by John Harris
He lowered the loud-hailer and waited. There was no sound and no movement from the other side of the gate.
‘I’m not deluding myself that they’ve left,’ he commented. ‘They’re there all right. What’s more, while we can’t see them, I dare bet they can see us. I’ll give ’em another go.’
‘This is the second time of asking,’ he said. ‘We have no wish for trouble and don’t wish to put anybody’s lives in jeopardy. This is private property but we wish to make a search. Open the gate.’
Again there was silence and in the still, humid heat that was held close to the earth by the low clouds it seemed menacing. The palm fronds hung listlessly and the British sergeant’s shirt was black with sweat. Cazalet still contrived to look cool.
‘Last time of asking,’ he said.
Lifting the loud-hailer, he tried again. ‘I shall not ask again,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you five minutes to open the gate, then we shall pull it down.’
He looked at his watch and waited. Inspector Yorke offered him a cigarette which he smoked quietly. He seemed to have the gift of remaining perfectly still, which was probably why he stayed cool when the others showed the effects of the heat.
After a while he nodded to Lieutenant Hubbard. ‘All right, Nick,’ he said. ‘Have it down.’
Hubbard turned to where an African sergeant was standing. ‘Have it down, Sargy,’ he said.
The sergeant and half a dozen men approached and a pair of wire cutters appeared. As the sergeant lifted the cutters, however, they heard a voice give an order from the huts half-hidden beyond the diggers and bulldozers. The sergeant jumped as bullets kicked up the dust by his feet, and one of his men spun round and fell to his knees. Grabbed by his arms, he was dragged into the trees and they all looked at Cazalet for orders what to do next.
‘Damn,’ Yorke said. ‘I didn’t want to start a bloody battle here.’
Lieutenant Hubbard eyed the open expanse of earth in front of the huts. The solitary eucalyptus tree threw a long pale shadow in the watery sun.
‘There’s not much cover,’ he pointed out.
Cazalet agreed. ‘This ought to be a combined services operation,’ he said to Yorke. ‘All the rage just now. Suppose those chaps at Makinkundi and Mamo and in the river Bic all started getting aggressive and pushing forward? The old Huns in there would find they’d got their hands a touch full. And that,’ he concluded, ‘might enable us to get among the bastards without having too many of our chaps hurt. Let’s put it to Molyneux.’
As the sound of the firing reached the river Bic, Feverel looked up.
‘That’s a machine gun,’ he said. ‘It seems to be developing into a battle.’
Looking up at the trees on the land above them, the padre hoped it wouldn’t mean more funerals. If it weren’t flying crew then there was invariably somebody whose constitution or mental attitudes couldn’t support the heat and the conditions, and funerals always seemed out of place in this forgotten corner of Africa.
Fox, who had had himself put ashore by the punt with a pair of binoculars, was just returning with the identity of the ship anchored offshore.
‘Maréchal Grouchy,’ he said. ‘Registered at Conakry. She’s lying almost stern-on and I could read the name.’
As he climbed aboard the pinnace, Feverel and Kneller took over the punt and chugged slowly up the winding creek.
It was quite narrow at the entrance, with other narrower creeks leading off into the mangroves. Two crocodiles watched them, their heads turning slowly as the boat pushed further into the narrow cleft in the land. The water was black with mud and stank of decaying vegetation, but as they turned a corner, the river began to open out. Turning into the bank and cutting the engine, they cautiously began to pole themselves forward. The heat among the overhanging foliage had a choking quality.
From behind a projecting spit of land, they could see two native fishing boats moored against the bank with, just behind them, the Dutchmen’s big launch. In the basin alongside the landing stage was the supply scow, secured with the little outboard-powered dinghy beneath the piles of the boathouse.
Feverel blinked the sweat from his eyes, then he took off his pith helmet and mopped at his face with the rag he wore round his neck.
‘Last time we were here,’ he reminded Kneller nostalgically, ‘we were given iced beer.’
They had just returned and were scrambling aboard the pinnace when Molyneux came through on the radio.
