by Leo Kessler
Air Commodore Jeeves had used the lull to his own best advantage. Swiftly, with his aircraftsmen and some of the trainee pilots working all out, he had transformed his obsolete battered training aircraft into rough-and-ready attack aircraft. Lewis guns had been mounted and bomb racks welded on the trainers. With the handful of instructors acting as pilots, and the trainee pilots as air crew, Jeeves had already launched several sorties against the Iraqi gun positions and their supply convoys bringing men, ammunition and water from Baghdad. The latter bombing attacks had been particularly successful, for the Iraqi army seemed to have no idea of convoy distances or the use of light machine guns as anti-aircraft defence. Twice the primitive bombers and fighter bombers had wiped out enemy convoys, leaving the main road from Baghdad littered with their shattered burning vehicles and the bodies of their soldiers.
Still, as Jeeves told McLeod, back from yet another recce into the desert behind the Iraqi positions, "The buggers are not going to sit there for ever, you know, with their thumbs up their arses. They're going to attack in the not so distant future."
McLeod stopped sucking his old pipe and nodded his grey head in agreement. "You're right, Air Commodore. Intelligence signalled half an hour ago that the enemy's going to get reinforcements – first-class troops." He hesitated for a fraction of a second, taking in the 'shit wallahs' truck', an old three-tonner lurching across the field, the great metal drums containing ordure from the other ranks' latrines, bumping up and down in the back. "German to boot."
"German!"
"That's it, sir. Huns flying in from Greece, via Bulgaria and French Syria. The RAF boys in the Middle East have already reported shooting down one of their transports over the Med."
Jeeves went brick-red with rage. "Those bloody Frogs. You can't trust the sods! Fighting the Hun last year, now helping him this one. What can you do with an ally like that?"
"Former ally," McLeod corrected the irate commodore. But the latter wasn't listening.
"What else do we know about these bloody Huns?" he demanded.
"Not much, sir. The info we have so far is that they're sending an SS battalion, perhaps some eight hundred men strong, with the Syrian French helping them over the border into Iraq from the airfield at Damascus. I don't know – " McLeod stopped abruptly and stared at the 'shit wallahs' truck'.
"What is it, McLeod?"
For a moment or two the old Scot didn't reply. His gaze was fixed on the truck.
"Well?" Jeeves demanded.
"It's the shite wallahs. They're driving that lorry as if they'd had a few. The shite from the barrels is flying everywhere." McLeod gave Jeeves a hefty shove and cried at the top of his voice in sudden alarm. "Get down everyone! Watch those shit wallahs!" In that same instant he pulled out his service revolver and, standing as if he were back on some peacetime range, pointed the .38 at the man in the back of the truck, dressed in black with a scarf wound across the bottom of his face. But it wasn't the scarf that caught the Scot's attention. It was the Tommy gun the man was carrying, which he was now aiming at a group of young officers just emerging from the mess. "Get to the bloody ground, will ye!" he cried angrily, and fired in that same instant.
He was too late. The man beat him to the draw. He pressed the trigger of his Tommy gun. It burst into frenetic life. Suddenly the air was full of the stink of burned cordite. The officers went down like ninepins, thrashing and cursing in their death agonies.
McLeod fired. The truck's rear tyre exploded as the bullet struck it. The truck careened wildly to the left. McLeod fired again. Its windscreen shattered into a gleaming spider's web of broken glass. Frantically the Iraqi driver fought to keep control. To no avail. With the Tommy-gunner hanging on for all he was worth, the truck slammed into the back of a Tiger Moth, attached by a tube to a petrol bowser. Whoosh. In a flash, the petrol exploded, wreathing both the truck and the plane in searing blue flame.
