The Exit Club: Book 1: The Originals

by Shaun Clarke

  Red flexed the muscle of his bared right arm to make his tattoo of ‘Jane’ wriggle her hips. ‘Seems like it,’ he replied with a crooked grin.

  ‘If this is L Detachment, SAS Brigade,’ Tone said, ‘I want out here and now.’

  ‘Oh, you do, do you?’ Sergeant Bellamy bellowed in Tone’s ear, having come up unnoticed to stand beside him. ‘So why don’t you just climb back on that bloody Hudson transport and go back to the brothels of Cairo where you clearly belong? Do us all a favour!’

  ‘Sorry, Sarge!’ Tone snapped into that bulldog countenance, glowering mere inches away from his face. ‘Just a joke, Sarge. No offence meant, like.’

  ‘I should bloody well think not. Now shut up and listen to what the CO has to tell you.’

  Though already informed by Captain Kearney that his new CO was six foot, five inches tall, Marty was still impressed when Captain Stirling stood up on the rear of the truck to welcome them to this piss hole in the desert. Captain Stirling looked massive.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Tone exclaimed softly, ‘that bastard’s a giant!’

  ‘But he doesn’t have his head in the clouds,’ Marty promptly responded. ‘I hear he’s quick and smart on his feet.’

  ‘Let’s hope so,’ Tone said.

  With his head practically scraping the canvas covering of the truck, Stirling thanked the listening men for volunteering to join L Detachment, apologized for the ramshackle state of the camp, and informed them that there was a ‘splendid’ Allied camp fifteen miles south of Kabrit, used by British, Australian, Indian and New Zealand troops, with the last named, in particular, living in relative luxury.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ Stirling continued – disingenuously, Marty suspected – ‘that I have to fly immediately to Cairo to arrange for the shipment of more transport and weapons, so I won’t be able to help you improve these awful living conditions. However, bearing in mind what I’ve just told you about the Kiwis, I trust that by the time I return you’ll have managed to sort something out.’

  ‘In other words,’ Tone whispered to Marty, ‘he expects us to go to that Kiwi camp and pinch all we need.’

  ‘It’s L Detachment’s first lesson in survival,’ Marty said with a grin. ‘We sink or we swim.’

  This turned out to be true. Within minutes of Stirling’s departure by Hudson transport to Cairo, Sergeant Bellamy, at Captain Kearney’s request, was bellowing for ‘volunteers’ to help him ‘requisition’ some supplies and equipment from the nearby Allied base camp. Before anyone could respond, Bellamy jabbed his finger at a dozen of the men, including Marty, Tone and Red, indicating that they should climb up into the battered three-ton truck. He then personally drove them the fifteen miles to the Allied camp, arriving there just as the sun was going down.

  ‘Tent city,’ he growled to Marty as they both stared at the hundreds of tents spread out in neat rows across a dusty plain, with the Mediterranean glittering in moonlight beyond the escarpment. ‘There must be thousands of men there.’

  ‘Thousands,’ Marty agreed. ‘And all living better than us. That isn’t right, Sarge.’

  ‘No, it’s not,’ Bellamy agreed with a mercenary grin. ‘New Zealand Division!’ he bawled as he drove past the Indian guard. Receiving no more than a weary nod of permission, he continued driving, passing row upon row of tents, tanks, halftracks, jeeps and the many trucks of the British, Australian and Indian lines, until he arrived at the area used by the New Zealanders. There, in the deepening darkness, with no Kiwis in sight and the truck parked by a huge, unattended supplies tent, he supervised the hasty loading of spare Kiwi tents, camouflage netting, proper camp beds, mattresses, sheets, pillows, towels, folding tables and chairs, steel lockers, shaving mirrors, kerosene lamps, cooking utensils, portable wash-hand basins, showers and latrines, and even crates of beer and spirits. At Tone’s request, they even stole the piano from the Kiwi’s mess tent. Then, with the truck almost overloaded, they drove out of the camp, receiving only another weary nod from the Indian guard on the main gate, and made their way back across the desert to their own, more modest, camp at Kabrit.

