The Exit Club: Book 1: The Originals

by Shaun Clarke

  By the afternoon of the fifth day, Marty, like most of the men, was almost mindless with exhaustion and growing stale from too much training. He was therefore relieved when Lieutenant Kearney turned up to announce that the training period was over and they could all return to the base camp.

  By last light, the LRDG convoy was back in the FOB at Siwa Oasis and the men were stood down for the night.

  ‘That was the longest fucking week of my life,’ Tone complained to Marty.

  ‘The most exciting week of my life,’ Marty

  responded, despite his chronic exhaustion. ‘Now I want

  a taste of the real thing. A proper patrol.’

  ‘You must be mad,’ Red said.

  Chapter Four

  Marty was filled with excitement when he rose at first light with the other men to attend to his ablutions and get dressed in his special desert clothing, including shirt and shorts, the shemagh and black woollen agal, leather gauntlets and open-toed Arab sandals. Like the others, he also put on a heavy sheepskin jacket to defeat the icy cold of the desert morning.

  After a hearty breakfast in the mess tent, he went with Tone and a bunch of other newcomers (already referred to mockingly by the ‘old hands’ of the LRDG as ‘pale faces’ or ‘Inglesi’) to the armoury to collect the weapons they had left there the day before. Shortly after, at the motor pool, they found the rest of the LRDG already checking their vehicles.

  Shivering with cold even in his sheepskin jacket, Marty glanced about him and saw that practically the whole of the LRDG, ten patrols in all, was moving out with a mixture of Chevrolet trucks, modified fourwheel-drive Ford F-60 cars, three-ton supply trucks and a Light Aid Detachment maintenance truck. Also moving out was the LRDG artillery section, consisting of a 4.5-inch howitzer, an 88mm 25-pounder, and a light tank, each mounted on a ten-tonner. He also saw that Captain Kearney was going to lead the expedition and that he was accompanied by the redoubtable Sergeant ‘Bulldog’ Bellamy.

  ‘Judging by this lot,’ Marty said to Tone, ‘I’d say we’re in for a pretty lengthy patrol.’

  ‘You are,’ Corporal ‘Red’ Lester told him before Tone could respond. ‘Reconnaissance and intelligence gathering is what it’s all about, though you may have some serious fun as well.’

  ‘What kind of fun?’ Tone asked.

  ‘Contact with the enemy,’ Red replied. ‘What the fuck did you thinkI meant, Inglesi?’

  Tone’s intended response was cut short when Captain Kearney stood up in his Chevrolet and Bellamy bellowed that the men should gather around to be briefed. When they had done so, Bellamy folded his thick arms and stared grimly at them, ensuring silence while Kearney talked.

  ‘As you men have probably gathered,’ he said, ‘we’re about to embark on a major reconnaissance patrol that will include cross-country drives to pinpoint enemy bases and positions, road watches to monitor the movement of enemy troops, and harassment attacks against enemy transport convoys. The operation could last as long as a month, which is why we’ve brought along the supply trucks. Our main area of operations will be the Western Desert of Cyrenaica, including enemy positions in the Gazala-Tmimi area. As usual, we’ll be making our own maps as we go along and have brought our survey sections with us for this purpose. Modest air support can be supplied, if needed, by our two American WACO light aircraft, but apart from those, we’re on our own. Are there any questions?’ There were no questions. ‘Right,’ Kearney said briskly, ‘let’s move out.’ When Sergeant Bellamy clambered up into the front of Kearney’s Chevrolet, the latter raised his right hand, indicating ‘Advance’.

  ‘Move out!’ Bellamy bellowed.

  The trucks moved out of the oasis in an irregular column, churning up clouds of sand and dust in their wake. Manning the Browning machine gun at the front of his Chevrolet, with Tone behind him on the Boys anti-tank rifle and Red driving, Marty felt a surge of exhilaration as they left the oasis behind and headed into the vast plains of the desert. That exhilaration was short-lived when, the instant the convoy moved out of the shade of the oasis, the sun’s blazing heat hit him with the force of a hammer on an anvil.

  ‘Shit!’ Tone exclaimed, wriggling out of his sheepskin jacket while still holding on to his Boys antitank rifle. ‘We’ve only been in the sun for a minute and already I’m boiling.’

