A Good Clean Fight (9 page)

*   *   *

Lampard led the patrol at a brisk, bumpy twenty miles an hour through a shallow depression and around a patch of rocks, and stopped. Before he could raise his binoculars he saw the Storch, half a mile to his right, just as it left the ground. “Tally-ho!” he shouted. “After the bastard!” But his driver had already seen it and Lampard's words were lost in the bellow of the engine. The jeep jumped away from its own dust.

The rest of the patrol joined in the chase with more or less enthusiasm. Mike Dunn, in the armed truck, urged his driver on. He knew the contest was absurd: any plane could outrun a truck, never mind out-climb it, but where Lampard led, Dunn followed: simple as that. Sergeant Davis, in the other armed jeep, did the same. In the wireless
truck Tony Waterman left it to his driver to decide the pace. Waterman's job was to remain operational, send and receive signals, not get mixed up in combat. Captain Gibbon, the navigator, had taken over the Alfa-Romeo, and he made no great effort to keep up. The desert surface was patchy and in parts treacherous, the Alfa's tires were losing their tread, and Gibbon believed that Lampard was simply frightening the German plane away, so why take chances?

After a quarter of a mile Gibbon saw that he was wrong. The Storch was flying, but only just. It was not climbing and it was not escaping. As the Alfa bucketed over some unexpected corrugations, Gibbon saw the red pulse of tracer leap from the machine guns in Lampard's jeep and arc high toward the plane. The burst fell short. But not all that short.

Schramm heard the stammer of the guns. He felt curiously unworried. Flying like this was like traveling on a gentle fairground ride, dipping and rising and dipping again. It took his mind off the pain. “Can you see them?” he shouted.

“Ever been to Jalo?”

“No.”

The pilot saw the glint of an outcrop coming toward them and he nursed the machine over it. “Oasis, right? Palm trees, yes? Hundreds. Thousands, probably.”

“Are you going to Jalo?” Schramm asked. It was
you
, not
we
. Schramm was just a passenger now. Excess baggage.

“She won't go over any palms,” the pilot said. “They're much too high for her.”

Schramm looked out and saw the odd palm tree, its fist of leaves well above their heads. The corner of his eye caught the flicker of tracer, as hot as neon. “I know you can't climb,” he said, “but can't you go faster?” He could see there was plenty of throttle waiting to be used.

“Faster is slower. Watch.” The pilot opened the throttle a fraction. At once the speed increased but the nose went down. He closed the throttle by the same fraction and the nose came up again. “Slower is faster. Know why? Fly slow and there's not much airflow over the elevators. We stay up. Fly faster, more airflow for the elevators to bite on, so they send us down. It's a balancing act.”

“They'll catch us if you don't go faster.”

“They'll catch us if we do. Catch us with our nose in the sand.”

Lampard braced himself to fire another burst and as he squeezed the triggers the jeep cornered so sharply that he got swung sideways, lost his footing and shot the sky instead. “God's bowels!” he shouted. When the jeep straightened, he looked to see what the driver had avoided. The sand was brown in places, so brown it was almost chestnut, but tinged white. “Salt marsh?” he said. The driver nodded, too busy searching the land ahead to speak. Lampard looked for the Storch, no longer dead ahead, then looked for the rest of the patrol, strung out behind, and he made his decision. “Stop!” he said. “This is no damn good.”

The jeep turned and cruised back, skirting the long patch of salt marsh. Dunn's truck saw them coming and waited.

“Nasty bit of bog,” Lampard said. “By the time we found a way around it, we'd have been too late.”

“Pity,” Dunn said. “You were gaining on him, too.”

“I was indeed. How far away d'you reckon those palms are?”

“Which palms? I can see about five thousand.” The skyline to the north and west was black with trees. Some seemed to float on lakes of light.

“Two miles at most.” Lampard answered his own question. “More to the point, where's Jalo garrison? It could be on the other side.”

“Don't know,” Dunn said. “Doesn't matter, does it?”

“Correct. Doesn't matter a toss. Not a tiny toss.” They looked at each other and laughed with the suddenness of broken tension. The chase was over, Jerry had won, it was all a joke. Jolly funny joke. Davis's jeep and Waterman's wireless truck arrived while they were still laughing. Corporal Pocock was sitting on top of the truck. “Captain!” Pocock shouted. “That sodding Storch is down again.”

