Killing Rommel (20 page)

I'm sensing rather than seeing a second vehicle approaching from the north. The machine skids up and stops, broadside across the road.

It's Collie.

I never see who is firing on us or what happens to them. I hear the ungodly shriek of Collie's Vickers Ks and the bang-bang of what must be Marks on the Browning. I'm still hanging on to Miller with my left hand.

Punch and Oliphant appear; they grab Miller. I turn back to the guard shed. Whoever was firing from there has vanished. This is cold comfort, as the racket and fireworks will bring every Axis trooper in the neighbourhood. I smell petrol and see flames behind me on the truckbed. Punch hauls Miller aboard Collie's truck. So much for covering Nick's withdrawal. There's only one option now and that's to get the hell out.

Miraculously my truck is still functioning. Punch and Oliphant climb on. They're kicking flaming petrol tins over the tailboard. I get the engine started; we follow Collie back to the main road.

Trouble, soldiers say, never comes in ones. Now: more headlights. Two fresh sets, speeding towards us from the south. Where are the armoured cars? We never find out. What's clear is there's no way round the approaching lights. They block our escape.

Collie's truck and mine brake in the middle of the road. Steam is pouring from beneath my shot-to-ribbons bonnet; smoke billows from under the cab; I've lost first but second and third seem to work. Jenkins is shouting that his Browning is tits-up. My truck is clearly on its last legs. Should I ditch it? I'm debating piling all eight of us aboard Collie's. But where can we run?

Our only chance is our guns.

The enemy headlights continue closing. They're a thousand yards out but already their high-beams are flickering across the tarmac where we squat.

We wrestle both trucks off the road. “Not far!” I'm shouting. If we bog down, we're sitting ducks. There's no cover. We slog at right angles away from the road, far enough to get clear of the approaching headlights but not so far that we can't dash back on to the road after they pass.

If they pass.

We halt, side by side, tails-on to the road. Every man dismounts and piles brush for cover.

Here come the headlights. We can hear the enemy engines now. Collie climbs back on the Vickers twins; Jenkins assists with the drums. Punch is on one Browning on my truck, Oliphant on the other. Marks seats a magazine in his Thompson. “Hold fire till my order,” I say.

We can see the enemy clearly now.

Two trucks.

Fiat 3-tonners, the kind used to carry infantry.

The vehicles approach at twenty miles per hour, one a hundred feet behind the other. I can see a driver and an officer in the lead truck. Windscreen wipers beat. The officer still hasn't seen us. He's standing on the running board, hanging on to the outboard mirror strut. I see him point ahead.

The lead truck slows.

The second follows suit.

The officer sees us. He swings off the step on to the tarmac, gesturing to both trucks to stop. They do. The officer is very young and wears a Bersaglieri cap. He is pointing to us and shouting something in Italian.

What happens next takes no more than twenty seconds.

The Fiats are stake-beds with brown canvas covers keeping the rain off the soldiers in the back. The men ride shoulder-to-shoulder on wooden benches, one bench along each rail, facing inward. To dismount from the vehicles, the soldiers must stand and file to the back, drop the tailboard and leap down to the road. As they begin doing this, I shout “Fire!”

Collie opens up with the Vickers Ks. Punch and Oliphant join in on the Brownings, Marks on his tommy gun. I'm firing my own Thompson, which I have grabbed in a hurry from its cradle on the cab wall.

The Italians spill from the rear of the trucks, one and two at a time, like children leaping down from a school bus. The officer stands in the road. He has only a pistol. He is firing at us as Collie's Vickers puts a burst dead-centre into his chest. A Vickers K has twin barrels. Its rate of fire is nine hundred and fifty rounds a minute. The gun is designed to be mounted on fighter aircraft. Its intended targets are other airplanes, not unarmoured human flesh. What it does to the young Italian officer I will not describe, except to say that what had been solid in one instant is liquid the next.

The Brownings in Punch and Oliphant's hands are .303 machine guns designed for use against infantry. Their rate of fire is eight hundred rounds per minute. In the Great War, tripod-mounted Brownings routinely mowed down companies of foot troops at ranges beyond five hundred yards. We, this night, are firing at no more than seventy-five feet. That is like saying point-blank.