The gunman dropped over the side, his body already being consumed by the greedy flames. McLeod didn't give him a chance to escape. "Bastard," he snarled, and fired again. The murderer flung up his skinny brown hands as if praying to Allah. But Allah was looking the other way this terrible day. Next instant he slammed to the tarmac, the flames from the burning plane engulfing him in a flash. One second more and the petrol bowser exploded with a thunderous roar. Ordure mixed up with chunks of human flesh splattered everywhere, and then it was over and a brooding silence descended once more on the huge RAF base, as the two officers left the mess for others to clear up, and walked away, both deep in thought.
After a while, McLeod took his old smelly pipe from his mouth and said thoughtfully, "Commodore, I'd like to make a suggestion."
"What? Oh, yes," Jeeves responded. "Then suggest away."
"It's obvious, sir, that apart from these pin-prick suicide attacks, the Iraqis are not going to attack in force until the Huns appear on the scene, if that is what the Jerries intend – and I think they do."
"Go on, McLeod."
"Well, sir, if we could locate the Huns before they contact the Iraqis, and can isolate them before they get into the mountain positions, then we'd have a damn good chance of clobbering them with your trainee pilots. They might not be the kind of top-class pilots we're used to, but out in the open desert, even they could bomb the shit out of the Huns, if you'll forgive my French."
"I will," Jeeves said with unusual enthusiasm for him. "That's an excellent idea. We know the Hun from the old war. Once he's dug in, it's one devil of a job to winkle him out." He frowned. "But how are you going to locate these Jerries of yours? Iraq's a damned big country."
"I've thought about that too, sir. The Germans can't go wandering around the desert blindly. They are going to need to contact the Iraqis pretty damned sharpish once they're on the ground, and for that they'll use their radios. What I would need, therefore, sir, would be one of your best RAF wireless operators, able to use a radio-location device."
"We've not got one," Jeeves interjected bluntly.
"I know. I've already enquired – "
"Have you just!"
"But I'm sure we've got the skills in the base's WT section to mock up a radio detection van to accompany my armoured cars."
Jeeves' hard face lit up. "Of course we have. We can use one of those little utility vans. They're tough little buggers. They don't use much fuel and there'd be enough room in the back to accommodate the radio-detection equipment, I'm sure. McLeod, regard it as done. Now, what's the drill going to be...?"
At five that afternoon, with the sun slowly sinking in the west and great black shadows sweeping across the desert scrub like silent predatory hawks, the patrol was ready to move out. For the last hour, McLeod had checked through their equipment methodically, while Hawkins, the radio operator, had been trying his detector equipment inside the burning interior of the utility van.
Old desert hand that he was, McLeod always did the checking for a long-distance patrol personally. A mistake in the number of jerricans of water, or even the salt tablets which the RAF crews had to take daily, could well spell disaster in the burning heat of the Iraqi desert at midday. He had seen men go mad with heatstroke all too often in his years in the Middle East to risk anything like that happening just on account of a simple oversight.
Over in the mountains, the Iraqi batteries were beginning to fire once again, and it seemed to McLeod as he reached their supplies of Eno's Fruit Salts, which the patrols used to make their stale drinking water more palatable, that the Iraqis were laying on the pressure at last. They were firing more rounds and more accurately. Did that signify anything? Were the plotters in Baghdad, who had started this new rising against the British, putting on the pressure? Or had the Germans arrived? McLeod didn't know. What he did know was that if the pressure was on, he'd have to find those damned Huns that the treacherous Frogs were helping to reach Iraq, sooner rather than later.
At five thirty he finished his check and, as a special treat, produced a bottle of ice-cold light ale f
or every man of the patrol. The fact that they were setting off on a dangerous patrol into the unknown didn't stop the look of delight in the men's eyes when they saw the beer bottle dripping with condensation. "Cor ferk a duck!" Red Brown exclaimed, "Ice-cold beer. Why, a bloke out here would give his left ball for a bottle of this, Squadron Leader."
McLeod returned his delighted smile with a somewhat wintry one of his own. "I'm not asking you to pay that kind of price, Brown. But you deserve it. All of you do. Better enjoy it slowly, lads. You won't be seeing the like for a long time to come." McLeod didn't realise just how true his words were. Some of them would never savour a bottle of ice-cold beer ever again.
