Caine’s heart sank. A ‘crashdive job’ meant that the wheels were wedged deep into the sand – a problem made worse by Netanya’s revving. ‘Periscope work’ meant that hi-lift jacks and a lot of hard shovelling would be needed to get her out.
‘It’s the way Netanya drives ’em, boss,’ the little Cockney complained. ‘’E don’t seem to realize the gears an’ clutch ain’t synchronized on a freetonner. Instead of changin’ direct, ’e works down froo the gears. Finks e’s drivin’ a bleedin’ Roller.’
‘Get all the boys over,’ Caine told him.
He jogged over to Glenda to inspect the damage. Netanya dropped out of the cab and came to meet him, looking embarrassed.
‘Sorry, sir,’ he said. ‘The surface all looks the same. Just bad luck.’
Caine squinted at the lorry’s tyres and saw at once that the pressure was too high. He’d given specific orders that drivers should adjust tyre-pressure on sand as a matter of course. Netanya had neglected it here, and this small mistake could have put the whole mission in jeopardy.
Caine bit back a mouthful of invective. ‘You’ve got about ninety pounds of pressure there, Manny,’ he said acidly. ‘Fifteen is plenty.’
Netanya nodded glumly, but Caine didn’t press it: they’d been crossing alternate patches of gravel and sand since the morning, and deciding on the correct pressure in such variable terrain was a real headache.
Dumper was already letting air out of the tyres: the rest of the boys were swarming around the truck ready to start shovelling. Caine measured the length of the mishmish pool, pacing it in both directions. He decided that the best course was to reverse out. He joined the rest of the lads, kneeling on the hot sand, sweating like warthogs, digging frantically with shovels and bare hands, sending occasional glances to where Dorothy stood sentinel half a klick away.
It was a losing battle. The sand was too soft, and the more they shovelled out, the deeper the wheels sank in. After ten minutes of back-breaking toil, Caine squatted back on his haunches and wiped sweat off his brow with his tankie silk scarf. Copeland stalked over to him on his waderbird legs, clad in shorts and chapplies. He hadn’t had a chance to clean the graze on his scalp and his hair was caked with a mixture of sweat, dust and congealed blood. He flashed a glance towards Audley’s jeep.
‘There’s no way we’re going to extract her, Tom,’ he said. ‘If we stay any longer we’re going to get caught with our pants down.’
‘You mean dump her?’
Copeland’s face had assumed the familiar expression of superiority that must have worked well when addressing a class of fourteen-year-olds, Caine thought. ‘Let’s face it, Tom,’ Cope said solemnly. ‘We’re going to dump all the wagons in the end. It’s not worth risking the operation for a truck.’
Caine considered it. ‘We can’t do it, Harry,’ he said. ‘She’s carrying almost all our water. What we need is something to stop the rear axle sinking – maybe some of those old petrol boxes would do the trick. We’re also going to need all the hi-lifts we’ve got to raise the wheels enough to get the sandchannels under them.’
Dumper and Gibson ran to Veronica and came back with shards of broken-up petrol boxes. Caine took the flat plywood pieces: crouching beneath the Bedford’s chassis, he placed them under her rear axle, working fast, but being careful not to disturb the fragile sandcrust. Wallace, Copeland, Rossi and Gibson struggled to set up the stiltlike hi-lift jacks by each wheel and worked the handles frenetically until the sweat was pouring off them in rivulets. ‘Watch it, skipper,’ Cope warned him. ‘The hi-lifts are wobbly as hell.’
Dumper and Gibson were ferrying the perforated steel sandchannels from Veronica, laying them in the sand by Caine – they were hot to the touch. The hi-lifts creaked, the jacking team huffed, sucked their teeth in the sharp heat; the 3-tonner’s wheels rose an inch, an inch and a half, two inches. Caine took the end of the first sandchannel, gasping as the hot iron burned his fingers. He was just about to crawl under the chassis again when Wallace’s voice rasped, ‘She’s goin’.’
The jacks slithered and shifted: the truck’s three-ton weight reeled. Caine had just enough time to throw himself clear before she crashed down in her grooves, with a slam of metal and a clang of springs. The men cursed, collapsed in the hot sand, tried to recover their breath. They were up a second later, though, their eyes flickering wildly in Dorothy’s direction. Copeland’s eyes bored into Caine like skewblades. ‘Skipper,’ he pleaded. ‘If they bump us now we’ve had it: Audley won’t keep them back for more than two minutes.’