  ‘And it’s only eight in the morning,’ Red reminded him with what sounded like relish, also removing his jacket. ‘Just wait till the sun climbs higher in the sky, then you’ll know what real heat is.’

  ‘We alreadyknow what real heat is, Corporal,’ Marty retorted as the truck bounced roughly across the stony plain, making him cling tightly to the grip of his rattling machine gun with one hand while removing his sheepskin jacket with the other. ‘Apart from those desert runs that only ended last night, Tone and I fought at Mersa Brega– so we know all about heat.’

  ‘My apologies, Inglesi.’

  ‘And you can cut that for a start,’ Marty said. ‘We might be new to the LRDG, but we’re not new to the desert, so don’t come it with the “paleface” or “Inglesi”. First names or rank only, thanks.’

  He saw Red’s crooked, black-toothed grin in the rearview mirror as he nodded assent. ‘A soldier who knows his rights,’ Red said amiably. ‘Message received loud and clear.’

  ‘Thanks, Corporal,’ Marty said.

  Already sweating from the heat, he found that even though he was seated behind his weapon, the muscles of his legs were already aching from his repeated attempts to keep his balance on the piles of kit beneath his feet.

  ‘You’ll get used to it,’ Red said when Marty complained. ‘Your legs will only ache for a week or so; after that, you’ll have the legs of a wrestler and the girls will go mad for you.’

  ‘What girls?’ Tone asked sardonically, squinting into the brilliant light of the vast, flat plain. ‘Christ!’ he added. ‘It’s hot!’

  The heat increased as the sun climbed higher in the sky and the trucks continued their journey across the hard sand of the parched plain. Sheer cliffs rose out of the heat haze in the north; sand dunes were visible in the west, so beautiful they seemed almost unreal. However, as the convoy advanced deeper into the Western Desert, to where the conflict had raged a few months before, they came across old battlefields where the debris of war was scattered everywhere: derelict staff cars and jeeps, scorched, mangled tanks and halftracks, tin hats peppered with bullet holes, discarded water cans, pieces of tattered, burnt clothing and the remains of caved-in weapon pits. Occasionally they saw protruding from the sand the withered foot or hand of some rotting corpse.

  ‘Poor bastards,’ Tone whispered.

  ‘Rather them than us,’ Red said tartly. ‘It’s just the luck of the draw, mate.’

  By 1000 hours, when the convoy had already stopped twice for the usual tedious checking of the vehicles and weapons, the sun was well up in the sky, over twenty degrees, throwing a sharp shadow from the needle of the sun compass. By noon, with the sun almost directly above them, the vehicles were halted again, but this time in the shadow of the steep side of a wadi where they would not be seen by enemy aircraft. While the rest of the men lay gratefully under the shade of tarpaulins stretched between trucks, the navigator of each vehicle took a fix on the sun through the smoked glass of his theodolite, the radio operator contacted base for any fresh orders (there were none) and Captain Kearney, accompanied by Sergeant Bellamy, wandered from one group of men to another, checking that all of them were okay.

  ‘So, Private Butler,’ he said to Marty, ‘you’re still surviving, I see.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Mary responded.

  ‘Not letting yourself be run into the ground by the LRDG?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  Kearney turned to the granite-faced Sergeant Bellamy. ‘Is Butler the one you said had a reputation for getting into mischief?’

  ‘A hard case, sir. Fairly bright, but undisciplined. The kind that needs to be kept busy. He might be all right out here.�
��

  ‘Will you be all right out here, Private Butler?’

  ‘Not much option, sir,’ Marty replied boldly, ‘being stuck here in the middle of nowhere.’

  ‘A good answer,’ Kearney said, then he marched off, still grinning, with Bellamy.

  ‘I think he likes you,’ Red said to Marty. ‘He’s a bit of a wild man himself and likes men with initiative. He’s not your regular army type at all; he doesn’t stand on ceremony and he judges a man solely by his actions. I think he likes a free spirit.’

  ‘That’s me!’ Marty retorted.

  The column was soon on the move again, advancing ever deeper into the desert, passing more old battlefields with their sad, sometimes sickening, debris, but not coming into contact with the enemy.

  ‘We’re still too close to our own lines,’ Red explained during another maintenance stop. ‘We’ll make contacttomorrow.’

