by Colin Smith
While Lang fiddled with his wireless the Templer went into the cab of the Fiat, opened the hatch above the front passenger seat and used his Dienstglasse to examine the airstrip. There were a couple of low brick buildings and between them a khaki coloured windsock hanging limply down its pole on this windless day. He saw the crews stripped to the waist moving about the Bofors guns and was reminded of the anti-aircraft team he had seen on the winding path coming down from the Acropolis on the day his friend’s letter had decided him to avenge Heydrich. He made out a couple of small aircraft, perhaps Hurricanes or Spitfires, parked off the runway. He thought there might have been more but there was too much dust to be certain.
The Templer became aware of a rumbling noise like the pounding of distant surf. He turned an ear to it and when he realised what it was, let the glasses hang by their strap on his chest, and gave a contented, feline stretch, briefly letting his eyelids close before feeling in his shirt pocket for his cigarettes. As he took his first drag, it occurred to him that this was the sound that. throughout his adulthood, sooner or later, he had always returned to.
25 - Radio Traffic
Calderwell, like the Templer, was also listening to the artillery.
“How close do you think they are?” asked Hare who was standing alongside him looking down at the airstrip at Burg el Arab where a Bombay transport had just landed.
“Oh it’s hard to say,” said Calderwell. “Ten miles or so. Wind can make a lot of difference, not that there’s much today”
“I suppose this could be it - Rommel’s big attack.”
“Doesn’t sound heavy enough to me,” said Calderwell, unable to resist playing the old soldier. He could see Hare was excited. They may have been much closer to death in the Italian air raid on Alexandria the night before but air raids were different. Civilians got killed in air raids.
“Well, I’ve just been told Jerry has reduced his radio traffic and apparently that’s sometimes a sign that he wants you to think he’s gone to sleep,” said Hare who had just returned from a signals briefing with a lieutenant-colonel at divisional headquarters. “By the way, they told me it’s all right to listen out for your spies as long as we don’t let it interfere with anything else. Quite intrigued by them they were.”
“How much did you tell them?”
“Just enough to make them co-operative. I thought they’ve got enough on their plate without Palestine’s problems.”
“Quite right,” said Calderwell.
Sergeant Dudek, one of the Polish interpreters, came up and asked Hare if he would please give him a chit, the word he used in his careful English, for him and his friend, Sergeant Szmid, to acquire rifles and tommy guns since, at the moment, they only had one revolver between them which did not seem correct.
Hare produced a message pad from a canvas map case he had over one shoulder and scribbled something in pencil addressed to the lieutenant-colonel he had just seen. “One of you better stay here in case we need your German,” he said, tearing off the page and giving him directions to divisional HQ as he handed it over. “See if you can scrounge us a Bren gun while you’re at it.”
“They were at Tobruk you know,” said Hare watching the Pole, a stocky figure, walk down toward the airstrip. Divisional HQ was a collection of trucks and caravans dug in about a mile to the west of them on the other side of the runway. “They were there during the first siege, before the South Africans took over. I expect they’re going to find us a bit tame.”
***
Under the camouflage net Lang, cross-legged on one of the blankets, was wiping the dust off the Winchester M1 carbine Hawkins had brought into their lives. His cloth was the pair of RAF issue blue serge knickers he had found in the WAAF’s small pack. He had cleaned the Schmeisser first, stripping it down, unloading the magazine, wiping each round before reloading it, finding the pulling apart and putting together of the weapon as soothing as other men might find a string of worry beads. When he had finished with the M1 he went over to where the Siemens set was lying on the orange juice boxes. The Templer’s coded message was lying on top of the set ready to be sent.
Three times Lang had tried to call Athens. After the second attempt he had tried moving the aerial but all he got back was the same “QRJ” which meant his signal was too weak to read properly though they had obviously been receiving something. This was infuriating because they were now so much closer to Athens than they had been in Jerusalem. He wondered if the batteries had somehow run down. They had been fine when he last checked them. It was probably atmospherics. He would try again in a few minutes. He ducked out from under the net to tell the Templer about the delay.
