Gavin Lyall - The Secret Servant

Tyler looked grim. "There should have been a guard on that wadi. The boys know a jeep when they hear one. Come on." He and Gunner took Tommy-guns and moved off into the hummocks. De Carette got out to sit at the guns of Tyler's jeep, just in case. By the time he'd slid into place, he found he had a lit cigarette in his hand.

Gunner came back about twenty minutes later, trailing his Tommy-gun by the sling in a hunched, disconsolate plod.

"They've gone. Just gone, Chev and all. The Jerries got 'em. They left a Volkswagen that got stuck, like." He started rummaging in the back of the jeep, and came up with one of the British four-gallon petrol tins. "Skipper wants a couple of gallons and some high-tension lead and a spark-plug."

"What for?" de Carette asked.

Gunner looked at him gloomily. "You could take 'em to him, sir, if you wanted."

"I will."

Gunner poured off half the petrol into the jeep's tank, and de Carette took the can back over the hummocks. Where the Chev had been there was a scatter of camouflage nets, torn bush, empty tins, cartridge cases – all the usual rubbish of an action. Fifty yards back down the wadi, Tyler was waiting by a Volkswagen that was jammed to its hub caps in soft sand. All its doors were open and there was a mess of blood on the driver's seat, but no holes in the bodywork. Somebody in the Chev had got off a burst that had hit the driver in the head or chest and the little car had run wild into the very obvious patch of sand.

"Why did they not pull it out?" de Carette asked. Given a heavier vehicle and a tow-rope – which was as vital in the desert as water – it was a simple job, even if it took a little time.

"I imagine they had one or two men wounded, bleeding badly, and I hope some of our boys to guard as well. They'd be in a hurry. But I wouldn't be surprised if they came back for it." Tyler lifted the engine cover at the back; it was the open military version of the Volkswagen, technically a Kьbelwagen.

"It may be booby-trapped," de Carette said.

"It isn't, but it's going to be. I'd rather do it with a mine or some 808, but that was all in the Chevs. So now we have to improvise."

He undid the lead from the furthest in of the two right-hand cylinders, a difficult one to get at, or even see properly. He connected part of the extra length of wire to the lead and pushed it through a hole he had already bodged in the fire wall that separated the engine from the back seat. Under the seat, there was a small stowage compartment for the battery, the jack and some tools.

Tyler punched a hole through the thin cap of the petrol can and threaded both pieces of wire through it, then attached them to the spark plug: one lead to the normal terminal, the other wrapped around the screw thread. The far end of that wire went to the negative terminal on the battery. Then he placed the petrol tin very carefully, screwed the cap gently on, and put the seat in place above it. Back at the engine, he arranged the plug lead so that, unless you looked very closely, it still seemed to go to the cylinder.

Military drivers are taught to check their vehicles much more regularly and closely than most civilian drivers ever do. But de Carette could see what would happen if they came to rescue this one. They'd be in a rush. One could be arranging the tow-rope, another might lift the cover just for a glance in case somebody had wrecked the engine overnight. He might not even bother to do that. But almost certainly one of them would try the starter, to see if the battery had gone flat. And that new plug would flash in the vapour coming off two gallons of petrol that nobody knew was down there under the back seat.

They started back to the jeeps in the reddening light.

"I never thought I'd feel glad we still had one of those damned tins," Tyler commented. The 'damned tins' were Cairo's idea of petrol cans: flimsy things that leaked if you even looked at them nastily. Mostly the LRDG used the far tougher German version, whose nickname was already becoming a generic for an efficient liquids container: the Jerry-can. But you couldn't punch holes in those.

They drove a few miles north and just before sunset turned off the track, well off, to make supper.

It was a gloomy meal. For once even Tyler seemed too drained to do more than insist that they light a fire and get hot food. They ate in silence, except for de Carette trying to reassure Lecat, whose morale was slumping as his saviours slid into their own melancholia. Luckily, he was too tired to stay awake longer than it took him to eat.

Tyler sat wrapped in a great-coat and brooded over a map-board by torchlight, a mug of rum-and-lime in his hand.

"How did they get t'Chev going?" Yorkie muttered. "Her looked bad to me."

Gunner stared at him in the last flickers of the sand-and-petrol stove. "What d'you think our boys was doing all afternoon while we was getting our balls bombed off? It could a been just the hose. I could fit a new one meself in half an hour."

"It looked like t'radiator to me. They would've filled it with porridge, most like."

"Best thing to do with porridge, that."

"There's nowt wrong with porridge."

"Bloody Scotties."

"Tha knows bloody well where Yorkshire is…" They mumbled on, huddled against the side of a jeep and swapping cigarettes automatically.

De Carette sat down beside Tyler. "That Boche commander must not be a fool, John."

"No… he's handled his side of things pretty well. Where d'you think he's based?"

"The village?" It was the only possible answer. About forty miles north the map marked a small village with a water hole, just off the track and on the edge of the Grand Erg Oriental, the real sand sea that stretched west and south into the Sahara itself, impassable even to a jeep. If the Germans weren't in the village, there was no logical place for them to be.

"Yes… they've probably got a dozen French prisoners and our boys, they'd need somewhere to lock them up."

"John," de Carette said suspiciously, "you do not want to go into that village…"

"I'd like to rescue our people, but if we can just reach the wireless Chev we could get a message through. It'll save us three days drive back to Zella – even if the Stukas don't get us."

This man does take war seriously, de Carette thought. He is proposing to invade a village, almost certainly a walled one, which must hold at least one armoured car and a platoon of infantry – if it held anything they wanted to find.

But then his vision of the war expanded and he saw over half a million men tangled in battle along the North African coastline. All Captain Tyler had left to lose was two jeeps and five lives. It was sheer bad luck that one life was called Henri de Carette.

They moved out at ten o'clock, with a sliver of moon due to rise around four in the morning. For them, it was probably safest to drive in the dark with headlights blazing confidently, and if anybody recognised them as jeeps that needn't mean anything. The Afrika Korps used as many jeeps as it could capture, just as the 8th Army used Volkswagens, Opel trucks, Steyrs and all the rest.

About midnight, they reached the turn-off for the village and stopped short to examine the wheel-marks by torchlight.

"There's been a scout car in and out here," Gunner reported. "But we knew that anyhow. And the Chev for a cert. And some lorry, and a Volkswagen. But we knew that, too."

Tyler stared up the little track. There was a distinct horizon where the stars ended, but you might not see a moving man at more than fifty yards. They daren't trust the map to tell them how far the village was, so two of them walked well ahead of the now lightless jeeps and their noise.

It was nearly two miles before an unnatural square shape hardened against the sky. They parked the jeeps off the track and Tyler, de Carette and Gunner went forward to reconnoitre.