Silent War

by David Fiddimore

  ‘Salaam, Abdul. You are well?’

  ‘I am well, Sergeant. You want my eggs?’

  Clare laughed. It was then that I noticed that though bare-chested, he was still wearing his pistol belt, and that the flap of its canvas holster was undone. His right hand didn’t stray far from it. Trigger had left me the Sten. My hands holding it were suddenly sweaty. The old man’s black eyes glanced at me from above his hawk nose – almost as if he knew what I was thinking and didn’t care. He smiled. His teeth were stained.

  Clare asked, ‘How many?’

  ‘Two dozen; English measure. All fresh. Young hens. Grade one.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Twenty-five ackers.’

  ‘Twelve.’

  The Arab shrugged, and turned away. He picked a cloth sack from the ass, put it on the ground, and carefully counted out twenty-four eggs – also onto the ground. A couple of the other squaddies had wandered over by now, but they didn’t crowd the transaction.

  Clare handed him a few coins across the wire. The old man bowed his head slightly as he accepted them. Clare nodded at the big black thing on the back of the animal. It was a human being dressed in a voluminous black garment. Dark eyes stared back at me from a narrow slit at face level . . . ‘You have a new wife?’

  ‘No, she’s just a woman. I bought her from the Bedou last week. You will not like her: she isn’t obedient yet.’ Then he spread his hands and offered, ‘But, just for you . . . five piastres for the whole camp. I collect her tomorrow.’

  ‘No thanks, Abdul . . . you break her in first, and we’ll see you next trip.’

  ‘She’s a Nubian. Very beautiful. Queen of Sheba.’

  ‘You told me that last time, and she was probably as old as my grandmother and very bad-tempered.’

  The Arab cackled, and then he smiled. No one could refuse a man with a smile like that. His smile was as trustworthy as that of the Jesus you see in pictures in the Children’s Illustrated Bible.

  ‘This one is different.’

  ‘Thank you for the eggs.’ There was no mistaking the finality in Clare’s voice. The Arab shrugged, smiled and they salaamed each other all over again. It went on a bit. Then he led the donkey away the same way he had come. When they were fifty yards away the person in the black bag turned to look at us; I felt her eyes on me.

  Clare said, ‘She might have been a young Nubian after all. What a pity.’

  ‘How do you know?’ That was me: always asking the bleeding questions.

  ‘No ordinary Arab woman would have looked back.’

  ‘I met a Navy cook in Port Said. He called all Arabs Ali because he said it was easier than trying to remember their names. Do you call them all Abdul?’

  Clare looked momentarily thrown. He said, ‘No . . . That is Abdul. I’ve known him well over a year.’

  ‘How did he know we were here?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘And where are his hens?’

  ‘I don’t know. All I know is that one moment you’re out in the middle of fuck-all, with a hundred empty miles in any direction, and the next moment there’s a cloud of flies, followed by an Arab riding up to you offering you eggs.’

  ‘How do they do that?’

  ‘I don’t know that either. It’s very mysterious.’

  ‘That’s what a Navy bloke told me.’

  Clare grinned, ‘Then it must be true, mustn’t it?’ He looked around at the others, and barked, ‘Hasn’t anyone got the char on yet?’ I was amused to see how quickly they moved, although there were a couple of downcast faces among them.

  ‘Was that really a young girl he was offering us?’

  ‘Told you already: who knows?’ I made the Sten safe; his eyes followed my hand movements. As I did that he said, ‘Well done, Mr Bassett. You can come out with us again.’

  The woman in black could so easily have been a man with a hidden machine gun, of course, and that’s exactly what we didn’t say. The other thing we didn’t say was that if a man with a donkey could track us into the middle of nowhere, then every other bugger out here probably knew where we were, as well. It induced a curiously vulnerable state of mind.

  When we stopped for a quick mid-morning brew-up I was standing between Clare and Trigger near the stove. I asked them, ‘That Abdul. Do you think he’s a spy?’

