City of Gold

by Len Deighton

  ‘Perhaps you are right,’ said Thunder coldly.

  Encouraged, Wechsler said, ‘You know we’d have a better chance on our own. What’s more, if Rommel’s boys start lobbing ordnance at us, you fellows in your armoured cars will be safer than us out in the open.’

  ‘We could argue all day and all night,’ said Thunder. ‘But the fact is that I am in charge. It doesn’t matter what you think. You two are both civilians, and Mr Wallingford is not in the army. I’m running this show. I’ve made my decision, and that is it. Be ready to move off as soon as the sun goes down. We’ll have to crowd people into all the cars and trucks, so you can’t take any baggage, except your typewriter and camera.’

  ‘My chaps need something to eat,’ said Wallingford.

  ‘Tell them to forage around the cookhouse. We’ll be dumping everything before we move off. No brewing up though. For the time being I don’t want any fires.’ In the distance could be heard a loud continuous rumble. They scrambled outside the tent to hear it more clearly.

  Wallingford said, ‘That’s to the east of us.’

  None of them spoke. Anyone still hoping that the echelon vehicles had run into nothing more than some long-range enemy patrol now gave up that hope. What was happening to the east of them was a real battle.

  For the last few days Thunder and his men had seen little or no air activity, but now, high overhead, two fighters crawled across the deep blue sky towards the gunfire.

  ‘I need another scotch,’ said Wechsler, as he watched the planes disappear over the rocky skyline. ‘It might be a long time between drinks.’

  ‘What do they do with captured war correspondents?’ said Wallingford affably.

  ‘Jewish war correspondents?’ said Wechsler, taking the cork from the whisky bottle. ‘I’ll drop you a postcard and tell you.’

  Wallingford smiled. He suddenly had the thought that Wechsler’s friendship might be a valuable asset when it came to an encounter with authority. ‘You won’t go into the bag,’ he told Wechsler. ‘Stick with me. One of my chaps speaks fluent German. In the dark, we’ll bluff our way through.’

  Thunder had already sent two cars out to recce the surrounding desert area, while avoiding the vast marked minefields that stretched out on both sides of them. They prayed that the Luftwaffe spotter planes would be needed elsewhere; in that respect, at least, their prayers seemed to be answered.

  Thunder’s convoy was formed up, briefed and ready, well before darkness. They started out early so that the drivers would all find the marked track, and be able to get compass bearings, before complete darkness closed in on them. No lights were permitted anywhere, and Thunder had strictly prohibited brew-ups and smoking. It was a demanding journey. Only a few veterans among the men had much experience of navigating across the desert by starlight. The vehicles straggled.

  Harry Wechsler was in the front seat of his Ford station wagon, with O’Grady driving. In the rear seats there were nine soldiers, rear-echelon men who’d abandoned their vehicles. All Wechsler’s expensive kit and equipment had been left behind to make room for them. Wechsler had argued and complained but Thunder proved adamant. His only concession was to promise to come back and get it all if the German attack fizzled out.

  They’d been going about an hour and a half when Thunder – leading the procession in his armoured car Ping-Pong – halted to take a look around and get a compass bearing. The desert air was cool and refreshing after the stifling heat of the armoured car.

  Once his feet were on the desert floor, Thunder knew where he was. It was always like that. Standing in the car with one’s head poking out of the top – or, worse still, peering through the tiny visor slits – he always had the feeling of being lost. But there was something so reassuring about having one’s feet on the ground that problems disappeared like spilled water.

  He could see everything through his binoculars. The ground sloped away. Lit by hazy starlight, the track stretched out in front of him for a mile or more. The tyre marks were easily seen, for the supply trucks had been using this track for weeks. There was a marker barrel only three hundred yards away, and he didn’t have to check the map reference to know where he was. The barrel was splashed with paint, where some nervous soldier had fumbled while painting the reference numbers. The splash looked like a seagull in flight, at least it looked like that to Thunder, and that’s why he recognised it so easily. From here the track led over a ledge and then down and across a hard flat limestone stretch. Beyond that there was the place where they’d find warm food, a drink and a welcome. Regimental HQ was home. It was where he kept his spare kit and his precious little hoard of reading matter: four paperbacks, a neatly tied bundle of letters, and ancient hometown newspapers. By now perhaps more mail would have arrived.

