A Good Clean Fight (28 page)

“You'd think they'd get fed up with shouting at each other,” he said. “Arab mentality, I suppose.”

She said
Mmm
as she worked on her drink.

“Still, I expect they think we're pretty peculiar too,” he said.

The sidecars had come from a cocktail shaker. She gave it a flourish, and the ice cubes chattered. “Look,” she said, “we don't need to go through all that junk again, do we?” It was a statement, not a question, and a pretty brisk statement at that. Lampard said: “Um . . .” She poured more drinks, and did it with a snappy action that suggested impatience. “The first time we met you were kind enough to tell me how Desmond got killed, frightfully brave, trying to save somebody else and so on, and you produced the large masculine handkerchief as required.”

“Never got it back, though.”

“You will. Second time, we talked about Desmond a bit, London a bit more and Cairo a lot. A hell of a lot. Good. I'm not complaining, but we've done that. Haven't we?”

Lampard pressed the chilled glass against his chin.

Thirty miles his patrol had marched since dawn that day, on a bottle of water: a ration which the British Army considered fatal, and yet everyone had survived. Tongues like raffia place-mats, maybe, but they survived. Now he had inside him this thrilling drink, which made him feel as happy as he'd felt since he'd strolled about the hangar at Barce, leaving bombs like clues in a treasure hunt, and here was the startling Mrs. Joan d'Armytage looking at him with one eyebrow cocked and half a smile. It made
him
feel small, that look of hers. A porcelain doll, yet she made him feel small. Amazing. “I'm sorry,” he said.

“Oh, stop being so bloody English. I'm widowed and you might be dead next week. Why apologize? It's such a waste of energy.” She turned and went inside.

Lampard counted to ten and followed her. She was standing in a dark corner, looking at gramophone records.
“Anyway, you're not a bit sorry,” she said, “so why lie? I hate this tune.” She smashed a record against a table, casually. “Desmond's favorite,” she said. “Now it's in as many bits as he is.”

“Don't get mad at Desmond,” Lampard said. “It's not his fault he's dead.”

“I'll be mad with anyone I want to,” she said calmly. “You really are utterly useless, aren't you? You can't be relied upon to do the simplest thing.” She left her gramophone records and walked over to him. She took his hands in each of hers and raised them to her shoulders. She slipped his fingers beneath the straps of her dress. “Up,” she said. She raised her arms as he raised his. The dress came off as easily as shelling peas. Easier. Underneath was nothing but skin. “Well, it's a hot climate,” he said. “Have you a coat hanger?”

“I do,” she said, “but if you have a cock I think that might fit better.” He looked shocked. She looked pleased. She took his hand and led him into the bedroom.

*   *   *

The water-tanker and its escort failed to meet the rest of the column at the rendezvous.

It was late afternoon before the column arrived at the map reference point, exactly one hundred kilometers south of the Jalo Gap, and found nothing but empty serir. The map had promised vast areas of serir, an Arab word meaning a flat gravel plain, and it was right. To the horizon in any direction no stone was bigger than an egg.

The surface made for fast, accurate driving, and on the way south Major Jakowski had taken the opportunity to hold a couple of training exercises.

“Suppose we were to meet an enemy force, here and now,” he said when they stopped for the midday meal. “What would we do?”

“Depends on its size, sir,” Captain Rinkart said.

“Ten vehicles. No armored cars.”

“So they are almost certainly not going to attack us. I would approach them and find out if they out-gun us.”

Jakowski was disappointed: Rinkart sounded awfully cautious. “Look: you're strong enough to surround them and hit them from all sides at once,” he said. “While you're thinking it over, they're escaping.” He turned to Captain Lessing. “Aren't they?”

“Yes, if they possibly can. However, if we make them stand and fight they might be carrying light howitzers in their trucks. Say, six shells a minute from up to five or six kilometers. Just imagine, sir.” Lessing shook his head. “They might even hit
you.”

“No artillery,” Jakowski ruled.

“Well, there's still the possibility of heavy-caliber machine guns,” Rinkart said. “I hear they've got twin point-five-inch Vickers on their trucks. RAF surplus. The Vickers is a brute of a gun. It can blow a truck to bits at three thousand meters. It's still lethal at four or five thousand. Six, maybe.”

