A Good Clean Fight

by Derek Robinson

  “See what happens to you when you tell bad jokes,” the doctor said.

  The station commander, Oberstleutnant Benno Hoffmann, came in. “Well, I tried,” he said. “They say there isn’t a spare airplane within a hundred kilometers.” Hoffmann had a camera. He began taking pictures of the feet.

  “What’s that for?” Schramm asked.

  “Cookhouse. I want it clearly understood that this meat is unfit for human consumption. And even if they had a spare plane they still wouldn’t send it. Smile for daddy.” He took a couple of full-length shots.

  “Why not?” Schramm asked. Apart from an occasional twitch as the skin came off, he lay as still as a log.

  “Oh, lots of reasons,” Hoffmann said. “They’re at least a hundred and fifty kilometers from here by now, so they’re somewhere in the Sahara, and the Sahara is the size of France, and it’s only four trucks and a dozen men, so if you don’t know where they are you’ll never find them.” He sat at the bedside and felt Schramm’s wrist, seeking the pulse. “Forget about them, Paul. Just think about getting your strength back.”

  “I know exactly where they are,” Schramm said. “They’re driving south, fast as they can. They want to squeeze through the gap between Jalo Oasis and the Calanscio Sand Sea. After that it’s wide open desert and they’re safe.”

  “Radio the garrison at Jalo,” suggested the doctor, whose name was Max.

  “Italians,” Hoffmann said.

  “Don’t we talk to our glorious allies?”

  “They don’t always listen. They especially don’t always listen if it means going out looking for huge, ferocious, British Commandos.”

  “Special Air Service,” Schramm corrected.

  “Shut up, you, you’re dead.” Hoffmann frowned at the doctor. “At least, my bit’s dead. How are your bits?” Max left Schramm’s feet and repositioned Hoffmann’s fingers. “Ah!” Hoffmann said. “You nearly slipped away, there, Paul. Try to pay more attention.”

  “They’ll go through the Jalo Gap at midday,” Schramm said.

  “For all you know they’re still hiding in the Jebel.”

  “They’re not hiding in the Jebel.” Schramm’s voice was low but firm. “They’ve used up all their bombs. Soon they’ll be getting low on fuel and food. They want to go home.”

  “They told you all this?”

  “They told me I was on my way to Egypt. And their trucks are half-empty. I could tell that from the suspension. Too much bounce in the springs.”

  “I’ve finished stripping the wallpaper,” Max said. “Now I’m going to paint some magic muck on your feet before I bandage them. This may sting a bit.”

  “Oh Christ,” Schramm said. “I know what that means. Give me something to hang on to.” Hoffmann offered his hands and Schramm gripped his wrists. “We’ve still got that Storch, haven’t we?” Schramm asked. “The one that found me?” Hoffmann nodded. He wished Paul would shut up. The grip on his wrists was tightening and sweat was popping out of Schramm’s forehead like rain on a windscreen. “Give me the Storch,” Schramm said. “I can show the pilot where to look.” Now the sweat was chasing itself down his face. “Nearly done,” Max said. They could hear his fingers slapping on the magic muck. “If I find them,” Schramm said, “you can persuade Operations to send a bomber or two, can’t you?”

  Hoffmann found himself nodding. “This is pure blackmail,” he said.

  “Done,” said Max. Schramm’s grip slowly relaxed.

  “You’re not fit to fly,” Max told him.

  “He’s not going to fly,” Hoffmann said. “He’s going to sit beside the pilot and look. He’s fit to look, isn’t he?”

  * * *

  Lampard’s patrol was less than halfway to Jalo Oasis when dawn broke. There had been trouble with the trucks: first a puncture, then dust clogging a carburettor, then another puncture. They drove without lights, not knowing who might be out searching for them. It was a moonless night. Once they left the Jebel the country was low-lying desert; neither flat nor hilly, dotted with scrub, very boring; but it was always possible to buckle the steering on a very boring rock. And there was the Tariq el ’Abd to be crossed.

  The Tariq was an ancient camel trail. The Jebel formed part of a great two hundred-mile bulge into the Mediterranean, and the Tariq was a short cut across the base of that bulge. German and Italian generals felt uncomfortable at the thought that anyone could so easily travel so close to their flank, and all along the Tariq they had scattered tens of thousands of “thermos” bombs: anti-personnel bombs designed to look like vacuum flasks. Unscrew the cap and it blew your arms off. Drive over one and it blew your wheel off. Maybe more.