Within seconds the first 3-tonner has disintegrated. The Vickers shreds its cab; the tyres rip and blow; the chassis crashes dead-weight on to the rims. Petrol spilling from the riddled tanks is ignited by our tracers; the Fiat goes up in a whoosh of orange flame. The second truck is reversing as fast as it can, back down the road. I am firing at it with my Thompson. I see the windscreen shatter. The vehicle lurches out of control, turns side-on and stops. Now the men tumble forth. Half the troopers in the first truck and a portion from the second have leapt to the road. Our machine guns cut them down, then elevate and traverse to take the others still in the trucks. In moments I have run through a fifty-round drum magazine. Punch's and Oliphant's belt-fed guns keep blazing. We are so close to the Italians that I can see the moustaches on their upper lips and the wedding rings on their fingers.

The volume of fire from the Vickers and the Brownings is so prodigious that it creates its own wind. The tarpaulins on the trucks blow and howl, then burst into flame. The Italians spill from the trucks in animal terror. Few have their weapons; none tries to turn and fire. Instead they dive for cover, seeking to burrow under the trucks or to use the frames and wheels as shelter. Our tracers and ball rounds pour into them. I can hear Punch's Browning banging, inches from my ear. Smoke seethes from its barrel. Our guns do not strip the foe of life with surgical strokes. They take them in a holocaust. The spectacle is not like the cinema, in which after a massacre the earth lies littered with forms clearly recognisable as human beings, possessed of heads and arms and legs. When we are done, the enemy are offal. I thank heaven that I glimpse this horror only by the light of the burning trucks and the tracers, and only for the instant I let myself look. One purpose is paramount in my mind. We must kill or incapacitate every man on the trucks. To permit even one to survive, in the darkness from which he can snipe or loose a machine-gun burst at my men, is unthinkable. These are armed enemy, who have hastened to this site with one object only: to take the lives of my companions and me. I must take theirs first. No truth could be plainer. Yet at the same time nothing can alter the fact that beneath the fascist insignia of their uniforms, these men are fathers, husbands, sons.

I let it go on till it seems nothing can remain alive. “Cease fire!”

I dash on foot to the shoulder of the road, peering north to a third, new set of headlights speeding towards us. I am shouting to Collie to get ready to run; we'll blow up my truck and take everybody aboard his. Suddenly the oncoming lights stop. A yellow Verey flare shoots skywards, followed by a red.

“It's Nick!”

In thirty seconds Wilder's patrol has reached us. They have two trucks of their own and an Italian Lancia. Without an order, Punch and Oliphant begin slinging our kit aboard. They pile the Brownings over the rails, then the ammo boxes, water tins and jerry cans of petrol. Grainger sluices our own truckbed and tosses a match. Nick stares at the carnage along the roadside. “Jesus,” he says, “what a mess.”

I climb aboard the Lancia with the din of the massacre still booming in my ears. My last glimpse, as our trucks pull out, is of Punch dashing back to the now-blazing Te Aroha IV to grab our bedding and the jug of rum from its nest behind the tailboard.

23

WE REACH THE rally point at Saunnu to find it shot up and sodden under a downpour. The Benina raid has overturned the hornets' nest. German and Italian patrols cover all escape routes south and east; scout planes scour the flats and every patch of cover. Nick Wilder commands now and I'm glad of it.

For two days and nights we run. Rain makes the trucks hard to see from the air, but the desert surface is mush and our tyres leave great livid scars. From these the enemy reckons our direction of flight; they send Macchis and ME-110s ahead. That's how they find the rally point.

Miller is dead. We've been unable to do anything for him; he has lost too much blood. Our lie-up the first night is tucked into the bank of a wide, stony wadi. We have learnt to site camps beneath gentle slopes, so we can get clear in a hurry if we have to. The post-adrenalin letdown has enervated us badly. We brew up by the heat of the engine block and knock back more rum than we ought. We wrap Miller's body in his greatcoat and belt it into a sand-channel which we lay flat on the truckbed of the Lancia. Miller had been chess champion of his Yorkshire outfit, the Green Howards; we tuck his miniature board and pieces under his shirt. We have not had a moment even to empty his pockets for his wife and children.

