Take or Destroy!

by John Harris

  As Devenish emerged from the hold of Andolfo and pushed aside the camouflage netting, Sergeant Bunch appeared from the Giuseppe Bianchi party. He carried a haversack and looked worried. ‘Sir,’ he announced, ‘our party copped it and the navy chap’s stopped one. These are his charges but we’ve nobody to place ‘em.’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ Devenish said. ‘Well, just hang on a minute, Sergeant, please. I’ll be along when I’ve finished here.’

  Bunch stiffened to his plaster mould salute and went back to where his men were crouching behind bollards and piles of rope, a little startled at the good manners of RAF officers. As the wounded were dragged away, he indicated the stone warehouses further along the mole. ‘I think we ought to do something about that,’ he said. ‘There’s a crowd of nasty old Jerries down there.’

  Almost as he spoke, the 47 at the end of the mole fired across the harbour. Like the gun near the Mantazeh Palace it had never been intended to fire into the town, and only Wutka’s telephone call had stirred its bewildered crew to life. It was hard to see what was happening round the Roman arch for the dust and smoke, but as they dragged the gun round, they saw HSL 117, a sitting target as it waited for Sotheby below the POW compound. At the crash, the camouflage netting on Giuseppe Bianchi leapt and the HSL, the last one afloat, went up in flames. As it began to settle, the crew of the 47 got to work again to manhandle their weapon further round towards the town. They were occupied with drawing a bead on what looked like a group of men round a machine-gun when the smoke cleared unexpectedly, and Bunch’s party were seen edging forward along the mole.

  As the machine-gunners opened up and Bunch and his men flopped down behind the drums and crates and timbers once more, they were spotted by the 47 by the Mantazeh Palace. Its crew worked the barrel round and let off a round across the harbour, which knocked a rusty ventilator from the sunken freighter in front of the warehouse and whanged into the wall of the mole near where Bunch was lying.

  ‘Bit nasty round here,’ Bunch observed mildly as chunks of concrete and metal flew through the air. ‘I think we’d better nip back and bring up a few reinforcements.’

  Still wondering what had happened to Swann, Sergeant Jacka had prepared a splendid bonfire. He had even found a second warehouse attached to the first, which was full of clothing and other stores. Manhandling drums of petrol from the little compound by the gate, he and his party forced them open and poured their contents among the crates, shavings, tyres and bales of clothing. Then he opened skylights and doors to make a good draught and, withdrawing his men, placed two charges with five-minute time pencils and retreated to the gate. Just to make sure, he withdrew the pin from a Mills bomb, tossed it into the store, and ran.

  It didn’t need the plastic explosive.

  He had just reached the corner when the grenade exploded, and the blast of the petrol going off sent him skidding on his chest into the arms of his men. In a matter of minutes both warehouses were ablaze.

  The glare lit their sweating, dusty, blackened faces and Jacka watched for a while to make sure everything was well alight. Then he gestured. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘We can think about getting back now.’ He looked round. ‘I wonder if that silly sod Swann’s found his way out of Wogtown yet.’

  As a matter of fact, Lieutenant Swann, seething with fury, was sitting on a none-too-sweetly-smelling bed in Zulfica Ifzi’s room not very far from Jacka’s blaze. His revolver and Sten gun reposed on the floor by the door and a perspiring Private Bontempelli sat facing him on a chair, pointing a rifle at his chest. Zulfica Ifzi stood alongside the Italian, chewing gum and occasionally taking a drink from a bottle of beer.

  ‘Look,’ Swann tried. ‘This is silly.’

  Bontempelli frowned. ‘Signore?’

  ‘I mean, you’ve lost the war.’ Swann tried to gesture while keeping his hands in the air. ‘It’s obvious. You might as well give yourself up.’

  Bontempelli could understand quite a lot of what Swann was saying but he preferred to feign ignorance. ‘Signore?’

  ‘I mean, give yourself up to me now and I’ll see you get jolly good treatment.’

  For a moment Swann wondered - as he’d wondered on and off for some time now - whether he could take a dive at Bontempelli and wrestle the gun from him. But Bontempelli’s finger was on the trigger and he looked nervous.

