The Secret Servant hm-1

by Gavin Lyall

  "Just officers and women in cars," Tyler brooded, "and one truck, probably with their baggage."

  "Jйsus. Can they really be leaving their own men?" Italian garrison units had no great reputation for gallantry, but this…

  "It looks very much like it. Ghadames could be wide open – if we can get a message through. Sonnez le boute-selle."

  They went north, Lecat jammed crossways among the supplies in the back of de Carette's jeep. The sun dwindled on their left, so that would be where any wise enemy would set an ambush, but they saw nobody. Perhaps the action over the last two days had persuaded even the camel drivers that their own journeys weren't immediately necessary.

  They passed the strewn wreckage of the Stuka, still smouldering in places, and reached the area of the wireless truck just before sunset. Surprised, de Carette saw Tyler drive steadily past the wadi and round a bend in the track that put it out of sight. There he stopped and de Carette pulled up beside him.

  Tyler looked grim. "There should have been a guard on that wadi. The boys know a jeep when they hear one. Come on." He and Gunner took Tommy-guns and moved off into the hummocks. De Carette got out to sit at the guns of Tyler's jeep, just in case. By the time he'd slid into place, he found he had a lit cigarette in his hand.

  Gunner came back about twenty minutes later, trailing his Tommy-gun by the sling in a hunched, disconsolate plod.

  "They've gone. Just gone, Chev and all. The Jerries got 'em. They left a Volkswagen that got stuck, like." He started rummaging in the back of the jeep, and came up with one of the British four-gallon petrol tins. "Skipper wants a couple of gallons and some high-tension lead and a spark-plug."

  "What for?" de Carette asked.

  Gunner looked at him gloomily. "You could take 'em to him, sir, if you wanted."

  "I will."

  Gunner poured off half the petrol into the jeep's tank, and de Carette took the can back over the hummocks. Where the Chev had been there was a scatter of camouflage nets, torn bush, empty tins, cartridge cases – all the usual rubbish of an action. Fifty yards back down the wadi, Tyler was waiting by a Volkswagen that was jammed to its hub caps in soft sand. All its doors were open and there was a mess of blood on the driver's seat, but no holes in the bodywork. Somebody in the Chev had got off a burst that had hit the driver in the head or chest and the little car had run wild into the very obvious patch of sand.

  "Why did they not pull it out?" de Carette asked. Given a heavier vehicle and a tow-rope – which was as vital in the desert as water – it was a simple job, even if it took a little time.

  "I imagine they had one or two men wounded, bleeding badly, and I hope some of our boys to guard as well. They'd be in a hurry. But I wouldn't be surprised if they came back for it." Tyler lifted the engine cover at the back; it was the open military version of the Volkswagen, technically a Kьbelwagen.

  "It may be booby-trapped," de Carette said.

  "It isn't, but it's going to be. I'd rather do it with a mine or some 808, but that was all in the Chevs. So now we have to improvise."

  He undid the lead from the furthest in of the two right-hand cylinders, a difficult one to get at, or even see properly. He connected part of the extra length of wire to the lead and pushed it through a hole he had already bodged in the fire wall that separated the engine from the back seat. Under the seat, there was a small stowage compartment for the battery, the jack and some tools.

  Tyler punched a hole through the thin cap of the petrol can and threaded both pieces of wire through it, then attached them to the spark plug: one lead to the normal terminal, the other wrapped around the screw thread. The far end of that wire went to the negative terminal on the battery. Then he placed the petrol tin very carefully, screwed the cap gently on, and put the seat in place above it. Back at the engine, he arranged the plug lead so that, unless you looked very closely, it still seemed to go to the cylinder.

  Military drivers are taught to check their vehicles much more regularly and closely than most civilian drivers ever do. But de Carette could see what would happen if they came to rescue this one. They'd be in a rush. One could be arranging the tow-rope, another might lift the cover just for a glance in case somebody had wrecked the engine overnight. He might not even bother to do that. But almost certainly one of them would try the starter, to see if the battery had gone flat. And that new plug would flash in the vapour coming off two gallons of petrol that nobody knew was down there under the back seat.

