by Ian Blake
Warily, the two men moved from one piece of cover to the next as they looked for the patrol which they knew must be somewhere in the area. It was Ayton who saw them first. He squeezed Pountney’s shoulder and pointed. The two enemy soldiers were walking side by side across the open ground, heading directly towards them. Pountney nodded once to indicate that he had seen them. He pointed to Ayton to stay where he was and take the man on the right while he moved across to another patch of gorse so that he could deal with the other one.
Ayton drew out his knife and weighed it in his hand. The manner in which he had dispatched the SS Feldwebel on the Italian schooner had reaffirmed his confidence in Fairbairn’s methods of teaching. Besides showing his pupils exactly where to place the knife to kill a man immediately, Fairbairn had taught them how to fight with a knife in close combat by slashing at vital parts of the body. He had also shown them how to kill a man quite silently, by wrapping an arm around the target’s throat from behind and driving the knife between the collar-bone and the neck. This severed the subclavian artery and the victim choked to death on his own blood in seconds. It was this method that Ayton chose to use.
The two soldiers loomed larger in the dark now, and the SBS men could hear that they were talking in an undertone. Both had their rifles slung over their shoulders, the thumbs of their right hands stuck under the slings to relieve the pressure on their shoulders.
Walking a yard or so apart, they passed inches from the two waiting men. Ayton caught a whiff of cheap aftershave which overlaid a more pervasive smell of sweat and tobacco. Pountney struck first, but Ayton’s target was too slow to react and the SBS man strangled the man’s cry into a gurgle with the crook of his arm around his windpipe. Then he thrust a knee into the base of the Italian’s spine, at the same time snapping his head back with his forearm with every ounce of strength he could muster. He heard the man’s neck crack, then the body went limp. He bent down and felt the jugular vein. Finding no pulse, he rolled him aside and looked around for Pountney. Kneeling, the older man was wiping his knife on the back of his victim, who was lying face down.
‘Now what?’ Ayton whispered. He wondered how they were going to get safely across the open ground to collect the rest of the party. As Pountney straightened up, Ayton could see the grin on his face.
‘We’ll pretend to be the patrol, of course,’ Pountney said. He tugged the rifle from under the dead man, took the black beret off his head and stuck it on his own. Ayton did the same. They hid their tommy-guns under their clothing and strolled out casually from the undergrowth, imitating as closely as they could the shambling steps of the guards.
It seemed to take an age to cross the open ground, but once they reached the other side, where the undergrowth hid them from view, they were able to divest themselves of the rifles and berets, then hurry to the rendezvous.
The other six men were all sitting on their haunches, their backs against the wall of the bungalow, their weapons cradled in their arms.
‘Thought you’d copped it,’ Bob Harmon whispered cheerfully.
Pountney didn’t answer, but began to lead the way back through the undergrowth, past the vehicle compound and up to the edge of the Rommel-Haus. The sentries outside the front door were quickly and soundlessly dispatched by Bailey and Davidson; then Harmon, who spoke good German, knocked on the door and demanded to be let in. A German officer opened it. He stood at the entrance, silhouetted by a dim light glowing in the hall behind him. As he stood barring the door, asking what Harmon wanted, Pountney stepped forward and rammed a pistol in his ribs. Harmon warned the Hauptmann not to speak, but the German grabbed the muzzle of Pountney’s pistol, forced it away from his stomach and began shouting for help. Pountney kicked him in the knee and as the man’s hands dropped down he shot him in the chest. The Hauptmann slid to the floor, but behind him there was a commotion as other Germans jostled by the door, which led to the room on the right. Pountney lifted his weapon and fired a burst at them. One fell and the others scrambled back into the room and shut the door. Harmon stepped forward with two hand-grenades, opened the door, rolled in the grenades and shut it again.
The double explosion shook the house and the SBS men heard muffled screams. There was a pause, then another German officer, his uniform in tatters, staggered out of the door. Pountney, who had moved into the house, fired a short burst and the man rolled over and lay still. Davidson stepped past him, kicked the door wide open and loosed several equally short bursts. The room was so full of smoke that it was difficult to see across it, but Pountney noticed the outline of a man rising from one corner. He shouted a warning, but Davidson either ignored it or did not hear it. A single shot rang out and Davidson fell soundlessly to the floor.
