Di Marco shook him awake. “We are crossing the border between Libya and Chad,” he said.
Schramm looked out of a window. Brown desert stretched to the horizon. “Should I care?” he asked.
“Now look out the other side.”
Schramm did, and saw mountains that climbed like cathedral spires. They were dangerously, suicidally close. The peaks were several thousand feet above the Heinkeclass="underline" he had a sick feeling that a breeze could blow the aircraft against those sheer sides at any moment. Then he took a breath and looked harder. The mountains were a mile away.
Di Marco suggested he sit in the cockpit. The view was even more stupendous from there: everything was bigger, clearer, more jagged, more magnificent. Schramm looked at the map and identified the Tibesti Mountains. They reared out of the desert like a gesture of defiance, pushing up and up, until the empty wasteland of sand was left a huge and giddy distance below.
The pilot let him enjoy the view. When it was behind them he said, “My backside’s numb. You take her for a bit. We’re halfway. She’s trimmed to fly hands-off. Just sit here and look confident. Steer one-nine-five and don’t touch any of the knobs.”
The man with the stomach wound was Walters. They buried him in the scrub. The ground was hard, so his grave was just a scrape in the soil with a lot of rocks heaped on top. “Rest in peace,” Lampard said, and that was enough. Nobody was in a mood for funeral rites. The faint noise of German military vehicles kept their nerves on edge; and occasionally the crash of mortar shells reached them from some distant and futile attempt at flushing out.
Lampard itched to get on and get out. They had thirty-odd miles to go. He disliked this wadi: it was too broad, too shallow; there was nowhere to put look-outs; the scrub was so thin that a shufti-kite would spot the jeeps; he felt exposed. But they could not move. Davis’s jeep had a puncture. What’s more, all the spare tires were holed. It would be madness to go on when a wheel couldn’t be changed in a hurry. Reluctantly, Lampard agreed.
“Time for some grub, too,” Davis suggested. Lampard agreed to that. Hunger didn’t add to efficiency. Everyone had bully, biscuit and water. The men examined the jeeps as they ate, and found damage caused either by the racketing drive across the Jebel or the attacks by the CR42s; it didn’t really matter which. Springs had cracked or snapped, a jerrican of petrol was bullet-holed, the steering on Lampard’s jeep was buckled, Davis’s jeep was trickling oil. It could all be patched, but patching took time. Lampard watched them work.
“In case I haven’t said it,” he said, “I want you to know that we put on an absolutely brilliant show last night.”
Nobody replied, perhaps because everyone was still eating, perhaps not. Lampard went away and cleaned his tommy-gun.
At last Davis came and told him the jeeps were as ready as they ever would be.
“Good. These blasted flies are all over me.”
“Wog flies,” Davis said. “Not English. Don’t know how to queue.”
The branches got thrown off the jeeps and the engines were started. They had traveled perhaps fifty yards when a shufti-kite came dribbling over the skyline and they had to swerve under cover again.
It was a Fieseler Storch, as slow as a bicycle. They sat motionless while it made lazy S-bends, all down the valley. “Now go away and bother someone else,” Lampard said. Instead it circled. Five minutes later it was still circling. “What’s it found?” he wondered. “What’s so important?”
Davis volunteered to go and see. While they discussed this, the Storch flew away. “Still worth a recce,” Davis said. “You never know what’s waiting down there. NAAFI van, panzer division, herd of elephants, could be anything.”
Lampard sent him, on foot, with one other man. Half an hour later the man returned. “It’s a bloody great German wireless truck,” he said. “Big radio mast. Sarnt Davis thinks the shufti-kite was reporting to it. He reckons the krauts in the truck are in charge of the search.”
“Take me to him,” Lampard said.
They found Davis hiding in the collapsed stonework of an old well.
“We could destroy that thing in ten seconds,” Lampard said, “but then the Hun would turn up and destroy us in five minutes.”
They had to wait for two roasting, fly-tormented hours until the truck dismounted its aerial and drove off. “My God, this war can be boring,” Lampard grumbled.
Every time they started up Barton’s Kittyhawk it fired for ten seconds and died. Dirty petrol. They washed the carburettors and cleaned the fuel lines but still the airplane would not come alive. They would have to drain the tanks, filter the petrol and start again.
Barton got fed up with potting at the wrecked Hurricane and he went in search of scorpions to shoot, turning over stones with his boot while he held the rifle ready. He found none and gave up. He noticed a butterfly. It was a Painted Lady, the only sort of butterfly the squadron saw in the desert, a delicate little creature whose wings were mottled a pale buff and red. Presumably it was migrating across the Sahara, a task so huge it was scarcely credible. Barton chased it and tried to shoot it down. He ran a hundred yards and exhausted his ammunition before he gave up, cursing. The Painted Lady fluttered south. It looked good for another thousand miles.
“What the hell’s wrong with him?” Prescott asked Skull. “Has he gone doolally too?” They were sprawled in the shade of the canvas roof of the mess.
“He’s normal. Fighter pilots exist in one of two states: torpid or rabid. Right now Fanny is rabid. He’s quite harmless as long as you don’t go near him. Excuse me.” Skull got up and strolled over to Barton, who was cleaning the rifle. “Decorations,” he said. “Have you done anything about recommending anybody?”
“Piss off. None of your business.”
Skull converted his sun-umbrella into a shooting-stick and perched on it. “The bravest pilot I ever knew should have got a DSO and probably a Victoria Cross,” he said. “Instead he got nothing, because his CO got killed before he put in any recommendations. No CO, no gong.”
“I’m not going to get killed.”
“Pip deserves something. Even I know that.”
Barton shut one eye and squinted down the barrel. “You do it,” he said. “Make a list.”
“Don’t be absurd, Fanny. I wasn’t there. You were.”
“That’s right, I was.” He oiled the breech and worked the bolt. “Well, I don’t remember seeing anything special. A few blokes got the chop, but that’s not unusual, is it?” He aimed at the sky and squeezed the trigger. “Giving them gongs isn’t going to make any difference.”
“It might acknowledge their courage.”
“Brave because they got the chop? Don’t talk balls. You don’t need courage to get killed. You need to be unlucky, that’s all.”
“I see. The squadron gets virtually wiped out and it’s just bad luck.”
“You’ve got it, Skull! Well done!” Barton tossed the rifle high in the air and caught it. “At last you’ve got it. Half of war is luck and the other half is cock-up. I had an uncle got killed at Gallipoli. Now what difference did Gallipoli make to anything?” He stared Skull straight in the eyes. “None. None! All those big brave Anzacs got the chop at Gallipoli and it didn’t change anything, not in the slightest! Of course, nobody knew that at the time.” Barton scratched his stubbled chin. “My uncle didn’t get a medal when he got killed,” he said. “He was very annoyed about that, my uncle was.”