by Ian Blake
Standing about ten feet away from him was a German Feldwebel, a non-commissioned officer, in desert uniform. On his head he wore a cap bearing the death’s-head insignia above its peak. Ayton had not seen this since Norway, but he knew immediately that it meant the wearer was a member of the SS, Hitler’s elite guard. He tightened his grip on the hilt of his knife and began carefully to work it out of its sheath.
The German had a holstered revolver at his hip, but his hands were nowhere near it. ‘Was machst du denn hier?’ he asked sleepily, rubbing his eyes.
Ayton made no reply, but beckoned the man as if to show him something, and as the Feldwebel stepped forward and crouched down inquisitively Ayton drew his knife. The movement alerted the German and Ayton saw first the puzzlement and then the fear in his eyes.
Ayton drove the knife upwards between the SS man’s fourth and fifth ribs, and into his heart. The man sagged forward so that Ayton had to hold the body back with his left hand to prevent it toppling on to him. Then, in one swift movement, he withdrew the knife, pushed the dead German backwards, stood up, wiped the blade on the man’s shirt and thrust it back in its sheath. Then he grasped the man under his armpits and hauled him into the cabin where he had been sleeping moments before, and shut the door.
When he had finished preparing the charge, Ayton took the SS cap back on deck and threw it into the dinghy.
‘A little souvenir,’ he said.
By now the schooner’s crew and passengers had all taken to the boats or had scrambled on to life-rafts. Pountney turned the cap over curiously. ‘Where did you get this?’
‘Just someone I bumped into,’ Ayton replied. ‘We were acquainted only very briefly. He must have been missed during the search.’
Pountney grinned up at him. ‘One of Captain Fairbairn’s little tricks?’
Fairbairn, an ex-Shanghai policeman, had been their instructor in the use of the knife that he and another instructor, a Captain Sykes, had invented for the commandos.
‘Worked a dream,’ Ayton replied.
As they reached the submarine’s bridge, where Woods was waiting for them impatiently, the scuttling charge exploded with a dull thud. The schooner shuddered and began to settle in the water. Decks awash, it was still wallowing in the slight, glassy swell when Woods gave the order to dive.
All day the submarine ran submerged at one hundred feet, coming up to periscope depth in the late afternoon so that the SBS men could study the coastline where they were to land after dark. The sun was over the land and blazed through the eyepieces as Pountney swept the coast with the main periscope in low power. Then he ratched the periscope up to high power and the beach leapt out at him, long and narrow and filled with barbed wire and other defences.
‘Nobody said anything to us about the beaches being fortified,’ he said when they went to the wardroom to study the reconnaissance photographs one last time and to look for any indication that the beach was mined.
‘Well, they wouldn’t, would they?’ Ayton replied bitterly. It was an unfair comment, he knew. An expert would have picked out the defences on the photographs, but no one else, apart from an agent on the ground, could possibly have known that they were there. And there were no agents on the ground – at least none who were able to make contact.
After dark the submarine partially surfaced and Woods and the SBS officers climbed on to the bridge. In the distance the conical mound of Etna stuck up into the night sky, a reassuring landmark from which to take a compass bearing. It was a clear, calm night, intensely dark but with a brisk inshore breeze which would carry the slightest sound to the shore.
‘Best if I piggyback you in,’ said Woods, ‘No problems then about noise. There’s plenty of water under my keel.’
Ayton glanced at Pountney, who shrugged. ‘Why not. Just don’t submerge too quickly and take us with you.’
Woods ordered the submarine to surface completely and the canoe and the explosives were brought on to the forecasing. The folbot was packed and the SBS men then stepped into it as the submarine crept in towards the shore, moving so slowly it created no wake.
‘One hundred and fifty feet, sir,’ the navigator said into the voice pipe, relaying the reading on the echo-sounder. Woods tapped the lookouts on the shoulder and indicated that they should go below. ‘One hundred feet . . . eighty feet . . . sixty feet.’
‘Dive, dive, dive,’ Woods barked into the voice pipe.