  Thunder started them off again and waved the accompanying armoured cars through. The way was clear, but it was better to keep to the Standing Orders: armoured vehicles in the van, soft skin vehicles protected. At the rear of Thunder Column, as one of his sergeants had named it, came Wallingford’s two trucks and then a final armoured car manned by Thunder’s best crew.

  Thunder was reassured to have Wallingford at the rear. Wallingford was experienced and had always taken a perverse pleasure in swanning around way out there in no-man’s-land. Wallingford seemed to court danger but, like most such men, he was always on his guard too. It was necessary to have someone experienced and alert as ‘ass-end Charlie’. In France in 1940 the gunners of both sides had always targeted the leading vehicle first. In the narrow roads and confined spaces of northern Europe that was a way of bottling up the vehicles following, so that they could be destroyed one by one at the gunner’s leisure. But desert fighting was different. Here gunners picked off the rearmost target first, in the hope that the loss would not be noticed before a couple more were knocked out. So he wanted someone reliable there.

  As Wechsler’s station wagon passed him, Thunder waved. Behind Wechsler’s big Ford came another armoured car, Dog’s Dinner. The car commander was a corporal. He flicked Thunder a salute that was almost a wave of the hand.

  Thunder slapped the metal of his own car as a signal to ready his own driver, and then clambered up on to the top and slid inside. The skein of cloud opened and the moon came into view, as he started down the slope. The track was well marked here. Although the ledge was hard and rock-strewn, there were enough soft sandy patches for there to be tyre tracks. This was where the supply convoys liked to rendezvous with squadron.

  Thunder remained in his vantage point, reviewing the convoy as it trundled past him. But they didn’t look like a parade, more like a train of refugees. Even the armoured cars were half hidden under amazingly large bundles of kit and boxes of supplies that they didn’t want to leave as a gift for the advancing Germans.

  As the big truck passed, Wallingford gave him a broad grin. Thunder waved to him, picked up his microphone and told his driver to get going again. ‘Let’s go, Yo-yo.’

  He’d never been able to understand Wallingford. Wally had submerged himself in the war; he never mentioned going home. Neither did he ever speak of his family or say anything about England. Wally had immersed himself so deeply he didn’t want to talk about the navy, his promotion or his desert teams, or even about booze or women. Wally had become an outsider.

  Thunder’s car moved easily down the line of vehicles, overtaking them one by one. All the time, Thunder was watching the horizon with quick sweeps of the head, the way he’d been told to do it at the training school. But in fact he knew that there was no chance that any enemy forces would be squeezed into the strip of land that now separated the retiring car squadron and its regimental home.

  The moonlight came and went. In the gloom Thunder’s driver was careful. The man had been assigned to Thunder at a time when he was considered the best driver in the regiment. Now there were other better, more experienced men who had been posted from other units, broken up by casualties. But Thunder was content with Lance Corporal Yeoman
s. Yo-yo had the same sort of care and – let it be whispered – caution that was a part of Thunder’s makeup. Like Thunder, Yeomans would take any risk that was a necessary part of a fighting man’s duties, but he had no ambition to earn a medal for valour – especially a post-humous one. He picked his way forward slowly.

  As his car got near to the head of the column, Thunder had his head sticking out of the turret and was admiring Wechsler’s Ford. He would love to own a vehicle like that. It ran smoothly and quietly, and even after they’d crowded all the extra men into the rear seats, its big V8 engine had purred and it had pulled away effortlessly.

  So Thunder was watching the Ford when it came to grief. The flash seemed to light up the whole landscape. Thunder felt the hot wind on his face and swayed with its force. Pieces of the Ford’s bodywork came flying past his head, playing a dissonant musical chord as the sharp-edged pieces of metal sang through the air. Only then did the sound of the explosion start going round inside his brain.