Fifteen minutes later, with the sun a blood-red ball on the horizon, they set off.
By eight that night they had covered ten miles off the road. McLeod thought that they had made good time, and decided it was time for them to bivouac for the night. He wanted the little radio operator to search the airwaves for any signal that the Germans might send, for so far he was searching the area merely by experience and intuition. On the morrow they'd face the shifting sands of the interior and progress would be slow and back-breaking, he knew that of old. Accordingly he didn't want to waste time in the damned shifting sands if he could help it. The constant stop-start of driving through that kind of terrain took the heart out of the stoutest of men.
Glad to stop, the men settled down over their little petrol cookers, making the inevitable 'char', frying tinned Canadian bacon and treating themselves (unknown to them, courtesy of the RAF's officers' mess) to the sweet delight of tinned peaches, while McLeod queried the little radio operator, who now, instead of sweating in the searing heat of the day, was shivering with cold. For now an icy wind was beginning to blow across the desert, and some of the men were already huddled in their sleeping bags, holding the precious warmth of their 'char' in both hands.
"Well?" McLeod demanded. "Anything, Sparks?"
The little operator, his lips blue with cold, shook his head. "Not much, sir. Though one thing – there's a lot more traffic than there was when we set out. The airways are fair buzzing with traffic – a lot of it coming from the direction of Baghdad."
McLeod nodded his approval. "Anything you could decipher?"
"No sir. But there's this. The hands are different."
"What do you mean, Sparks?"
"Well, sir, we trained most of the Arab operators and we can recognize their 'hand' – the way they send Morse. They do it on the British Army pattern. But these hands aren't using the British style." He shivered violently and McLeod took pity on the little man in his thin desert uniform. "All right, Sparks, go and get yourself some char and a wad. It'll warm you up."
That night, despite his weariness, the old Scot couldn't sleep. While the rest slept, save for the sentry, who moved around in an attempt to keep warm, he lay with his hands propped beneath his head, staring at the night sky. It was a beautiful night, the sky hard and silver, bright with the light of myriad stars. It was good to lie thus in the warmth of the sleeping bag, protected from the cold outside. It was the kind of feeling he had experienced as a child in the freezing cold manse of his father, warmed by the stone water bottle his mother had slipped under the blankets when his father, the dominie, hadn't been looking; or that he experienced with his wife, poor dead Jenny, killed in the first great London blitz of late 1940, at the same time as his son Jamie had gone missing with the Scottish 51st Highland Division back in France: a whole family wiped out in a matter of six months.
McLeod sucked his false teeth and wished he could have a smoke of his pipe. But he knew that was impossible; it might give their position away to anyone who might be on the lookout for their camp. He told himself he really didn't have much to live for, had he? He was just a lonely old broken-down middle-aged squadron leader who would never get any further promotion. After all, he was a non-flyer, and promotion always went to pilots. He smiled ruefully. There was nothing he could do about things, but soldier on. As they had said in the trenches in the old war, when he had been a boy, with that fatalism of the front-line soldier who knew he had a mere six weeks to live, "Roll on death, let's have a crack at the angels." His smile broadened even more at the memory, and then he turned over and went straight to sleep, at peace at last.
CHAPTER 11
When McLeod awoke that dawn, the weather had changed dramatically. Instead of the bone-chilling cold of the night, with the kind of visibility that made you believe you could see to the end of the world, the dawn was muggy and the desert was covered by a thick yellow haze that reminded the Scot of the sea frets of his Scottish youth. He frowned. It was not the kind of weather that he had expected. Nor was it something that he welcomed.
In fog, his armoured cars were particularly vulnerable to marauding Iraqis. With visibility down to a few yards, they could easily approach an unwary armoured car crew and put them out of action with a grenade thrown into the open turret, or a volley fired at close range into a vehicle's tyres, and by immobilising it, make the stalled armoured car easy meat for the attackers.
