm took over the controls. The peaks looked even more magnificent as they slid past the left wing.

  “Good climbing in those mountains,” di Marco said. “Many gazelle.” During the next hour he gave Schramm several slight changes of course, always nudging the Heinkel toward the northwest. “Headwind,” he said. “It keeps pushing us eastward.”

  “Bad for fuel consumption.”

  “Not good. But the machine has lost much weight.”

  “Good for fuel consumption.”

  “Not bad.”

  The fuel gauges told their own story, and long before the pilot squeezed his shoulder and Schramm slid out of his seat, he knew the bomber would never make Defa. He plugged in his intercom just in time to hear the pilot say, “How long have we got?”

  “Fifteen minutes,” di Marco said. “Twenty at most.”

  “As soon as I find a promising bit of desert I’ll go up and circle,” the pilot said. “You’ll need some height to help the signal on its way.”

  The rest was routine. The Heinkel climbed and circled, and then spiraled down to the desert floor, which turned out to be flat and smooth. They landed without a bounce and rolled to a stop.

  “That’s the easy bit,” the pilot said.

  They got out and walked about. Simple exercise was a huge pleasure. There were some high dunes in the far distance to the west; otherwise the Sahara reached emptily to all the horizons. After a day of constant engine-roar, Schramm found himself listening for a sound, any sound. His ears craved noise. The silence was so greedy that it was painful. When he spoke his voice seemed puny. “What next, d’you think?” he asked di Marco.

  “Our Desert Rescue Unit should come out and get us.”

  “Aircraft?”

  “Trucks.” He looked at the setting sun. “But not, I think, today.”

  “They’re jokers,” the pilot said. “They couldn’t find the hangar floor if they fell out of the airplane.”

  * * *

  Barton was up and dressed a good two hours before dawn, which was just as well because his Kittyhawk was stone dead when the troops tried to warm her up.

  For forty minutes he sat in the mess tent, hunched over a pint of tea, and heard the engine kick and die, kick and die.

  Skull came in. “Sand,” he said. “Sand in the piston-chambers.”

  “What d’you know about it?”

  “Just speculating.”

  “Well don’t. Shut bloody up.”

  Skull poured himself some tea. He added condensed milk with the flourish of a great chef. Barton watched grimly.

  Prescott joined them. “Morning,” he said. Skull nodded, Barton grunted. Fifty yards away, his Kittyhawk kicked and died. “Gremlins,” Prescott said.

  “It’s not sodding gremlins,” Barton growled.

  “Sorry. Figure of speech.”

  “Stuff it up your chuff. Use it to keep the bullshit in.”

  “Yes, sir.” Prescott took his tea to a dark corner.

  Nobody spoke until Bletchley walked in with a cardboard box. “Completely forgot about these,” he said. “Real eggs and bacon.” He gave the box to Skull and sat opposite Barton. “What’s up with your kite, Fanny? Gremlins?”

  Barton shook his head. “Christ knows, sir.”

  “I have it on good authority that it’s not sodding gremlins, sir,” Skull said. “Thus one sub-species is completely eliminated.”

  “Go and cook, Skull,” Barton said.

  When, eventually, the engine fired and crackled and settled into a solid thunder, Hooper came into the mess tent. He had been watching the ground crew’s efforts. “What was it?” Prescott asked him.

  “Electrics. Damp in the electrics.”

  “Crap!” Barton said. “They don’t know what it was. They just made that up.” Skull brought in a tray of fried eggs and bacon. Suddenly Barton felt much better. His future was full of good grub and violence. “Gremlins,” he said. “That’s what it was, bloody Cambridge-educated gremlins, vicious little buggers, isn’t that right, Skull?” He helped himself to bacon.

  “Buggery is not yet part of the curriculum at Cambridge,” Skull remarked, “although I believe its appeal is second only to plagiarism at Oxford.”

