A Good Clean Fight (19 page)

“Bloody biscuit again,” Tiny Lush complained. “Boring bloody biscuit.”

“Give the grease a shove,” someone said. The tin of margarine slid along the table.

“Pay attention, Uncle,” Doggart said to the adjutant. Kellaway looked up from his clipboard, still mentally adding columns of figures. “Carry nine, carry nine,” he muttered. “What's wrong, blast you?” he asked.

“Bread,” Lush demanded. “When are we going to get bread?” He banged a biscuit on the table, hard, so that crumbs flew.

“Stuff your bread,” Doggart said, “What about Schofield? Has he bought it, or what? I need to know.”

“How can you stuff bread?” Kit Carson said. “You can't stuff bread.”

Kellaway shut his eyes. “Carry nine,” he told himself.

“I bet they get bread at Wing,” Pinky Dalgleish said.

“Bread's what you stuff stuff
with
,” Carson said.

“Stuff-Stuff?” Kellaway opened his eyes. He looked baffled. “What d'you mean, stuff-stuff?” But by now Carson had his mouth full.

“Schofield owes me forty ackers,” Doggart said. “He bet me five to two Geraldo couldn't fly, silly man.”

Kit swallowed hard and gestured with his mug. “When I said stuff-stuff, I meant like stuffing birds, Uncle,” he explained. Kellaway still looked blank. “You know, like Geraldo,” Kit said.

“Nobody stuffs Geraldo,” said a Greek pilot called George. He had just sat down. “Geraldo is my friend. You want to stuff Geraldo, you have to stuff me first.”

“Queue forms on the left,” said Doggart.

“Schofield's in hospital, that's all,” Kellaway told him irritably. “It's only gyppy tummy, for God's sake. Nothing to get worked up about.”

“Not like bread,” Dalgleish said. “I get very worked up about bread, especially since we never get any.”

“Geraldo's not your friend,” Kit Carson told Greek George. “He bit you the other day. How can—”

“I forgive!” George said. “All Greeks forgive and love everyone.”

“You love Huns?” Tiny Lush asked.

“We love dead Huns very much, yes.”

“Oh, bugger,” Kellaway grumbled. “Now I've gone and forgotten the bloody number I was carrying.”

“Seven,” Doggart said firmly. Kellaway frowned at him, unbelieving. “Or possibly twelve,” Doggart said.

“Fido, you're a berk,” Kellaway said crossly. He had drunk too much of Baggy Bletchley's whisky last night. He really didn't like whisky, but when the air commodore offers you whisky you drink the stuff. That was part of the adjutant's job: keeping the CO company on a whisky-binge. Fanny liked whisky too much and sometimes he liked too much whisky. That wasn't good for the squadron. A hundred yards away, a mobile generator started throbbing.
Kellaway's head throbbed too, but not in synch with the generator. That annoyed him. The whisky had left him thirsty, so he made himself drink tea. It tasted like paint. Warm, sweet paint. What he wanted was milk, chilled milk, pints and pints of lovely chilled milk, so wonderfully white and wet and cold that it would wash him clean and quench his thirst forever and ever . . . He shook his head, hard, to get rid of this torturing image. Sweat dribbled into his eyes and stung them.

Tiny Lush leaned across the table and showed Hooper a biscuit. “See these holes?” he said. “Know what they're for?”

“Beats me.”

“To let the weevils out. You have weevils in America?”

“Sure. The best.” Hooper rapped the biscuit with a spoon. “Any weevils in there?”

“No. Little bastards deserted when they heard we were going up the blue.”

Dalgleish said: “The weevil has a tiny brain, but he uses it all the time. That's the main difference between your average weevil and Kit Carson.”

“Which one is Kit?” Hooper asked Dalgleish. “I've forgotten.”

“The one with jam on his chin.”

“I'm writing a book,” Kit told Hooper. “It's going to make everyone here famous. You wait and see.”

“I knew someone died from gyppy tummy,” Greek George said. “He was running to the latrine and he tripped and broke his bloody neck.”

“Pilot?” asked Doggart.

“Air-gunner.”

“No loss, then. He wouldn't have hit the bog anyway.”

Tiny Lush stood and stretched. “What a dump,” he said. “Half a million square miles of sod-all. I don't know what you did to get sent here,” he told Hooper, “but let this be a lesson to you.”

