A Good Clean Fight (48 page)

News from Cairo, even if it was rumor, was welcome in Kufra. Conversation was brisk. Dunn noticed that Lampard was not giving it his full attention. As they went in to dinner, he said: “Corky says the Pope got married again.”

“Good for him.”

“Wake up, Jack.”

“What? Oh. Sorry.” Lampard took a deep breath, and forced a smile. “I was thinking about the Black Cat Club.”

“What about it?”

“Nothing. Came into my mind, that's all.”

Dinner was curried goat, enlivened by a range of side dishes: chopped coconut, sliced bananas and dates, roast peanuts, small boiled eggs, diced onion, grated cheese, and sour goat's milk sprinkled with herbs and lime juice. Lampard recovered his confidence as he satisfied his
appetite. Toward the end of the meal he asked Lester if he had had a pleasant trip to Kufra.

“We flew here,” Lester said. “Took four hours and thirty-five minutes in an RAF Hudson. Just enough time to read the Cairo papers, eat a sandwich and have a snooze. I recommend it. It's the only way to travel.”

“For the privileged few, yes.”

“Fortunate rather than privileged,” Malplacket said. “Lester has an American friend in Transport Command. He arranged it.”

“The seats were going spare,” Lester said. “We didn't do the war effort any harm. Besides, Malplacket's part of the war effort. He's in charge of gung-ho.”

“And you? What brings you here?”

“Strictly hush-hush. Tell you later.”

“I may not be here later.”

“Oh, we have time to talk. Are you an early riser? I like to see the sun come up. Care to join me? It's scheduled for dawn.”

“Why not?” Lampard said. He shrugged, and Lester smiled, and Major Tickenham looked on with approval. He liked his guests to hit it off.

*   *   *

Malplacket drank too much coffee at dinner. It was made Arab-style, thick and black and strong, and it guaranteed that he had a restless night.

When Lester woke him he was too groggy to get dressed. He pulled on a jellabah, the loose cloak worn by the natives, which he had bought in the market. “I'll do the talking,” Lester said. “My dear chap,” Malplacket mumbled, “I am incapable of speech and intend to remain so for the indefinite future, so please talk all you wish.”

Lampard was waiting in a jeep. He drove them to the
edge of the oasis. They sat and watched the sunrise. “Hot stuff, eh?” Lester said.

“Blindingly obvious,” Lampard said.

“I make that fifteen-all,” Malplacket said. They looked at him. “Never mind,” he said. “It would take far too long to explain, and I honestly haven't the strength.”

“You want to know why we're in Kufra,” Lester said. “You want to know the score. OK. I'm an accredited war correspondent for the Chicago
News.
You can see my documents if you want. The SAS seems to me to be the only outfit that's doing any actual fighting. I want to go with your patrol and watch you do your stuff, whatever it is. Simple as that.”

“If it's so simple,” Lampard said, “why didn't you obtain permission through the usual channels in Cairo?”

“Two reasons. One, if I went through the usual channels I wouldn't make first base. Two, if by some miracle they let me go with you, they'd make damn sure they censored the bejesus out of everything I wrote.”

“I like the censors,” Lampard said. “They keep the enemy guessing.”

“Guessing what? Guessing that you guys keep raiding their airfields and blowing up their Messerschmitts? I found out about that, so it's probably reached Rommel too.”

“That's still no reason to give the entire game away.”

“What game? Long before my story hits the streets, your war will have changed completely. It's campaign season! Time for another battle! Soon the Front will be at the back, or vice versa, and this entire set-up will be history. Meantime,” Lester said, “yours is the best story of the desert war, and I want to tell it the way it deserves to be told, not gutted by some fat blue pencil. I could make you the new Lawrence of Arabia, you know that? You should be very happy with me.”

Lampard thought about it. “And where do you fit in, Mr. Malplacket?” he asked pleasantly.

“Um . . .” Malplacket had not been listening; he had heard it all before. He had been thinking about the way the leaves of the date-palms kept up a leathery creaking in the breeze. He thought it sounded like the cautious mating of elderly elephants; then he dismissed that as a frivolous notion; and finally he wondered if he was fundamentally a frivolous person, a question that called for serious examination, but not before breakfast . . . “Let's see, now,” he said. “My role runs parallel with that of Lester. I too am in the market for a dashing exploit. To boost morale back home, you see. Churchill told Blanchtower to find some gallant feat of arms, and Blanchtower sent me to look in the desert.”

