A Good Clean Fight (43 page)

“All men did, up until the Middle Ages,” Skull remarked. “Considered quite normal.”

“She disapproved. She went out, went for a bloody
swim. When she got back I was in bed, knackered, half-asleep. She wanted sex,
now.
I wasn't up to it. That convinced her. I was more in love with Dumbo than I was with her.” His eyes began to leak again. “By Christ, I think she was right.”

Geraldo poked his head inside the truck. “Sod off,” Fanny growled. He threw the empty bottle. “Go and find your own dung heap. I'm on top of this one.”

“End of story?” Skull asked.

“Rows. Fights.” Pip touched a scar on his cheek. “Her wedding ring did that. She screwed a captain in the Pay Corps, I chucked all her stuff out of the window, now she says she's pregnant and she wants all my money.”

“The Pay Corps!” Skull made a face. “Dear me.”

“It must be a relief to be back in a nice clean war,” Fanny said.

“It is. It is.” Pip took some more rum.

“Talking of which,” Skull said. “Our hauptmann prisoner—thank you, just an inch or three to keep out the cold—Mr. Winkler assures me that your strafing campaign disturbs the Wehrmacht not in the slightest. In fact, he says, the more you do it the less it hurts.”

“That's exactly what you'd expect him to say, isn't it?” Fanny said blandly.

“Why?”

“He's lying, that's why. Why? Because he wants us to stop. Billy and I slaughtered an infantry battalion. Billy and I caught them on parade and we
massacred
the bastards! So don't tell me—”

“Yes, I mentioned that to the hauptmann,” Skull said.

“What did he say?”

“No more parades in the desert. You and Billy won't catch them like that again.”

“Billy won't catch anyone,” Pip said, “poor sod.”

“I believe Winkler,” Skull said. “I think he's telling the truth. And I'll tell you why,” he went on as Fanny's mouth
opened and snapped shut. “If he was really trying to trick us he would say the strafing had inflicted vast casualties, German morale is in their boots.
That
would encourage us to continue strafing.”

“I don't need Winkler's encouragement,” Fanny growled.

“Which is just what the enemy wants us to do.”

“Bollocks.”

Skull shrugged.

Pip was amused. “Got no answer to that, have you, Skull? See, brains aren't everything.”

“I've foxed 'em,” Fanny said dourly. “I've got them so they don't know winking from wanking.”

Skull took more rum. “I used to think this muck was filth,” he said, and drank. “But now that I penetrate the stench, I detect a hint of coarseness beneath the putrefaction.”

“By God!” Pip said, impressed. “Wish I could talk like that.” Fanny sneered. “Did you learn it at Cambridge?” Pip asked Skull.

“I don't
think
so. Nobody actually
learns
anything at Cambridge.”

“Anyway, I got the buggers off their backsides,” Fanny said. “Didn't I?” Nobody answered. “Didn't I?” he demanded.

“Yes,” Skull said. Fanny grunted with satisfaction. “And no,” Skull said.

“No standing patrols,” Pip pointed out.

“They'll be up tomorrow.” Fanny scratched his armpit so vigorously that he spilled his drink. “One good kick in the slats,” he said as he scuffed the rum into the floorboards. “You watch.”

Skull stood. “It's a pity Dalgleish can't be here to discuss the point with you.” He finished his drink.

“He was a volunteer. He didn't have to go.”

“What?
You left him no choice.”

“Bollocks.”

“Sidi Zamzam was a deathtrap. You knew it, we all knew it. Pinky handed Uncle his will before he took off. The flak got him, but you killed him.”

The punch was a huge haymaker that would have broken the intelligence officer's face, but as Fanny swung his fist he slipped on a pool of rum, blundered into Pip and trod on his foot. Pip cursed and struck out. Geraldo, airborne in panic, flew into them. For a moment there were arms and feathers everywhere. Fanny thrashed about and tried to beat off the bird, but hit the lamp instead. In the blackness, Skull decided it was time to slip away.

It took him some time to find his tent. His feet had difficulty walking in a straight line. The desert was a lake of black ink. The stars glittered brilliantly. When he admired them he tripped over his wandering feet, so he stopped admiring. They continued glittering. It occurred to him that they didn't give a damn if nobody looked at them, ever. He was thinking about this when he reached his tent and found Hick waiting for him. “Goodnight,” Skull said.