Pountney threw himself sideways and slammed the door shut, then moved into the hall, followed by Ayton and Corporal Daly. They sprayed the area with fire before running for the flight of stone stairs on their right, which led to the upper floors. As they did so, a Hauptmann flourishing a Schmeisser came running down the stairs while another officer, armed with a Luger pistol, leant over the banisters shouting instructions.
Before Ayton could get a bead on the German with the sub-machine-gun, a burst from the weapon caught Daly and twisted him round, and the heavy 9mm bullets threw him against the wall. Daly slid to the ground and Ayton saw blood gush from his mouth. The German turned the muzzle towards Ayton, who fired at the same moment. The bullets whined over Ayton’s head. Then the Hauptmann’s knees buckled and the weapon clattered noisily down the stone stairs, followed closely by the man’s body.
The German with the Luger was still leaning over the balustrade, and now holding the pistol in both hands to steady his aim. He fired and Pountney felt the bullet pluck his arm as he swung his tommy-gun upwards and pressed the trigger. The Luger clattered on to the stairs as the man staggered forwards, slumped over the balustrade, then slowly toppled over the top, to hit the hall floor with a terrible, bone-breaking thump.
‘Come on!’ shouted Pountney.
If Rommel had been asleep he wouldn’t be now, but he had no way of escape. Pountney ran for the stairs, leapt over the dead German at the bottom of them and started ascending, two stairs at a time. He flung open the door of a room on the first floor from which were coming the strains of a Viennese waltz. The room, comfortably furnished with a rug and several sofas, was brightly lit, and in one corner a gramophone was playing the music he heard. Pountney saw the startled face of a German officer peering at him from behind one of the sofas. It certainly wasn’t Rommel. The SBS man pulled out the pin of a hand-grenade, rolled it in, shouted ‘Gute nacht’ and slammed the door.
Behind Pountney, Harmon fired a burst into the other first-floor room, and someone inside began cursing and shouting in German. The hand-grenade went off and the waltz turned to a screech before fading away.
By now Pountney was halfway up the next flight of stairs, with Ayton close on his heels. The top floor also had two doors. Pountney tried one, but it wouldn’t open. He stood back, and in one movement blasted off the lock, kicked open the door and flung himself into the room.
The other door was ajar. Ayton kicked it open and raked the area in front of him with fire. The room was full of stacked furniture, but otherwise unoccupied. Ayton cursed and turned. As he did so, he heard three separate bursts of automatic fire from the other room. He ran across and dived through the door, his weapon at the ready. He found himself in a kind of ante-room.
‘Here, Phil,’ Pountney called from an inner room. Ayton went through and found him ransacking an empty bedroom lit by a single standard lamp. To the right was a bathroom. Its door stood wide open and Ayton could see the line of gouges across the tiled wall where Pountney had sprayed the room with bullets.
‘No one here,’ said Pountney in disgust.
On a highly polished coffee-table stood, in a large onyx frame, a photograph of Rommel’s smiling wife and solemn, bespectacled son. Several silver-backed monogrammed hairbrushes were neat
ly lined up on the top of a dressing-table and a pair of gilded slippers stuck out from under the bed. The bed was narrow and covered with a grey blanket of the type familiar to all British service personnel. Perhaps they were British, Ayton thought.
‘Fuck all,’ Pountney cursed, wrenching open drawers in a fury as if expecting to find Rommel in one of them.
‘Come on,’ urged Ayton. ‘Let’s get out of here. You’re not going to find the Afrika Korps’ operational plans rolled up in his pyjamas.’
Smoke, mixed with the stench of gunpowder, drifted up the stairwell as they ran back down to the ground floor. It hung in the hall, thick and acrid. The dead Hauptmann proved to be only wounded and was groaning loudly. Daly had been taken outside, and Harmon had his tommy-gun levelled at the closed doors. He looked up questioningly; Pountney shook his head.
‘There’s still some of them in there,’ Harmon said, nodding at the nearest door. ‘I’ve laid charges in the wireless room. They’ll go off any moment.’