“That's that, then,” Jakowski said. “Let's all turn round and hurry home.”

“No, sir,” Lessing said. “Let's call in the Stukas.”

Jakowski shook his head. “Radio silence. I made that clear before we left. We'll never catch the enemy if we keep telling him where we are.”

Lessing thought:
But if we've found him he knows where we are, you dummy.

“All right,” Jakowski said. “All right. No doubt the options will clarify themselves under the pressure of actual combat. Meanwhile you, Rinkart, take three fast trucks and disappear and make some mock attacks on the main column. Lessing, put a lookout on every truck. The men are dozy. They think because this desert's empty it's safe. Well, it's not empty and it's extremely dangerous.”

Rinkart cheated. He took six trucks, split them into pairs and came at the column from three different directions, sometimes breaking off and retreating, sometimes running parallel, sometimes racing in and aiming a burst of machine-gun fire high above the column. It enlivened the afternoon and it pleased Major Jakowski. Thus he was not too upset when his navigator told him they had reached the rendezvous and no water-tanker was waiting. “I expect they had a puncture, sir,” one of the lieutenants said. Jakowski ordered a truck to be placed with its headlights aimed at Jalo, as a beacon for the missing drivers. By dawn the truck's batteries were flat and nobody had arrived. By midday Jakowski was worried, angry and impatient; but mainly impatient. “Can't wait any longer,” he growled, and left a sergeant and two men with two trucks at the rendezvous. As soon as the water-tanker turned up, they were all to chase after the main column, damn fast. Meanwhile water rations were cut by a third.

*   *   *

Before the war, Skull was a junior don at Cambridge, teaching the history of the Protestant sects in Tudor England. Often he challenged the accepted version of events. As he said in his lectures, the truth was always the truth, no matter what men preferred to think.

When war came and Skull was rapidly commissioned into the RAF as an intelligence officer, he brought his awkward Cambridge interest in the truth with him. It often upset people. Even in the RAF there were men, quite high-ranking men, who grew quite indignant when foreign journalists questioned the official figures for enemy aircraft destroyed. Skull was present when an air marshal said to some skeptical war correspondents: “If you think so little of our claims, why don't you go to Berlin and check theirs? The Luftwaffe's scores are absolutely preposterous!”

“With respect, sir,” Skull said, “what the Luftwaffe claims is beside the point. Proving them wrong doesn't prove us right.”

“Wait outside, Skelton,” the air marshal said stonily. When the journalists had left, still unconvinced, he recalled the intelligence officer and blasted him for his interfering stupidity. Skull was unmoved. “I'm sorry if I embarrassed you, sir,” he said. “But if we believe our own lies we deceive ourselves and, by so doing, we aid the enemy. Surely that's self-evident.”

“Don't preach to me, flight lieutenant.”

Skull twitched his nose so that his spectacles bounced. “Preaching assumes moral alternatives, sir. War allows us no such choice. We cannot award a fighter pilot his kill just because we feel he
deserves
it. The truth—”

“Get out,” the air marshal rasped. “Stay out. I never want to see you again.”

That was shortly after Dunkirk. Later, Skull upset more people and got posted out of Fighter Command; made enemies in Bomber Command, and was eventually posted to Egypt. When his Uncle Stanley heard where he was going he gave Skull his old rowing blazer. “Just the thing for the desert,” he said. “Don't suppose I shall need it again. Holidays thing of the past for us. Lucky you.”

As it happened the old buffer was right. His blazer was a size too large for Skull, and its stripes of dove gray, pillar-box red and royal blue, with gold piping, had faded to soft pastel shades, but its cool looseness was just the thing for the desert. Skull wore it with a pair of corduroy bags bought in Cairo, and he carried an old golf umbrella that doubled as a shooting-stick, which he'd found in a flea market.

Dressed like this, he was walking around LG 181, examining the Tomahawks one by one. A senior flight sergeant went with him.

The adjutant saw this little parade every time he looked
up from his desk in the orderly room. Eventually he gave in to his curiosity. Intelligence officers did not usually go about in the heat of the day, scrutinizing the undersides of airplanes. Kellaway put his cap on.