He gave one last look at the folbot sitting transversely on the forecasing, then climbed down the ladder.
In the control room the First Lieutenant ordered the inner ballast tanks to be blown first and told the planesmen to submerge the submarine at a shallow angle. The bow dipped, and the folbot floated off the forecasing. Free of the submarine, the SBS men paddled hard to avoid being caught in the suction it produced as it continued to submerge.
The onshore breeze helped propel them in, but closer to the beach the swell turned to surf, which they could hear crashing on to the sand. The heavily laden folbot became progressively more difficult to contol, and fifty yards from the beach they decided to tow it in by swimming the rest of the way. It was better to arrive soaking wet than to risk capsizing the folbot.
The surf tumbled them ashore, then tried to suck them back out to sea, but they pushed the folbot clear of the water and lay beside it, winded by the force of the waves. As they strained to see if there was any movement, Ayton remembered a remark made by another SBS man, Eric Newby. A windswept enemy beach at night was, he had said, the loneliest place in the world.
He was right.
They lay flat on the sand watching and listening. It was now that any SBS team was at its most vulnerable. If they had been spotted, they didn’t stand a chance. The only temporary retreat would be the open sea, where they could be picked off at leisure.
But all they could hear was the wind sighing through the coils of barbed wire which ran the length of the beach twenty yards in front of them. After waiting a few minutes they took out their knives and, dragging the folbot along between them, carefully probed the sand ahead for mines. When they reached the coils of barbed wire Pountney used cutters, while Ayton unfolded the spade. By the time Pountney had cleared a path, Ayton had buried the folbot upside down and eliminated any trace of the landing.
They crawled through the gap in the wire, dragging the bergens carrying the explosive behind them. Once through, they closed the gap and noted its position. The back of the beach was only a short distance away. Pountney ran towards it with both bergens while Ayton again covered their tracks. There had been no mines in front of the wire, so it was unlikely that there would be any behind it, but fear and tension brought sweat trickling down their faces as they crossed the sand.
A line of trees separated the back of the beach from a narrow road, beyond which was the railway line. At this point the line ran through a shallow cutting, but to the left, after about two hundred yards, it disappeared into a tunnel.
They crouched in the undergrowth and listened. Above them the wind sighed through the trees. Behind them the surf sucked and boomed on the beach and the cicadas sang around them in the broad swathe of bushes and coarse grass which divided the road from the railway line.
Pountney glanced at his watch. They were already behind schedule; they would have to get on with it. He was about to cross the road when he heard subdued laughter to their right. He motioned Ayton back, but then both men froze as boots clattered on stones. Male laughter – coarse and throaty mingled with female giggles. Pountney swore under his breath. They must have landed on a lovers’ haunt.
From the shadows falling across the road emerged two figures: a soldier with his rifle slung across his shoulder, and a girl clinging to his arm and looking up at him. Sweet whispers of Italian floated through the night air. The SBS men watched the couple approach, and with their hands on their knives, waited for them to pass by.
Instead, the soldier stopped and said something. The girl giggled and shook her head. The
soldier dropped his hand on to the girl’s breast and she stood on tiptoe and kissed him. As the soldier took the girl by the hand and turned towards the beach, Ayton and Pountney instinctively leant farther back into the shadows. The girl resisted, then relented, and the couple sauntered between the SBS men crouching in the undergrowth.
Once on the beach, the soldier wasted no time. He tossed aside his rifle, took off his shirt, laid it on the sand and lowered the girl on top of it. He sat beside her, pulling off his boots and trousers as she tucked up her skirt.
Pountney began easing his knife out of its sheath. He knew he was going to have to kill them, because they could not afford to waste any more time. There were, he thought grimly, worse ways to die than in the middle of a screw.
He waited his moment.
Ayton watched the couple, his knife in his hand. The girl opened her legs and Ayton felt a surge of desire. He hadn’t been with a woman for a month. It felt like years.
The soldier lowered himself on to the girl. Pountney weighed his knife in his hand and took a cautious step forward.