‘They want us to do something active,’ the padre explained.
They looked at the bewildered white-kneed men clutching their rifles on the stern of the pinnace.
‘With that lot?’ Fox said.
‘There are three dozen rifles.’
‘Fat lot of good they’d be against a machine gun, sir.’
Feverel was frowning. ‘I reckon it’s less a case of us going in,’ he said, ‘than of them coming out.’ He explained what he meant. ‘There were boats moored up the creek and that seems to indicate what the Maréchal Grouchy’s doing out there. I bet she’s been sent down to pick them up when they’ve finished. Once aboard that thing, they could be in French waters in an hour or two.’
The padre looked puzzled.
‘We could stop ’em, though, sir,’ Feverel went on cheerfully. ‘If they’re going to use that launch we saw up there, we have one splendid weapon. We’ve got a wire hawser in the hold that we used to tow a target down to Lungi. Attached to the winch wire and a set of strops we’ve got down there, it’d stretch across the creek.’
The padre was uncertain. ‘They asked for something positive,’ he said doubtfully. ‘They want us to put our chaps ashore.’
‘Then let’s do both, sir.’
The narrowest part of the river was near one of the bends and the pinnace was moved up and, out of sight from the boathouse, nosed into the bank. As he appeared from the wheelhouse, Fox looked round at the deck crowded with bewildered landlubbers wondering what the hell was going on. He was an indolent man who always felt harassed when the mooring party started getting ideas, and he took it out on his passengers.
‘Get these stupid sods below,’ he snorted. ‘They’re in the way!’
Sweating profusely and tripping over their rifles, the airmen were pushed into the forecastle, the radio cabin, anywhere there was room, and told to stay out of the way. It was stifling below and there was a chorus of dismay. Fox glared at them. ‘If you don’t shut up,’ he snarled, ‘I’ll close the bloody door and lock it! Then it’ll be really hot!’
As the pinnace moored fore and aft, the punt was worked alongside and wire strops and shackles were dragged from the hold with the wire towing hawser and lowered into it. Starting up the engine, Kneller and Feverel chugged across the river, and, dragging the strops ashore after them, shackled one of them round the bole of a large palm tree. Trudging back to the pinnace, they attached a heavy rope to the end of the winch hawser, dropped it into the punt and climbed down after it.
‘What’s going on now?’ one of the airmen asked, his head above the hatch coaming.
‘We’re making a mousetrap,’ Feverel explained.
One or two men offered to help but Feverel pushed them away with a protest that they’d get their fingers caught, and settled for two of the time-expireds.
The punt low in the water with four men on board, they headed back across the river, paying out the rope as they went. Reaching the shore, they moored the punt and began to haul in the rope. The winch wire, attached to the other end with the winch in neutral, began to follow it. By this time they were all plastered with mud.
‘This is a bloody mucky job,’ one of the two helpers complained.
‘The mooring party’s never been noted as the glass of fashion,’ Kneller agreed cheerfully. ‘We’ll make you honorary members.’
Eventually the end of the winch wire appeared from the water and they dragged it across the mud and shackled it to the towing hawser and the strops, and attached them to the wire round the palm tree.
Then, standing on the mud, Feverel took a look round him and began to make circles above his head with his hand.
With Kneller up to his knees in the water watching it, the wire was hauled taut and the brake applied.
By this time Cazalet was beginning to grow annoyed. What he had expected to be a neat little operation was turning into a major battle.
‘We’ll have to rush the place,’ Yorke said.
‘Not so easy as you’d think,’ Hubbard pointed out. ‘As usual the bush’s been cleared because of mosquitoes and that gives them a bloody good field of fire. There’s no cover at all except one tree fifty yards from anywhere. You can’t approach from any side without being spotted, and I’m not going to have my chaps all knocked off for a lot of bloody Huns who are well and truly bottled up.’ He turned to Lieutenant Harder, his second-in-command. ‘Let’s have the Bren set up, Frank, and give them a burst or two to show we mean business.’
