A Good Clean Fight (17 page)

“Ah.” Hooper seemed quite satisfied with that.

During lunch Bletchley chatted about the latest war news
until he suddenly said to Patterson: “I'm rather surprised you're still a flight lieutenant after all this time and effort.”

“Maybe I prefer effort, sir.”

“But you were in line for promotion recently, weren't you? After your last tour of ops?”

Patterson looked away. “Somebody hinted that there was another stripe waiting if I went down to Rhodesia and did some instructing.”

“Rhodesia! Wonderful country,” Bletchley told Hooper. “Chance of a lifetime,” he told Patterson.

“Damn good chance of getting stuck there for a lifetime,” Patterson said. “It's three thousand miles from here. I wangled a job at the Fighter School just down the road instead.”

“Where, I'm told, you've been invaluable,” Bletchley said.

Patterson shook a few grains of salt onto his plate, dipped his finger and licked the tip. He said: “I served my time, I paid my debt to society and now I'm ready to come out, sir.”

“Back to combat?” Hooper said.

Bletchley smiled at them both. “Take a tip from an old lag,” he said. “Don't push your luck. Know when to fight and when to run away. That's what Eddy Rickenbacker told me in the last show, when I was young and eager, a damned sight too eager.” Patterson still sat hunched over his plate, tapping the salt grains and brushing them off his fingertips. Hooper got on with his steak. “There's no shame in knowing when to quit,” Bletchley went on. “Quite the reverse, because there's no merit in death. Not a bit. That stuff about
dulce et decorum est pro patria mori
is all balls, you know. Death in action is neither sweet nor fitting, and God knows I've seen enough of it to know.”

“Me too,” Patterson said, not looking up.

“Of course I grieve for every man we lose,” Bletchley said. “That doesn't mean to say I measure each man equal,
equally valuable, equally expendable. Certainly not. Some men must be protected. Their worth is greater. Simple as that.”

Patterson raised his eyes. “Are you still talking about me, sir?” he asked.

“I've been given a roving commission,” Bletchley said. “Stooge about from squadron to squadron, talk tactics and equipment, find out what's cooking in the kitchen and then spread the good word. Sharpen the cutting-edge. Sort of thing we should have done in the Battle of Britain and didn't. We had no flow of information then, neither upward nor sideways, so a lot of decent chaps got killed for nothing.
This
time we'll get it right. There's a place on my staff for an intelligent young fighter pilot.”

“I've applied to go back on ops,” Patterson said. He disliked Bletchley too much to look at him.

“I'm looking for someone who's flown in the desert and who knows what questions to ask. He'll be a squadron leader this year and, if he plays his cards right, probably a wing commander next.”

“Excuse me, sir,” Patterson said. He got up and walked toward the lavatory.

He washed his face, scrubbed his nails, brushed his hair, let his pulse-rate slow down, and went back. Hooper was eating ice cream. Bletchley was watching a waiter peel an orange for him. “You've given it some thought, then?” Bletchley asked.

“Not for a second,” Patterson said. “I want to join a fighter squadron in the desert, sir. I want to get back on ops.”

“Of course you do. But first you want some of that splendid ice cream. A double portion for Mr. Patterson,” Bletchley told the waiter. “Where he's going, his memory of the stuff will need all the help it can get.”

They moved to the terrace for coffee.

“You might like to know,” Bletchley told Patterson,
“that if you had shown the slightest interest in joining my staff I would have been on the phone this afternoon and your posting up the blue would have been killed stone dead. Up the blue,” he told Hooper, “means into the desert.”

“I'm flattered, sir,” Patterson said.

“Don't be. I wouldn't have you on my staff under any circumstances. You're a total fighter pilot and as such completely useless for anything else.”

Patterson was startled. “Then why offer me the job, sir?”

“To make absolutely sure. But if you'd so much as blinked, you know where you'd be tomorrow?”

“No idea, sir.”

“Rhodesia. Wonderful country. You'd hate it.” He drank his coffee in three gulps. “As it happens I'm going your way tomorrow, so you can have a lift up the blue. Cairo West aerodrome, 0600 hours. No, don't get up.”

They watched him stride away, upright and confident as a good RAF officer should be. “Bastard,” Patterson said. “Did you see his dirty little game?”

