A Good Clean Fight (62 page)

“One bullet through the leg. Some cuts from rock splinters. Smedley's face you know about. That's all. The jeeps are OK. We lost a bit of petrol from the jerricans. You can smell it.”

“That's all right, then.” Lampard walked to the edge of the track and stared into the night. “Barce is down there. You can see the road from Benghazi.”

Dunn saw nothing but blackness. “Even if we got inside, the sun would be up before we could plant half the bombs,” he said. “Barce is a bloody big airfield. You remember.” Lampard said nothing. “It's four-fifty,” Dunn said. “We simply haven't got the time.”

“Bags of time. And won't they be surprised?”

Lampard took the patrol out of the Jebel by the simplest possible means: he let gravity do the steering. As long as the jeeps were going downhill he knew they must be heading more or less north or northwest, toward the road that linked Barce and Benghazi. Often gravity was not a safe guide and he had to turn and drive along the contours until he found a track that the jeeps could skate down without falling out of control. Nevertheless, the night was full of the howling of gearboxes and the bellow of engines and the clash of metal on stone.
This is insane
, Dunn said to himself, over and over, until the word
insane
lost all meaning and became just a noise in his head.

They reached the bottom at five past five. Lampard did not pause. He bucketed across the fields and mounted the road at five-fifteen. That was when he stopped for a briefing.

“We're not going to bomb their aircraft,” he announced. “No time. We'll machine-gun them. Strafe 'em. First we leave bombs alongside this road, all the way to the airfield. Thirty-minute fuses. Save a few for the checkpoint at the gate. Short fuses there. We drive into Barce like the clappers
of hell, shoot the daylights out of it and leave the same way.” He described his plan in detail, giving each jeep its position in the attack and each man his task. “All understood? Good. Off we go.”

*   *   *

An airman shook Paul Schramm awake at four fifty-five a.m. and gave him a piece of paper. It was a teletype. The message came from the headquarters of an infantry regiment based eight miles away, toward Benghazi. It was a copy of a signal received by the regiment from one of its patrols in the Jebel. Schramm had asked the regiment to inform him immediately if a patrol made contact with the enemy. Now, it seemed, one had. That was what the teletype said. Any normal person could have understood it in ten seconds. Fifteen, if he needed to find his reading glasses. Schramm was not normal at four fifty-five a.m. His eyes might be open but his brain was made of congealed fog.

He washed his face and read the teletype again. Then he put on his reading glasses again and this time it made some sense.

Time. What was the damn time? He found his watch and it said eleven-thirty. Impossible. Idiot watch was upside-down. Two minutes to five. Dawn in an hour. The SAS never raided just before dawn, it was crazy, how could they get away?

He telephoned the station duty officer, the duty NCO in charge of airfield defense and the ops officer in the control tower, each with the same message: risk of raid, stay alert. They did not sound alarmed. They had heard it before.

Next he telephoned the duty officer at Regimental HQ. “Any developments?” he asked.

“The shooting's over. They pulled back. Our men are looking for bodies.”

“I see.” Schramm tried to imagine what it was like, clambering
about the Jebel, searching for something that might not exist, in a very black night, with a lethal enemy somewhere in the darkness. “Look . . . No offense intended, but how sure are you that the unit your men ran into really was British?”

“It was armed, it had vehicles. What are the alternatives? Arab guerrillas? Deserters? Escaped prisoners of war? No. This outfit was too well organized. We took losses, major.”

“You're not going to like this,” Schramm said.

That amused the duty officer. “Well,” he said, “if it's too painful I shall just burst into tears, like we always do.”

“Maybe it was another German patrol, working in the opposite direction,” Schramm suggested. The duty officer said nothing. “You're biting your lip,” Schramm said. “I can smell the blood.”

“Actually I'm eating a rather gruesome frankfurter. Well, I won't say it's never happened. Nothing benevolent about friendly fire. However, I can assure you that we have only one patrol operating in the Jebel right now. Just one.”

