The secret servant, p.18
The Secret Servant, page 18
“Always something new,” Tyler said, his long face becoming an opera devil in the red light. “Ex Africa semper aliquid novi. We may impress ourselves with what we’re up to, but I doubt we’d impress old Pliny. Although it was some Greek who said it first…”
He rambled on in his slow, serious voice, and de Carette flattered himself that Tyler might be glad to have a companion to whom he could quote Latin. Yet the scholar and soldier seemed to blend without a seam showing, and Tyler wasn’t condescending when he argued with Corporal Bede about the unnecessary complication of the Tommy-gun. Was this some Anglo-Saxon duplicity?
But he was right about the desert: always something new. To some it was a mysterious woman, to others an old bitch who never knew her own mind. Neither pretended to know the ‘desert’. It would change subtly, from gravel to tiny stones to bigger ones and then sharp rocks that carved at your tyres until your arms were limp with winding the steering-wheel and your speed had dropped at least ten mph (or ten mih – miles in the hour – as the Army put it, just to remind you this wasn’t a Saturday afternoon picnic). And then the lady might throw a real change of mood at you, like a crumbled escarpment that fell away a full three hundred feet that you wouldn’t have chanced even in one of the new Sherman tanks.
Or perhaps a miniature mountain range, jagged as broken glass, poking out of the plain like the backbone of some vast dinosaur. All quite unexpected, of course.
The desert was a very old lady. And there were almost no maps of her face.
Tyler poured everybody a mug of rum, lime-juice powder and water, then one by one they wrapped themselves in sleeping bags under tarpaulins stretched from the vehicles like tent-halves.
The night turned viciously cold under a sky crowded with stars that shone, not twinkled, in the diamond-clear air. They were all young, fit and well rested, so nobody felt very tired yet. There wasn’t much talking, but matches flared and cigarettes glowed until well after midnight.
Around noon on the third day they slid down the western escarpment off the Hamada and, according to dead reckoning navigation, crossed into Tunisia.
Unexpectedly – as you’d expect – the desert changed to short, sandy-grey hummocks wearing toupees of crackly brush that broke off and jammed in the track rods and exhausts. It had a depressing and unnatural nastiness, like the man-made deserts of rubbish and broken cars beside the railway yards outside big cities. It slowed them anyway, but they also went more cautiously.
That night they leaguered three-quarters of a mile before a track that wasn’t properly a road but had been in use long before most other roads in the world. From the Mediterranean in the north it reached down some 1800 rambling miles through the real Sahara to Tamanrasset and finally Kano in Nigeria, and camel trains had been plodding it since Hannibal’s day.
If the French had got this far, they had almost certainly used this track. But so would any Afrika Korps unit which had picked up the same rumour. They put a watcher at the trackside while the rest of them went on with the evening chores.
About half an hour before sunset, two aeroplanes flew northwards on the far side of the track. Through glasses, Tyler identified them as Stukas. They were flying suspiciously low and slow, although the nearest landing-ground was at least seventy miles away. De Carette felt a ripple of unease run through the patrol, and when the aircraft noise had faded, several of them quietly went around checking the camouflage nets and bushes piled on the vehicles.
“We shan’t see them again today,” Tyler said. “They don’t have the night-flying lights and whatnot on the landing-grounds here. It’s probably safer lighting a fire at night than by day. There must be dozens of Arab fires up and down the track.” He gave a little chuckle, but went on frowning at the humps that were the Chevs. “Oh well… if you knows of a better ‘ole, go to it.”
Then he had to explain the old First War cartoon of the soldiers in a shell-hole to de Carette.
They kept watch on the track, in relays, until midnight. De Carette felt left out at not having been chosen, but the last watcher let him know why. It was a corporal called Bede, rather quiet and serious.
“Only a few camels,” he reported. “But when it was clear I went down and took a shufti and there’s been a lot of wheeled stuff recently. No tanks or half-tracks, just wheels. Some Opels and Volkses and some I don’t know, Skip. I tried drawing a couple of them.” He shone his torch on the signals pad and held it out – but to de Carette, not Tyler.
“I tell you,” de Carette smiled, “I thought it was fantastic, quite absurd. How could I recognise the patterns of some old French tyres? I could not even tell you the patterns of my own cars or the jeep I had just been driving. But then I saw: all of them would know just that. Like their own signatures. I was ashamed and angry, but now I know they were telling me something. I might tell them about Africa, but they could tell me – the only professional soldier – about war. John knew it, of course.”
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.”
26
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.
