by John Harris
There was another explosion and the air buffeted him, knocking his helmet over his ear with a hard jolt; somewhere nearby a machine-gun shuddered in a long run and a geyser of smoke which had lifted into the air began to drift past him. The whole bloody place was full of gusts and cracks and flashes of light, and as he lifted his head he heard Gardner who was firing around a corner of one of the huts give a little gasp and saw him start to sway. His head began to roll, his face turning blindly as if trying to make out where he’d been hit, and he slid down the wall of the hut; one arm still moving feebly as he gradually sank to his knees, his head bowing forward, a hand clutching his chest, so that he looked like an Arab making his obeisances to Mecca.
One of the American orderlies ran to him but the machine-gun started again and, just as Sugarwhite joined him at Gardner’s side, he fell across the wounded man, a gaping hole in his neck. Sugarwhite stared in horror, wondering in a panic which of the two men he should attend to first. There seemed to be little sign of injury on Gardner but the American was losing blood with great speed.
Trying to remember what he’d learned about first-aid, Sugar-white dragged out his field dressing and tried to bandage him, but the blood spurted over his hands, drenching his sleeves and splashing his face. The American groaned and twisted as Sugar-white tore at his shirt to staunch the flow. Then, with unexpected suddenness, he became quiet, his face grey, and Sugarwhite laid him down, choking with a sense of futility. Gardner was also silent by this time and Sugarwhite looked round, desperate for someone to tell him what to do, seeking encouragement, even a faint sign of success somewhere among the slaughter.
But Sergeant Freelove was now busy with Mitchell while Taffy Jones still crouched with his head down, indifferent to everything. He had reached the end of terror now, the extreme of emotional degradation. Half delirious, he was grasping at the dusty earth, hunched, panting, not looking up, one hand combing through his greasy hair, his eyes dilated, his cheeks blanched with horror.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ someone said, infected by his fear, and Freelove turned from where he was bent over Mitchell.
‘Shut up,’ he snapped. He lashed out with his boot at Taffy. ‘Pull your bloody self together, man! You!’ He glared at Sugarwhite. ‘Get up forward!’
Sugarwhite nodded speechlessly, thankful for even the smallest indication of leadership. He glanced at Gardner still kneeling head-down alongside the wall and, concerned for him, remembering that he’d been the first man at Gott el Scouab to show any sign of friendliness towards him, he pawed at him unhappily, wondering if he could do something to help. But the Yorkshireman didn’t move and Sugarwhite saw that he’d gone as grey as the American.
‘Go on!’ He realized Freelove was staring at him. ‘What are you waiting for?’
Sugarwhite nodded again and, grasping his rifle and scrambling to his feet, scuttled through the drifting dust from the fallen arch towards the buildings opposite the mosque. As he flung himself down, he saw Hockold crouching behind a wall with Amos who had a bandage round one of his hands. With them were Waterhouse, Belcher, Tinner Eva, and Docwra who had blood on his face and looked as though he’d like to be sick. As Sugarwhite stared around him, trying to make out who was alive and who was dead, a shell from the 75 above the POW compound whistled past the front of the German headquarters and exploded on the harbour wall. The blast knocked Sugarwhite’s helmet over his ear again and sent him staggering. As he picked himself up, he saw on the wall a canary in one of the little wooden cages the Italians seemed to like. It was terrified by the racket, fluttering inside its prison and beating its wings frantically against the bars. Sugarwhite gazed at it for a moment, thinking angrily what a bloody silly lot the Italians were to bring a singing bird into a place like Qaba to be frightened to death.
As he took the cage down, a sniper’s bullet spanged against the stonework a foot from his head. He collapsed in a heap, his eyes full of gritty dust and shocked by his narrow escape. He was burning with hatred against the Germans. It seemed they were venting their spite on him alone. His ribs hurt, and his futile rage was laced through with an agonizing misery at the death of his friends. Placing the cage in a corner, he watched the canary’s panic die away to sporadic flutterings. Then he patted the cage as if to say, ‘It’ll be all right now,’ and gripped his rifle, looking round for something on which he could work off his loathing of the Nazis.
