by Ian Blake
Ayton shipped his paddle and secured it to the deck. Then he unsnapped the waterproof cover around his waist and, lifting his legs clear, swung them sideways and lowered them into the water, at the same time bending backwards to keep the canoe on an even keel. Pountney, aware of what his partner was doing, automatically leant the other way as Ayton launched himself into the water by pushing with his hands. He had timed it right, for the water was waist deep. He grabbed the stern to steady the folbot as Pountney made his own exit from the front cockpit. They towed the folbot through the breaking waves, keeping as low a profile as possible, ran it clear of the water’s edge, then threw themselves on to the sand. They had not seen any patrols during the day, but they had no means of knowing if there were any at night.
They lay on the sand, searching the darkness. Nothing stirred except the cicadas which chirruped away in the bushes behind the beach. After a few minutes they rose cautiously and, half crouching, ran with the folbot to the jumble of rocks that marked the end of the beach. They slid the craft into a crevice before returning to the beach to erase their footsteps with a special rake they carried. This done, they returned to the folbot, took out the two bergens, climbed the rocks, crossed the road behind the beach and sheltered behind a drystone wall.
‘So far so good,’ whispered Pountney. Ayton could hear the suppressed excitement in his voice. ‘We’ll head inland and find a place to lie up during the day.’
‘Good,’ said Ayton crisply. He felt icy calm now.
‘It’ll be just a lot of Wops guarding the airfield. We’ll run circles round ‘em.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Ayton. Sometimes, he thought, Pountney’s persistent optimism could be counter-productive.
They slung the bergens on to their backs. Pountney took out his pocket compass, set the correct bearing which would take them into the mountains near Maritsa, and set off at a steady pace with Ayton ten yards behind him.
At first they had to cross drystone walls and skirt the occasional farmhouse, but soon any signs of habitation disappeared. The ground underfoot gradually became rougher and more uneven, and then began to rise quite steeply. After two hours they rested in an outcrop of rocks. Ahead and above them the mountain ridge cut a clear line across the night sky. Looking back the way they had come, they could see the coastline below them and the sea a black mass beyond it.
They opened two cans of self-heating soup, Pountney lacing his liberally with rum from his hip-flask. When they had finished them they buried the cans, and while Pountney checked the route with his compass Ayton studied the map with a shaded torch.
‘If we’re where I think we are,’ he said, ‘I reckon we’re about ten miles from the airstrip.’
‘We’ll cover that before dawn, no problem,’ Pountney replied. ‘So we should have plenty of time to find a hide-out for the day. Might even be able to recce the airstrip quickly.’
But the gradient became steeper than ever and in the dark they had difficulty clawing their way up. Soon they were forced to abandon a direct route to the ridge and take a zigzag one instead. Eventually they stumbled across a rough path, spotted here and there with mule dung, and followed it upwards. It petered out near a ruined building tucked under the ridge. They climbed the last hundred yards to the crest over large rocks, to find themselves looking down on a flat coastal plain. Pountney scanned the area with his binoculars, but everything was too shrouded in mist and darkness for him to be able to see the airfield. They rested for ten minutes before beginning the descent. This proved even more difficult than the ascent, for the ground was a scree of loose rocks on which they slithered and slipped. The noise they made echoed alarmingly off the mountainside, but they comforted themselves with the fact that they were miles from any habitation.
The ground levelled out after a while and when it began to steepen again the scree was replaced by rocky outcrops, clumps of coarse grass, bare earth and the occasional sparsely leafed bush or tree. They half slithered, half climbed down, hanging on to what they could, tired now from the weight of their bergens and concerned that it would soon be light. At last they were able to walk without difficulty, though the ground was strewn with loose stones and rocks, so that they stumbled frequently. They were both well aware that a turned ankle would be fatal to the operation.
Glancing back, Ayton saw the first glimmer of light above the ridge. At the same moment Pountney said: ‘There it is.’
