“Mafia, probably. I expect strangulation is full of old-fashioned symbolism. You know what they’re like.”
“Fortunately not.” The brutal crump of an explosion rattled Schramm’s window. “Hello!” the duty officer said. “Need help?”
“No,” Schramm said. Heavy machine-gun fire broke out. “Yes!” he shouted, and dropped the phone.
Guard duty was just killing time. Night guard duty was killing time that had died while you weren’t looking and so it went on forever. Eventually the body adjusted to this eternity. The heartbeat slowed, the eyes stopped searching, and the brain avoided all strenuous thought until it was barely ticking over.
People who never had to do it kept saying how important guard duty was. People like the station commander kept on about vigilance. You never saw him at five in the morning, so how did he know what he was talking about? The trick of doing guard duty was very simple. Take it as it comes. That’s how you get through the night. Very, very slowly. You don’t try and work it to death. That can’t be done, because there is no work. You relax and you let the night set its own sweet pace. You can’t change it, so you take it as it comes.
The two men on guard duty at Barce airfield main gate had been on their feet since two a.m. and they ached, literally ached, to sit down. Better yet, lie down. Their leg muscles were stiff, their knees hurt, their shoulders resented the weight of their rifles. Twenty minutes ago the NCO had opened the guardhouse door, told them to keep their eyes open, and shut it. Now he had his feet up, lucky bastard.
Only one vehicle had gone through since two a.m. Barce was dead. The guard was due to be relieved at six. Best not to think about it. Best not to think about anything. Just take it as it comes. That was the only way to treat the war: take it as it comes. Thus the two men on guard duty were not excited by the unhurried approach of a pair of dimmed headlights. One man yawned, the other rubbed his eyes. The vehicle slowed, made a turn of more than ninety degrees, and stopped. Evidently it was about to return the way it came. “Schramm?” the driver said. “Herr Major Paul Schramm?”
“Ja, ja,” one of the guards said.
Lampard reached out and gave him a rucksack. “Heil Hitler!” he said, and drove away. His presence had lasted seven seconds.
The NCO emerged and wanted to know what was going on. The guards told him it was a delivery for Major Schramm. The NCO squatted on his heels and tried to open the rucksack, but its drawstring had been tightly knotted. The bombs inside were on a one-minute fuse. He was still worrying at the knot when they exploded. The three bodies got hurled away with their arms outstretched in a caricatured gesture of surprise.
Lampard’s jeeps rushed the gate as soon as the flash lit up the night, but when they reached it the gate and the wooden guardhouse had gone, were in small pieces, many of them still tumbling from the sky. As he passed, Dunn pointed to another small building and his gunner gave it a four-second blast that knocked it flat. Perhaps it contained more guards, perhaps not. Either way, it was no longer a threat. For the first time all night, Dunn felt good.
Lampard knew this road. He had driven it before. The three jeeps enjoyed the luxury of a perfect surface; quite quickly they were up to fifty, sixty miles an hour and still gaining. Lampard saw lights coming at them, head-on. “Don’t slow down!” he shouted. A flashing red was added. A siren wailed. The headlights blazed. It was a fire truck, ten times as big as a jeep and not about to give way. Lampard’s driver knew this and he acted fast. The jeep left the road and was fishtailing violently through a stretch of gravel as the fire truck thundered by. Lampard looked back at the cloud of dust and screwed up his face, waiting for a crash that never came. The other two jeeps appeared, they all found the road, they picked up speed.
The road swung sharp left. “Straight on,” Lampard ordered. Now they were on the actual airfield. Somewhere behind them a giant klaxon was letting off angry blasts. The other jeeps pulled up and drove alongside Lampard, all their headlights full on, searching for aircraft. They found patches of mist, a stack of oil drums, a small broken glider, more mist, but no aircraft.
The patrol changed direction, and their beams swept over another barren area. Lampard was furiously trying to remember the layout at Barce. They changed direction again, and again the night was empty. The place was so bloody big. What if they’d parked their planes in a far corner? What if Barce was another Maghrun? Two searchlights came on, brilliant sticks of light, prodding the sky. Once again the three jeeps swung and searched a fresh, dead spot. Flak began to be pumped up one searchlight beam: bombs meant bombers. In the jeep on Lampard’s left, Sergeant Davis fired a brief burst and his driver steered, making his headlights follow the tracer. Lampard saw a row of fighters, 109s, a dozen at least. He shouted with delight.
That burst finally convinced somebody in airfield defense. A light machine gun opened up, then another. Lampard’s driver switched his headlights off. The others copied him. Now that they knew where the target was they could drive blind.
Paul Schramm was a spectator to all this. He stood on the narrow balcony outside his bedroom, listened to the rise and fall of jeep engines, saw the sweep of headlights and the pulse of tracer. He felt detached, almost remote. There was nothing he could do.
Benno Hoffmann joined him. “How did they get in?” he asked.
“Through the main gate. They just blasted their way in. I’ve sent for help. The army’s on its way.”
“Can’t we hit them with something? Mortars, or…”
“Too late, Benno. We’d be just as likely to hit our own aircraft now.”
“Yes, of course.” Hoffmann made himself comfortable in a chair. “Might as well enjoy the show, I suppose.”
Lampard guessed the distance, reached across and hit the horn, and all the headlights came on. For a glorious second or two he was entranced by the spectacle of rows and rows of bright, clean Messerschmitt 109s, yellow at nose and wingtip, their canopies gleaming, perched on their undercarriages like well-trained hounds. Then the jeeps changed formation from line abreast to single file and the gunners swung the barrels to the flank and opened up.
The effect was cruel in its savagery: even Lampard was taken aback by the sheer intensity of this devastation. Each jeep carried four Vickers K machine guns, mounted in pairs: two at the front, two at the back. Each Vickers K fired a thousand rounds a minute. The three jeeps cruised parallel to the German airplanes and blasted twelve thousand rounds a minute into them. Some burst into flames at once: headlights were no longer needed. The noise was frightening: the night seemed to be battered to bits. The bullet-streams scythed through the undercarriages and the fighters crashed on their bellies. Petrol tanks ignited, blew machines apart, sprayed blazing fuel over other fighters. The jeeps reached the end of the row and one German squadron lay wrecked. Their flames lit up a second row and the jeeps turned on it. The gunners hosed bullets up and down these fresh targets, and as they too exploded it was inevitable that flying debris would fall through the infrared beams and trigger Schramm’s defensive system. His fixed machine guns blazed loyally at the empty air, their voice drowned in the huge roar of the Vickers Ks. It was a scene of mechanized and professional madness. Dunn’s mouth was open so long that it dried inside and he could not swallow or salivate. He blinked as one of the searchlights came down and added its beam to the bonfire. Sergeant Davis swung his Vickers. His eyes were squeezed shut but the blinding glare penetrated them. He aimed where the glare was worst and kept firing until it went out. For a long time after that, luminous blossoms of changing color swamped his vision.