‘Let’s get the hell out of here, then,’ said Pountney. ‘How’s Daly?’
‘Dead,’ Harmon replied.
‘And Davidson?’
‘He’s dead, too.’
Pountney swore. Vendettas didn’t work in wartime. War was impersonal. It needed a cool head – and luck. Especially luck.
Minutes later they had laid Daly and Davidson out under the front wall of the house and covered their bodies with a gas cape. Raindrops began to spatter the cape as Pountney bent over the dead SBS men and ripped off their identity tags. As he did so the charges in the wireless room exploded, shaking the house to its foundations. It seemed a suitable farewell.
Robertson emerged from the darkness to report that, as Pountney had ordered, the telephone wires had been cut before Pountney had entered the Rommel-Haus and that two Germans – who had come running from a nearby bungalow when the shooting had started – had both been shot.
Pountney led the way back. He noticed that there were several lights on in the town now, and from the vehicle compound he heard the engine of one of the half-tracks cough into life.
They ran across the open ground well apart in case they came under fire. Opposite the bungalow from which they had started out an Italian three-ton truck was parked by the side of the road. Tommy was standing by it; he was in army uniform now and carried a Sten gun. He waved them over urgently.
Pountney glanced back and saw the Rommel-Haus surrounded by a halo of smoke and flame. Well, the SBS had at least left their calling card, he thought. But next time . . . The party piled into the back of the truck, tripping over jerrycans, some full of water, others full of fuel, and a Bren gun which had been set up on an anti-aircraft tripod.
‘We’re going to have to fight our way out,’ said Tommy calmly as he put the engine into gear. ‘Know how to use a Solothurn?’ he asked Pountney, who, with Ayton, had climbed into the front. Tommy pointed at a large, circular hole in the roof above Pountney’s head. The butt of a long-barrelled rifle was sticking down through it.
‘Fucking right I do,’ said Pountney.
All SBS men went through a course which taught them how to fire and maintain the enemy’s weapons. The Solothurn was the Italian Army’s Swiss-made anti-tank rifle. It fired a 20mm, armour-piercing bullet which was quite effective at close range against armoured cars and the like. It was certainly more lethal than the British equivalent, the Boys rifle, which fired a half-inch bullet that couldn’t penetrate tissue paper.
Pountney pulled himself to his feet as the truck lurched forward.
‘Hold tight!’ Tommy yelled and let in the clutch with a jerk. The Solothurn was secured to the truck by a simple bipod. Pountney swung the butt upwards with one hand, then squeezed himself through the hole until he could fit the butt securely into his shoulder. The rifle kicked like a mule, he knew, and he needed a broken collar-bone at this particular moment like a hole in the head.
He made sure that the magazine, which clipped on to the left-hand side of the breech, was secured, then cocked the weapon, felt the first round slide easily into the breech and squinted down the sights. Provided one of Rommel’s Mark III Panzers didn’t interrupt their progress, he felt confident that the Solothurn could deal with whatever vehicle appeared in their path.
‘Hold on!’ Tommy yelled as he accelerated and swung the truck around the first corner, its tyres screeching. Ahead of them a group of Germans with lanterns were running across the road. Ayton, his tommy-gun thrust out of the passenger window, caught a glimpse of one enemy soldier by the roadside working frantically to load a magazine on to a light machine-gun. The truck was past the machine-gunner before he could fire and it scattered the others like leaves in the wind. Bursts of tommy-gun fire from the back dropped two of them before the truck squealed round another corner and was gone. A cheer went up in the back.
‘Good driving,’ Ayton yelled at Tommy.
Tommy flashed him a grin. ‘I won at Brooklands in ‘37,’ he yelled back. ‘Keep a look out on your side. We’re not out of trouble yet.’
Tommy was right.
From his vantage point it was Pountney who saw the tank first, just a split second before Tommy. He swore under his breath. He had thought it was one of the open half-tracks that had started in the vehicle compound. But ahead of them, emerging cautiously from a side-street, was the unmistakable outline of the square-sided CV3.
The tank’s two machine-guns were still trained fore and aft, so its crew had not yet seen the truck. Once they did, all they would have to do was stop in the middle of the street and there would be no way past them.