  Clare looked amused. He said, ‘No, Charlie; he’s an egg salesman – that’s his job,’ and he threw the lees of his tea on the hot sand, where it sizzled for a second before it disappeared. Time to mount up. As we walked back to the K5 I recalled that he had said Charlie. Maybe I’d just joined the Army.

  I didn’t draw a stag when we had our midday rest stop, because I had one of Watson’s radio sweeps to perform. I got two different signals somewhere out to the northwest, but they weren’t talking to each other. I copied their clumsy Morse into a small notebook Watson had given me. It was supposed to live locked in a hidden compartment under the floor of the truck.

  Clare came in while I was homing in on the second, and he listened in one earphone. I showed him what I’d written down: as far as I was concerned it was gibberish, but, strangely, it didn’t look like any code form I’d seen before either. Almost immediately I found a voice transmission, but I only caught the last minute. The language sounded high-pitched with some guttural sounds thrown in for good measure. When it died, Clare leaned forward to my pad and marked an extra four word spacers in places I wouldn’t have recognized.

  I asked, ‘What was it?’

  ‘Yiddish.’

  ‘What were they talking about?’

  ‘Us, probably.’ That put a bit of a different complexion on it. So I decided to miss my call in – which I was entitled to do – and run it at the fall-back time in the evening. I don’t know why. When I informed Clare of my decision he nodded in approval before he turned away. As we set off again Trigger handed me a beige cotton ski-cap with a big peak; I’d already seen most of the other guys wearing them. They had come out after the first brew stop after the Bitter Lake. It had a diamond-shaped cloth badge sitting above a cloth eagle carrying a swastika.

  ‘What’s this?’ I asked him.

  ‘Best desert hat ever made; so say thank you. It will never let you down.’

  ‘Thank you . . . but it’s Nazi.’

  ‘The cap’s not Nazi, is it? – only the bloke who wore it once. Anyway it was Afrika Korps, and they weren’t all that bad. Cut the badge off, if it bothers you.’

  ‘Thank you.’ I said it again.

  ‘Just take it off and sit on it if we run into a Yid patrol, OK? It upsets them.’

  ‘Shouldn’t the Israelis stay their side of the border?’

  ‘Nobody knows where the border is any more, sir. Why else do you think we’re up here?’

  I remember two things from the evening that followed. One was that we climbed up, for the umpteenth time it seemed, out of a low stony wadi – but instead of being faced with more of the same there was now sand. Beautiful deep orange sand lit up by the setting sun as if it was on fire. It stretched for a hundred miles, and was so beautiful that it took my breath away. Clare turned us round, and we camped for the night around a lonely, stumpy-looking tree. The odd rusty can dotted here and there said we weren’t the first Boy Scouts to spend the night here. The second memory is that when we were settled round the stove with a bottle each, taking the smallest of sips to make the beer last, one of the kids asked me to tell them what it was like flying over Germany in 1944.

  I talked for longer than I intended, and at the end of it no one said a word for several minutes. Then Trigger asked me to tune one of the radios so as to pick up some music. I got something from Port Said or Cairo. Arab music. Drums, tambourines and small cymbals; the gentle wailing of pipes and flutes. That was why the guys began to compare the dancing girls they’d seen in clubs and bars up and down the Canal Zone. Flat bellies and big tits seemed to be the combination they recalled best. When I asked about the girl and the pig I’d
been told about, Clare said, ‘She must be a European; even English maybe.’

  ‘How do you make that out, Sarge?’ That was one of the young national servicemen: I never properly learned his name. Carter maybe?

  ‘No Muslim woman would be allowed to do that. They’d lock her up; maybe even worse. Stone her or cut bits off her – just like in the Bible. The pig is religiously an unclean animal for them . . . they can’t even touch it. It’s because we allow that sort of thing to go on in our clubs, and build churches everywhere, that they don’t take us seriously when we say we want to negotiate an end to the troubles out here.’

  ‘Have you seen her, Sarge?’

  ‘Yes; as it happens.’

  ‘What was she like?’

