“I thought you might.”
“It raised the whole tone of the occasion.”
“Let’s say it helped. Frankly, there’s not a hell of a lot one can say at times like this. Ah… many thanks.” Bletchley smiled and accepted a mug of tea from an airman. “Who was Saul?” he asked.
“First king of Israel. Fought the Philistines, quarreled with the high priest, went off his head, killed himself.”
“Doolally, I expect. The desert doesn’t change much, does it?”
The Bombay flew out with Bletchley, Kellaway, the doctor and all but a very few ground crew. That left Barton, Hooper, Skull and the signals officer, Prescott. Prescott asked Skull why he stayed. “For the sake of the children, of course,” Skull said. Prescott stared.
Bletchley had brought a new gramophone record: Geraldo and his orchestra, with Sam Brown singing “A Foggy Day in London Town.” They all stood around and listened. “Crap,” Barton said. He took the disc and sent it spinning into the desert. “Play Bowlly,” he ordered. “Play ‘Empty Saddles.’ That’s real music.”
Defa’s oasis came over the horizon exactly where di Marco had promised it would be. There was no need for the Heinkel pilot to alter course; he simply let the nose sink and eventually he flew the bomber onto the airstrip and made a perfect three-point landing. One piece of professionalism deserved another.
The oasis was just a fistful of dusty palms and a well, with a couple of camels sneering at the new arrival. The camels had already seen two Junkers Tri-Motor transport planes come in, so they were not impressed by a Heinkel 111.
Everyone got out of the Heinkel and stretched their legs. “Nice piece of navigation,” Schramm said to di Marco.
“That was the easy bit,” the pilot said. “That was like taking a tram across Hamburg.”
Already, crewmen from the transports were refueling the Heinkel from jerricans. The stink of petrol drifted with the breeze and Schramm took a stroll to escape it. Not far. After the coolness of cruising at eight thousand feet, Defa was a swamp of heat. He sat under the wing of the nearest Junkers and did his sweating privately. The flies soon got wind of it and arrived to taste a new vintage.
The pilot and di Marco came and joined him.
“She doesn’t look big enough,” Schramm said. The Heinkel 111 had two engines and a fuselage like an expensive cigar, curved and streamlined from end to end. “How big is she?”
“Not big enough,” the pilot said. “But you don’t want to worry about that because she’s actually bigger inside than she is outside.”
“That’s clever.”
“It’s brilliant.”
“All right, it’s brilliant. How did Dr. Heinkel do it?”
“He didn’t. We did. We dumped all the junk the Luftwaffe keeps stuffing into these poor beasts. We threw out all the guns and ammo, all the armor-plating, the oxygen bottles, the heater.”
“Also the parachutes,” di Marco said.
“You threw out the parachutes?”
“Certainly,” the pilot said. “You know how much a parachute weighs? Ten kilograms. We lost the navigator’s table, the gunners’ seats, several black boxes and the aviator’s thunderbox, so if you haven’t moved your bowels today you’d better do it now. We also cut the crusts off the sandwiches and took the pips out of the oranges.”
“Amazing,” Schramm said. “So how far will she fly now?”
“God knows. Normal loaded weight is twelve thousand kilograms. When they’ve finished topping up all the extra tanks she’ll be well over the maximum permissible overloaded weight, which is fourteen thousand kilograms. About two thousand kilograms of that is bombs.”
“Maybe she won’t fly at all. I mean, if she’s heavier than the maximum permissible overloaded weight then how do you—”
“You’re right, I don’t.” He helped Schramm to his feet. The ground crew were screwing on the fuel caps.
“I’m surprised you agreed to take me,” Schramm said. “I’m just useless weight.”
“Well, the general insisted on an observer and you can fly her for a bit. It’s going to be a long day. Besides, you’re fairly thin and you’ve had a haircut.”
They stopped by the starboard wheel. He unzipped his flying overalls. “This is the place recommended by the manufacturer’s manual,” he said. Schramm unzipped and they pissed on the wheel. “Every little helps,” the pilot said.
He taxied to the very end of the airstrip and ran up the engines until the bomber was shaking and the props were screaming. Even so, when he waved the chocks away the Heinkel seemed to waddle forward and there was no eagerness in the way it worked itself up to a fast trundle. Halfway down the strip the tail came up, grudgingly, like a nagged husband, and now the wings were slicing the air with some efficiency. Yet for all the lift they created, they were dragging a load that the Heinkel had never been designed to carry. The throttles were wide open. The exhaust stubs were pumping smoke. It was not the greatest airstrip in Libya and the pilot’s teeth clenched every time his wheels thumped a ridge. It wasn’t the longest airstrip either. As the Heinkel ate up the final few yards the pilot said silently Goodbye Mama and eased the control column back. Maybe the wheels bounced her off a bigger ridge than usual, or maybe she was ready to fly, or maybe God reached down and changed the laws of science. The pilot didn’t know and he didn’t care. The bomber flirted with the desert for a mile or two as he retracted the wheels. After that she climbed like a pregnant duck. It was thirty minutes before he told himself he could relax and an hour before his jaws completely unclenched.
The two jeeps sat in a dark corner of the twisting wadi. The sound of the engines of the Italian biplanes rolled around the sky like an endless echo. The survivors of Lampard’s patrol ate dates, sipped water, cleaned weapons, filled petrol tanks and treated the wounded. Apart from the man with a bullet-hole in his leg, two men had been hit by the CR42s: one in the arm, one in the stomach. The arm was broken. The stomach wound was very bad.
Lampard and Sergeant Davis walked back to the entrance to the wadi, keeping in the hard shadow all the way. The burning jeep lay in clear view, on its side, sending up smoke as rich as black velvet. They counted three bodies, none moving. Davis thought he could see the leg of the fourth man sticking out from a patch of camel-thorn, but Davis had banged his head on one of the Vickers when his jeep swerved sharply and he got double vision if he looked at things too hard.
“They’ll see us if we go out there,” he said.
“Somebody might be alive,” Lampard said. “I hate to just leave them.”
“Even if he’s still alive he’ll be half-dead. Best let the German medics have him. They can’t be far away, can they?”
They walked back to the jeeps. No need to discuss the situation. It was all too stark. Impossible to move while the Italian aircraft were overhead; yet every minute they waited brought enemy infantry nearer, guided by the marker of smoke.
“How interesting,” Skull said. “How very interesting.” He read on. “My goodness,” he said. In the distance a Kittyhawk’s engine turned over, coughed and died. “Yes indeed,” he said, with a suppressed chuckle, and turned a page. “All too true.” He read on, eyebrows up, spectacles down. An overheated breeze came out of the desert, rattled the canvas sunscreen like a bad-tempered child seeking attention, and moved on, ignored. “Mmmm,” Skull said.
“Some of us are trying to sleep,” Prescott muttered.
“What’s that?” Hooper asked Skull.
“This? Oh… nothing special. Pinky Dalgleish’s diary. I took it off Uncle when he was doolally, because it seemed to upset him. Mind you, I can see why.” He began reading again.