“Blanchtower's his old man,” Lester said. “He's a lord.”

“A dashing exploit,” Lampard said. “Well, we certainly do our share of dashing.” He was wearing a revolver in a webbing holster. He took the gun out and held it between his knees.

“Oh no,” Lester said. “You're not that stupid.”

Lampard spun the chamber. He cocked the gun. “You're very cocky,” he said. “For someone who's an awfully long way from home.”

“Don't even think of it,” Lester told him.

Malplacket said, “What should he not even think of?”

“Killing us like he killed that Aussie major.” Lester got out of the jeep and kicked a tire, not in anger but for something to do. “Malplacket here may look like a lampshade, but his father really is in the British war cabinet. Lord Blanchtower lights Winston Churchill's cigars. Me, I'm just a hack from the Windy City but I didn't fly here without insurance. Before I left Cairo I wrote up your killing, and it didn't look like self-defense to me, it looked like murder. If I'm not back there within a month, that statement goes straight to the British Army Provost-Marshal.”

Lampard let his head fall back until he was staring at
the sky. “Wild accusations from a missing American civilian,” he said. “The Provost-Marshal will file it and forget it.”

“My lawyer didn't think so. And he drew up the affidavit.”

Malplacket said to Lampard, “The sequence of events would appear to be: you kill us, and the army hangs you.”

“In a nutshell,” Lester said.

Lampard was silent.

“Difficult to detect any benefit to anyone in that arrangement,” Malplacket said. “But of course I may have overlooked something.”

Lampard put the gun away. “I won't take you on the raids,” he said. “You can join the patrol, but raiding is dangerous and it calls for skills and fitness which you two do not possess. You would almost certainly get hurt, you would quite definitely put my men at greater risk, and I won't allow it. But, you'll get your story, after the raid.” He started the jeep.

“You won't regret this,” Lester said.

“D'you know,” Malplacket said, “I think I could persuade Blanchtower to authorize a cinema film about your patrol. David Niven, Trevor Howard, Cary Grant.”

“Not Cary Grant,” Lampard said.

“No, perhaps not. Errol Flynn as Rommel? Rather audacious casting, don't you think?”

After breakfast, Lampard called his men together and told them that two observers would be going with them, both civilians. Nobody was surprised. It was assumed that Lester and Malplacket were spies, to be left in the Jebel. That sort of thing had happened before.

Lampard dismissed the men. The officers remained.

“We're early,” Lampard said, “we stay here tomorrow, clean weapons and so on, move out the next day.”

“A signal just came in,” Sandiman told him. “For you. I had to decode it, of course.”

The choice of words, his tone of voice, made Dunn and Gibbon glance at him.

“Of course,” Lampard said. He took the piece of paper. He read the message. His head sank, but only briefly. “Change of plan,” he announced. “We move out tomorrow, early.”

“Cairo want a reply, sir,” Sandiman said.

“No reply needed. Don't even acknowledge, in fact don't send
anything
to
anyone
until I say so. Understood?” Lampard strode away, looking as grim as a general. His right fist was clenched. The signal was crushed inside it.

“Golly,” Dunn said.

“Better tell us,” Gibbon said to Sandiman.

“Can't do that.”

“Look: Mike needs to know everything. If Jack gets hit, Mike takes over.”

“Sorry,” Sandiman said. “No can do. Classified secret.”

“Was it an order to move tomorrow?”

Sandiman hesitated. “This isn't fair,” he said, and left them.

They watched him go. “So it wasn't an order to move,” Dunn said, “but Jack's moving anyway, fast, and nobody's to know. Pick the bones out of that, if you can.”

“Looks like a skeleton to me,” Gibbon said gloomily; but then, Gibbon said almost everything gloomily.

*   *   *

Streams of tracer pumped themselves up from the desert in brilliant red-and-green streaks, climbing easily, almost lazily, until they got a whiff of their target, when they seemed to race and bend toward it.

