A Good Clean Fight (27 page)

When you don't care . . .
I'm bound in iron bands,
When you don't care . . .
I'm lost in desert sands.
In this wilderness, with none but you to guide me,
I'm in heaven with your tenderness beside me . . .

“Sarcastic bastard,” Barton said aloud.

*   *   *

Paul Schramm's feet had begun to heal. He could drive a car, provided he didn't stamp on the pedals, so he drove to Benghazi Hospital to keep the appointment which the station MO at Barce had made for him. Schramm didn't want a second opinion, but he could do with a haircut and the Officers' Club would have the latest newspapers.

An orderly led him to the office of Dr. Grandinetti, who turned out to be female. Well, why not? She looked to be about forty. Her face was a slim oval, no make-up. She had short black hair, very curly, and a straight gaze, with one eyebrow slightly cocked. He did not like the look of her, and he decided to make it as brief as possible. “It's just a few desert sores,” he said.

“That's not what Max told me. Max is quite worried about you.”

“Max is an old woman.” He made a little throwaway gesture. “Sorry.”

She spent an uncomfortably long time looking at him, and then said: “Sleeping well?”

He thought three times before saying: “As well as the British bombers let me.” She kept watching him, so he added, “I don't need much sleep.”

“Lucky you,” she said. Schramm thought she looked slightly amused. Bloody woman.

“Well, if that's it, I'll be leaving,” he said. “Thanks for your time.”

“Suppose I asked you to take your clothes off, major,” she said.

“Suppose I asked you to do the same,” Schramm snapped. He felt the blood rush to his head.
This is ridiculous
, he told himself.
She's trying to provoke you and you're just helping her.

“Suppose we examine this situation.” She opened a bottle of acqua minerale and poured two glasses. “You come here for treatment. In the last three years I have seen ten times as many naked men as you have. Twenty. I see a dozen naked men before breakfast. Not all alive, of course.” She sipped the fizzing water and pushed the other glass across her desk. “So why are you in such a rage?”

“I'm not in a
rage
, for God's sake. It's just that . . .” He shrugged. “This is all such a waste of time. Mine and yours.”

“Don't concern yourself with me,” she said sharply. “Be honest: you don't give a damn about me. Do you?”

Schramm felt trapped. If he agreed, she scored. If he disagreed, she scored double. Bloody woman. “Agreed,” he said. “I think you stink.” It was such a childish remark that he surprised himself. On the other hand he enjoyed it. “Don't feel offended,” he said. “I think the whole damn world stinks.”

“In that case it's no wonder you're depressed,” she said.

“Who says?” He was peeling bits of dead skin off his fingers. He hunched his shoulders. He stared at a corner
of her desk, analyzing the joinery, the way the various pieces of wood fitted together. His eyes felt tired, his eyelids were heavy, he had to keep blinking. This wasn't right, it wasn't fair. He'd come in for somebody to check his desert sores, that's all, and now he'd be lucky to get his haircut . . . Bloody, bloody woman. What the hell was the matter with her? “Maybe I got a touch of sunstroke a couple of weeks ago,” he said wearily. “There's really nothing wrong with me.” He looked up. How could she be so cool? Why didn't she speak? Why didn't she tell him what was wrong with him?

“Sunstroke,” she said. “That was careless.”

“I got captured by the British. That's all I can tell you, and I shouldn't even tell you that.”

“But you escaped.” She made a fist of her left hand and propped her chin on it: a small but touching gesture. “That's not a secret,” she said. “I worked it out by myself.”

“I escaped.” Schramm didn't want to think about all that. “I escaped, that's that, it's over, happy ending, welcome home, Paul. Have a medal, take two, take a dozen, give them to your friends if you can find any.” He got up and took off his tunic. There was sweat on his face. He wiped his face with his hands, wiped his hands on his trousers. “Brilliant. Everyone's proud of you.”

“But the whole damn world stinks,” she said flatly.

“You've noticed it too, have you?” he said. “That's reassuring.” He slung his tunic over one shoulder. “You don't want to look at my sores, and I don't want to look at you.”

“Come back tomorrow, please,” she said. “Same time.”

