The Eagle's Cry

by Richard Townsend Bickers

  It was not a dramatic landing. The Blenheim was travelling so fast that the wheels ripped through the sand instead of bogging down. There were a few bumps and the crew were thrown hard against their straps. Sand and stones hissed and rattled against the fuselage. The Blenheim slowly came to a stop with the crepitation of hot metal cooling under the engine cowlings.

  “Damn those Wop ack-ack gunners.”

  “Nice landing, Geoffrey.”

  “Any landing I can walk away from is all right by me, Skipper.”

  They had to hurry. Their feet would leave tracks in the sand. The night was still warm but in a few hours it would become chilly. They wore only shirts and shorts. Luckily no one wore flying boots, which would have been awkward to walk in. In the heat of Egypt and at low altitude they were warm enough without them. Each carried a revolver and a water bottle but they had no rations.

  They stuffed the maps, charts, log books and signal codes into the observer’s canvas bag with his navigation instruments.

  It was their duty to destroy the aircraft if possible. Setting it alight would bring the enemy speeding to capture them. If they did not set fire to it, they would make the enemy a present of a serviceable aircraft which could be used to fly behind British lines to bomb or photograph with impunity. If they had had time to drain the oil from the engines they could have started and run them with the last of the petrol until they seized. But seized engines were repairable; and there would soon be more engines to salvage from crashed Blenheims to fit in a serviceable airframe.

  Petrol was dripping from the starboard wing tank. Denton loaded a Verey pistol.

  “Get fifty yards away on the other side, you two.”

  He fired a cartridge at the wing, turned and ran. The vapour exploded with a grunt, and a blast that almost knocked him off his feet.

  With a hand compass and flashlight by which to check it, Denton led the way eastward at a trot. They had thrown the navigation bag into the fire and were unencumbered: maps and charts were of no use to them. Anyway, they might still be captured; they had a long way to go to the border: about 23 miles, Critchley calculated.

  When they had run fifty paces they walked another fifty and kept this up, alternating for twelve minutes. Scout’s pace. When he was a scout, Denton had done it often enough; twelve minutes to the mile. By the time they had covered the first estimated mile they were all three out of breath and panting so hard that they could not hear. They stopped to listen for the sounds of pursuit. The night was silent still.

  They could not keep up five miles an hour for long in the sand. It would soon become four and if the sand became soft they would be forced to travel even more slowly. Allowing for rests, cramp and blistered feet, they could reckon on seven or eight hours’ trudge. Denton explained this when they stopped at the end of the second twelve minutes. And still there was no sound of the enemy hunting them.

  For a while after leaving the aircraft their ears had, as they always did after a long flight, buzzed with the noise of the engines. Now they were filled with the drumming noise of their pumping hearts as they ran. There had been a lot to make their hearts beat fast in the last hour. The approach to the target, the waiting enemy fighters, the anti-aircraft fire, the sight of other Blenheims being shot down; their own emergency and the sudden landing. Although the forced landing had been gentle, the minutes preceding it were fraught with uncertainty. Doubt and danger had made the adrenalin flow fast. Their immediate response to the awareness that they were safely down had been euphoria. Now exertion and the knowledge that they had far to go, that the enemy could easily follow their tracks from the burned-out aeroplane, brought the opposite reaction and they became afraid.

  They broke from a trot to a walk and Denton held up a hand. They could see quite well by the light of the stars and rising moon.

  “Wait.”

  They stood and listened. Faintly across the sands came the murmur of engines. Looking back towards the distant glow of the smouldering Blenheim they could see pinpricks of light. It looked as if three vehicles were approaching the wreckage.

  “Unless the Eyeties are blind, sir, they’ll follow us here in five minutes.”

  There was nothing droll about Sergeant Butler’s melancholy delivery this time.

  “Then we’d better run bloody fast. Come on.”