Just discernible in the pre-dawn gloom below them were the two parallel lines of the runway, much lighter against the dark background of the plain. Ayton could just make out the curves and humps of a line of hangars. Ten minutes later they came to a crumbling stone hut. Its corrugated-iron roof had slipped so that one edge of it lay propped on a nearby rock. The only sign of previous habitation was an iron stove which lay rusting on its side.
‘This’ll do,’ said Pountney, sliding his bergen off his back. They cleared the rubble from the compacted earth floor and spread out their ponchos, ate one of the ‘K’ ration meals, and took liberal swigs from their hip-flasks.
‘I’ll stand sentry first,’ said Pountney, and as Ayton slept he watched the morning sun climb steadily above the mountain ridge. The heat shimmered off the rocks, blurring the air and distorting the landscape. It grew in intensity all morning until Pountney had to seek the shelter of what shade the corrugated-iron roof could provide.
At midday he shook Ayton, and together they brewed some tea on the tiny collapsible solid-fuel stove they had brought with them.
Ayton felt refreshed and more cheerful. Pountney lay down on his poncho, pulled his bergen under his head, told Ayton to wake him at four, then fell asleep immediately.
The heat intensified and the hum of the cicadas grew more persistent. The roof was now too hot to touch and too hot to shelter under. Ayton took Pountney’s binoculars and climbed a nearby tree. This shaded him from the sun and, as he had hoped, exposed him to a faint, cooling breeze that carried with it the scent of thyme. He settled back in a fork near the top of the tree and began scanning the area with the binoculars. From his vantage point he could just see parts of the airstrip, which he judged to be about two miles away. His view included a stretch of the perimeter fence which he studied intently. This seemed to consist of ordinary linked-wire netting topped by a triple row of barbed wire angled outwards at forty-five degrees. It did not look particularly formidable, though Ayton supposed there was an outside chance that it might be electrified. It would certainly be protected by anti-personnel mines or booby-traps unless the Italians were even more incompetent than they were reputed to be. He knew that there would be patrols. There might also be dogs, though he fervently hoped not, for he liked dogs and had a healthy respect for their abilities. Throwing a dog off your scent once it had got on to you was not easy, as he had learnt during his training in Scotland. A trained Alsatian could scent a man at a hundred yards in optimum conditions.
He moved the binoculars to study the one hangar he could see, but it was closed and there was no sign of life around it. As he switched to another building he could not immediately identify, he heard the throb of aero engines to his left, and turned. They looked like triple-engined Savoia-Marchettis, the type they had been told were stationed at Maritsa, but their outlines shimmered so much in the heat that it was difficult to be sure.
He watched the three bombers circle the airfield and land. Shortly afterwards another three appeared from the same direction, and touched down. Then another came in, lower than the rest, and Ayton could see that it was in trouble as it swung groggily in the sky. But, to Ayton’s disappointment, the pilot managed to land it.
The sound of the engines revving up came to him clearly as they taxied off the runway. Then there was silence again except for the constant hum of the cicadas. Ayton waited an hour before returning to the hut to wake Pountney.
‘Seven of them, you say?’
‘Well, six and a half. The damaged one looked on its last legs.’
‘I expect they
’ve been bombing some convoy to bits or attacking Crete. The bastards.’
British forces had just withdrawn to Crete from Greece, which the Germans had invaded the previous month, and were now bracing themselves for a German attack on the island.
‘If the perimeter fence is the walk-over you say it is, we won’t have any trouble getting into the place.’
‘Do you want to recce it beforehand?’
Pountney shook his head. ‘I’ll just take a shufti from your tree.’
Pountney moved off with the binoculars and Ayton began unpacking the bergens. He was delighted to see they had been given the latest type of plastic explosive. The earlier version, known as Nobel 808, had an almond smell which always gave him a severe headache, however carefully he handled it. The new stuff, known to everyone simply as PE, was much more malleable and hardly smelt at all. It looked like a block of butter but had the consistency of plasticine.
