by Shaun Clarke
‘This is a right bleedin’ circus,’ Tone slurred.
‘It’s the best bag shanty in town,’ Marty said, using the Royal Navy slang to describe a brothel. ‘That’s why there’s so many sailors here.’
Joining the queue that snaked down the hallway, Marty and Tone continued to drink Zebeeb from the bottle and traded tall stories about their night’s activities so far while the queue ahead of them inched impatiently forward. Finally, when it was their turn, Marty, high and mighty, pushed the hysterically giggling Tone into the room. He waited a few moments, then peeped through the keyhole and was gratified to see that his virginal Welsh friend, nervous even in his drunkenness, was stretched out on the naked bint on the bed, his pants around his ankles, his white-skinned spine spangled with the light from an oil lamp, and appeared to be moving awkwardly inside her. Eventually, after what was only a matter of minutes, he staggered out of the room and said smugly, ‘Follow that, if you can!’
‘No problem, mate.’
Entering the room, Marty found the Egyptian prostitute, a dark-skinned barrel of lard, her eyes pitchblack and demented, swabbing her bruised thighs with a wet rag. Suddenly feeling unreal, the floor shifting beneath his feet, wondering what he was doing here, thinking of Lesley and then trying to forget her, he obeyed thewoman’s curt nod, the mad seductiveness of her gaze, and unbuttoned and then stretched out beside her. As she wearily spread her legs, raising knees black with boils, her blistered hands blindly groping, he felt himself falling in and out of consciousness, eyes opening and closing, and realized that he wasn’t getting anywhere, being far too drunk. Slipping into an odd kind of reverie, at once desirous and guilty, he recollected his single night of sex with Lesley in that small room in the Savoy hotel. It was an artful dodge, a born survivor’s trick, offering the necessary distraction, and he managed a slight erection, wisely slipped on a condom, and felt himself entering the woman as her gaze sucked him in. There was madness in that gaze, something lost, beyond redemption, and he sensed intimations of a future he did not wish to know. Shuddering, he came too quickly, gaining little satisfaction, and was relieved to button himself up again and hurry out of the room, once more hiding behind false jocularity as he grinned at Tone.
‘Bloody fantastic!’ he boasted loudly ‘She was so desperate after your pitiful effort, she practically came off the bed.’
‘Oh, yeah?’ Tone retorted.
‘Bloody right, mate. In fact, she told me you came too quickly, before you were even in properly, and that I could use up the time you’d paid for. Thanks a million, mate.’
‘Pull the other one, Marty.’
Giggling hysterically, they left Tiger Lil’s, stepping back into the sultry Egyptian night, and made their way unsteadily through the teeming crowds of the Birka, repeatedly falling against the outdoor tables of the cafés where Arabs were still drinking coffee, smoking hashish pipes, playing backgammon and talking excitedly. Soldiers, sailors and airmen were still entering and leaving the many nightclubs and bars, and the usual swarm of filthy, baying bootblacks hotly pursued them.
Suddenly feeling hungry, Marty hailed a taxi and had it take them to the Union Jack pension, which, though run by a Greek proprietor, specialized in egg and chips for the British. After washing the greasy meal down with beer, which took them over the edge as far as drunkenness was concerned, they decided that it was too late to return to camp and that they had best spend the night here in the pension. Paying for a twin-bedded room with the last of their piastres, they fell onto their separate beds without removing their clothes.
Marty fell asleep almost instantly, despite the continuing noise outside, and had erotic dreams about Lesley, seeing her large brown eyes floating in darkness as her naked body, sweat-slicked and moonlit, uncoiled to envelop him. In his dream, he was consumed with love for her and felt the pain of his loss. Then sleep’s true darkness claimed him.
He was awakened at dawn by a couple of British Army MPs, who drummed their batons of the metal headrests of the beds, creating a shocking din. Jerking upright with a racing heart and splitting head, feeling ill and dazed, he was ordered out of bed, ushered with the dishevelled, equally hungover, Tone into a paddy wagon, then driven to the MP barracks at Bab el Hadid. There, they were both thrown into a cell, charged with being AWOL.