  The other two had to work hard to keep up with Denton, who was fitter than they were. While they ran he thought wretchedly about what they could do to avoid capture. There were dunes a few hundred yards ahead. Perhaps they could hide among them and ambush their pursuers. Their Smith and Wesson .38s were loaded aand each man carried 12 rounds in his belt pouch.

  If the vehicles were scout cars or lorries, not armoured cars, they could shoot into them and kill the drivers and anyone in the passenger seats. They could then drive off in one. If they killed or wounded any Italians and their bid failed, the Italians would treat them harshly. If they didn’t kill them out of hand, they would certainly beat them up with rifle butts. The Italians were cruel in victory. It occurred to Denton then that they were in for a rough time anyway, if they were caught. Whoever first laid hands on them would inflict punishment in revenge for what they had done to the airfield at El Adem. They had to avoid capture.

  They were panting up the first dune. The slope was steep and the crest a good fifty feet high. When they skidded and slid down its far side they saw that the desert here was littered with stones and dotted with large bushes of camel thorn.

  Denton forced words out as he gulped down huge mouthfuls of air. “We’ll stop ... after ... the next dune ... got ... a ... plan.”

  When he looked back from the top of the next dune he saw three pairs of headlights coming towards them.

  Jerkily he told the others what they would do. There was enough light for accurate shooting at close range. The three vehicles were in line astern. The three men separated. Butler stayed behind a bush midway between the dune behind them and the one in front. Critchley climbed back to the top of the former, with a torch. Denton hurried halfway up the next dune ahead. When the vehicles began to climb the dune on which Critchley lay in wait, he would flash a warning, then come halfway down it and lie in a hollow scooped out of the sand.

  When the leading vehicle came abreast of Denton, he would shoot the driver; and the passenger, if there was one. Butler and Critchley would do the same to the second and third vehicles respectively. They would then race forward to join Denton and drive away in the leading vehicle. If there were any men in the back of any of the vehicles, they would kill them all.

  By the time Denton had given his orders and the three of them had run to take up their ambush positions, they could hear the vehicles so clearly that they must be approaching the first dune.

  The engine of the leading one began to accelerate as its wheels sank into the sand on the slope. Headlights shone towards the sky when each vehicle began to climb the incline.

  Denton lay in a trench he had hurriedly made for himself. His shirtsleeves were rolled up and he could feel the roughness of the sand against his elbows. He held his revolver with his right hand and supported the wrist with his left, to hold a steady aim. Critchley’s torch shone briefly and an instant later Denton discerned his dark shape against the light sand as he scuttled down to hide.

  The first vehicle came over the top of the second dune, from which Critchley had given warning. Denton could see that it was an open scout car with a manned machinegun mounted at the back. There were two men in the front seats, one driving.

  The second car appeared over the crest of the rise, also with a three-man crew. Denton made ready to open fire. He could hear the engine of the third vehicle roaring on the far side of the dune. Its tyres whined as they spun in loose sand. The first two were coming down the slope but the third had not yet appeared.

  The first car came level with Denton and he fired at ten yards’ range, at the driver’s head. A split second after the flash of the revolver shot, the driver pitched s
ideways against the man in the passenger seat. His foot slipped from the accelerator pedal and the engine stalled.

  The passenger shoved the dead driver away and Denton fired twice. The first shot brought a scream. On the second, the man collapsed on top of the driver and lay inert.

  The machinegunner had not been expecting an ambush and was slow to react. Bullets began to strike the sand near Denton. He fired and missed. His second shot hit the machinegunner in the chest but the firing continued. With his last shot, Denton killed the man behind the machinegun. He leaped up and ran to the car.

  Butler had killed the machinegunner in the second car with his first shot. With three more he killed the driver and the soldier next to him. Then he ran to the first car, hauled the dead gunner out and jumped aboard to man the gun. He swung it round to bear on the third car when it at last breasted the slope.