  Barton and Hooper ate hungrily; they were eager to get in the air. The meal was soon over. Bletchley walked with them to their aircraft. “This Heinkel pilot could be the single most dangerous man in the Luftwaffe,” he said. “If he gets back to Benghazi, he’ll show them how to do it better and they’ll raid the Takoradi Trail seven days a week.”

  “There may be other crewmen in the target area,” Hooper said. “Which one’s the pilot?”

  “Kill ’em all. No survivors. Take no chances. Kill everyone.”

  “Yes, sir.” Hooper felt more comfortable. He preferred simplicity. Air combat was no place to start picking and choosing.

  Airmen were standing on the Kittyhawks’ wings, topping up the fuel tanks, right until the very last minute. The glow-worm flare path had been lit, but the brightest things in the night were the flames jetting out of the exhaust stubs as Barton and Hooper took off. Quickly the flames shrank to pinpoints of yellow and were lost to sight. The double drum roll of the engines took much longer to fade.

  “Is that true, what you said about Oxford?” Bletchley asked.

  “Probably not. I suspect that they were boasting,” Skull said. “They have so little to boast about, poor creatures.”

  * * *

  Noise and jolting did not wake Lampard. Stillness and silence did. He woke up as if someone had flipped a switch and found himself lying beside a man whose face was covered in bandages. For a m
oment nothing made sense. He sat up and saw an outrageous flush of colors in the eastern sky: reds, greens, yellows, mauves, pinks. Dawn.

  He jumped over the tail-gate and ran to the cab. Both trucks had stopped. They were facing a Heinkel 111 that was sitting in the middle of nowhere, apparently intact. It was about a mile away. It seemed no bigger than a tie-pin. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Nothing’s wrong.” Gibbon had his binoculars on the bomber. “It’s just that your average Heinkel 111 has half-a-dozen guns pointing in various directions. I could drive up, you could demand surrender, we could all be dead in ten seconds.”

  Lampard took the binoculars. “I don’t see any guns,” he said. “Get closer.”

  They advanced cautiously to within half a mile, then a quarter of a mile. Now it was plain that the Heinkel’s gun turrets were empty. “Wait here,” Lampard said. He took a tommy-gun and walked forward. The air was pleasantly cool, and he felt fresh and strong.

  The fuselage door was open. He looked inside and saw three men sleeping on the floor. This was a strange situation for Lampard; usually when confronted with the enemy, asleep or awake, he killed them without delay. Now he intended to capture them, but first he would have to wake them up. What to say? Wake up seemed civilian, almost suburban. Hdnde hoch! smacked of the cinema. You are my prisoners was awfully formal, and they might not understand English. While he was worrying about it, one man raised his head and stared. It was Paul Schramm. Lampard flinched with shock.

  “Jack Lampard,” Schramm said. The other two men awoke. “I don’t suppose you’re alone,” he said.

  “Of course I’m not bloody alone.” Lampard was struggling to catch up.

  “One never knows with you chaps.” Schramm heaved himself up and rested on an arm. “You lead such irregular lives. Any chance of some breakfast?”

  “You’re very frisky,” Lampard said, “for a prisoner-of-war with a gammy leg and no boots.” They both laughed, very briefly.

  “Well, you know me,” Schramm said. “I try to enjoy my war.”

  “So you should. What else can you do with it?”

  Schramm pulled on his flying boots and spoke to the others. They all got out, and he introduced them to Lampard. “He’s frightfully nervous,” he told them, in English. “He may shoot you, just to calm his nerves.”

  By now the trucks had arrived. The prisoners were searched, and the Heinkel was searched, and no weapons were found.

  “Breakfast,” Lampard decided.

  “The food is awfully good here,” Schramm told di Marco in English. “Except for the tea. My advice is to avoid the tea.”

  “Cheeky bugger!” Smedley said.

  “Take that man’s name, sergeant,” Schramm said; but his remark caused a sudden silence and stillness. He looked around for the cause, and saw no sergeant. “Ah,” he said. “My apologies.” They got on with their jobs.