Lampard scrambled up beside him. Far off, beyond a patch of scrub, half a wing could be seen sticking out. The ground where the plane had landed fell away in a slight depression and this had hidden it from view unless you were Pocock, up high. “Brilliant!” Lampard said, and jumped down.

He couldn't wait for the Alfa. He called the rest of the patrol around him for orders. “Stroke of luck,” he said. “Whatever's wrong with that shufti-kite is getting worse. I shall go back in the jeep and try to find a way around the salt marsh. Mike, you follow. The rest wait here. Any questions?”

Sergeant Davis said: “There's Eye-ties in those trees, you know.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Flies.” Davis waved an arm through the buzzing black aura. “Smell the garlic on their breath.” He was not happy.

“Why hasn't someone come out to help those idiots in the plane?”

“Dunno.”

Lampard looked through his binoculars at the stretch of palms, but it was only a gesture, and they all knew it. “It'll take us three minutes, maximum,” he said. “I've never known an Italian who could put his pants on in less than three minutes.”

Gibbon arrived in the Alfa as Lampard and Dunn left. “What's the score?” he asked; and when Waterman explained, Gibbon merely sniffed. “Not impressed?” Waterman said.

“We should be on the trail, not on the spree.”

“It's only three minutes, Corky.”

“What if it takes longer?”

“Then we've got time for a brew-up.”

Gibbon turned away and tried to find some shade. Waterman climbed onto his wireless truck and settled down to watch the attack. Trooper Smedley sat beside him. “If you ask me, this is plain bloody silly,” Smedley said.

“Ours not to reason why.”

“First we go to all that trouble to try to sneak through the Gap, then we go chasing butterflies till we're nearly in Jalo. What's so special?”

“You know what he's like when he gets his teeth into something,” Waterman said. “British bulldog.”

“I had a mate had a bulldog,” Smedley said. “Ugly as sin. Dog wasn't much to look at, neither.”

Schramm leaned forward and tried to see what the pilot was doing to the engine. Waste of time asking: he got no answer except metallic clinks and thumps that made the plane shiver. All he could see were hunched shoulders, moving as if the arms were using a spanner. The stink of petrol was so strong that it shimmered.

“Go and get some soldiers from the garrison,” Schramm shouted, but it came out as a weak shout. “They can tow us in.”

No reply. Schramm gave up. He was an Intelligence Officer; he was not trained for combat, he was trained to use his brains to help others succeed in combat. The last forty-eight hours had proved what he already knew: combat was a young man's game. He rested his head against the baking-hot leather of the seat and thought of cold steins of beer until he could almost feel and taste the wonderful stuff and he had to swallow in order to meet the illusion; but he had no spare saliva and the swallow was a failure. The pilot, looking pleased, climbed into the cockpit. “Problem solved,” he said. “I have emptied half the Sahara out
of the bowels of this poor old cow. Now she'll sing like a bird.”

“And fly like a bird?”

“No, she'll fly like a grand piano, but even a grand piano can fly if you lash enough power to it.”

The engine fired willingly enough; after that it coughed and roared alternately. The pilot knew he had to cut and run before it overheated. He ran, trying to taxi between or around the stones, some as big as melons, that dotted the ground. Three times out of four he missed them. Fourth time, the plane rocked and the wheels suffered. There were also palm trees and patches of scrub to avoid. He leaned far forward until his nose almost touched the windscreen. The rudder never ceased wagging.

Lampard's driver had found a track. It wasn't much of a track, but it was definitely not salt marsh and it seemed to lead somewhere near where the Storch had been last seen. Lampard told him to get a move on, and the jeep hammered along at a good twenty-five miles an hour. It felt like seventy. Behind, the armed truck charged into the jeep's dust with blind faith.

Waterman watched the progress of the interception through binoculars from the top of his wireless truck. It had the inevitability of gradualness: the jeep was traveling at more than twice the speed of the Storch; the gap between them closed like slowly shrinking elastic; you could plan the point of meeting. That point was never reached. When the range was still two hundred yards, the jeep slowed, the truck came alongside it, and both began firing.

