A Good Clean Fight (31 page)

A few seconds later a man in the next room said, “No sir, don't mean maybe.” He came and stood in the doorway. It was Henry Lester. “Don't explain,” he said. “I saw it all.”

Lampard put on his trousers. “Why should I explain anything?” he asked.

“I'm a newspaperman. This looks like news.”

“Excuse me.” Lampard went past him and searched the rest of the flat. The outside door was open; he closed it. When he came back, Lester was testing the major's breath with a small silver mirror from Mrs. d'Armytage's dressing table. “No soap,” Lester said. “They do this all the time in the movies and it never makes a damn bit of difference. Same here. There's nothing stiffer than a stiff, is there?”

Lampard put his shirt on. “You were at the Black Cat Club,” he said.

“I followed you here. You're SAS, aren't you? And those guys in the white berets were phonies . Am I right?”

“The brigade abandoned the white beret some time ago. Too conspicuous.” Lampard found his shoes and socks. “Word got around Cairo that wearing a white beret and SAS shoulder badges was a quick way to a free drink. Imitation warriors appeared on the scene. We discourage imitations.” Using his foot he nudged the major's limbs straight. “You appreciate I had no choice whatsoever.”

“This place Kufra,” Lester said. “That's the big oasis, right? I guess you guys use it a lot.”

“I have nothing to say about Kufra.”

“No, sure, I understand. You said it all, back there at the
club.” Lester glanced toward the bathroom. “She okay?”

“Probably taking a bath. Don't disturb her. I've got to get this thing out of here.” They were standing by the body, the American at its head, the Englishman at its feet. “Any suggestions?” Lampard asked.

“What d'you usually do?”

“Dig a hole in the sand.”

“Back in Chicago they dig a hole in the lake.”

They looked like a pair of removal men, patiently working out how to get a big sofa through a small door.

“I don't suppose anyone saw him arrive,” Lampard said.

“Only me.” They looked at each other. “Sure, you could kill me too,” Lester said, “but that would only double your problem. Why don't you just airmail this one?”

“Airmail?”

Lester got a grip of the major's armpits. “Take his feet,” he said.

They carried the dead major through to the rear balcony. It overlooked a garden, six flights down. “Plenty of back-swing,” Lester said. “On the count of three.” The body went sailing into the night. They waited, and heard a brief, crunching thud. “It's all roses and grass down there,” Lester said. “Chances are he broke his neck.”

The cocktail shaker held the makings of one last sidecar. Lampard split it between two glasses, and they drank. He looked about the flat. “Hard to believe,” he said.

“Guy was drunk. Leaned too far. Lost his balance.”

“Why did you follow me?”

“I'm interested in Kufra. Seems to me there's a helluva story in what you're doing.”

Lampard thought about it. “Pity,” he said. “You've been very helpful. Awfully sorry, old chap, but that's the way it has to be. Now: can you find yourself a taxi?”

“Why don't we share one?”

“I feel I ought to stay here a little longer. One doesn't like to leave a job half-done, does one?”

“One certainly doesn't,” Lester said, “and I guess two don't like it twice as much.”

When Lester had gone, Lampard tapped on the bathroom door. “Bedtime,” he said. Mrs. d'Armytage came out wearing a red silk nightdress that clung to her like a frightened child. “Good God, you've got your clothes on
again
,” she said.

*   *   *

Major Jakowski's column kept radio silence, but his signals unit listened out at regular times for messages. He was hoping that Luftwaffe Intelligence would discover the location of the landing-ground used by the ground-strafing Tomahawks. That would be perfect—a long dash; a dawn assault; blazing aircraft and pillars of smoke; then a swift return to the patrol area, poised for more action.

What everyone needed was action. They were getting bored with making long sweeps across the serir, which was so flat and empty that no matter how far you drove you always ended up feeling you were back where you'd started. Action would be the test and the reward. It was time for some blood to justify all this sweat.

And then, in the middle of the afternoon, when they had paused to rest and refuel, the radio truck picked up a signal from Benghazi. It was the message Jakowski had not expected. It said that radio-traffic intercepts by Luftwaffe Intelligence indicated the possible presence of an enemy patrol at the following map reference.