It was at that moment that Wutka burst out from among the buildings by the Boujaffar on the motor-bike. Firing was coming from the houses opposite and most of the men with Hockold were occupied with keeping it down, so that only Hockold and Sugarwhite, facing directly towards Ibrahimiya, spotted him. Sugarwhite froze, the skin tight across his jaw. Wutka was clearly an officer and, to the infuriated Sugarwhite, the sort of brutal SS Nazi who had caused so much wretchedness in the world. It was a long shot but the bullet hit Wutka in the small of the back to sever his spine as if it had been chopped with an axe.
As Wutka let go of the handlebars and toppled backwards, the motor-bike went careering onwards to crash into the corner of the naval barracks and fall over with spinning wheels, leaving him spreadeagled in the middle of the road, staring at the stars, aware with his last shreds of consciousness that before long there would be no stars, no sky, nothing but darkness.
‘Good shot, Abdul,’ Hockold said, and Sugarwhite turned, startled and more pleased that Hockold knew his nickname than by the fact that he’d killed the German. It was almost as good as if he’d shot Hitler.
As Wutka died, Nietzsche was turning his attention to the men infiltrating the buildings by the ruined arch. His snipers were in position and every time anyone in the centre of the town raised his head a rifle cracked. But the British were not giving ground, and he turned to the sergeant alongside him.
‘I think we might get them with mortars,’ he said. ‘Bring them up.’
As the sergeant hurried off, bent double, Nietzsche crept to the window to look at the position below. A sniper was crouching there, his face pressed against the brickwork, only the edge of his cheek and his eye showing. As Nietzsche reached him, he gestured to him to keep down.
Then the sniper pulled the trigger and Nietzsche lifted his head again for a quick look. The firing below had died a little and the British seemed to have gone to ground again.
In fact, they had just discovered Dr Garell’s bunker below the harbour wall.
‘Sir -’ Sergeant Freelove came running bent double to where Hockold was crouching ‘- there’s a German dressing station just behind us. There’s a doctor there.’
‘Right.’ Hockold turned and scrambled back with him to Dr Hickey by the mud huts. ‘Sergeant Freelove’s found somewhere for you to set up an aid post,’ he said. ‘You’d better get going. We’ll cover you.’
As the firing broke out again, the American and his orderlies ran for the harbour wall, bent double, carrying and dragging the wounded with them. Hockold went after them and Dr Carell, wearing a white apron, turned to meet them as they appeared. He had three wounded Germans and an Italian with him.
‘Sprechen Sie Englisch?’ Hockold asked.
Carell nodded.
‘I’m taking this place over. Are you a doctor?’
Again Carell’s head inclined.
‘Well, you can consider yourself my prisoner or you can help with the wounded. Whichever you like. You need fear nothing from my people if you help.’
Carell’s head came up. ‘You have no need to threaten me, Herr Oberst,’ he said. ‘I’m a doctor and there are no nationalities among injured men.’
When Hockold got back, Amos was bending over Sergeant Freelove who’d just been hit in the neck.
‘Sniper,’ Amos said. ‘He’s up there among the houses somewhere.’
Eva, crouching among the bricks near Sergeant Sidebottom, turned. ‘Would ‘ee like me to get ‘un, sir?’
‘Know where he is?’ Hockold asked.
‘In yon window wi’ the red blin
d, sir! ‘E keeps shovin’ his head up for a look.’
‘Think you can?’
‘I can take a mouse’s eye out, sir.’
As Hockold called for stretcher-bearers for Freelove, Eva rested his rifle on his pack and squinted along it.
There was still a lot of firing, and Hockold turned to glance at Swann and Jacka crouching down beside him. It was time they were moving off towards the warehouse but there was no point in their getting themselves killed for a matter of a minute or so of waiting.
He directed the machine-gunners towards the windows where the firing was coming from and it died a little. Then Eva’s rifle cracked, and he looked round to see a figure rise in the window with the red blind and flop back out of sight.
‘Got the mucky toad,’ Eva said happily. ‘That’s two!’
The sniper stared round at Nietzsche laying flat on his back alongside him, one eye a bloody hollow, his face mildly surprised, then he turned to shout to Unteroffizier Upholz in the next room.
