“Harris and Waterman. I got cross-examined too.”
“Jack’s report of that patrol was all balls,” Gibbon said. “You know and I know that Harris got killed because of a cock-up, and as for poor old Waterman…”
“God alone knows what Jack thought he was up to then,” Dunn said flatly.
“On the bloody spree, that’s what he was up to. On the razzle.”
Dunn was silent. He remembered Lampard on Barce airfield, collecting unused bombs as the pencil-fuses burned, seeking fresh targets, manic, unstoppable, when he should have been leading everyone back to the Jebel at high speed. He’d got away with it then. Jalo had been the same sort of lunacy only far more needless, and in broad daylight too; and Waterman had paid the price.
“Oh well,” he said. “The adj saw through him, didn’t he? Clever bloke, the adj. Nothing we can do about it now.” He was feeling sleepy. Gloomy talk usually did that to him.
“It’s your neck,” Gibbon said. “It’s your funeral.”
“Meaning what?”
“I think the man’s an addict. He’s got to have his dose of glory. If anything goes wrong, if he cocks it up, he’s got to have a double dose. He made a cock-up over Harris and that’s why he took us into Jalo, chasing the Luftwaffe, for God’s sake.”
“It might have worked.” But there was no passion in Dunn’s loyalty.
“So now he’s got two cock-ups to make up for. What’s worse, he lied about them and he got found out. That’s three cock-ups. What d’you think he’ll do next?”
“Hit Beda Fomm,” Dunn said. “As ordered. What else can he do?” Gibbon merely shook his head. “He’s the CO, Corky. What he says, goes.”
“I think his brakes have failed,” Gibbon said. “I think he can’t stop himself.”
It was at least fifty kilometers to Beda Fomm and the first twenty-odd would be over twisting, dipping tracks, so Lampard drove with the headlights on. He knew this part of the Jebel fairly well. It was likely that there were enemy patrols about, so the faster he moved, the better. This was like dashing through a rainstorm to miss the drops: it wasn’t logical, it didn’t always work, but what was the alternative?
They came out of the last slopes of the Jebel without having alarmed anything more than a couple of herds of goats.
The plain south of Benghazi was crisscrossed with farm tracks and camel trails. Lampard let Davis drive, while he tried to pick out a route toward Beda Fomm. Twice they almost blundered into military camps—first an infantry unit, to judge by the sea of tents, and then a squadron of tanks, black and motionless as cattle—and each time Davis had to back out. An hour of this wandering wore out Lampard’s patience. He could hear the rumble of heavy traffic only a few kilometers away. He aimed for the noise.
Davis found the coast road. It was busy. They waited until a long column of supply trucks roared by southbound; then Davis accelerated hard, slammed briskly through the gears, and added himself to the end of the line.
The column drove fast. After seven or eight minutes, Davis shouted and pointed to the right. Lampard saw an Mel 10 dimly illuminated in the shielded lights of a vehicle. Men moved, as flat as shadows. Probably a nightfighter, probably being serviced. “That must be Al Maghrun,” Lampard said. “Beda Fomm’s about ten kilometers, on the left.” But as he spoke, the column slowed down. And stopped.
Checkpoint.
Up ahead, flashlights flickered alongside the leading vehicle. Hurricane lamps, striped barriers, machine guns on tripods. Davis began to reverse. “Hang on, hang on,” Lampard said. He jumped down. The truck in front had a red lamp hooked to its tail-gate. He removed it and hooked it on the back of his own truck. “That makes us official,” he told Davis. “Now let’s see if they check everyone or just the leader of the band.”
The column moved off, and it was still picking up speed as the tail-end vehicle went through the checkpoint. Lampard waved slackly at a guard who was counting the trucks. “Pick the bones out of that, Hans,” he said.
Davis saw a turn-off where Beda Fomm ought to be and he drove down it. He parked and killed the engine. A wind had got up, bringing a strange, sharp smell. Davis took a good sniff. “Margate sands,” he said. “Bank holiday.” It was the smell of the sea.
The soil was sandy and it seemed to grow nothing but stunted pines and needle-sharp cactus. Lampard was convinced he knew which way the airfield lay, but after walking for forty minutes the night was still full of pines and cactus; and the slow, shuffling pace of their progress had become wearying. What’s more, dawn wasn’t far off.
“Stop,” Lampard said. “Chocolate.” He broke off two big chunks and gave one to Davis. As they stood and ate, a double row of warm yellow lights sprang into life and illuminated Beda Fomm. The perimeter was only fifty yards away. It was like a gift from the gods. The lights were runway beacons. After a while a Junkers Tri-Motor dropped out of the darkness and touched down. The beacons went out, but as the Junkers taxied to its arrival area the pilot used a spotlight, and the spotlight swept over a flock of 109s, widely dispersed.
On their way back, the captured truck broke down in the Jebel. Lampard and Davis hid it and walked home. They reached the camp just after eleven a.m., soaked in sweat, and ravenous. “Beda Fomm’s on,” Lampard told Dunn. “Briefing at sixteen-thirty, then we eat, then we go.” He looked around. “Where are the prisoners?”
“Gone. Sandy managed to signal an LRDG patrol that’s going home and they said they’d take the prisoners provided we threw in a case of tinned pears, so we did.”
“Commercial travelers,” Lampard said. “What else can you expect?”
Fanny Barton surprised Skull by asking him to select an enemy airfield for the next dive-bombing attack.
“Why?” Skull said. “You’ve always picked your own targets. What’s happened? Writer’s block? Brewer’s droop? Dropped your crayons?”
“I just thought you ought to earn your pay.”
“I see.” Skull searched the CO’s face and found nothing but serious intent. “There is no suitable target for three Kittybombers,” he said. “Not unless you count the field at Berka, which is very handy for the British War Cemetery outside Benghazi.”
“You’ll find something. If there’s nothing suitable, give me the least unsuitable. Teatime OK?”
Skull went off to his tent and fished out his maps. He read all the latest intelligence bumf that had come in on the Bombay. The Luftwaffe had plenty of airfields and thickets of flak batteries around each of them. How could men fly into targets like that? And yet he knew that Pip Patterson and Hick Hooper would follow Barton without hesitation, wherever he led. He knew they were conscious of the danger: he had seen fear in their eyes, during the pre-op briefings. Nevertheless, as combat approached, the pilots became intensely alive in a way that Skull could always recognize but never understand.
The doc appeared in the tent doorway and sat on his haunches. “I’ll give you five English pounds for that mawkish bit of sentimental slush,” he said. “This isn’t a joke. I don’t make jokes on such a lavish scale.”
Skull picked up the gramophone record of “Empty Saddles.” “This?”
“It’s rancid. The very words make me retch.”
“I like it. This is the voice of the common man you hear.”
“It’s a godawful dirge. We can’t avoid the dying but do we have to put up with the dirge?”
“The pilots like it too. Ask them. Ask Fanny.”
The doc’s face twisted as if he had toothache. “Play something else, can’t you? What’s on the other side?”
Skull turned the record over. “‘I’m Headin’ For the Last Round-up,’” he said. “Another gem.”