‘Oh, my God!’ Tone groaned when the cell door had been slammed shut. ‘My first night in Cairo and already I’m up for a court-martial!’
‘I doubt it,’ Marty reassured him, then stretched out on his bed with his hands clasped under the back of his head, gazing up at the ceiling. He tried to ignore his guilt and splitting headache and his stomach’s vile rumblings. ‘Did you use a condom last night?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ Tone replied. ‘Wise man,’ Marty said, thinking of his new wife waiting patiently for his return, loving him, trusting him, not for one second believing that he dallied with diseased whores in Cairo.
I should have more sense , he thought.
Shortly after noon, he and Tone were released from the cell and driven back to the camp at Almazur, arriving there when the sun was still high in the sky and the heat threatened to make them throw up. Escorted by the burly MPs to the HQ tent, they were made to stand at attention in the boiling sunlight until the Commanding Officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Welsh, could see them. Not being a man to take nonsense lightly, he let them cook in the sun for an hour, then had them brought into him by a sergeant major, one after the other, to a table overloaded with various files, loose documents and maps. The CO had a walrus moustache, a sun-scorched, jowly face, and eyes as grey and hard as desert stones.
‘From a brief perusal of your records, Private Butler,’ he said when Marty had snapped to attention, offered a perfect salute, and recited his name, rank and serial number, ‘it would seem to me that you’re a soldier rather short on selfdiscipline.’
‘Sorry, sir, but – ’
‘Be quiet and speak only when asked a direct question!’ the sergeant major bawled in his ear.
‘Yes, sergeant major!’ Marty snapped.
The CO stared steadily at him for some time, as if studying some kind of rare zoological specimen, his fingers clasped beneath his chin and drumming lightly together. Eventually, sucking his breath in and letting it out with a forlorn sigh, he said, ‘You’re a good soldier, Private Butler – no doubt about that – but you’re constantly in trouble, getting drunk or fighting, and you don’t even seem to have enough discipline to beat the curfew or get out of bed on time in the mornings. Clearly, Private Butler, you need a more exacting life than you’re getting – one that will fill every minute of your day and keep you out of mischief.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Marty said.
‘Shut your mouth, soldier!’ the sergeant major bawled. ‘Speak only when asked a direct question!’
‘Yes, sergeant major!’ Marty snapped.
After another tortuous silence, broken only by the growling and clattering of some passing Matilda tanks, which filled the tent with swirling sand, the CO cleared his throat and continued: ‘It’s my belief that you can put your excess energy to good use, and thus hopefully subdue your disorderly habits, by joining the Long Range Desert Group. The LRDG is presently engaged in reconnaissance and intelligence gathering behind enemy lines in the Western Desert. The work is exhausting and dangerous, which should suit you perfectly. Do you have reason to think otherwise, Private Butler?’
‘No, sir!’ Marty snapped, secretly thrilled at the thought of working with that already legendary group of men. ‘When do I leave, sir?’
‘The sooner the better,’ the CO replied drily. ‘Be on the apron at first light tomorrow morning.’
‘Yes, sir!’ Marty snapped.
‘All right, Private, dismissed.’
With the sergeant major bawling his instructions right behind him, Marty saluted his CO, performed a sharp about-turn, then marched with singing heart out of the tent, back into the heat of the blazing sun. He had just been rewarded for hi
s sins and it made him feel ten feet tall.
Chapter Two
The LRDG camp was located at Siwa Oasis, nearly 300 kilometres to the south-west and across the frontier, at the crossroads of the old caravan routes. With its saltwater lake, fierce dry heat and swarms of fat black flies, the oasis was a place noted for its ability to tax a man’s strength, which is exactly why it suited the Long Range Desert Group: it hardened new men and prepared them for the desert even before they went out on their first patrol.