“I've got something to tell you. I didn't tell you at debriefing because—”

“Tell me tomorrow, Hick old chap. I'm going to play a little music now, and—”

“This is serious.”

Skull lit a stub of candle and sat on his bed. “Not as serious as ‘Empty Saddles in the Old Corral.'” He found the record. “This is a seminal example of the entire
oeuvre.
This is . . .” But by now Hick too was sitting on the bed. “I shan't remember it, whatever it is,” Skull told him. “I've had rather a trying day.”

“I blew up an ambulance this afternoon.”

“Theirs or ours?”

“Theirs.”

Skull put the record aside. “It could have been worse,
then. Begin at the beginning, as the King said.” He saw that Hick wanted to know which king. “Never mind!” he said, waving his arms as if they could dispel curiosity. “It doesn't matter.”

“I was Tiny Lush's number two,” Hick said. Which had saved his life. Dalgleish and Stewart led the attack on Sidi Zamzam. Lush and Hooper followed, with Hooper last of all, two or three lengths behind Lush and off to his right. They all knew that there was no hope of surprise. Several times the formation had been forced to weave and duck as tracer reached up and chased them. Warning signals from those gunsites must have raced ahead.

Toward the end there was no need to navigate. All trails led to Sidi Zamzam. Just follow the tracks; any tracks. The target came up on the horizon looking like a dozen crates that had fallen off a truck. Soon each crate became a dump the size of a small warehouse, the dumps built far apart. Dalgleish was amazed: it was twice the size he remembered. No flak yet. He wondered if some of the dumps might be dummies. All were draped with camouflage netting. Which was which? Who cared? Still no flak. What a dump! Joke. Nearly there. Fifteen seconds. The target blurred in the prop-disc. In and out, fast. Ten seconds from now . . . Still no flak. Still no flak. Still no flak. Then he was blown apart.

A shell hit his cockpit with a ferocity that ripped the aircraft into large pieces and flung them left and right, so it had no difficulty in destroying Dalgleish. He knew nothing. He certainly felt nothing. If his eyes registered any part of the flash, his brain had only a millionth of a second to record the image before the explosion plastered his head all over the inside of the cockpit canopy, which was itself utterly shattered and scattered and lost. What happened to the rest of his body was of no importance. The Tomahawk's nose and engine flew on, screaming and dropping. It carved a spectacular scar in the desert floor and vanished under a boiling dust-cloud.

By now Billy Stewart was dead. The sudden storm of explosive that had boxed him in included a long burst of heavy machine-gun fire. This crept along his engine cowling with a noise like a maniac using a pickaxe. As Stewart snatched at the control column the bullets smashed through his ribcage. The impact whacked the column sideways. The fighter rolled obediently into the ground. It crumpled like cardboard and bloomed in flame.

Tiny Lush swore continuously when Dalgleish exploded and Stewart crashed and the box of flak came rushing at him, bigger than ever, blotched with shellbursts and laced with tracer. He flirted with turning away, knew he'd left it too late and decided to climb over the flak instead. The flak hounded him. A cluster of razor-edged shrapnel chopped off one tailplane and half the rudder, and the Tomahawk lurched into a spin. The faster it fell, the worse the spin. Lush was still cursing when it hit the desert and he hit the instrument panel and the entire fuselage compressed itself around him and through him until there was no cockpit any more.

Hooper had the advantage. He was a few lengths behind Lush, giving just enough extra space to let him break right and escape the flak. He fled. He dropped to zero feet, rammed the throttle wide open and raced for safety. He felt sick. His left leg had the shakes so badly that he took his foot off the rudder pedal. Something was wrong with his mouth: it wouldn't shut, and he couldn't breathe properly, and the inside was so dry that it hurt. He tried to swallow and there was nothing to swallow. His arms felt so weak that he was terrified of crashing the aircraft. If this was war he hated it and it hated him.