  The heat was truly appalling for most of the afternoon, burning even through the black woollen agal and shemagh to the skull; but it cooled to more bearable levels in the late afternoon, when Captain Kearney started looking for a place to lay up for the night. Eventually, after another hour’s search, he found the ideal spot: on a high ridge overlooking a flat plain divided by an Axis forces’ main supply route – or MSR, as such routes were known. Intending to spend most of the following day surveying that MSR, he told the men to form a protective laager and make camp.

  The trucks laagered by parking across the wind, then the men covered the vehicles with ‘cam’ nets of desert- coloured hessian, which blended perfectly with the surrounding shrub, making the tracks hard to see from the air. Each driver then pinned his truck’s tarpaulin by two wheels on the lee side with the upper half forming a windbreak, the lower a groundsheet. Before resting, however, the drivers had to check their day’s petrol consumption and make the usual maintenance checks, while the rest of the men checked and cleaned their weapons, then covered the moveable parts with stretched condoms.

  ‘It may stretch over this weapon,’ Red said, carefully drawing a rubber over the barrel of his 9mm Sten machine gun, ‘but it’s too small to fit over mine – or so my women would tell you.’

  ‘I’ll bet,’ Marty retorted.

  ‘Personally, I don’t like rubbers,’ Tone chipped in as he fumbled with the condom he was trying to stretch over the ten-round detachable box magazine of his .303 Lee Enfield boltaction rifle. ‘I can never get the bloody things on and I hate taking them off.’

  ‘How can you hate taking them off,’ Red challenged him, ‘when you can’t get the bloody things on?’

  ‘He’s so big they all burst,’ Marty said, trying to help his friend out, ‘when he reaches his full potential.’

  ‘Pull the other one,’ Red said.

  Luckily, at that point, the cook – Monsieur Verdoux because of his concoctions – called out that dinner was ready. Though not exactly over the moon to sample Monsieur Verdoux’s bully-beef curry, Marty and his friends wolfed it down, rinsed the foul aftertaste out with a brew-up, relaxed with a smoke, then washed in cold water held in metal containers, trying to get rid of the sweat-slimed sand. Finally, they stretched out under the camouflaged trucks and tried to sleep as best they could, given that the evening was bitterly cold and that the flies and mosquitoes, oblivious of the cold, whined and buzzed about them all night.

  nicknamed poisonous

  Those still sleeping were awakened at first light by the troopers on last watch and found themselves not only shivering with cold, but also bitten black and blue by the mosquitoes that had tormented them without respite. After attending to their ablutions, they put on their warm sheepskin jackets, had a breakfast of wads and hot tea, then settled down to a lengthy reconnaissance of the MSR on the desert plain below the escarpment.

  Within an hour, the sun was high in the sky and the heat had forced them to remove their sheepskin jackets. By the end of the second hour, the sun was even higher, the heat was even worse, and the flies and mosquitoes were forming dark clouds around them, driven into a feeding frenzy by the smell of human sweat. Luckily, the MSR was busy, with German and Italian trucks moving constantly along it, clearly heading for Tobruk where British, Australian and Indian forces were still under siege. This constant activity at least gave the men something to watch, though the only ones who could actually do anything positive were Sergeant Bellamy, who was keeping a log of all enemy movements; Captain Kearney, who was in constant radio communication with MEHQ Cairo, calling up air strikes against the enemy transports; and the NCOs of the survey section, who spent their time making specialized LRDG maps of the vast area stretched out below them, unfolding to the heat-hazed horizon.

  ‘If I have to lie here all day,’ Marty whispered to Tone where they lay together on the edge of the escarpment, looking down on the heatwaves shimmering up off the desert plain, ‘I’ll go bloody mad. Why the hell can’t we go down into that desert and drum up a bit of action for ourselves? Better than sitting here roasting our backsides. More productive as well.’

  ‘Hail the hero!’ Red exclaimed mockingly. ‘He can’t wait to get into a firefight and shit in his pants.’

  ‘The day I shit in my pants,’ Marty retorted, ‘is the day I have to stand before my Maker. It won’t happen before that.’

