Eagle at Taranto (Commander Cochrane Smith series)

by Alan Evans

  They walked down the ridge, leaning back against the slope, and climbed into the cab, squeezed close together. Katy held her camera carefully on her knee. The truck ground along below the ridge after Jamie’s, then they turned together to climb it where there was a saddle and the crossing was easier. On the far side of the ridge and down on the plain they made better going. Ahead of them the dust had settled and the smoke blown away. Vehicles were grouped to the right of the fort where the sheds stood.

  In the middle distance lay the truck that had been hit and thrown onto its side. They meandered down to it, Powell steering between the bigger lumps of rock and deeper holes that might wreck the suspension, and following the taped path through the mines. They passed close by the truck — and a body.

  It was one of the infantrymen and someone had driven the point of his bayoneted rifle into the earth so it stood as a marker. The eight-hundredweight trundled past only feet away and Katy looked down at it. She thought of the body too as “it”, could not connect this with a living man. It lay face-down, the limbs splayed out awkwardly, unnaturally, as in some of the pictures she had seen. The steel helmet had fallen forward so she could see the hair, close-cropped like Powell’s. The khaki shirt and shorts were darkly stained. Powell said tersely, “Bought it.”

  Bert asked, “Did you know him?”

  “Dunno. Couldn’t tell. Maybe.”

  They drove on and when they were close to the fort they saw that the walls and towers were pocked with shell-holes. It was still unreal to Katy. She still half-expected Foreign Legionnaires to show on the ramparts, and a band to strike up something from The Desert Song. The gate was in the side wall of the fort and an armoured car stood there, its commander leaning out of the top of the turret, smoking a cigarette. The other armoured cars were scattered about the area.

  Infantry with rifles, bayonets fixed and glinting wickedly in the sun, moved among the sheds and buildings outside the fort, herding prisoners with their hands held high. The Italians wore bluish-grey shirts and baggy trousers that were wrapped around with puttees below the knee.

  The truck stopped close by the wall where there was shade from the rising sun. Bert and Katy got down and walked to the gate. The two leaves of it hung, sagging, where they had been blasted open by an engineer’s charge. Katy cried out, “Bert! What’s all the paper?”

  He answered, “There’s always paper.”

  Scraps and sheets of it were blowing out past the splintered gates and Bert trapped a sample under his boot, picked it up and glanced at it before throwing it again to the wind. “It looked like a page of somebody’s letter home.”

  They walked through the gateway. Inside the fort was a square and more prisoners were collected in a group at one side of it. All of them clutched some belongings: a bundle of clothes or a pack or a blanket. They looked untidy and vacant and sad. Some of the infantry stood around the prisoners, on guard, their rifles slung over their shoulders. Other soldiers moved purposefully in and out of the low buildings built against the walls of the fort. Bert said, “They’re looking for intelligence, maps and orders.”

  Shells had fallen inside the walls, smashing the roofs of some of the buildings and making small craters in the square. There were dead lying in the square. They were horribly dead. Headless. Faceless. One with the intestines spilled out. Katy held down the contents of her stomach and took her pictures.

  They went to look into the towers and found there was a gun in each tower. Katy did not know what kind they were but they looked smaller than the twenty-five-pounders. Three were intact but one had taken a direct hit before the surrender and its crew were scattered around it. Horror again.

  Bert glanced sideways at Katy then led the way back across the square, walking quickly with his familiar long, disjointed, shambling gait. Paper was blowing about the square, letters, documents, old news-sheets, pages from books.

  Outside the fort again, they returned to the truck where Powell had his stove burning once more and a kettle on top. of it. He said cheerfully, “Breakfast in a minute. Nothing to shout about, just bully beef, biscuits, jam and a wet, but —”

  Katy said, “No, thank you.” She walked around to the back of the truck where nobody could see her, leaned against the tail-board and closed her eyes. It made no difference; she could still see them.

  Some time later, Bert said, “Here.”

  Katy opened her eyes and saw he carried a mess-tin and a mug in one hand while with the other he flapped at the swarming flies. She protested, “I told you I didn’t —”

  “I know you don’t want to but you’ve got to. You need the food and the liquid. Anyway, it’s only biscuits and jam.”