“This one looks as if it's been flown through a barbed-wire fence,” Skull said to the flight sergeant. He ran his fingers over a rash of patches that spattered the fighter's belly. “Several fences . . . Who's is it?”

“The CO's, sir.” The flight sergeant pointed at the letters F.B. on the fuselage. It was the squadron commander's privilege to have his initials on his aircraft.

“Yes, of course.” Skull fingered some bullet-streaks on the engine cowling. “I thought the CO always took the best kite.”

“He does. Engine's perfect. He can't keep away from ground fire, that's all. You should see the armor under his seat. Taken a right hammering, that has.”

“Hello, Uncle,” Skull said. “Thank you, Chiefy.” As the flight sergeant walked away he said: “The ground crews are working miracles, as usual.”

“Yes?” Kellaway looked at the airplane and saw nothing new: just an oil-stained Tomahawk with lots of scratches around the cockpit, black streaks below the exhaust stubs and smoke trails on the wings behind the guns. “Jolly good,” he said. Of course the ground crews were excellent; they always were; why comment on it? “What does ‘effulgent' mean?” he asked.

“Shining brightly. By extension, splendid or brilliant. Why?”

The adjutant looked disappointed. “I'm trying to put together a letter to poor old Schofield's next-of-kin. Something for Fanny to sign. He's hopeless at that sort of thing, all he can think of is
He pressed home his attack without thought for his own safety.
I don't suppose anyone pays much attention to these letters, but you can't honestly say that sort of thing about a blasted intelligence officer, can
you?” He went and sat in the shade of the wing, leaning against a wheel.

“I take it Schofield wasn't effulgent,” Skull said.

“Don't say I said so, but he was a bore.”

“Ah.”

“Kept rattling on about the temperance movement. I think his father died of drink. Not very appropriate, though, was it? Not here.”

Skull closed his umbrella and sat against the other side of the wheel.

“All the same, the man wasn't a complete failure,” Kellaway said. “It would be nice to trot out something different for a change.” He turned his head and sniffed. “Smell anything?”

“Petrol.”

“Oh.” Kellaway relaxed. “What if I said his work was at all times thoroughly meretricious? That has a nice ring to it.”

“Meretricious is a damn good word.”

“Yes. I saw it in a crossword once. It sort of stuck.”

“It means cheap and nasty. From the Latin,
meretrix
, a harlot.”

Kellaway tossed a handful of sand at some flies who were lazily dogfighting in the shade. They ignored him. They knew all about sand.

“I thought it had something to do with merit,” he said.

“No doubt the harlot would say it has,” Skull said; but he knew at once that it was too hot for that sort of discussion. “You could always say he set an example to the rest of the squadron,” he suggested. “You don't have to say what he set an example
in
.”

The adjutant nodded sleepily. “Exemplary conduct,” he murmured. “That'll do nicely.”

“Come on.” Skull got up and opened his umbrella. “I'm going to harangue Fanny, and I might need a witness.”

Kellaway paused when they were halfway to Barton's
truck and sniffed the air again. “I knew I could smell it,” he said bitterly. “Damn. Sometimes I wish God would strike us all down with permanent constipation.”

Barton was sprawled on his bunk, looking at a map of central Libya. He had a fistful of colored pencils. “Any new targets from Group?” he asked.

Skull shook his head. “I dropped in to ask about my leave.”

“Leave? You only just got here.”

“True. But I shan't be here much longer if you keep up your strafing campaign.”

“Oh yes?” Barton was barefoot. He folded his legs and began stuffing pencils between the toes. “What's wrong with it?”

“Every machine in the squadron has been hit by ground fire at least four times. Sometimes minor damage, sometimes not.”

“They all got back.” Barton wiggled his toes and made the pencils ripple. “All profit, no loss.”

“That's luck.”

“Tough old kite, the Tommy,” the adjutant said. He was thinking about the best spot for the new latrine pits.

“Luck runs out,” Skull said. “Three sorties a day, day after day, all strafing runs, somebody's bound to get hit where it hurts. At that height, at that speed, chances are he'll dig a big hole. Sandbags in the coffin, as we used to say.”