A Good Clean Fight (71 page)

“I guess we're early, or he's late,” Lester said. “Or a bit of both.” They had a box of tinned food and two jerricans of water. That should be enough.

*   *   *

Toward sunset Malplacket built a fire as he had seen the patrol do it—fill a large can with sand and soak it with petrol—and he made a stew.

By then Lester had finished his story. He had been writing it in his head ever since they had left Benghazi, so putting it down on paper was easy. Malplacket read it as they ate.

“Splendid. Spiffing, in fact. Congratulations.”

“You really like it?”

“Yes, indeed. And Chicago will find it irresistible.”

“It zips along.”

“I enjoyed your moments of irony. Very refreshing.”

“Yeah?” Lester took the pages back. “Huh.” He flicked through them. “This is just a first draft, of course. Still kinda rough in spots.”

“Don't lose those ironic moments, old chap. They are the little leaven that leavens the lump.” Lester raised his
eyebrows. “First Corinthians, chapter four,” Malplacket said. “Feel free to use it. It's out of copyright.”

“Thank God you're not judging the Pulitzer. You'd give it to
Fanny Farmer's Cookbook.”

They had one blanket each, and it was not enough. They awoke, shivering, long before dawn, as a scouring wind blew sand into their hair and ears and nose and mouth.

Tea was hot but gritty. They took shelter in the Fiat and listened to the whine and moan. When the sun came up, they watched the desert floor shift and twist as the wind hustled it elsewhere.

“Goddamn weather,” Lester said. “I just hope it doesn't louse up Lampard's navigation.”

“Gibbon knows his job. He won the MC, remember.”

“Maybe Gibbon got wounded. Or captured.”

“In England it is a criminal offense to spread alarm and despondency. You are not only spreading it, you are digging it in.”

“I got sand in my crotch.”

Malplacket sighed.
“Everyone
in the desert has sand in his crotch. Some have more than others. Corporal Pocock, for instance, has a very great deal of it.”

Lester had nothing to say about that. He climbed into the back seat and began to rewrite his story.

The wind dropped at about ten o'clock. Breakfast was another stew; afterward, Malplacket was so tired that he slept in the shade of the car.

The midday sun awoke him. He felt grubby and stained, and he took a short walk to revive himself. That was a mistake. The desert looked bigger and emptier than ever.

Later, he read Lester's second draft. “Excellent,” he said. “A vast improvement.”

Lester waited. “I took out all that ironic crap,” he said. “You notice?”

“Yes, I did.” Malplacket returned the pages. “Very wise.”

Lester stuffed them into his back pocket.

“The new satirical undertones are far more telling,” Malplacket said.

“Horseshit.”

Malplacket recoiled slightly. “My dear fellow. You do yourself an injustice.”

“Where? Show me where.”

“It runs throughout. The merest undertones. Your satire is never rampant. One of the qualities I most admire in your work is its satirical restraint.”

“Sure. And this heat's fried your brains.”

An hour before sundown Malplacket cooked another meal. “I'm afraid it's stew again,” he said. “However, I put in some prunes for variety.”

Lester was standing on the roof of the Fiat, searching the northern horizon. “Forty-eight hours,” he said. “They should be here by now.” He climbed down. “I've been thinking. We never would have got into Benghazi without your nosebleed. That was a truly gutsy nosebleed.”

“Thank you. And your performance at the Italian lady's villa was outstanding.”

“Yeah, I thought so. I've always wanted to beat on a door with the butt of a pistol.”

“Gratifying?”

“I found it so.” Lester walked around the car, kicking the tires. “Listen: I know how you feel about alarm and despondency and so on, but . . . Let's not kid ourselves. This is beginning to look not so good, isn't it?”

“A fair summary.”

The night was cold again. The dawn was brilliant, but it revealed an empty desert.

“If we don't go back to the Jebel now,” Malplacket said, “by tomorrow we shall be out of water.” But the Fiat would not start. The more they tried, the more they ran down the battery. Winding the starting handle made noise and blisters, but the engine remained dead.
They cleaned every part that was cleanable, and achieved nothing. The sun was brutal. They got into the car to escape it.

“Just tell me one thing,” Lester said. “Honest answer, OK? Did I really put any irony in that first draft?”

