A Good Clean Fight (5 page)

“Yes. But the guns aren't manned.”

“He doesn't know that.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Look,” Lampard said, “I'm in command here. Now shut up and eat your apricots, or I won't take you to see General Cunningham in Cairo.”

“He is in Alexandria,” Schramm said. “And General Auchinleck now commands your Eighth Army.”

Lampard uttered a cry of exasperation and threw up his hands, losing a boiled potato from his fork. “For God's sake
stop showing off!”
he cried.

“Sorry. I thought you would wish to know.”

“Now look what you made me do.” Lampard sucked his empty fork. “That spud came fifteen thousand miles, all down the Atlantic, round South Africa, up the Indian Ocean, through the Canal, across miles and miles of burning desert, scorched by day and frozen by night, just to give me strength to fight the horrible Hun, and you've gone and ruined it.”

“If you know so much,” Dunn said, “how come you didn't know we were going to raid your place last night?”

Schramm ate his cheese. Lampard reached across him and gave Dunn a congratulatory slap on the leg. “Blindingly obvious,” he said. “Well done, Mike.”

Nobody spoke for a while. The note of the airplane engine hardened and softened as it turned, invisibly. Dunn flicked a couple of drowning flies from his tea, and drank fast before the mourners could arrive. Lampard yawned and stretched his arms until his ribcage creaked. “Sergeant Davis!” he called.

“Sir?”

“Has the lookout had his meal yet?”

“No, sir.”

“Send up a replacement. This shufti plane is being a bit of a bore. It'll be dark in an hour and I want to move pronto.”

“Sir.”

Dunn scratched his beard vigorously and examined his
fingernails. “What were you listening to, in the car?”

“Music. Mozart. Reception is better away from the buildings.”

“My sister plays the piano. She won a prize for playing the Moonlight Sonata. Mozart wrote that, didn't he?”

“Beethoven.”

“Oh, well. Same difference.”

“The English are not a very musical race,” Schramm said.

“Dunno about that. We've written some damn good songs. ‘Yes We Have No Bananas.' ‘Roll out the Barrel.' All that stuff Vera Lynn sings, like ‘There'll Be Blue Birds over the White Cliffs of Dover.' And you should see our chaps listening when Lili Marlene gets sung on Radio Belgrade: dead silence, nobody moves. Anyway—”

“Shut up a minute,” Lampard said.

The lazy buzz of the Storch had strengthened and deepened. The sound came bouncing off the walls of the wadi, confusing the ear. Then suddenly the plane appeared, gray as a moth, strolling along, ludicrously slowly, trembling in the last of the waves of hot air. It was low, about three hundred feet, and it was exploring the valley where the patrol was hiding. Lampard was unworried. The trucks looked like scrub and the men looked like the rocks they sat among. The pilot was up in the glare of the setting sun, searching for detail in shadow as dark as a cellar. As long as nobody moved nobody would be seen. “Good heavens. That is a British plane,” Schramm said. As Lampard and Dunn shaded their eyes and tried to make out its markings, Schramm heaved himself up with both hands and began running.

Sergeant Davis got off the first shot. The act of drawing his revolver left him sprawling awkwardly and he missed. Harris fired next, but he had been staring at the plane and he couldn't focus fast enough on the shadowy figure and he too missed. Dunn got closest. Dunn got a bullet between
Schramm's feet. By then Schramm was twenty yards from the foot of the cliff and dodging briskly, not to make himself a more difficult target but because the stony floor of the wadi hurt his bare right foot, and in any case his boot made him lopsided. He stumbled, almost fell, saved himself with both hands and kicked forward like a sprinter in his blocks. Ten strides took him out of the shadow and into the sunlight, both arms waving like a shipwrecked sailor at a passing sail. Lampard was bellowing: “Hold your fire! Stay where you are! Cease fire! Do not move! Let him go!” Schramm heard nothing. He was prancing along the valley floor, strenuously signaling his existence to the Storch, forcing his limbs into violent action despite the pain in his lungs and the fiery protests of his damaged bare foot. The Storch dipped. Schramm cheered and waved his handkerchief. The Storch lost a hundred feet and circled.

Davis called: “There's a rifle in the jeep, sir. I can get him with that, easy.”

