Take or Destroy! (31 page)

‘Come on,’ he roared, leaping unexpectedly to his feet. ‘Come on!’

None of his men was ready and they were slow to move. Bullets whacked into the trees about them and one of them went down with a crash. It only served to excite Swann still more and he stood erect, yelling and waving his arm.

Hockold saw him from the ruined arch. ‘Get down, man!’ he yelled, but Swann was oblivious to everything now and had set off running. He rounded the corner by the mosque into the Shariah Jedid in fine style, yards ahead of the heavily-laden Jacka and the rest of his party.

Tor God’s sake,’ Jacka muttered in disgust.

Swann was charging happily up the hill now, elated by the fact that he was out of the German fire and by the knowledge that this time he was going to show everyone what he could do. Turn right, he’d been told. An opening appeared alongside him. It was nothing but an alley and was clearly the one he’d been told to avoid. Just ahead of him was another opening wider than the first.

‘Not that one!’ Jacka yelled, but Swann didn’t hear him in his excitement and swung round the corner, so blind with elation he hardly knew what he was doing.

Jacka saw him go. ‘Oh, Christ,’ he said. ‘The silly bugger didn’t have to do that!’

On the corner of the alley down which Swann had disappeared, Jacka stopped dead. Almost immediately it narrowed and turned again, and there was no sign of Swann. Jacka knew it was dangerous to go in there, and he signed to the men to follow him up the Shariah Jedid instead. Twenty yards further on he saw the opening he wanted.

‘Here we go,’ he said.

Immediately in front of him there was a warehouse surrounded by a wire fence with a notice bearing a skull and cross-bones and the words,
Achtung! Lebeinsgefahr!

There was a little guard-house by the entrance, from which a burst of firing came as they approached. They flattened themselves against the wall; then Jacka pulled out a grenade and tossed it at the guard-house. It bounced off the door and burst with a shattering crash in the narrow street.

It didn’t seem to have done any damage but the door of the guard-house opened and two Germans stumbled out with their hands in the air. In the excitement one of Jacka’s men shot them.

‘You silly sod,’ Jacka said furiously. ‘They’d packed it in!’

He blew the lock off the gate with his Tommy gun and, as he did so, he became aware of another man lifting his head from behind a crate just beyond. He fired quickly. Splinters leapt from the crate and the head disappeared. In the silence he could hear moaning.

As they pushed through the wrecked gate, they found themselves in a small compound, with the doors of the warehouse at the end of it. Again they shot the lock to pieces. Dragging the doors back, they found themselves staring at crates, piles of shavings and stacks of tyres.

‘That lot’ll burn nicely,’ Jacka said with satisfaction. ‘I wonder what that silly bugger Swann’s doing?’

Swann was staring down at the bodies of two people he’d just shot. As he’d hurtled out of the Shariah Jedid and down the winding alley he’d found himself face to face, not with a warehouse as he’d expected, but with a group of small flat-roofed native houses that gave off a smell of urine. They’d looked wrong and he was just wondering where he’d made his mistake when he saw two figures moving in the shadows by a doorway and fired automatically.

They fell into the street and, as he edged forward warily, he saw that both were Arabs. One was a mere boy with a fez on his head who was sprawled against the wall, stone dead, his nose punched in by Swann’s bullet, his crossed eyes staring blankly at his bare feet. The other, who looked like a bundle of dirty washing, appeared to be an old man, his eyes opaque with trachoma; he was moaning quietly and Swann could see blood oozing from underneath his rags.

Realizing in horror that the man was blind and that the boy had been leading him to safety, he looked round for Sergeant Jacka for advice. To his surprise, there was no one with him and he moved back a little down the winding lane. But there was no one there either and he swung once more towards the two bodies, worried about the old man. He was still standing there when Private Bontempelli, shoving his head out of Zulfica Ifzi’s room to see if it were safe to leave, stumbled into him.

He was as startled as Swann and quite prepared to put his hands up in surrender. But Swann was troubled, lost and shocked at having shot two harmless people who weren’t even in the battle, and he was slow to respond.

Bontempelli recovered first and lifted his rifle.
‘Mani in alto!’
he said. His voice was almost falsetto with fear.

Swann stared. ‘Pardon?’