Disembarking from the RAF Hudson transport that had flown him in with Tone, who had also been seconded to the LRDG, Marty saw that the forward operating base (FOB) was ringed with the 25-pounder gun-howitzers of the Royal Horse Artillery, an equal number of British 6-pounders, Bofors anti-aircraft guns, sangars manned by Browning machine-gun teams, and even some captured Italian 75/27 guns. Camouflaged Ford F-60 cars and Chevrolet trucks were lined up along one side of the camp, under a protective canopy of palm leaves. They were, Marty noted, covered in dust, badly battered, and peppered with bullet holes.
Beyond the perimeter, on all sides, were the magnificent sand dunes and, beyond them, only the ‘Blue’ – the common term for the desert – stretching away to the dust-wreathed horizon under an azure sky streaked with silvery-white lines of sunlight.
The men of the LRDG were all wearing desert dress: khaki shirt and shorts, regular army boots with rolleddown socks, and a soft peaked cap instead of a helmet. Each man also had a Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife and a holstered Browning 9mm High Power handgun strapped to his waist. One of them, a short, broadshouldered bulldog of a sergeant with windblown tawny hair, a sunburnt face, and the fathomless brown eyes and demeanour of a Rottweiler, was waiting for Marty and the others when they emerged from their Hudson transport and gathered together around the Bedford trucks lined up by the runway.
‘All right, you lot!’ he bawled. ‘Don’t stand there like limp dicks at a wedding. You’re with the LRDG now – not with a bunch of regular army wankers – so hump yourselves up into one of those Bedfords and be quick about it. Are you deaf? I mean now!’
Impelled into action by the sergeant’s impressive bellowing, Marty and Tone humped their kitbags onto their shoulders and scrambled with the other newcomers up into one of the Bedford trucks. Sitting side by side, they felt the inexorable rise of the desert heat and sweated profusely as other soldiers tumbled in and groped their way along to find a space on the wooden benches.
‘Bloody hot, isn’t it?’ Marty said. ‘Hot as hell,’ Tone replied. ‘We’re paying for our sins in Cairo.’
‘Too true,’ Marty said. ‘And coming from the coal mines of Wales, you probably know what hell’s like.’
‘Damned right. Cold, damp and as dark as night. Not like this at all, mate.’
Tone had left school at fourteen years of age and gone straight down into the coal mines, as all the men of his family had done for generations. Two years later, his father died from lung congestioncaused by a lifetime’s inhaling of coal dust. About a year after that, the roof of a tunnel collapsed, crushing Tone’s only brother under rubble, and Tone had held his hand until he died. Racked by despair, Tone’s mother had died eighteen months later, leaving Tone all alone in the world. Deciding that mining wasn’t for him, he packed it in and headed for Cardiff, where he became a labourer on a building site and gradually worked his way up through bricklaying to a position as foreman. Hardened by his experience and determined to get something more out of life, he was just about to start his own modest construction business when war broke out and he was called up. Though initially angry to have been deprived of his freedom, he was surprised to discover that he actually enjoyed life in the army. It was a feeling that he shared with Marty, and that feeling, combined with their similar backgrounds, had made them firm friends.
‘Here we go,’ Marty said.
The truck lurched forward, its wheels churning up clouds of fine sand as it headed for the many tents, large and small, that were spread out within a broad, irregular ring of green palms and gleaming white dunes. The drive took only a few minutes, then Marty and the others clambered down to the ground and milled about in front of one of the larger tents. A wooden crossshaped sign had been hammered into the ground beside the entrance, announcing this tent as the headquarters of the Long Range Desert Group.
‘Home sweet home,’ Marty whispered.
He and Tone had to stand there in the burning heat, choking in the sand being churned up by the incoming Bedfords, until the rest of the trucks had arrived from the airstrip. The last was hotly pursued by the Rottweiler sergeant in a jeep being driven by a corporal with a hawklike, freckled face, a mop of dishevelled red hair and bare arms covered in tattoos. When the jeep had screeched to a halt beside the last of the Bedfords, the sergeant and corporal both stepped down and approached the waiting newcomers.