  “What was that about?” the pilot asked.

  “Death in action. They must have suffered losses. I said something rather thoughtless.”

  “You seem on good terms with that tall officer,” di Marco said.

  “We have a lot in common. He bombed our best aircraft, I killed one of his best men.” Schramm immediately felt slightly ashamed. Killing was nothing to brag about. “I’ll tell you later,” he said. “There will be plenty of time for conversation, I’m afraid.”

  The patrol knew how to cook quickly. Bacon, sausages, potatoes, mixed vegetables, all went into one great fry-up and then were spooned into mess tins. They all ate standing up. There was biscuit, margarine and jam for those still hungry. Everyone was. In a very few minutes the meal was finished, the equipment reloaded, the trucks restarted.

  Lampard took a sack of bombs from a truck and beckoned to Smedley. “You deserve a treat,” he said. “Five-minute fuses.” Working together, they planted bombs in the cockpit, on the wing-roots, inside the fuselage, on the tailplane. “If only they were all as easy as this,” Lampard said.

  “If only.” Smedley’s voice was as flat as the desert. “I know what you’re thinking,” Lampard said. “Why you? Why me? Why are we alive when they’re dead?” That was not what Smedley was thinking, but he said nothing. “It’s not your fault,” Lampard said, “and you have no cause to feel guilty.” Smedley did not feel guilty, and the words made him stare. “Think of it this way,” Lampard said. “War is like boxing. If you want to hit the other man really hard, you’ve got to get close enough so there’s a risk he’ll hit you. See what I mean?”

  “He hit us yesterday all right,” Smedley said. “By Christ, did he hit us.”

  The trucks moved off to a safe distance and everyone watched except the pilot. The bombs on the wing-roots exploded first. The wings detached, taking the undercarriage with them, and the bomber fell on its belly. The nose exploded, the tail got blown to pieces, the fuselage was shattered. When the pilot looked up there was nothing to see but a patch of smoke drifting away.

  “Kufra,” Lampard told Gibbon. “And quite quickly, please.”

  Gibbon led. Lampard drove the second truck. He had asked Schramm to sit beside him. “Tell me,” he said, “what have you been up to since we last met?”

  “Oh . . . work. Shuffling . . . um . . . what do you call it? Bumf? Is that right?” Lampard nodded. “Routine stuff,” Schramm said. “Mainly what it consisted of was going around sweeping up after your chaps.”

  That pleased Lampard. “I’m afraid we are a bit untidy,” he said.

  “Yes.” Schramm made his voice wooden. “Yes . . . Well, I grew rather tired of that, so I organized a trip down to Fort Lamy.”

  Lampard thought he had misheard. “Fort Lamy?” he said. Schramm nodded. “That’s in Chad,” Lampard said. “Isn’t it?”

  “What’s left of it is in Chad. We bombed it.” Schramm spoke modestly, but the words gave him enormous satisfaction.

  “You bombed Fort Lamy?”

  “Yes. We blew up twenty-three new Hurricanes.”

  Lampard was silent, while he tried to take it all in. Then he said: “You flew to Chad and back. For God’s sake, that’s a colossal distance!” When Schramm merely smiled and shrugged, he said, “I can’t believe it. How far is it?”

  “About three hundred kilometers too far, I’m afraid,” Schramm said wistfully.

  That killed the conversation for a few miles. The desert was blank: the only thing that moved was the other truck, and its shape and size never changed. There was nothing to do but drive and think.

  “By the way,” Schramm said, “Mrs. d’Armytage has moved to Alexandria.”

  “Hey!” Lampard protested. “That’s below the belt.”

  “Is it? I thought you would prefer to know. It might avoid disappointment when you got to Cairo.”

  “Blast your eyes.” Lampard scowled at the dust from Gibbon’s wheels until he realized his right foot was thrusting harder and harder. He relaxed it and the truck dropped back. “Why Alexandria?” he demanded.

