A Good Clean Fight (59 page)

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Skull showed Barton a list of all the Luftwaffe airfields and landing-grounds within range of LG 250. There were fifty-four in all. The one he considered least unsuitable as a target was an advanced landing-ground called Gadd el Ahmar.

“Convince me,” Barton said. He took the list and began tearing it into small pieces.

Skull did a thorough, professional job on Gadd el Ahmar. It was relatively isolated, being forty miles behind the Gazala Line and forty-five miles south of the Mediterranean. The nearest Luftwaffe field, Mechili, was a long way to the west; Tmimi was far to the north. Gadd el Ahmar was relatively close to LG 250, so the Kittyhawks could carry a light load of fuel, thus improving their performance. It was a temporary field, so flak would be minimal and radar probably non-existent: the SAS had blown up a mobile radar at Gadd a month ago and there was no sign that it had been replaced.

Barton nodded and tore.

On the other hand, Skull said, Gadd was often quite
busy. The Luftwaffe used it to refuel Ju88s on reconnaissance missions over Egypt. Recently a squadron of Stukas had trained around Gadd. Engine failure, or navigational error, or bad weather, forced German aircraft to land there. The pickings were promising. Above all, Allied territory was within easy reach if anything went wrong.

“All things considered, then, you reckon Gadd el Ahmar is the obvious target,” Barton said.

“Yes, I do.”

“That's exactly why I'm not going there. Hold your hand out.” Barton scooped up all the bits of paper and flung them into the air. They fluttered down. Some landed on Skull's head and shoulders. One piece fell on his palm. “What have you got?” Barton asked.

Skull turned it over. “Beda Fomm,” he said.

“Lovely. That's what we'll hit.”

“You're mad,” Skull said. “You've gone doolally.”

“Not a bit!” Barton cried cheerfully. “If I don't know what I'm doing next, how can the enemy possibly know?”

It was late in the afternoon when the three Kittyhawks took off. Barton led them in a circuit and then brought them down in line abreast to beat up the field. Skull, Uncle and the doc stood and watched. It was useless speaking until the thunder had passed and faded to a drone as the formation climbed westward.

“I apologize for breaking your gramophone record,” the doc said. “It was an uncivilized thing to do in the middle of a war.”

“Think nothing of it.”

“You broke ‘Empty Saddles'?” Kellaway said. “Damn clumsy of you. That was Fanny's favorite.”

“It was a necrophiliac dirge, Uncle. Pretentious, syrupy guff. Even so, I had no right to break it.”

“Don't concern yourself,” Skull said. “As it happens, I have another copy in my tent.”

“Mother was right,” the doc said. “I should never have left Ireland.”

The choice of Beda Fomm may have been a matter of chance, but to every other aspect of the raid Barton gave the closest possible thought.

Success hinged on timing their arrival just as the last fat slice of sun slid below the horizon. Sunset happened fast in Libya: day turned to night without the long English compromise of dusk. However, at ten thousand feet the Libyan day lasted a little longer: a pilot still saw the rim of the sun when men below him were in darkness.

The Kittyhawks flew northwest from LG 250, climbing hard, and leveled out at twenty thousand feet. At this time of day the average Luftwaffe fighter pilot would be heading for home: the 109, with its knock-kneed undercarriage and its tendency to crab at the moment of touchdown, was not an easy machine to land in the dark. Barton saw a few metallic glints at great distance. They all faded to nothing.

The Kittyhawks cruised watchfully for almost an hour. Over the Jebel they circled while the sun edged lower and lower until it silently collided with the end of the world and seemed to flatten a little on impact. They made one more circuit and then Barton led them down.

Beda Fomm was clear to see. South of Benghazi the coastline bulged out and then in. Beda Fomm sat in the center of that inward curve. Its runways made a distinctive pattern, a slanting cross, as if someone had slammed a rubber stamp on the scruffy countryside. It was a tiny cross, but the last, blazing, horizontal rays of the sun made it shine. Soon it was no longer tiny and it no longer shone, and then it was lost in the gloom as the sun vanished. The Kittyhawks were diving at an ever-steeper angle, picking up speed like skis on ice, plunging into darkness. Barton had slipped into his usual stoic, fatalistic frame of mind. Nothing could be changed, so there was no point in worrying. Patterson was not yet frightened, but knew he soon
would be and he dreaded it; meanwhile he was a small god about to blast a small enemy and as always the prospect gave him huge excitement. Hooper, too, was enjoying himself. He felt like the hand guiding a giant firearm. The bombs under the wings were bullets. Soon he would fling them at the target and go. Then flak began exploding and he began to shake. His left thigh trembled violently. He whacked it with his fist, but still it shook.