I shall be killed
, Paul Schramm thought,
and all because Maria Grandinetti couldn't answer the telephone.

The tracer reached the peak of its trajectory and fell away, perhaps a couple of hundred yards short. “Awkward,”
Benno Hoffmann said. “If I get any closer they'll hit us. If I don't get any closer they'll never identify us.”

“What's wrong with using the radio?” Schramm asked.

“The valves are broken.”

Hoffmann was flying an RAF Lysander captured in the last British retreat from Benghazi. The Lysander was a high-wing monoplane with a rugged undercarriage, including spats on the wheels, and it was an excellent aircraft for low-level reconnaissance, bigger and far better (in Hoffmann's opinion) than the Luftwaffe's Storch. The trouble was it didn't look anything like a Storch, which was why Jakowski's column was trying hard to destroy it.

He had found the Lysander only the previous night, on a fighter field at Beda Fomm, south of Benghazi. The fighter pilots kept it hidden at the back of a hangar, because it was thoroughly unofficial. They had painted it bright yellow with oversized swastikas, and they used it to shuttle pilots to and from Tripoli when their leave came up. The station commander at Beda Fomm was an old friend of Hoffmann's. He agreed to lend the Lysander in exchange for two cases of Scotch whisky. In the morning someone explained the Lysander's controls and instrument panel, and sat beside Hoffmann while he did a few circuits and bumps. Then he flew her back to Barce.

“Biggest canary in Libya,” he said proudly. “Want to come? I'm just waiting for di Marco.”

“You're playing with your toys again, Benno,” Schramm said. “When are you going to grow up?” He went off to telephone the hospital.

She did not answer. He stood and listened to the phone chewing mechanically at the silence in her office, but nobody answered. After a while his ear hurt, so he switched the instrument to the other ear. “Come on, come on, come on,” he muttered, and he was still muttering it when the switchboard decided enough was enough and cut him off. He hung up so hard that he banged his fingers.
All I want
is a damned appointment
, he told himself. He made the call again and failed again. All he wanted was to hear her voice.

The Lysander was ticking over, and Hoffmann was talking to Captain di Marco. Schramm joined them. “All right,” he said. “I'll go.”

“Good man!” Hoffmann said. “You can help push her home if anything breaks.”

They refueled at Jalo. With di Marco navigating and using the aerial-reconnaissance photographs, they flew on and found a cluster of trucks deep in the Sahara. Schramm, through binoculars the size of beer-bottles, saw Afrika Korps markings; but he was looking down, out of the sun, whereas they were looking up, into the midday glare. Hence the tracer.

“Drop a message,” di Marco suggested. They did.

Five minutes later Hoffmann put the Lysander down alongside the trucks. Captain Lessing and Lieutenant Fleischmann came to meet them. “Where's Jakowski?” Hoffmann asked.

“He's not here, sir,” Lessing said. “He took twenty trucks and went to intercept an enemy unit in the Calanscio. That was four days ago.”

They moved out of the sun and under a canvas sheet that had been rigged up to make some shade. After the coolness of the Lysander's cabin the heat of the serir was like a foundry at full blast. Schramm's eyes were swamped with sweat, and the salt stung.

Hoffmann spread the photographs on a table. Lessing summarized events since the column left the Jebel al Akhdar. “Accurate navigation has caused us a lot of difficulty,” he said. “That may explain Major Jakowski's late return. On the other hand, he may still be engaged with the enemy.”

“Anything's possible, I suppose,” Hoffmann said. He looked at di Marco.

“May I talk to the navigator?” di Marco said.

Sergeant Voss brought his maps, but di Marco gave them only a glance. “Your compass?” di Marco said. Voss said it was in his truck.

“Fetch it,” Lessing ordered.

“With your permission,” di Marco said, “let us go to the compass.”

They walked to the truck. Schramm could smell cordite hanging in the air.

Voss pointed out the compass, attached to the center of the dashboard. Di Marco tipped it slightly and they watched the gimbal mounting make it level and steady again. “Standard Luftwaffe magnetic compass,” Hoffmann observed.

“Standard rubbish,” Lessing said. He turned to Hoffmann. “With all due respect, sir.”