  “The military police were a nuisance.”

  “Oh.”

  “Never mind. The Australian is buried now.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “The latest information I have is that Mrs. Challis is free and—”

  “Pack it in! Look, you stay out of my love-life and I’ll stay out of yours.”

  Schramm looked out of the window. “The strange thing is that you made my love-life happen. I cut my feet so badly running away from you on the Jebel that I needed treatment and she was the doctor.”

  “I don’t want to hear about it,” Lampard said.

  “The war brought us together and now the war has broken us up,” Schramm said. “Long live the war.”

  “I don’t care,” Lampard said. “I don’t care about Joan d’Armytage or Elizabeth Challis or your lady doctor or anyone else. All I care about is my patrol.”

  “What patrol?” Schramm asked. “Where?”

  “Shut up or I’ll bash you.” The right foot went down so hard t
hat Schramm’s head was jerked back. He shut up.

  * * *

  Barton had had all night to think about this job, and he had changed his mind about the way it should be done.

  If the Heinkel was down where Signals Intelligence said it was, it lay at the extreme range of the Kittyhawk. But Barton didn’t trust those fixes on forced landings. Direction-finding stations had to work very fast on poor signals from remote aircraft. They were lucky to get three bearings, and when they did, the three lines never met at one definite, unanimous point. They came together and crossed, and what they made was a small triangle. Then the operator usually split the difference and put the fix in the center of the triangle. It was the best he could do and it might be a long way from the truth of the matter: twenty, thirty, fifty miles from it. Barton had seen it happen. He had no confidence that Luftwaffe DF stations were any better than RAF ones.

  If he had to go hunting for the Heinkel, Barton wanted plenty of leeway. He decided not to fly to the target area at three hundred miles an hour, which was a high cruising speed that drank the juice without thought for the morrow. Instead, he decided they would take off early, and fly slowly, and arrive with their tanks a damn sight more than half-full.

  That was his plan, and it was why everyone was up two hours before dawn. Then came the gremlins.

  When at last the Kittyhawks got off the ground, he climbed gradually to ten thousand feet and settled down with the airspeed indicator at two hundred miles an hour, a nice round figure which would get them there and, God willing, get them home again. Bletchley had promised the Commanding Officer of the Desert Air Force and the C-in-C Middle East and the Prime Minister and the King and Roosevelt and Stalin and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir that Fanny Barton and his intrepid Yankee wingman would race the Luftwaffe across the Sahara, destroy their bastard Heinkel, save the Takoradi Trail and win the war, even if it killed them. Well done, Baggy. You gave, and you did not stop to count the cost. You stayed behind and did not have to worry about returning.

  Barton suddenly remembered Baggy saying: What a hypocritical young thug you are, Fanny, you don’t give a tiny toss for Takoradi, do you? It was true. So what did he care about? The squadron. Nothing else mattered. Uncle had once said the squadron never died, chaps came and chaps went, but the squadron never died. By God, never a truer word was spoken. To Barton, strapped tightly into his Kittyhawk, seemingly balanced and motionless at the top of a night sky, those men lived as vividly as if they sat in the cockpit. Greek George, for instance, had come into the mess and said, “Nobody stuffs Geraldo, Geraldo is my friend.” What had that been all about? Barton couldn’t remember. People said peculiar things in the mess. Who was it said he’d never seen a fly land on Butcher Bailey? Mick O’Hare, that’s who. Fighter pilots were such individuals, you never knew what they were going to say next. That night they were drinking rum, Pip Patterson had said, “I’m definitely going to murder my wife.” Was he serious? He’d sounded serious. Pip had always been serious. The great thing about the squadron was it didn’t matter if somebody didn’t make sense all the time. A chap was entitled to his funny ways and as long as he did his job properly, who cared? Four strafes in six days. Someone had said that. Who? Fido Doggart? Tiny Lush? Didn’t matter. Only the squadron mattered.