Gavin Lyall - The Secret Servant

He chuckled at the memory, coughed carefully, and said: "He asked Bede if he could tell which way they had been going, these tracks. But he could not. So John sent him back with his torch, a long useless walk, to have a look. It was his sort of discipline."

They renewed the watch again from before dawn. At half past nine, Tyler went off to take a stint himself. Without him, de Carette felt even less a part of the family, and suddenly very frightened. Here they were, behind enemy lines (insofar as that part of the desert had 'lines' at all) but they weren't dashing about, blazing away with machine-guns and watching fuel dumps go up in fountains of flame. They were crawling under the camouflage nets to tinker with the engines and guns, brewing up tea, smoking, re-reading tattered old letters from home, snoozing,… it was all so normal that it made the war seem very much more total than just the bombing of children and old women.

One of the Chev drivers, a lance-corporal known as Griff, came over with a blackened tea-can. "Cuppashay, sir?" He was a handsome boy from somewhere in London, his hair ink black except for the dust, and the lower half of his face looking as if he'd washed in ash. By now they all had four-day beards, ranging from the True Explorer to the Sadly Adolescent. Nobody shaved in LRDG; it was a waste of water but more than that a waste of hot water, which took fuel and time. What they heated, they drank asshay, though no Arab would accept Griff's brew as real tea.

"Thank you very much." De Carette offered him a cigarette.

"Ta, sir," Griff squatted down and puffed. "Is it true what they say about the Arabs around here, sir? I mean them not being like the Sennoos?"

"I am afraid that it is. Here, I think it would be a bad mistake to trust them."

"Yer." Griff frowned as he thought out the implications of this. In Libya, the Senussi were the LRDG's best allies against Italian overlords who shut them in concentration camps and, occasionally, took their chiefs up in an aeroplane and pushed them out without benefit of a parachute. But in Tunisia the French were the hated overlords, and de Carette had spent too long as a child in North Africa to have any illusions about it. Vichy had gained some popularity with its anti-semitic laws, but most popular of all – according to Intelligence – were the newly arrived German troops with their rigid good manners and open-handed payments for food and services rendered.

If 'liberation' meant a return to tight-wad French rule, most Tunisian Arabs wanted nothing to do with it.

"Yer," Griff decided. "Could make it tricky, that, sir. Mind, the Skipper speaks Arabic, did you know that?"

"He speaks it better than I myself do, and I was born in Algeria. He also speaks better French than I speak English."

"Yer." Griff nodded, satisfied. "He's dead clever, the Skipper. Wonder what he'll do, after the war? I s'pose he'll go to Oxford or Cambridge and be a professor. I can't see him wanting to be a bleedin' general."

It was a simple assumption, but Griff didn't live to see it come true. Ten minutes later, the aircraft found them.

The first was a lone CR 42, an old biplane fighter and just about the last of its type that the Italians dared fly over Africa. It droned along, weaving lazily, parallel to the track. The pilot was obviously searching the ground but whether he was looking for anything in particular… In any case, all they could do was lie still in the best cover they could find. Even if the vehicles hadn't been immobilised by camouflage, they couldn't have dodged among those hummocks.

The pilot could have seen something as small and chancy as the glint of a well-scrubbed cooking-tin; more likely it was the sheer bulk of the Chevs. They stood at least five feet high when loaded and even parked between the hummocks couldn't be made to look like small bushes. But whatever he saw, the moment was quite clear. The fighter stiffened out of its curving flight, then its engine howled as it climbed flamboyantly against the sun.

The patrol swore vividly and scuttled around, re-arranging themselves to meet the line of attack. They rammed magazines into the Tommy-guns and cocked them – and so did de Carette, although he hadn't much faith in pistol-calibre bullets bringing down an aeroplane. But there was no time to tear off the camouflage nets and get at the machine-guns on the vehicles, even if anybody had felt suicidal enough to try.

Fired simultaneously, four heavy machine-guns make a single stretched-out explosion: brrrrrap. The recoil checked the aeroplane for a moment in a sprinkle of falling brass cartridge cases, and dust erupted all around the wireless Chev. The Tommy-guns burped back. De Carette knelt up, the gun stabbing against his shoulder like a pneumatic drill.

The biplane climbed away, followed by the thin rattle of a single Lewis gun.

It was sheer chance that Bede had been working on the other Chev at the time. And it was probably his strict but unimaginative sense of what was right and proper that made him knock aside the bits of bush over the Lewis gun and pull down the netting until the barrel poked through. He might have run away from a Messerschmitt, which was a proper modern aeroplane, but not from some tatty old biplane.

"Get out of there, you stupid bugger!" Griff screamed, and rushed across to the Chev. De Carette saw him ranting at the shadow of Bede inside the netting, but then the biplane turned in again, wings wriggling as it straightened its aim. He heard the first few shots from the Lewis before it was blotted out. Brrrrrrap.

The Chev vanished in a blast of dust, and in the middle of it there was flame. Griff staggered out of the smoke, either wounded or dazed. De Carette got up – so did half a dozen others – but they were slapped down as the whole thing blew. Petrol, mines, grenades, maybe even the plastic explosive, all at once. Blazing fuel cans arced into the bushes on every side and started new fires, and when the first eruption died down, the Chev was a tangle of junk, burning steadily and pouring black smoke into the air. Somebody ran across to Griff, took one look and ran back. There was no sign of Bede at all.

The biplane climbed away rather slower than before, and went into a wide, wary turn. So perhaps Bede, or even one of the Tommy-guns, had got lucky after all. Or maybe it was just out of ammunition, because after one circle, it flew away to the north.

"Get all the camouflage off," de Carette ordered. "Get everything ready to move." They hardly needed telling. The CR 42 knew it had left an unfinished job, and the smoke was rolling two hundred feet into the air before it thinned out. An aeroplane could probably see that from forty miles away. Ammunition began to cook off in the fire, spitting in all directions.

They were ready to move in under five minutes. The wireless Chev had several holes through its wooden bodywork, and there was a strong smell of petrol from a punctured can, but worst of all was a patch of damp on the ground between the front wheels.

"The bugger got her in the waterworks," the driver said. He crawled under and started feeling up around the radiator. "Shit."

"How far can you go?" de Carette asked.

"Dunno, sir… could be a mile or two…"

"Put in some water now, quickly." They moved like a circus acrobatic team. One yanked open the bonnet, another tossed down the can of water, the driver had the radiator cap off, a fourth started pouring. The bonnet clanged shut again.

"Go," de Carette said. "Spread out, go for the track. The Skipper will be coming back, one of us will see him." He slipped easily into command now there were decisions to be made. He must remember that he, unlike them, was a properly trained professional soldier. It was pure chance that they knew more about war than he did.