Pountney and Tommy acted simultaneously, for as Pountney shouted to Tommy to stop, the driver was already bringing the truck to a juddering halt by the side of the road.
The tank was moving very slowly; only the front half was visible. Pountney saw the turret beginning to swivel, first left, then right, as the crew peered through the slits.
Pountney trained the Solothurn on the tank. He could try his luck by attempting to put a shell through one of the slits; but for once he ignored his gambler’s instincts. If he missed, there wouldn’t be a second chance. It was better to wait for the tank to move forward enough and so expose its engine, housed just behind the turret.
He could hear the squeal and clank of its tracks as the CV3 crawled forward. The turret began to swing purposefully towards the truck and Pountney knew then that the tank crew had seen the vehicle.
‘For Christ’s sake, fire!’ Tommy roared up at him.
‘He knows what he’s fucking doing,’ Ayton yelled at Tommy.
Inch by inch the tank moved forward and inch by inch the muzzles of its machine-guns trained round towards the truck. Calmly and deliberately, Pountney pumped three 20mm shells into it in quick succession, just below the armoured skirt which protected the engine.
The tank stopped and smoke started cascading out of the engine, but the turret, with its two machine-guns, continued to swivel. Pountney aimed carefully, and squeezed the Solothurn’s trigger. There was a loud crack and a whine, and a spark of metal hitting metal, as the bullet ricocheted off the side of the turret. He fired once more, and again there was a crack and a whine and a spark.
Ayton watched in helpless fascination. Tommy revved the truck and put it into reverse, but Pountney shouted to him to keep it still. He saw now that the slit in the front of the turret was larger than the ones at the sides. Yet he had to fire before the machine-guns did. The black oblong of the slit seemed absurdly small, but the range was very short, no more than a hundred yards. He squeezed the trigger again and felt the butt thud into his shoulder.
This time there was no ricochet or spark, and the turret jerked and stopped. Pountney knew the mayhem an armour-piercing bullet caused inside such a small space. He worked the Solothurn’s breech mechanism and fired again, and the tank slewed sideways as if the driver had fallen on the controls.
‘Let’s go!’ cried Tommy, slamming his foot on the accelerator. The truck bou
nced forward and skidded round the front of the tank. Ayton gave it a burst of fire as a farewell. ‘Save your ammo,’ Tommy yelled.
Suddenly they were clear of the town. The unmetalled road became a rutted, sandy track over which the truck bounced and heaved. To their left the sky was already salmon pink against the rain clouds.
Soon after sunrise Tommy took the truck off the track into a wadi, where they camouflaged it with desert netting. They brewed tea and ate cold rations, then took it in turns to stand guard while the rest slept under the truck or beneath nearby scrub.
During the morning the clouds cleared away and the sun blazed down, bringing with it a crawling, maddening mass of flies and other insects. There was no escaping them. They crawled everywhere: on the men’s faces, up their nostrils, across their eyelids.
By midday the heat was intense, making it difficult to touch anything, move or even breathe. In mid-afternoon they heard the sound of an aero engine and out of the shimmering haze a biplane with Italian markings appeared, skimming low across the desert. It droned around in circles for a few minutes before disappearing westwards.
‘The hunt’s on,’ said Pountney, watching it go with a hand shading his eyes.
Tommy snorted. ‘Needle in a haystack. Know how big the Libyan desert is?’
Pountney shook his head.
‘As large as India,’ Tommy said, then rolled over and went back to sleep.
The biplane was the only sign that the SBS were being pursued. When darkness came they continued their journey southwards towards the oasis. With the coming of night the temperature plummeted and the desert cold seeped into them. At first they drove without lights at a snail’s pace, but after some hours Tommy turned on the headlights and increased his speed. When dawn came he did not stop.
They reached the oasis that evening just as the blistering red sun was dipping below the desert rim. There they found a circle of tatty palm trees, a brackish pool of water, a small Arab encampment full of tethered camels and half a dozen heavily armed open trucks around which were clustered a group of men in assorted khaki clothing. Several were bareheaded and had driving goggles pushed up on to their foreheads; others wore Arab head-dress; many were bearded.