  In fact, Bontempelli was very nervous because he’d just remembered that his rifle wasn’t loaded. There were bullets in the pouches on the belt resting across his knee but he’d forgotten to thrust a clip into the magazine and he had a suspicion that if he tried to now, Swann would take the opportunity to pounce on him. Despite their well-known sense of fair play, he had a feeling that the British didn’t stick to the rules when they were in trouble.

  It occurred to him he might use Swann’s Sten, but he had no idea how a Sten worked and he felt that if he took his eyes off Swann long enough to find out, it would be just too long. There was also the revolver, of course, but British service revolvers were reputed to have a kick like a mule so that you couldn’t hit the side of a house with them even at ten yards. No, he decided, it was safer to keep the muzzle of his empty rifle pointed at Swann’s chest and hope for the best, conscious that nobody but he knew how his life hung entirely on the Englishman’s ignorance.

  Zulfica Ifzi was watching him, her eyes bright. It was obvious she thought him a hero and he knew that the next time he arrived on her doorstep the fun and games would be twice as erotic as hitherto. She was an accomplished performer when she gave her mind to it and, by the look on her face, in future she’d be a mass of concentration.

  The more he thought about it, in fact, the luckier he realized he was. When it was all over, somebody would be bound to ask questions about him failing to appear at Ibrahimiya with the other Italians, but if the British were driven away it was going to be possible to emerge with a prisoner. If the British weren’t driven away he could graciously hand over the rifle to the Englishman and surrender instead. He seemed to be covered both ways, and it seemed very much by now as if the raiders were just about everywhere it was possible to be except in Zulfica Ifzi’s room.

  Bontempelli was dead right. They were.

  Out at the lorry park, Captain Cadish had already extracted fifteen Lancia trucks - more than enough, he reckoned, to carry a hundred and fifty men - and dispersed them around the group of bungalows which he had fortified and stocked with petrol, tinned food and water. Then the rest of the lorries had been driven together, their tanks punctured, and destroyed with a grenade tossed in the middle.

  ‘Piece of cake,’ Cadish said.

  So far it had been a piece of cake for Murdoch too. Expecting the most difficult job of all, he had fallen, in fact, for the easiest, though he had made it easier by the speed and certainty with which he’d moved.

  When Murdoch arrived among them, the handful of guards and stores staff at the fuel depot had still been watching the glare of flames from the town and the lorry park and the occasional flash of a bomb to the south on the airfield, and trying to make up their minds which ought to occupy their attention first. They were all either dead, wounded or prisoners within a matter of minutes.

  While the survivors were being shepherded into the road, Cobbe, Auchmuty and a few others went round the hundreds of drums which by Wutka’s diligence had already been stacked there, piercing them with ice-picks while By’s great fists hurled them to the ground to spill their contents in the dust. Then the RAF explosives expert and Honorary Aircraftman Rouat placed five-minute time charges and ran.

  There was a drainage ditch alongside the road to carry sudden winter downpours to the sea and they all took shelter in it. While they were waiting for the bang, Baldissera’s lorries arrived on the scene. The Italians had wasted a good twenty minutes arguing with the Luftwaffe at Ibrahimiya before it had dawned on them that their presence was no longer required there. The air raid seemed to be over and the alarm about parachutists seemed to be a false one; but, no more keen
to face black-faced commandos than they were to face black-faced parachutists, they had turned their vehicles about unwillingly and headed slowly back. They were just approaching the petrol dump when the first charge went off and the stacks of drums went up, less with a bang than a whoof. A whole series of explosions followed, as if a giant were blowing huge breathy belches across the face of the desert.

  Without waiting for orders, the Italians dived from their lorries and pressed themselves to the earth while fragments of scrap iron and wood and brick bounced with little puffs into the dust around them. When they lifted their heads again the whole hundred-yard-square expanse of the compound was roaring, sending huge black clouds of smoke into the sky. The heat was so tremendous it created its own draught and they could feel the air being sucked past them to feed the names. Dust and uprooted shrubs began to roll with it and disappeared as cinders into the heavens with the smoke.