The ten rolls of PE were wrapped in waxed paper. Ayton laid them in a row on the floor of the hut. Each weighed 224g, half of which was enough to destroy any aircraft. Then he took out the clam mines – small explosive devices designed to be attached to their targets with magnets – and the empty sacks of the Gammon grenades, and laid them to one side.
The clams could be useful if there were any trucks or small armoured vehicles on the airfield worth destroying, but they wouldn’t need the Gammons unless they were discovered and had to fight their way out. He’d never used them, but he’d been told they were just the job against armoured cars and light tanks, especially the Italian ones, whose armoured plate was paper-thin.
Next he took from the bergens the primers and detonators and pencil fuses for the explosive charges he wanted to make up, and finally he placed on a nearby chunk of masonry the lengths of cordtex he had brought with him, just in case Pountney decided it was worth laying a series of charges which would explode simultaneously. Then he took out his pocket knife and began to cut the rolls of PE in half. He had just finished doing this and begun taping the magnets to the charges, when Pountney returned.
‘It all seems so quiet down there,’ he said. ‘You’d have thought we’d have seen perimeter patrols or at least some trucks going in and out.’
‘Too bloody hot for them, I expect,’ said Ayton. He finished taping the magnets and opened the box containing the primers. These were cork-shaped pieces of explosive with a hole drilled in the middle to take the detonator. He took care to keep wiping away the sweat trickling from his brow. Though the primers were covered with a damp-proof coating, any liquid that came into contact with them could prevent them from working properly.
Ayton began working the primers into the charges. This was simpler than it had been in the Scottish climate, because the heat made the PE easy to mould. He inserted a primer at each end of the charge, for everything had to be duplicated to cut the risk of equipment failure.
Pountney watched Ayton’s meticulous preparations restlessly, his mind churning over every possible thing that could go wrong. ‘This place is hundreds of miles from the nearest British base,’ he said, almost thinking aloud. ‘It’s way beyond the range of any British bomber base. So they can’t be expecting an attack from the air, much less one from the land.’
‘That’s what the SBS is all about, Jumbo. Surprise. In and out before anyone’s had time to say as much as fucking hello or goodbye. I just hope the others have as good a chance as we’ve got.’
Pountney grunted his agreement. He’d been wondering how the others had been getting on. The complete Special Boat Section of twelve men had been committed to Operation Angelo, the aim of which was to destroy as many enemy aircraft on the ground as possible so as to lessen the air attacks on the vital Malta convoys. The target airfields were scattered across the Axis-occupied parts of the eastern and central Mediterranean and no fewer than six submarines had been committed to help carry out the raids as part of their routine patrols.
‘If the LRDG can do it, so can we,’ Pountney said.
The Long Range Desert Group had become past masters at raiding aerodromes behind enemy lines in Libya with their heavily armed jeeps and trucks, and had a proven record of success. But the SBS still had to prove it could be done from the sea, and Pountney knew the future of his unit hung on the success or failure of Angelo. If it failed to produce the goods, the SBS might not have a second chance, and Pountney knew he could then very well be returned to the humdrum existence of an infantry officer, a fate which he had worked strenuously and consistently to avoid.
‘We can do it,’ Ayton said quietly.
He finished inserting the primers into the plastic explosive and began inserting a detonator through the hole of each primer, making sure that it was the open end of the detonator which was sticking out. He handled each detonator with great care for, unlike PE, which could be hit by a bullet without exploding, the half which was inserted into the primer was made with a very sensitive explosive. To protect it from dampness, each detonator had been packed in sawdust, and Ayton was careful to tap off every trace before inserting the detonator in the primer. It was a long, slow business which needed patience – which was why it was Ayton’s job not Pountney’s.
