A Good Clean Fight (56 page)

Kellaway skipped a few pages.

Big joke. Butcher force-landed in the desert and got his Tomahawk towed back to the LG by a couple of camels. Turned out he needn't have force-landed anyway. He forgot to switch over fuel tanks, so he thought he ran out of petrol when he didn't. Butcher reckoned he deserved a gong but Fanny fined him two weeks' pay for being such a berk. Butcher said it cost him a month's pay to hire the camels. Fanny asked the Arabs to give the money back, in exchange for an IOU they could take back to Desert Air Force HQ. The Arabs said OK, they'd give the money back, but only after they'd towed the Tommy with Butcher in it back where they'd found it. Big joke.

Kellaway skipped some more.

Billy Stewart sits outside his tent and watches flies. Why?

And some more.

Dreamt about T. I wish he'd go away. It's over a year since he bought it. Everyone knew he was going to buy it, he was such a bloody awful pilot. Poor bugger.

He skimmed to the last entry.

Uncle's gone doolally again. I suppose that's what happens when you get old. Not for me, I hope.

It was Kit's last entry. Kellaway discovered that his eyes were crying. He was not overwhelmed with grief for Kit, but evidently his eyes felt otherwise. He let them cry, wiped his face, picked up the bedroll and the notebook and trudged off to see the doc.

“Next time I go batty,” he said, “kick me out.”

“All right. It's only the desert, you know.”

“I know.”

“If you spend too long in the blue and you don't go mad, there's something seriously wrong with you.”

The adjutant thought about that. “Billy Stewart used to spend all his spare time watching flies,” he said.

“He did indeed. Come on, we'll take ourselves over to the mess. The Bombay brought some beer in.”

Supper that night was fried eggs and potatoes, also flown in on the Bombay.

“Why did Billy Stewart watch flies all day?” the adjutant asked.

“He was exercising the muscles of his eyes,” Barton said. “He reckoned that if he could count the corns on the feet of a fly at ten paces, he could easily spot a 109 at five miles.”

“Billy had terrific eyesight,” Pip said.

“He was a good type.”

“I've been thinking about Kit,” Pip said.

“Any beer left?” Hick asked. Barton tossed him a tin.

“What about Kit?” the adjutant asked.

“I watched him fall. It was all wrong. The parachute popped open, but he kept going. It didn't check him at all. Ever heard of a parachute strap breaking?” Nobody had. “They're made to carry an elephant.”

“Maybe the buckle bust,” Hick suggested.

“Buckle's twice as strong,” Barton said. “Two elephants couldn't bust a buckle.”

“I think he undid it,” Pip said.

There was silence while the pilots reviewed the routine of leaving a cockpit, of leaving it in a tearing hurry, of the flurry of acts while smoke gushed by, the kite skidded, the enemy squirted tracer and panic made the hands accelerate.

“Force of habit,” Pip said.

“Look,” the doc said to Skull, “I hope you're not going to play that bloody dirge again tonight.”

“‘Empty Saddles'?” Hick said. “National anthem of the American West.”

“The potency of the homely metaphor,” Skull said, and sang:

Empty boots covered with dust,
Where do you walk tonight?
Empty guns covered with rust,
Where do you talk tonight?

“You can't beat the simple declarative sentence in English prose,” he said. “It goes right back to Chaucer.”

“I wish it would,” the doc said grimly. “I'd pay its bloody fare.”

*   *   *

There were some good vehicles in Lessing's camp. Jack Lampard picked out two Mercedes-Benz and a Fiat, all of them tough-looking trucks with fat tires and reinforced springs, and had them loaded with German fuel, water and food. Lester saw what was going on and came over. “Risky, isn't it?” he said. “We might get shot up by the Desert Air Force.”

“They'd shoot us up if these were Swiss ambulances,” Lampard said. “They shoot up anything they see.”

“Bastards.”

“Tell you what,” Lampard said. “If they shoot us up, we'll shoot 'em down. That'll make a good story, won't it?”

Malplacket had been less than honest with Lester about his knowledge of Randolph Churchill's weekend in Benghazi. Before Malplacket left England, Blanchtower had made it very clear to his son that this was an example of
the kind of daring that he expected him to uncover in the Middle East. “It's all part of the English buccaneering tradition, Ralph,” he told him. “Just as our ancestors held sway over the high seas, so Randolph and Fitzroy slipped ghost-like through those arid wastes.”

