A Good Clean Fight (10 page)

His driver pointed. “Wireless truck,” he said. Black smoke, rich as oil, was gushing into the sky.

A fold in the land hid the truck from view: the same fold that, earlier, had concealed the Storch from Lampard's jeep. Dunn knew his driver was right. Only the wireless truck could have burned like that. Now they knew where the fourth armored car had gone, although how it got there was a mystery. The armed truck rounded the salt marsh and they saw more of the burning vehicle. It was gripped by vivid red flames that jumped and swayed like dancers, all wrong for the desert, far too lively; nothing should be so wildly active in such stifling heat. Another crump shook the wireless truck, or perhaps that was just the shuddering of the afternoon air. Fresh smoke boiled up, thrusting the old smoke higher.

Lampard's jeep got there first. He stopped for ten seconds to check out the area, seeking any trace of the enemy. Then he made a fast circuit of the burning truck. Two men came out of a patch of waist-high scrub. They were Corporal Pocock and Trooper Smedley.

“Where's the Alfa?” Lampard demanded. “Where's Davis?”

“Gone.” Pocock pointed eastward. “And bloody lucky to do it.”

“Anyone hurt?”

“Mr. Waterman's in there.” Pocock looked at the wireless truck. Only its shell was left, looking curiously frail through the flames. As the wheels burned out, the chassis settled, like an animal making itself comfortable.

“Jump in,” Lampard said. Dunn's truck had arrived. “Time to beat it for home, I think.” He got out and went over to Dunn. “Looks like Tony got the chop,” he said.

Dunn was beyond caring. All he knew was that he was sitting next to the biggest smoke signal in Libya. “Too bad,” he said. When Lampard remained looking at him, he added: “Could have been you or me, I suppose.”

“More likely you or I.”

Dunn stared. “Come again?”

“You or I, not you or me. Verb
to be
takes the nominative, not the accusative.” Lampard nodded in approval of himself.

“Drive on!” Dunn said loudly. Death he could take. Death and grammar, no.

If he had used his brains, Schramm would have crawled into the shade of the Storch's wide wings and waited to be rescued. Instead, he got to his heavily bandaged feet and tried to walk to the headquarters of Jalo garrison in order to tell them to radio Barce airfield. It would be a simple message, merely informing Hoffmann where to find (and destroy) the British patrol, and so Schramm thought it must be a simple walk. That wasn't sensible, but Schramm was sick and tired of acting sensibly. He had acted sensibly when he got captured, and when he escaped, and when he walked across the Jebel, and when he acquired the Storch; and look what acting sensibly had got him: an escort of flies. He stumbled bravely in the wrong direction. When he reached a palm tree he clung to it and had a rest before aiming for the next palm tree. He had no hat. He walked
with his mouth wide open, wheezing the superheated air over his bone-dry tongue.

When the Italian armored cars were sure the British patrol had gone, they checked out the Storch and extracted the body of the pilot. Someone noticed blurred footprints and quite quickly the Italians found Schramm, who had almost completed a full circle.

At Jalo hospital the doctor didn't even try to understand his croaking and grunting. When Schramm had sipped a little milk, some of his voice returned, but his Italian was jumbled and the doctor knew little German. Schramm kept getting out of bed and trying to use the telephone. Eventually the doctor gave him a swift injection when he wasn't looking and Schramm fell peacefully asleep, which gave the doctor a chance to examine his feet. Schramm's feet greatly impressed the doctor.

Lampard and Dunn raced back along their own tracks and found the Alfa and the other jeep waiting at the point where the patrol had turned off to hunt the Storch. There was no pause, no discussion. Lampard waved at Gibbon, pointed south, and the patrol began the long sprint across the serir to Kufra.

Serir was the best going in the Sahara. It was a fine, smooth, gravel plain and it stretched without bump or blemish from horizon to horizon. It was so good that you could almost take your hands off the wheel. Unless a mirage appeared there was nothing to see, nothing to look at except the other vehicles barreling across the flat, empty, beautiful landscape. The patrol loved it. Every hour took them another fifty miles from the enemy. The racing air hustled around their bodies and for the first time in many days they were almost cool.