‘They’ve got the major! He’s dead.’
Upholz gestured and a corporal ran to the sniper’s room. But he was foolish enough not to keep his head far enough down, and the joyful Eva put a bullet straight through his temple to slam him against the far wall.
‘Three,’ he yelled. ‘They don’t know the first thing about it!’
The sniper squirmed on his stomach to the next room where Unteroffizier Upholz and half a dozen men were firing industriously towards the remains of the Roman arch.
‘They got the corporal as well,’ he said flatly. ‘This place’s getting too dangerous.’
As the firing from the house opposite died, Swann stood up. He was annoyed at the narrow escape he’d had but by no means scared. Crouching among the trees with the bullets whistling over his head, his exultation burst out in a great shout of excitement.
‘Come on,’ he roared, leaping unexpectedly to his feet. ‘Come on!’
None of his men was ready and they were slow to move. Bullets whacked into the trees about them and one of them went down with a crash. It only served to excite Swann still more and he stood erect, yelling and waving his arm.
Hockold saw him from the ruined arch. ‘Get down, man!’ he yelled, but Swann was oblivious to everything now and had set off running. He rounded the corner by the mosque into the Shariah Jedid in fine style, yards ahead of the heavily-laden Jacka and the rest of his party.
Tor God’s sake,’ Jacka muttered in disgust.
Swann was charging happily up the hill now, elated by the fact that he was out of the German fire and by the knowledge that this time he was going to show everyone what he could do. Turn right, he’d been told. An opening appeared alongside him. It was nothing but an alley and was clearly the one he’d been told to avoid. Just ahead of him was another opening wider than the first.
‘Not that one!’ Jacka yelled, but Swann didn’t hear him in his excitement and swung round the corner, so blind with elation he hardly knew what he was doing.
Jacka saw him go. ‘Oh, Christ,’ he said. ‘The silly bugger didn’t have to do that!’
On the corner of the alley down which Swann had disappeared, Jacka stopped dead. Almost immediately it narrowed and turned again, and there was no sign of Swann. Jacka knew it was dangerous to go in there, and he signed to the men to follow him up the Shariah Jedid instead. Twenty yards further on he saw the opening he wanted.
‘Here we go,’ he said.
Immediately in front of him there was a warehouse surrounded by a wire fence with a notice bearing a skull and cross-bones and the words, Achtung! Lebeinsgefahr!
There was a little guard-house by the entrance, from which a burst of firing came as they approached. They flattened themselves against the wall; then Jacka pulled out a grenade and tossed it at the guard-house. It bounced off the door and burst with a shattering crash in the narrow street.
It didn’t seem to have done any damage but the door of the guard-house opened and two Germans stumbled out with their hands in the air. In the excitement one of Jacka’s men shot them.
‘You silly sod,’ Jacka said furiously. ‘They’d packed it in!’
He blew the lock off the gate with his Tommy gun and, as he did so, he became aware of another man lifting his head from behind a crate just beyond. He fired quickly. Splinters leapt from the crate and the head disappeared. In the silence he could hear moaning.
As they pushed through the wrecked gate, they found themselves in a small compound, with the doors of the warehouse at the end of it. Again they shot the lock to pieces. Dragging the doors back, they found themselves staring at crates, piles of shavings and stacks of tyres.
‘That lot’ll burn nicely,’ Jacka said with satisfaction. ‘I wonder what that silly bugger Swann’s doing?’
Swann was staring down at the bodies of two people he’d just shot. As he’d hurtled out of the Shariah Jedid and down the winding alley he’d found himself face to face, not with a warehouse as he’d expected, but with a group of small flat-roofed native houses that gave off a smell of urine. They’d looked wrong and he was just wondering where he’d made his mistake when he saw two figures moving in the shadows by a doorway and fired automatically.
They fell into the street and, as he edged forward warily, he saw that both were Arabs. One was a mere boy with a fez on his head who was sprawled against the wall, stone dead, his nose punched in by Swann’s bullet, his crossed eyes staring blankly at his bare feet. The other, who looked like a bundle of dirty washing, appeared to be an old man, his eyes opaque with trachoma; he was moaning quietly and Swann could see blood oozing from underneath his rags.