The sergeant stared grimly at them, his dark eyes flicking threateningly from one to the other, then he sucked in his breath, let it out with a melodramatic sigh, and said, his voice like gravel, ‘Let me introduce myself. Sergeant Ralph Bellamy. It’s a name you won’t forget aslong as you’re here, so treat it with respect. I’m also called “Bulldog” behind my back because my bite is even worse than my bark, but if any of you call me that to my face you’ll feel the pain soon enough. You’re with the LRDG now and, being a tight, disciplined outfit, we don’t tolerate any nonsense from cowboys. And that’s what you men are. You have a bad reputation. You’re all basically good soldiers who have too much energy and haven’t responded properly to discipline. We’re going to change all that. I’ll personally see to it. I’ll use up your excess energy and the work itself will force you to be disciplined. By the time you’ve finished with the LRDG, you’ll be the finest soldiers in North Africa. Take my word for it.’
‘Yes, Sarge,’ Marty said with a helpless grin, unable to keep the mockery out of his voice.
Sergeant Bellamy stared steadily at him for some time, as if taking his measure. He grinned tightly, dangerously, then let his gaze roam up and down the rest of the newcomers. ‘Right now,’ he said, ‘you’re going in there’ – with a nod of his head he indicated the entrance to the tent beside the HQ tent – ‘for a briefing from the CO’s second-in-command, Captain Alan Kearney, formerly of Number Eight Commando. When the briefing’s finished, you’ll be allocated accommodations, kitted out, given lunch, and then put to work straight away. No peace for the wicked, right? Okay, follow me.’
While the red-headed corporal with the freckled face and tattooed arms (the head of a roaring lion; a heart with an arrow through it and a name embroidered around it; various badges and shields) grinned crookedly and climbed back into his jeep to read The Strand, Sergeant Bellamy led the newcomers into the large tent, which had rows of folding metal chairs facing a crudely made wooden platform supporting a rectangular table, chairs and a blackboard covered with a chalk-drawn map of Siwa Oasis and the surrounding area.
The men had barely settled into their chairs when an army captain entered the tent and marched to the raised platform, taking up a position facing them, his back turned to the blackboard. Immediately, the newcomers stood up and saluted en masse. About six foot tall, with the solid physique of a ruby player, the captain had unusually bright green eyes and dark, mischievous good looks.
‘Welcome, gentlemen,’ he said, speaking what sounded like Oxford English with just the slightest trace of his original Irish brogue. ‘Captain Alan Kearney at your service. I’m called “Paddy” behind my back, but call me that to my face and you’ll be in serious trouble.’ When the anticipated laughter had died down, he continued: ‘This initial briefing is to familiarize you with the territory in general and the LRDG in particular. You may smoke if you wish.’
He waited until the smokers had lit up and were puffing contentedly, then he picked up a long stick and tapped the blackboard with it, indicating the marked oasis in the centre of the chalk drawing.
‘Siwa Oasis is 11.2 kilome
tres long and 3.2 kilometres wide. Beyond the palm groves, to the south, are the great white dunes, running north to south in the Great Sand Sea, known to the Arabs as Devil’s Country. An area approximately the same size as Ireland, it can only be crossed two hundred kilometres south of Siwa by a route that passes the artesian well at Ain Dalla, the last watering point in over five hundred kilometres en route to Kufra. To the north-west lies the Qattara Depression, running farther north to stop fifty metres from the sea near El Alamein. Unfortunately, its floor is so far below sea level that it’s impassable to ordinary vehicles.’
He paused to let the Hudson transport that had brought in the newcomers take off again from the nearby airstrip, heading back to Cairo. When the roaring had died away, he continued.
‘It’s not a pleasant place, mainly because of the Ghibili: a hot wind filled with dust instead of sand. In fact, as you’ll soon find out, true sandstorms are rare in these parts, though dust storms occur frequently and can be absolutely hellish, as well as devastating to our vehicles. The Ghibili, however, is even worse. Also, the extreme variations in temperature inland– frost in the morning, fifty degrees by noon– can cause men to die from exposure. In short, the Great Sand Sea was well named when the Arabs dubbed it Devil’s Country. It is, in fact, a murderous terrain for all but the Arabs.’
‘And the LRDG presumably,’ Marty said.