The German was in the same position he had left him in, head and shoulders poking through the roof hatch of the Fiat’s cab while he surveyed the airstrip through his Dienstglasse. “I’ve been watching their transport aircraft come in,” he told him. “My God, they fly low. You can’t see them at all until they get out to sea and turn round. Next time you try and send that message you had better put a priority heading on it. Otherwise they’ll take all day to get round to decoding it. I know those cypher clerks in Athens. They can be lazy swine.”
***
Calderwell watched Hare’s DF unit open up for trade. In the back of the bread vans and the Marmon-Herrington armoured cars the special operators opened every door and window they could before they started fiddling with their tuning knobs. Hare was sitting alone in one of the vans listening to a set through it speakers, headphones in his hands. He caught sight of Calderwell walking past. “Listen to this,” he said. “Bit of a tank skirmish going on somewhere.”
He had chanced on it while tuning in to one of the frequencies they had for De Wet or whatever his name was. “Knight One to Knight. Somebody is throwing stones but I can’t see where they’re coming from. Is that one of our ponies or some other team’s about one five zero zero yards to my right front? Over.” It was the kind of English voice you would instantly put on a horse.
“Knight to Knight One. Yes, I’ve been watching that pony too. Put a shot across his withers and see which way he jumps. Not too close.”
“Roger that.”
“Knight Three to Knight. Think I am three zero zero further forward than Knight One and can see at least four hunters behind that pony. I’m sure he’s the other team. Can I engage? Over.”
“Knight to Knight Three. If you’re sure, give the buggers hell.”
“Knight to Knight One. Did you copy Knight Three’s message? Over.”
“Knight One. Yes, the ponies bolting. Am also engaging. Got him!”
“Knight to Round Table. Well done.”
“Knight Three to Knight. Somebody is throwing a lot of stones at me.”
“Knight to Round Table. Do not go swanning off beyond that ridge and ware hounds.”
Hare looked at Calderwell with raised eyebrows. “Ware hounds?”
“Probably means watch out for infantry,” he explained. “They’re yeomanry.” Calderwell felt the hair on his arms begin to rise. Silly sods! Silly magnificent bastards. Take away their horses, give ‘em tanks with quick firing cannon and machine guns and wireless, the whole works, and they were still cavalry. Twenty-five years and nothing had changed to whatever they kept between their ears. Did they really think the Germans would not guess that a pony must be an armoured car, a hunter a tank, stones shells and hounds infantry,? Any moment now they would probably hear a hunting horn.
A motorcycle drew up outside and a very dusty dispatch rider dismounted. When he removed his goggles the patches of white skin beneath them made him look like a panda bear. Hare got up to take his message but it turned out to be for Calderwell from the Assistant Super in Jerusalem. He read it twice before turning to Hare. “Apparently we’re no longer looking for a Humber staff car,” he said. “It seems that somewhere near Beersheba they hijacked a captured Fiat lorry the RAF was using to deliver canned orange juice to that big airfield they have south of Gaza. Left the WAAF wh
o driving it locked in the boot of the car.”
“Did she tell them anything?”
“Apparently not. It says, ‘Driver in hysterical condition. Unable to assist.’ Couldn’t have been much fun in this kind of heat.”
On Hare’s wireless Knight Three was saying, “We’ve lost a shoe. Can somebody send up the farrier. They’re throwing an awful lot of stones now.”
“Knight to knight three. Look to your procedure. Don’t say this sort of thing on air.”
“Sorry. Trying to put smoke down.”
“Knight to round table. Engage at eight zero zero. Over.”
“Knight Three. My jockey has taken a fall. We need Monkey Orange soonest. Over.”
Even through the static there was no mistaking that the commander of Knight Three, his driver wounded and desperate for the Medical Officer, was a worried young man.
“Knight Three this is Monkey Orange. We’re a bit busy at the moment. Do what you can until we get to you. Over.”
