Dunn ran. Fleischmann shouted, chased Dunn with the beam and grabbed with his other hand at the Luger in his belt. He briefly caught Dunn, but Dunn was dodging like a rabbit and he vanished again. Fleischmann fired a shot in the air, then dropped the Luger so that he could switch on the headlights. Corporal Pocock opened the passenger door, leaned across and shot Fleischmann through the head.
At once there was machine-gun fire from the desert. It came from the south, five or six weapons, widely spaced, sending arcs of tracer pulsing toward the German unit.
Captain Lessing did a smooth job of organizing the defense. He switched off the headlights and the spotlight. He told the rifles and light machine guns to cease fire: the enemy was out of their range. Then he stopped the heavy machine guns blasting away non-stop. Finally he got the mortar crew assembled. Nevertheless there was much shouting and dashing about; and enough enemy fire came ripping through the canvas hoods of the trucks and flinging up streaks of sand to make the scene very lively and noisy. One machine-gun crew had a stoppage; they were cursing softly and hitting the weapon. Corporal Pocock found a rifle and hid by the wheel of a truck. During the next rattle of fire, he shot both the crew in the back. For a moment nobody noticed. Then he heard shouts, orders, whistles. Two men scuttled across and dragged the bodies from the gun. Pocock briefly considered shooting them too. No. Not wise.
Captain Lessing had had a terrible thought. “What if that’s Jakowski out there?” he said to the senior NCO. They were lying in a shallow slit trench.
“Why would Major Jakowski attack us?”
“Christ knows. Why would the British attack us? They could sneak past and be over the horizon long before dawn. Why look for trouble?”
“Major Jakowski always looked for trouble,” the NCO said.
More tracer brightened the night. Dunn, lying on his stomach, saw a machine-gunner outlined only ten feet away. He raised his pistol and shot him. Then he shot his loader.
“What the hell was that?” Lessing demanded. “What maniac’s using a pistol?” Before the NCO could answer there was a throaty bang: the mortar crew had fired. “Find out what range they’re using,” Lessing said. The NCO heaved himself up and ran. The mortar crew were reloading. One held a flashlight: mortars were tricky, and they had never operated at night before. As the loader dropped the shell in the tube and ducked away, Corporal Pocock shot him. The NCO saw the muzzle-flash. He knocked the flashlight to the ground and used his Schmeisser to spray the area where Pocock had been standing. One bullet took off Pocock’s left kneecap and he collapsed. The NCO rammed on another clip and sprayed again. This time he hit Pocock in the throat and legs. He wasted a third clip, but then he was a good NCO. He always made sure.
Lessing heard the Schmeisser and it made no sense. He counted to three and sprinted to the radio truck. The operator was sitting inside, waiting for orders. “See if you can raise Jakowski,” Lessing told him. “That may be Jakowski out there. Try him, call him up.” The operator chose a frequency. The light over his set made it easy. Dunn crept to the door, shot Lessing, shot the operator, smashed the valves and called it a night.
He walked in a wide half-circle that took him back to Lampard’s assault party. “Not many left,” he said. In fact only the senior NCO and three men survived, one of them wounded. In the flat, tired twilight before dawn, the senior NCO surrendered.
The Germans buried their dead and the SAS buried Pocock. Most of the bodies went into trenches they had been running toward when Lampard’s machine guns cut them down. The last shovel tidied the last grave as the sun swelled and floated clear of the horizon. Everyone ate breakfast, including Lester and Malplacket, who had been allowed to inspect the scene of the action.
“All I heard was a lot of shooting.” Lester said. “What exactly happened here?”
“We infiltrated their position and shot them in the back,” Lampard said.
“They were looking the other way, you see,” Dunn explained. “Toward Jack.”
“Well, now you’ve seen some action,” Lampard said. “Is it any use to you?”
Malplacket hesitated. “To be absolutely truthful, I was hoping for more dash,” he said. “More dash and pluck.”
“You don’t see David Niven playing the part of Pocock?” Lampard said. “Creeping up on German sentries and cutting their throats from ear to ear? No, perhaps not.”
“What were these guys doing, out here in the desert?” Lester asked.
“I expect they were up to no good, just like us,” Lampard told him cheerfully. “The difference is we’re rather better at it, aren’t we?”
Many people knew about Greek George. He could tell by the way other Arabs glanced when they met up with his Arabs. Many such meetings took place. The foothills of the Jebel seemed empty, but they gave a living to a great network of families, always on the move, always meeting and exchanging news. Greek George was no secret in the Jebel.
This did not worry him; after all, the Arabs had already shown him great kindness. In any case they knew he was planning to walk back to the Allied lines. One day they brought him a pair of desert boots, calf-length: probably taken from an Italian officer. Also an army water-bottle.
Sometimes German patrols passed nearby, on foot or in half-track personnel-carriers. George did exactly what the others did: he stood and watched. The more often it happened, the safer he felt. He was just another Arab.
Schramm’s fears for Lessing’s safety were not entirely wasted. They prompted General Schaefer’s staff to signal Lessing and order him to report by radio twice a day, at six a.m. and six p.m. Jakowski’s policy of radio silence was overruled.
When there was no six a.m. transmission, Colonel von Mansdorf telephoned Oberstleutnant Hoffmann and asked him to make a reconnaissance flight in the yellow Lysander. Hoffmann asked Schramm to come along and navigate.
“All right. Provided you tell Schaefer to go and piss in his hat.”
“For the love of God!” Hoffmann said impatiently. “You’re in a permanent temper nowadays, Paul. What is it? Piles?”
“No, it’s worse than piles. It’s the knowledge that I wasted so much time on that stupid wop bitch.”
Later, as they were strapping themselves into the cockpit of the Lysander, Hoffmann said, “She may be a wop, and she may be a bit of a bitch, but she’s not stupid.”
“I don’t care,” Schramm said, “I don’t care, I don’t care.”
“The more you say it, the less I believe it. And if you really think she’s stupid, you’re in bigger trouble than I thought. Anyway, that’s your problem. Let’s go.”
The flight was routine.
Schramm had the binoculars on the little cluster of trucks as soon as it came out of the haze on the horizon. “Half of them have gone,” he said.
Hoffmann made a wide approach and circled. “Nobody there,” Schramm said, but Hoffmann could see that for himself. Then Schramm found the row of graves. Hoffmann landed.
Already the sun had baked the bloodstains black and cracked their surface like old paint. Weapons lay about, smashed and useless. Ammunition and empty cartridge-cases made small heaps.
“Nowhere to retreat,” Hoffmann said, “and nothing to hide behind. A very short chapter in the history of war.”
“This wasn’t a chapter,” Schramm said. “It wasn’t even a paragraph. It wasn’t even a footnote. It was a spelling mistake in a grammatical error in a footnote to a footnote that nobody’s ever going to read anyway.” He went off to count the graves.
They landed at Benina to refuel. While Hoffmann went to a telephone and called von Mansdorf, Schramm looked at the damage from the dive-bombing. Most of the craters had been filled but one was still being excavated. It was enormous. A young Luftwaffe pilot leaned on the barrier, looked down twenty feet and watched dirt being shoveled away from a sixteen-cylinder engine.