Walters came back, sweating and pleased. Connors came back with a dislocated finger and without his Sten; it had gone flying when he tumbled down a gully. Smedley came back with a bloody face: stone splinters had sliced his cheek open. Sergeant Davis snatched Connors’s hand when he wasn’t looking, straightened his finger with a clean jerk and caught him as he fainted. Peck did not come back.
They waited three minutes. Lampard had the body of the Oberst placed at the side of the trail, pistol in hand, facing the enemy. As an afterthought he scattered the remains of the money all about. “Should give them something to think about,” he said.
Still no Peck. Enemy fire had tailed off. Only an occasional bullet fizzed by.
“It’s four-forty,” Dunn said. “You can forget Peck.”
“What d’you reckon?” Lampard asked Smedley.
“Dunno, sir.” His words were weakened by the hole in his cheek. “We split up. He was firing, running about, making them think there was ten of him.” He shrugged. “Dunno, sir.”
The jeeps retreated at speed behind spurts of covering fire, and stopped after a quarter of a mile.
“You can bet your boots that Jerry patrol has raised the alarm,” Dunn said. “There’s still time to reach camp before dawn.” This night seemed to have lasted a week.
“Jolly good,” Lampard said. Dunn felt he had been talking to himself. “Sergeant Davis!” Lampard called. “Casualties?”
“One bullet through the leg. Some cuts from rock splinters. Smedley’s face you know about. That’s all. The jeeps are OK. We lost a bit of petrol from the jerricans. You can smell it.”
“That’s all right, then.” Lampard walked to the edge of the track and stared into the night. “Barce is down there. You can see the road from Benghazi.”
Dunn saw nothing but blackness. “Even if we got inside, the sun would be up before we could plant half the bombs,” he said. “Barce is a bloody big airfield. You remember.” Lampard said nothing. “It’s four-fifty,” Dunn said. “We simply haven’t got the time.”
“Bags of time. And won’t they be surprised?”
Lampard took the patrol out of the Jebel by the simplest possible means: he let gravity do the steering. As long as the jeeps were going downhill he knew they must be heading more or less north or northwest, toward the road that linked Barce and Benghazi. Often gravity was not a safe guide and he had to turn and drive along the contours until he found a track that the jeeps could skate down without falling out of control. Nevertheless, the night was full of the howling of gearboxes and the bellow of engines and the clash of metal on stone. This is insane, Dunn said to himself, over and over, until the word insane lost all meaning and became just a noise in his head.
They reached the bottom at five past five. Lampard did not pause. He bucketed across the fields and mounted the road at five-fifteen. That was when he stopped for a briefing.
“We’re not going to bomb their aircraft,” he announced. “No time. We’ll machine-gun them. Strafe ’em. First we leave bombs alongside this road, all the way to the airfield. Thirty-minute fuses. Save a few for the checkpoint at the gate. Short fuses there. We drive into Barce like the clappers of hell, shoot the daylights out of it and leave the same way.” He described his plan in detail, giving each jeep its position in the attack and each man his task. “All understood? Good. Off we go.”
An airman shook Paul Schramm awake at four fifty-five a.m. and gave him a piece of paper. It was a teletype. The message came from the headquarters of an infantry regiment based eight miles away, toward Benghazi. It was a copy of a signal received by the regiment from one of its patrols in the Jebel. Schramm had asked the regiment to inform him immediately if a patrol made contact with the enemy. Now, it seemed, one had. That was what the teletype said. Any normal person could have understood it in ten seconds. Fifteen, if he needed to find his reading glasses. Schramm was not normal at four fifty-five a.m. His eyes might be open but his brain was made of congealed fog.
He washed his face and read the teletype again. Then he put on his reading glasses again and this time it made some sense.
Time. What was the damn time? He found his watch and it said eleven-thirty. Impossible. Idiot watch was upside-down. Two minutes to five. Dawn in an hour. The SAS never raided just before dawn, it was crazy, how could they get away?
He telephoned the station duty officer, the duty NCO in charge of airfield defense and the ops officer in the control tower, each with the same message: risk of raid, stay alert. They did not sound alarmed. They had heard it before.
Next he telephoned the duty officer at Regimental HQ. “Any developments?” he asked.
“The shooting’s over. They pulled back. Our men are looking for bodies.”
“I see.” Schramm tried to imagine what it was like, clambering about the Jebel, searching for something that might not exist, in a very black night, with a lethal enemy somewhere in the darkness. “Look… No offense intended, but how sure are you that the unit your men ran into really was British?”
“It was armed, it had vehicles. What are the alternatives? Arab guerrillas? Deserters? Escaped prisoners of war? No. This outfit was too well organized. We took losses, major.”
“You’re not going to like this,” Schramm said.
That amused the duty officer. “Well,” he said, “if it’s too painful I shall just burst into tears, like we always do.”
“Maybe it was another German patrol, working in the opposite direction,” Schramm suggested. The duty officer said nothing. “You’re biting your lip,” Schramm said. “I can smell the blood.”
“Actually I’m eating a rather gruesome frankfurter. Well, I won’t say it’s never happened. Nothing benevolent about friendly fire. However, I can assure you that we have only one patrol operating in the Jebel right now. Just one.”
Schramm got dressed. His mouth tasted foul so he brushed his teeth. When he turned out the lights and opened a window there was still no hint of dawn. Well, the aircraft were safe, that was the great thing. In fact, he rather wished the SAS would have a go at them, just to prove the infrared beam. Not that it needed proving: it had been thoroughly tested by local paratroops and they had always set it off, even when they knew it was there and tried to crawl under it. The telephone rang.
“I don’t quite know how to tell you this.” It was the regimental duty officer again.
“I promise to be brave,” Schramm said.
“Here it comes, then. Our patrol in the Jebel has just found a body, and it’s an Oberst in his best uniform with a pistol in his hand. He wasn’t shot and his pistol is fully loaded. I expect you’d like to know how he was killed.”
“Please.”
“Strangled. Also there was money everywhere.”
“Strangled.” Schramm thought hard. Was this some kind of gruesome SAS trick? If so, what did it achieve? He could think of nothing. It was a mistake to see the SAS everywhere. “It could be part of a black-market racket,” he said. “Maybe this officer of ours was doing a deal with some Italians, they ran into your patrol, assumed it was a trap, killed him and left at top speed. I bet you that’s what it was.”
“Strangled,” the duty officer said. “That’s a funny way to murder a German officer in the middle of a gunfight.”