A Good Clean Fight (66 page)

*   *   *

As they walked back to the jeep, Lampard and Davis discussed what next.

Davis was all for lying up until nightfall and then driving
the last thirty miles to base camp. It might take most of the night, but they had plenty of time. They could move slowly and continuously, and there would be no shufti-kite to worry about.

Lampard wanted to go now. If they drove in the dark it would have to be without headlights. Too many Hun patrols were out looking for them. So they'd probably miss the track, drive into rocks, bust the jeeps. And they'd certainly get lost.

Davis said he was sure he could navigate from here to base camp in the dark.

Lampard said the trouble with night-driving was you couldn't see the ambush until it was too late.

After that they walked in silence.

Lampard called everyone together. “The good news is that Jerry is obviously rather annoyed by our raid on Barce,” he said. “The bad news is the Jebel is now swarming with enemy patrols. However, the good news is the Jebel is a very big place, with ten thousand wadis, and they can't search them all, or even a fraction. Now, we can either wait here until dark and crawl back to base, or we can make a dash for it with our eyes wide open. My decision is to make a dash for it. We go
now.”

As they dispersed, Connors said to Blake, “The bad news is I got the pox. The good news is you can have it if I get killed.”

“Charming,” Blake said. “Fucking charming.”

Lampard led. Battered as they were, the jeeps were remarkably quick and surefooted and he made them go fast. At the same time he showed proper caution. When he came up against a blind bend or a narrowing defile he stopped and sent a man ahead to recce. Davis approved.

They were moving southwest, against the grain of the Jebel. It meant making a series of long zigzags. Often they crossed the marks of half-tracks: the enemy had been here recently. Twice they saw foot-patrols on distant skylines.
Lampard quickly put the jeeps out of their sight and hoped for the best. After an hour they had covered fifteen miles. Now they were over the high ground of the Jebel and the gradient was helping them. No sign of the shufti-kite.

The landscape was starting to look familiar, and when he recognized the mouth of a wadi, Lampard knew they were less than a dozen miles from base camp and a brew-up. This was a good wadi: scoured smooth by flash-floods which had rolled all the boulders against its walls. Furthermore, there were no tire tracks in the sand. Lampard accelerated. The sooner they got in, the sooner they got out. Halfway through the wadi his jeep took a bend and nearly hit a pair of German trucks speeding in the opposite direction. Before he could shout, a fire-fight was raging.

There was neither time nor space for tactical subtlety or skilled maneuver. It was simply a matter of who fired first and who fired longest. The two pairs of Vickers Ks in the second jeep swamped the first German truck, killed the driver, killed the troops, sent the truck headlong into the stone wall of the wadi. As that happened the second German truck turned the corner and a machine-gunner on its cab found the jeep and sprayed it very thoroughly. The jeep had no protection, no armor, nowhere to hide. Sergeant Davis, Trooper Connors, Blake the fitter, all died. This was completed in a matter of a few seconds.

Lampard had overshot the action. In his desperation to reverse he found the wrong gear, bashed a wheel against a rock, found reverse, sent his jeep sprinting backward. There was a very brief point-blank battle between the double pair of Vickers Ks in his jeep and the machine-gunner in the second truck, aided by a dozen rifles. The German soldiers had been well drilled: they got off a useful volley of shots and the machine-gunner fired over their heads. But the Vickers Ks erupted with a blast of two hundred bullets in five seconds. They had been designed
to destroy airplanes. They wiped out the second truck. It was a mismatch, the dream of every soldier, to find the enemy exposed and out-gunned and to overwhelm him, kill him ten times over, give him not the fraction of a chance. The fight was over in the time a man might hold his breath. The echoes bounced from wall to wall of the wadi like a ball game. The second truck caught fire. Its fuel tank exploded with a gentle, almost apologetic,
boom.

The mismatch had not been complete. Of the three men with Lampard in his jeep, one—a gunner called Sharp—was dying, hit by a bullet in the chest. Another, Menzies, had a broken jaw, smashed by a spinning ricochet. He was in great pain; he could barely spit out the fragments of teeth that threatened to choke him. Trooper Smedley was untouched, although the hole in his cheek had started to bleed again. Lampard had been largely protected by the gunners alongside and behind him. A bullet had struck his right ear and left it flapping; blood coated his face and neck. The jeep would not start.