‘You’re bloody methodical, aren’t you, Phil?’ Pountney remarked. Part of him admired this trait in his companion, but a larger part was irritated by it. He knew well enough that the greatest care always had to be taken in preparing explosive charges, but he couldn’t for the life of him see why Ayton had to remove every speck of sawdust before inserting a detonator, or why the charges were laid out as if they were on parade. It was, he supposed, simply part of a Marine’s training. The Marines didn’t just clean the caps of their boots until they could see their immaculately shaved faces in them; they also polished the leather sole under the boot as well. And then they put Brasso on the studs.
‘Better safe than sorry,’ Ayton replied. He was aware of the triteness of the remark, but as a result of his training, and from stories he had heard from those who had returned from operations, he knew how unreliable explosive charges could be, especially those detonated by time-fuses. It seemed pointless for him and Pountney to expose themselves to such danger, only to be thwarted in their aim by a badly assembled charge which either failed to detonate or, worse, detonated prematurely, perhaps killing the man who had laid it.
After inserting primers and detonators into each roll of PE – firing systems were always duplicated in case one failed – Ayton checked and double-checked each one to make sure that they were clean, secure and dry before starting on the trickiest part of the assembly.
Pountney watched Ayton irritably for a while before turning away and leaving the hut. He glanced at his watch and then at the late-afternoon sky. The sun was sinking now, but was still strong enough to force him to shade his eyes as he scanned the open country ahead. He wanted to move up to the airfield while it was still light, so that they could recce the place properly and then break through the perimeter as soon as it got dark. If they didn’t they would be behind schedule, because they were going to need the best part of the night to return the way they had come and rendezvous with the submarine before dawn.
‘How long, Phil?’ he asked impatiently when he returned to the hut.
‘Give me a quarter of an hour,’ Ayton muttered.
He removed from the bergen the two cigar-shaped containers in which the pencil fuses were packed. As their name implied, these were about the shape and length of a pencil. At one end of each fuse was a copper tube, at the other a sprung-steel connector with a percussion cap inside it. In the middle was a spring-loaded striker held off the percussion cap by a thin wire.
Ayton looked through the inspection hole in each fuse to make sure that the wire was not broken or obstructed in any way. If he was in any doubt he put the suspect fuse aside. He connected the fuses by pushing their connectors into the open end of the detonators. When the time came, all that he and Pountney would have to do was to crush the fuse’s copper end b
etween forefinger and thumb and remove the coloured safety strip which prevented the striker from being accidentally released. Crushing the copper end broke an ampoule of acid which ate through the wire at a predetermined rate. In theory it was all very simple; in practice it didn’t always work out that way.
When he had finished with the charges, Ayton prepared a detonator and pencil fuse for each of the clam mines. These were small Bakelite containers, filled with explosive, which already had magnets and primers fitted to them. It was exacting work in the intense heat of the late afternoon, but Ayton worked steadily, making sure that each fuse fitted securely into its detonator.
Pountney was standing over him again and Ayton could feel his impatience. Pountney stooped and picked up one of the faulty fuses and examined it.
‘Green. How long a delay is that?’
‘Nine hours.’ Ayton hated being interrupted, but tried not to sound irritable.
‘That’s much too long, Phil. It will be daylight by then and they’re bound to be spotted before they explode.’
A slight frown wrinkled Ayton’s forehead. It told anyone who knew him that he was annoyed, but he worked on in silence for a moment before saying quietly: ‘Nine hours is an estimate, Jumbo. You know that as well as I do. How hot do you think it is now? Eighty?’
‘At least,’ said Pountney. ‘Nearer ninety, I’d say.’
‘And how much does it drop during the night?’
Pountney shrugged at such minutiae. ‘Haven’t a clue. Quite a bit, I suppose.’
‘Yeah, but not by all that much, and metal aircraft are bound to retain some of that heat, aren’t they?’
‘You’re probably right,’ replied Pountney. He knew what Ayton was driving at. Even so, nine hours! He’d have used six-hour fuses and to hell with it.