  Lampard halted his patrol a few miles short of the Tariq el ’Abd when he reckoned dawn was still half an hour away. Within a minute, a fire was lit and a dixie of water was set to boil. To brew up in the desert, all you needed was a large tin filled with sand and soaked in petrol. It burned cleanly and steadily, and for a surprisingly long time. Soon bacon was frying alongside the brew-up.

  They had stopped in a hollow. Lampard didn’t care if he was seen by passing aircraft—a fire in the desert wasn’t worth a bomb or even a bullet, there were always Arab fires twinkling on the horizon—but he cared about German armored cars. After all that havoc at Barce the enemy must be out hunting him. Of course the desert was vast, it was easy to vanish into it, but if you were found there was nowhere to run to and nothing to hide behind. In fact you were lucky if you could run. On his first patrol Lampard had discovered what it was like to have to run: they had been chased for an hour, flat out, by vehicles that might have been German armored cars or might have been a roaming unit from the flank of the Eighth Army. Nobody could identify them and nobody wanted to let them get close enough to be identifiable, so the patrol just turned and ran, trying not to think about punctures and hoping that if there were any soft sand about, the other lot would get stuck in it. In the end they out-ran them and never found out whether it was a great escape or all a waste of time. That’s what happened when you were lucky. If you were unlucky and they jumped you, it would probably be a very brief fight. In fact it probably wouldn’t be any kind of fight, just a sudden storm of heavy machine-gun fire laced with cannon shells, and the patrol vehicles, being soft-skinned, would get torn to bits. What would happen to the members of the patrol, being even more soft-skinned, wasn’t worth thinking about.

  Lampard, Dunn and the navigator, Gibbon, walked to the top of the nearest hillock. After hours of engine-roar, the silence was so total that it was almost painful. The desert had the same kind of crystalline stillness you get on nights of intense frost. The stillness and the silence formed a powerful presence: to break them was to reveal how great they were, how little you were.

  The three men stood and listened. Nothing.

  “Various possibilities,” Lampard said. “Jerry has no patrols out looking for us. Jerry has patrols out, but not near here. The patrols are near here, but they’re hiding in a wadi, waiting for daylight.”

  “Is there anything we can do to alter any of those possibilities?” Gibbon asked.

  “No.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  They walked back to the fire. “Jerry won’t try to jump us before dawn,” Dunn said. “He hasn’t the faintest idea how strong we are.”

  “Mr. Schramm will tell him,” Gibbon said.

  “Schramm’s still hiking across the Jebel. Anyway, nobody knows we’re the same outfit that attacked Barce. We could be a completely different patrol, lousy with mortars and bazookas and pom-poms plus a couple of anti-tank guns in the boot.”

  “I wish we were,” Gibbon said.

  “I don’t,” Lampard said. “If you want to slug it out, go and join the Tank Corps. Ah, bacon!” He rubbed his hands and leaned over the fire to sniff the aroma.

  “He always says that,” Gibbon said to Dunn. “Every morning he says Ah, bacon! What does he expect? Jam sandwiches?”

  “I think he likes bac
on,” Dunn said.

  “If there’s one thing I like,” Lampard said to Sergeant Davis, “it’s bacon.”

  “One day we’ll have scrambled eggs,” Gibbon said, “and he’ll still say Ah, bacon! You mark my words.”

  “Got any eggs?” Dunn asked the cook.

  “Only dried.” The cook was busy forking bacon into mess tins.

  “Don’t like scrambled eggs,” Lampard said. “They remind me of my prep school. The headmaster’s brother kept a chicken farm. We used to say that if you eat eggs all the time, you feel down in the mouth.”

  A fitter called Blake said: “I wouldn’t send any kids of mine away to boarding school.” He spat out a bit of rind. “Not natural.”

  They were standing in a circle around the fire. The air was as warm as a sunny English summer afternoon, but the night was still black.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Dunn said. “After ten years at boarding school, the rest of life comes as rather a pleasant surprise.”

  “Who’s to say what’s natural?” Davis asked.

  “Joe Harris wasn’t natural,” Corporal Pocock said, and took a quick swig of tea as if to wash away the taste of the words.

  Tony Waterman, the signals officer, happened to be standing next to Pocock. “Mustn’t speak ill of the dead, old chap,” he said.

