by Colin Smith
Yes, thought Calderwell. I bloody well suppose they were and if your men had been properly briefed they might have smelt a rat, starting with the man behind the wheel of the Humber.
“We’d better get some road blocks sorted out, “ said the Assistant Super. “At least on the Tel Aviv road.”
“What do you think will happen to my driver?” asked the Colonel suddenly. “He’s a good lad.”
“They’ll kill him,” said Calderwell who couldn’t remember when he had ever found a moustache so irritating. “Barring a miracle they’ll kill your good lad.”
***
“Do you mind if I smoke sir?” asked Hawkins.
“Go ahead,” said the Templer.
They had pulled over and stopped on a slight incline about two hundred yards before a bend where the road had recently been widened for the increased traffic. In the moonlight the white chippings that made the surface there were plainly visible. Hawkins had assumed the halt had been called because one of his passengers wanted a piss but neither of them had moved. He heard a couple of clicks in the back and concluded that they must be fiddling with the wireless set they were carrying. He sat, enjoying his cigarette, elbow on the open window, drinking in the night sky, wondering how different it was from the sky they would seeing at home in Acton about now for it would be dark there too - they were only a couple of hours ahead in Palestine. Of course, theirs might be full of searchlights and parachute flares and Jerry bombers though Jerry didn’t seem to be over so much lately.
Hawkins opened the car door and stepped out. “Just stretch my legs sir.”
“Don’t go too far,” said the Templer. He hadn’t been expecting this.
“Shall I follow him?” asked Lang. Like the German he had his pistol in his hand.
“I suppose it would be better done out than in.”
Lang walked around the back of the car. The Templer quietly opened his door and got a leg out. Hawkins was standing about twenty yards away, one hand in the small of his back, inhaling deeply and staring into the seductive Syrian heavens. Lang, his pistol held loosely in his right hand, tried to walk quietly but the white chippings crackled underfoot. When Hawkins heard his steps he half turned and Lang put the gun behind his back. Then Lang became conscious of another sound, the growl of a truck engine straining up the incline. He turned and could see nothing at first but then made out the bulk of the vehicle about three hundred metres away.
“Put your gun away,” whispered the Templer who was now standing alongside him. The truck began to slow down then came to a halt besides them. They saw it was the RAF vehicle they had passed earlier. The near side window of the cab went down and a head of black curly hair came out.
“Need any help sir?” asked a cheerful female voice that was evidently clued up enough to know that only the commissioned classes travelled by Humber.
“No thanks,” said the Templer. “Just having a break.” He knew that the British often employed women drivers in safe areas but it still came as something of a shock.
Lang realised immediately that she was a Jew. In Palestine women as well as men had volunteered to serve with the British, convinced they were protecting the Yishuv. This one was in the WAAF – Women’s Auxiliary Airforce. Hawkins stomped his cigarette end out and stared at her curiously. Women driving ambulances and staff cars were common enough. But this was his first sighting of one of these women, the army had them as well, who drove heavy transport between Egypt and Palestine. There were only two stories about them: they were either lesbians or whores, sometimes both. This one had now climbed out of her cab. In her khaki drill slacks and regulation shirt with a propeller insignia on the shoulder Hawkins found she looked disappointingly wholesome, especially with the top couple of buttons of her shirt undone. Of course, women in trousers were always a bit suspect though they were even driving buses in them in Acton nowadays.
“They’ve opened a new pit stop just before Hebron sir,” said the WAAF addressing herself to the Templer. “There’s petrol and a YMCA canteen there and beds if your schedule allows you to use them. It’s about forty minutes up the road.”
“Are there telephones?” inquired the Templer.
“I think so,” said the woman. “There’s an office there for checking people in or out.” Her English was excellent, hardly any trace of an accent.
“Well, perhaps we’ll see you up there.”
“Not for long sir. I’ve got to be on my way or there will be a squadron without its orange juice for breakfast.” The Templer glanced at the cardboard boxes on her trailer and saw that they carried the label of a Jaffa fruit juice king.