Caine glanced at his watch, then at the sun, then at Dorothy. Audley and Larousse hadn’t budged nor given any sign of enemy movement. He dekkoed Cope, watching him, feet apart, hands on hips. ‘Let’s give it one more go,’ he said. ‘If we don’t get her out this time, we’ll leave her.’
The truck was as deeply wedged as she’d been when they’d started. They had to go through the entire process of digging out sand, placing wood under the rearaxle, working the hi-lifts now with a sense of desperation, expecting the Hun to appear any minute, unable to erase from their minds either the savage contact earlier or the sickening abbatoir scene they’d witnessed at the ridge.
This time, though, the jacks held, just long enough for Caine to slide the sandchannels under the wheels. When they were snugly fitted, he bawled at the team to release the hi-lifts. The lorry settled on to her sandchannels with a sigh, Caine took a last shufti at Dorothy, then jumped into the cab.
He started her up, threw her into reverse, let in the clutch. The truck lurched backwards, tossing and swaying like a fishfloat in water, the whole crew heaving from the front. Finally, she rolled back, and Rossi and Gibson belted in the spare channels with perfect precision. A moment later her tyres crunched on terra firma. Caine set the rear brake, cranked the transmission into neutral and dropped from the cab, leaving the engine running. ‘Come on, lads,’ he yelled. ‘Let’s get packed up and get the hell out of here.’
17
As the boys raced to stash away jacks, shovels, sandmats and sandchannels, readjust tyre pressures, top up fueltanks, Caine made a sign to Audley to come in, then had a dekko at the sky. The sun was tilting over to the west, a fire meridian now suffusing the leached-out pallor of the afternoon. There were smears of purple murex and flamingo pink across the world’s edge, like daubs in a child’s painting book. A moment later Dorothy slalomed to a halt beside him. Audley shoved back his goggles and Caine saw an expression of relief on his face. ‘No sign of them, old boy,’ he announced. ‘Not even a dust-trail. They must have given us up as a bad job. Maybe Gibbo’s mines did more damage than we thought.’
Caine nodded but made no comment. He couldn’t believe that the Hun had abandoned the chase when they’d been coming on with such apparent resolve. True, Gibbo’s mines might have made them wary. They might have been afraid of walking into more traps: rather than turning tail, though, he thought they might be making a circling movement of some kind, staying below the skyline, planning to bump his convoy further on. Whatever the case, he was uneasy: it didn’t feel right.
He turned his back on Audley, dimly registered the sound of Dorothy’s motor receding, idling, then accelerating. He glanced back to see that she was heading north again and assumed that Audley was taking the initiative – going to see if he could find the Hun. Caine helped the lads stow away the last of the kit and was about to walk back to Doris when Fred Wallace gargled, ‘Shuftikite.’
Caine froze in midstep: the stark simplicity of it hit him like a rabbit punch. Of course the Axis column had called in air support. That was why they’d hung back beyond the horizon. He was a stupid duffer: in their haste to get moving, not even Copeland had broached this possibility. They should have remembered the signs of aircraft-strafing at the LRDG site.
He heard the aeroengine almost at once, a full thirty seconds before the aircraft hummed into view, a silver gnat plummeting gracefully through the rainbow skeins of dust. He didn’t ne
ed his binos to tell him that she was a CR42 biplane of the Regia Aeronautica. ‘Stop,’ he yelled. ‘Stop what you’re doing. Now.’
He followed the silver insect with his eyes as she trawled across the leaden sky with a maddening slowness – almost a deliberate impudence – that made him want to reach for a weapon at once and blast her down. He traileyed the scene around him – vehicle tracks, people tracks, the untidy configuration of wagons, the raggletaggle clutch of men, the heaps of sandspoil, the plumes of dust still hanging in the air from the unsticking – it wasn’t possible that the pilot could miss them.
An instant later the biplane tippled wings, banked and dumped altitude, crooning down in a long arc almost directly towards them. Caine’s pulse zipped. With an intuition born of years up the Blue, he knew for certain that she was coming in on a straffing run. The CR42 was outdated and slow, but that was exactly what made her dangerous as a spotter. Macchis and Messerschmitt 109s were much faster, and their pilots were therefore likely to overlook what was going on downstairs. The CR42 wasn’t a match for an RAF Spitfire, but she toted a halfinch Breda firing deadly armourpiercing needle bullets, as thick as Wienerschnitzl. A belt of those could easily devastate Caine’s little column.