The Bren was brought up between the trees and gave the huts a couple of long bursts. The firing started the birds shrieking and set the monkeys jumping and screaming in the trees. There was no sign of life from the buildings beyond the gate and Cazalet frowned.
The African soldiers, joined now by the party that had pushed up-river from Mamo, were dispersed among the trees and the firing started again. They could see bullets chipping splinters off the wooden huts and hear them whining into the air from the parked diggers. Then, as one of the African lance-corporals, too enthusiastic for his own good and seeing an opportunity to get nearer, led three of his men between the trees, a burst of fire from the buildings brought down two of the men at once. The other two dived for shelter as the lashing bullets cut down twigs and leaves and set the whole population of the forest dancing with rage.
Standing near the gate, Hubbard received the news with an angry frown.
‘Corporal Luke,’ Harder reported. ‘Hit in the head. Private Malaki in the hip. Malaki’s all right. I’m not so sure about Luke.’
‘Blast,’ Hubbard said. He’d grown surprisingly fond of his black soldiers and, knowing they trusted him, he didn’t like them getting hurt. ‘That means we’ve got to do the thing properly now. The buggers can’t go shooting at the King’s men.’
Heidegger was growing worried. He was well aware, even before Lorenz had returned from his reconnaissance towards Makinkundi, that they were surrounded and that an attempt to secure the lighter in the Bunce and shoot up the aircraft was futile. They’d probably not even reach the water’s edge. And any moment now the RAF would start dropping bombs. It seemed to be time to check on their escape route because he had no wish to spend the rest of the war in a British prison camp.
The mine buildings had been built close together so that moving between them in the rainy season wasn’t too hazardous. Under cover of the strategically parked diggers, it wasn’t difficult to slip from one to the other despite the firing, and Heidegger moved through them, past the men standing behind doors clutching their weapons, his eyes flickering over the open space in front.
‘It’s up to us,’ he encouraged. ‘We mustn’t let the Fatherland down.’
Nobody answered him and he realized that the old out-of-date cult of the Fatherland had given way to the new cult of the Führer.
The telegraphist had set up the radio in one of the central buildings which had been arranged as a reading room. It was a bare whitewashed place with only African masks and spears as decorations. There were a few brightly coloured mats on the floor and several leather-covered armchairs which in the dry season would be covered with dust but now, with the rains, showed a grey film of mould over their polished surface.
‘Try to contact the Maréchal Grouchy again,’ Heidegger said. ‘We may have to leave tonight.’
As the operator bent over his set, Heidegger sent for the mine manager to find out from the Dutchmen whether their boats were fuelled. The man he sent reappeared in a hurry.
‘They’ve gone, Herr Kapitänleutnant!’ he said. ‘They unscrewed the window frame and escaped.’
Heidegger frowned and, picking up a pistol, moved through the huts towards the Bic. The last hut had been built over the river to form a boathouse and the room above had been turned into a games room. There was a table-tennis table and a radio and, as he walked towards the window, his feet echoed hollowly on the boards. The place smelled of the damp which came through the floorboards from the river beneath. A man stationed by the window turned.
‘Take care, Herr Kapitänleutnant,’ he warned. ‘The English might be trying to get in through the back door.’
From alongside him, Heidegger studied the Dutchmen’s boats below. Surely, he told himself, they would never leave them with empty fuel tanks. A boat with empty tanks was as good as no boat at all but it was still just possible the Dutchmen themselves might try to use them for their own getaway.
‘It’s your duty to stop anyone taking those boats,’ he pointed out.
The man nodded and Heidegger edged forward warily for another look.
The padre had finally got his party ashore. It had been a lengthy business and he had begun to realize that, despite the purple and white ribbon that graced his best tunic, it was harder to run a battle than he’d ever thought. His ideas were out of date and it was largely thanks to Corporal Fox, Feverel and Kneller that they’d been able to achieve anything at all.