Young and inexperienced, the soldier climaxed immediately with a cry and a grunt.
Pountney hesitated.
The soldier rolled off the girl laughing, and picked up his trousers. The girl laughed too, then sat up, threw back her hair and scrambled to her feet. She smoothed her skirt down across her thighs and, stooping slightly so that her long black hair shaded her face, brushed the sand away from her bare legs in an infinitely graceful motion.
Pountney crouched down as the soldier snatched up his shirt, shook it and slung it with his rifle over his shoulders. The young man took the girl’s hand and whispered something in her ear. She giggled and they crossed the line of trees and continued down the road.
‘Talk about a quickie,’ Ayton murmured when he rejoined Pountney. They crossed the road, their rubber-soled boots making no noise on the broken surface, and walked quickly through the tall, coarse grass and stunted bushes which separated it from the railway. They climbed over the two strands of wire fence, and jumped down from the cutting on to the single track.
‘At least we won’t have to worry which is the right one,’ said Pountney.
Ayton looked along the line, crouched down and tapped his knuckles on the reinforced cement in which the wooden sleepers were embedded. He supposed this was a precaution to prevent movement of the rails in an area where landslides were common.
‘This is no good,’ he said quietly.
‘What do you mean, “no good"?’ Pountney hissed. To create the maximum damage, Ayton explained patiently, the charge had to be laid under a rail. That way, if the pressure switch was fixed to the rail the right distance from the charge, the engine fell into the hole the explosion created. And that caused problems to those trying to clear up the mess.
Pountney looked along the track to where it disappeared into the black cavern of the mountainside. ‘What about the tunnel? Got enough explosives?’
‘Probably not. But it’s better than nothing.’
They followed the line until they came to the tunnel. At the entrance Ayton made up three charges: a small one to derail the train, and two bigger ones to destroy the tunnel and seal in the train with fallen masonry.
They walked cautiously into the tunnel, which smelt of damp and urine, walking between the rails and treading on the sleepers to avoid making any unnecessary noise. Once Pountney tripped and the sound of boot on rail echoed around them. Every few yards they stopped and listened. The tunnel curved slightly and the entrance behind them disappeared. It was intensely dark.
‘Christ! This must be far enough,’ Pountney whispered into Ayton’s ear. He shaded the beam of the torch with his hand while Ayton crouched and fitted the charge to the rail. He placed the pressure device, called a fog signal, close to the charge, hoping that when the train triggered the charge it might cause another, bigger explosion in the engine itself. The two bigger charges he fitted with sympathetic fuses which would, with luck, be triggered by the tremors caused by the destruction of the engine in the confined space of the tunnel. He taped the first to the side of the tunnel twenty feet in front of the fog signal. Then they walked back to the entrance and he taped the second one some ten feet inside it.
He was repacking the bergens when Pountney tapped him on the shoulder and put his finger to his lips. Ayton paused. Pountney put his ear to the rail and indicated that Ayton should do the same. They could hear a faint, spasmodic, but quite distinct ringing.
‘A train?’ Ayton whispered.
Pountney shook his head. ‘Something’s hitting the line.’
They looked into the blackness of the tunnel. The faint beam of a torch, held by someone beyond the bend in the tunnel, flickered up and down.
‘A patrol,’ Pountney whispered. ‘Let’s get the fuck out of it.’
They scrambled out of the cutting, crossed the road and crouched in the undergrowth. A few minutes later a patrol of five men emerged from the tunnel, trudging along between the rails. From the shape of the hats they wore the SBS men knew they were carabinieri, armed Italian police.
When they had passed, Pountney signalled to Ayton to return to the beach while he covered the retreating patrol with his tommy-gun. The patrol didn’t pause and three minutes later it had disappeared from view.
Ayton worked feverishly to open up the gap in the wire. Once through it, he retrieved the spade from under its shallow layer of sand and began digging up the folbot.