  Red laughed and rolled onto his belly to watch the first of the air strikes called in by Captain Kearney. Crawling closer to the edge of the escarpment, Marty watched keenly as a squadron of Hurricane fighter planes swooped on the Italian troop transports snaking across the shimmering plain, along the MSR. As the first of the aircraft flew over the column, guns chattering, the anti-aircraft guns on the Italian transports roared into action, filling the blue sky with crisscrossing tapestries of green tracer and ink-coloured clouds of exploding flak. Simultaneously, the desert around the troop trucks erupted in a series of explosions that hurled columns of swirling sand high into the air to rain back down over the scattering vehicles. Though spreading out to minimize the danger from the attacking aircraft, the Italian vehicles were unable to escape the combined onslaught of machine-gun fire and bombs, many bursting into flames and, in some cases, being hurled onto their sides with burning men spilling out of the rear and black smoke boiling over them.

  Feeling safe on the escarpment, though baking in the fierce heat, the men of the LRDG lit cigarettes and watched the attack, cheering each time an Italian truck was either bombed or came to a shuddering, smoking halt in a hail of bullets from the Hurricanes. Soon that section of the MSR was covered in a pall of boiling sand that temporarily obscured the Italian column. Ten minutes later, the British aircraft, having released all their bombs, fired the last rounds from their machine guns and headed back to Cairo without casualties.

  As the spiralling sand and dust settled back on the desert plain, the Italian column was seen to be devastated, with many of the trucks burning and pouring smoke. The dead or wounded bodies of those who had tried to escape were scattered widely about them.

  Similar attacks took place throughout the rest of the morning as Kearney continued to radio back to MEHQ Cairo details of passing Axis columns. By early afternoon, the Italians, obviously realizing that their MSR was under surveillance, sent a couple of CR.42 fighter planes to reconnoitre the area and, if necessary, put the Brits out of business. The aircraft flew low over the escarpment twice without seeing the camouflaged LRDG vehicles, but seeing them on the third run, when they flew over at low altitude, they circled around to come back for an attack.

  ‘Shake out!’ Captain Kearney bawled. Marty was up and running at the sound of that commanding voice, but Red was already at the truck, ripping the ‘cam’ net off and throwing it onto the front seats as Tone scrambled up to take his position at the Boys anti-tank rifle. Marty managed to take his position behind the Browning machine gun just as the first of the Italian fighter planes came barrelling out of the azure sky with all guns firing, stitching lines of spitting sand across the rim of the escarpment, right up to where
Captain Kearney’s Chevrolet was breaking the laager by lurching forward in a cloud of churning sand.

  The first of the Italian aircraft had already whined over the LRDG and was ascending again when the hail of fire from a rapidly following CR.42 caused the rim of the escarpment to explode with a mighty roaring, as if a bomb had fallen, accompanied by mushrooms of swirling, hissing sand that erupted just short of the two escaping Chevrolets.

  Marty heard the roaring of his machine gun before realizing that he had actually pressed the trigger. As he and Tone opened fire, Red pressed his foot on the accelerator and the Chevrolet shot forward through the swirling sand. Nearly thrown out of the truck, Marty gripped the stock of the Browning tighter, braced his legs, then managed to aim approximately at the next incoming Italian plane and fire a sustained burst as it roared down and up again, its bullets causing more catastrophic explosions of sand and gravel and dust.

  ‘Bastards!’ Tone bawled excitedly, firing at the diving aircraft with his pintle-mounted Boys anti-tank rifle. ‘Take that, you sods!’

  The LRDG trucks were now racing down the hill, weaving frantically to avoid the lines of spitting sand being stitched by the machine guns of the Italian fighter planes, bouncing violently over rocks and potholes, their wheels churning up clouds of sand that mingled with the sand already boiling upward and hissing noisily. Like Marty, the rest of the LRDG gunners were hammering away at the Italian aircraft, practically hanging on their weapons and swinging them wildly from side to side as they attempted to follow the aircraft that were diving and climbing through a great web of purple tracery and black flak.

  Eventually, one of the Italian planes was hit. Pieces of metal flew off it and flames burst from its fuselage, engulfing the cockpit before the unfortunate pilot could escape. Whining and wobbling, spitting flames and oily smoke, the stricken plane plummeted, spinning, to earth and smashed into the desert plain, exploding as a spectacular ball of fire. The other aircraft, like a flock of frightened birds, turned away and flew off.