  The car following Wechsler’s station wagon swerved to avoid the cloud of smoke that came rolling up and hid the wreckage. ‘Get on! Get on!’ Bodies – some of them ablaze – came rolling across the sand as men were thrown out of the car. ‘Get on!’

  What would have been an agonising decision, about whether to continue on and risk more casualties on the trail, was solved by Thunder’s instinct and automatic reaction to the danger. ‘Keep moving! Get on!’

  As the smoke drifted away, the bent frame of the station wagon came into view. It could have been the victim of gunfire, of course, but after so many months of fighting, all who saw it knew it had hit a mine. It was a Teller mine: a large steel dinner plate with an ignition device fitted into the upper pressure plate. Most of them were set so that a man, or even a motorcycle, would fail to trigger them. Only the pressure from something worth destroying would make them explode.

  The Germans had laid the Teller mines across the track, four metres apart, in the usual pattern that avoided a domino effect. Then some artful German engineers had rolled a British tyre across the centre of it, to leave its distinctive tracks. It was an old trick, but like all old tricks it worked well enough to be repeated time and time again.

  Thunder jumped out of his armoured car and ran to the burning wreck. The front off-side wheel had taken the blast. The men who’d been crammed into the rear seats had been strewn across the desert. Miraculously most of them were still alive. It was not easy to see them in the darkness. All of them were burned, their clothing scorched and tattered. They were huddled together, like men carefully arranged for group photos. Three were sitting in the sand, nursing their legs and moaning softly. Two others were standing over them, cuddling themselves in postures characteristic of broken arms and cracked shoulder bones. They all looked dazed, as casualties do as they endure the first few minutes of a lifetime of being crippled.

  Thunder ran to the car. The flames had died out but the wreckage was hot, and there was a nauseating smell of burning rubber and scorched oil. The two men in the front seat were still there. They were done for. O’Grady was the lucky one; he was dead. Wechsler’s lower body was crushed by the dismounted engine, and a steering wheel spoke had pierced his stomach. His head was flopping to one side and he was groaning through chattering teeth.

  ‘We’ll get you out,’ said Thunder. He’d seen it all before. They’d never get him out; both men were jammed tightly into the jungle of twisted metalwork. ‘Just hang on for a minute or two.’

  Wechsler seemed to have heard him. His hand moved a fraction, and he gave a soft yelp of pain. A corporal medic appeared from nowhere and Thunder stood aside. The man was a gunner from one of his cars. A kennel boy before the war and without any proper medical training or experience, he’d become the unit’s only first-aid man. While rummaging in his shoulder bag he gave a glance at O’Grady. It was enough. Without hesitation he pushed the needle of a disposable morphia syringe into Wechsler’s arm, squeezing the tube tight to give him as big a dose as possible. Then he turned to Thunder and shrugged.

  ‘Get back to your car, corporal.’

  ‘It’s gone, sir.’

  ‘Climb up on to my car then. It’s not far to go now.’

  ‘I’ll stay with the rest of them, if you don’t mind, sir.’

  Thunder hesitated. It would mean one car without a gunner. On the other hand, the injured echelon men deserved some sort of first-aid treatment. ‘Okay. I’ll send someone back for you before it gets light.’

  ‘We’ll be all right, sir.’

  Thunder nodded. The gunner was risking his life, and yet his manner was matter of fact, as if he was doing no more than wait for the next bus. Thunder wondered sometimes if all the men really understood the consequences of the risks they took. And yet this man was staring those risks right in the face.

  ‘Good man,’ said Thunder. It was things like this that wracked him with a guilt that piled up higher and higher. One day it would be piled so high that he’d not be able to go on. Thunder tried to push it out of his mind as he climbed back up onto his car again. He gave a quick look around and saw Wallingford.

  ‘It’s not your fault, Thunder,’ Wallingford said.

  Thunder looked at him. Wallingford had always had the uncanny knack of reading his mind. Did his face always reveal his every feeling? ‘Yes, it was,’ said Thunder. ‘The tyre tracks were too fresh. Look at them. The bloody Hun engineers rolled a British tyre between their mines. I should have been at point.’

