Later that day he was taken to Benghazi and for a week he was interrogated, sometimes brutally, sometimes not. There was little he could tell them, and nothing about spies or raids or sabotage or intelligence. At the end of a week they shot him. First he had been tried and found guilty. It was all perfectly legitimate.
Lampard decided to make a run for it. His patrol was down to seven men and three of them were wounded. Some of the others had taken a few knocks.
Before he could tell them his decision, the CR42s left. Their engines faded; within seconds it was hard to hear them.
“No stamina,” someone said. “Gone to lunch.”
“Let’s go,” Lampard said.
He drove the first jeep, not fast, always approaching the bends with caution in case the enemy had somehow sneaked into the wadi. Its narrow walls reflected the rumble of the jeeps and revealed only a narrow strip of sky; which was why none of the patrol heard or saw the Stukas until the first bomb fell. It created a high brown fountain of earth somewhere ahead, followed by a thundercrack of a bang, and then, much later, a shove of air as the blast found its way up the wadi. Lampard stopped. He looked up, and saw the Stuka soaring as if it were performing at an aerobatic show.
Sergeant Davis appeared beside him. “Now what are the buggers up to?” he said.
They waited, and caught a glimpse of a second Stuka in its dive, and they heard the steady scream of its air-brakes. Again, the explosion was far ahead.
“They’re bombing that end of our wadi,” Lampard said. “They’re trying to box us in. They can’t see us but they know we’re in here.”
“Stukas this end, troops the other.”
“If they’re bombing that end, it means there are no Hun troops in front of us,” Lampard said. “It also means the air’s going to be thick with dust, I hope. It’s worth a try, anyway.”
They drove hard, and saw the mouth of the wadi just as another Stuka pulled out of its dive and they could actually watch its bomb continue the plunge until it vanished into a fog of dust and smoke. The explosion radiated dirt and debris around a sullen flash of red, and its blast made the jeeps rock on their springs. Lampard counted to five and charged into the muck before another Stuka could drop its load.
The exit was not blocked: no bomb had toppled its walls; but it was badly cratered. Davis lost sight of Lampard’s jeep almost at once. He squared his wheel to dodge a rock the size of an anvil and ended up slithering into a crater that steamed with a choking chemical stink. The other side looked too steep but he charged it, and it was too steep. The jeep got halfway and spun its wheels. “Out and shove!” he bawled. They manhandled the jeep, its tires smoking with effort, and it climbed out of the hole. Another crater came out of the dust. He swung away from it and his wheels began bouncing off rocks. There seemed to be a hundred. But his double vision was now permanent, so maybe there were only fifty. Too many, anyway. He backed up and tried the other side of the crater. Both craters. And they both had two edges. So what? He had four hands. He chose the wrong edge and felt the jeep lurch and wander like a drunk. He stamped on the brake, set the handbrake, got out. “You drive!” he shouted. The jeep was teetering, as ready to fall as to stay. He joined the manhandlers, twice as powerful now with his four hands, and they coaxed the thing back onto safe ground. By now they were outside the wadi, and there was more space to work in. They ran alongside the jeep, pointing at rocks and potholes ahead. Davis heard an old familiar scream in the sky. “Get in!” he shouted. They were already scrambling aboard. The driver glanced back once and put his foot to the floor. The fog of dust was thinning. The bomb-blast seemed to urge the jeep on its way.
Lampard’s jeep was waiting under the inevitable, the invaluable acacia trees. Thank God for acacias. They were like military umbrellas: high enough to get a jeep under, low enough to hide it. The jeeps moved from patch to patch of cover and the Stukas seemed not to notice. The jeeps found a stretch of cliff face and used its black shadow to hide in. They fled, separately, across a bare plateau and met up in a mile-wide wadi where they hid in some scrub. It had been hard driving: hard on the jeeps and even harder on the casualties. The man with the stomach wound was dead.
“Skull’s never flown,” Barton said. “Skull’s a fucking penguin. What does he know?”
He was still stiff with anger. He had a rifle, and he fired three rounds at the ancient wreck of the Hurricane. The last bullet hit the rudder and knocked it silly.
Hick Hooper sat on a stack of ammunition boxes and watched. The Kittyhawks were not yet airworthy: fitters and riggers were still at work on them.
“Funny thing about nationalities,” Hooper said. “I mean, Churchill’s half-American. And Hitler’s not really German at all, he’s Austrian. Come to that, the King of England’s pretty damn German himself.”
“Cock.” Barton banged off two more rounds and hit the prop. “Who told you that?”
“Skull. He said the royal family’s surname is Saxe-Coburg.”
Barton scoffed. “That’s Intelligence for you! It’s Windsor. Even I know that.”
“He said it was Saxe-Coburg until 1917. They changed it because—” Barton fired again and cut him off. There was silence while Barton reloaded. “Who gives a damn anyway?” Hooper said. “I’m half-German, if it comes to that.” Barton glanced sideways. “My mother was born in Cologne,” Hooper said. “Where the eau comes from. We nearly went back there during the slump. I was about thirteen, I guess. How about that? I might have ended up in the Luftwaffe. I might have been flying one of those nightfighters, trying to—”
“Here!” Barton tossed the rifle to him. The conversation made him uncomfortable. He watched Hooper work the bolt and take aim. “Anyway, they bloody well started it,” Barton said. “I had a cousin killed in the London blitz. Never met her, but I saw a photograph. Pretty little girl and they blew her to bits.” He blinked as Hooper fired. “They’re all shits as far as I’m concerned. They don’t know the meaning of humanity and decency and fair play. I shan’t be sorry if every German gets his stupid fucking head blown off.”
“Well, you’ve certainly done more than your share,” Hooper said.
“It’s the only way we’ll ever get back to a normal civilized kind of living,” Barton said, “by ripping their German arms off and beating their German brains in with the bloody German stumps. Blokes like Skull can’t understand that. They’re too busy filling their fountain pens. Are you going to fire that thing or fondle it all day?” Hooper put three shots through the RAF roundel.
A lot of the Sahara was once seabed. You can pick up fossilized fish bones five hundred miles inland. This is one reason why so much of Libya and Egypt is so flat. Although Defa airstrip was nearly two hundred miles from the Mediterranean it was only three hundred feet above sea-level, and the Heinkel 111 flew south for another couple of hundred miles before the desert floor climbed to twice that height. It was a very gradual, unexciting geography: one beige brown after another. Paul Schramm soon grew tired of it.
With di Marco sitting beside the pilot, the only place left in the cockpit was the bomb-aimer’s position, lying face-down in the Perspex nose. Schramm tried it for a while, dozed off, and woke up when the sun began to bake him. He squeezed past the pilot and sidled along the catwalk in the middle of the bomb-bay, to the space where the air-gunners usually lived. There was nothing to look at there, but there was nothing to look at anywhere.
He sat propped against a bulkhead and tried to make sense of his situation. He was a more or less superfluous passenger in a smallish, oldish, twin-engined bomber designed to raid targets a few hundred kilometers away which was trying to reach a target that was two thousand kilometers from its base. Below, for almost the entire flight, was a desert that was so lethal you might as well shoot yourself and get it over with. Assuming, of course, you survived a forced landing in a machine so overloaded with fuel that it was a flying tanker. Schramm found himself listening to the throb of the engine-roar, frightening himself with imagined hiccups or hesitations. That was absurd. The whole damned operation was absurd. He made himself reread the newspaper and he fell asleep.