by Colin Smith
Lang slowed. “What do you think?”
“Harassing fire on lines of communication, that’s what I think. They’ll walk it up and down the road. The next salvo could be where we are now. Our best chance is for you to put your foot down. Or would you like me to drive?”
Lang accelerated.
***
The medics were struggling to keep the stretchers in their slings. Every time the Bombay jinxed from side to side some of the poles would slip out and one of the wounded drop, sometimes head first, to the floor. Gott went to help them. Davison forced himself to follow though all he wanted to do was tighten his seat belt and stay put. As he got to his feet he saw small orange flames begin to lick around the starboard engine, gutter in the slipstream, then reappear.
The poles at both ends of the Sikh’s stretcher had come out of their slings and tipped him on his side to the floor where he was being sick. A medic was holding him under the arms. Davison managed to get the poles back into the slings and then got his arms around the bloody bandages on his thighs. As Davison tried to lift him the Sikh screamed in agony. He tried again, holding him under the knees. Between them they got the Indian back onto the stretcher quite easily - he wasn’t very heavy. Then the aircraft jinxed again and Davison was thrown on his back.
“You all right sir?” shouted the fitter he had been helping as Davison struggled back to his feet. He nodded his head, speech suddenly rendered impossible by a coughing fit that brought tears to his eyes. It was the first time he had noticed how the aircraft was filling with smoke . Somebody, it might have been Gott, asked, “Are we firing back?”
“Can’t,” croaked Davison, getting his voice back. “Not from the back. It’s a wooden gu -” But before he could explain about the Bombay’s inability to fly with both gun turrets and a full load he saw a look of alarm spread across the face of the fitter acting as a medic and followed his gaze to where a curtain of darting flame, starting from above, was developing at the entrance to the cockpit.
“They’ve hit the wing fuel tank,” said the fitter and Davison remembered that the aircraft’s wing was above the fuselage. “Let me get at it.” He saw the RAF man had picked up a fire extinguisher from somewhere and managed to turn his body to let him get by, steadying himself by hanging on to one of the stretcher slings like a commuter on the London tube. One of the portholes revealed that the small orange flames he had noticed around the starboard airscrew had become great shooting tongues of fire. They were much closer to the ground now. The smoke was getting thicker. It was difficult to see. Davison thought, “We’ve had it.” An authoritative voice said, “Get that door off. Take it off its hinges.”
The MI5 man saw one of the fitters go to the door aft of the wing and begin struggling with its emergency handle. Somebody went to help him. Gott? Davison would have gone too when the coffee grinder noise, which was the sound of the Messerschmitt 109 F’s cannon firing through their airscrew disc with the aid of an interrupter gear, sounded again. This time Davison saw jagged little patches of blue sky appear in the side of the fuselage. At least one of the men by the door had fallen over. The Bombay was bucking like a horse. He hung onto the sling and looked at the Sikh who was staring intently back at him with wide open eyes, his shining hair framing his youthful face. Then he understood that the main reason his hair was shining so much was because it was covered with blood and the wide open eyes were not seeing. “You were right,” said Davison out loud.
The aircraft continued to bounce along. It felt different. Could it be that they had landed? Put these things down anywhere, the schoolboy pilot had said. He tried to look out of the window but there was too much smoke. More cannon fire and something knocked Davison off his feet again. He lay on his stomach under the stretchers, conscious that the floor was wet. At first he thought it might be blood then, because his nose was so close to it, he realised it was petrol. The smoke was making it harder to breathe. It became much quieter. Davison wondered whether the engines had been switched off or simply burned out. There was a lot of coughing. Somebody was reciting the Lord’s Prayer in a resigned, cultivated voice. “And forgive those who trespass against us.” He found it comforting and tried to join in but did not get in step until, “For thine is the Kingdom.”
The Bombay seemed to be slowing down. The machine gunning started again. “Stop it! Stop it now God. Do you hear? You bloody stop it God!” Davison thought it sounded like the same man who had been singing about how much he liked being at the seaside but he couldn’t be sure.
“For ever and ever,” said the cultivated voice. “Amen.”
Outside a burning man rolled over and over in the sand having fallen through the escape hatch in the cockpit floor. Overhead fresh contrails pointed in a westerly direction.
***
“Well if you want to go on I can’t stop you sir,” said the sergeant who had joined the soldier at the checkpoint with the red flag. “That’s providing you know the password.”
He found Calderwell and his Austin Tourer very odd. It was so damn unmilitary. Nor did he like being stared at by this mad eyed Pole whose hands had never left his Bren gun. And what the hell was an Inspector from the Palestine Police doing up here in the first place? Nor did it make any sense that he was travelling with this signals captain in a Marmon-Herrington with a funny aerial. But it was Hare who put him right, dismounting from his armoured car so he could do so.
“Did the two Poles who just went through here in a Fiat truck know the password sergeant?”
“Well, did they?” the sergeant inquired of his sentry whose face was answer enough.
“It would be very strange if they did because they happen to be German parachutists in British uniform,” continued Hare who thought that should liven some ideas up.
“Unless somebody thought he was being helpful and told them what it was,” said Calderwell.
