Killing Rommel (16 page)

I wave Oliphant and Grainger over. “Get ready to move. Look official, as though we just got orders. We'll go in three minutes.”

Grainger stops. “Where are we going?”

“I haven't a clue.”

I'm turning towards Punch to repeat these instructions, when an Afrika Korps NCO in a Kübelwagen jeep rolls up to the 88 crew two hundred yards to our east and orders them to pack their kit and get ready to move. He reaches us next, shouting the same command. All along the line, gun limbers are being readied and engines are kicking over.

“It's about mucking time,” says Oliphant.

The whole position is being dismantled and pulled back.

“Balls and glory,” says Punch. “The Huns ain't as dumb as I thought.”

Twenty minutes later, our trucks are grinding north alongside a dust-billowing column of 88s towed by armoured half-tracks. Bucking over a ridge, Punch lifts a buttock and looses a spectacular trumpet.

“Damn!” he says. “I'm even fartin' like a Kraut.”

17

THREE HOURS PASS. The sun blazes. We have stripped to the waist except for Wehrmacht caps and goggles. Storms of alkali roil on a blistering west wind. The German column has halted and scattered three times, all false alarms, once when a front of tanks, which turned out to be their own, appeared on a rise to the east; once when British scout planes passed, high overhead; a third time for no reason at all. It's reassuring to see that the foe are not supermen but fuddled troopers muddling along, as deaf and blind as we are.

“Jump on the blower?” Grainger asks amid the dust of the second halt. He means do we dare radio our position and report what we've seen. I've been chewing this over since the first scatter. Is the information worth more to Eighth Army than our mission? I decide it isn't. We've seen our own planes overhead. What report can we make that the aircrew haven't radioed in already? Then there's Jake and Nick and Major Mayne. To break wireless silence risks them and the whole operation, not to mention ourselves.

On the other hand, we may have stumbled on to something. The operation's objective is to penetrate enemy lines. We've certainly done that. I decide that our aim is to stay cool and keep our eyes open. After the third scatter, we make off to the flank, away from the heaviest concentration of vehicles. No one notices. We're paralleling the southernmost column, a fleet of ammunition lorries, miles from our original post. My watch reads ten o'clock, just as the midday haze begins fogging all vision, when we cross a spur of some nameless desert highway and enter a broad valley cut by numerous defiles and wadis. Axis scout cars and bikes can be glimpsed ahead. The supply vehicles are being funnelled into single-file columns by military police with death's-head insignia on chains round their necks. Taped lanes lead the way through a minefield. The provosts wave us through too. A vast marshalling area spreads before us. It must hold a division.

Punch drives. I've taken the commander's slot, so I can perch on the rail and take in as much as possible. I've changed my mind about signalling HQ. This massing of enemy armour is too important. Oliphant stands at my shoulder, on the Vickers, industriously de-gritting its receiver with a paintbrush. I'm fumbling with the map in the wind when Grainger on the wireless truck shoots me a whistle.

He points west. A hundred-foot escarpment parallels our route. At its brink sits an enormous camouflage-painted vehicle, towering over several staff and scout cars parked adjacent to it. The vehicle is scrim-netted and dug in for concealment. But it's so huge you can't miss it. A forest of aerials rises several hundred feet away, no doubt planted at that distance so as not to appear like a headquarters concentration. The hair stands up on my neck.

“Rommel?” I call to Grainger.

“If it ain't, it's his bloody uncle.”

I tell Punch to slow down but keep moving. Our two-truck convoy continues traversing, about a mile out, on a line parallel to the scarp and a hundred feet below it. We're in a broad, sandy valley, across which spread scores of infantry, mortar and anti-tank positions; in fact, we're on the trace used by supply lorries to service them. On top of the scarp, I count a dozen soft-skinned vehicles, but no tanks.

“There,” calls Oliphant, indicating the base of the slope. Six or seven Mark IIIs squat in line abreast. Hatches are open; crews lounge about, looking to their housekeeping. Bivvy flaps have been rigged for shade. I see one fellow shaving over a canvas basin. We're passing a thousand yards in front of them. No one pays any notice. The place looks like a happy village, with denizens in no hurry crossing hither and thither.

Through glasses I peer at the oversize vehicle. It is definitely a Dorchester, the type of captured British ACV that Rommel calls a Mammoth. Should I go on the air? I've forgotten all about alerting HQ. What counts now is Jake, Nick, and Major Mayne. They have to know what we've run into.

“Punch, I'm putting up the fishpole.”