  ‘Holy Mother of God,’ Baldissera said. ‘What happened?’

  One of the men behind him started to pray. ‘Siccome Voi, o gran Dio – ‘

  ‘Shut up!’ Sergente Barbella gave him a kick, and they began to move forward towards the flames to see what was happening. Eventually they were standing in groups, illuminated by the glare not fifty yards from where Murdoch’s party crouched in the ditch.

  ‘God damn it,’ Gadish whispered, shocked. ‘We’ll be shooting ‘em from the back!’

  Murdoch shrugged. ‘Gey sight safer than shooting ‘em from the front,’ he said.

  It was possible to see the glare of the burning petrol dump from the centre of the town, and Hockold knew that Murdoch had done his job well. The mortars that Nietzsche had brought into action before he was killed were now dropping their bombs among the buildings by the remains of the Roman arch, Docwra had been killed, while Cook-Corporal Rogers, a little startled to find the war rather more bloody than he’d expected, was lying on his back among the scattered stonework. Eva bent over him. There was blood on Rogers’ face and he was dazed and shocked. ‘They got me, Tinner,’ he said. ‘Better take me money.’

  Eva did as he was told. Then he took another look at Rogers in the light of the flames. ‘Tedden that bad, Rodge,’ he said. ‘Tedden only a scratch.’

  Rogers’ head lifted. ‘You sure?’

  ‘ ‘Course I’m sure.’

  Rogers heaved. ‘Then give us back me wallet,’ he said.

  As he struggled to sit up, however, another of the mortar bombs dropped nearby with a nerve-shattering crash and he forgot his money, even the wound that had knocked him over, and dived for shelter with a yell of fright.

  The explosion left another man sprawled grotesquely over a captured Spandau and a second badly wounded. Sugarwhite and Willow struggled to lift him out of the rubble, Sugarwhite -- his hurt ribs making him catch his breath -- wondering as he strained under the weight, if it was as difficult for a dead man to be hoisted into heaven. Carrying the injured man into the bunker, smeared with his blood and with his arms flopping round them in a parody of affection, they were shocked by the pain they faced. There was a stink of death in the place and they were glad to get away.

  ‘God,’ Willow said, his mouth trembling. ‘There’s more stiffs than living in that place!’

  They wormed their way back to their shelter among the rubble and, as they gripped their rifles, a German ran from the buildings across the Shariah Jedid towards the mosque in an attempt to outflank their party. Sugarwhite shot him before he reached shelter and he rolled over in a whirl of arms and legs. Almost immediately a sergeant appeared in an alley between the buildings, waving and shouting other men into a rush, and Sugarwhite shot him, too. But as the rush died away in a spatter of fire from the ruins of the Roman arch, the mortar began to fire again. An abrupt crash lifted him from the ground and slammed him down again with a force that jarred his teeth and knocked the breath from his body. His helmet seemed to be crushed on his head and his lungs became filled with a rush of sand and grit that scraped at his injured ribs.

  He gave Willow a stiff wooden grimace that was meant to be a smile. ‘They’ve got us taped,’ he panted.

  A shell from the 75 above the POW compound whacked into the rubble, and while the stones and dirt were still falling on them the Germans tried another rush. Sugarwhite brought one of them down and Eva shot another, and the rest dived back into shelter. Then the mortar started again, the crashes seeming to shake the flesh loose over their nerves.

  ‘I reckon we ought to move over a bit,’ Sugarwhite said.

  He had just heaved himself painfully to his knees, looking for a better shelter, when another shell from the 75 exploded alongside them and the shock wave snatched him up like a rag doll in the shrivelling heat of a molten flash and flung him head-first into the wreckage of the Roman arch.

  Willow lifted his head and stared with haggard eyes at the pair of legs sticking stiffly up in the air. ‘Poor old Abdul,’ he muttered.

  The main party was under heavy pressure from three sides. Unafraid of death because it seemed inevitable, it had always been Hockold’s intention to draw as much fire as he could so that the demolition parties could work unhindered. But, whatever his own fatalism, he felt he owed life to the rest of his party, and with the mortars, the two 47s and the 75 above the compound firing at them, he could see their numbers dwindling away to nothing.