“None.”

“How about the second?”

“I invented the satirical undertones.”

“Now tell me why—”

“A joke,” Malplacket said. “All a joke.”

Lester hunched his shoulders and stared at the trembling horizon.

“Hell of a time to make jokes,” he said.

“It was irresistible, I'm afraid.”

“I leave irony to Hemingway. I put irony in a story, it gets spiked.”

“I apologize. In any case I'm afraid that the joke may have been on me. The real irony is all around us, isn't it? The desert gave us our adventure and now, thanks to the desert, we can't report it.”

Lester got out and tried the starting handle again. It felt like winding up a diesel locomotive. He soon quit.

“I was going to do a third draft,” he said. “You know, add some more color.”

“I wouldn't bother, old chap. What you've done is fine.”

Lester picked at his blisters. “Anyway, the story's not over yet, is it?”

“Good point. Who knows what the morrow may bring?”

When the moon rose, they began walking north. Lester carried a jerrican with about three pints of water in it. Malplacket had calculated that it was roughly a hundred kilometers to the edge of the Jebel, to food and water, provided they kept a straight course. The trouble with walking at night was they couldn't use the sun compass.

“Plenty of stars up there,” Lester said. “I don't suppose you know how to steer by the stars?”

“Oddly enough, they failed to teach me that at Eton,” Malplacket said. “Very remiss of them, wouldn't you say?” The three pints of water sloshed back and forth with every pace.

*   *   *

It took a long time, but details of the strafing of Lampard's trucks trickled through to SAS headquarters, via the International Red Cross, and Captain Kerr was able to write to the next-of-kin. Colonel von Mansdorf and Oberstleutnant Benno Hoffmann got their information much sooner, of course. A German Desert Rescue column had reached the scene while the wreckage was still smoking and brought all the bodies back to Benghazi. Benno Hoffmann escorted Dr. Grandinetti to Schramm's funeral. He was distressed when she cried during the service, but it was only a little, and he cheered up when she smiled at him.

“Poor Paul,” she said. “Poor me. Poor us.”

Afterward, he took her for a drink at the Officers' Club. “The first time we went out for dinner, this was where he wanted us to go,” she said. “For a romantic, Paul had very little imagination.”

“I never thought of him as a romantic,” Hoffmann said. “Of course he wanted to marry you, so . . .” He relaxed: the funeral had taken more out of him than he had expected. “Was that ever going to be possible?” he asked.

“He thought so. He thought he had earned it. Paul believed that pain was payment. He'd suffered, so now he deserved to be happy.”

“Well, you made him happy,” Hoffmann said. “Or at least you made him less unhappy.”

“Did I? I helped him to stop feeling sorry for himself and to stop being angry with everyone else. And I showed him a lot of dying men, so he could see that war is not
adventure and that pain is not payment, because it buys nothing. He didn't believe me,” she added.

“He really shouldn't have gone on that raid,” Hoffmann said. “It was bound to be dangerous.”

“Oh well. Isn't that why he went? Men are always killing themselves to prove their manhood.”

“What Max would call a self-inflicted wound,” Hoffmann said sadly.

“At least Paul made a thorough job of it,” she said. “At least he didn't come back and expect me to help him finish it for him. He was kind enough to spare me that.”

Her words sounded strangely flat. Hoffmann looked, and saw that her eyes were drenched with tears. He felt clumsy and inadequate; he searched for a helpful answer and found none, so in the end he said what he thought. “You loved him, didn't you?” he said.

“He was such a middle-aged child. I shall always miss him.”

She finished her drink. They parted and went back to work. Two days later she left Benghazi for Milan.

There were no more raids on the Takoradi Trail. Fanny Barton got made up to wing commander, but he did not get a DSO; he went to Rhodesia and took over a Flying Training School. Hick Hooper returned to the US Army Air Force and enjoyed his war. Pip Patterson survived. Skull got posted to a bomber squadron in Egypt; after all, he knew something about bombers.

Hornet Squadron was re-formed with a fresh batch of pilots. Kellaway had recovered his wits so he stayed on as adjutant. “Chaps come and go,” he told the new Intelligence Officer, “but the squadron never dies.”