  Denton dragged the two corpses from the front of the leading car, sprang into the driving seat and started the engine. Critchley ran down the slope towards them, zig-zagging and sliding. He had shot the driver of the third car but the passenger had shoved the driver aside and was driving it. The machinegunner had just opened fire on Critchley when Butler began shooting at the last vehicle with the first car’s machinegun.

  Critchley jumped into the seat next to Denton. The third car jerked back out of sight on the reverse slope of the dune it had just climbed. Denton let in the clutch and roared away. He heard Butler open fire and bullets from the third car humming past. He steered between two dunes, the car lurching as he spun the wheel and the tyres went down into sand and up over large stones.

  Butler shouted “Got ’em!” There was no more shooting from the last car. But the car Denton was driving was bumping badly and losing traction. He stopped it and ran round to the rear. Both tyres had been shot to shreds.

  They hurried back to look at the other two cars and make sure all the occupants were dead. While Critchley and Butler changed the rear wheels of their car, Denton took three sub-machineguns and six loaded magazines from the dead Italians, then poured fistfuls of sand into the petrol tanks of the two cars they were abandoning. He switched off their headlights and removed the distributor arms. He carried spare belts of ammunition to their car for the Breda machinegun. Fifteen minutes later they resumed their eastward journey in high spirits.

  All three of them were shivering as once more reaction to a narrow escape from violent death took hold of them. The night air had turned chilly. They trembled with sick excitement that compelled them to laugh and chatter: about the surprise of the Italians when in a few seconds they had ceased to be the hunters and became the cornered quarry; about the anger of whoever found the abandoned cars and tried to start them. In their minds were a jumble of images: the first dead men any of them had ever seen, two with their heads almost completely shot away, all of them with their clothes soaked in blood, the ungainly sprawl of dead limbs, sagging heads and yawning mouths, staring eyes.

  Had others seen the tracer bullets and heard the machineguns?

  They had left the dunes behind and were speeding across flat, firm sand and tufts of camel thorn. Critchley had the compass on his lap and kept giving Denton corrections to his course, as, with no landmarks, he kept drifting a few degrees to north and south.

  They had been going for a quarter of an hour when Butler turned and shouted “Low-flying aircraft with landing lights on, dead astern, sir. About a mile.”

  Denton braked and switched off the engine. They heard the sound of aero engines and saw wingtip lights. The landing lights shone onto the sand. Presently they saw the flames from the fat exhaust tubes projecting beneath the engine cowlings and could make out the silhouette of a Ghibli against the stars.

  “It’s followed the tracks of the three cars and now its following us.” Denton started the engine and drove off at speed, angry at this fresh stroke of bad luck. He dared not use his headlights. In the thin light from the stars and moon the desert surface was deceptive and treacherous. At any instant they might drive into a pothole or hit a large stone, bog down in soft sand.

  The Ghibli, according to its rôle, carried as many as five 12.7 mm and three 7.7 mm machineguns. Whatever variant was pursuing them, it would have at least two forward-firing guns that could be trained on them. They were a small target and in the poor light they would be hard to hit. He would start now to zigzag instead of following a straight course to the border, and when the Ghibli attacked he would dodge nimbly about: but violent evasive action increased the chances of disaster by driving into some obstacle.

  Critchley said “I should have taken one of the other cars. We could have confused them by splitting up.”

  “We’ll baffle them. If they catch up with us, try to shoot the pilot, Butler: kill him, and they’ll crash. Never mind about the air gunners. If you can get the pilot with your first burst, we’ll be out of trouble.”

  “Until some more of the buggers turn up. I’ll do my best, anyway, sir.”

  “Don’t be such a bloody pessimist, Sergeant.”

  To hear him, Denton thought, you would think he had just announced a decision to slash his wrists with his Service-issue jack-knife.

  “It’s coming straight at us now, sir, dead astern half a mile.”

  Denton turned sharply to the left and a quarter of a minute later the Ghibli hurtled past 300 yards behind them at a height of less than 50 ft. They watched it begin turning back when the pilot realised he had lost their wheel tracks.