The flak became a storm. Often the smoke obliterated the ground. Barton stopped looking for Beda Fomm: if all this muck was coming up, the target must be down there. He watched the altimeter unwind and he blinked repeatedly as his Kittyhawk smashed through the tortured, blackened air. A dim familiar pattern took shape below and he bombed it, felt the airplane shift as it lost its load, and heaved the stick into his stomach.

Nobody escaped undamaged.

They flew home as low as possible, only fifty or sixty feet above the desert. This was to baffle the radar, which would be confused by echoes from the dunes, and to hide from the nightfighters. Barton knew how difficult it was to pick out a low-flying aircraft by day, let alone at night. Yet a pair of Mel 10 nightfighters bounced the Kittyhawks, bursting out of the blackness with a thumping, dazzling barrage of fire. The Kittyhawks broke hard toward the attack and for a few seconds there was a cursing chaos of near-collisions. The 110s' speed carried them many miles away. They hunted doggedly and caught the Kittyhawks again. Patterson took several hits. But Barton kept his little formation down on the deck, they lost the 110s, and eventually they reached LG 250.

It had a flare path, of sorts: tins full of sand soaked with petrol. They gave a feeble outline to the runway.

“You go first, Pip,” Barton said.

“Do my best.”

The ground crew were waiting, armed with axes, pick-handles,
fire-extinguishers, metal-cutters, buckets of sand. Patterson made his approach like an accident looking for somewhere to happen: left wing down, nose high, speed falling too fast. Far too fast. He knew all this, but he could do nothing to alter it. What he didn't know was that only one wheel had come down. The other was stuck. There were cockpit signals to tell the pilot the state of his undercarriage, but Patterson was in no shape to look at cockpit signals.

The airplane fell apart when it hit the ground. Four tons of machinery traveling at well over a hundred and twenty miles an hour is very unforgiving. The Kittyhawk shed its wings, the fuselage screamed and bucketed along until it had snapped off its tailplane, and what was left performed a long, grinding pirouette down the strip, gradually exhausting itself against the unfeeling desert.

The ground crew got Patterson out in a tearing rush. The stench of petrol urged them on. They staggered and stumbled away with him. As the doc knelt in the sand the engine flickered and caught fire with a roar like a trapped animal. “Let it burn,” he said. “I need the light.”

The fire helped Barton and Hooper too. They picked their way between the lumps of wreckage and landed safely.

“Busy night?” the doc said, without looking up from his work.

“We got bounced by some 110s. How is he?”

“If the kite took as much of a beating as the pilot, it's a miracle he got it down at all.” By now Skull and Kellaway were there too. They all formed a loose circle around the stretcher. A pressure lamp added its pure light to the yellow flames.

“What's the score?” Patterson asked. He was very hoarse: the crash-landing had flung his head about so violently that he could scarcely swallow.

“Shut up, you. It's long past your bedtime.”

“I want—”

“Lie still and behave.”

“I want the song.” Patterson looked around until he found Skull. “‘Empty Saddles.'”

“For the love of Christ!” the doc said. He slid a needle into Patterson's arm. “Is there no taste left in the world? I'm surrounded by the droolings of dross.”

“Dross can't drool,” Skull said. “Dross is mineral.”

“Play the record,” Barton told Skull.

“He can't hear it,” the doc said. “He's out.”

“I don't care. Play it.”

The stretcher was carried away. They all trudged alongside it. “Where did he get hit?” Hick Hooper asked.

“Right leg, made a mess of his calf. Left hand, two fingers gone. Shell splinters down his left side. Right eye isn't working. Right shoulder's dislocated, deep cut on the arm, left leg's broken, but I think that all happened in the crash. Probably some other damage I'll discover in due course.”

There was a long silence. They were impressed.

“I'll put a new needle in the gramophone,” Skull said. “I think we can afford it.” He went off to his tent.