After a couple of minutes he recovered. He took the machine up to five thousand feet and circled while his heart stopped banging and his leg stopped twitching and his mouth summoned up saliva from somewhere. He was still frightened. He was alone, he was badly shaken, he was
vulnerable. The intelligent thing was to go home. He was actually calculating his compass course when flak burst around him and ahead, so close that he saw a flicker of hot red in the heart of each ball of smoke, and he even heard the gruff
woof-woof
, exactly like some distant elderly dog.

At once he dropped a wing to the vertical and fell sideways, curling hard left. The desert stood on its ear and revolved right. His airstream howled strangely until the Tomahawk eased itself into a normal dive. He was strapped tightly to the machine, he trusted it to do what he wanted, and he was no longer afraid. He was enraged. They had killed his friends and now they had nearly killed him too. Find them and blast them: that was the answer. It was all very simple. Rage had cleared his brain. It lusted for a target.

He leveled out at three hundred feet and searched and searched. No target. No flak battery, nothing. Just empty desert. Rage became resentment and it soured him. He slumped and let the airplane fly itself. The airplane did this quite competently, and after a short while it found him something to kill: a traveling dust-cloud.

Inside it was a small convoy, probably five or six trucks, typical German supply stuff, canvas-topped, big wheels, desert camouflage. Hooper felt impatient to smash them, so that he could go on and smash something bigger. They were coming toward him, so he dipped and made a head-on attack. A shallow dive let him open fire on the first truck, then ease the nose up a touch and hammer the rest in turn. The last was an ambulance. Big red crosses everywhere. Hooper was so startled that he forgot to stop firing. The ambulance sagged under the impact. Briefly it became outlined in flame, like a firework show-piece; then it exploded with great violence. Hooper had a glimpse of jagged, blinding heat. He snatched at the stick and felt the Tomahawk being bounced by the shock waves.

“I went back to look for the ambulance,” he said, “but it wasn't there.”

Skull sighed, heavily. “It's not on, old chap. You really mustn't blow up enemy ambulances, even if they are full of ammunition. It's what the RAF calls bad form. Look: you forget you ever told me, and I'll forget I ever heard.”

“So then I went and shot up four more German ambulances,” Hick said. He made it sound like a perfectly sensible thing to do.

Skull fished out his handkerchief and blew his nose. As usual he found a deposit of desert dust. “Four,” he said. “You strafed four more German ambulances.” He rubbed his forehead, stretching and smoothing the skin. “This has been a truly terrible day,” he said. “I thought it was over, I thought nothing more could go wrong. You strafed four more German ambulances.”

“Two exploded,” Hick said. “I reckon they must have been carrying ammunition. Hell of a bang, both times. I was looking up at bits of ambulance coming down.”

“And the other two?”

Hick shrugged. “Maybe they unloaded their ammo already.”

“Maybe they were full of wounded.”

“You want me to apologize? I'm not going to apologize. I killed some of their people. They killed some of my people. Tomorrow will be the same. I like ambulance-busting. I'm good at it, and it makes sense. Not often that fun and profit get combined in a war.”

“God help me, I'm beginning to think you're right,” Skull said. “I must be as mad as the rest of you.”

Schramm snatched at the Luger, bent his knees, squinted down the barrel and fired three shots. Each shot made him blink furiously. He lowered his arm. The sergeant sidled up and detached the gun from his fingers. “Perhaps we ought to practice first with an empty weapon, sir,” he said.

“I think you hit the red flag,” Hoffmann said. “Or if you didn't hit it, you certainly frightened it.”

Schramm looked at the Luger. “That thing doesn't suit me,” he told the sergeant. “It feels all wrong. I need a sub-machine gun, something I can get both hands on. A Schmeisser, or something.”

“Intelligence officers don't carry Schmeissers, Paul,” Hoffmann said.

“Well, you suggest something then. Thank you, sergeant.” They strolled away.

“You're not a firearms man,” Hoffmann said. “A club would be more your style. Look at the way you walloped that British soldier. Pure Stone Age.”

Schramm grunted. “I told you Lampard's patrol has left Cairo, didn't I?”

“More than once.”

“There must be other patrols hiding in the Jebel. Or near it. I've applied for more troops to guard the airfields. General Schaefer's in Tripoli, at a conference. Apparently he can't make a decision in Tripoli, don't ask me why.”

“A week ago you said trip-wires around the perimeter were the answer.”