“Weather’s fine for flyin’ this mornin’, sir,” said the young Cockney pilot, whose sidelong grin displayed his crooked front teeth. He was enjoying an obvious moment of mirth concerning his rather nervous passenger. “No reason to worry.”
“Who’s worried?” Michael fired back, a little too quickly. In the North African desert in mid-August a clear sky could never be called upon to lift the spirits. It might be cloudless but it was often a pale milky color more white than blue, as if that cruel sun had burned all the beauty even out of Heaven. “You just tend to the flying,” Michael said, and told himself to relax. Easier told than done. He didn’t relish flying very much; it was a combination of his distrust—one should not call it fear, of course—of confinement and heights, and the whole idea of sitting in a sputtering machine many thousands of feet above the earth seemed even more unnatural to him than a sea voyage.
But it was the aircraft that really bothered him. This thing, with its stubby nose and thick-waisted bulk and clumsy-looking fixed landing gear, seemed to Michael a relic more suited to the last world war than the one in the unfortunate present. As Michael understood, the Lysander had been an antique even on its maiden flight in 1936. This was the year 1941, and what in the world was this thing even doing on a landing strip, much less about to take to the air as soon as the three Spitfire fighters went up. Michael shifted his bottom in the hard leather seat, whose rips were oozing cotton, and mused upon the fact that the Lysander was named after a Spartan general.
He knew what Spartan soldiers said about their shields: With this, or upon this.
Somehow, it was not comforting.
The airfield at the Bir Al Kabir oasis was a slapdash construction of tents and prefabricated buildings brought in by cargo planes from Cairo, two hundred and twenty-four miles to the east. The scraggly palm trees around the waterhole were not pretty and the water was not sweet, but even water that smelled and tasted of rotten eggs was life in this climate of a hundred and twenty-two degree days. A hot wind sometimes blew in, nagging at the tents and hissing through the aircraft engines to find their weak places, as more spinning sheets of dust painted machines and men alike the blanched shade of misery.
There was a war going on, and it was not always necessarily Churchill’s British versus Hitler’s Germans and Mussolini’s Italians; sometimes it was the Brit versus the invasion of a hundred thousand biting flies, or the Brit versus the month of burning days so stunning saliva dried within seconds to white crust on the cracked lips, or the Brit versus the empty horizon upon which heatwaves threw mirages of huge lakes that shimmered like molten vats of white glass.
The first of the Spitfire fighter planes was taking off. Woe to the other pilots behind him, including the Cockney kid at the Lysander’s controls, due to the amount of dust the takeoff stirred up. “You must be an important chap, sir,” came the next comment. “Three Spit escort and all, beggin’ your pardon.”
“I have my uses,” Michael answered. The way the Lysander’s engine made the plane vibrate did not make him talkative. The pilot would be throttling up and rolling out onto the runway when the third Spit took to the air, any minute now.
“Roger that. We’re waitin’. Over,” said the pilot through his headset microphone.
The second Spitfire roared off into the sky. The third was taxiing into takeoff position.
Michael checked his Rolex wristwatch. He figured he’d be in Cairo in time for a debriefing meeting at HQ and then on to lunch on the shaded veranda of the Piper’s Club. He hadn’t realized how much he missed their small filets, a platter of orange rolls and a fine cold beer. Two beers would be doubly fine. Then on to sleep for about twelve hours, on sheets of Egyptian cotton.
The third Spit took off, trailing dust. “Here we go, sir,” said the pilot cheerfully, and Michael thought he must be a budding sadist, for the kid gave the plane a little jerk as it rolled forward onto the strip, as if it wanted to leap into the air without benefit of a proper sprint. The noise of the engine was like hammers beating hollow metal drums to a madman’s rhythm, and over that unholy racket Michael could hear what sounded to him like loose bolts jumping in the wings.
“Roger, on our way,” the pilot told his controller. “Over.” He throttled up and the Lysander began to roll.
The Lysander’s chief talent was that it didn’t need a very long runway. They were off the ground in about ten seconds, and Michael placed his hands on his knees and squeezed the blood out of them as the craft rose quickly to meet the three Spitfires circling above the field.
“Goin’ up to fifteen thousand today, sir,” the pilot told him. “Get yourself a good look at the desert from way up there.”
Another look at the desert was the last thing Michael Gallatin needed or wanted.
His entire four-day mission out here had involved looking at the desert. He knew what they’d called him at the airfield: Majorly Strange. That was because after every sundown he drove through the guards’ position in an open-topped Morris truck and drove back in an hour before sunup. They knew that he was a reconnaissance officer, but they were puzzled as to why he went out alone. What they didn’t know was that, once out in the desert at a distance of a couple of miles or more, the recon major stopped his truck, took off his uniform, folded it and put it away, and then Majorly Strange became a creature that the word ‘strange’ utterly failed to describe. Over the sand and fist-sized stones of the hammada he ran westward on four legs, and cloaked by the night he travelled mile upon mile to make note in his human mind of the brutal landscape: the soft pits of sand that could swallow a truck or a tank, the series of dunes that would turn a soldier’s legs and willpower to jelly, the vast flat plains stubbled with cactus that rose to mountains and fell off again into chasms of jagged red rock. He was searching also for the German mines that lay in their thousands under the sand or the stony crust, and these he could smell by the metallic tang of danger that thrust at him, snake-like, as he approached. So much metal, and so much high explosive. The air reeked.
He used his heightened sense of direction to place these minefields on the map he’d learned to carry in his head, and so on he went alert for German patrols or the movement of troops and armored vehicles or the almost imperceptible blue lamps of an enemy outpost whose machine guns were trained on a maze of barbed wire, tank traps and Bouncing Betty mines designed to burst up from the ground and explode red-hot shrapnel into a man’s groin.
His job was to find a path for the British Army to move westward and destroy the Afrika Korps’ seige of Tobruk, which had trapped over twenty-four thousand Commonwealth soldiers in a ring of steel since the tenth of April.
At the airfield on his return, Majorly Strange would retire to a radio room and send his findings to his contact in Cairo in a code based on British nursery rhymes. Therefore the future of the war in North Africa and the lives of many thousands of men hung on the likes of Old King Cole, Strutting Cock Robin and the hungry wolf at the door.
“Easy peasy,” said the pilot. “Lemon squeesy.”
They had taken up their position just behind and below two Spitfires with the third guarding their tail. They flew east. The Lysander’s engine noise became a dull rumble. Michael did not care to sightsee what his sight had already seen, so he closed his eyes and tried to rest.
Yesterday had happened one of those rare encounters that made life, to Michael, such an interesting mystery. Such things could not be written in books and be believed.
He’d been walking to his quarters after he’d sent the radio codes when someone had fallen into step beside him.
“Excuse me, sir. Major?”