Schramm got dressed. His mouth tasted foul so he brushed his teeth. When he turned out the lights and opened a window there was still no hint of dawn. Well, the aircraft were safe, that was the great thing. In fact, he rather wished the SAS would have a go at them, just to prove the infrared beam. Not that it needed proving: it had been thoroughly tested by local paratroops and they had always set it off, even when they knew it was there and tried to crawl under it. The telephone rang.

“I don't quite know how to tell you this.” It was the regimental duty officer again.

“I promise to be brave,” Schramm said.

“Here it comes, then. Our patrol in the Jebel has just found a body, and it's an Oberst in his best uniform with a pistol in his hand. He wasn't shot and his pistol is fully loaded. I expect you'd like to know how he was killed.”

“Please.”

“Strangled. Also there was money everywhere.”

“Strangled.” Schramm thought hard. Was this some kind of gruesome SAS trick? If so, what did it achieve? He could think of nothing. It was a mistake to see the SAS everywhere. “It could be part of a black-market racket,” he said. “Maybe this officer of ours was doing a deal with some Italians, they ran into your patrol, assumed it was a trap, killed him and left at top speed. I bet you that's what it was.”

“Strangled,” the duty officer said. “That's a funny way to murder a German officer in the middle of a gunfight.”

“Mafia, probably. I expect strangulation is full of old-fashioned symbolism. You know what they're like.”

“Fortunately not.” The brutal crump of an explosion rattled Schramm's window. “Hello!” the duty officer said. “Need help?”

“No,” Schramm said. Heavy machine-gun fire broke out. “Yes!” he shouted, and dropped the phone.

*   *   *

Guard duty was just killing time. Night guard duty was killing time that had died while you weren't looking and so it went on forever. Eventually the body adjusted to this eternity. The heartbeat slowed, the eyes stopped searching, and the brain avoided all strenuous thought until it was barely ticking over.

People who never had to do it kept saying how important guard duty was. People like the station commander kept on about vigilance. You never saw him at five in the morning, so how did he know what he was talking about? The trick of doing guard duty was very simple. Take it as it comes. That's how you get through the night. Very, very slowly. You don't try and work it to death. That can't be done, because there is no work. You relax and you let the
night set its own sweet pace. You can't change it, so you take it as it comes.

The two men on guard duty at Barce airfield main gate had been on their feet since two a.m. and they ached, literally ached, to sit down. Better yet, lie down. Their leg muscles were stiff, their knees hurt, their shoulders resented the weight of their rifles. Twenty minutes ago the NCO had opened the guardhouse door, told them to keep their eyes open, and shut it. Now he had his feet up, lucky bastard.

Only one vehicle had gone through since two a.m. Barce was dead. The guard was due to be relieved at six. Best not to think about it. Best not to think about anything. Just take it as it comes. That was the only way to treat the war: take it as it comes. Thus the two men on guard duty were not excited by the unhurried approach of a pair of dimmed headlights. One man yawned, the other rubbed his eyes. The vehicle slowed, made a turn of more than ninety degrees, and stopped. Evidently it was about to return the way it came.
“Schramm?”
the driver said.
“Herr Major Paul Schramm?”

“Ja, ja,”
one of the guards said.

Lampard reached out and gave him a rucksack.
“Heil Hitler!”
he said, and drove away. His presence had lasted seven seconds.

The NCO emerged and wanted to know what was going on. The guards told him it was a delivery for Major Schramm. The NCO squatted on his heels and tried to open the rucksack, but its drawstring had been tightly knotted. The bombs inside were on a one-minute fuse. He was still worrying at the knot when they exploded. The three bodies got hurled away with their arms outstretched in a caricatured gesture of surprise.

Lampard's jeeps rushed the gate as soon as the flash lit up the night, but when they reached it the gate and the wooden guardhouse had gone, were in small pieces, many
of them still tumbling from the sky. As he passed, Dunn pointed to another small building and his gunner gave it a four-second blast that knocked it flat. Perhaps it contained more guards, perhaps not. Either way, it was no longer a threat. For the first time all night, Dunn felt good.