Even putting the ham-fisted newcomers on to the mud had been a difficult business because, with Kneller at the tiller, the punt would carry no more than three at a time and had to go backwards and forwards, its passengers eyeing the three inches of freeboard like rabbits eyeing a snake. As the group gathered onshore, already well plastered with mud, they began to work their way forward over the flats to the trees with the instructions to try a few pot-shots at anything they could see. The new arrivals clearly didn’t like this part of the operation but the padre got them spread out and told them to work their way nearer and fire when they got the opportunity.
Untrained for this sort of thing, however, they clung together, watching the padre nervously and it occurred to him that it wasn’t all that different from Ypres in the winter of 1917–18. The only change was the smell, and he remembered how he had felt the first time he had heard firing.
As he turned, he saw the end of the boathouse in front of him, the water sparkling on the underside. For a moment he stood still, wondering what to do, then he saw a man standing in the shadows by the window and wondered if he could hit him.
It didn’t worry the padre that he held a rifle. When the war had broken out, among other things he had considered forgetting his cloth and joining an active regiment again, and had reached France in 1940 just in time to take part in the evacuation of Dunkirk. Arriving to comfort the wounded and dying, he had ended firing a Bren gun as the Messerschmitts came over. It had cost him not one minute of repentance. To Daniel Morgan, the Nazis deserved none of the sympathy that he had in abundance for other men. Wounded, he would have done everything in his power for them. Clutching a weapon, they were a threat to the bewildered youngsters with him and he knew he was a good shot with a rifle.
Remembering the words of an American chaplain at Pearl Harbor – ‘Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition’ – without hesitation he lifted the weapon and fired.
four
By the time Lorenz returned from his sortie to Makinkundi, it was afternoon. Like Heidegger, he was well aware by now that they were surrounded and that the British, assuming that escape was impossible, were in no hurry. Nevertheless, he decided, someone would eventually think of bombs and the wooden-huts at Yima didn’t seem to offer much in the way of protection from high explosive.
As he struggled back through the undergrowth, he heard a shot from the direction of the Bic, then a wild fusillade. It was difficult to tell where it came from and he assumed that the British were making another attempt on the mine. The need for care slowed him and the heat was stifling. When he reached the safety of the mine buildings he could see no
sign of Heidegger and one of the men gestured with his head. Heidegger was in the reading room, stretched out on a settee where the medical orderly was trying to pad a wound in his shoulder.
‘What happened?’ Lorenz asked.
‘It’s not too bad,’ the medical orderly said. ‘He was hit from the river Bic.’
Heidegger looked pale and shaken but he was still busy with the defence of the mine.
‘What did you see?’ he demanded.
‘Makinkundi’s swarming with troops,’ Lorenz said. ‘We’ll not get out that way.’
Heidegger frowned. ‘Then we must try to keep them occupied here in the best way we can in the hope that the U-boats can handle the convoys.’ He had changed his mind with his wound and had accepted that escaping via the Bic was going to be more difficult than he had expected. ‘We shall have to wait until dark before we can move out, and in the meantime we have to assume that the Dutchmen are probably giving all the details of our defences to the English.’
Lorenz frowned. ‘Which Dutchmen? I locked them in the storeshed.’
‘You obviously didn’t lock them carefully enough,’ Heidegger said coldly. ‘They removed the window and escaped.’
Lorenz scowled. ‘We should have got rid of them in the beginning,’ he snapped. ‘We should have shot them.’
Heidegger ignored him. He was preoccupied with the defence of the mine and Lorenz turned to the radio operator. ‘Are we in touch with the Maréchal Grouchy?’ he asked.
‘She’s waiting off the coast, Herr Leutnant.’
‘Warn them to stand by.’
Magda Fallada was sitting in the office hidden from the firing by the bulk of a Euclid. Lorenz picked up one of the tommy guns. An idea was forming in his mind. He could see no future in Heidegger’s forlorn hope and the chances of holding on until dark seemed slim. With the resources at their disposal, he couldn’t imagine that the British would be prepared to sit on their backsides and wait for surrender. And – once more the thought of bombs came to his mind – they had aeroplanes.