The first time he’d been straffed, years back, he’d been so terrifed he couldn’t move. It still scared him, but not as much now, because he knew that the manoeuvre was almost as hazardous for the pilot as for his targets. Unless the flier wanted to risk squandering his shots, he had to get the kite in low – as low as twenty feet from the surface – and that left her wide open to ground-to-air fire.
The CR42 was still well out of her own effective range when Caine came to a decision. ‘Wallace, Larousse, man the Vickers,’ he roared. ‘Trubman, Rossi, the Brens. I want a wall of fire in front of that crate before she gets in straffing range. Anyone with a Garand or a Bren put in his tuppenceworth: fire directly in front of the aircraft, not at her.’
Caine watched Wallace sprinting bigboned for Doris and remembered that Audley and Larousse had gone off for a recce. He swore, knowing that this effectively halved his main firepower. ‘Dumper, Gibbo,’ he roared. ‘Get the bazooka jacked up. If the kite gets through the firewall, blow her out of the sky.’
He’d hardly finished his sentence when he heard Wallace trombone the working parts on the twin Vickers, saw him traverse muzzles, raise elevation. He clocked the aircraft dropping towards the column like a hawk – five hundred feet, two hundred feet, a hundred: he caught the biplane’s batshadow racing across the sand. ‘Watch my tracer,’ Wallace bullhorned.
The Vickers cymballed thunder, gouted fire, curved steaming orange tracer directly in the CR42’s divepath. From the cabs of Glenda and Veronica, the mounted Brens kicked in, belched, ticktacked, squelched green tracer in long bright rods: the brilliant dotted lines of colour merged, mingled, entwined, wove together in a spectacular rainbow barrier of light. Caine, armed with his shortrange Tommy-gun, could only watch. From all around him came the bass boomph, boomph, boomph, boomph of Garands and the staccato tacktacktack descant of Brens as the other SAS men opened up. Caine felt the air buck, felt his eardrums flutter, breathed cordite, took in the thrashing torque of aeroengines as the pilot tried desperately to pull out of the dive. Squinting in the lowering sun, Caine could see the Italian tricolore on the double wings, could see the pilot’s head, his mouth spread in a mad rictus beneath the flying helmet and goggles.
The biplane yawed and bobbed. Her path started to flatten out. Caine’s heart dropkicked: the firewall was always a dicey tactic, and it looked like she’d made it through. Fifteen yards forward and to the right of Caine’s position, Dumper and Gibson were crouched at an oblique angle to the aircraft’s trajectory, their bodies locked together in a tight clinch. Dumper traversed the muzzle a fraction, lined up the crosshairs a tad in front of the biplane’s nose, and gripping the forward pistolgrip with his disfigured left hand, took first tension on the firing mechanism. ‘Watch the backblast, mate,’ he rumbled.
The bazooka shockwaved fire, backslashed flame and smoke. The air shizzed; the rocket skeetered, greasetrailed, kerblunked into the airplane’s frame. For a split second nothing happened. The CR42 careened on in a breathtaking powerglide. Then her body bulged, ballooned, bludgeoned apart, karooned into curds of flame with an earsplitting krooooompp. The pilot’s squarejawed leer vanished: the fueltanks starflashed in a spectacular many-pointed red dwarf, the wings disintegrated, shrapnel and blazing canvas tatters rained down.
The biplane skewbladed over the heads of the SAS men, a shapeless mass of flaming airborne wreckage, a dying skeleton of blazing aeroskin and crazily tangled sidestruts. She lufted on far past their small leaguer, drooling fire, dribbling smoke, losing height rapidly until what was left of her slapped to earth, dissolved into an octopus-head of tarsmoke and a layer of charred wreckage that spread across the desert for hundreds of yards.
Caine’s men clapped and whooped. Dumper and Gibson stood up and made neat little bows to the cheering audience. Dumper held the bazooka high in both hands, as if presenting it for approval to the gods. As they trotted back into the leaguer, Wallace and Pickney danced a samba and blew them mock kisses. For a moment a carnival atmosphere reigned. Caine plumped down. ‘Good shooting,’ he beamed. ‘Now let’s get moving before that bloke’s mates come alooking.’