“He sounded like an English officer,” whispered the sentry. “Polish Liaison.”
Before they drove off Hare spoke on the sergeant’s field telephone to brigade headquarters. A major there said, yes, they would try to cut off the suspect Fiat truck if they could find a Bren gun carrier or something to spare but they were a bit tied up for the moment. They thought Jerry might be contemplating a local attack which was what the shelling of the road was about and if they were going that way they should be jolly careful. On no account should they take the right-hand fork before brigade headquarters because the area immediately beyond that had been mined.
“If they’re still stonking the road I’m going to put my foot down and drive straight through it,” Calderwell told Hare. “No sense in stopping if there’s no decent cover.” He still couldn’t believe he had forgotten to borrow a tin hat from somebody.
“If it looks bad,” said Hare, “you’ll have to stop and crowd in with us. I can’t afford to lose Sergeant Dudek.”
“It must be nice to be appreciated,” said Calderwell.
***
“Would you mind lighting me a cigarette,” asked Lang, bent over the wheel of the Fiat, teeth gritted. The last one had been very close, a crack, more like a rifle than the way he had imagined incoming artillery, followed by the playful push of its blast against the side of the Fiat.
The Templer passed him the lit cigarette. “You are doing very well,” he said. Not everybody did. They had just passed a burned out Bren gun carrier.
“Now which way?” They had reached the fork in the road.
“Right,” said the Templer without hesitation.
“The Tommy said the minefield was this way.”
“He also said it was marked. We will try and find a way round it. If we go straight on we will come to that brigade headquarters he was talking about and there will be a lot more checkpoints. And we must start heading west now towards our lines.”
“Your lines,” said Lang but he took the right fork anyway. It was a narrower track with old vehicles ruts baked in by the sun. Ahead of them he could see, cutting across th
e track, a single strand of waist-height barbed wire attached to metal posts. In some places the wire, presumably to make it more visible, had been threaded through the round cans that most British composite rations came in.
“That must be the start of the minefield,” said Lang.
The Templer tried to look at the land beyond the wire through his glasses but though Lang was driving quite slowly now they were bouncing about too much in the cab for him to focus. “Get a move on,” he said.
“She won’t steer. I think we’ve got a flat.”
They had two flats, both Lang’s side and both tyres pierced by shrapnel, presumably from the last shell burst. The front one was shredded but the rear tyre still had some air in it. They discovered they had two spares on board but the Templer decided they could only afford the time to change the front one.
“And tyres are supposed to be soft in the desert,” he said. As he got the jack out Lang froze when a single shell screeched overhead to land on the road they had just left. “I don’t think they are aiming at us,” said the Templer, pausing to examine the smoke and dust raised by the shell through his Dienstglasse. “I think they’re firing blind at the road.” Three more shells landed near the same spot then another four. Through his field glasses he could make out the dust of at least two more vehicles heading towards them.
***
“When they stop draw up alongside them while I let them in,” Hare shouted down to his driver. From the open turret of the Marmon-Herrington he was watching the little Austin ahead of them as it sped towards the dirty eruptions of desert grit and smoke that marked where the shells were falling. Hare was thinking how very incongruous such a civilian looking vehicle appeared in the circumstances. If you had to take a car to war his Bentley, now safely garaged at the Russian Compound thanks to an arrangement with the Assistant Super, exuded a solidity that was much more in keeping. Even so, the Austin, its top rolled down, was going like a bat out of hell and showing absolutely no sign of slowing down.
***
From under his gas goggles Calderwell looked across at Dudek who had put on a helmet he may well have worn at Tobruk and though much of its yellow paint was missing his country’s white eagle was still clearly stencilled on its front. The Pole’s lips were pursed, his head slightly down and his shoulders hunched forward in a kind of boxer’s crouch. In his right hand he was holding two spare magazines for the Bren gun. It occurred to Calderwell that he was in good company. The Pole had not once mentioned transferring to the armoured car.
The policeman glanced in his rear view mirror and saw that Hare was about four hundred yards behind, perhaps a bit less. Ahead of them the shelling appeared to have slackened off. He found himself filling with a kind of savage exultation. It was something he had not experienced for twenty-five years, not since he had heard that strange doubling note of Toby Albright’s hunting horn at Huj just before they charged the Austrians’ Skoda guns. Calderwell felt himself go cold. His foot pressed down on the accelerator. A shell exploded no more three hundred yards ahead of them. He gathered the reins in his left hand, lent slightly out of the saddle, with his right elbow tucked firmly into his waist, the thirty-six inches of the basket hilted ‘08 cavalry sword extended.
“The silly sod is going to go through it,” said Hare, dropping into the warm armoured innards of the Marmon-Herrington and pulling the hatch cover down on top of him, secure against anything other than the roulette ball chance of a direct hit. If anything happened to his Pole he would never forgive that crazy policeman.