Nick calls for my damage report, which I can give in ten seconds: medical orderly dead, wireless vehicle destroyed. On the surviving truck: Browning disabled; cracked sump, two bent tie-rods, petrol for a hundred miles. Men either beat up, shot up, sick or all three. Nick's T1 is in the same shape, except their wireless is still functioning. Like us, they have no working navigation.

We reach the burnt-out RV at nightfall of the second day. Nick studies the site through binoculars, then orders us to pull back five miles to the secondary rendezvous designated before the patrols set out for Benina. Wrecks are sobering sights. Even in the fading light we can make out the hulks of our comrades' vehicles—Doc Lawson's, the fitters', Nick's second wireless truck—belly-down on bare rims with their tyres incinerated under them. The exposed engines are charred black, rubber vaporised, seats melted down to springs and frames. We can see the tracks where the Afrika Korps armoured cars came in, pasted our fellows, then rolled out. Sandbanks have been torn by the treads of half-tracks, the kind the Germans use to ferry motorised infantry. Farther back we can see the lanes carved by the wide desert tyres of the 3-tonners on which they carry ammo, rations and petrol. “They're not out here on a picnic,” says Nick.

This time they mean to find us.

After dark, he takes two men and creeps in to inspect the RV. Returning, he reports three graves, one enemy and two of ours—Daventry and Porter, both New Zealanders, neither of whom I know.

“They buried them cleanly, give the Huns that.” Nick has taken the men's ID discs, which the Germans have left on mounds rimmed with stones. He'll bring them home if he can. The enemy have marked two of our burnt-up trucks with paint:

288 MENTON

“Just to let us know who nailed us,” says Nick. “It's their unit, whatever the hell the name means.”

Exhausted as both patrols are, we can't linger. We'd be safer splitting up—one group might reach safety and send aid to the other—but with only one wireless we have to stick together. Should we bury Miller here, beside the others? There's no time. We divide the remaining petrol and grub among the four vehicles, sharing rum and cigs, tea and chocolate, in case one or two get shot up or mired. “Luck,” says Nick. We're off.

All night we search for a way across the mudflats. Here at the southern end of the Jebel, the wadis all drain to the desert, forming the intermittent lakes called
balats
. The lakes are three feet deep in places, inches in others. Their bottoms are like mucilage. The patrols feel their way in the dark upon the high ground of natural causeways and grope along archipelagos elevated a few inches above the slough. Again and again one truck gets bogged down, leaving the others to tow it clear. Clutches scorch and shudder. The labour proves an ordeal, as tyres become gummed with heavy, water-freighted mud, which can only be cleared by back-breaking spadework. The toil is exhausting; in the end we can't get clear of the
balats
. Dawn finds all four trucks slogging dejectedly back the way they came, west towards the foothills, while double lookouts scan the sky for the planes we know are coming.

0815. ME-110s overhead. Two with one spotter. We're lying up under camo nets in a notch of an escarpment. The MEs haven't spotted us yet. Their technique is to target one notch at a time and blast it top to bottom with cannon fire.

0900. MEs wing off, out of ammo. Spotter has found us, though, stays with us, just out of MG range.

1145. Well, that was a hot hour and a half. MEs back, re-armed, wicked twin-engined monsters spitting fire from cannons and machine guns in the aircraft noses. Our lie-up is so far down the scarp, the planes can't have a real go or they'll crash into the cliff. It's a close thing, though, and we're pretty rattled.

By noon the Messerschmitts have flown off for the second time, returning to base to rearm and refuel. But now armoured cars have found us, probably the same pursuit force that beat up the rally point. No choice but to run. The worst of it is these steady attacks leave us no interval to set up the Wyndom and signal HQ. Other friendly patrols may be within hailing distance. Tinker and Popski certainly. Nick says he's had signals informing him that at least two others, Lazarus' S1 and Spicer's Y1, may be within sixty miles, not to mention Major Mayne and the SAS, from or about whom we've heard nothing since Benina. Compounding the frustration: We don't know how far west the main British advance has pushed. That's where we want to go. Safety may be as close as a hundred miles, which we can reach, or as far as three hundred, which we can't.