“I saw it before you did. Kind of took you by surprise, didn't he?”

Patterson scowled at Bletchley's empty chair. “You'd think he'd have something better to do in the middle of a war than talk a pilot into flying a desk.”

“Well . . .” Hooper looked at Patterson's left hand. The thumb was constantly worrying the fingers, pressing and flicking, chasing and snapping. Patterson put his hand in his pocket. “How many tours have you done?” Hooper asked.

“Two.” Patterson stared him in the eye. “Just two. One in the UK, one out here. The way that old bastard was going on you'd think I was over the hill.”

“Don't get mad at me,” Hooper said. “I'm just a poor harmless Yankee boy who got sent in to make up the numbers.”

“I'm going for a swim,” Patterson growled. “D'you want to come?”

Hooper was slightly amused. The ends of his mustache went up a fraction. “I read a book about how to make friends,” he said, “and I have to tell you, you're doing it all wrong.”

“I don't want to
make friends
,” Patterson said. He made it sound like a disease. “I made a lot of friends once and they all turned out to be bloody idiots, every single one of them.” His stare was now a challenge for Hooper to argue the point.

“I just had a great idea,” Hooper said. “Why don't we go for a swim?”

They walked across the terrace.

“What about this evening?” Hooper said. “Any plans?”

“I think I'll murder my wife,” Patterson said.

“Yeah,” Hooper said. “Well, I can see how that might make you feel better.”

The Tomahawks landed at LG 181 in the late afternoon when the air was calm and the light from the west made lengthening shadows of the machines until the wheels touched and created high plumes of dust that ran down the strip and fogged everything.

LG stood for landing-ground. Most of the Western Desert was one enormous LG. All you needed to do was pick the rocks out of the sand. In England the fighter airfields were given friendly names: Biggin Hill, Tangmere, Middle Wallop, North Weald, Hornchurch, Bodkin Hazel. No names in the desert. Nothing to name.

The squadron had flown fifty miles from LG 158 to LG 181. This did not mean there were twenty-odd landing-grounds between the two. The war was not as neat as that; the war had bounded and rebounded across the desert, sometimes charging in hot pursuit, sometimes lurching into uncertain stalemate, sometimes backing off in a strategic withdrawal that degenerated into a galloping rout. As the armies moved, so the air forces abandoned or seized airfields which were often already familiar to the new owners because they had been seized or abandoned more than once before. If the airfields became crowded there was always more desert for a new LG and always a new number to identify it, sand and numbers being very cheap in North Africa.

The ground crews had moved to LG 181 by truck during the day and the pilots found more or less what they had left: a fringe of tents, a couple of dozen vehicles, a fuel
dump, an ammunition dump, four Bofors ack-ack guns, cooks' wagon, signals truck, latrines and half a million flies. In case of enemy attack, everything was widely dispersed.

Barton landed first. He dumped his parachute on the wing and strolled across to the signals truck. Prescott and Schofield were sitting in its shade. “Christ, you look lousy,” Barton said to Schofield.

“He feels lousy,” Prescott said.

“I didn't ask you,” Barton said.

“I know you didn't,” Prescott said, “but at the moment all messages are being relayed through me. I expect you want to know what's wrong with him.”

Barton squatted and examined Schofield's face. Beneath the tan, Schofield's skin was slack and gray and his eyelids drooped, pouchy as a frog's. Schofield licked his lips and breathed through his mouth, almost panting, then licked his lips again. Apart from that he sat quite motionless, as if he'd been dumped there. “What's wrong with him?” Barton asked.

“Gyppy tummy. The Doc's gone to get some stuff.”

Barton touched the intelligence officer's cheek. “He's freezing,” he said. “Get a blanket.”

“Five minutes ago he was sweating buckets.”

“Just get a blanket.”

Prescott went. Barton stood and looked down at Schofield. The squadron MO arrived, carrying a bottle of water. “Dysentery,” he said. He knelt and got Schofield to swallow a tablet, holding the bottle to his lips to wash it down. “Well done,” he said. “Now for God's sake
keep
it down.”

For the first time, Barton noticed the smell.

“We can't wait for the ambulance plane,” the doctor said. “The troops are refueling the blood wagon now. I'll go with him.”

