“I see.” Lampard tried to read Davis’s expression in the night and failed. “Well, this will either be an outstanding cock-up or you’ll get a large medal. Take Blake with you, see what you can find, come back here. Use that staff car. Better not take the Oberst. You’ve got an hour.”
The dead officer had been left sitting behind the wheel and had begun to stiffen in that position, so he was carried to the front seat of the Ford. Davis was relieved to see that his eyelids had fallen until they had almost closed. Strangulation was all very well, but it played merry hell with the eyeballs. Davis was not squeamish; it was just that, given a choice, he preferred people to keep their eyeballs to themselves.
The staff car left. Everyone had something to eat: slabs of bully on biscuit. Lampard was a great believer in eating whenever you could.
A breeze had sprung up, rustling the trees. It was possible to talk softly.
“I didn’t realize you had such strong hands,” Dunn said to Trooper Smedley.
“It’s all in the thumbs,” Smedley said. “I used to tear telephone books in half as a sort of party trick.” He spoke mildly.
“Anyone can do that,” Peck said.
“Not three books at a time.” That silenced Peck. “People got tired of it, so I used different things,” Smedley said. “I tore up tarpaulins, sheets of plywood and rolls of linoleum. You can tear up anything if you’ve got the hands. I tore up a complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica once. It’s all in the thumbs. After a while it comes natural, but you got to practice. If you want to be good at anything, you got to stick at it.”
“Rome wasn’t burned in a day,” Peck observed.
“Corporal Harris once told me he’d killed a full-grown sheep when he was a boy,” Dunn said.
“With his bare hands?” Smedley asked.
“No. He said he used a knife.”
They waited for Smedley’s reaction. “That’s all very well,” he said, “but what’s he going to do when he hasn’t got a knife?”
“Harris always had a knife,” Lampard announced. “Harris killed two sentries with it on our last raid, perhaps more. Unfortunately one of them stabbed him in the stomach. He concealed his wound in case it slowed down the patrol. A rough diamond, but a very gallant soldier.” Lampard swallowed. “The desert is his grave,” he added.
Nobody was going to argue, but total disbelief hung in the air like static electricity. “Bit of bully left,” Dunn said swiftly. “Anyone want the last bit of bully? Shame to waste it. Peck, have a bite.” The danger passed.
At twenty minutes past midnight the staff car returned. “Dead easy,” Davis said.
Lampard let him lead. There were salt marshes on the seaward side of the coastal road and Davis had found a causeway that flanked them. It was narrow and in many places broken, so the trucks went very slowly. The best part of an hour had passed before Davis turned right, into a wandering track that eventually found the perimeter of Al Maghrun airfield. It was big and black. The only noise was the distant rumble of traffic on the coastal road.
Lampard sent Dunn and Peck to recce. “No bombs,” he said. “If you get bumped off I don’t want them to know why you’re here. Make it snappy.”
The snappiest they could make it was thirty-five minutes, by which time they had searched Al Maghrun and found it empty of aircraft. “There’s some blokes asleep in a billet and a lot of oilstains on the grass,” Dunn said. “That’s all.”
Another disappointment. Sometimes a raid seemed to be jinxed; sometimes a leader seemed cursed with ill-luck. Lampard sensed a slump of spirits and responded instantly with the British army’s answer to all misfortune. “Time for a brew-up, sergeant,” he said. Long experience had shown that there was no reverse that did not look better after a mug of hot tea. When the operation was a shambles and the situation seemed hopeless, it was time for a brew-up.
They had brought the makings with them. The desert stove—a tin of petrol-soaked sand—was placed where it was hidden between the trucks. There was still a risk of its being seen, but Lampard reckoned that if Al Maghrun really was not operating the risk was worth taking. “We should be flattered,” he said. “Obviously the enemy’s moving his planes from place to place to try and baffle us.”
Nobody said anything. What they were not saying was quite clear: tonight the enemy had succeeded.
The water boiled. A handful of tea was thrown into it. The brew foamed and seethed.
“I suppose there’s nothing to stop us going back to camp now and trying again tomorrow night,” Dunn said.
“I hate to do that,” Lampard said.
Dunn immediately thought: His brakes have failed. He can’t stop himself.
A tin of condensed milk and half a pound of sugar got stirred in. The result was strong, sweet, hot and immediately cheering.
“Dawn in four hours,” Dunn said. “Not much time to recce somewhere else and raid it and still get into the Jebel.”
“Of course there’s one place we don’t need to recce,” Lampard said. “We’ve been there before.”
“Barce,” Davis said.
They finished their tea in silence; not because they disliked the suggestion but because it was the patrol leader’s idea and his decision. “What d’you think?” he asked Mike Dunn.
For the first, and last, time, Dunn did not answer him.
“Hello?” Lampard said. “Anyone at home?”
“Does it matter what I think?”
“How can I tell till I hear what you’ve said?”
“All right.” Dunn threw his dregs into the dying fire. “I think we should return to camp and try again tomorrow night. I think we ought to recce Barce first because the defenses have almost certainly changed since the last time. I think if we try to hit Barce tonight we’ll run out of darkness before we’re safe.”
“Ah. Any more?”
“And I think I’m wasting my breath because you’ve made up your mind.” Some of the men laughed at that, although the harshness in Dunn’s voice was surprising.
“As to being safe,” Lampard said, “we’re never going to be that. We left our calling card on the enemy with those bombs at the checkpoint. Also he’s missing one large colonel. And Barce is the ideal target because they’ll never expect another raid so soon.”
“You’re guessing,” Dunn said.
“If you want to live by a timetable, old chap, you should have joined the GWR, not the SAS.” Lampard spoke gently, and won more laughter. “I’ll give you one cast-iron certainty. If we hit Barce twice, the Hun will definitely wet his knickers.”
“Not half,” said Trooper Smedley.
“How far is Barce from here?” Lampard asked Dunn.
“Couple of hours.”
“We’ll dump these trucks and take the jeeps. Off we go, then.”
As they dispersed to the vehicles, Peck nudged Blake and muttered, “What’s up with old Dunn, then?”
“Time of the month.”
“Don’t be so bloody daft.”
“Well, don’t ask such bloody daft questions.”
Davis navigated them around the perimeter of Al Maghrun until they reached the coastal road; then Lampard took over. He decided he wanted the corpse of the Oberst beside him, in the passenger seat of the staff car. It was fetched from the Ford, the tunic was removed, and the body was lashed to the seat with a length of cord under its armpits. The tunic was slit up the back and replaced on the body, all buttoned-up and tucked-in so the cord was invisible. With its cap on and its hands in its lap, the corpse looked very convincing.
Davis noticed some stiff triangular pennants in the back of the car. Lampard chose two and fitted them into sockets on the wings. Meanwhile Dunn had discovered a briefcase, forced the lock and found various official papers and quite a lot of money. Lampard took charge of it all. “You never know,” he said.