“This isn’t Gallipoli,” Skull said.
“I’ll recommend everyone for a DSO,” Barton said. “Satisfied now?” He walked away before Skull could answer.
Schramm liked flying the Heinkel. Even overloaded with fuel she was still responsive and her great sail of a rudder made for good stability. He had no need to change the throttle settings. He just kept her on course, checked the gauges now and then, and when a lump of hot air came bubbling up he did his best to anticipate the bumps and hollows they flew through.
From seven thousand feet—presumably the most efficient cruising height—the ground looked bleak and baked. The foothills of Tibesti had been rust red. An hour’s flying changed the color to a bleached yellow and the texture to an infinity of ripples. Later still, the ground looked as if it had been trampled by the tiny hooves of a mighty herd: for as far as Schramm could see, it was imprinted with a pattern of crescent shapes, all pointing in the same direction. He realized these must be dunes, millions of dunes. He had once suggested driving over this terrain. He breathed deeply and felt hugely grateful to di Marco.
Two hours after Tibesti, five hours after Defa, six and a half hours after Berka, the pilot relieved him. “Many thanks,” the man said.
“My pleasure. She was a perfect lady.”
“That was the easy bit,” the pilot said.
Schramm stood behind di Marco, whose lap was full of charts and notebooks, slide-rules and dividers, and plugged into the intercom. “Where are we?” he asked.
Di Marco showed him. “Lake Chad is the next landmark. You see? It’s about the size of Luxembourg. We should cross the eastern tip of it and then pick up this river, the Chari, which flows into Lake Chad. We fly up the Chari. The Chari goes through Fort Lamy. The airfield is on the left.” He made it sound as if he were telling a stranger in town how to find the public library.
The crescent dunes changed to flat scrub, nothing but acacia from horizon to horizon. The acacia gave way to palms. Schramm began to feel hungry, but he felt it was the wrong time to say so. They were steadily losing height: when the palms thinned out and the country became more like wooded parkland, he saw cattle grazing on every side.
Lake Chad came up precisely when and where di Marco had calculated it should. It was a glittering blue, fringed with hundreds of islands of intense green. Waterbirds in their thousands took off and swirled in clouds of flickering white and pink. After the aridity of the desert it was like a huge, costly, choreographed welcome. Black men standing in fishing boats waved. Nobody in the cockpit spoke.
The river Chari was twice as wide as an autobahn. Its banks were lined with grass huts, all arranged in neat rows according to the tidy mind of some French colonial administrator. Fort Lamy was in sight. Di Marco put his charts away and moved down to the bomb-aimer’s position. Schramm took his seat. “On schedule,” he said. “Congratulations.”
“That was the easy bit,” the pilot said.
As they walked back to the jeep, Lampard and Davis discussed what next.
Davis was all for lying up until nightfall and then driving the last thirty miles to base camp. It might take most of the night, but they had plenty of time. They could move slowly and continuously, and there would be no shufti-kite to worry about.
Lampard wanted to go now. If they drove in the dark it would have to be without headlights. Too many Hun patrols were out looking for them. So they’d probably miss the track, drive into rocks, bust the jeeps. And they’d certainly get lost.
Davis said he was sure he could navigate from here to base camp in the dark.
Lampard said the trouble with night-driving was you couldn’t see the ambush until it was too late.
After that they walked in silence.
Lampard called everyone together. “The good news is that Jerry is obviously rather annoyed by our raid on Barce,” he said. “The bad news is the Jebel is now swarming with enemy patrols. However, the good news is the Jebel is a very big place, with ten thousand wadis, and they can’t search them all, or even a fraction. Now, we can either wait here until dark and crawl back to base, or we can make a dash for it with our eyes wide open. My decision is to make a dash for it. We go now.”
As they dispersed, Connors said to Blake, “The bad news is I got the pox. The good news is you can have it if I get killed.”
“Charming,” Blake said. “Fucking charming.”
Lampard led. Battered as they were, the jeeps were remarkably quick and surefooted and he made them go fast. At the same time he showed proper caution. When he came up against a blind bend or a narrowing defile he stopped and sent a man ahead to recce. Davis approved.
They were moving southwest, against the grain of the Jebel. It meant making a series of long zigzags. Often they crossed the marks of half-tracks: the enemy had been here recently. Twice they saw foot-patrols on distant skylines. Lampard quickly put the jeeps out of their sight and hoped for the best. After an hour they had covered fifteen miles. Now they were over the high ground of the Jebel and the gradient was helping them. No sign of the shufti-kite.
The landscape was starting to look familiar, and when he recognized the mouth of a wadi, Lampard knew they were less than a dozen miles from base camp and a brew-up. This was a good wadi: scoured smooth by flash-floods which had rolled all the boulders against its walls. Furthermore, there were no tire tracks in the sand. Lampard accelerated. The sooner they got in, the sooner they got out. Halfway through the wadi his jeep took a bend and nearly hit a pair of German trucks speeding in the opposite direction. Before he could shout, a fire-fight was raging.
There was neither time nor space for tactical subtlety or skilled maneuver. It was simply a matter of who fired first and who fired longest. The two pairs of Vickers Ks in the second jeep swamped the first German truck, killed the driver, killed the troops, sent the truck headlong into the stone wall of the wadi. As that happened the second German truck turned the corner and a machine-gunner on its cab found the jeep and sprayed it very thoroughly. The jeep had no protection, no armor, nowhere to hide. Sergeant Davis, Trooper Connors, Blake the fitter, all died. This was completed in a matter of a few seconds.
Lampard had overshot the action. In his desperation to reverse he found the wrong gear, bashed a wheel against a rock, found reverse, sent his jeep sprinting backward. There was a very brief point-blank battle between the double pair of Vickers Ks in his jeep and the machine-gunner in the second truck, aided by a dozen rifles. The German soldiers had been well drilled: they got off a useful volley of shots and the machine-gunner fired over their heads. But the Vickers Ks erupted with a blast of two hundred bullets in five seconds. They had been designed to destroy airplanes. They wiped out the second truck. It was a mismatch, the dream of every soldier, to find the enemy exposed and out-gunned and to overwhelm him, kill him ten times over, give him not the fraction of a chance. The fight was over in the time a man might hold his breath. The echoes bounced from wall to wall of the wadi like a ball game. The second truck caught fire. Its fuel tank exploded with a gentle, almost apologetic, boom.
The mismatch had not been complete. Of the three men with Lampard in his jeep, one—a gunner called Sharp—was dying, hit by a bullet in the chest. Another, Menzies, had a broken jaw, smashed by a spinning ricochet. He was in great pain; he could barely spit out the fragments of teeth that threatened to choke him. Trooper Smedley was untouched, although the hole in his cheek had started to bleed again. Lampard had been largely protected by the gunners alongside and behind him. A bullet had struck his right ear and left it flapping; blood coated his face and neck. The jeep would not start.