They picked up Tyler and his co-watcher after only a few minutes, staggering breathlessly back through the hummocks towards the smoke. De Carette gave him a quick report, and Tyler dropped panting into the gunner’s seat of his jeep.
“Onto the track, then we’ll head south.” They charged off again. The first thing was to put distance between themselves and that black signpost in the sky.
They had to stop once, to put another can of water into the Chev; they didn’t like using it up that way, but they had plenty for the moment-And in any case, de Carette knew the mission was dead. The loss of a truck and two men wasn’t itself so bad: any military unit has to be able to take casualties without falling apart, and the lost supplies and fuel would have been used up by the dead men and wrecked truck anyway. But a single bullet through the wireless Chev’s radiator was far worse. If they had to abandon that truck and fit eight men into two jeeps already jammed with gear, they’d have to dump not only the Chev’s supplies but some from the jeeps as well.
It seemed very bourgeois thinking, and de Carette reminded himself of his mother in her high-necked black bombazine, old before her time because her chosen age was old, ticking off on her fingers the tiny triumphs of a morning’s shopping in Cannes market.
But he hadn’t starved at home and he didn’t want to starve in the desert. No, the mission was dead. Tyler would know that.
They reached the track and turned south, away – they hoped – from trouble. For about ten miles they ran at speeds of thirty and forty mph, until the Chev’s driver waved them down. The radiator was steaming like a kettle.
“Another ten seconds and she’d sieze solid, Skipper.”
Tyler looked carefully around. There was a narrow strip of the bushy hummocks on the west side of the track before the real sand began. “Get off the road and dig her in.”
They all bumped cautiously into a dead-end wadi, ran for a hundred and fifty yards, then stuck. Everybody except the gunners leapt out and started smothering the truck in netting and bushes. The gunners watched and automatically lit cigarettes. None of the vehicles had windscreens, so it was near impossible to smoke on the move.
Tyler scribbled a quick message on a signals pad and showed it to de Carette. It gave their position, then: No clue French. Lost two men and one Chev air attack. Other Chev probably immobile. Task unlikely completion. Details follow. Tyler.
De Carette nodded. “Does one need more detail?”
Tyler made a grunting chuckling noise and gave the signal to the Sergeant. “Encipher that and get it off as soon as you can, never mind about proper call times. We’ll be back by dark.”
One of the gunners called: “Planes, Skipper! Up north.” He used a deliberately husky voice, as if aeroplanes five miles away might overhear, but de Carette now knew how he felt.
“Start up!” Tyler shouted. They drove out of the wadi and on southwards at a sober speed to keep down the dust.
“They’re comin’ this way, sir.” his gunner said. They called him Yorkie, a solid squat boy from a Yeomanry regiment.
“What are they?”
“Stukas I reckon. Bugger ‘em. There in’t no hurry, sir.”
De Carette had instinctively accelerated, but speed was no use against an aeroplane until it was actually attacking you.
“They ‘ave us.” Yorkie said. De Carette let the jeep coast, looking back over his shoulder. The two crank-winged Junkers 87’s were following straight down the line of the track and as he watched, their engines began to strain, reaching for more height.
He drove on slowly, glancing upwards. The first Stuka nosed carefully over, with the precision of a marksman bringing a target rifle into his shoulder. Yorkie muttered filthy words. The Stuka dived almost vertically but not very fast, a crippled black shape against the pale sky.
“This in’t our ‘un,” Yorkie said. “We’ll get ‘is mate.” He swung up the K guns and fingered the triggers. “Could you keep ‘er still a moment, sir?”
De Carette turned the jeep sideways and stopped. The Stuka was already right overhead, going for Tyler’s jeep, a quarter of a mile down the track. Yorkie started firing as the Stuka let go two small bombs and began a sharp pull-out.
Tyler’s jeep swerved wildly away off the track and two yellow-black spouts of smoke jumped up behind him. The jeep seemed unharmed. So did the Stuka.
‘“Ere comes our ‘un,” Yorkie said, and went on swearing calmly as he changed the pans on the K guns. But he wouldn’t be able to elevate them enough to shoot at a a dive-bomber coming from right above.
“It seems so,” de Carette said, surprised at how cool he sounded. He was terrified. He had been in a few night-time air raids in Egypt, and under artillery fire three times. But those had been impersonal, random affairs. Now a man in an aeroplane had chosen to kill him. There had been a choice and that man had decided to kill him, de Carette, rather than somebody else. It was unbelievable. As it toppled into the dive, the second Stuka looked like a gun barrel with wings.
He hauled the jeep around and accelerated furiously north, back up the track and into the diving aeroplane, hoping to force it to steepen its dive even further. But he was going too fast to look up.