  She could not have faced the warm and greasy corned beef, but she sipped at the tea and forced down the biscuits that were dry and hard, like the kind you fed to a dog, and smeared with jam. She felt a little better afterwards, took off the hat and shook her short hair, seeing the dust fall from it. She wiped the sweat from her brow with a grimy handkerchief and replaced the hat.

  Bert was writing in his notebook. When he’d finished, Katy said, “Well, I saw it. Finally.”

  “Uh?” Bert glanced at her.

  “The war.”

  “Oh, that.” He dismissed it with a shrug, then asked, “Did you get plenty of pictures?”

  “Yes. And I see what you meant. They won’t let me use most of them. I’ve never seen pictures like that anywhere.”

  “Your first time.”

  First. There would be others. She wondered how many times Bert had witnessed such scenes — and worse. She asked, “Do you — get used to it?”

  Bert looked at her, stone-faced. “No.”

  The column headed slowly back to the gap in the wire, herding their prisoners along with them. They passed through the wire into Egypt that night and next morning Jamie broke away from the column with his two trucks and set out across the desert to the long coast road to Alexandria. Once on the road they made better time. They passed through Sidi Bar-rani, then Mersa Matruh and shortly afterwards Powell, hunched over the wheel, said the airfield in the distance was the Royal Air Force base at Ma’aten Bagush. That held no significance for Katy; she did not know Mark Ward was there.

  Then the khamsin blew, a wind like the breath of a furnace, driving the fine dust of the desert in suffocating clouds. In the trucks they could not see ten yards ahead. It was mercifully short-lived — the khamsin sometimes blew for several days —but through all that interminable day and in to the night they huddled inside the closed trucks where the heat was that of an Oven. They wore cloths over mouth and nose but the dust still got through.

  The khamsin blew itself out in the night and they brewed tea at first light, ate corned beef, biscuits — and sand, then went on. Powell’s eyes were red and weeping from the dust; he could hardly see.

  Katy offered, “I can drive that thing.”

  Jamie shook his head, “Not on, I’m afraid. Army vehicle, so only the Army is allowed to drive it. I’ll do it.”

  “What about your leg?”

  “The leg is all right. I’m due to go to Cairo as soon as this jaunt is over, anyway, and they’ll pass me fit for duty.”

  Jamie drove them into Alexandria at mid-morning, threading the eight-hundredweight through the traffic. He dropped Bert at his hotel and Katy got down to bid him goodbye. Bert was going to clean up then catch a train to Cairo to file his story. Katy’s films were in his pocket.

  She said, “I’ll be hearing from you.”

  Bert nodded and squinted at her, the sun in his eyes. He asked, “Form any conclusions?”

  Katy remembered the action at the fort only forty-eight hours before the dead. She said flatly, “Only that I was right and America should stay out of this bloody business.”

  Bert did not answer her but glanced at the truck to make sure Jamie was out of earshot. “Nothing more...specific?”

  Katy said, “What did I make of the war in the desert? It seems you send a few arm
oured cars, guns and soldiers through the wire, patrol and maybe shoot up a convoy or capture a fort, then back through the wire again. Men die, but for no apparent purpose. Does that sum it up?”

  “The Italians don’t patrol through the wire.”

  “So are the British preparing to attack?”

  Bert did not answer that either, but asked instead, “Remember I asked you in Cairo how many British troops you’d seen? Well, how many have you seen now?”

  Katy thought, Plenty. Then thought again. A troop of the elderly armoured cars here and there. Four tanks. Two batteries of twenty-five-pounder field guns — or was that the same battery, seen twice? Several platoons of infantry, a platoon being twenty to thirty men. “Not a hell of a lot, I guess.”

  Bert nodded, “That’s right. And I’ve been checking around, talking to some of the British newsmen, putting two and two together. I don’t think they’ve got much of anything: planes, tanks, guns or men, not a tenth of the force the Italians are building up in Libya behind Sollum. They’ve got five divisions!” He paused. “You ever watch the fights?”

  Katy was lost by this sudden shift in the conversation, “The fights?”