*   *   *

David Stirling created the Special Air Service in 1941. At a time when everyone else regarded the vastness of the Sahara desert as an obstacle, and an impassable obstacle
at that, Stirling saw it as an opportunity: a golden opportunity. The war was being fought up and down the coastal strip because that's where the road was, plus the occasional length of railway. Thus the battlefield was a thousand miles long but only fifty miles wide, and most of it was empty desert. No civilians to worry about. No property to protect. No pernickety neutrals whose borders had to be respected. It was a tactician's delight and a quartermaster's nightmare. Given enough supplies, you could fight wherever you liked. Given enough supplies: that was the rub. Harbors were few, so the man who allowed commanders to fight was the truck driver. Tens of thousands of truck drivers, German and Italian, British and Commonwealth, brought food and water, ammunition, medicine, mail, petrol and spares and God and the quartermasters knew what else, and hauled their loads hundreds of miles to the Front (which of course did not exist in the traditional sense, being only an interim stretch of desert where you were perfectly free to walk if you didn't mind getting your head blown off by some invisible gunner). At the time of the stalemate in May 1942, each side was trucking its supplies five or six hundred miles.

Long before this, Stirling had shown how vulnerable to attack the enemy supply system was. But first he had had to overcome two massive, ancient, faceless obstacles: the Sahara and British Army HQ. Of the two, the army proved harder to beat.

Stirling's sin was that he was proposing an irregular operation, led by himself; and he was only a second-lieutenant at the time. By instinct the staff at Middle East HQ, Cairo, rejected irregularity of any kind. They had been trained to fight orthodox battles on battlefields: find the enemy and biff him where it hurts, before he can biff you. That's what it came down to. They didn't like cocky young subalterns with nil experience who proposed to poach the best men from the best regiments and then swan off up the
blue where they could run their own show, all togged up like the chorus from
The Desert Song
, no doubt. It was flashy and it was fun to go and play cowboys behind enemy lines, but it didn't win wars. If you allowed one freelance operation, soon everybody would want to do it. “I blame that bugger Lawrence,” a major-general said. “He started this irregular carry-on.
Very
irregular, according to his version. Personally, if I got deflowered by a fat Turk the last thing I'd do is write a damn great thick book about it . . . Who is this fellow Stirling anyway? What's his game?”

Stirling won. He went to the top, or as near the top as he could reach. Being six foot five he was never inconspicuous; what's more he was on crutches, the result of an accident in parachute training which had badly damaged his back and temporarily paralyzed his legs. Nevertheless, he bluffed his way into Middle East HQ without a pass, and before he got caught and thrown out he had managed to talk to General Ritchie, who was deputy to the Commander-in-Chief, General Auchinleck. It says much for Ritchie's and Auchinleck's intelligence and imagination that they recognized a good idea even when it was presented by a crippled subaltern. Stirling got permission to recruit sixty-six men and form a detachment of the Special Air Service Brigade, which did not exist but the title might persuade the Germans that it did.

The first SAS raid went in by parachute, at night, and was a disaster. The aircraft met gales and rain, the parachutists fell into a sandstorm, some were killed or injured, some simply vanished. Of sixty men dropped, twenty-two survived. No damage was done to the enemy. The survivors were brought out by a patrol of the Long Range Desert Group.

Parachuting wasn't the way to deliver the SAS. But if the LRDG could bring them out, Stirling reckoned it could also take them in.

The job of the LRDG was to patrol deep behind enemy
lines and collect information. They could take their trucks across five hundred miles of empty sands and arrive within two hundred yards of their planned destination, even if it was just a cross on the map. Which it often was.

In December 1941 the LRDG escorted three small SAS patrols to within walking distance of several German airfields near Benghazi. Some fields were empty but others were not. Twenty-four aircraft were destroyed at Tamit, thirty-seven at Agedabia. The next night, Stirling's men went back to Tamit, found some replacement aircraft standing there and destroyed those too. Elsewhere, much enemy transport got blown up. The patrols marched back into the desert, rendezvoused with the LRDG, went home to Cairo.