  “Yes, sir?” Sergeant Davis stopped eating a biscuit and gazed at Waterman. “Why is that, sir?” Waterman was startled. He picked his teeth with his tongue while he tried to think of an answer, and failed.

  “Eat too many eggs,” Lampard said, talking to the fire, “and you feel down in the mouth.”

  “We got it the first time, Jack,” Dunn said.

  “Ask me,” Pocock said, “the only safe time to speak ill of Harris is now he is dead.”

  “I thought you were his friend, corporal,” Lampard said.

  “Harris had no friends. He didn’t get on with people, except when it came to killing them. He was bloody good at that.”

  “Good, but not perfect,” Gibbon said.

  “Killing the enemy is an admirable pastime,” Lampard said. “I myself quite enjoy it.”

  “How many d’you reckon you killed at Barce?” Waterman asked.

  “Hard to say. I expect quite a few went up with the ammo dump. Couple of dozen?”

  Waterman nodded. He was Signals, he knew nothing about combat. “Seems reasonable. More than enough to avenge Harris, anyway.”

  Gibbon said, looking at the sky: “Can you avenge someone before he gets the chop?”

  Most of them let the question pass. It was too complex and uncomfortable; and anyway, who cared? But the idea interested Gibbon. “Premature retaliation,” he said, still studying the sky. “Vengeance in advance. By gum, there’s a lot to be said for it, Tony. It solves so many problems! Strike first and beat the rush! Draw blood now and avoid disappointment later! Revenge is sweet, so why wait until you need some? Shop early while stocks are plentiful.”

  “You do blather on,” Waterman said.

  “I might recommend Harris for a decoration,” Lampard said.

  “His feet smelt worse than any man I know,” Davis said.

  “Perhaps a Mentioned in Dispatches would do,” Lampard said.

  There was a soft gray tinge in the sky. Soon the sand would be touched by shades of delicate pink and green and purple and, for a few minutes, the desert would look beautiful, before everything got roasted white again. The patrol busied itself, topping up fuel tanks and emptying bladders. They wanted to reach the Tariq el ’Abd while the thermos bombs would still be casting long shadows. If they were exposed, that is.

  * * *

  It had not been easy to get the Storch: the plane was overdue for overhaul, the fitters actually had it in the hangar, with the engine cowlings off and the tanks drained, when Hoffmann told them to put it all together and fill it up.

  As the plane was being pushed out of the hangar, Major Jakowski’s car arrived, brakes screeching, horn blaring. Jakowski was in charge of airfield protection at Barce and he had just returned from a large meeting in Benghazi where he had been made to describe the disaster that had happened two nights ago: twenty-seven aircraft destroyed, six men dead, twelve wounded, one missing, five large vehicles burned out, also much fuel and ammunition lost, extensive damage to buildings . . . When he stood up at the meeting and heard his own voice, the list sounded dreadful. It was dreadful. It was like the toll of some massive air battle, without the consolation of enemy losses. Those present had then asked a lot of hard questions of Jakowski. Jakowski had few answers to give. The general who chaired the meeting had not spared him. Next time, Jakowski knew, it would be the Russian Front.

  So he had raced back to Barce, thinking hard of all the men whose backsides he would kick. Trouble was, they were nearly all up in the Jebel, searching for the British raiders. Then he saw the Storch. “I want that,” he told Hoffmann. There was a brisk argument which Jakowski lost. He lost because he had no good reason for using the Storch; he just wanted to create the impression of activity by flying hither and yon, seeking out his patrols one after another. That was not what he said. What he said was that he needed the plane so he could effectively liaise with and integrate the units carrying out his clean-up operation in the Jebel. The Storch would give him an essential overview of this. “I’ve got to have it,” Jakowski said. His shirt was black with sweat.

  “Wrong place,” Schramm said. He was in a wheelchair. “The British raiding party is not in the Jebel. Not any more.”

  By now the pilot of the Storch had arrived. “You want an overview of the Jebel?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Jakowski said.

  “Well, you won’t get it from this box of bits. She hasn’t got the ceiling. I flew her yesterday. She’s tired out, she needs a new engine. And look at this.” He took hold of an aileron and worked it up and down. “Soft as shit,” he said.

  “How can I do my job without proper support?” Jakowski demanded, but the steam had gone out of him.