  They started back to the jeeps in the reddening light.

  "I never thought I'd feel glad we still had one of those damned tins," Tyler commented. The 'damned tins' were Cairo's idea of petrol cans: flimsy things that leaked if you even looked at them nastily. Mostly the LRDG used the far tougher German version, whose nickname was already becoming a generic for an efficient liquids container: the Jerry-can. But you couldn't punch holes in those.

  They drove a few miles north and just before sunset turned off the track, well off, to make supper.

  It was a gloomy meal. For once even Tyler seemed too drained to do more than insist that they light a fire and get hot food. They ate in silence, except for de Carette trying to reassure Lecat, whose morale was slumping as his saviours slid into their own melancholia. Luckily, he was too tired to stay awake longer than it took him to eat.

  Tyler sat wrapped in a great-coat and brooded over a map-board by torchlight, a mug of rum-and-lime in his hand.

  "How did they get t'Chev going?" Yorkie muttered. "Her looked bad to me."

  Gunner stared at him in the last flickers of the sand-and-petrol stove. "What d'you think our boys was doing all afternoon while we was getting our balls bombed off? It could a been just the hose. I could fit a new one meself in half an hour."

  "It looked like t'radiator to me. They would've filled it with porridge, most like."

  "Best thing to do with porridge, that."

  "There's nowt wrong with porridge."

  "Bloody Scotties."

  "Tha knows bloody well where Yorkshire is…" They mumbled on, huddled against the side of a jeep and swapping cigarettes automatically.

  De Carette sat down beside Tyler. "That Boche commander must not be a fool, John."

  "No… he's handled his side of things pretty well. Where d'you think he's based?"

  "The village?" It was the only possible answer. About forty miles north the map marked a small village with a water hole, just off the track and on the edge of the Grand Erg Oriental, the real sand sea that stretched west and south into the Sahara itself, impassable even to a jeep. If the Germans weren't in the village, there was no logical place for them to be.

  "Yes… they've probably got a dozen French prisoners and our boys, they'd need somewhere to lock them up."

  "John," de Carette said suspiciously, "you do not want to go into that village…"

  "I'd like to rescue our people, but if we can just reach the wireless Chev we could get a message through. It'll save us three days drive back to Zella – even if the Stukas don't get us."

  This man does take war seriously, de Carette thought. He is proposing to invade a village, almost certainly a walled one, which must hold at least one armoured car and a platoon of infantry – if it held anything they wanted to find.

  But then his vision of the war expanded and he saw over half a million men tangled in battle along the North African coastline. All Captain Tyler had left to lose was two jeeps and five lives. It was sheer bad luck that one life was called Henri de Carette.

  They moved out at ten o'clock, with a sliver of moon due to rise around four in the morning. For them, it was probably safest to drive in the dark with headlights blazing confidently, and if anybody recognised them as jeeps that needn't mean anything. The Afrika Korps used as many jeeps as it could capture, just as the 8th Army used Volkswagens, Opel trucks, Steyrs and all the rest.

  About midnight, they reached the turn-off for the village and stopped short to examine the wheel-marks by torchlight.
<
br />   "There's been a scout car in and out here," Gunner reported. "But we knew that anyhow. And the Chev for a cert. And some lorry, and a Volkswagen. But we knew that, too."

  Tyler stared up the little track. There was a distinct horizon where the stars ended, but you might not see a moving man at more than fifty yards. They daren't trust the map to tell them how far the village was, so two of them walked well ahead of the now lightless jeeps and their noise.

  It was nearly two miles before an unnatural square shape hardened against the sky. They parked the jeeps off the track and Tyler, de Carette and Gunner went forward to reconnoitre.