He looked up. The sky was a soaring, intoxicating blue. Anything was possible under such a sky. Forget the Tomahawks! This enemy patrol was his real target. Let the airplanes wait!

He summoned his officers. “Where are we?” he asked Lieutenant Schneeberger. “And where are they?”

Schneeberger was the column's navigator. He had
trained as a Luftwaffe navigator for a few weeks until a defective eardrum made flying too painful and he had transferred to the army. Since the column set out, Schneeberger, with the help of a sergeant, had plotted its course by dead reckoning. They recorded the compass bearings it followed and the distance in kilometers it traveled on each bearing. Now Schneeberger unfolded his map and aimed his pencil at the end of the wandering line. “I calculate that we are here, sir.” He looked at the signal. “And the enemy is . . . um . . . let's see . . . here.”

Nobody spoke, but Captain Lessing gave a small, amused grunt. Schneeberger looked again. He was pointing at the middle of the Calanscio Sand Sea. “That's where the signal puts them,” he said defensively.

“Ludicrous,” Lessing said.

“The English are mad but not suicidal,” Captain Rinkart said.

“Good, good.” Major Jakowski liked an argument; it gave spice to his decision. “Be more explicit, gentlemen, please.”

“Well, the dunes in the Sand Sea are too high and too steep,” Rinkart said. “And there are tens of thousands of them.”

“You can't get a truck across the Calanscio,” Lessing said. “Even the Arabs have more sense than to go into it.”

“No water anywhere,” Rinkart said. “Heat like a furnace.”

“You've been there, of course,” Jakowski said.

They waited for each other. Eventually Rinkart said: “I've seen aerial photographs. If I'd been there, I wouldn't be here, sir.”

“The English seem to have managed it.”

“This map reference may be wrong, sir,” Lessing said. “Benghazi says it got some intercepts. That just means a couple of our direction-finding stations took bearings on an enemy transmission and the bearings crossed in the
Calanscio. Maybe the transmission was too short to give a good fix. The bearings might easily be a few degrees out. That can alter the fix considerably. Ten kilometers? Thirty? Fifty?” He took his cap off and shook it. The answer was not there. All it held was a little sand.

“Heat makes radio signals wander too,” Lieutenant Schneeberger said.

“When were these intercepts made?” Rinkart asked. “Benghazi doesn't say. Could be last night. Yesterday, even. The enemy's moved since then.”

Jakowski clasped his hands behind his back and squared his shoulders. “And on the positive side?” he said.

Another lieutenant, whose name was Fleischmann, said: “If the enemy is in the Sand Sea, and we can catch him, he won't be able to escape easily, sir.”

“Anyway, we can always call up the Stukas,” Schneeberger said. Jakowski sniffed. Schneeberger added: “As a last resort, sir, of course.”

“We're going in,” Jakowski decided.

“It might be a decoy, sir,” Rinkart said. “A couple of men planted in the Calanscio with a radio to distract us from their main patrol.”

“I've considered that. I shall divide the column into Force A and Force B. Rinkart and Schneeberger will come with me as Force A into the Sand Sea. We'll take twenty vehicles and fifty men,” he told Rinkart. “Go and pick the best.” To Schneeberger he said, “Leave your sergeant-navigator with Fleischmann. He can teach him how it's done. Lessing, you're in command of Force B. Keep up the hunt. We all rendezvous here in forty-eight hours precisely. Right, let's see some action.”

Twenty minutes later, Force A detached itself and drove eastward. Soon the vehicles were dots on the desert. After that, only their dust-cloud proved that they existed. Eventually it too was swallowed by the boiling horizon.

“So here we are,” Captain Lessing said. Lieutenant
Fleischmann and Voss, the sergeant-navigator, stood waiting for orders. It was too hot to sweat; the sweat dried as soon as it formed on the skin. “Sergeant: if we leave here, can you guarantee to bring us back? I mean, to this very spot?”

“Do my best, sir.” But Voss had been a lay preacher at home in Saxony and he could not tell an outright lie. “That's not to say you'll get an actual rendezvous.”

“No? Why not?”