He can't hear with the engine noise. I go ahead. I cross to the cradle on the rear of the truckbed and loose the six-foot antenna for the “A” set, the short-range wireless. It springs skyward with a great whoomp-whoomp. I'm thinking: If the caravan on top of the scarp is indeed Rommel's Mammoth, Rommel himself will almost certainly not be in it. He'll be in a staff car, roaming the front somewhere. I would gain nothing by going on air. To do so could queer the whole mission if the Germans intercept.

On the other hand, Rommel could be here. This could be it. To stumble on to such luck and do nothing…

The “A” set sits under a steel shell behind the driver's seat in my patrol commander's truck. Oliphant has already dug out the headset and chest mike. He switches the radio on. I take the gear and kneel beside the set, balancing myself between a spare wheel and a stack of ammunition cases. I lift the backing plate on the radio and reach my hand in to feel the vacuum tubes; when they're warm, the set will be ready. I pull the phones over my peaked cap. What I'm about to do is potentially the most momentous act of my life.

Forget codes and protocol. I'm going up in the clear.

“Hello Jake, Chap calling. Objective in sight. I say again: I'm looking at what we came for. Off to you.”

The headset fills with static. Nothing. I realise I have not thought beyond the sending of this signal. I have no clue what to do next except continue to report. I repeat:

“Hello, Jake and Nick, Chap calling. Objective in sight. Out.”

No answer. I'm half-relieved. How many more times can I transmit before some German intercept truck picks us up? I'm just depressing the mike button when Punch raps me hard. Ahead on the sand road, a Fiat 3-tonner is ploughing straight at us, with more trucks behind.

“Smile and wave.”

The Italians pass, singing. Ammo vehicles. Two more roll by in a storm of alkali. My headphones come alive:

“Hello, Chap, Jake answering. I see you. Shut up and get in a hole. I say again: Shut down and find a hole. Off to you.”

The last Fiat buffets past, swamping our cab in dust. I pull the headset off and turn to Punch and Oliphant. “Jake's here.”

They react as electrified as I.

“Keep going.” I sign to Grainger on the wireless truck to follow.

I'm expecting the whole camp to erupt into action. Surely our signals have been overheard; in seconds we will come under fire. But nothing happens. We continue rumbling across the flat. Oliphant scribbles

JAKE

on a pad and holds it up for Grainger, Marks and Durrance in the wireless truck. They sign back that they understand. My skull is revving. Have I done the right thing? Where's Jake? What's the form? The track our trucks are on leads past some kind of mobile repair shop. A safe spot. No infantry. Punch sees it and puts us on a beeline.

We buck past a pair of parked transporters. Their drivers smoke in the shade beside the first cab. I swing my glasses back towards the scarp. Tank crews are packing up. Men clamber up over the kit rails of their vehicles; plumes of diesel smoke belch from exhausts.

Has my signal been intercepted? Is this the cause of the pack-up? It can't be. No massed formation can react that fast. What should we do? If Jake is here, Nick must be too, and Mayne's SAS. Have they signalled the RAF? Will Mayne and Jake attack on their own?

All round us, enemy outfits are loading up, engines cranking. The transporter drivers peer in our direction. Not suspiciously; more like they're confused by the mobilisation and want to check with us, their comrades, to see if we know what's going on. One of them starts towards us on foot. I turn to Oliphant on the Vickers guns.

“I see him,” he says.

The German keeps coming. Sixty yards out.

“Punch, get us rolling.” I sign to Grainger to do the same. At my shoulder, Oliphant pulls both cocking levers. The enemy driver keeps approaching.

“Chap,” says Oliphant, “let me take him now.”

“No.”

The wireless truck fires up. Punch stalls. “Grainger, get moving!” The driver sees our No. 2 start up; he lengthens stride to head it off. Punch wrestles with the choke. I can smell the carb flood. The German is within fifty feet now. He stops.

“He's on to us,” says Oliphant.

The driver squints hard in our direction.

Suddenly he turns and bolts. I see the back of his shirt and the soles of his boots. At that moment, the earth erupts.

A blizzard of destruction rolls directly over the man. For an instant I think it's Oliphant on the Vickers. Then the shock wave hits. Shadows streak above us; a blast like a bomb nearly bowls me out of the truck.

Two RAF fighter planes boom overhead at two hundred miles an hour, strafing everything in their path. Cannon fire rips the sand. Two stripes fifty feet wide roar forward at impossible speed.

“Jesus Christ!” cries Punch.

The Hurricanes thunder away. The concussion of their engines deafens us. We have not even heard them coming.

Out on the sand the transporter driver, who has been knocked prone, scrambles to his feet and sprints for all he's worth. Somehow the cannon fire has missed him. As I turn to check on myself and my men, two more Hurricanes drop out of nowhere and scream down the axis of the valley, machine-gunning the enemy tanks and trucks at the base of the ridge. Where the planes' fire strikes, the earth explodes in a storm of rock and dust. The fighters blast over the scarp at the height of a clothes line.