Near the end of the serir the Alfa began to complain. Its exhaust pumped smoke and the engine developed a painful clatter. A couple of miles later there was a small explosion and the engine dumped its oil on the desert. One of the
trucks took the Alfa in tow, but within minutes that truck had a puncture. As soon as they restarted, a jeep stopped. The engine was healthy but the clutch had quit. Lampard looked at the sun. Kufra was still a good hundred miles away, with some sharp rocks and then a nasty little neck of the Sand Sea to be crossed. He glanced at his driver. The man had eyes like a lizard with a hangover. Lampard had been sharing the driving. He knew how the man felt. “We'll stop here,” Lampard announced.

Nobody talked much. The cooks got cracking. The patrol was a long way from the enemy, but all the double-Vickers were cleaned just the same. The loads were checked for leaky water tins or jerricans. The fitters peered into engines that were still too hot to touch, or squatted by the tires, looking for tomorrow's trouble.

Meanwhile: food.

Compared with the average soldier in the Western Desert, the men of the SAS ate like kings. Lampard's patrol lined up for sardines, meatloaf, fried onions, tinned potatoes, pickles, tinned vegetables, tinned peaches, cheese and biscuits. Each man got two pints of tea. There was jam and syrup and, if the patrol commander said so, an issue of rum.

Lampard looked at his men. Nobody had washed in two weeks. Hair, beards and uniforms were filthy from a blend of desert dust and Jebel dirt and the greases and oils applied to weapons and vehicles, all of it evenly distributed by the action of sweat. The men took their loaded mess tins and moved away and ate the food steadily and blankly, not looking at each other, certainly not looking at the sunset, which was releasing a sudden flood of startlingly lovely colors, greens and pinks and mauves. “Rum,” Lampard said to the cook, who nodded. But even that word failed to turn any other heads.

When they had finished eating, Lampard collected his second pint of tea (the one with the reward of rum in it)
and took Sergeant Davis aside. “What went wrong?” he asked.

Davis cleaned his mess tin in the sand. He held it up to the fading, spilled-paintbox light so that he could see into the corners. He murmured, “Dear, dear.” He cleaned it again, checked it again, turned it upside-down and banged it with his hand to shake the last few grains loose. “Difficult to know where to begin,” he said.

Lampard slowly walked away. Twenty paces. Davis counted them. He turned and walked back. Nineteen paces. “You lost a pace somewhere,” Davis said. “My old drill sergeant wouldn't have liked that. He'd have sent you back to find the bloody thing.”

“Suppose we start again.” Lampard sipped his tea. “What went wrong?”

Davis was ready this time. “Not for me to say, sir. But I can tell you what
happened.
One of those wop armored cars got around the salt marsh somehow, and it clobbered us.”

“Why didn't you see it coming?”

“I've wondered about that myself. Two reasons. One is, as soon as their cars came out of the oasis and started firing, we decided to pull back. So we weren't watching them all that closely, especially as we had a bit of trouble turning the wireless truck. The other reason is the armored car that hit us didn't come flying across the bog. It came sneaking up a little wadi on the other flank.”

Lampard folded his arms and let his heavy head sink until his chin would go no further while he absorbed this information. “What next?” he asked. His voice was so gruff it was almost a growl.

“Next . . . Well, next the Eye-ties fired a burst and hit the wireless truck. Hit the tires, front and rear, so I knew that was that, and we decided to get out quick. That was when Mr. Waterman got upset about leaving his code books in the truck, so he went off to get them, and while he was
inside the truck the Eye-ties gave it several squirts and I reckon they hit the petrol tank. Like putting a match to a gas-ring. Whoosh! Up she went.”

The sun had almost gone. The temperature was falling in a rush; soon it would be time for a woolen cardigan. “It must have been an extremely small wadi,” Lampard said.

“Big enough.”

“What I mean is, there was no reason to expect an attack from that quarter.”

Sergeant Davis said nothing. Enough light remained for Lampard to see the look in his eyes: a look that said
Not for me to say, sir
.

“On the other hand,” Lampard said, “on this sort of job there's always reason to expect an attack from any quarter.”

Davis said nothing in the same expressive way.

“On the
other
other hand,” Lampard said, “no risk, no win. And we did get the Storch.”

“So we did,” Davis said. “We got the Storch.”