Lampard knew this road. He had driven it before. The three jeeps enjoyed the luxury of a perfect surface; quite quickly they were up to fifty, sixty miles an hour and still gaining. Lampard saw lights coming at them, head-on. “Don't slow down!” he shouted. A flashing red was added. A siren wailed. The headlights blazed. It was a fire truck, ten times as big as a jeep and not about to give way. Lampard's driver knew this and he acted fast. The jeep left the road and was fishtailing violently through a stretch of gravel as the fire truck thundered by. Lampard looked back at the cloud of dust and screwed up his face, waiting for a crash that never came. The other two jeeps appeared, they all found the road, they picked up speed.

The road swung sharp left. “Straight on,” Lampard ordered. Now they were on the actual airfield. Somewhere behind them a giant klaxon was letting off angry blasts. The other jeeps pulled up and drove alongside Lampard, all their headlights full on, searching for aircraft. They found patches of mist, a stack of oil drums, a small broken glider, more mist, but no aircraft.

The patrol changed direction, and their beams swept over another barren area. Lampard was furiously trying to remember the layout at Barce. They changed direction again, and again the night was empty. The place was so bloody
big.
What if they'd parked their planes in a far corner? What if Barce was another Maghrun? Two searchlights came on, brilliant sticks of light, prodding the sky. Once again the three jeeps swung and searched a fresh, dead spot. Flak began to be pumped up one searchlight beam: bombs meant bombers. In the jeep on Lampard's left, Sergeant Davis fired a brief burst and his driver steered,
making his headlights follow the tracer. Lampard saw a row of fighters, 109s, a dozen at least. He shouted with delight.

That burst finally convinced somebody in airfield defense. A light machine gun opened up, then another. Lampard's driver switched his headlights off. The others copied him. Now that they knew where the target was they could drive blind.

Paul Schramm was a spectator to all this. He stood on the narrow balcony outside his bedroom, listened to the rise and fall of jeep engines, saw the sweep of headlights and the pulse of tracer. He felt detached, almost remote. There was nothing he could do.

Benno Hoffmann joined him. “How did they get in?” he asked.

“Through the main gate. They just blasted their way in. I've sent for help. The army's on its way.”

“Can't we hit them with something? Mortars, or . . .”

“Too late, Benno. We'd be just as likely to hit our own aircraft now.”

“Yes, of course.” Hoffmann made himself comfortable in a chair. “Might as well enjoy the show, I suppose.”

Lampard guessed the distance, reached across and hit the horn, and all the headlights came on. For a glorious second or two he was entranced by the spectacle of rows and rows of bright, clean Messerschmitt 109s, yellow at nose and wingtip, their canopies gleaming, perched on their undercarriages like well-trained hounds. Then the jeeps changed formation from line abreast to single file and the gunners swung the barrels to the flank and opened up.

The effect was cruel in its savagery: even Lampard was taken aback by the sheer intensity of this devastation. Each jeep carried four Vickers K machine guns, mounted in pairs: two at the front, two at the back. Each Vickers K fired a thousand rounds a minute. The three jeeps cruised parallel to the German airplanes and blasted twelve
thousand rounds a minute into them. Some burst into flames at once: headlights were no longer needed. The noise was frightening: the night seemed to be battered to bits. The bullet-streams scythed through the undercarriages and the fighters crashed on their bellies. Petrol tanks ignited, blew machines apart, sprayed blazing fuel over other fighters. The jeeps reached the end of the row and one German squadron lay wrecked. Their flames lit up a second row and the jeeps turned on it. The gunners hosed bullets up and down these fresh targets, and as they too exploded it was inevitable that flying debris would fall through the infrared beams and trigger Schramm's defensive system. His fixed machine guns blazed loyally at the empty air, their voice drowned in the huge roar of the Vickers Ks. It was a scene of mechanized and professional madness. Dunn's mouth was open so long that it dried inside and he could not swallow or salivate. He blinked as one of the searchlights came down and added its beam to the bonfire. Sergeant Davis swung his Vickers. His eyes were squeezed shut but the blinding glare penetrated them. He aimed where the glare was worst and kept firing until it went out. For a long time after that, luminous blossoms of changing color swamped his vision.

The raid had lasted four minutes and now it was over. The jeeps raced for the empty end of the airfield. The time was five-forty.