Derek Robinson - A Good Clean Fight

The station commander, Oberstleutnant Benno Hoffmann, came in. “Well, I tried,” he said. “They say there isn’t a spare airplane within a hundred kilometers.” Hoffmann had a camera. He began taking pictures of the feet.

“What’s that for?” Schramm asked.

“Cookhouse. I want it clearly understood that this meat is unfit for human consumption. And even if they had a spare plane they still wouldn’t send it. Smile for daddy.” He took a couple of full-length shots.

“Why not?” Schramm asked. Apart from an occasional twitch as the skin came off, he lay as still as a log.

“Oh, lots of reasons,” Hoffmann said. “They’re at least a hundred and fifty kilometers from here by now, so they’re somewhere in the Sahara, and the Sahara is the size of France, and it’s only four trucks and a dozen men, so if you don’t know where they are you’ll never find them.” He sat at the bedside and felt Schramm’s wrist, seeking the pulse. “Forget about them, Paul. Just think about getting your strength back.”

“I know exactly where they are,” Schramm said. “They’re driving south, fast as they can. They want to squeeze through the gap between Jalo Oasis and the Calanscio Sand Sea. After that it’s wide open desert and they’re safe.”

“Radio the garrison at Jalo,” suggested the doctor, whose name was Max.

“Italians,” Hoffmann said.

“Don’t we talk to our glorious allies?”

“They don’t always listen. They especially don’t always listen if it means going out looking for huge, ferocious, British Commandos.”

“Special Air Service,” Schramm corrected.

“Shut up, you, you’re dead.” Hoffmann frowned at the doctor. “At least, my bit’s dead. How are your bits?” Max left Schramm’s feet and repositioned Hoffmann’s fingers. “Ah!” Hoffmann said. “You nearly slipped away, there, Paul. Try to pay more attention.”

“They’ll go through the Jalo Gap at midday,” Schramm said.

“For all you know they’re still hiding in the Jebel.”

“They’re not hiding in the Jebel.” Schramm’s voice was low but firm. “They’ve used up all their bombs. Soon they’ll be getting low on fuel and food. They want to go home.”

“They told you all this?”

“They told me I was on my way to Egypt. And their trucks are half-empty. I could tell that from the suspension. Too much bounce in the springs.”

“I’ve finished stripping the wallpaper,” Max said. “Now I’m going to paint some magic muck on your feet before I bandage them. This may sting a bit.”

“Oh Christ,” Schramm said. “I know what that means. Give me something to hang on to.” Hoffmann offered his hands and Schramm gripped his wrists. “We’ve still got that Storch, haven’t we?” Schramm asked. “The one that found me?” Hoffmann nodded. He wished Paul would shut up. The grip on his wrists was tightening and sweat was popping out of Schramm’s forehead like rain on a windscreen. “Give me the Storch,” Schramm said. “I can show the pilot where to look.” Now the sweat was chasing itself down his face. “Nearly done,” Max said. They could hear his fingers slapping on the magic muck. “If I find them,” Schramm said, “you can persuade Operations to send a bomber or two, can’t you?”

Hoffmann found himself nodding. “This is pure blackmail,” he said.

“Done,” said Max. Schramm’s grip slowly relaxed.

“You’re not fit to fly,” Max told him.

“He’s not going to fly,” Hoffmann said. “He’s going to sit beside the pilot and look. He’s fit to look, isn’t he?”

Lampard’s patrol was less than halfway to Jalo Oasis when dawn broke. There had been trouble with the trucks: first a puncture, then dust clogging a carburettor, then another puncture. They drove without lights, not knowing who might be out searching for them. It was a moonless night. Once they left the Jebel the country was low-lying desert; neither flat nor hilly, dotted with scrub, very boring; but it was always possible to buckle the steering on a very boring rock. And there was the Tariq el ’Abd to be crossed.

The Tariq was an ancient camel trail. The Jebel formed part of a great two hundred-mile bulge into the Mediterranean, and the Tariq was a short cut across the base of that bulge. German and Italian generals felt uncomfortable at the thought that anyone could so easily travel so close to their flank, and all along the Tariq they had scattered tens of thousands of “thermos” bombs: anti-personnel bombs designed to look like vacuum flasks. Unscrew the cap and it blew your arms off. Drive over one and it blew your wheel off. Maybe more.

Lampard halted his patrol a few miles short of the Tariq el ’Abd when he reckoned dawn was still half an hour away. Within a minute, a fire was lit and a dixie of water was set to boil. To brew up in the desert, all you needed was a large tin filled with sand and soaked in petrol. It burned cleanly and steadily, and for a surprisingly long time. Soon bacon was frying alongside the brew-up.

They had stopped in a hollow. Lampard didn’t care if he was seen by passing aircraft—a fire in the desert wasn’t worth a bomb or even a bullet, there were always Arab fires twinkling on the horizon—but he cared about German armored cars. After all that havoc at Barce the enemy must be out hunting him. Of course the desert was vast, it was easy to vanish into it, but if you were found there was nowhere to run to and nothing to hide behind. In fact you were lucky if you could run. On his first patrol Lampard had discovered what it was like to have to run: they had been chased for an hour, flat out, by vehicles that might have been German armored cars or might have been a roaming unit from the flank of the Eighth Army. Nobody could identify them and nobody wanted to let them get close enough to be identifiable, so the patrol just turned and ran, trying not to think about punctures and hoping that if there were any soft sand about, the other lot would get stuck in it. In the end they out-ran them and never found out whether it was a great escape or all a waste of time. That’s what happened when you were lucky. If you were unlucky and they jumped you, it would probably be a very brief fight. In fact it probably wouldn’t be any kind of fight, just a sudden storm of heavy machine-gun fire laced with cannon shells, and the patrol vehicles, being soft-skinned, would get torn to bits. What would happen to the members of the patrol, being even more soft-skinned, wasn’t worth thinking about.

Lampard, Dunn and the navigator, Gibbon, walked to the top of the nearest hillock. After hours of engine-roar, the silence was so total that it was almost painful. The desert had the same kind of crystalline stillness you get on nights of intense frost. The stillness and the silence formed a powerful presence: to break them was to reveal how great they were, how little you were.

The three men stood and listened. Nothing.

“Various possibilities,” Lampard said. “Jerry has no patrols out looking for us. Jerry has patrols out, but not near here. The patrols are near here, but they’re hiding in a wadi, waiting for daylight.”

“Is there anything we can do to alter any of those possibilities?” Gibbon asked.

“No.”

“That’s what I thought.”

They walked back to the fire. “Jerry won’t try to jump us before dawn,” Dunn said. “He hasn’t the faintest idea how strong we are.”

“Mr. Schramm will tell him,” Gibbon said.

“Schramm’s still hiking across the Jebel. Anyway, nobody knows we’re the same outfit that attacked Barce. We could be a completely different patrol, lousy with mortars and bazookas and pom-poms plus a couple of anti-tank guns in the boot.”