As if these shots were starting signals, four armored cars charged out of the oasis in line abreast and sped toward the attack. They were less than half a mile away. Very soon they too were firing, brief ranging shots of heavy cannon laced with tracer. The shots fell close and kicked up sand. Immediately the armed truck was reversing at speed up the track, its gearbox screaming, its driver
searching fur a turning place. Lampard fired a second, longer burst at the zigzagging Storch. Then his driver spun the jeep round and chased the truck.

The Storch kept going. Schramm had felt bullets whacking into it and he had heard them fizzing past. He was helpless, just as liable to be killed if he jumped out as if he stayed inside. The pilot was cursing the airplane, the British and the desert, and his face was screwed into a vast grimace that anticipated each crash of wheel against rock. The engine kept cutting out for an instant and then picking up with a harsh and painful roar, as if it had to take breath each time.
Like a bullfight
, Schramm thought,
it's like a wounded bull
. He told himself not to waste time on fantasies. So what else could he do? Tighten your seat belt! Get your head down! He did both those things.
Fatuous
, he told himself.
Futile.
There was more firing. The pilot sighed. The Storch seemed to trip. It fell on its nose and smashed its propeller: Schramm clearly saw some of the bits spinning away and bouncing off a red rock. The tail kept coming up until Schramm was hanging in his straps, looking down at a boiling cloud of dust and dirt. The door beside him sagged open, a clear invitation. He punched the release button on his straps, fell helplessly and lay with his face in the sand, moaning. Nobody responded. “Oh, Christ, that hurt,” he said weakly. No answer. If it hadn't been for the flies, everything would have been very quiet. Ten thousand flies. All sopranos. How odd. “They can fly,” Schramm told the pilot. “Why can't you?” He examined the flies and saw instead a remarkably regular pattern of black specks, thousands of black specks. The noise was inside his head. “No flies,” he said weakly.

Lampard heard the pounding of the Bofors gun, solid and steady as a bass drum, before he saw the armed truck through the cloud of dust it had thrown up as it reversed. Dunn's driver had found a half-circle of rocks, probably
an old goat-pen, enough to give the truck some protection, and before Dunn could jump down from the cab his crew had the Bofors in action, pumping 37 mm shells at the Italian armored cars. By the time Lampard's jeep stopped in the lee of the truck, the Breda 20 mm was firing alongside the Bofors. The clatter and bang were deafening. Lampard grabbed Dunn by the arm. They ran clear of the dust and the noise.

“Three,” said Lampard. “I can see three. There were four. Where's the other gone?”

“Maybe it went back,” Dunn said. “For God's sake, let's get down.” The three armored cars were at the extreme limit of the Italians' range, but spent rounds were plopping into the sand and Dunn felt conspicuous.

“Why should it go back?” Lampard was searching the scene through binoculars. “Makes no sense. Tell you what makes sense. Outflanking makes sense. Those three keep us busy while number four sneaks round behind us and duffs us up.”

“That's all salt marsh,” Dunn said, waving toward the left. “So he can't get through there, can he?”

Abruptly all firing ceased. The armored cars had pulled back. For a while both sides stood and looked at each other through air that twitched and shivered and baked.

“Let's get out of here,” Dunn said. “What are we waiting for?”

“What are
they
waiting for?”

“The heavy brigade. Stukas. Who knows? Tanks. Artillery.”

Lampard made one last search through his field glasses, knowing that every second was risky and enjoying every second of risk. “All right, let's go,” he said, but he took a final look at the wrecked Storch. Nose down and tail high, it made a silhouette like an English market cross. Someone tumbled from the cockpit and fell out of sight. Dead or alive? Probably alive. Less than totally satisfying, that. Pity
the kite hadn't burned. Nothing beats a nice pillar of flame. His jeep came by and he swung into the front seat.

Dunn was relieved when the three armored cars made no attempt to follow. He guessed that the sudden presence of a Bofors on an ordinary-looking truck had alarmed and discouraged them. Now the only danger lay in covering the next five or six miles of patchy going before the Italians could whistle up an air strike; after that it was all hard, flat desert where you could really put your foot down and sprint for home. A dull thudding pounded the air. At first Dunn thought it was a flat tire beating itself to bits, but the truck ran smoothly. More thudding sounded, then a pause, then a long and gloomy crump. “Jesus!” he said.