  Another mortar bomb landed with a deafening crash, and bricks and stones bounced among them.

  ‘I think it’s behind the hotel,’ Amos said. ‘Let me have a go at getting it. I can get into the Shariah Jedid and to-and-fro a bit round the back door.’

  ‘How many men will you need?’

  ‘Ten should be enough with Sergeant Sidebottom.’

  Collecting his men, Amos snatched at a haversack containing ammunition and, waiting for a lull in the firing, dived for the trees across the road. They made one of the houses opposite without difficulty and, as Sidebottom shot the lock off the door, they burst inside. The house was furnished luxuriously and there was even a piano. Waterhouse crossed towards it and, caparisoned as he was for war, his concave cheeks black, his ginger hair over his eyes, he began to pick out the National Anthem.

  ‘Nice tone,’ he observed in his flat catarrhal voice.

  As the rest of the party arrived they gathered round Amos. ‘We’re going further up the street and through that door there,’ he said. ‘Ready?’

  ‘Right,’ Sidebottom said.

  As they dashed out again, they were spotted and a machine gun on top of the naval barracks opened up. They flung themselves into the doorway, arid a flying splinter of stone whipped over Sidebottom’s shoulder to lay Amos’s forehead open from his eye to the hairline.

  Pausing to blink away the blood and the shock, he shook his head in an attempt to get his senses back. With an effort, he succeeded and looked round at Sidebottom who was watching him.

  ‘I’m all right,’ he said. ‘Come on. Inside.’

  They had reached the entrance to what had clearly once been the home of some wealthy Egyptian. As they smashed the door open they heard a scream and, whirling, Amos saw a plump, terrified girl in a yellow dress crouching behind it, holding an enamel jug to her chest. They were in a small tiled courtyard, with a fountain surrounded by plants. The roof was open to the sky; bullets had smashed the leaded window and shattered the figure of a dolphin in the centre of the fountain so that the jet was spraying wildly across the floor. The wet tiles were covered with plaster, glass, and fragments of pottery, stone and wood, and the girl’s cheek had been cut by a splinter. She was obviously quite certain she was going to be raped.

  ‘Tell her to shut up, Sergeant,’ Amos said, his forehead dripping blood on to his blouse. Sidebottom crossed to the girl and began to address her in his quaint mixture of English, Egyptian and Indian Army pidgin.

  She stopped screaming and said something, but her wide, shocked eyes never left their faces.

  ‘She says her old man’s the caretaker, sir,’ Sidebotto
m reported. ‘He had to go home because he was ill. They were comty feloose so she took over for the night. She’d locked herself in.’

  ‘Tell her she’s all right.’

  Sidebottom spoke to the girl again, bending over her so that she cringed back, her wet skirt up over her fat thighs, her feet pulled under her, her hands still clutching the jug, her eyes staring at them in terrified black orbs.

  Amos had been watching through the back window and had located the mortar established on a small patch of green behind the Boujaffar, its bombs sailing over the low out-buildings into the Bab al Gawla.

  ‘I’ve found it,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

  Leaving Sidebottom and two men to cover him, he led the rest of the men through the back door. But they were seen by a group of riflemen on top of the Boujaffar and the first man out was flung back against the wall, his Sten hitting Waterhouse in the face, so that he went down with a crash, stunned and bleeding from a split lip. Amos was also hit, this time in the cheek, and it sent him spinning back against the wall while the girl behind the door screamed again as the bullets came through, bringing down ugly enamelled pottery and plates ranged on shelves along the opposite wall in a shower of flying fragments, and making the plaster jump into the air in a cloud of dust and grit.

  Amos shook his head, spattering the girl’s dress with blood from his torn cheeks as he spat out broken teeth. His mouth was a livid gash and he could hardly see for the pain, but he grasped his Sten and waved soundlessly towards the door. Sidebottom threw a grenade and the mortar disappeared in a cloud of smoke. Two or three German heads popped up from a shallow trench just behind, and as Amos, half-blinded and desperate, shot at them they disappeared again at once.