  By midnight they had raised the tents and filled them with their personal belongings. They had also raised the biggest tent as a mess tent, helped the cook set up his make-shift kitchen, carried in the folding tables and chairs, stacked the crates of beer and spirits beside a refrigerator, run off a portable electric generator, and, finally, wheeled in the piano. With Tone playing and leading an impromptu singsong, they partied until the early hours of the morning, then collapsed one after the other into their beds and slept the sleep of the dead.

  When they were bellowing of Bulldog exhausted and hungover. Nevertheless, regardless of how they felt, their brutal special training commenced with no mercy given.

  woken at first light by the Bellamy, most of them were

  The systematic torture of the ‘Originals’ began with a more intensive weapons course than any of them had ever undergone before. Assuming that their greatest need would be for a barrage of gunfire at relatively close range to cover a hasty retreat after acts of sabotage, Sergeant Bellamy gave only cursory attention to the standard bolt-action rifles and instead concentrated on the new 9mm Sten submachine gun. Though relatively cheap to produce and crude in design, it could fire 550 rounds per minute from 32-round box magazines and had an effective range of forty metres. To cover the same needs, great attention was also given to the M1 Thompson submachine gun, the 0.5-inch Browning heavy machine gun, the Bren light machine gun, and the lethal Vickers K .303-inch machine gun, actually an aircraft weapon, which fired a mixture of tracer, armour-piercing incendiary, and ball.

  ‘We’ve got more weapons than fingers,’ Tone noted sardonically. ‘What the bloody ’ell do we do with ‘em?’ ‘What you do with them is fire them,’ Marty replied, ‘when Sergeant Bellamy tells you to do so. Don’t ask for a reason.’

  ‘The reason,’ Sergeant Bellamy told him, materializing like a ghost beside him, ‘is that you dumb bastards have to learn to protect each other by being able to pick up and use another man’s weapon, no matter what kind it is. Do you understand, Private Williams?’

  ‘I understand, Sarge,’ Tone said.

  ‘You never cease to amaze me.’

  Firing practice was undertaken on a flat stretch of

  desert, baked by a fierce sun, often covered in windblown dust, filled with buzzing flies and whining mosquitoes, with crudely painted targets raised on wooden stakes at the far end, overlooking the Great Bitter Lake. This strip of ground was also used for training in the use of hand grenades, including the pineappleshaped ‘36’ grenade, also known as the ‘Mills bomb’, and captured German ‘potato mashers’, which had a screw-on canister at one end, a screw-off cap at the other, and a wooden handle.

  ‘Stealing from the enemy,’ Tone said. ‘This can’t be a good sign.’

  ‘It’s a good sign in the sense that these potato mashers are better then our hand grenades,’ Red insisted. ‘This wooden handle makes them easier to throw and they’re also more reliable in actually exploding.’

  ‘Give me the good old “thirty-six” any day,’ Marty said. ‘It fits my hand very nicely, thanks.’

  ‘It’s long and thin,’ Red explained to Tone, ‘so he imagines he’s holding his own dick.’

  ‘If he could get it that hard and that long,’ Tone said tartly, ‘he’ll be more of a man that he is now.’

  ‘There speaks the virgin,’ Marty retorted, ‘about the only married man inthis threesome. I’d call that real cheek.’

  ‘Just throw the bloody thing,’ Bulldog Bellamy interjected, suddenly materializing over them where they lay belly down on the burning sands. ‘If you confuse a potato masher with your prick, you’ll be in pretty bad trouble. Okay, you berks, throw!’

  ‘Yes, Sarge!’ all three men bawled simultaneously, then they threw their grenades.

  ‘Bloody hopeless,’ Bulldog complained when the grenades exploded short of the targets. ‘A bunch of
wankers I’ve got here.’

  After that, he worked them relentlessly, making them throw one grenade after another, throughout the blazing afternoon, until the falling of last light, allowing them to return to camp for a meal and sleep only when they were completely exhausted.

  This wasn’t unusual. These days, they were all exhausted most of the time. Their nerves were also stretched to breaking point by a combination of relentless training in the vicious heat, constant thirst, the tormenting insects, and a variety of increasingly paranoid fears, including dread of the many venomous snakes and spiders.

