Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  Malley, having polished the lens on his Speed Graphic with the green silk scarf he was wearing looked down into its viewfinder and began to compose the frame. It had the Bren gun team in the foreground while through the dust the ghostly outline of the other Tommies could be made out as they hugged the side of the tank, poised for the next leap forward. When he had finished he moved back towards the sergeant, put the big camera down and started squeezing off shots with the Leica he had obtained from a Sikh havildar in Fourth Indian for two bottles of whisky. He knew that the Leica’s lens made his old Graphic look like a gold fish bowl but he hadn’t really got the hang of it yet though he loved its solid feel, heavy for its size and a shutter mechanism as quiet as a Duchess’s fart.

  Malley watched as one of the little open topped tracked tankettes the British called a Bren gun carrier appeared. Then there was a sharp crack from somewhere in and they were all showered with sand and grit. “What the hell was that?” said Malley, crouching down with the rest of them and furiously wiping his lenses all over again.

  “Itie grenade,” said the sergeant as casually as he could manage. Just before they started a conspiratorial Aussie had shown him a box full of the little red missiles they had captured from the Italians and assured him that their bark was much bigger than their bite but they were guaranteed to have those top brass bastards jumping out of their seats.

  ***

  As it happened, Sir Harold hardly flinched. The High Commissioner did not share the aversion to loud bangs acquired in Flanders by a younger age group to himself. In 1914 he had been forty-two and a highly valued administrator in the Sudan with a gorgeous native mistress and superiors in the Colonial Office who thought him indispensable.

  In any case, he was safely accommodated on a kind of makeshift review stand: a three ton truck with its canvas side rolled up and two rows of cane chairs placed one behind the other on its flatbed. Sir Harold was in the front row seated next to the brigadier who was hosting the occasion. On his left was the lieutenant colonel commanding the battalion the sergeant belonged to and next to him sat the Australian major in charge of the battle school whom the brigadier addressed as Sam.

  Calderwell was in the row behind them flanked by a mournful looking Polish Colonel and an RAF Squadron Leader with a Distinguished Flying Cross among his medal ribbons and his right hand in a black leather glove. Those officers who, for one reason or another, had not qualified for a place on the truck were congregated either side of it where they had arranged themselves so that everybody would get a view.

  The policeman was surprised to spot that among them, standing close to the vehicle’s lowered tailgate, was De Wet the South African major who had given Malley such a hiding at the Europa. There was no mistaking him. Under the bright afternoon sunshine he was wearing a bush shirt and shorts with knee length socks and more than ever Calderwell could see that the South African had the build of a second row forward. When he spotted Malley, nose taped to his face, striking dramatic poses with his cameras he thought the Yank must have been very drunk indeed to think he could take him on.

  De Wet was accompanied by another South African officer, a captain almost as tall but gaunt and dark who passed him a small pack he was holding by its back straps. Shortly afterwards he vaguely registered the major crouch over it then straighten up again. Later it occurred to Calderwell that he had noticed this because officers usually tried to avoid carrying anything heavier than a walking stick, even Imperial officers as the Colonials were known nowadays. In the same group standing not far away from the South Africans and talking to a couple of pretty young auxiliary nurses was Malley’s journalist friend Pickett. At one point, just as the captain gave De Wet the bag, the photographer came and stood alongside Pickett and, for a moment, Calderwell caught him staring thoughtfully at De Wet. Then he went off again.

  “For this exercise we have to imagine some of the Bren gun carriers are tanks,” the brigadier was explaining to the High Commissioner. “Of course, we do have one real one, that little French Renault thing the Australians captured in the Lebanon. I’m told in Tobruk the Aussie infantry sometimes ran after crippled panzers, jammed their tracks with steel rods and finished them off with Molotov cocktails. True or false Sam?”

  “Magic,” agreed the Australian major. “Of course, they had to get close. Should have left the South Africans some longer wands I suppose.”