  Denton turned back onto his original heading. The aircraft completed its turn and presently, when it had picked up the trail, turned again. Denton turned to the right. He and the Ghibli were now on parallel tracks, many hundreds of yards apart, travelling in opposite directions. When the speedometer showed that he had driven a kilometre due south, he turned east again.

  The chase went on. At 40 miles an hour, bumping and swaying over the undulations, patches of soft sand and stones, Denton gradually reduced the distance to the frontier. He avoided keeping to any set pattern and turned at random to north and south of his homeward course. The Ghibli pilot was flying well, quickly picking up the tracks each time he lost them.

  “How far now, d’you think, Ian?”

  “Ten miles.”

  “That’s what I’d say. Fifteen minutes as the desert vulture flys.”

  “Don’t mention vultures. Say half an hour, the way we’re going.”

  “We won’t be safe when we’ve crossed into Egypt. The Wops’ll follow us.”

  Butler interjected an encouraging notion. “If we run into one of our own Army units, sir, they’ll thing we’re Eyties, in this gari, and shoot us up.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant. Just what we needed.” Tension and Sergeant Butler’s perversity made Denton start to laugh and in a moment Critchley began to laugh with him.

  Although Denton was driving an irregular course and the Ghilbi, at 120 m.p.h., could not turn tightly, its pilot had twice anticipated Denton’s intention and come so close that they felt the slipstream.

  The second time, Denton’s patience snapped and his obstinacy and pride overcame caution. “I’m not going to run like a rabbit from anyone, least of all a bunch of bloody Wops. If these bastards want trouble, they can have it. We’ll shake them ... take the initiative. We’ll open fire before they do.”

  He was not ignoring his responsibility for the lives of his crew. The enemy could not capture them with an aeroplane. Therefore the intention must be to kill them: which the Ghibli could very well do. To turn from flight to aggression was not, then, rash and irresponsible. Anyway, Denton reasoned, what was to prevent more aircraft arriving on the scene? Two or three of the highly manoeuvrable C.R. 42s, with their ability to turn on a wingtip, would quickly put an end to their chances of getting out of this alive. The moon was strengthening and visibility improving.

  “Stand by to open fire, Butler. Shoot straight at the cockpit. Even if you don’t kill or wound the pilot, you’ll scare him and, at low level, he m
ight prang. Ian, help him reload.”

  Critchley scrambled into the back seat. They watched the Ghibli bank around once more towards them.

  “I’ll try to keep away from his front guns.”

  Denton spun the wheel and took the car away to the port side of the aeroplane’s course, the side on which the pilot sat. When the Ghibli was 200 yards away, Butler began shooting. His tracer passed in front of the target, then began hitting the port engine.

  “Good show, Butler. You’ll get him next time. “

  Butler of course was less sanguine. “If he comes back. The Eyeties don’t like fighting. Got no stomach for it.”

  But this one evidently had a strong stomach, for he was circling again.

  The ground sloped down from the Libyan Desert to the Western Desert of Egypt, 600 ft below. The escarpment increased the car’s speed and boulders on the hillside gave better protection than the open desert. We’re going to make it! Denton told himself. But we have to get that damn Ghibli.

  It was coming straight at them from behind. Denton put the wheel hard over. The offside wheel ran onto a patch of soft sand and the car slewed around, the rear end swinging through a semi-circle. Its three occupants tumbled. Denton held tightly to the steering wheel and Butler clung to his gun. Critchley fell into the front passenger seat and began scrambling back to Butler’s side while the car was still skidding.

  The noise of the aircraft’s engines was very loud. Butler opened fire. Bullets from the Ghibli’s front guns whined off the rocks and dug holes in the sand. The driving wheels churned noisily and the car moved slowly out of the trap. It surged forward suddenly and caught Denton unprepared. Its nearside front wheel rammed a boulder and the engine stalled.

  Denton felt a hard blow on his left thigh, and, an instant later, a burning sensation in his right forearm.