“No, sergeant. Now everyone listen to me. I don't want that prisoner killed until the airplane has gone. I don't want him
touched
.”

By now Schramm was a hundred yards away, heading for the mouth of the wadi.

“You know best, Jack,” Dunn said quietly. “Personally I'd put a bullet through the bastard p.d.q. That little shufti plane can't land here, and it wouldn't even if it could.”

“
Think
,” Lampard said. “The pilot sees a man. The man wants to be seen. He's not an Arab. He could be this Luftwaffe major the pilot knows is missing, probably pinched by enemy raiders. And all of a sudden—bang!—somebody shoots the bloke. Now what does that tell the pilot?”

“See what you mean.”

“If you got a radio message from that Storch saying, ‘Here's a funny thing: I've just found your missing major, but would you believe it, somebody down there's just shot him,' what would you do?”

“I'd say . . . um . . . ‘Give me the map reference and I'll send a dozen Stukas to work it over.'”

“Right. Think how many airfields Jerry's got within range of here. There's time for him to make an attack before the light goes. Ever been Stuka-ed.?”

“Once. Bloody murder.” Dunn and Lampard watched Schramm trotting away down the wadi, while the Storch made wide circles above him. After a while Schramm turned a bend and was lost to sight. “The sensible thing for that Storch to do would be to go home and refuel,” Lampard said. But the Storch continued to circle for several minutes. “Buzz off, for heaven's sake!” Lampard said. And this time it did, climbing to a thousand feet, leveling off and flying north.

“Harris!” Lampard called. Harris trotted over. “He's crippled in one foot and by now he must be half-maimed in the other, so he can't have got far. Go and kill him, fast. Get back in ten minutes and I'll make it
double
egg and chips for a week.” Harris was already on his way. They watched him go. He ran leaning forward, as if into a stiff breeze.

Gibbon the navigator had joined them. “Given a million soldiers like Harris,” he said, “the war would be over in a week.”

“No, you're wrong,” Lampard said. “Given a million soldiers like Harris the war would never end.” That made no sense to Gibbon, but he didn't care enough to argue. “Sarnt Davis!” he called. “Just time for a brew-up, I think.”

*   *   *

Schramm had been limping to spare his right foot. Occasional smears of blood showed behind the toe-prints, while the left boot kept stamping its pattern in the dust.

One stride by Harris covered two by Schramm. Harris
reckoned the German must be slowing all the time. Schramm was twice as old as Harris, unarmed, slightly disabled and almost certainly not trained in hand-to-hand combat. If Harris had been capable of pity he might have felt sorry for him. As it was he looked forward to the pleasure of a quick knifing and then the reward of Captain Lampard's praise.

By now the wadi had taken a bend to the left and another to the right. Still the footprints limped ahead. Harris wondered where the hell the German thought he was going: not to a landing strip, that was certain; too many rocks everywhere; the wadi was strewn with them, many as tall as tombstones. Now the smears of blood were getting bigger. Something lay on the ground ahead: a handkerchief, or part of a shirt. Maybe Schramm had tried to bandage his foot and failed. Harris put on speed until he was running hard, chasing his own shadow. That shadow was Schramm's piece of good luck. Schramm was squatting behind a rock, hearing the running footsteps get louder and watching the shadow magnify until he took the only chance he was ever going to get and he dived at Harris's legs. A boot smacked Schramm's mouth and pain flowered through his head, but Harris suffered much more because he was traveling fast when he tripped and his face skidded along the wadi floor. Schramm lurched to his feet, a rock in each hand, missed with the first and cracked Harris's head with the second. It was a sharp rock and it dented his skull like a badly parked car. Schramm turned to see who was following; who would fire the squirt from the tommy-gun that would cut him down before the rattle could reach his ears. Nobody followed.
Bloody fools
, he thought.
They don't deserve to win.

Harris's right boot was too big for Schramm, so he pulled off Harris's socks as well, both of them, and took his tunic and his revolver and grenades and knife, then he scuttled down the wadi until he was safely around the
next bend. His fingers trembled and his lungs heaved as he dragged on the socks and laced up the boot. He heard himself laugh and didn't like the sound: too shrill, too triumphant. He had never killed a man before. He stamped his right foot. The boot felt good. He grabbed the weapons and ran.