“How far are you going?”
“Just after Khan Yunnis. They’ve levelled a new landing strip there for Kittis?”
“Kittis?”
“Kittihawks. The Americans call them Curtis P40’s.”
“I see. Well, thanks for stopping. We might have needed you.”
“That’s all right sir.”
They watched her pull away, Hawkins vowing to himself that he would overtake her and have a cup of tea waiting for her at this YMCA canteen, providing his passengers agreed to stop. You never knew with officers. Having stopped for no reason at all they we quite likely to charge on when they should be stopping.
As the RAF truck disappeared around the bend the Templer said, “We’d better get going.”
Lang looked at him questioningly but he motioned him into the car. The Jew thought it was high time they were driving this car themselves with a few hours to spare before the hue and cry went up if it hadn’t already. There was only one way to achieve that safely. Leaving this young and rather stupid young soldier bound and gagged somewhere was far too risky. The end could only be a bullet in the back of his irritatingly long and narrow head. They should have shot him as soon as that damned RAF truck had pulled away. He was beginning to suspect that, however anxious the Templer might be to blow MacMichael to smithereens, he had no real stomach for close killing no matter how necessary. He remembered how angry he had become when he shot the young Arab goatherd who found their parachute but there had been no other choice.
Even so, there was no denying that that ever since the British arrived in time to stop his transmission the German’s moves had been no less than brilliant. True, he was lucky. Most rolls of the dice would have seen them killed or captured. Lang had fully expected to have their bluff called the moment they left the bungalow and was resigned to shooting his way out and probably dying in the attempt. Far better shot than put into the condemned man’s red suit for the last walk to the leather lined noose at Acre jail.
But the Templer knew how to handle the British. He played them like the virtuoso he was and it had been beautiful to watch. He knew their ingrained response to tribal class signals. He knew how ordinary British soldiers, especially ordinary British soldiers in the dark, and it seemed they were often in the dark in more senses than one, responded to a certain manner, a certain accent. Nor did it matter that the driver would eventually spot their South African flashes. It was well known that, unlike the Australians and New Zealanders, some of the South African officers could be more English than the English at times.
The German had made it all up as they went along of course and was no doubt continuing to do so. But that was part of his genius. Lang realised that, for the last half hour or so, he was beginning to believe that they might actually get away with it. If Rommel could not move to them they were going to move to Rommel. An audacious move and probably the right one. He assumed that was the plan, they had hardly had chance to exchange a meaningful word since leaving the bungalow. It was probably right to get the Templer out of Palestine until things became clearer, Lang thought. After all, they had failed to kill MacMichael and even the people who had sent him to make contact with Berlin over a year ago had never envisaged working with a German infiltrator like this. If Rommel broke through perhaps it would all have been worth it. But now people were asking why would the Nazis need th
em? They wanted compliant Jews, not fighting Jews? And it was becoming perfectly obvious that there was some truth in these reports of mass murder in Poland.
As the car bore him towards Hebron, site of the tombs of Abraham and Sarah and holy to Jew and Muslim alike if you had time for religion which Lang did not, he became aware of feeling this acute sense of loss. It was an aloneness he had never known before. All the time he had been in the Lebanon persuading people to take him seriously then afterwards training in Athens under the Templer, he had sustained himself with the belief that one day he would be rewarded with the respect, admiration, perhaps even the love of his people.
Now what had started as a fantastic notion, a wild and totally unsubstantiated suspicion to be sent packing with the contempt that it deserved, had taken root and grown into a perceived truth. They had become an embarrassment. If he and this German remained in Palestine they would either be betrayed to the British by the very organisation that had started the affair or quietly disposed of by some sad eyed acquaintance who knew where his duty lay. He was sure of it.