  By Digger standards it was a lightweight jibe. Even so, Calderwell found himself looking to see whether the two South African officers a few feet below them had caught it. But they appeared to be too engrossed in the spectacle being laid on for them to notice. Some white smoke canisters had been let off, the stuff that was intended to screen the movement of troops in small areas. Its friendly fog drifted around the soldiers in the demonstration platoon. Malley was delighted. Against this backcloth the Tommies were silhouetted as nobly as a war memorial. Now all he needed was a bit of movement.

  Calderwell was thinking that in his war their horses had sometimes kicked up enough dust to make smoke screens quite unnecessary. That’s what had saved a lot of them from the machine-guns covering the Austrian artillery they had charged at Huj. From his grandstand position on the truck he could see the audience either side of it peering intently into the smoke. The only exceptions were the two South African officers who were now walking away from the scene. De Wet appeared to look at a wristwatch as if they might be late for their next appointment. Perhaps they had simply seen enough of the real thing. Calderwell noticed that neither of them was carrying the smallpack. For a moment he considered going after them and telling them they had forgotten it. Then it occurred to him that they might have brought it for somebody else. Besides, yelling after people about their forgotten small packs wasn’t the kind of thing you did when you were with the top brass.

  He had been flattered by Sir Harold’s invitation to come along so they could chat in his car though the High Commissioner, who practised a gruff charm, had insisted the honour was his. “The army will wonder what makes me worth such a senior police bodyguard.” On the way to Sarafand, MacMichael had got him to tell the whole story from the beginning starting with his collision with Muna’s knickers in Forsters’ back yard to finding the murdered boy and the cigarette packet on the Horns of Hittin. “What a stroke of luck that was for us!” he said. “Then you’ve made your own luck Inspector Calderwell.” But it soon became obvious that MacMichael had another reason for inviting him along. He was concerned that police inquiries might lead to unwelcome speculation. “The last thing we need is the Arabs here thinking that the Boche are scouting the ground to leapfrog ahead of Rommel with a paratroop landing, do another Crete. Perhaps you might give the impression that you’re looking for shot down airmen or something like that?”

  ***

  The sergeant spotted where Malley had placed himself, saw him looking down into the viewfinder of his Speed Graphic again, and guessed what was wanted. “Look like you mean it,” he told his little command, “and you might make the fuckin’ papers.”

  They started to go forward at a slow trot, Bombay Bloomer shorts flapping about their knees, rifles at the high port across their bodies so that from where Malley was standing the bayonets appeared to be growing out of their left shoulders. The sergeant, who was carrying a Thompson sub-machine gun he had borrowed off a friend at battalion headquarters, went first then the two riflemen followed left flank rear by the Bren gun team. Malley had only taken a couple of frames when one of the Australian officers stage managing the pyrotechnics spoilt it all by appearing in his viewfinder waving his arms about.

  Then came a soft, muffled explosion that made just enough dust to make Malley give up his picture making. When it had settled he saw that the person who had run out and ruined his picture was lying very still on his back. Examination of epaulettes and shoulder flashes revealed he was an Australian lieutenant. Or had been. He took his picture then looked round for something better. About thirty feet ahead of him the infan
try sergeant was sitting on the ground with one leg bent beneath him and the other outstretched. “Everybody stay where you are,” Malley heard him say in a weak voice. “There are mines here. Go back and get help.”

  But Hawkins, the apprentice butcher, was already settling alongside him, trying to pull apart the canvas cover on the shell dressings they all carried, cursing whoever decreed they should be machine stitched so tightly together that a man might bleed to death before it could be ripped apart. Parts of the sergeant’s right foot reminded Hawkins of raw mince only you wouldn’t have bits of a black leather and shiny white splinters of bone in minced beef. Not where he worked anyway. The sergeant saw what Hawkins was looking at and began to groan.

  In their seats the brass hats were too far away to hear the sergeant’s mine warning and it took almost a minute for them to realise that all was not well. Even when they did and field glasses were produced, the remains of the smoke screen mingled with the dust being kicked up by the Bren gun carriers made it impossible to ascertain what had occurred.