There was a close bang and something pinged off the left wing of the Austin possibly a stone. Calderwell swerved around the burned out Bren gun carrier. As they did so the windscreen went, a spider’s web of fine cracks spreading from Dudek’s side to his. Calderwell shoved the frame down onto the bonnet, dimly aware of its glass crumbling as he did so. Dudek was yelling something at him but he could not make out at first what it was. Then he understood. He was saying, “Right! Turn right!” For the first time he noticed the fork in the road. Calderwell pulled the wheel over at the last moment when they had almost missed the turnoff and for a fraction of a second the car tipped onto two wheels. “I saw their dust,” the Pole said. “They went this way.”
Calderwell looked in his mirror just in time to see Hare’s Marmon-Herrington, its hatch down and the flap of the driver’s armoured visor only half open, as it passed the turning and thundered on towards the brigade headquarters. For a moment he slowed the car and they watched Hare disappear into the fog of his own dust. “The captain was not looking,” said Dudek reproachfully
“Don’t worry. He’ll come back.”
The Austin’s narrow wheels rattled over the corrugated track and some of the shattered glass from the windscreen cascaded in over the dashboard, distracting Calderwell so that Dudek saw it first.
“Look,” he said.
Ahead of them was a stationary Fiat truck. It was standing at the place where a bend in the track turned it to the right so that it was almost broadside onto them. Calderwell stopped the car. He estimated the distance at no more than four hundred yards. He had no binoculars with him, another stupid omission like the tin hat. Hare had some but Hare had gone the wrong way.
“Sergeant,” he said. “I’m going to get a little bit closer. Then I want you to put two or three bursts over that truck. Be careful you don’t hit it. It might not be the we think it is. We may have made a mistake. And even if we haven’t made a mistake I want these two alive.”
He put the car into first gear and began crawling forward while Dudek removed the the Bren’s curved magazine, wiped the end of it on his shirt and put it back. After they had gone about two hundred yards they could make out two figures doing something behind the bonnet. Calderwell stopped. “This’ll do,” he said.
Dudek pulled down the bipod legs beneath the light-machine-guns heavy barrel, rested them on the bonnet and pulled back the cocking handle. “Let ‘em know we’re here,” said Calderwell. “Short bursts.”
Behind them the German guns continued to shell the road.
27 - If you prick us…
Not for the first time, it occurred to the Templer how well they worked as a team. He sometimes found himself doubting whether Lang was Jewish at all. Perhaps he had been adopted? Kidnapped? The Jews like gypsies were supposed to steal babies. Or so he’d been told.
They might, he thought, almost have been professional mechanics the way they located the tools, got the truck jacked up, the spare ready. The shells were now landing almost a mile away and had already become the impersonal hammering of men at work. Soon all that lay between them and a working vehicle, for the other tyres till had some air in it, was one stubborn wheel nut. This obstinately refused to budge, not even when the Templer got a doubled handed grip to the brace and one foot up against the wheel. Their concentration on the task at hand was such that they were quite unaware of the approach of the other vehicle. When Dudek started shooting the German had been thinking that if the recalcitrant nut didn’t turn soon they might have to reconcile themselves to abandoning the Fiat and getting around the minefield on foot.
The zizz and crack of the Bren gun rounds above their heads sounded considerably more personal than the shelling. They both flung themselves to the ground then crawled under the truck. It was obvious that the firing could not be coming from the left hand side of the Fiat which was parked more or less parallel to the minefield. Lang crawled under the truck, opened the cab door on that side, and retrieved from behind the seat the holdall containing the carbine and the Schmeisser plus the remaining plastic explosive with its detonators. When he got back under the truck with it he found the Templer lying under the rear axle using his Dienstglasse.
“It looks like one small vehicle about two hundred metres away,” he said. “Probably no more than two men. My guess is they’re not sure who we are and are firing over our heads. I don’t think we’ve been hit once and they’re close enough to do it if they want to.”
While he was talking Lang wiped over their weapons with the yellow scarf he had been using to keep the dust out of his nose and mouth, paying special attention to the magazines. “Which one do you want? The Schmeisser or the American one?” he asked.
“What I want is the aerial to your wireless set with that yellow scarf tied to it.”
“It’s not detachable.”
“Snap it off,” said the Templer. “I promised to get you a new one.”
There was another burst from the Bren. Again the truck was not hit. Lang returned with most of the telescopic aerial from the Siemens set with the yellow scarf tied to the end of it.
“Now let’s see if we can get them to come a bit closer,” said the Templer, crawling out from beneath the truck.
***
“They surrender,” said Dudek.
From the Austin they could see that some sort of pennant was being waved at them from behind the bonnet of the truck, a pennant attached to something glinting in the dipping sun behind it.
Calderwell put a hand to his forehead, scrunched up his eyes. He was beginning to wonder whether Hare had not done the right thing by carrying on. There would be hell to pay if this turned out to be a sapper working party making some last minute adjustments to the minefield. He could now make out the figure of a man standing upright behind the bonnet waving frantically. One man, not two. But there had been two before. The truck certainly looked like it could be a Fiat. It was the same size. But a lot of people had Fiat trucks, even the Italians.
“We’ll get a bit closer,” he told Dudek who was putting a fresh magazine into the Bren. Calderwell thought the flag or pennant or whatever it was appeared to be waving quite indignantly now, as if by someone who had decided that the worst was over and fear had given way to anger.