*   *   *

After fifteen minutes, Sergeant Davis and Corporal Pocock went to find out what was keeping Harris. Davis brought back the body, carrying it slung over his shoulder, the head wobbling and the hands flapping at every stride. Behind him came Pocock, carrying the left boot and walking backward in case the German had decided to follow them and fling a grenade.

Lampard went forward and met Davis. “This was all my fault,” he said. The body slipped a little. Davis shrugged it back into place.

The rest of the patrol came to look. All they could see of the back of the head was a thicket of flies. Nobody spoke. Someone got a blanket and spread it on the ground. Davis knelt on the edge of the blanket and let the body fall. The flies rose in fury, and at first everyone thought the strange, high-pitched sound came from them; until they realized that Lampard was weeping.

Some men were surprised, but no one was embarrassed: Captain Lampard commanded the patrol, it was his privilege to weep if he wanted to. They withdrew and left him to it.

“What d'you think happened?” Lieutenant Dunn asked Davis.

“Harris must have took his boots off to kick the Jerry officer to death,” Davis said, “and he got a whiff of his own feet and dropped dead.”

“It's no joke, sergeant.”

“Course not, sir. It might have happened to any one of us. I shared a tent with him, I should know.”

Captain Gibbon strolled over to them. He nodded at the sky, which was primrose-yellow fading to blue-black. “I hope he gets a move on,” he said softly. “Dark in ten minutes.” They glanced at Lampard, who was standing motionless beside the corpse, his arms folded and his head bowed. “Attitude to be adopted, other ranks, for the mourning of,” Gibbon said. “Brigade of Guards drill book, Appendix “F,” Active Service, Foreign Parts, matinees Wednesdays and Saturdays.” Dunn turned away. He, like Lampard, was a Coldstream Guard, and so he felt a loyalty to him; yet now that Gibbon had pointed it out, Lampard's attitude did look too formal, too posed. There was a lot of Lampard—he had powerful features, an icebreaker of a nose, wide and determined lips, a thrusting jaw—and merely arranging his hefty limbs, finding places to put those considerable hands and feet, gave him mannerisms and attitudes that might seem posed. Dunn was sure that none of this was for effect; Lampard just behaved naturally and it ended up
looking
like an act.

Lampard knelt and neatly folded the blanket over Harris. “Right, gather round,” he called.

They gathered round.

“Schramm has gone,” he said. “Question is, how far and how fast? Mike: what would you do if you were Schramm?”

“Beat it for home,” Dunn said. “And hope I ran into a search party on the way.”

“You wouldn't lie up and wait for daylight?”

“Not bloody likely. Sooner I get back to base, the sooner base can scramble some Stukas to catch us in the desert.”

“So maybe we shouldn't dash off into the desert.” Lampard shut his eyes so that he could massage the lids. “Sergeant Davis looks unhappy.”

“He's got Harris's knife and revolver and grenades, sir,” Davis said. “And he's got a bloody nerve, too. He might just be daft enough to come back in the night and try to do more damage.”

“He's made a pretty good start at that,” Gibbon said.

“I'm not going to spend the night here,” Lampard declared. Grunts of satisfaction all round. “Assuming the enemy comes after us, which way will he expect us to go? South or east?”

“South,” Dunn said. “Back to Kufra.”

“Yes? Why? It's seven hundred miles to Kufra. A thousand from Kufra to Cairo. Why should he expect us to make an enormous detour?”

“Because that's the way we came,” Corporal Pocock said.

“Does he know that?”

“He seems to know everything else,” Dunn said.

One of the fitters broke wind. “Beg pardon,” he muttered. “Bloody cheese.”

“If he thinks we know he knows, maybe he'll think we'll go east instead,” Lampard said. “Run parallel to the coast. Less than half the distance. Refuel at Siwa. By far the best route. Blindingly obvious.”

“There's only one thing wrong with the east route,” Gibbon said. “It's lousy with airplanes, so we get shot up.”

“No danger of getting shot up,” Lampard said. “We just destroyed half the Luftwaffe, remember?”

“I'm not worried about the Luftwaffe,” Gibbon said, “I'm worried about those lousy bastard Beaufighters who used the Rhodesian patrol for target practice.”