There was a long silence. They were impressed.
“I’ll put a new needle in the gramophone,” Skull said. “I think we can afford it.” He went off to his tent.
“Give us some rum,” Barton said. The adjutant was holding the bottle.
“Did we hit anything?” Hick asked. “I couldn’t see.”
Barton took the glass and drank. “I don’t know,” he said. “I have a feeling some of the bombs didn’t go off.” Fifty yards away a dance band began to play.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Easy Bit
Lampard saw a German foot-patrol. Ten or twelve men were sitting round a fire on a distant hillside. They all stood up when the vehicles went by. Lampard had put his captured Mercedes truck at the front and Malplacket’s Fiat station-wagon at the tail, and he hoped the dust would obscure what was in between. He waved, and a couple of Germans waved back. Lester saw them, and he too waved. “Bunch of krauts back there,” he said. He amazed himself by his bravery.
Later they passed another foot-patrol. “Bip your horn,” Lampard said. The driver did, twice, and almost everyone waved. “All a matter of confidence,” Lampard said.
It was dark when they stopped near the coast road. Lampard walked to the rear. “Parting of the ways,” he told Lester and Malplacket. “Turn right and Benghazi’s twenty kilometers up the road. We’ll wait at the rendezvous until forty-eight hours from now, not a minute longer.” The rendezvous was a grid reference in the desert. “If anyone stops you, tell them you’re staff officers. Shout at them. That’s quite effective sometimes, so I’m told. Good luck.”
They shook hands. Malplacket drove his Fiat past the patrol and disappeared.
The three armed jeeps were hidden in some scrub.
The raiding party got into the Mercedes and the Ford trucks. A red light was hung on the Ford’s tail-gate. They moved up to the road and waited.
Thirty minutes later they were still waiting. A few vehicles had passed, but they were all heading north. Nothing went south. For most of the time the night was silent.
Lampard got out and strolled back to Dunn in the Ford. “Last night we couldn’t cross the road for the traffic,” he said. “I wonder what’s up?”
“Bridge down somewhere, maybe. Or it could be just an old-fashioned pile-up. Accidents happen, even in a war.”
They waited. The tang of some wild herb hung in the air: rosemary perhaps. After a while someone snored softly, then grunted as he got a dig in the ribs. Lampard was not surprised; on his first raid he himself had dozed off while the enemy barbed-wire was being cut. It was a curious response to extreme danger. Maybe the body reacted to heavy stress by switching off, or maybe it was just the phlegmatic British character expressing itself… Dunn clicked his fingers. Something was coming. Lampard hurried back to the cab. Engines were started.
It was a big road convoy and it was traveling fast. Lampard searched the darkness, trying to see where the convoy ended. It was painfully long and the whomp-whomp-whomp-whomp of tires seemed endless. Then it ended. “Go!” he shouted and his driver made the truck jump forward. “Stop!” he bawled. “Stop, stop!” His driver trod violently on the brakes. Lampard got flung against the windscreen. “Well done,” he said. His temple was bleeding.
Dunn appeared at the window. “Flak wagon.” Lampard said. “Their last vehicle was a flak wagon. I couldn’t sit behind a lot of Huns with guns staring at me.”
“Don’t blame you. Enough to put a chap off his grub.”
After ten minutes the blood had congealed. No more traffic had appeared.
Lampard waited another five minutes and then called everyone together. “This is hopeless,” he said. “We could wait here all night. We’ll have to go alone, and if things get sticky at the checkpoint we’ll shoot it up and press on. No grenades. I don’t want shrapnel in the tires.”
They drove south, without lights. Lampard knew roughly how far it was to the checkpoint. As he counted the kilometers slowly clocking up on the dashboard he tried to think of a way to avoid a firefight at the checkpoint, assuming it was still there. Al Maghrun airfield drifted by on the right. One thing was certain: his German wasn’t good enough to fool the thickest sentry.
“Go slow,” he said. “It should be near here.” The Mercedes lost speed until it was crawling. In the end they both saw it at the same time: a small red light, a fleck of blood in the blackness. “Pull over,” he ordered. “Switch off.”
They sat and looked at it.
“Right,” Lampard said, and got out quietly. He found Sergeant Davis in the back of the Ford. “Take two bombs,” he said, “and plant them on the other side of the road, as near that roadblock as you can get. We’ve got some short fuses, haven’t we? Good. You’ll have to work out the timing. The point is, I want you back here so we can drive there and arrive just as they explode.”
“Ah. Not too near the roadblock, then,” Davis said. “You don’t want us to get blown up. It’s a whatsit.”
“Distraction.”
“That’s the word. Destruction.” Davis stuffed bombs inside his battledress blouse, picked out some pencil-fuses, and disappeared into the night as if he had fallen down a well.
He was back in six minutes, breathless and pleased. “Five-minute fuses,” he said. He checked his watch. “I set them exactly… um… three minutes ago… now. You don’t need to start yet. Give it a minute.”
“Have some chocolate,” Dunn said.
They got back into the trucks. “They’re listening to the bloody radio,” Davis said. “Lili bloody Marlene again.”
Lampard watched the second hand nibble its way around the dial. “Go,” he said. “Nice and steady.”
A guard came out of the hut, carrying a hurricane lamp, as the Mercedes trundled up to the barrier pole and stopped. Two more men followed. All were armed. One had a clipboard. He put a boot on the step of the cab and asked a question. Lampard began scrabbling through a bundle of papers he had found clipped to the dash, and muttered an answer, but the pencil gripped between his teeth turned it to gibberish. When the man said something else, Lampard turned to the driver and made an incoherent inquiry. The driver looked at him and shrugged. Lampard almost handed the bundle of papers to the guard, changed his mind halfway, and went back to scrabbling and muttering. Saliva dripped from the pencil. The guard banged impatiently on the door with his fist. The first bomb exploded with a blinding crack that swayed the truck on its springs. The guard fell on his backside. Lampard was briefly stunned and deafened so that he couldn’t hear himself. More guards poured from the hut. A machine gun opened up but its rattle was lost in the second explosion. At last Lampard heard his voice shouting, “Drive drive drive.” The Mercedes was already moving. The barrier pole snapped like a breadstick and bits flew everywhere.
The guards let them go. The place was under attack—bombs, mortars, shells, who the hell knew what?—and the safest place for two German trucks was obviously elsewhere. As the Ford charged after the Mercedes, Dunn saw in his wing mirror a spurt of tracer fire. It was not aimed at them, and he watched with interest until it was lost behind a bend.
After all that, Lampard missed the turn-off to Beda Fomm.
He knew it as soon as he heard the wheels rumble over the metal planking of a bridge. There had been no bridge between the roadblock and the turn-off. “We’ve overshot,” he said. The driver made a U-turn and the bridge rumbled again. Lampard was puzzled: how could he have made such a mistake? He must have been daydreaming. “Go slow,” he said.
A side road appeared, a soft and dusty gray-white in the blackness, and they pulled over. It didn’t look right. Lampard took Sergeant Davis and went to investigate. The others sat in the trucks and kept silent.