  ‘There was no way to be sure. The Hun likes to use British trucks. Everyone knows that, although I’ve never figured out why.’

  Thunder answered him mechanically, as he answered questions from his men sometimes. ‘The double tyres on their Opels clog with sand. They like British wheels and tyres; they’re more open treaded.’ He got into the car and picked up the microphone and tried to push the guilt out of his mind.

  ‘You learn something every day,’ said Wallingford, with an assumed brightness that was not convincing. Like Thunder, Wallingford could not help but see the death of Wechsler and O’Grady as some sort of dire omen.

  ‘Let’s go, Yo-yo,’ said Thunder quietly and his car moved forward. He twisted his head for one last look at the casualty. He could see the corporal medic inspecting the injuries of the huddled men. Over his microphone he said, ‘Put your foot down as much as you can, Yo-yo, we’d better be leading the parade when the old man spots us. We’ll have to send someone back here to collect these odd-bods.’

  The driver gave nothing more than a click on the intercom to acknowledge the order. They ploughed onwards for what seemed hours. The promise of dawn was turning the eastern sky purple when they saw the outer sentries and the guard tanks that shielded the regimental leaguer.

  ‘Home sweet home,’ said Yo-yo. With Thunder leading the little column, the vehicles crawled into position, coming into their parade formation. For a moment everything seemed normal and calm. The tanks were sitting in tight groups, as they always were at night. A few men emerged from their tents, blinking in the moonlight as they watched them arrive. But the men moved in a curious way and there was not the sort of activity that was normal in a unit preparing for dawn stand-by.

  As Thunder climbed down from his turret, he saw it all more clearly. The regiment had taken a beating. Armoured cars and tanks that from a distance seemed so sound and intact, could now be recognised as wrecks. In such poor light the appearance of a tank does not change much after a high-velocity armour-piercing shell has travelled right through it, making hamburger of its crew and iron filings of its engine.

  Jesus! said Thunder to himself. ‘They’ve been clobbered. There’s no one left.’ He was reminded of those scenes from Hollywood Westerns after the Indians had scalped everyone in the fort.

  More men came to stand and stare. It was not as bad as it looked. The newcomers greeted their friends and stood about exchanging accounts of what had happened. Casualties had been relatively light, but the German armour had picke
d off many of the tanks. The dumps had gone up in smoke. As an armoured unit, the regiment’s potential was severely depleted.

  Staggering, swaying and uncertain, still deafened by the artillery barrage, men emerged from their shelters to look at Thunder’s Column and the survivors it had brought. Colonel Andy Anderson, his uniform dirty and torn, grabbed Thunder, took him aside and listened impatiently to his report. Then, with a typical example of Anderson showmanship, he ordered his own driver to jump into the Matador and go back to collect the men stranded in the desert.

  Wallingford looked around nervously. He saw Darymple’s car, Beryl. It had survived the attack and even nailed some of the attacking force. ‘What happened here, Robbie?’

  Darymple was grinning. It was action, the very thing he’d wanted so badly while sitting behind that Cairo desk. ‘The Hun came in from the east side of the box, and we weren’t ready for him. He was knocking us all over the field by the time any of the engines were started. He’d got his guns up close. We were sitting ducks. It was a massacre: like facing a bloody firing squad. Bang! Bang! Hand the gentleman a coconut! I got Beryl hull down and let the blighters have a taste of their own medicine. The show was all over in an hour, and their armour pushed off somewhere to the northeast. There are still plenty of Huns along our perimeter. Infantry and antitank guns. Just for the moment they have us pinned down. We’re out of contact with Brigade. Wireless out of action, precious little drinking water, and ammunition is strictly rationed until we make contact with echelon. We’ve spent the last three hours of darkness mopping up and getting the bodies buried.’ He looked at his wristwatch. ‘I must make sure my chaps get something hot to eat.’

  Two men from the cookhouse arrived with a big bucket of hot sweet tea for the newly arrived men. ‘Listen, you people!’ shouted Anderson. He stepped up onto an ammunition box so as better to see the men around him. ‘Get yourself some tea and don’t waste time. I want you back reporting to your sections inside five minutes.’