Punch is cursing our stalled engine. The second pair of Hurricanes has boomed overhead so fast the eye can't catch up with them. In the killing zone, German trucks and transports are shredding like toys in a gale. The ground still shakes beneath us.

Impulse makes me look at my wristwatch. To this day I can see that face, a Wittnauer Elysian with squarish numerals and radium arms that I bought on the Rue Fouad el Awal in Cairo after bartering my grandfather's Breitling for fuel on the retreat to El Alamein. In an instant I understand everything.

“This is it!”

The attack. It's happening now. This is why Jake has ordered us to find a hole and get in it.

The planes scream over the scarp and roar skyward into a steep, banking climb. It takes moments before our skulls stop ringing, so overwhelmed are we by the suddenness of the aircraft's appearance and by the impact of their speed and power. In moments the second pair of Hurricanes have climbed a thousand feet and are banking into the turn that will bring them back again over the target. We can see the trails of their exhaust hanging in the air. On the summit of the scarp a surprisingly small number of enemy vehicles are blazing. Men are racing in all directions.

We're moving too. Punch has got our truck started. I'm peering through glasses at the Mammoth. Nothing has touched it. It hasn't moved. I can see armed men rallying to it and others, without weapons, exiting its side and rear doors. They do so in neither panic nor urgency but looking a bit befuddled, as if they thought something had happened but weren't sure exactly what it was.

“Go for the target!”

We're picking up speed now, straight down the axis of the valley. I have climbed back into the truckbed and am wrestling the tarpaulin off the Browning. Oliphant is already blazing away with the Vickers. The twin barrels fire so fast, nine hundred and fifty rounds per minute, that they burn through a ninety-six-round drum in seconds, howling with a piercing, blood-freezing squeal. The Mammoth perches a thousand yards away and a hundred feet up the scarp. We're crossing directly in front of it. Dead ahead of us squats the repair bay. Fitters are streaming out into daylight. Some dash towards slit trenches, others congregate nonchalantly as if they're about to ask their comrades for a smoke. As we accelerate to go round the repair tent, a 10-tonner pulls out broadside, inadvertently blocking our route. Oliphant swivels the Vickers. The truck lights up with hits. I have never seen a motor vehicle get out of the way so fast.

We're past the repair shops now. I can feel Punch engage third gear. The truck bucks like a wild beast. We still haven't seen Jake, Nick or Major Mayne. The Germans have seen us though. Along both sides of the track, enemy troopers dash to positions. Oliphant shreds one fellow before a wall of sandbags. I'm shouting to him to put his fire on the Mammoth. I look behind. A truck chases us. I'm swinging the Browning round to engage it, when I realise it's Collie.

He's standing on the bed of Guns, hanging on to the mount of the 20mm Breda gun and pointing in frustration at the summit of the scarp. The heavy Breda faces rearward and can't be rotated forward past 90 degrees. Standage is braced beside Collie, draped in belts of ammunition. Midge is driving; Hornsby mans the fore-mounted Browning. I can't see the jeep with Conyngham and Holden anywhere. Collie's truck speeds ahead, apparently seeking some spot where it can pull up with its rear end facing the summit and cut loose for at least a few moments. We barrel past two Afrika Korps infantrymen carrying spades, no doubt returning from heeding nature's call. They gape like tourists. Oliphant holds his fire, though they're sitting ducks.

Collie's truck turns off the track, angling towards the scarp. We veer with him. Adrenalin floods through me. I look in Oliphant's eyes and see the same. He's changing drums; both barrels of his Vickers pour smoke as if they were on fire. We bounce off the main trace at forty miles an hour.

On the summit of the scarp, two storms of dust are racing towards the Mammoth. Tracer fire streaks from both. This can only be Jake and Nick or Mayne's SAS. It's too far to see and impossible to use field glasses at this jarring, molar-rattling clip, but the vehicles, whoever they are, are racing along the crest of the scarp, throwing up great plumes of dust and chalk. Down on the flat, our column of three produces its own cyclone. Impossible as it sounds, no one has fired at us. We're moving so fast we're outrunning the alarm.

Something makes me look up. What I see stops my heart. Two Hurricanes are diving straight at us. I can see their propellers like giant windmills and the flashes of the cannons on the leading edges of their wings. They're firing at us. The dust we're raising must have drawn the pilots' eyes. This realisation happens in a fraction of a second. Then the rounds strike. I have never heard anything, including solid shot from Mark IV Panzers, to match the violence of those cannon shells as they hit and explode in front, on both sides and behind us. The sound is like the end of the world. The Hurricanes roar overhead so low that their wingtips seem to scrape the sand.