“You're looking awfully tired, father,” Malplacket said, hopefully. “You're not overdoing things, are you? At your age—”

“Pluck and dash. That's what the man in the street wants. That's what Winston wants.”

“Mmm.”

“Confusion to the king's enemies.”

“Well, I'll try. That sort of thing's bound to be awfully hush-hush.”

“Of course it is. No rose without a thorn. You must take risks. Don't think of me. Britain is at war. Your life is a sacrifice I must be prepared to make, if necessary.”

“I see.”

“Pluck and dash, Ralph. The blood of English buccaneers throbs in your veins, remember.”

Malplacket had agreed enthusiastically because he knew he would never be expected to duplicate Randolph's mad exploit. Now, however, that was what Lester constantly talked about. The idea of strolling around Benghazi obsessed him. Lampard wouldn't take them on a raid, but to walk around a German-occupied city was a far better story. He discussed it with Dunn. Then he came back and discussed that discussion with Malplacket, who could not be as discouraging as he wished, but who played devil's advocate. The major obstacle, he pointed out, was transport. Lampard would never give them a jeep.

“We could walk,” Lester said stubbornly.

“My dear fellow, we could skip, hand in hand, singing quaint old English folk songs as we went. But it will probably be twenty-five miles there and the same distance back. When did you last walk fifty miles?”

Lester grudgingly agreed that walking was out of the question; but this setback only made him more determined. The rasp of triumph was in his voice when, in the aftermath of the firefight, he found Malplacket doing a little looting and he said, “Did you know that Lampard's taking some of these kraut trucks? You realize what that means?”

Malplacket was trying on various German hats. He looked inside a soft, peaked cap, much worn. “A Hauptmann Lessing owned this . . . No, I don't. What does it mean?” He had found Lessing's mirrored sunglasses on the ground, beside the cap. He tried them on and gazed invisibly at the American.

“For one damn thing,” Lester said, annoyed by Mal-placket's blandness, “it means if we bump into any Beaufighters you'll never become Lord Blanchtower the Second.”

“Fifth, actually.”

“Whatever. And more important, it means if I can find a truck that works, we've got transport into you-know-where. Also some German clothing to wear.”

Malplacket tried on the cap. “Just a hint of the Chelsea Arts Ball, don't you think? But I'll take it. Have you asked Lampard?”

“On my way now. You'd better come too.”

Thus it was that Malplacket, without ever being given the luxury of making a choice, tacitly agreed to go with Lester to Benghazi.
Why am I getting involved in anything so foolhardy?
he wondered.
Is it to please Blanchtower? Or is it to spite him, since the odds are that I shall be shot as a spy, leaving him with neither a son nor a propaganda victory? Is it that I can't abandon Lester? Or has Lester manipulated me into this recklessness, like a schoolboy dare?
As he trudged through the African heat, polishing Lessing's sunglasses with his shirt tail, Malplacket felt that perhaps the real reason was that he simply didn't care. His
life had gone on long enough. It was an overcrowded planet. Time to step aside.

He listened while Lester told Lampard what they planned to do, and what they needed. “I assume you're taking your patrol into the Jebel. During your operation, whatever it is, we can be doing a Churchill and Maclean in Benghazi. We get what we want. From your point of view, if we're killed or captured you're not responsible, and you'll be free of us. If we get out, we just tag along behind you until you get home, and we vanish. I sort of fancy that olive-green Fiat station-wagon over there.”

“Bloody dangerous.” Lampard's voice was as blank as his face.

“You reckon? Listen, if Malplacket walked through Cairo dressed like that, what would happen?” Lester tipped Lessing's cap to a more rakish angle.

“He'd get a few salutes and lots of offers of dirty postcards.”

“There you are, then.”

“I'll think about it.”

He thought about it for five minutes. “All right,” he said. “Take the station-wagon. But I want something in return. I'm not having my career prejudiced just because you two go playing silly-buggers in Benghazi. If you get killed, and I think you will, that affidavit of yours must be destroyed, unopened. I want a letter to that effect, to your lawyer. Tell him to burn the bloody thing, in my presence.”