Bontempelli coughed and swallowed.
‘Hande hoch’
he tried. ‘Hands - oop!’ He drew a deep breath and lifted the rifle.
‘Per favore, Signore,’
he added politely.

Attention was then turned to fuel supplies, gun positions and supply ships.

The smoke which had aided all the other parties had served only to hinder Captain Watson. It was blowing back from the smoke floats at the end of the mole and, caught by the blast from the guns, was drifting over the supply ships in whirling swathes, thick, choking and obscure.

Watson had been the first man on board. The draped folds of the heavy camouflage nets, threaded with broad strips of coloured canvas, made the decks gloomy, but there were areas of speckled light where the glare from the flames shone through and as he had leapt aboard
Andolfo,
the inner ship of the trot of three, he saw a startled officer pop up from a hatchway.

‘Wer da?’
the officer said, wondering what was happening, and Watson, still running, kicked him in the face like a footballer taking a ball on the run. The officer’s head snicked back, his neck broken, and he slid out of sight. Followed by Devenish and a group of soldiers, Watson continued without a pause across the connecting gangplank to
Guglielmotti,
the next ship. A soldier carrying a gun appeared round a winch. Automatically, the man alongside Watson lunged forward with his bayonet and the soldier fell back with a scream. On
Cassandra,
the last ship, the guards, who’d been inside the galley making coffee, had more time to collect themselves. But when they appeared and found themselves faced with the horde of black-faced men bristling with weapons, they weren’t sure what to do. They knew all too well what was beneath their feet and had already decided among themselves when they’d first heard of the likelihood of a raid that it was probably unwise even to fire a rifle. An Italian merchant seaman who appeared confirmed their fears.
‘No
!’ he screamed, diving behind an open hatch.
‘Non tirare!’

The British, better organized and better briefed, didn’t have to worry and the three guards went down under a swarm of dark figures with flashing knives and bayonets.

Led by the naval guides, Watson’s party scoured the officers’ and crews’ quarters of the three ships. It didn’t take long and as they began to come up on deck, their hands in the air, Devenish started to climb into the hold of
Andolfo
with his plastic explosive.

As he disappeared, an unexpected burst of firing from the end of the mole stopped the other party dead in their tracks as they headed for
Giuseppe Bianchi,
further along. Watson was standing under the drooping netting at the end of
Andolfo’s
gangplank where he could keep an eye on all four ships at once, at the same time shepherding the captured crews over to
Umberto.
He was quite safe from the machine-gunners on the end of the mole, but a chance burst from the houses across the harbour swept across the decks, ripping through the netting and making the strips of canvas leap and dance. As Watson’s head jerked up, the next burst ripped into his face, neck and shoulders, and sent him staggering sideways across the mole to crash into the wooden shelter Upholz and Wutka had used as they checked the cargoes.

For a moment, he clung to the shelter, his fingers clawing the wood, startled by the lash of pain and his inability to do anything about it. Then, slowly, as his knees gave way, he slid down, his face scraping the rough timber to leave a dark smear across its gritty surface, and fell into a sitting position before rolling gently sideways. Shocked by the suddenness of his dying, as he felt the cold stone of the mole against his cheek, he knew without the slightest doubt that he would never see his wife again and would go groping through eternity to find her, his last conscious thought the question, Why? Why? Why?

As Devenish emerged from the hold of
Andolfo
and pushed aside the camouflage netting, Sergeant Bunch appeared from the
Giuseppe Bianchi
party. He carried a haversack and looked worried. ‘Sir,’ he announced, ‘our party copped it and the navy chap’s stopped one. These are his charges but we’ve nobody to place ‘em.’

‘Oh, dear,’ Devenish said. ‘Well, just hang on a minute, Sergeant, please. I’ll be along when I’ve finished here.’

Bunch stiffened to his plaster mould salute and went back to where his men were crouching behind bollards and piles of rope, a little startled at the good manners of RAF officers. As the wounded were dragged away, he indicated the stone warehouses further along the mole. ‘I think we ought to do something about that,’ he said. ‘There’s a crowd of nasty old Jerries down there.’