Still McLeod knew he had to carry on with his vital mission. The Huns had to be found before they could link up with the Iraqi army besieging the base. With a bit of luck, Jeeves' makeshift aerial strike force might be able to scupper them before that. All the same, he warned his crews, busy shaving and swallowing a hearty breakfast of the usual Canadian tinned bacon, beans and, of course, a mug of their celebrated 'Sarnt-Major's char': a thick rich brew, made even richer by the addition of a precious tin of Carnation milk.
"Keep the hatches battened down at all times till the fog lifts. I know it's going to be hot in the tin cans," he lectured his men, "but it's better being hot than dead. And above all, keep your eyes peeled at all times. If you see any wandering Iraqis, don't bother to challenge, fire at the buggers straight away before they can get close to your vehicle. If you don't – " he attempted a smile, though he had never felt less like smiling – "they might well give you a nasty kick in the arse. All right," he concluded, "five more minutes and we're on our way – and those of you who want to take a shovel for a walk – " he meant those who had to evacuate their bowels, covering up the faeces with a shovel – "don't go out of sight of the vehicles. Okay, get to it."
McLeod' s words had their effect. Now the armoured car crews went about their duties with understandable nervousness, occasionally glancing over their shoulders when they 'took their shovels for a walk', as if they half expected they were being followed by a bunch of murderous Iraqi cut-throats.
An hour later, crawling along at a snail-like ten miles an hour, they were still fighting the yellow fog, and there was no sign of the usual burning sun, which would have dispersed it in a matter of minutes. Now everyone was on edge, the drivers and gunners peering through their slits for the first sign of the enemy, ready for action at a moment's notice. McLeod, the old Iraqi hand, shared their nervous apprehension. For he knew just how vulnerable they were crawling along at this slow pace, shrouded in fog, which could cut them off from one another in a matter of moments, as it drifted across the desert. At the same time, however, he was on the lookout for the first sign of these elusive Huns who were supposed to be out in the desert somewhere or other and trying to make the link-up with the Iraqi forces besieging the base.
Another hour passed with leaden feet. Still the fog had not lifted. Indeed, a worried McLeod felt it had even thickened, as they now entered a series of low hills where the fog lingered in the hollows, coating the sides of their obsolete vehicles with damp condensation, as if they were in the Highlands of his native country on some grey November day. Now, because of the terrain and the fog, they were forced into passing through the little passes in single file, the drivers of the vehicles barely able to see the outline of the armoured car in front.
McLeod felt his sense of unease growing. This was ideal ambush country. A bold attack by a handful of determined men might well be able to halt the whole strung-out convoy with d
isastrous results. He started to study the country about and ahead with ever more intense concentration, feeling the damp beads of sweat trickle down the small of his back unpleasantly. More than once he broke the command vehicle's radio silence with, "Now don't forget, you men, keep those turrets closed, and you gunners, watch both flanks. Clear?"
But the men needed no urging. All of them knew only too well what Iraqis did to British troops taken prisoner. They died – but slowly and very painfully. As they often warned newcomers to the armoured-car section, who hadn't 'got their knees brown' yet, "Save the last bullet for yersen, mate. It's better to die clean like that than have the Arabs working yer over with their frigging knives. Frigging soprano, after they've finished with yer waterworks." And they would give a dramatic shudder to illustrate their point.
Time dragged. The series of passes through the fog-bound hills seemed endless. McLeod, not an imaginative man usually, felt his nerves begin to tick nervously. Somehow, he couldn't explain exactly why, he started to see shadows reflected through the fog, wavering from one extreme to the other, becoming large and menacing and then diminishing into almost nothing. Above the whine of the car's Rolls Royce engine, he imagined he heard other noises. What they were, he couldn't define. All he knew was that they were frightening, intended him no good. For a few moments he longed to order his driver to go faster, put his foot down and hasten their departure from the passes. But he knew that would upset the others following him, perhaps even cut him off from the other cars. He contained himself and let the driver continue at his snail-like pace.