“Give us some rum,” Barton said. The adjutant was holding the bottle.

“Did we hit anything?” Hick asked. “I couldn't see.”

Barton took the glass and drank. “I don't know,” he said. “I have a feeling some of the bombs didn't go off.” Fifty yards away a dance band began to play.

Lampard saw a German foot-patrol. Ten or twelve men were sitting round a fire on a distant hillside. They all stood up when the vehicles went by. Lampard had put his captured Mercedes truck at the front and Malplacket's Fiat station-wagon at the tail, and he hoped the dust would obscure what was in between. He waved, and a couple of Germans waved back. Lester saw them, and he too waved. “Bunch of krauts back there,” he said. He amazed himself by his bravery.

Later they passed another foot-patrol. “Bip your horn,” Lampard said. The driver did, twice, and almost everyone waved. “All a matter of confidence,” Lampard said.

It was dark when they stopped near the coast road. Lampard walked to the rear. “Parting of the ways,” he told Lester and Malplacket. “Turn right and Benghazi's twenty kilometers up the road. We'll wait at the rendezvous until forty-eight hours from now, not a minute longer.” The rendezvous was a grid reference in the desert. “If anyone stops you, tell them you're staff officers. Shout at them. That's quite effective sometimes, so I'm told. Good luck.”

They shook hands. Malplacket drove his Fiat past the patrol and disappeared.

The three armed jeeps were hidden in some scrub.

The raiding party got into the Mercedes and the Ford trucks. A red light was hung on the Ford's tail-gate. They moved up to the road and waited.

Thirty minutes later they were still waiting. A few vehicles had passed, but they were all heading north.
Nothing went south. For most of the time the night was silent.

Lampard got out and strolled back to Dunn in the Ford. “Last night we couldn't cross the road for the traffic,” he said. “I wonder what's up?”

“Bridge down somewhere, maybe. Or it could be just an old-fashioned pile-up. Accidents happen, even in a war.”

They waited. The tang of some wild herb hung in the air: rosemary perhaps. After a while someone snored softly, then grunted as he got a dig in the ribs. Lampard was not surprised; on his first raid he himself had dozed off while the enemy barbed-wire was being cut. It was a curious response to extreme danger. Maybe the body reacted to heavy stress by switching off, or maybe it was just the phlegmatic British character expressing itself . . . Dunn clicked his fingers. Something was coming. Lampard hurried back to the cab. Engines were started.

It was a big road convoy and it was traveling fast. Lampard searched the darkness, trying to see where the convoy ended. It was painfully long and the
whomp-whomp-whomp-whomp
of tires seemed endless. Then it ended. “Go!” he shouted and his driver made the truck jump forward. “Stop!” he bawled. “Stop, stop!” His driver trod violently on the brakes. Lampard got flung against the windscreen. “Well done,” he said. His temple was bleeding.

Dunn appeared at the window. “Flak wagon.” Lampard said. “Their last vehicle was a flak wagon. I couldn't sit behind a lot of Huns with guns staring at me.”

“Don't blame you. Enough to put a chap off his grub.”

After ten minutes the blood had congealed. No more traffic had appeared.

Lampard waited another five minutes and then called everyone together. “This is hopeless,” he said. “We could wait here all night. We'll have to go alone, and if things get sticky at the checkpoint we'll shoot it up and press on. No grenades. I don't want shrapnel in the tires.”

They drove south, without lights. Lampard knew roughly how far it was to the checkpoint. As he counted the kilometers slowly clocking up on the dashboard he tried to think of a way to avoid a firefight at the checkpoint, assuming it was still there. Al Maghrun airfield drifted by on the right. One thing was certain: his German wasn't good enough to fool the thickest sentry.

“Go slow,” he said. “It should be near here.” The Mercedes lost speed until it was crawling. In the end they both saw it at the same time: a small red light, a fleck of blood in the blackness. “Pull over,” he ordered. “Switch off.”

They sat and looked at it.

“Right,” Lampard said, and got out quietly. He found Sergeant Davis in the back of the Ford. “Take two bombs,” he said, “and plant them on the other side of the road, as near that roadblock as you can get. We've got some short fuses, haven't we? Good. You'll have to work out the timing. The point is, I want you back here so we can drive there and arrive just as they explode.”