  The village had a wall, all right, squeezing it tight so that the outside houses and wall became part of each other. Feathery date palms stuck up among the buildings, giving the whole ramshackle place the look of a big flat flower bowl. The wall had no value against attack: it could be climbed in seconds. But here the usual enemy was the sand, ebbing and flowing with the winds and able to swamp an open village in a few days. There were occasional drifts piled as if they were trying to lift like a wave and break over the top of the wall, but none had made it yet. The only other way in was a single gateway blocked with two heavy but rickety wooden doors. Wood had to last a long time in the desert. And it could have been an abandoned cemetery for all the sound and light coming out of it.

  They crept around it at a distance where they hoped they, wouldn't be seen – unless somebody had night glasses – and then made one cautious foray up to look at the wall itself. The Romans might have begun it, the Foreign Legion would certainly have done some of the patching, and two millenia of villagers the rest.

  They were fingering the flaky mud covering and crumbling stonework when the first motor started.

  Instinctively they crouched, Tommy-guns raised, but common sense said that if you've spotted an intruder the first thing you do isn't to start a motor vehicle. Tyler waved them outwards, and they scuttled away into the night. Behind them, another engine coughed and then a third.

  "The first was a truck," Tyler decided. "The second was different, maybe the scout car. Would you agree?" he added politely.

  "John, it is whatever you say."

  "They're not just running up their engines. They're coming out."

  But it was a couple of minutes after they reached a place to watch the gateway before there was a flash of headlights inside and the gates were dragged slowly open.

  Three vehicles drove out. A squat four-wheeled scout car, then unmistakably, the Chev, and finally a four-wheel truck.

  "Blast, blast, blast," Tyler muttered.

  "Will your Yorkie start shooting?" de Carette asked nervously.

  "No," Tyler said firmly, like an order aimed a mile down the track. "Not if he wants to stay in LRDG."

  In that clear night there was no afterglow from the headlights; one moment they were lighting the dunes with their rocking beams, then they were out of sight completely, leaving just the engine noise. They listened for well after that too had faded before starting to walk back, gloomily.

  "That wasn't a fighting patrol," Tyler said. "They might be evacuating completely, or they could be just taking prisoners and wounded up to Mareth or somewhere, and be coming back in daylight. We can't get the Chev's wireless now."

  "If there's one in the village, Skipper," Gunner said, "we could go and sort of liberate it, like."

  "Could you make a German wireless work?" de Carette asked. He saw only the heads turn in the darkness, but knew he was getting an incredulous stare, and mumbled an apology. If you were prepared to drive across unmapped deserts for a thousand miles, you'd better believe you can make anything work.

  "Let's go and sort t'buggers out – if they're there," Yorkie said.

  Tyler waited a moment for de Carette to cast his vote, then said quietly: "Right. We'll do it in two stages…"

  27

  Tyler and de Carette climbed the crumbling wall very carefully, but still scabs of dried mud flaked off under their boots and flopped into the sand. They rolled carefully over the top and dropped a few feet into a tiny orange grove, itself held in by a two-foot wall. Even in the January night, the trees had a faint fragrance.

  A narrow alleyway led down between the houses towards what must be a central piazza with the water hole that had first made the village possible. The buildings on either side were jammed together, their flat roofs blending to form a second upstairs village that was private to the wives, leaving the streets strictly for men and a few servant girls.

  De Carette had been in villages like this before the war, but had felt hardly any more welcome. There would be plenty of rifles around that didn't belong to the Afrika Korps.

  Starlight throws no shadows, just blurring patches of dark and not so dark. They paused in the mouth of the alley, where it met a sandy lane perhaps the width of a truck, leading uphill to the right towards the gateway. Tyler moved in a careful crouch across to a clump of stubby palms on the far side, and when nothing reacted to that, started moving down towards the piazza, de Carette paralleling him beside the near wall.

  He had been flattered at first that Tyler had picked him, then depressed when he realised that, au contraire, Tyler had picked Yorkie and Gunner as the ones he trusted to handle the jeeps. Now he just felt frightened. But at least he might get his first chance to kill somebody. Yesterday's Stukas had made the war a very personal thing, and he didn't want to die that sort of virgin.