“I came here to learn air combat,” Hooper said. “So far it's the only thing nobody talks about.”

“What's there to tell?” Lush said. “Try really hard and you might die of boredom.”

“No action?”

“Kit wet the bed last week,” Doggart said. “That was pretty exciting.”

*   *   *

Barton had briefed his flight commanders the night before. He had called them to his truck and shown them a map of the sector of the desert within range of LG 181. “Fun and games tomorrow,” he said. “Ground attack! Nothing but ground attack. What a treat, eh?” He was smiling like a boy who'd been promised an air-gun for his birthday; Pip Patterson thought he could even see a sparkle in Barton's eyes, though it might have been the glint from the oil lamp. “No more climbing and stooging about and finding nothing upstairs,” Barton said. “This is guaranteed action! We'll fly in pairs. Six pairs, six targets.” He waved at the map. Six crosses were widely scattered. “Take your pick, except for this one.” He pointed to the most northerly cross. “That's mine. Lovely juicy battalion of kraut infantry under canvas. Yum-yum.”

“What are these others?” Dalgleish asked.

“Troops, supply depots, fuel dumps, transport parks, the usual rubbish. All on this list.”

They studied the list. “Take off at 0800 hours?” Patterson said. “This is all a bit sudden, isn't it, Fanny? I haven't met half my Flight yet.”

“Brief them after breakfast. They're all old sweats, they'll know what to do. Don't worry about the kites, they'll be ready. I've given the ground crews their orders.” His smile broadened until he burst into laughter. “I do enjoy a good strafe. The little buggers run like rabbits until
bingo! They all fall down, rows and rows of them.” He drummed his fists on the table in a rapid tattoo. “Wizard sport. Wizard!”

“Why eight o'clock?” Dalgleish asked. “I thought dawn was the best time.”

“They're all in bed at dawn. I want them on their feet with their bellies full of breakfast.”

“Breakfast,” Patterson said flatly.

“Yes. See, most blokes feel like death when they get up, so you don't want to kill them then, do you? They wouldn't notice the difference. But prang 'em when they've begun to come alive and it's a much bigger disappointment. See?”

“No,” Patterson said.

“Well, you never did have any imagination, Pip. What was it Moggy Cattermole used to call you?”

“For Christ's sake . . .” Patterson hunched his shoulders. “Bloody Moggy. Why d'you have to bring him up?”

“Pathetic Scotch dwarf
,” Barton said, delightedly. “That was it.”

“Charming,” Dalgleish said.

“It was the way he said it,” Barton told him. “Like . . . I don't know . . .”

“Like a dog shitting on the carpet,” Patterson said. “Moggy was the squadron shit.”

“You must be at least six foot,” Dalgleish said.

“Forget it. Forget Moggy.”

“He was a character,” said Barton.

“He was a shit and he got the shittiest chop you can get,” Patterson told Dalgleish. “Clobbered by a Spit. When would that have been?” Barton shrugged. “September '40, probably,” Patterson said. “Toward the end of the Battle, anyway.”

Barton folded the map and gave it to Dalgleish. “Maybe it wasn't a Spit,” he said. “I mean, that was just a rumor.”

“I heard Moggy yelling blue murder at the other kite on the RT,” Patterson said, “and the Observer Corps said they saw a Spitfire attack a Hurricane. When the post mortem opened him up they found enough three-oh-three ammo to fill a two-pound jam jar.”

“These things happen,” Barton said jauntily. “I should know. I got a Blenheim once.”

Dalgleish had reopened the map. He was estimating the various bearings and times to the targets. “I'd much sooner do this at dawn, Fanny,” he said. “That way we'd have the glare behind us. Dazzle the buggers, right?”

“But you'd have to go in
low
,” Barton said. “Lousy view of the target. Better later. Sun's still in their eyes, it's twice as bright, you arrive at five hundred feet, see what's on offer, nip down, piss all over them, crack off home. Beats working for a living, doesn't it? Right, I'm off to drink Baggy's booze.”

When he had gone, Dalgleish said, “Did he really get a Blenheim?”

“It was the squadron's first kill of the war,” Patterson said. “Mistaken identity. We all thought they were Ju88s. Awful boob. Fanny had to go and apologize.”