While Menzies and Smedley carried Sharp away, Lampard ran back and looked at Sergeant Davis's jeep. The three men in it were sprawled or twisted in the uncomfortable attitudes of most battlefield corpses. He took their identity discs. This was a messy business: it left his hands sticky with blood. Already the flies had begun to feast. It would be a great day in fly history. He spread pieces of clothing over the dead faces. “Rest in peace,” he said. This jeep would not start either. The shimmer of spilled petrol hung around its broken tanks.

Menzies and Smedley were kneeling beside Sharp. His chest was a mass of sodden field-dressings and his eyes were almost closed. Lampard kneeled and gripped Sharp's hand. Tiny pink bubbles kept forming and breaking and reforming at Sharp's mouth. The bubbles got smaller and fewer, and he died. Lampard took his identity disc. “Rest
in peace,” he said. “The jeeps are kaput. We'll have to walk. Bring water and a weapon.”

*   *   *

Fort Lamy seemed like a very pleasant town. The streets were broad and lined with shade trees. Schramm saw a square with a fountain playing. A restaurant had tables outside it. The food in Fort Lamy would be a lot better than in Benghazi: trust the French to export the best part of their culture to the colonies! “Nice place to sit out the war,” he said.

“If there's just one fighter with loaded guns here you won't be going home to Barce,” the pilot said.

“Relax. They arm the Hurricanes in Egypt.”

“So you say.” The pilot was nervous. He had never made such a low, slow approach to a target in broad daylight. He could see people down there pointing up at him. If the airfield had just one anti-aircraft gun it could scarcely miss.

“Left a little,” di Marco said. He had already seen aerodrome buildings ahead. The pilot adjusted.

“Tell me when you want a smoke marker,” he said. By dropping a marker he could discover the wind strength and direction.

“Not necessary,” di Marco said. Smoke from chimneys was rising almost vertically. He lay face-down in the nose, looking through the bomb-sight.

Schramm saw the Hurricanes before the Heinkel crossed the boundary. They were lined up, wingtip to wingtip, as if on parade. He counted twenty-three. “Left, left,” di Marco said. “More . . . more . . . more . . . No, that's not good. We're off-target. Make another approach, please.”

As they flew over the Hurricanes, Schramm realized that there was no flak, no tracer, and nobody was taking off. The whole scene was placid. A few men looked up. One ran.

Their second approach was better, and di Marco bombed after only a few corrections. They all felt the Heinkel bounce a little when the load detached. Schramm turned and looked back as the Heinkel banked and climbed. Di Marco's aim had been precise. One instant the Hurricanes stood like perfect reproductions of each other; the next instant the stick of bombs rapidly flowered along their line, so quickly that it looked like a magician's trick, a string of silent blossoms of energy destroying the fighters and flinging the bits high in the air.

“Well done,” Schramm said. It seemed inadequate.

“Make a circuit,” di Marco said.

More people were out on the airfield now; quite a crowd. Schramm thought he could see men with rifles, but of course the range was hopeless. Smoke and dust were thinning over the Hurricanes' graveyard. Recognizable pieces lay all around: wingtips, wheels, rudders, propellers. Several wrecks were burning.

They flew around the field. “I think I see some machines inside that hangar,” the pilot said.

“Not fighters,” di Marco said. “There is a fuel dump in the northeastern corner of the field. We should bomb that.”

They made their approach. Schramm saw a stack of square tins that looked as big as a small house. “Right . . .” di Marco said. “Steady. Right . . . Steady. Now left . . . Steady. Good. Good. Good. Bombs gone.” Again the Heinkel bucked a little.

The stick straddled the fuel dump. It set off a series of explosions, each greater than the last, each pumping a rush of flame that burst like a balloon to release a bigger, fiercer upsurge. Rich black smoke boiled into the sky. Within a minute it was twice as high as the bomber. Schramm had nothing to say. This was more than a fire. It was an act of God. It was beyond words.

The pilot made half a circuit so that di Marco could take
photographs. Then he put the nose down, crossed the field low and flat out, and beat up the crowd. Most of them ducked; Schramm did not blame them. The Heinkel climbed steeply over the hangars and cruised away. “Steer zero-two-zero,” di Marco told him.