  Then they were at the piazza and fading back into dark doorways to survey it.

  It would have been about thirty yards square if anything in that village had been square, with a dim glitter of water in a walled pond off to one side among the date palms. Alleys made doorways of darkness at the comers, and opposite, past the palms, were the arches of camel stables and…

  … and the faint hard outline of another Volkswagen. De Carette's heart seemed to give a gulp. A parked vehicle meant a guard: in a place like this the villagers would loot the gold from your teeth while you slept.

  For a full five minutes they watched, but nothing moved or made any sound. Then Tyler eased slowly back up the lane and de Carette followed. They went about fifty yards and met under another palm.

  "The guard must be in the stables," Tyler whispered.

  "They are probably all in the stables. To be anywhere else they would have to put people out of their houses, and I think it is not German policy to cause such trouble here."

  "Yes… I hadn't thought of that. Thank you, Henri." De Carette felt a glow of satisfaction.

  "And another at the gate," Tyler went on. He looked at his watch. "Twelve minutes, Let's get up there."

  They slunk quietly up the winding lane, until the gap of stars ahead showed they were in sight of the gateway. It was too risky to go any further. They slid into doorways and waited. Above, a sprinkle of real light, by starlight standards, had fallen on the highest roofs and palms. The moon was up. De Carette found suddenly that he was staring across the lane at a battered old enamel Singer Sewing Machine advertisement. He almost laughed aloud, but remembered that this was one machine that needed no power and usually no repair. The sewing machine and the rifle. The front line of civilisation.

  Then he heard the growl of the jeep.

  A figure that was just a moving shadow broke the line of the gateway, peering out at the sound. On the left. How would he be armed? A light machine-gun would be the obvious weapon, but that should have two men…

  Somebody shouted from the piazza and the gate guard called back, then the night shattered as the K guns fired, throwing a burst of little tracer darts though the topmost palm fronds and spattering against the buildings.

  Two men ran up from the piazza, clumping and panting. They carried rifles, but missed seeing Tyler and de Carette because they just weren't looking. They joined the guard at the gates, trying to drag them shut.

  Tyler slipped out of his doorway and cat-footed up the lane. De Carette followed. This was better than they'd expected: three me
n at the gate instead of one or two. At twenty yards range. Tyler stopped and lifted his gun to his shoulder. De Carette did the same, in the slow motion of utter certainty.

  He aimed low at the figure hauling on the right-hand gate and squeezed the trigger, letting the gun track upwards with the recoil. The man collapsed like a burst balloon, and de Carette felt a surge of relief that was almost a sexual climax. He could do it, he had done it, and if he died now, the score was at least level.

  He stepped back against the wall to reach into his haversack for another magazine, thumb the old one out, let it drop, push the new one into place. They ran forward.

  One of the men on the left of the gate was still moving. Tyler fired two shots into him. De Carette took his own victim by the feet and dragged him clear of the gateway, which was still open wide enough to take a jeep.

  He would like to have known the man's name.

  The jeep charged past on the moonlight plain, and Tyler flashed his torch at it. It swung in and ran up to them.

  Lecat was sitting up in the back of it, holding a rifle.

  "Why the hell did you bring him?" Tyler asked Gunner, who was driving, with Yorkie at the guns.

  "You try making him stay behind, Skip. He's like a fuckin' dog."

  "I explained to him," de Carette began.

  "Never mind," Tyler said. "We've knocked off three and there might be only one left. Follow us."

  "I did explain to him, John," de Carette muttered, as they moved out ahead.

  "I heard you. I forgot what I had said yesterday: he has found a new mother. He isn't going to be alone again."

  They went about twenty yards ahead of the blacked-out jeep that purred gently on the downhill slope. There might be no more than one man down there. The Volkswagen only held four; it was smaller than a jeep. But that, de Carette thought uneasily, meant that it could hardly carry any supplies as well. That didn't sound like the desert.