Barton took the bottle and had a swig. “What am I supposed to do for an intelligence officer?”

“Beats me. This one's no good to you. He's discharging at both ends and leaking through every pore. If he goes on dehydrating like that in this heat he'll be dead in twenty-four hours.”

The ambulance bustled across the sand and pulled in downwind, so that its dust would not blow over them. Prescott arrived with a blanket, in time to see Schofield lifted aboard and driven away. “Tough luck,” he said. He was wearing the blanket draped over his head and shoulders.

“Don't stand there looking like Santa Claus,” Barton said. “Get on to Wing, tell them—”

“I already told them, Skip,” Prescott said. “They'll organize the ambulance plane and it'll rendezvous with the Doc, if not tonight then first thing tomorrow.”

“Yes, but—”

“And Wing is also finding us a new IO with utmost speed. The adj sent off a signal half an hour ago.”

“Oh.”

“We're not complete dummies down here, you know. You flash boys may be hot stuff upstairs, but the ground staff does its share of work too.”

“Sure.” Barton scuffed the sand to cover the stain where Schofield had been sitting. “What have you done about the view?”

“View?” Prescott turned through a full circle and everywhere he looked was empty and flat and desolate. “What view?” he asked.

“Exactly,” Barton said. “It's perfect. Don't touch it.” He trudged off to his quarters. As squadron commander he was privileged to live in a trailer. Everyone else had half a tent, except for flight commanders, medical officer, intelligence officer and adjutant, who had a whole tent each.

By now the squadron had landed and the pilots had moved into their tents. Moving in took only a couple of
minutes; you put up your camp bed, unrolled your bedroll and dumped your personal kit in a corner. Personal kit amounted to a few clothes, toilet kit, perhaps a book, sometimes a souvenir such as an Italian officer's dress sword or a pair of German binoculars. One pilot kept a pet tortoise. Most tents had lucky charms kicking around somewhere: a mangy rabbit's-foot, a pair of dice, a celluloid toy won at a fair, a twisted bullet pried from a cockpit, a girlfriend's scarf, now torn and sun-bleached and streaked with sweat stains, but still treasured like the last five-pound note on earth.

The youngest pilot on the squadron was Kit Carson. He was twenty but looked eighteen. He had been christened Tarquin Borrowdale Delahaye Carson, but from the day he went to school he was called Kit. Because he had an uncle who was a bishop, and because he wore a little gold crucifix on a fine chain around his neck, Kit considered that he was not superstitious; yet he was interested in other people's superstitions. He wandered from tent to tent, asking questions and writing the answers in a spiral-bound notebook he had scrounged from the orderly room.

Tiny Lush, dozing on his bed, muttered obscenities at him so Carson moved on. He found Billy Stewart sitting motionless in the doorway of his tent with his hands eighteen inches apart as if describing the length of a fish. Occasionally the hands clapped and Stewart did or did not kill a fly; then the hands returned to their first position. “Got a minute, Stew?” Carson said. “I'm finding out if people are superstitious. Have you got a lucky charm?”

Stewart did not look up. “The little buggers know I'm here,” he said. “When I kill one, the others all get a really bad case of the twitch for twenty seconds. But they never go away. Not stupid, see? But not bright either. You've got a brain like a fly, Kit. What d'you think they think I think they're up to? And vice versa?”

“Dunno. Is this a superstition of yours? Killing flies?”

Stewart was silent for a good minute. Then he said: “I have only one superstition, Kit. I never talk about my superstitions. I'm very, very superstitious about that. Write it down.”

As Kit Carson wrote, Stewart abruptly banged his palms together. Carson said: “You can't kill them all, Billy.”

“Ah, but they don't know that, do they? And I think I've got them on the run. They're showing signs of panic.”

Fifty yards away, Pinky Dalgleish watched from his tent. He was “B” Flight Commander and he had been called Pinky because his little finger stuck out like a bowsprit when he drank tea. This was a misleading characteristic: Dalgleish was an aggressive pilot who hated coming back with unfired ammunition, and he had a sometimes black and brooding temperament which made Kit Carson nervous of him, even though Kit was not in “B” Flight; but now he saw Dalgleish watching and decided to go over.