  There were a couple of low guffaws before he responded. I looked up: a billion billion stars like the night before. I could feel the heat radiating from the oil-drum stove on my legs, and cooler air off the desert curling around my back.

  ‘Bloody formidable, as it happens . . . but my mother wouldn’t ’ave been all that chuffed to see me there.’

  We broke away soon after that. Every man to his own blanket and his own thoughts. I tried to think about Dolly and Grace . . . they were so much part of my world, but I found thoughts of my boys instead, and the girl Flaming June. Maybe she was still waiting for her wounded hero. Maybe she had married him. I remembered Dieter telling me off for blowing it with her, and Carlo crying. I resolved to send her a letter or a card when I got back. Cast my bread upon the waters.

  In the morning the Sergeant sat me down at the radio, and made me stay there. We didn’t break camp. I had a two-hour listening watch for Watson in the middle of it, so it didn’t make that much difference. Clare himself set off into the desert with one man, a pole about six feet long, a shovel, a map and a compass – but they only went about fifty yards.

  The men lazed about watching him, but no one seemed to think it odd behaviour. Those who’d been in the blue with him before had seen it already, and those who hadn’t had learned to trust him anyway. From the small side window of my radio wagon I watched him prospecting around in the sand. After about an hour he straightened from the latest hole that he had scooped, turned back to us and waved. Five or six of the lads lifted spades that had been dumped in a heap from one of the wagons, and trudged up the nearest sand dune to join him. Then they began to dig in earnest.

  Clare and his helper returned to us. Trigger put on a brew. When he had an ally mug of strong tea in his hand the Sergeant climbed into the radio room.

  ‘Anything?’

  ‘No, Sergeant. Even the static sounds pretty uninspired. What am I listening for?’

  ‘Anyone. Friendlies and unfriendlies.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’

  ‘Friendlies are the ones we allow to be out here, and the unfriendlies aren’t. At the moment the Israelis are classified as friendlies, but only four years ago they were blowing up hotels full of our nurses, weren’t they?’

  ‘So even the friendlies are unfriendly, as far as you’re concerned?’

  ‘Yeah, so yell if you hear anything. Goddit?’

  ‘Yes, Sergeant.’

  ‘I’ll get Trigger to bung you a cup of char; I should ha’ brought you one.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘. . . and one last thing.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘That cap really suits you: you look like a proper little Nazi.’

  ‘I knew someone clever in the War Office a few years ago . . . he said that we are the Nazis now.’

  ‘He should know.’

  ‘He died.’ Actually I shot him, but let’s pass over that one.

  ‘Well; he can’t have been all that clever then, can he?’

  Thinking about it, being deemed not all that clever is an epitaph that Piers would have absolutely hated. It cheered me up no end.

  They dug up a lorry. Well, half a lorry anyway. The rear end of an old AEC Matador buried deep in the sand. Clare had found it eventually by watching the compass swing as he moved around it, and by drawing intersecting vectors in the sand. The wagon was under the place where they all crossed. It had a steel box body with rear doors, having probably been an artillery tractor in an earlier life. Trigger had them all stand back, and then screwed about it a bit for booby traps. Apparently it was one of his specialities, but he didn’t find any. Then he rattled up and down its metal side with a big screwdriver for a bit. The noise set my teeth on edge.

  ‘Gets rid of the scorpions,’ Clare told me later. ‘They scarper when they get the vibrations.’

  ‘What about snakes?’

  ‘Yeah. There’s always a couple down under the frame, but the noise usually sends them about their business as well. But, you’re right – when the bold boys start working on it I make sure they’re careful where they step, and wear leather gauntlets.’

  A bright kid called Muzzard spelled me for an hour so I could get some grub. He was a complete novice, but he picked up the principles of the sweep very quickly . . . I thought he showed promise. He was supposed to yell for me or Clare, of course, as soon as he heard something. He didn’t though, and I got some lunch and a cuppa in peace. I wandered up to the excavation before I settled down again. The Matador’s cargo space was filled with ordnance, motor spares, petrol and water. Clare’s team were checking the safe date on the metal cases and wooden boxes, and replacing those that were out of date with fresh stores from one of our trucks. The stores being replaced were detailed by entries onto about thirty different forms.

