The others arrived at safe intervals. He led them round the boulder and tried to get back into the streambed lower down but, perversely, there was no streambed. Evidently the water went underground. There was, however, a new track. It wandered, but it always wandered downward. In five minutes they were on the plain. Fifteen minutes later they reached the road and they were looking at the gap in the wire and at notice boards stuck in the ground at each end of the gap. The notices said Achtung! Minen. They also carried a skull and crossbones. “That’s all balls,” Lampard said softly.
They eased their rucksack straps and waited. The starlight was slightly brighter now, and the notice boards, stenciled black on white, were big and obvious.
“Well, you’re the boss,” Lieutenant Dunn said. They were grouped closely together.
“Hang on,” Davis said. “Let’s think about this.”
“It’s all balls,” Lampard said. “Put up to scare off the Arabs.”
“I don’t remember seeing them this afternoon,” Davis said. “In fact I’m sure I didn’t.”
Dunn said: “You don’t think they might have mined the gap this evening, Jack?”
“Not a chance. Jerry transport uses it as a short-cut to get on and off the airfield. We saw them do it.”
Corporal Pocock, who had gone forward, came back and said: “You can see the tire tracks, sir. And plenty of footprints too. No sign of mines.”
“What sort of sign did you expect to see?” Davis asked.
“Dunno. Disturbed earth, that sort of thing.”
“The entire bloody gap is disturbed earth.”
“Listen,” Lampard said, “they haven’t mined it for the blindingly obvious reason that they’re going to need it again tomorrow. Satisfied?”
“You’re the boss, Jack,” Dunn said. “I hope you’ve reckoned the odds, that’s all. I mean, it’s just possible that Jerry’s decided not to use it any more. In which case—”
“In which case he’d close the gap with wire, which is ten times faster and cheaper than mines. Agreed?”
Short pause. “Unless he ran out of wire,” Davis said.
“For Christ’s sake!” Lampard said, pointing. “It’s concertina wire. It’s made to stretch, isn’t it?”
Corporal Harris had been tossing pebbles into the gap. “If we had some prisoners we could send them through to find out,” he said.
“Right, that’s enough talk,” Lampard said. “I go first.” He turned and strode into the darkness.
The others retreated rapidly to the edge of the road and lay flat. Lampard’s figure was a dim blur. “What if it really is mined, sir?” Pocock muttered to Dunn.
“I suppose that will become blindingly obvious, Pocock.”
Lampard reached the gap, crouched and stroked the biggest and freshest of the tire tracks. They were clean-ribbed and firm. He surprised himself by being reminded of the last time he had touched a woman. He was twenty-four, and women were fun, but war was better. He stood and stared. His body was pumped-up with energy. All his senses were supremely alert, competing to serve him best. He went across the gap in a rush of long strides, heels digging into the tire track. Nothing exploded. He wanted to laugh and cheer and throw grenades; now he knew he was unstoppable. Achtung! Minen, what a lot of balls! He strolled back, casually and a bit jauntily, hands in pockets, to the middle of the gap. “No problem,” he said. He jumped up and down. “Safe as Oxford Street.”
“My old granny got knocked down in Oxford Street,” Harris muttered.
They followed Lampard in single file.
“Mind you, she was pissed as a fart at the time,” Harris said. Lampard ignored him. They set off, in line abreast, widely spread.
Corporal Pocock was the first to find an airplane. They converged on him and walked around the Me 109, touching its skin and sniffing its expensive aromas, the fruity tang of aero-dope and the faint, fairground stink of once-hot oil. Now they could see the silhouette of another 109, and beyond that a smudge of darker darkness that promised a third. Lampard jogged down the line and counted ten fighters. He left Davis and Harris to take care of them and moved on with Dunn and Pocock at a brisk run.
Pocock found the second line of fighters, too. A thin mist was rising, enough to absorb the starlight, but a faint reflected gleam from a cockpit canopy caught his eye. He set down his rucksack and hurried on to find out how many more aircraft were parked here. Dunn and Lampard examined this one. “Pretty new,” Lampard said. “The paint’s still smooth and shiny.” He was standing on a wheel and feeling the engine cowling. “It gets sand-blasted damn fast. What are you looking for?”
Dunn was fiddling with the side window of the cockpit. It clicked, and half the canopy swung open. “I had a thought on the way down that bloody mountain,” he said. “Why not stuff the bomb beside the seat? That way you get the fuel tank. It’s L-shaped, the pilot sort of sits on it. Make a lovely bonfire.”
“If it’s full. Might be empty. Anyway, we want the airframe. That’s the expensive bit.”
“You know best.”
Pocock returned, gasping but triumphant. “Twelve of the buggers,” he said.
“Marvelous. Tell you what,” Lampard said to Dunn, “put half the bombs in the cockpit and half on the wing-roots.”
“A controlled experiment,” Dunn said. “The spirit of true scientific inquiry.”
“Wait for me here.” Lampard jumped off the wheel and made off into the darkness. This is too easy, he thought. Where’s Jerry? No sentries? No dogs? It’s a pushover. A walkover. A cakewalk. A piece of cake. There was benzedrine in his pocket, but benzedrine would be wasted on him now. He saw the massive shape of a bomber. His blood was thumping like jungle drums.
It was a Junkers 88, twin-engined and huge. “You beauty,” he whispered. He decided to place a bomb on each wing, between the engine and the fuselage, but the wing was high above his head. He ran to the tail, took two bombs from his rucksack, and used his elbows to heave himself onto the tailplane. He began to walk forward, but the curved fuselage was wet with mist and he slipped and fell, knowing that he was falling and kicking off so that he landed on his feet and rolled over. That seemed enormously funny. For a few seconds he lay on his back and laughed without making any sound except for a bit of wheezing. “All right, you slimy bastard,” he said. He put the bombs inside his shirt.
Next time he sat on the fuselage, straddling it with his legs, and heaved himself toward the wings. Then it was easy. He stuck pencil-fuses into the bombs, planted them and jumped down. It was all so simple. The more he did, the easier it got.
He found a three-motor Fokker transport with a ladder leading to its cockpit. That got a bomb. Moving fast, he put bombs on the wings of two small aircraft, probably spotter planes, and in the cabs of three massive petrol bowsers which reeked of fuel.
He sat on an oil drum and checked his watch: twenty-three minutes since they came through the gap. The first pencil-fuses had been set for an hour, with the later fuses being shortened as time passed. The night was pleasantly chilly: a night made for action. Lampard felt pleased yet also oddly discontented, almost resentful. He had come a very long way to give the enemy a bloody nose and they were nowhere to be seen. “Pathetic,” he said aloud, and got up and walked back to Dunn and Pocock.
“We’ve done all these fighters,” Dunn said, “and we found something that looked like an ammo dump, so we did that too. Also a great stack of boxes. Probably spares.”
“Good,” Lampard said. He kicked a wheel. “I suppose we might as well go home, then.”