The road curved and twisted as the terrain got hillier, the land rising steeply from the Dead Sea which he knew was a couple of miles to their left. Lang became aware that his Walther was digging painfully into his groin. He had stuffed it into his trouser pocket after the RAF lorry pulled up and it was not a very satisfactory arrangement. He recalled he had a standard British Army issue canvas pistol holster in the grip at his feet that also contained the Schmeisser and various items of clothing he had thrown in it including the shirts with the Polish shoulder flashes.
Lang fished in the bag for it, in the process pulling out a grey, civilian roll neck sweater for it was now well after one in the morning and getting chilly. Once he found the holster he spent the next few minutes attached it to his webbing belt. Since it was designed to accommodate a Webley revolver the little automatic was quite lost in it but it was considerably more comfortable than being jammed against his balls. Besides, he assumed where they were going officers were required to wear side arms. The Templer was sitting with his eyes closed and Lang too tried to sleep; but it did not come easily and when it did it was no more than a light doze from which he woke shivering despite having pulled the roll neck sweater on. Once he found his head resting on the Templer’s shoulder and hurriedly pulled it away. Sometimes he dreamed a bit, scraps of dreams, sometimes about people or places that had once made him happy. Times when the sun was on his face and hope in his heart. Times in the Galilee kibbutz when Wingate had filled him full of fire and certainty in the rightness of his cause.
“You must get out of the kibbutz, go outside the wire and ambush,” the Britisher goy was saying, the only Englishman he had ever met who seemed to love their cause as much as they did. Well, he had gone a little further outside the wire than even Wingate might think desirable.
Then, to his amazement, he found himself dreaming of the gymnast Helga, the elfin eighteen-year old daughter and trainee nurse of the German consul at the Turkish border port of Alexandretta. This was where he had stayed while the Sicherheitsdienst waited to insert him into what had recently become British controlled Syria and thence back to Palestine. Helga, recently graduated from some “Strength Through Joy” finishing school near Ulm was, like her father, blissfully unaware of his racially impure background. All she knew was that he was a soldier of the Reich about to depart on some dangerous mission and therefore worthy of the comforts only a pure bred young Aryan woman could bestow. Lang suspected Helga might be a bit myopic, or perhaps not as experienced as she made out, for even when her blond crop was only inches below his navel she never commented on the absence of a foreskin. During a ten day stay Helga had incited him to contravene the Nuremberg race laws against a garden palm, in a rather difficult airing cupboard and once in her bedroom though, for some reason, the door was without bolt or lock. Their last trysting place had been on the towel covered floor of a tiled bathroom where she had cached the douche bag she thought her mother wouldn’t miss under a loose floorboard beneath the bath. “I don’t want to find myself breeding for Germany before I’ve had chance to nurse for it.”
And it must have been these words that conjured Lang’s dream for in it were Helga’s parents who were formally dressed and raising glasses in a toast. It was some sort of civic occasion and their daughter was wearing a white dress with a little enamel swastika badge. She was plumper than he remembered. There were dozens of swastika flags, red and white, flapping in the breeze. There was an arch of sabres each attached to a wrist emerging from a starched, white shirt cuff. Beyond the cuffs there were uniform sleeve in black and grey. He saw that one of the black sleeves belonged to the Templer who was wearing his black Waffen SS tanker’s tunic with its silver piping on the collar. He was grinning his lopsided grin. He felt a hand on his arm and he turned to see Helga was at his side, her pixie face turned up at him. She took his hand and put it on her stomach. It felt round and hard. To his horror he realised that the douche had failed. She was pregnant and they were getting married. Then they were standing at the foot of some white marble steps on the top of which stood some kind of Christian priest who was using both hands to beckon them up. Helga seemed to have his arm in a grip of iron. The priest smiled and Lang saw that his very yellow teeth were dripping with blood and he was holding something out to him. As he came closer he saw it was a yellow Meagan David with Jude inscribed in black Gothic characters in its centre.
He woke up shivering in time to hear the driver saying, “She’s moving sir.” He looked out of the window and saw they were passing the RAF truck. As they went by its driver gave them a smile and a wave. Lang noticed her hand was long and slim and felt a surge of pride that one of their women should know how to handle a big truck like that even if lack of proper guidance had lured her to the wrong side. The leaders of the Yishuv had a lot to answer for.