  “In Madison Square Garden. The boxing.” And when Katy shook her head, Bert went on: “Sometimes you see a guy jabbing to keep the other feller off balance and you know he doesn’t want to punch it out because he don’t have a punch.”

  Katy said blankly, “So?”

  “So the British are jabbing. I think Wavell is trying one hell of a bluff.” Wavell was commander-in-chief, Middle-East. “He’s making these raids and pinprick attacks to keep the Italians unsettled and thinking he’s stronger than he is. He’s aiming to win time to build up his strength but damn near everything he needs has to come the long route around the Cape, and it’s a slow business. So far the bluff has worked. But when that big Italian army starts rolling there’s precious little between Sollum and Cairo to stop them.”

  Katy paled, thinking, And we’ll be in the way. They were neutrals but a shell could not discriminate. She had gone to the war and been sickened by it. Now it was coming to her.

  “Hey!” Bert gripped her by the shoulders. “You look like hell. Snap out of it. That’s the way I figure it but I could be wrong. I don’t know much, I just have this gut feeling.”

  Katy smiled at him lopsidedly, “O.K.”

  He studied her. “Do you want out?”

  “No.” She shook her head, definite. “I’ll see it through.” She was not a quitter.

  Bert nodded, “Right. You did pretty good out there. See you, kid.” He shambled away into his hotel.

  Katy returned to the truck and Jamie drove her on to her apartment, carried her kit up himself and set it down by her door. He smiled at her, “Everything all right?”

  Katy pushed at a damp tendril of hair, felt the sand in it, “Yes. Fine. All I need is a shower, and sleep.”

  Jamie lifted one hand to his cap in a casual salute. “I’ll be seeing you.”

  Inside the apartment weariness flooded over her. She had to force herself to go through to the bathroom and run hot water. She stripped and stood in it, eyes closed, letting the ache soak out of her. Finally she aroused herself enough to get out of the shower and towel her body.

  She crawled into the bed, lay in a daze and thought that she was overtired. She wondered if Mark had telephoned while she was away, whether he would call her tonight. Suddenly she was wide awake and uneasy, for a moment certain that something bad had happened to him. Was that a premonition? Then her common sense reasserted itself. She told herself she was just exhausted and had seen too much of death and destruction. She was letting her nerves take charge. Mark was all right.

  But she did not sleep for some time.

  5 Bomba

  Mark knew neither apprehension nor premonition that morning. He thought of Katy as he often did, because she fascinated him, and of Taranto because it forced itself on him.

  He sat in the cockpit of Ethel on the Royal Air Force field at Ma’aten Bagush. Hardy, the fitter, stood on the port wing, meaty hands curled around the long starting-handle protruding from the engine cowling, shoulders lumpy with muscle bowing and lifting as he wound the handle slowly.

  The night before, when the khamsin blew, the pilots and observers of the four Swordfish were called to the operations room. All save the flight leader, who had been carried off to hospital with bronchitis, left the mess and groped their way over to the ops room. They were muffled against the hot rasp of the wind and the scouring dust, only their eyes showing and their hands lifted to shield them. Conversation was impossible and their swearing at being dragged from the mess was drowned by the wind.

  They sat or stood about in the ops room, trying to wipe sand from their sweating faces as the briefing officer’s voice, straining above the roar of the wind outside, told them: “The Blenheim flying reconnaissance today spotted a sub heading into Bomba Bay, and a ship — probably a depot-ship for the sub — already in there.” Bomba was in Libya, beyond Tobruk, some three hundred miles from Ma’aten Bagush. “The Met people tell us this khamsin will have blown out before morning. The scheme is that you take off at seven in the morning, fly up to Sidi Barrani, refuel there and wait for the dawn reconnaissance flight to report. If the ship and the sub are still there, they’re yours. Questions?”

  Mark asked, “What about the flight leader, sir? He’s in hospital.”

  “We’ve sent a signal to Dekheila asking for a replacement.” The briefing officer went on to give what information was known of enemy defences at Bomba, then paused and looked around at the thoughtful young faces in the yellow light. “Any more questions? No? Then I suggest an early night.”