  “I think we’d better go and have a look,” the brigadier said to the colonel. Sir Harold thought it improper just to sit there so he climbed down the steps that had been placed against the tailboard and followed them into the smoke. Within seconds the lorry had emptied, Calderwell striding after His Excellency’s chauffeur who, being his real bodyguard, had been quicker off the mark.

  Malley couldn’t believe his luck. This was a winner, a cover picture if ever he saw one. And unposed too! All he needed to do was get a bit closer. The trouble was he knew the sergeant was right about not moving. Where there was one mine there were almost certainly several more. What the mines were doing there was another matter. This piece of scrubland outside Sarafand was a much trained over area and no doubt they quite regularly had mine clearing exercises here. Could they really have buried fuzed mines then forgotten them? One thing Malley had always given the British credit for, perhaps the only thing, was that they tended to be safety conscious. Now he didn’t even have to give them credit for that. Of course, the other possibility was that the mines had not been laid by the British but by some discontented citizens of the Mandate, Arabs or Jews in the knowledge that long odds sometimes paid off.

  Malley wish he knew what the odds were. There could be one mine here. There could be fifty. He looked down at his feet. They seemed to be resting on the commonplace local mix of stone, gravel, sand and a few tough looking weeds. Surely you could see if it had been disturbed? Nothing untoward was visible. Staring hard at it he took an experimental pace forward. Nothing happened. He took another one. He was OK. Just ahead of him lay the sergeant with Private Hawkins leaning over him while the four other soldiers were about as near to the wounded man as Malley. One of them was gently hoeing the ground around him with his fixed bayonet but the others had frozen into a worried looking tableau. Malley paused and focused on the kneeling figure besides the sergeant and used the Leica; but there were much better pictures to be had if he could get another five or six pace closer.

  The American looked down at the flimsy suede desert boots he had recently acquired and wished he had not fallen for such a fairy footed Limey affectation. They made his feet feel so vulnerable. Tentatively, he moved the right one towards a gravelly patch that looked like it had not been disturbed for a millennium or two and put the toe of his boot down on it. He stood there like that for a while and then, very slowly and holding his breath, allowed the heel of his boot to come down. Then he breathed and rested his hands on his right knee as he looked for somewhere nearby where he might place his left boot. There was a tempting patch of sand ahead with what appeared to be a tuft of arid vegetation sprouting from it. Even so, his left foot was most unwilling to take off and Malley had only just got it got it airborne when from behind him a faint voice advised, “Don’t worry mate. There aren’t any mines. That was a gun cotton charge with a dicky bloody fuze.” Malley looked round to see the Australian lieutenant resurrected and dusting himself off. “I was trying to warn him that one of them hadn’t blown. He must have put his foot right on it and set it off.”

  A Bren gun carrier was now almost alongside the sergeant. Malley watched Hawkins and the lieutenant load the wounded man into the carrier. The sergeant didn’t make a sound until they had almost got him over the side when they must have knocked something because he started screaming, “Watch my fuckin’ foot you bastards. Christ it hurts.”

  Malley moved in really closed with the Leica now and then flashed another three frames with the Speed Graphic as a backup in case he had got the exposure wrong with the smaller camera. He knew he was making great pictures, perhaps the best yet. Only a front line soldier might spot that the carrier crew felt relaxed enough to have their helmets hanging on the side of their chariot.

  The VIP party had got to within a couple of hundred yards of the little tracked vehicle when the blast from a much louder explosion scooped them up from behind and then threw them down again with a shocking indifference. Calderwell lay on his stomach, his head full of the noise of the bang. Slowly, he pushed himself to his feet and out of the corner of an eye saw Sir Harold doing the same. He turned to see what had happened.

  The entire trailer of the lorry that had served as their makeshift review stand was ablaze from end to end. Even as Calderwell watched there was a playful whumph as the petrol tank went up and more orange flames darted along the woodwork. Soon a long column of black oil smoke smeared the cloudless sky.