That amused Dalgleish. “You wouldn't catch Fanny apologizing for anything nowadays,” he said. “You'd get a kick in the slats before you got an apology out of him.”

Patterson found the list of targets. He spiked it on a pencil and twirled it like a parasol. “I suppose all this gen came from Intelligence,” he said. Dalgleish nodded. “So it's probably three days old,” Patterson said. “A day to take the snaps, a day to collate all the gen, a day to get it sent up here.”

“So what? It doesn't matter what we hit, as long as we hit something.”

Patterson twirled the paper in the opposite direction. “Done much ground-strafing?” he asked.

“As little as possible,” Dalgleish said. “The whole point of flying is to get away from all that unpleasantness.”

*   *   *

Barton's information was wrong. His target was not a battalion of German infantry living under canvas. It was two battalions of German infantry and they were on parade.

This was pure chance. One battalion was being replaced by the other and it chanced that a general on a tour of inspection decided to see them both at once. The men had scrubbed and shaved and polished and pressed, and now they were drawn up in columns of four with their unit standards planted in the sand and their officers strolling about, chatting, sweating and wishing the old bastard would for Christ's sake come. He was forty minutes late.

The only soldier not on parade was a corporal with a sprained ankle who was manning a forward observation post, five miles out in the desert. The British army was a long way off, but you never knew when some armored-car patrol might come looking for trouble or prisoners or cheap glory; and there were always aircraft to watch out for.

The corporal had been on duty all night. He was weary, with the grubby fatigue that conies from hours of doing nothing, seeing nothing, hearing nothing. He had to keep a log, and now he was bringing it up to date:
0500 hours—nil
, he wrote.
0600 hours—nil. 0700 hours—nil.
He heard the noise of aircraft and jerked his head up, but his eyes flinched against the glare and refused to change focus fast enough. By the time he found the two planes a mile away they were leaving him, too low to reveal their wing markings. He got the binoculars on them at the second attempt, but his grip was tense and their speed was great: they kept slipping in and out of view. Still couldn't see the markings. Looked Italian. Italian air force had a new fighter, Macchi 202. These were Macchis. Probably.

He knew about the general's visit. It took him five seconds to worry whether he should telephone the camp and maybe disrupt the entire parade with a false alarm and lose his stripes. Then he grabbed the phone. It took eight seconds for a sergeant to answer it. “You sure?” the sergeant asked. “No,” said the corporal. “Maybe they were ours, maybe they weren't. All I know is they were going fast and low.”

“Major!” the sergeant shouted, and ran. It took him twelve seconds to find the major and another six seconds to give him the information. The major thought hard. “He's not sure?” he asked. He could see the general's car approaching, entering the camp, motorcyclists leading. “No sir, not sure,” the sergeant said.

The major did a brave thing. He dismissed the parade. He shouted the order to dismiss as loudly as he could. “Air attack! Air attack!” he bawled. “Take cover!” He was ten seconds too late. Barton and his wingman, Stewart, arrived in a storm of noise and a blast of gunnery. They began firing before they reached the camp, the aircraft slightly nose-down and the bullet-strikes always racing two hundred yards ahead, so that most of the men they killed were dead before the shadows of the Tomahawks rushed across them. Barton was amazed and delighted. What a mob! What a score! Stewart was so startled he could not quite believe it was happening. The flaming, juddering racket of his guns made his eyelids flicker, and briefly he saw the scene of scattering men and collapsing bodies like an old cinema film, badly projected.

Then the camp was behind them. Some red tracer chased the planes. Barton weaved a bit to spoil the gunners' aim. Soon they were out of range. Barton climbed and turned for home. Stewart followed, covering his leader's tail as a good wingman should. The strafe had been over so quickly, he couldn't take it seriously. He found himself chewing hard on the inside of his mouth. He'd fired one long burst,
that was all, and it had ripped through those men, flattened them like a gale of wind. Stewart was as keen to score as the next fighter pilot: he knew the exultant surge when an enemy plane exploded or spun down and crashed. But this was different. This wasn't fighting. The old reassuring phrases slid through his mind:
They started it. They'd kill you like a shot if they could. The only good Hun is a dead Hun.
He was not reassured. He tasted blood and stopped chewing.
Forget it
, he told himself.
It's over. Forget it.