  Mark offered, “I’ll tell the ground crew.” He fought his way, head down against the wind, to their quarters and found some of them in bed, the others about to turn in. Sand swirled across the floor of the tent and lay over everything.

  Hardy stood in cotton undershorts and vest; Laurel peered out sadly from his blankets and said gloomily, “It’s got to be bad news, sir.”

  Mark told them. The bed opposite those of Laurel and Hardy was occupied by the Leading Torpedo-man, whose job it would be to arm the four Swordfish with bombs or torpedos. He grumbled, “Roll on my bloody twelve.”

  Laurel sniffed, “Won’t do you any good. The war’ll still be on when your twelve years are up, so you’ll still be in.” “Cheerful bastard.” The Torpedo-man turned over.

  Mark left then, grinning, knowing the Swordfish would be ready in the morning and on the top line.

  They were. Six 250-pound bombs were slung under Ethel’s wings while a torpedo hung below the belly of each of the other three Swordfish. It was a fine, bright morning, the sky a clear, empty blue. Hardy heaved on the starting-handle. Mark was settled inside his harness, a khaki overall covering his white shirt and shorts, comfortable old shoes on his feet.

  Tim’s voice came through the Gosport tube: “Is this miracle of communications working?”

  Mark answered him: “I can hear you.”

  “Can’t ask for more, I suppose.”

  Hardy had wound the starting-handle up to a good speed now. Laurel climbed onto a step on the undercarriage, set his own hands on next to Hardy’s and kept up the momentum while Hardy swung more easily, resting his hands on the handle.

  Mark glanced along the line of Swordfish again and saw Ollie Patch’s head sticking out of his cockpit. Ollie was a short, wiry captain, Royal Marines, who had first learned to fly with a Royal Air Force commission. He had been flown up from Dekheila at first light to lead the operation.

  Hardy was now winding in earnest again, he and Laurel together, the handle whirling round. The full heat of the day had not yet come but Mark could see the sweat drip from Hardy’s chin.

  Fast enough. Mark reached out his left hand to the ring on the bottom of the control panel, pulled it to let in the clutch and the engine fired, the propeller kicked and spun. He warmed up the engine, che
cking temperatures and pressures, while Hardy pulled the starting-handle from its socket and passed it up to Tim Rogers to be stowed in his cockpit.

  All four Swordfish were running up their engines now, sending sand swirling and billowing across the field. Mark felt no excitement, no expectation of action, and thought, Early yet; might all be for nothing if the sub and the ship have flown the coop in the night. He carried on with his pre-flight checks and at seven o’clock the Swordfish trundled off one by one and followed Ollie Patch into the sky.

  Ninety minutes later they landed, cautiously and warily, at Sidi Barrani. Mark peered over the side of the cockpit as he came in: this rough desert strip was close to the sharp end of the war and had suffered several air raids since the Swordfish squadron had staged there on the way to attack Tobruk. The surface was a moonscape of bomb craters filled with sand and rock and roughly levelled. He had to pick a way through them. The landing was bumpy, and thoughts of the bombs under the wings lurked at the back of his mind, but Ethel rolled safely to a halt and he cut the engine.

  Tim Rogers said into the silence, “Not exactly Imperial Airways, are we?”

  Mark told him, “Stop wingeing about the ride. There is a war on, you know.”

  “Go on. Is that a fact?”

  “Know where we are?”

  “Place looks familiar. I was going to ask someone.” Tim nodded at the R.A.F. ground crew, in ancient, oil-stained khaki shirts and shorts, closing in to refuel the four Swordfish.

  Mark said, “Find out at breakfast. Maybe there’ll be somebody there to tell you the way home as well.”

  They climbed down and a fitter pointed Campbell towards the cookhouse, where he could eat, then said to Mark, “That’s your mess, sir — and the ops room as well — over there.” But they knew it from their previous visit.

  Mark and Tim walked over to where it lay, set back from the strip. The mess-cum-ops-room was built out of petrol tins filled with sand, roofed by a tarpaulin and draped with camouflage netting. Tim muttered, “Not exactly the Dorchester, either.”