  Calderwell looked around him. The audience appeared to have all left the truck together and were unscathed. The Squadron Leader was helping the Polish Colonel to his feet and both the brigadier and the lieutenant colonel were barking orders. Sam, the Australian major, had lost his hat and was scratching his head. Once they were on their feet they ran back the way they had come. Hard on their heels came Malley, wondering whether the day was going to get even better.

  As he got closer to the blaze Calderwell saw people staggering about with blood on their faces. Somebody was calling for stretcher-bearers and sure enough Calderwell noticed a pair of them sprinting towards a knot of people standing about a hundred yards from the blazing vehicle. He followed them and discovered Pickett kneeling besides one of the auxiliary nurses he had been talking to. She looked hardly out of her teens and had auburn hair though some of it was almost black with the blood that was gushing through it and down her face from a wound in her scalp. The other nurse was crouched besides her, whispering words of comfort in Hebrew and something else, perhaps Yiddish, and dabbing at her friend’s head and face with a totally blood soaked shell dressing. Somebody passes her a fresh shell dressing and she tried to wind the bandage around the head of the girl whose cheeks had turned the colour of flour. She did it very gently but every time she got anywhere near the wound the girl would whimper and she would stop and murmur something to her.

  Pickett and the stretcher-bearers tried to be gentle but as soon as they started to get the stretcher under her she cried out. There was a flash and Calderwell saw that Malley had elbowed his way to the front of the crowd. He gave him a scowl and Malley switched to the Leica.

  Pickett stood up and Calderwell noticed that the officer issue khaki drill shirt the reporter wore had several long dark stains on it. The stretcher-bearers began to carry the nurse, with her friend walking alongside them, to an ambulance that backed towards them with its rear doors flapping open.

  Calderwell gave Pickett a curt nod of recognition and walked away. The fire on the truck was beginning to subside, most of its combustible parts having been consumed. About twenty yards from it Calderwell foot kicked something off the ground. As it came to rest the sun caught some shiny thing attached to it. He picked it up and saw that it was the scorched front section of a canvas small pack. The shiny thing was one of its brass buckles where the straps went through. He was examining this when Malley took a picture of him but he was using his Leica and the policeman didn’t hear the shutter move.

  13 - Th
e Narkover Connection

  “It was the truck’s goddam gas tank?”

  “That’s what they say,” said Pickett. “‘Petrol fumes old boy. Hot day. Perhaps somebody dropped a cigarette.’”

  “If that was a gas tank I’m an Orangeman.”

  “And I’m a Yankee.”

  “Down the hatch Reb,” said Malley, raising his glass.

  The Café Europa was a forgiving concern. Besides, apart from Malley’s nose the damage had been negligible, nothing to what happened when the Australians and the Durham Light Infantry first coincided there. And the American was a good tipper.

  “Anyway, I remember hearing the tank going up after the first explosion.”

  “So do I. Apparently they have two tanks on that kind of truck. One is a kind of reserve.”

  “Do they honestly expect you to believe this bullshit?”

  “I don’t think they care,” said Pickett.

  “You write anything?”

  “No. Why remind my masters I don’t have an El Alamein date line yet? Besides, what’s there to write about people getting killed in an accidental explosion? Even the Palestine Post would need a quiet day to make much of that. An attempt to ice His Excellency during a demonstration of armoured warfare without tanks would be somethin’ else. Even better if we had any idea who did it. But we’d never get it through the censor.”

  “I know who fughin did it,” said Malley who was looking at him sideways while he paused to ignite a Lucky.

  “Sure you do.”

  “Honest Injun Mistuh Pickett suh,” he said, drawing in the smoke.

  “So tell me.”

  “What do I get?”

  “Your reward will not only be in heaven. I’ll buy you your next glass of delicious warm Eagle beer.”

  “Spoken like a true gentleman of the Sowth. Mannerly and pitifully poor. When did you say you’re leavin’ for Alamein?”