  ‘CIO – CII. That means count it all out, and count it all in,’ Trigger sang out, when he dropped in for a chat. ‘. . . a good military principle.’ The radio wagon was as hot as hell. I sat in my shorts and boots, and the perspiration poured off every inch of my body. My shorts were as wet as if I’d just come out of the sea with them on.

  ‘Want me to give you ten minutes?’ Roy asked.

  ‘No, I can manage, but thanks.’

  ‘OK. Just shout.’

  I saw him slogging up the dune with a spade. They were nearly all up there by then, burying the fucking thing all over again. By the time they finished smoothing out the sand with mats dragged behind them, it was difficult to know anyone had ever been there: the first breath of wind would do the rest.

  There were a couple of times in the next few hours when I was tempted by Rogers’s offer. No signals. Or nearly no signals anyway. There was a bleating in the distance I could barely make out, so I yelled until Clare ducked his head into the shack.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Dunno. It comes on, and then fades.’

  ‘Can you read any of it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Let me know if it comes back.’ I saw him look down at his watch and trigger the sweep hand on the stop. That was interesting. Exactly half an hour later I called him back.

  He asked, ‘Same signal?’

  ‘Yes. Probably a hundred miles away, unless he has a dodgy battery.’

  Clare stopped the sweep arm of his watch, grinned and said, ‘Good. You can secure; then clean yourself up, and let’s get out of here.’

  The penny dropped a few minutes later. I had heard the recall, and the content of the message was immaterial. The interval between the end of the signal and the beginning of the next was everything: a thirty-minute gap to tell Clare to clear off. I rubbed down with sand, and changed my clothes. At Trigger’s insistence I piled so much foot powder between my toes that my boots and socks puffed smoke with each step I took.

  He said, ‘You’ll lose all the skin between your toes, but if you can keep them dry at least they won’t get infected. Stick it under your arms as well.’

  ‘Why doesn’t it happen to you?’

  ‘Who says it don’t? We just learned to live with it.’ Uh-huh? ‘Smoke break?’

  Clare swapped over with Rogers, and kept his promise. He taught me how to drive a four-by-four. It was like heaving a tank about, but I liked that odd grab of ext
ra traction from the front wheels when you least expected it. He had me drive into some softer stuff, just in order to prove the wagon could pull itself out again. I was sweating again, but only in the small of my back. Clare had three days’ growth of beard – all the others did as well; it made them look like pirates.

  ‘What have we been doing out here, Sergeant?’

  ‘On a scheme. In the RAF you’d call it an exercise.’

  ‘In the RAF we’d call it replenishing a stores dump, and I’ll bet it’s one that’s not supposed to be there.’

  ‘You know, Charlie . . . mind that rock; you might have 4WD but things that size can still break your springs . . . where was I?’

  ‘. . . You know, Charlie?’

  ‘Yeah, there’s such a thing as seeing too much.’

  We camped thirty miles from the buried Matador, and the Arab came in that night with his eggs and his woman. We bought more of the former, and Clare firmly declined the woman again.

  ‘Has the Sarge ever said yes for the woman?’ I asked when Clare was out of earshot.

  ‘No,’ Trigger told me, ‘but I think about it a lot.’

  We didn’t see the Arab again.

  Three nights later we drove over one of the swing bridges, and on to the Treaty Road. My skin was dry and salty – and suddenly brown: the sun had caught up with me without my noticing. I felt as tired as if we’d been away for weeks. Arab kids were chasing chickens with sticks in the Ismailia suburbs, and in the town centre watchful military patrols armed with pick-axe handles were looking for Arabs to beat up. This could only end in tears.

  Chapter Eleven

  Blue kettle rag

  Oliver shook me awake. Perspiration had run down my chin and pooled in that hollow at the base of the throat.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Nothing. You were shouting.’

  ‘Sorry, I was dreaming.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Snow. Isn’t that silly? I was dreaming I was in a snowball fight with my boys.’