Almost as he spoke, the 47 at the end of the mole fired across the harbour. Like the gun near the Mantazeh Palace it had never been intended to fire into the town, and only Wutka’s telephone call had stirred its bewildered crew to life. It was hard to see what was happening round the Roman arch for the dust and smoke, but as they dragged the gun round, they saw HSL 117, a sitting target as it waited for Sotheby below the POW compound. At the crash, the camouflage netting on
Giuseppe Bianchi
leapt and the HSL, the last one afloat, went up in flames. As it began to settle, the crew of the 47 got to work again to manhandle their weapon further round towards the town. They were occupied with drawing a bead on what looked like a group of men round a machine-gun when the smoke cleared unexpectedly, and Bunch’s party were seen edging forward along the mole.

As the machine-gunners opened up and Bunch and his men flopped down behind the drums and crates and timbers once more, they were spotted by the 47 by the Mantazeh Palace. Its crew worked the barrel round and let off a round across the harbour, which knocked a rusty ventilator from the sunken freighter in front of the warehouse and whanged into the wall of the mole near where Bunch was lying.

‘Bit nasty round here,’ Bunch observed mildly as chunks of concrete and metal flew through the air. ‘I think we’d better nip back and bring up a few reinforcements.’

Still wondering what had happened to Swann, Sergeant Jacka had prepared a splendid bonfire. He had even found a second warehouse attached to the first, which was full of clothing and other stores. Manhandling drums of petrol from the little compound by the gate, he and his party forced them open and poured their contents among the crates, shavings, tyres and bales of clothing. Then he opened skylights and doors to make a good draught and, withdrawing his men, placed two charges with five-minute time pencils and retreated to the gate. Just to make sure, he withdrew the pin from a Mills bomb, tossed it into the store, and ran.

It didn’t need the plastic explosive.

He had just reached the corner when the grenade exploded, and the blast of the petrol going off sent him skidding on his chest into the arms of his men. In a matter of minutes both warehouses were ablaze.

The glare lit their sweating, dusty, blackened faces and Jacka watched for a while to make sure everything was well alight. Then he gestured. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘We can think about getting back now.’ He looked round. ‘I wonder if that silly sod Swann’s found his way out of Wogtown yet.’

As a matter of fact, Lieutenant Swann, seething with fury, was sitting on a none-too-sweetly-smelling bed in Zulfica Ifzi’s room not very far from Jacka’s blaze. His revolver and Sten gun reposed on the floor by the door and a perspiring Private Bontempelli sat facing him on a chair, pointing a rifle at his chest. Zulfica Ifzi stood alongside the Italian, chewing gum and occasionally taking a drink from a bottle of beer.

‘Look,’ Swann tried. ‘This is silly.’

Bontempelli frowned.
‘Signore?’

‘I mean, you’ve lost the war.’ Swann tried to gesture while keeping his hands in the air. ‘It’s obvious. You might as well give yourself up.’

Bontempelli could understand quite a lot of what Swann was saying but he preferred to feign ignorance.
‘Signore?’

‘I mean, give yourself up to me now and I’ll see you get jolly good treatment.’

For a moment Swann wondered - as he’d wondered on and off for some time now - whether he could take a dive at Bontempelli and wrestle the gun from him. But Bontempelli’s finger was on the trigger and he looked nervous.

In fact, Bontempelli was
very
nervous because he’d just remembered that his rifle wasn’t loaded. There were bullets in the pouches on the belt resting across his knee but he’d forgotten to thrust a clip into the magazine and he had a suspicion that if he tried to now, Swann would take the opportunity to pounce on him. Despite their well-known sense of fair play, he had a feeling that the British didn’t stick to the rules when they were in trouble.

It occurred to him he might use Swann’s Sten, but he had no idea how a Sten worked and he felt that if he took his eyes off Swann long enough to find out, it would be just
too
long. There was also the revolver, of course, but British service revolvers were reputed to have a kick like a mule so that you couldn’t hit the side of a house with them even at ten yards. No, he decided, it was safer to keep the muzzle of his empty rifle pointed at Swann’s chest and hope for the best, conscious that nobody but he knew how his life hung entirely on the Englishman’s ignorance.

Zulfica Ifzi was watching him, her eyes bright. It was obvious she thought him a hero and he knew that the next time he arrived on her doorstep the fun and games would be twice as erotic as hitherto. She was an accomplished performer when she gave her mind to it and, by the look on her face, in future she’d be a mass of concentration.