“Knight to Knight Three. Did you hear Monkey Orange over? Knight Three acknowledge over. Knight Three?”
But Knight Three wasn’t on air.
***
The Templer and Lang were standing by the Fiat sipping from orange juice cans they had extracted from the box at their feet. It was getting harder to find a drinkable can, many of them were badly dented, even split at the seams so that their contents were spoilt and tasted foul.
Every now and then the Templer would lift his field glasses off his chest and look at the airstrip. It was Lang who first spotted Sergeant Dudek’s slow progress towards them. Even from a distance he had the bent gait of the heavily burdened. As he drew closer they could see why. On one shoulder was a rifle and on the other a tommy gun, each hanging on its sling while with both hand across his body he carried a Bren gun which weighed almost as much as the other two put together.
“My God!” said the Templer. “A walking arsenal. Do you think he’s their secret weapon?”
“It might be even worse,” said Lang who had picked up another pair of binoculars in the Humber though they were not as good as the Templer’s. “Take a look above the sergeant’s stripes through your glasses. Do his shoulder flashes say what I think they say?”
The Templer looked. “I don’t believe it,” he said. “I don’t suppose you speak any Polish?”
“Not that you would notice. Certainly not enough to fool a native speaker.”
“Well, he’s seen us now. Perhaps somebody noticed our flashes and told him there were Poles here. Go under the net and cover me and if you have to fire use your pistol. A couple of single shots might not attract too much attention. But only if you have to. He’s not an officer. He might not feel he ought to be too chummy.”
Dudek, beaming and sweating and a little out of breath, had noticed these Poles on his way to Divisional HQ but been in too much of a hurry to socialise. Now he let the Bren gun rest on its butt, holding it by the barrel with his left hand so that his right was free to give the Templer a smart salute. The Templer returned it. Dudek looked puzzled. Wordlessly, the German turned away from him and walked over to the cab of the Fiat and got in to emerge through the hatch in the roof from where he began to peer intently at the desert through his lightweight binoculars.
Dudek said something to him in Polish. The Templer continued to look. Dudek said something to him in Polish again, possibly the same thing. The Templer put his glasses down and pointed down towards the airstrip, the direction the Pole had been heading in the first place. Dudek hesitated. Then he saluted, with rather less élan this time, and picked up the Bren before plodding on with his load. From behind him the Templer noticed the interesting spiked shadow the noon day sun concocted of man and weapons.
***
Dudek got back in a filthy temper which Hare’s praise for acquiring the Bren gun only partly mollified. Gulping down his second mug of brackish warm water from one of the cans they kept in their transport, he told Szmid what had happened. He had met this Polish major. Yes, he knew there weren’t supposed to be any Poles in this sector but he must be on some sort of special attachment like themselves. God only knew what he was up to. He was standing in the roof hatch of this Italian truck, the kind they captured when their brigade broke out of Tobruk, and was looking at the airfield through a pair of binoculars. Funny bugger. He was wearing British rank badges on his epaulettes - a crown instead of a bar and a star - and he saluted like the British did with his palm facing you instead of the ground. Anyway, he had stood there, making more sweat than a gypsy’s horse, and asked this sod for some water. And you know what he did? He didn’t say a word. He just pointed down the bloody hill towards the airstrip. Can you imagine it? You would have thought he was a fucking Prussian - arrogant swine! And it gets worse. Do you know what they had at the side of the truck? It’s absolutely unbelievable. They had this cardboard box full of cans of bloody orange juice. All he had to do was tell me to take one. What a bastard! I bet he’s one of Anders crowd. If he’d been with us in Tobruk last year we would have shot him.
***
Viewed through the Templer’s Dienstglasse the airstrip, its humble buildings, the humpbacked Hurricanes dispersed off its runway with their noses in the air, the twitchy barrels of the Bofors anti-aircraft guns, drifted in and out of focus, their outlines sometimes trembling into a migrainous shimmer before taking shape again. He had watched two twin-engined transport aircraft come in and take off. One had been on the ground for no more than ten minute while a colony of worker ants hollowed out its insides - it looked like ammunition boxes - before it was in the air again. The other had lingered to take on wounded. The ambulances had been waiting to meet it and he had watched them line up and take turns to discharge their cargoes.