“I know,” the pilot said.

“Well, that was fairly successful,” Schramm said.

“That was the easy bit,” the pilot said. “That was like going to the bar on the corner for a beer.”

“How much fuel have we got?”

“Not enough,” the pilot said. “But we all knew that before we left, didn't we?”

*   *   *

The first signal reached Cairo while the Fort Lamy fire crew was still hosing down the remains of the Hurricanes.

There was nothing they could do about the fuel dump. The heat was so intense that you could make toast a hundred yards from the flames, if you were stupid enough to stand there. Much of the fuel had been stored underground. The fire was only beginning when the bomber left the scene. Sixty thousand gallons of aviation fuel takes a lot of burning.

News of the raid hit Middle East HQ like a fox in a chicken house. Quite senior officers were seen running in its corridors. Even more senior officers were tracked down to Shepheard's, or the Gezira, or a seat in the stalls for
Gone with the Wind
, and rushed back to their offices.

At first some people refused to believe the report.
Fort Lamy bombed? Don't be absurd. Some radio operator's got himself blotto on the local hooch.
Signals bounced back and forth. The raid was confirmed, clarified, expanded, personally witnessed and endorsed by the Fort Lamy station commander. A solitary Heinkel had taken out twenty-three Hurricanes and three months' fuel supply.

A brash young squadron leader, freshly arrived from England to fetch and carry for an air vice-marshal, couldn't see what all the fuss was about. “It's a bit cheeky, I agree, sir,” he said, “but we often lose more than that to the U-boats in a single convoy, so . . .”

“Don't be a bloody idiot all your life,” the air vicemarshal growled. They were pounding along a corridor to a suddenly urgent meeting. “The Takoradi Trail's an artery. In fact it's
the
artery, there isn't another, and we've been getting fifty Hurricanes a week pumped up it. Now this cocky Hun stooges across from God knows where and chops the artery! There's blood all over Chad, and our hopes of air superiority up the blue have gone down the bog! Got it now?”

“Yes sir.” The squadron leader put on a spurt and opened the door to the room inside which sudden urgency was already loud.

The meeting made some fast decisions. Within minutes, signals went top secret, top priority, to the station commanders at Maiduguri, Geneina and El Fasher—stages on the Takoradi Trail to the west or east of Fort Lamy—ordering all aircraft to be dispersed immediately. Ditto fuel supplies.

By now an expert on the Heinkel 111 had been found and the meeting was pretty confident that the raider must have refueled somewhere in the desert. There was much stabbing of index fingers at various spots on the map of North Africa, and a short shock when it was realized that to the north of Nigeria lay the French province of Niger. Unlike Chad, Niger had remained loyal to the Vichy Government in France. Niger was therefore stiff with collaborationists, and if the Luftwaffe had set up a refueling airstrip inside Niger, that would put the field at Kano within easy range. Warning signals went to Kano, in Nigeria. Also to El Obeid and Khartoum, in Sudan. Christ Almighty, if one obsolescent Heinkel could knock out Fort Lamy, nowhere on the Trail was safe.

Meanwhile, somebody had been talking to the Heinkel expert about the bomber's speed.

“Well,” he said, “given a pair of good engines, properly serviced, and assuming no headwind, I'd say a decent pilot might crank two hundred and fifty miles an hour out of her. But this chap won't be doing that, of course. He'll be cruising at the most fuel-efficient speed, which is somewhere in the region of a hundred and eighty miles an hour. Perhaps a hundred and eighty-five as time goes by and his tanks get lighter.”

They returned to the map. Assuming he was flying back to Libya—and that made more sense than going by northern Niger, which was nothing but sand seas and rocks, an enormous distance from anywhere, and therefore not an easy place to stockpile jerricans of petrol—assuming he was trudging home to Libya, where was he now?

South of the Tibesti Mountains, that's where.

For the first time, the meeting brightened up.

The bugger still had something like seven hundred miles to go. At a hundred and eighty miles an hour. There was time to find him and bust him. It wouldn't help Fort Lamy, but it might make the Luftwaffe think again.