Pountney waited until the footsteps of the patrol had died away and looked at his watch. They were hopelessly behind schedule: the submarine had been due to pick them up half an hour ago. He ran down to the beach to join Ayton. It was, despite the brightness of the stars, still very dark. But first light was not far away, and in the Mediterranean it came very quickly.
The surf had subsided and they launched the folbot without trouble, leaving the beach with quick, powerful strokes. After taking their bearings, Pountney brought out the infrared receiver from its waterproof pocket beside the front cockpit and held it up at head height.
The screen was speckled with green pinpricks – the infrared light from the stars – but as Pountney swung it slowly in an arc, a large green spot appeared. ‘Turn to starboard,’ he said to Ayton. ‘More, more . . . that’s it.’
Now the hidden beam lay dead ahead. Pountney noted the bearing on the P8 compass, then they both bent to their paddles, thrusting with what remained of their strength. Ahead of them the first glimmer of dawn began to tinge the sky, but at sea level it was still pitch-dark.
Ayton felt exhaustion seeping through him. He could tell from Pountney’s flagging strokes that his strength was running out too. The Sentinel was probably gone by now. With dawn spreading rapidly across the sky, Timber could hardly risk staying on the surface. His mind wandered to the possibility of finding their own way back to Malta: a hopeless proposition. But he knew neither of them would ever admit defeat, never willingly surrender.
If a windswept beach was the loneliest place in the world, an empty sea was the most forbidding.
‘There she is!’ Pountney cried.
Ayton peered into the darkness, but saw nothing. Beads of sweat ran into his eyes and he rubbed them with his forearm.
‘Where?’
‘There.’ Pountney pointed with his paddle.
As much as Ayton stared, for him nothing broke the line of the horizon and everything below it was inky black.
Then suddenly he saw it. It was the conning tower, a blacker shadow on the black sea. He gleefully thumped Pountney on the back.
‘It’s there!’
‘I told you it fucking was, you dimwit Marine.’
They redoubled their efforts and as they drew slowly, agonizingly slowly, closer, the Sentinel rose from the sea like some huge whale, compressed air frothing round its hull. Men clambered down from the conning tower and ran along the forecasing. Eager hands grasped the folbot and hauled the two men out of their cockpi
ts and on to the submarine.
There, they stumbled along the slippery forecasing and climbed on to the bridge, where Woods was waiting for them. ‘You’ve taken your time,’ he said.
6
The General was tall, lean and bald, with a clipped moustache which glistened with sweat. He had been a general for so long the red tabs on his khaki bush shirt were a faded pink.
Looking at his campaign ribbons, headed by the vertical red-blue-red of the DSO, Pountney decided that the man must have been in the Army since the year dot, yet there was a vigour about him that he liked.
The General waved the SBS officer to a seat while he paced about his office like a caged bear. Cairo was sweltering and a large fan turning slowly in the centre of the ceiling seemed to do no more than slightly rearrange the foetid air.
Pountney waited apprehensively. He didn’t mind action. In fact, he rather enjoyed the heat of battle. It brought out the best in him, he always thought; made the old grey matter work much faster. What he couldn’t abide, what he had spent his whole adult life avoiding, was the methodical, humdrum, everyday existence of the civil servant, the paper shuffler. He couldn’t abide such types – and he knew they couldn’t abide him, if only because they couldn’t pigeon-hole him. But in the man now prowling around him he thought he might have met his match.
‘The fact is, the War Office don’t like it,’ the General said eventually, expanding on his theme. ‘Nobody has acted up to now, because no one took your unit seriously. I hope you don’t mind me being frank.’
‘Not at all, sir,’ said Pountney politely.
‘Everyone thought you were just another of Keyes’s foibles. Lot of people not too keen on Combined Ops out here, you know. They don’t like having their best men volunteering for the Commandos.’
‘Is that so, sir?’
The General wiped a handkerchief over his thinning hairline, then shot Pountney a glance. ‘You wouldn’t think of resigning, would you? I’d guarantee you promotion to major and post you anywhere you liked.’