Stirling had found the formula for success: small patrols of very physically fit, highly-trained men, completely self-contained, able to arrive from nowhere, create total havoc in the night and vanish the way they came. The SAS grew rapidly and raided ceaselessly. Eventually it trained its own navigators and became independent of the LRDG. The SAS was more than a thorn in Rommel's side: it was several thorns. They didn't always draw blood. Some patrols got badly knocked about, but that was the price of audacity. If, as Lampard's raid on Barce showed, you could wipe out a fighter squadron at the cost of two lives, in the crude arithmetic of war that was damn good value.

*   *   *

Lampard found a signals lieutenant called Sandiman and a trooper called Peck to replace Waterman and Harris. There was no shortage of volunteers to join the SAS, and both men had seen a lot of fighting in the desert, but Lampard wanted to be sure they had the strength—physical and moral—to survive the extreme tests that SAS raiding would impose.

He called the patrol together and began training. At first they marched across the desert near Cairo with heavy loads. They covered ten or twelve miles, did some weapons-firing, marched another five miles, made a dummy raid on an imaginary airfield, then five more miles and met the truck that took them back to a shower, a meal, a bed. Soon he extended the daily distance and cut down the water ration. Peck and Sandiman kept up with the others.

“Are they good enough?” Lampard asked Lieutenant Dunn.

They were sitting in cane long-chairs outside Lampard's tent. It had been a roasting day and Dunn's aching feet were hugely grateful to be at rest. “They haven't cracked up, cocked up or thrown up,” he said. “What more d'you want?”

“I want to see them drink their own blood.”

Dunn thought about it. “When they've done that,” he said, “should they go on and drink yours too?”

“Yes. Provided they ask permission first. I keep wishing I'd shot that German, you know. That chap Schramm. Shot him before he had a chance to escape.”

Dunn was accustomed to Lampard's abrupt changes of topic. He leaned back and waited.

“Not dead,” Lampard said. “Too valuable for that. But I should have shot him in the leg, so he couldn't run.”

“Water under the bridge, Jack. Besides, it's not as if he got away with any secrets. We didn't tell him anything.”

“Let's go back and bump him off.”

“Tonight?”

Lampard looked him straight in the eyes and held the stare until Dunn had to blink. “No, not tonight.” he said.

“Good.” Dunn was pleasantly drowsy. “Not tomorrow night either, if you don't mind, Jack. I'm taking my popsy to the flicks.” He let his eyes shut. “It's
Snow White.
Utterly terrifying. She holds my hand during the worst bits.”

Lampard left him dozing and went off to make some telephone calls. When he got back, Dunn was very awake and talking to Gibbon, the navigator. “Corky's got a gong!” Dunn announced. “He's got an MC for . . . What's it for, Corky?”

“Usual shit,” Gibbon said. “Stealing pencils, not getting caught.” They knew he was pleased because he looked gloomier than ever.

“Maybe Major Schramm put in a word for you,” Lampard said.

“Bugger Schramm! He was only guessing,” Dunn said. “We're all going to have a drink or seventeen, to celebrate. The whole patrol! You coming?”

“I've got to go to a conference first. Hold out your hand.” Lampard scribbled on Dunn's palm in indelible pencil. “Call me at this number and I'll join you after, say, 2100 hours.”

An hour later he was being let in to the penthouse flat of Mrs. Joan d'Armytage. This was the third time they had met and he was impressed by her smallness. The previous times they had met at Groppi's, where she had been seated and it was crowded. Now, in all this spaciousness, she seemed doll-like. And yet she was a very grown-up doll: a lot of womanliness was packed into that little figure. She wore a black dress, sleeveless, simple. They shook hands. Lampard was afraid to squeeze, so he compensated by taking her hand in both of his. She added her other hand to the clasp. Lampard experienced a sudden tightening in his throat.

They went onto the balcony and drank cocktails. “Very Noel Coward,” he said. “What is this drink called?”

“It's a sidecar. Brandy, Cointreau, lemon juice. Quite drunk-making.”

He looked down at the street. The traffic was fighting its usual civil war. “God, isn't Cairo
loud
!” he said.

She nodded, and looked at the early stars.