Clearly our pursuers know this. They come at us from the east, cutting off all escape in that direction. Do they know we're the outfit that went after Rommel? Have they been sent after us specifically? “There's an Iron Cross waiting,” Nick says, “for any Hun lieutenant who brings in our scalps.”

My watch reads 1230 as our four trucks lurch from their hiding holes and churn north along the base of the escarpment. Pursuing us are at least two armoured cars, a 4-wheeler and an eight, which we've glimpsed bulldozing through the brush, and one or more half-tracks carrying infantry. Our Chevs and even the Lancia could outrun the gang if they were in good repair, but with burnt clutches, patched sumps and punctured radiators, the pursuit bangs and jounces like a Keystone Kops farce. Top speed never gets above ten miles an hour over salt-bush-thick sand and shingle, whose surface is cut every hundred feet by ditches and runnels, some capacious enough to swallow a jeep, others only a foot deep and two across. These are the worst. Into them the front axles plunge with an impact that beats the frame as if on an anvil and sends men and kit flying. Rain continues; visibility is down to fifty feet. We can't see the Germans and they can't see us. The armoured cars' cannons are useless in this gloom, so they simply rake the unseen ground ahead of them with bursts from their 7.92s. We can see tracers rebounding off the scree and hear the bullet-strikes above us on the scarp. With dread, we're counting the minutes till the 110s come back. “Maybe the buggers'll stop for lunch,” Punch shouts across at me as the Lancia bucks over the obstacle-course landscape with every bolt and rivet crying. The chase bumps along, devoid of excitement or even urgency. It just feels stupid. A futile, moronic way to die. About an hour along, our trucks gain enough of a lead for Nick to signal halt and set us up in an ambush position behind the shoulder of a ridge. At fifteen hundred yards, Collie's Vickers and two of Nick's Brownings get good bursts on to the 4-wheeler, which we catch in the open with both hatches up and its commander's and driver's heads high. Through the Dienstglas binos I can see the tracers spraying the armoured car like a garden hose; the German veers, plunges into a shallow wadi and stops with a bang. “Got him!” cries Punch.

“Stay on him,” Nick shouts, “till you knock him out.” For the first time I feel real rage towards the foe. I'm tired of being chased by these bastards. Guns from both our trucks pour fire on to the armoured car. But in a few seconds both hatches button up. The German grinds away laterally, using the wash as cover. Coming our way.

“Slowed him anyway,” says Collie.

We run for another hour, taking intermittent fire from the 4-wheeler (the eight appears to have fallen behind) and from two half-tracks, which we glimpse at intervals among the scrub, until a cracking Old Testament cloudburst saves us.

By dark we're fifteen miles farther on. The storm passes; the heavens clear. The night turns hard cold. We've been running all day north and west, 180 degrees from the direction we want. Night finds us making a hasty camp in a wadi at the base of the escarpment, fifty miles farther from safety than we were at dawn, with less than sixty miles of fuel remaining.

Worse, when Nick's operator sets up the aerial, the atmospherics are so bad he can't raise a peep. Collie, Punch and I scout out a high spot where we hope the next flood won't reach; we slip Miller's body under, digging as silently as if with teaspoons, and set up a cairn with a cross of brushwood. We stand bare-headed over the Yorkshireman. We've got one beer, which at first we think to bury with him, then change our minds and share it out amongst ourselves. “He'd have given us hell,” says Punch, “if we'd wasted a good pint.”

Back in camp a rising mist has turned the night black and cold. “I'm getting bloody tired of this,” I tell Nick as our patrols carve out a lie-up and try to get a brew on. It's clear to everyone that we can't keep on like this. “What now?” I ask.

Nick squints up the thirty-storey face ascending above us. “I don't know what's on top of this bastard,” he says. “But we either get up this scarp tonight or the Jerries'll finish us in the morning.”