  They had been training for five days when Hudson transports arrived from Cairo, bringing Captain Stirling in with a horde of Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME), who instantly started work in improving the quality of the portable showers and ‘thunder boxes’. Other aircraft, following the Hudson transports over the next couple of days, brought in trucks, jeeps and drivers from the Royal Corps of Transport, as well as weapons from the armoury at Geneina.

  ‘I’m bloody glad not to be one of them,’ Tone said as he, Marty and Red watched the REME creating a defensive perimeter of stone-walled sangars containing Bofors anti-aircraft guns. The men were stripped to the waist, burnt by the sun and gleaming with sweat.

  ‘Bloody REME,’ Red said disparagingly, swatting flies and mosquitoes away from his flushed face. ‘Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em. Just like the women.’

  ‘Amen to that,’ Marty said.

  The following day, the first lessons in their demolitions training took place on the firing range, under the supervision of a dour Royal Army Ordnance Corps (RAOC) sergeant, Alfred ‘Limp Dick’ Hardy, an experienced sapper formerly with the scarred from the many accidents caused by his dangerous profession, Limp Dick was a deadly serious Geordie who demanded their full attention when lecturing them about low explosives such as gunpowder, high explosives such as RDX and PETN, and the intricacies of initiators, time fuses and firing caps. When the lectures and demonstrations were completed, he stopped the men from yawning by putting them through a series of exercises designed to show them how to handle the explosives and set them off in a variety of potential circumstances: aircraft, bridges, roads setting of booby traps. As the men had to complete these exercises themselves, with live explosives, there were many harrowing moments and nerve-racking and ammunition technician, Royal Engineers. Dramatically

  the blowing up of parked or buildings, as well as the experiences. Certainly a lot of bullshit flew back and forth, to cover up their most fearful moments.

  ‘You don’t have to be nervous with it,’ Limp Dick sneered as Tone attempted inexpertly to connect a time fuse to a nonelectric firing cap. ‘It isn’t a woman’s tit you’re holding, so just get on with it, lad.’

  ‘He’s never held a woman’s tit,’ Marty quickly chipped in. ‘If he got the chance, he wouldn’t just be nervous – he’d absolutely explode.’

  ‘We’re allgoing to explode if he doesn’t do this bloody job right,’ Limp Dick said. ‘That’s a real explosive charge he has there.’

  ‘ What?’ Tone exclaimed, shaking even more and visibly sweating. ‘Did you say a realexplosive, Sarge?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Limp Dick replied. ‘You touch one item to the other, make sure they connect, then, if you press that initiator – voilà!– the whole thing blows you sky high.’

  ‘Oh, Jesus!’ Tone groaned.

  As it was with the firing range, so it was with explosives: most of the exercises took place in the boiling, blinding heat while flies, mosquitoes and midges buzzed and whined about the struggling men. In combination with the heat, dust and insects, the thirst may have contributed to some of the men’s crazier antics. These involved the indiscriminate firing of rifles and pistols, the exploding of Thermos bombs, the collecting of wild dogs as vicious pets, betting at organized scorpion fights, and the hunting of gazelles and other desert animals.

  Appalled by these antics, Captain Kearney determined to stamp them out. Most hateful of all to him were the vicious scorpion fights in which someone would dig a circular ‘scrape’ in the sand, pour petrol around the edge, set it alight, then place two scorpions inside the ring of fire. Driven mad by the heat, the scorpions would viciously fight one another to the death. When Kearney also learned that the men were betting money on the outcome of the scorpion fights, he resolutely put a stop to them and ruthlessly returned those responsible to their original units. This punishment became known as an ‘RTU’ and was dreaded by everyone.

  Another sport, equally disgusting to Kearney, was the hunting of the beautiful desert gazelles, which the men would pursue in trucks, firing upon the unfortunate creatures with their rifles. While the animals’ carcasses didat least have the merit of supplementing the unit’s rations, Kearney viewed it as just another vicious blood sport. He stamped it out with a combination of even more training– now sometimes up to eighteen hours a day– or RTUs for the inveterate troublemakers. This worked, weeding out the last of the undesirables and leaving only the crème de la crème of the original volunteers.