“Hard to explain, sir. You see, Lieutenant Schneeberger and me, we each had our own compass and we traveled in different trucks and we made separate records on separate maps. The idea was to keep a check on each other in case one made a mistake.”

“Admirable.”

“Yes, sir. Trouble was, it didn't work, sir. End of the day, the route on my map didn't look a bit like his route.”

“Faulty compass,” Fleischmann suggested.

“I changed my compass, sir. Changed it twice. Made no difference.”

“So Schneeberger's compass was wrong.”

“He changed his, sir. We still didn't agree.”

“And by how much,” Lessing said, “did you not agree?”

“Seventy-three kilometers, sir.” Voss opened his map. “Mr. Schneeberger reckons we're
here.
I reckon we're
there
, seventy-three kilometers to the southeast.”

“It could be worse than that,” Fleischmann said.

“Don't be bloody silly,” Lessing told him. “How could it be worse?”

“Maybe they were both wrong. Maybe the truth is we're neither here nor there, but somewhere else.”

Lessing stared at him. Fleischmann was right: it could be far, far worse. The implications spread through Lessing's mind like shock waves. “So that water-tanker we sent to Jalo,” he said. “Maybe it wasn't late at the rendezvous yesterday.”

Voss said: “By my reckoning, sir, the column stopped about twenty-five kilometers east of the real rendezvous point.”

“How can all the compasses be wrong?” Lessing said.

The three men stood and worried, while the desert wind hunted tirelessly up and down the musical scale.

*   *   *

Captain Kerr liked to start work at six a.m., when the telephone was silent and he could concentrate on signals that had come in from the patrols during the night. Thus he was surprised to find Lampard waiting outside his office and looking, Kerr thought, weary and a bit anxious. “Come in, park yourself and get it off your chest, whatever it is,” he said.

“I want to leave now. Today,” Lampard said.

“You're not due to go on patrol until—”

“I know, I know. But everyone's fit, the vehicles are ready, we can draw stores in an hour. I want to go.”

Kerr brushed some dead flies from his desk onto his blotter. “They got clobbered by the fan,” he said. He opened a window and tossed them out. “Never learn, silly creatures. A lesson to us all to watch where we're going and to stay out of trouble.”

“I know the colonel's in the desert, but you don't need his permission,” Lampard said. “You can do this off your own bat.”

“Has someone in your patrol not watched where he was going and got himself into trouble?” Kerr asked.

“No. Nothing like that. I just want to get in an extra couple of days' training. We can do it en route. More realistic.”

“Ah.” Kerr sat at his desk and folded his arms. He thought for rather a long time. Lampard watched. He
yawned, once. Then his face resumed its old expression: hard, serious, tired.

Kerr unfolded his arms. He scrabbled through some papers, found what he wanted, read it, put it back. “No trouble, then,” he said.

“There are too many mouths and ears in Cairo. Security's a joke here. I never feel safe until I'm in the blue. Sooner the better.”

“The thing is, you see,” Kerr said, “if somebody had got into trouble, it would be bound to come out. You wouldn't be here, but I would. And here is where the trouble would land.” He took out a piece of chalk and marked a cross on the middle of his desk. “Here.”

Lampard frowned at the cross.

“You're not the first patrol leader to do this,” Kerr said. “Others have turned up here with a sudden craving for heat, thirst, sand, flies and all the delights of the desert.” He worked hard with the chalk.

“It's not really trouble,” Lampard said. “It's just a sort of an awkward coincidence. It involves a lady who is the widow of an officer killed in action, a Mrs. d'Armytage. I called on her last evening to offer my sympathy. He was an Old Boy of my school, you see.”

“I see nothing awkward so far.”

“She lives in a block of flats. While I was there, an Australian major fell from the balcony. Broke his neck.”

“Her balcony?”

“Heavens, no. Balcony at the other end of the building.”

“Careless.”

“Drunk. I mean, that's my guess. You know what these Australians are like.” He had a short staring-out match with Kerr which ended in a draw. “I found the body when I was leaving. In a rosebed. If there's an inquiry they'll question me and then Mrs. d'Armytage will get dragged in, and she's really not strong enough.”