The aircraft carried visible turret armament front and back, there were no red crosses on it and when it landed several fit look passengers emerged. But there had not been the kind of flurry on the tarmac prior to its departure to indicate it might be taking some important person back to Cairo with it. There had been no fussing over staff cars, no scramble to open rear doors, no salutes exchanged.
Shortly before four o’clock the Templer told Lang they would give it another half hour and then clear out. He thought there was another aircraft due in shortly because some more ambulances had just come in. Obviously there was a casualty clearing station nearby. The Jew nodded. Did he have any choice? He was drift wood. If they came safely ashore now it would be none of his doing. At his last try Athens had come back right away with QWD - delivered correctly.
What on earth they would make of the message once it was decoded and in the right hands was, of course, another matter. They were supposed to be in Palestine, not Egypt’s western desert even if they were hot on the heels of MacMichael. Athens might suspect they had been captured and it was all some trick to lure the Luftwaffe into an RAF trap. Even if they spotted MacMichael about to board a plane there was no guarantee that the Luftwaffe would be in a position to do anything about it.
***
Some of the stretcher cases were already out of the ambulances and waiting on the ground to be lifted onto the Bombay. Among them Davison was astonished to see, lying with her slim, bare back towards him, an olive skinned woman with shiny black hair that grew well below her waist and a silver bangle on her right wrist. Then the head turned just long enough for him to glimpse a youth’s flimsy beard and he realised he was looking at a young Sikh who had lost his turban though he didn’t seem to have a head wound. Davison had always found it odd catching Sikhs with their hair down. They looked both wild and vulnerable at the same time.
When they met that morning Auchinleck, as one Indian army officer to another, had told him that the British people, Churchill included, did not appreciate the debt they owed “our Indians”. At the beginning of July an Indian brigade in shallow foxholes scraped on a flinty ridge had sacrificed themselves to keep Rommel’s spearhead out of El Alamein and bought time for the rest of the army. D
avison had often found that people who knew what his job was would open up, confident that they were dealing with a man who could keep secrets and had not been all that surprised when Auchinleck proved no exception.
Britain’s Commander-in-Chief for the Middle East made it plain that he thought that Palestine was now out of danger. So, for that matter, were Alexandria, Cairo and the rest of Upper Egypt. They had stopped the Afrika Korps in its tracks, he said, and they were going to push Rommel back though it would probably be a couple of months before they were ready to attack. Meanwhile, the prime minister had promised him the 8th Army would be provided with everything it needed to do the job. There would also be at least one important command change. Strafer Gott, who previously had been telling people that after two years in the desert he might be too tired for it, had at last agreed to take command of the 8th Army which would allow Auchinleck to go back to Cairo and resume his broader duties. Gott was going to Cairo tonight for a final chat with Churchill before the prime minister returned to London with Brook, Britain’s top soldier.
“Brook really wanted Montgomery you know,” Auchinleck had confided as they parted. Davison knew Montgomery well. During the Arab revolt he had commanded a division in Palestine and Davison had been in almost daily contact with him. Like quite a lot of people he had found it difficult to establish any kind of rapport with the acerbic little teetotaller.
“Montgomery has no experience of the desert and he can be difficult,” Davison had ventured.
“I think I’ve heard that sort of thing before,” said Auchinleck and the MI5 man was left in no doubt that they were as one when it came to Bernard Montgomery.
Davison had come away from the Auk’s tactical headquarters on the Ruweisat ridge feeling that he was the bearer of glad tidings for Sir Harold. Certainly he now had some very good reasons for advising him that the formation of a Jewish home guard should at least be delayed if not indefinitely postponed. Then that damn fool in the tank transporter had run them off the road and very nearly killed them.