“I'll do it now.”

“Do it later. We're leaving now.” Lampard climbed onto his jeep. “Start up!” he shouted.

He had put the prisoners in the captured vehicles. The patrol drove in a widely scattered formation in case Stukas arrived from the north. But no aircraft appeared. Gibbon navigated them through the Jalo Gap during the midday haze, and they crossed the Tariq el 'Abd in late afternoon. Lampard was pleased. He found a familiar wadi on the
edge of the Jebel and they camouflaged the trucks with camel-thorn. They had covered the best part of two hundred miles without incident, without even a puncture. The men walked back toward the desert, smoothing out the tire tracks with bunches of fern. There was rum and lime-juice for everyone. “I can smell Hun,” Lampard said. His whole nervous system felt boosted.

“That's jolly useful,” Malplacket said. “What does it smell like?”

“Hard cheese,” Lampard said instantly. It wasn't a joke; he just said the first thing he thought of; yet it made them laugh, so he smiled and took the credit. They were good men, his patrol. For an instant his tired mind strayed, and he wondered why Pocock wasn't present. Then he remembered. Hard cheese on Pocock.

*   *   *

Paul Schramm was not forty-four. He was twelve, and naked, and running to catch a train that might leave at any second. The station was crowded and he was horribly ashamed of his nakedness, but all his clothes were on the train. He kept shouting at everyone to get out of his way. Nobody listened. The harder he ran, the slower his legs moved. He had to force each pace. Then, to make it worse, he couldn't run straight because his left leg was too short. He was struggling, the train was leaving, and now the station was deep in a thick, syrupy fluid that trapped his legs and made him wade laboriously, exhaustingly. That was when he found the knife in his hand. It hadn't been there before, but now he had it and he struck out at the idiots who wouldn't get out of his way because they didn't care, they weren't going to catch the train, they were too ugly to go anywhere. So he hacked and stabbed and slashed furiously with his rubber knife, and he was helpless, useless because his wrists were firmly held by Benno Hoffmann.

Later, much later, after his batman had given him a wet towel to rub his face and body, followed by a dry towel and fresh pajamas, and had stripped the bed of the sweat-soaked sheets and remade it, and had finally gone away, Schramm stopped trembling. He summoned up all his twelve-year-old strength and asked: “What time is it?”

“Four-forty,” Hoffmann said.

“Oh.” Schramm took a deep breath, so deep that his chest shuddered when he let it out. “Christ, that was a madhouse. I've never been
there
before. Did I get you out of bed?”

“That's all right, I had to get up. Somebody was having a nightmare. I could hear it all the way down the hall.”

“I couldn't catch the train. I was wading in blood.” He gave Hoffmann a sorry smile. “What a feeble cliché: wading in blood. I ought to do better than that, at my age.” Then he remembered how young he had been, and he got the shakes again. His face seemed to cringe; the skin felt as if it were being touched by fine cobwebs.

Hoffmann put a blanket round his shoulders. “You look like a wreck,” he said. “Feel free to cry, if it helps.”

“I haven't got the strength to cry. I might manage a drink.”

They each had a stiff Scotch. The RAF had left quite a lot behind when they made their hurried exit from Barce, but Hoffmann was running low and he saved it for special occasions.

“What a total madhouse,” Schramm said.

“You're not the first, you know. I've been on bases where the pilots' quarters sounded like an audition for the Berlin Opera. Get into bed before you spill that.”

Schramm slept late. He awoke with a slight headache and a keen appetite, a very unusual combination for him. He showered and shaved. When he walked to the mess his muscles ached pleasantly, as if he had climbed a small,
simple mountain. The dream was sharp in his mind. Its memory retained a tinge of panic and fury.

He was making steady headway through his paperwork, letters to be answered, forms to be completed, telephone calls returned, when a corporal tapped on his door. Station commander's compliments, and could Major Schramm spare him a few minutes?

This was all very formal. Usually Benno just picked up the phone, or strolled down the corridor. A sudden dread took Schramm by the throat. Enemy bombers raided Benghazi harbor every night. Maybe last night they missed and hit somewhere else. He buttoned his tunic.