  As the training continued with radio communications, first aid, nocturnal navigation, and enemy vehicle-and-aircraft recognition added to the men’s growing list of skills, it gradually became apparent to all of them that they were in a combat unit like no other, with no distinction in rank and everyone, including the officers, compelled to meet the same exacting standards.

  The informality went beyond that. The word ‘boss’, first used, perhaps accidentally, by Sergeant ‘Bulldog’ Bellamy, gradually replaced ‘sir’ and informal meetings, in which decisions were agreed between officers and other ranks after open, often volatile discussion, became commonplace. This in turn increased the mutual trust between the men and greatly enhanced the feasibility of the four-man patrol. Also, as each of the four men had a specialist skill – driver/mechanic, navigator, explosives and first aid – but all had been crosstrained to do the other men’s jobs if required, this made them uniquely interdependent.

  Their psychological bonding was made even more complete by the harsh fact that anyone who failed at any point in the training, or who bottled out because of fear, exhaustion, thirst or other causes, was RTU’s without mercy. As the numbers were whittled down, those remaining were forming the kernel of an exceptional band of highly skilled, close-knit, fighting men.

  Marty was proud to be one of them. Also, he found himself admiring Captain Kearney and Sergeant Bellamy even more than before. With Captain Stirling being compelled to spend an increasing amount of time by himself– either developing the strategies to be used for forthcoming operations or commuting between Kabrit and Cairo to keep MEHQ informed of his progress – Kearney and Bellamy between them were supervising the general training and ensuring that the administrative side of the camp ran smoothly.

  Possibly because of his LRDG experience, Bellamy concentrated on exercises in the desert and certainly increased the men’s chances of being RTU’d by introducing lengthy hikes by day and by night. Not a man to demand of others what he could not do himself, he turned himself into a human guinea pig by making the first hikes entirely alone and gradually increasing the distance he had to cover, the length of time he had to go without water, and the weight he had to hump in his Bergen rucksack. Only when he had gauged his own limits in this regard did he demand that the rest of the men follow suit.

  Bellamy also set himself precise navigation tests that had to be completed within a certain time. When Marty asked him about them, he responding by inviting Marty to go with him on one of his lengthy hikes.

  ‘Pure bloody genius,’ Marty related to Tone after the event. ‘He told me we were going to hike to an RV twenty miles away and that he’d know when we’d done exactly that. Since the desert’s so barren – no landmarks to navigate by– I couldn’t figure out how he’d manage it. But the bugger marched across the desert with complete confidence, calculating how far we’d hiked every couple of miles and not mak
ing a single bloody error. I just couldn’t figure out how he was doing it until I noticed that the cunning bastard was carrying lots of small stones in his trouser pocket and kept transferring them, one at a time, from one pocket to the other. What he was doing, you see, was counting his paces. After each hundred steps, he’d transfer one of the stones to the other pocket. He told me the average pace was thirty inches, so each stone represented about eighty-three yards. That way, he knew just how far he’d marched. Pretty smart, right?’

  Marty admired Bellamy and Kearney not only because of their many innovations, but because neither man ever asked the others to do anything he had not first done himself. Indeed, regarding the murderous hikes into the desert, only when Bellamy had personally ascertained what could actually be accomplished did he introduce them as part of the ‘selection’ course. The desert lessons, or tests, included nights sleeping in laying-up positions, or LUPs, scraped out of the freezing desert floor; signals training, covering Morse code, special codes and call-sign signals; the operation of radios, recognition of radio ‘black spots’ and the setting up of standard and makeshift antennae; the maintenance of weapons in the windblown, freezing darkness; the procedure for calling in artillery fire and air strikes; and general desert survival by day and by night.

  Those who failed to meet the rigorous standards set by Kearney and Bellamy were brutally RTU’d, but seeing that the captain and sergeant had done all those things themselves, the men at least accepted the harsh justice of it when they were failed and sent back to their original units.

  As an NCO, Sergeant Bellamy was close to the other ranks, knowing and speaking their language. Aware of this, Captain Kearney made a special point of taking part in the many arduous physical tests devised by the former LRDG sergeant and, by so doing, succeeded in forging his own close bond with the men. This bond was further strengthened by his willingness to forget his rank and meet the men on a level they understood.