He looked across at the Templer but he was still sitting there with his eyes closed though he sensed that he was not asleep. The German had yet to give him the slightest clue as to why he had decided to spare this young Englishman’s life or at least delay his killing. Surely he didn’t expect to be able to continue to spin him stories that would have him drive them to the El Alamein line? And an alert must have already gone out for the car. They could be picked up at any checkpoint long before they got close to the border crossing at Rafah.
Lang estimated that they were probably no more than fifteen minutes away from this drivers’ rest camp the Royal Army Service Corps had established outside Hebron. What had the WAAF called it? A pit stop? A motor racing term. They could not possibly halt before then, not while her truck was behind them again. He guessed they would have to do it somewhere between this rest camp and Hebron where they were due to hand over the set to this nonsensical “advance party” the Templer had created. He could not see how there could possibly be any alternative. It occurred to Lang that perhaps the best thing would be to do the same as he’d done with the Arab boy on the Hittin and take the initiative.
He watched the back of Hawkins’ head again, noted how his dark, Brylcreemed hair ended just below his forage cap, the grubbiness of his collar and wondered how many shirts privates were issued and how often they got to launder them. Lang knew where he would put the bullet when the time came. He saw the spot exactly, the way the cropped hairs grew out of it, then looked away and tried to think about something else.
“We’re getting pretty low on petrol sir,” said Hawkins. “The old bus drinks it like a tank. When we get to this rest place, I think we’d better fill up there for the trip back? Don’t know where else we’ll find any this time of night.”
“Very well,” said the Templer, without opening his eyes. “We’ll do that.” Lang looked across at him but the shutters remained down.
21 - A Bumpy Ride
Davison was brave enough about it but he hated flying. Nor did it help that the sergeant pilot alongside him looked as if he might still regard shaving as a bit o
f an adventure. He probably owned socks that were older. It was his second flight that morning. The first leg had started in Jerusalem shortly after dawn.
He was acting as a glorified messenger boy really, Davison knew that. But thanks to a little horse trading at last night’s meeting with the Assistant Superintendent at the King David he had been able an hour later to turn up for his briefing at the High Commissioner’s residence considerably empowered. He had been the first person to tell MacMichael that his appointments secretary, Jessica Hallowes, had been having an affair with the German agent who, posing as a South African officer, had tried to kill him at Sarafand. “That’s how he knew you were going to be there.” And if that wasn’t enough, it had been established that he was working with at least one known Jewish terrorist.
Sir Harold had reacted to these grim tidings with his usual persiflage. “I mean, we all know both Jews and Arabs are trying to kill me but it was always comforting to assume that any German assistance in the matter was going to the weaker party. The Jews are so much better at being terrorists. And now Berlin knows that Churchill and Brooke are in Cairo.”
Davison seized his opportunity to assure him that, as long as his service was given a free hand and the police acted on their advice, they were well placed to track them down. “You’re right about the Jewish terrorists being clever but they’re often hopelessly divided. I think some of them must be feeling very uncomfortable about this German accomplice, especially now with all this talk of mass killings in Poland. Just because you’re an obvious target doesn’t mean you have to be an easy one.”
“Perhaps I shouldn’t be letting you out of my sight,” Sir Harold had sighed but he didn’t mean a word of it. As far as he knew MI5 had never managed to exploit Jewish infighting to the point where they were running an agent who made a difference. But Davison had his uses. He really couldn’t afford to waste an entire day for an hour’s chat with Auchinleck during which there was a damn good chance that neither of them would tell the other anything they hadn’t heard before. “I was going to go myself but there’s simply too much on and I need Nicholl for day to day army liaison,” he explained as he topped up their whiskies and sodas on the terrace of Government House. “Besides, this is very sensitive stuff and he’s not really senior enough.” Never hurt to flatter.