Realizing in horror that the man was blind and that the boy had been leading him to safety, he looked round for Sergeant Jacka for advice. To his surprise, there was no one with him and he moved back a little down the winding lane. But there was no one there either and he swung once more towards the two bodies, worried about the old man. He was still standing there when Private Bontempelli, shoving his head out of Zulfica Ifzi’s room to see if it were safe to leave, stumbled into him.
He was as startled as Swann and quite prepared to put his hands up in surrender. But Swann was troubled, lost and shocked at having shot two harmless people who weren’t even in the battle, and he was slow to respond.
Bontempelli recovered first and lifted his rifle. ‘Mani in alto!’ he said. His voice was almost falsetto with fear.
Swann stared. ‘Pardon?’
Bontempelli coughed and swallowed. ‘Hande hoch’ he tried. ‘Hands - oop!’ He drew a deep breath and lifted the rifle. ‘Per favore, Signore,’ he added politely.
9
Attention was then turned to fuel supplies, gun positions and supply ships.
The smoke which had aided all the other parties had served only to hinder Captain Watson. It was blowing back from the smoke floats at the end of the mole and, caught by the blast from the guns, was drifting over the supply ships in whirling swathes, thick, choking and obscure.
Watson had been the first man on board. The draped folds of the heavy camouflage nets, threaded with broad strips of coloured canvas, made the decks gloomy, but there were areas of speckled light where the glare from the flames shone through and as he had leapt aboard Andolfo, the inner ship of the trot of three, he saw a startled officer pop up from a hatchway.
‘Wer da?’ the officer said, wondering what was happening, and Watson, still running, kicked him in the face like a footballer taking a ball on the run. The officer’s head snicked back, his neck broken, and he slid out of sight. Followed by Devenish and a group of soldiers, Watson continued without a pause across the connecting gangplank to Guglielmotti, the next ship. A soldier carrying a gun appeared round a winch. Automatically, the man alongside Watson lunged forward with his bayonet and the soldier fell back with a scream. On Cassandra, the last ship, the guards, who’d been inside the galley making coffee, had more time to collect themselves. But when they appeared and found themselves f
aced with the horde of black-faced men bristling with weapons, they weren’t sure what to do. They knew all too well what was beneath their feet and had already decided among themselves when they’d first heard of the likelihood of a raid that it was probably unwise even to fire a rifle. An Italian merchant seaman who appeared confirmed their fears. ‘No!’ he screamed, diving behind an open hatch. ‘Non tirare!’
The British, better organized and better briefed, didn’t have to worry and the three guards went down under a swarm of dark figures with flashing knives and bayonets.
Led by the naval guides, Watson’s party scoured the officers’ and crews’ quarters of the three ships. It didn’t take long and as they began to come up on deck, their hands in the air, Devenish started to climb into the hold of Andolfo with his plastic explosive.
As he disappeared, an unexpected burst of firing from the end of the mole stopped the other party dead in their tracks as they headed for Giuseppe Bianchi, further along. Watson was standing under the drooping netting at the end of Andolfo’s gangplank where he could keep an eye on all four ships at once, at the same time shepherding the captured crews over to Umberto. He was quite safe from the machine-gunners on the end of the mole, but a chance burst from the houses across the harbour swept across the decks, ripping through the netting and making the strips of canvas leap and dance. As Watson’s head jerked up, the next burst ripped into his face, neck and shoulders, and sent him staggering sideways across the mole to crash into the wooden shelter Upholz and Wutka had used as they checked the cargoes.
For a moment, he clung to the shelter, his fingers clawing the wood, startled by the lash of pain and his inability to do anything about it. Then, slowly, as his knees gave way, he slid down, his face scraping the rough timber to leave a dark smear across its gritty surface, and fell into a sitting position before rolling gently sideways. Shocked by the suddenness of his dying, as he felt the cold stone of the mole against his cheek, he knew without the slightest doubt that he would never see his wife again and would go groping through eternity to find her, his last conscious thought the question, Why? Why? Why?