Normally everyone sat around for an hour or two, talking, maybe listening to the BBC. Not now. After driving all night and all day they wanted only sleep. A couple of fitters worked on their vehicles for an hour or so, but by eight p.m. they too were wrapped in their blankets. Nothing moved in the desert; it was as still and silent as the sky. For the best part of twelve hours the members of the patrol slept like dead men, which in some cases was good practice.

Soon after dawn, Gibbon saw Dunn stowing his blankets in the truck, and walked over. “You're a clever chap, Mike,” he said quietly. “Maybe you can explain what we were supposed to be up to, yesterday.”

Gentle flattery from Gibbon put Dunn on the alert. “What d'you mean?” he asked. He knew what Gibbon meant.

“Of course, I'm only the bloody silly navigator,” Gibbon said. “What do I know about the art of war? It seemed to me yesterday that we were in the wrong bloody place at the wrong bloody time, risking the whole bloody patrol for the sake of a twopenny-ha'penny target that wasn't worth five rounds rapid. But of course I could be wrong.”

“We did hit the plane,” Dunn said.

“Bang goes tuppence-ha'penny,” Gibbon said. “Yippee.”

“It's not as simple as that.”

Gibbon twitched his nostrils. Bacon was frying. “Burned pig!” he said. “Nothing like it, is there?”

“That's not very funny,” Dunn said.

“Nobody ever caught the pig laughing,” Gibbon said, “so I'm sure you're right.”

They walked to the fire and watched the cook at work. Lampard joined them. “Ah, bacon!” he said.

Gibbon cleared his throat. “I was just thinking about yesterday's little battle,” he said.

Lampard stretched and yawned and waited.

“Hot stuff,” Gibbon said.

“Just a skirmish.”

“I bet the Italians claim a major victory. Big British attack repelled with heavy casualties.”

“No doubt. But it was still just a skirmish.”

“No heavy casualties?”

That made Lampard look sharply at Gibbon. “You know the score,” he said. “We had a spot of bad luck.”

“Ah, is that what it was?” Gibbon asked. “A spot of bad luck?”

Dunn said: “For Christ's sake, shut up, Corky.”

“Just trying to put myself in the picture, Mike.”

Lampard snorted to blow some flies off his beard. “I bet I could find a fuel dump in Jalo Oasis at night,” he said. “And an ammo dump. How about it, Corky? You and me in the jeeps with a couple of chaps. You navigate and I
steal some fuel, and then we go marauding around the Jebel. Are you on?” Lampard slapped his hands and infuriated the flies.

Gibbon tried to think of a good reason why not, and couldn't. He was saved by Sergeant Davis. “The tires won't stand it,” Davis said.

“Oh well,” Lampard said. “Another time, perhaps.”

Davis was right. They had to mend six punctures to cover the remaining two hundred kilometers to Kufra, which was a big, sprawling, well-found oasis with plenty of stores, including new tires. Kufra was an SAS base, so Lampard was able to radio HQ in Cairo and report his arrival. Cairo ordered the patrol home.

“Ping-pong is not an Olympic sport,” Henry Lester said. “What you've got here in the desert is a ping-pong war. That's why the public don't buy it. It's not box-office.”

“For Pete's sake, Henry,” his wife said. “Put a sock in it and eat your ice cream.”

They were in the Gezira Sporting Club in Cairo, having dinner with a mixed bunch of journalists and army officers, and all night Lester had been trying to provoke a winnable argument. He was forty-one, shortish, chunky, with a receding crewcut, and he represented a Chicago newspaper whose readers like to be told just what the hell was going on in the world, short and sharp, without a lot of tap-dancing and blowing bubbles. So Lester held short, sharp, strong opinions about almost everything. “I'll say this for Cairo,” he said. “They make good ice cream, and that's the only single, solitary thing to be said for the place.”

“Glad you enjoy it,” said a lieutenant-general called Saxon. “Just remember you wouldn't be sitting here at all if the British Army hadn't stopped Graziani's attack in 1940.”

“Ping!” Lester said. “Wavell counter-attacks, gains a thousand miles. Pong! Rommel arrives, the British lose it all. Ping! Auchinleck attacks,
he
gains a thousand miles. Pong! Rommel attacks and wins half of it back. Ping! Did I forget anyone?”

“Only a few dead men,” said a brigadier named Munroe. “A few hundred thousand, that is, counting both sides. Pity they're not here to argue with you, isn't it?”