For a few moments the men gathered by Doris, clearing weapons, lighting cigarettes, glugging water gratefully from feltcovered canteens. ‘Shall I get comms with base, boss?’ Trubman asked, his bulging face bright red from the strain of the past few minutes. ‘Report the contact?’
‘Maintain wireless silence for now, Taffy,’ Caine said, drawing deep on a Black Cat cigarette. Whatever procedure they were using, W/T chatter could always be dee-effed, and after what they’d been through today, Caine had become wary of exposing his position. Slinging his Garand, Trubman rolled his coalsack body away unhappily to Veronica to disconnect his antenna.
Caine walked over to the jeep. Copeland was already back in the driver’s seat, and Wallace was cleaning the Vickers with a piece of rag. ‘Reminds me of the first time I tried to shoot back at an Axis kite,’ the big man said. ‘Just before Dunkirk it was. Me and this other chap was mannin’ an LMG on the back of a Morris truck. Minute we opens fire, the bleedin’ lug snaps off the tripod, dunnit. Had to take turns holdin’ the damn thing on our shoulders while the other fired. Bloody hopeless.’ He winked at Caine. ‘No bazookas in them days, Tom.’
Caine grinned at him, and looked around. ‘Where the heck have Audley and Larousse got to?’ he demanded.
‘Audley said they’d clocked a gazelle,’ Wallace snarled. ‘Just after we got the wagon unsticked. Must of gone to shoot it.’
Caine nodded, furious that Audley had let him assume he was doing a recce. He was faced with the choice of waiting for Dorothy to come back or leaving without them. He had almost decided to let them catch up on their own when the thumpa thumpa thump of Vickers ‘K’s drummed out from somewhere not too distant. Caine and Copeland sat up, scouring the desert for movement. Wallace dropped his cleaning rag, trained his twin weapons in the direction of the shots. ‘You don’t reckon he’s tryin’ to snag gazelle with a machine-gun? he asked incredulously.
Before anyone could answer, there came the rattle, crack and bump of small arms from the same direction. ‘That’s the Hun,’ Cope hissed.
‘Start up,’ Caine snapped, waving to the drivers of the other two wagons to do the same. Motors roared. Heads bobbed out of hatches, and Caine heard the plunk of Brens being cocked. He grabbed the big-calibre Browning mounted in front of him, remembered it was jammed and snatched his Thompson instead. Dorothy creased suddenly into the leaguer riding a skirl of dust, Audley driving, Larousse stooped over smoking guns in the back. The jeep careened to a halt a yard from Doris and Caine saw Audley’s eyes bulging in his ghostwhite face. He was trying to blurt out something, but was so worked up he couldn’t talk. Larousse cut across him. ‘It�
�s the Krauts, sir. Six or seven softskins led by an AFV – looks like an Sdkfz 222 light armoured car. They’ve worked a flanker round us, and they’re moving in – not more than a half-mile away.’
Audley nodded frantically. ‘Sorry, old boy,’ he warbled. ‘I know I shouldn’t have gone after game, but if we hadn’t, we’d never have spotted them.’
Caine bit his lip. ‘Take up position as tail-end Charlie,’ he ordered, ‘and get ready to go like a bat out of Valhalla. We’re going to outrun the Jerries and hit those dunes before last light.’
18
The German patrol was back on their trail: Caine’s drivers pushed their vehicles up to top speed but couldn’t throw them. ‘They’re gaining on us,’ Wallace croaked at intervals. ‘Can’t you go any faster, mate?’
The wagons spread out in air formation, spraying dust, bumping over stony ground, searing through hard gravel and sand, zigzagging and crossing over each other’s tracks to present harder targets if the Hun got near enough to open up.
Every time Caine looked, the enemy was there – a belt of black links shawled in haze, coming on with that same sharklike doggedness he’d sensed from the beginning. ‘Hope to Christ we don’t hit another stick,’ Copeland commented huskily. ‘Then we’ll really be scuppered.’
‘Shut up,’ Wallace bawled at him. ‘Don’t say it. Just keep going.’
Standard tactics would have been to stop and lay ambush, but the Hun were too close for that. Caine considered sowing mines, or just halting to make a stand, but rejected both ideas as hopeless. The only thing they could do was to make sure they kept out of range of the AFV’s cannon long enough to reach the dunes.
Death or Glory II: The Flaming Sword: The Flaming Sword Page 12