That was in May 1942. One month later, Rommel's advance had carried him so deep into Egypt that he was within a day's drive of Cairo when he was finally checked at El Alamein. By November 1942 the German army had been soundly defeated there. It began a retreat that was to
cover more than a thousand miles, through Egypt and Libya, to Tunisia. In May 1943 the last German soldiers in North Africa surrendered. On September 4, 1943, Italy was invaded and Allied armies were on the mainland of Europe. The Desert Air Force and the SAS went with them. They fought until the war was won, on May 7, 1945.

THE END

A Good Clean Fight
is fiction built around fact. I reckon the reader is entitled to know which is which. In brief: the characters are invented, while the history and the geography are as accurate as I could make them.

The Luftwaffe did have airfields around the Jebel (at Barce, for instance) that were attacked by the SAS; and SAS patrols did drive hundreds of miles via Kufra Oasis in order to raid behind enemy lines. Kufra was not the only desert base that the SAS used, and I have juggled the dates slightly so as to make Kufra their main staging-post in the spring of 1942, a time when there was a lull in the ground war and the Gazala Line separated the two sides.

The Desert Air Force never stopped fighting. It had a lot of Curtiss Tomahawks and Kittyhawks. Many Allied pilots liked these aircraft, but without doubt the higher they flew, the less well they performed. (A New Zealand pilot told me that his Kittyhawk had once been outclimbed by a Liberator—a four-engined bomber. Admittedly, the bomber had dropped its load.) However, as a groundstrafer the Tomahawk or Kittyhawk was a great success.

My description of the work of the SAS—the fact that they drove vast distances in order to outflank the enemy; that they hid up in the Jebel; raided airfields by night either silently, with bombs, or loudly, with armed jeeps; and then made the long return journey through the desert—is broadly accurate. So is the scale of the damage they inflicted. For instance, one patrol bombed thirty-seven aircraft at Agedabia airfield; another blew up twenty-seven
at Tamit; a third destroyed thirty at Barce. David Stirling led no fewer than eighteen armed jeeps onto a German aerodrome known as LG 12 and in the space of a few minutes machine-gunned rows of Me 109s, Stukas, Heinkel Ills and Junkers 52s. In all, the SAS destroyed more than two hundred and fifty enemy aircraft between December 1941 and August 1942.

It was daring work, and the motto of the SAS is, of course,
Who Dares Wins.
They did not always win without loss. Usually they struck hard and escaped fast—the German army was curiously reluctant to retaliate and, as far as I know, Major Jakowski's force had no counterpart in reality. But any SAS patrol that got caught in the open by Stukas or Me 109s was likely to suffer badly.

Special operations called for special qualities. Those who served in the SAS were not wild men, but there can be no doubt that some had more than a touch of recklessness. One of the most remarkable was Captain Paddy Mayne, a big, quick-thinking Ulsterman who had been an Irish rugby international before the war. Mayne was apparently quiet, even reserved, but he had an explosive temper. On rugby tours he had been known to throw fellow players out of hotel windows for no particular reason. When Stirling began to recruit officers, he had to get Mayne out of close detention (he had knocked out a superior officer as a means of settling an argument) and the Irishman made it clear that he was interested in only one thing: fighting.

Mayne inspired huge faith in the men he led. One famous story describes how he ran out of bombs and so he ripped the instrument panel from a Messerschmitt in order to disable it. When not on operations he could be moody and bloody-minded to the point of irresponsibility. (Those who drank with him learned to be very wary.) When Stirling left him at base with orders to train some new recruits while Stirling went raiding, Mayne felt snubbed. He built himself a large bed and lay on it, reading, for days on end.
Stirling came back and was furious at Mayne's negligence. Mayne was only good for combat. At that he was superb: before the war was over he had been awarded four Distinguished Service Orders. To win one DSO is a great achievement; to win four is phenomenal.

All the characters in
A Good Clean Fight
are invented, and certainly Jack Lampard is not based on Paddy Mayne. However, when I was writing the story I was aware that there was room for powerful individuals inside the SAS, and that quirks of behavior were acceptable so long as the individual got results. (Mayne survived the war, but never settled in civilian life; he died in December 1955 when he drove his car into the back of a parked lorry.) Incidentally, as far as I know, Department SU in Cairo did not exist.