  “She’ll fly, won’t she?” Hoffmann asked the pilot. The man shrugged, but he didn’t say no. “Fly her today and we’ll service her tomorrow,” Hoffmann said.

  “You’re absolutely sure there are no British in the Jebel?” Jakowski asked Schramm.

  “I didn’t say that. The men who came here two nights ago have left the Jebel, I’m sure. But there may be others.”

  Jakowski took off his cap and slashed at the flies. “This isn’t war,” he said. “They didn’t teach us anything about this at Staff College.”

  Four medics lifted Schramm out of the wheelchair and hoisted him into the cockpit. They packed cushions around his bandaged feet and fastened his straps. While the engine was warming up he showed the pilot where to go. The pilot folded the map and stuffed it down the side of his boot. “It’s none of my business,” he said, “but if you’re so sure you know where these Commandos are going, isn’t it possible they know you know, in which case they won’t go there?”

  “Not Commandos.” Schramm yawned. “SAS.” For the first time since he had escaped, his body was allowing itself to relax completely. “They think that because I know that they know that I know what they intend to do, then I’ll think they’ll change their plans. That would be the obvious thing to do, which is why I’m sure they won’t do it.”

  “Why not?”

  Schramm’s sleepy brain struggled to explain why not, and eventually succeeded. “Because,” he said, “it would be pointless for us both to do something different.” Now that he heard his explanation it seemed not quite right, but he couldn’t spot the fault. “Too confusing,” he said, and yawned.

  “You know best,” the pilot said. “But if you think we’ll see much of anything in the desert at midday, you’d better think again.” He tested the engine until the Storch shuddered against its brakes, and then he let the revs fall to a grumble. “I’m told they built this thing out of what survived from three wrecks,” he said. “Sometimes she feels as if perh
aps they lost a few bits. But you’re not interested in that sort of technical detail, are you? No. We might as well leave before one of you has a small heart attack.”

  The Storch groaned and stumbled up to three thousand feet, hitting thermals that felt like hump-backed bridges. But once they were above the Jebel the air became cooler and smoother. The cockpit canopy had a canvas screen that kept the sun out; with the cabin ventilation wide open it was really quite pleasant. Schramm let his head rest against the side window and looked down on the landscape he had so painfully limped across: dusty green scrub and grass, red earth fields, gray stone outcrops, all of it split by hundreds of wrinkled wadis. It looked a bit like a very old, stained camel-blanket, dropped and forgotten. The window vibrated gently. It was a pleasant sensation. Schramm relaxed and enjoyed it.

  * * *

  Crossing the Tariq was a walkover.

  Gibbon found the tracks the patrol had made when they came north and now they drove south, fitting their wheels into the same ruts. Dead easy. On the other hand there was a dead camel a hundred yards away providing breakfast for a dozen birds and a million flies, which probably meant it had trodden on a thermos bomb. Mike Dunn studied it through his binoculars and reported no evidence of the camel-owner. “I expect the birds ate him first,” Pocock said. “Bloody tough meat, camel.”

  “Where on earth do the birds come from?” Dunn wondered.

  “Same place as the flies,” Lampard said. “Nowhere and everywhere.”

  “I wish something would eat the bloody flies,” Pocock said.

  “My brother-in-law sold flypaper before the war,” said Blake, the fitter. “He could’ve made a fucking fortune out here.”

  “Give me his address,” Dunn said. “I’ll get him flown out.”

  “Too late. Fell down a hole in the blackout. Broke his neck.”

  “Ah. Pity.”

  “Flies didn’t think so. Best thing ever happened to them.”

  It was about two hundred kilometers to Jalo. By mid-morning they were more than halfway there, which pleased Lampard. The more distance he put between the patrol and the Jebel, the greater would be the area that the enemy had to search. There was a danger in speed, in fact several dangers: the trail of dust announced their presence; the broken ground gave the tires and springs a continual beating; and men who had already driven through the night had to take the heat that came pounding down from the sky as well as the heat that hammered back from their engines, along with the eternal, smothering sandy dust that sought out their eyes and ears and nostrils like a plague of grit. Lampard took the risk of speed because he knew he must have the luxury of time when they crawled past Jalo Oasis. No plumes of dust near Jalo; no bellowing engines. The Italians who garrisoned Jalo were not famous for their aggression, but if they knew how small this patrol was, they might be tempted to come out and chase it. An Italian bullet could be as fatal as any other kind.