Captain Lessing knew that placing a smoke marker for Jakowski to home in on was dangerous: anything that attracted Jakowski’s men might attract others. But he had no choice. Captain di Marco had underlined what was already obvious, that Jakowski’s navigation was a mess; and Lessing could think of no other way to help guide his commanding officer toward the rendezvous.
Meanwhile, he ordered more trenches to be dug and organized a permanent watch, one man guarding each side of the camp, changed every two hours. After sundown the change was every hour. Staring into the desert at night was wearying work. Even the best sentry lost concentration.
Lessing discussed tactics with Lieutenant Fleischmann. “What do we do if a British force attacks us?” he asked.
“By day? Let them get within range of our mortars and see how many trucks we can knock out, for a start.”
“They may have mortars too.”
“True. All right, we disperse our trucks and—”
“So now we’ve got no means of moving our mortars quickly, unless you intend to carry them on your shoulders at the double.”
“No.”
“The men would admire and respect your amazing devotion to duty.”
“I think not, sir.”
“Neither do I. So we keep a couple of trucks to enable us to shift our firepower. What if they attack at night?”
Fleischmann hunched his shoulders. “All depends,” he said. “Do we know how strong they are?”
“Do they know how strong we are?”
They stared at each other, and suddenly both men laughed.
“If it’s bigger than an armored brigade it’s not fair,” Fleischmann said, “and I shan’t play.” They settled down to work out fields of fire for the heavy machine guns.
The burning oil drum was a mystery, and Dunn refused to guess at the identity of the trucks. Lampard spent ten minutes alone. When he came back he had decided to attack. There was total silence from the other officers.
“Nobody is cheering,” he said.
“I just don’t see the point, that’s all,” Gibbon said. “We know precisely where they are. I can steer us well clear of them in the dark. Even if they hear us they won’t interfere. Not in the dark.”
“There’s no other SAS patrol in this area,” said Sandiman, “but that doesn’t prove it’s Jerry, does it? And if it is Jerry and his radio op gets a message out, it’ll be Stukas tomorrow, a pound to a penny.”
Lampard tugged his left ear-lobe and looked at Dunn.
“You’re the boss, Jack,” Dunn said.
“You’re against it too.”
“Beda Fomm is our target.”
“Oh, we’ll hit Beda Fomm. I don’t like the idea of a Hun ambush waiting for us on our way back.” Lampard could see they were not impressed by this argument. “Besides, it’s time the chaps had a bit of fun.” That made Gibbon stare and Sandiman sniff, but Lampard didn’t care. He had made up his mind. He sent for the men and began his briefing.
Lessing, Fleischmann and the senior NCO took it in turns to supervise the watch throughout the night. At four a.m. Fleischmann accompanied the new sentries as they replaced the old. Nothing had happened. The moon was down and the blackness was absolute.
The new sentry on the northern side was a twenty-one-year-old Berliner called Manfred. He took over the light machine gun, acknowledged Fleischmann’s sharp reminder to stay alert, and for seven or eight minutes he did just that. Then his girlfriend Tania slid into his imagination as sweetly as she had once slid into his bed, and after that his military duty was always on the losing side.
Her real name was Hannah. Tania suited her much better. She was built like a dancer, but a dancer with real breasts instead of the flat blisters which most dancers had. Manfred had first seen her in a leotard at the gymnasium where he trained, and it was her outspoken nipples that made him gasp. They gave point to breasts that were firm, neat and circular, like her buttocks. A little later he discovered a stunning pair of legs at one end and a delightful face at the other. Manfred was a shy, handsome boy, very good on the horizontal bars, but hopeless at making small talk with any goddess who had outspoken nipples, so he made friends with her brother, Adam, instead. Adam was a cheerful lad and very keen on table tennis.
Months passed. Manfred had been silently in love with Tania for so long that the pain was now part of his everyday life. One weekend his parents went away to attend a funeral and he arranged to stay at Adam’s house. That was when Tania slipped into his room and into his bed and stole his virginity, using a combination of sweetness and savagery topped with a small packet of nitro-glycerine that sent skyrockets ricocheting between his ears. When he got his breath back she kissed him. To his amazement, he detected gentle affection. She was in love with him. What a brilliant coincidence!
He sat cross-legged on the sand, stroked the light machine gun, and remembered all the places where they had made love. In the summerhouse. In the attic. Deep in a pine forest, stark naked, while squirrels watched and an oblivious breeze made the tree-tops sigh. In a shower-cubicle, as the hot spray plastered their hair down and made her breasts squeak against his chest. On the back seat of her cousin’s car. Under a bandstand in a deserted park. In a sleeping-bag. Behind somebody’s garage. In a field of buttercups, rich tall yellow buttercups that gave her skin a buttery sheen. That had been a good one; she had said so, tucking an arm behind her head and looking at him with huge shared satisfaction. Manfred inhaled powerfully through his nose and held his breath while he stared at the stars and listened to the tiny howl of life in his ears. Corporal Pocock wrapped his left hand over Manfred’s mouth and cut his throat so expertly that he died in a few seconds.
The sentry on the western side sat huddled in a blanket until the pressure on his bladder became uncomfortable. He draped the blanket over the machine gun and wandered away. Dunn found a shape that was fractionally darker than the darkness and was about to stab it when he heard a splash and a grunt of pleasure, so he backed off. The trickle ceased. The man returned, took some dates from his pocket and started to chew. Guided by the sound, Dunn moved in and whacked him on the head with a spring-loaded cosh. He caught the body at the armpits.
Pocock spent far more time listening than moving. In that way he found a man asleep in his blankets, gently lifted a blanket and pressed it over his face as he killed him with a stab under the ribcage to the heart. Or, if not the heart, the aorta. It was a big knife, and double-edged; it was bound to find something vital.
Dunn smelt the heavy aroma of diesel fuel and carefully traced it to a truck. A man was asleep in the back, snoring sporadically. Dunn tried to climb in. A chain rattled and he froze, right leg in mid-air. Now he could hear two sets of breathing. Too dangerous. He lowered himself, inch by inch. One of the men sat up and asked something in blurred and bleary German. “Uh-huh,” Dunn muttered. He lost himself in the night and waited until his heart stopped kicking itself to death.
He moved again and his luck ran out. Somebody had a nightmare.
Lieutenant Fleischmann knew who it was. The same man had a nightmare every night at this time, more or less, so Fleischmann was ready for it. He was sitting in the cab of a truck. He switched on the spotlight, swung it toward the panicking screams and caught Dunn in the beam: black of face and bright of knife.