Take or Destroy! (12 page)

‘Smith starts the fight Gaukrodger finishes. And the others aren’t exactly backward.’

‘Good. Get them all in your cabin, will you?’

Puzzled, Dysart told the six men to report below and from the little desk alongside Dysart’s bunk Babington looked up at them. ‘You’re going to take part in a small deception we’ve planned for Jerry,’ he said. ‘I want you one at a time to turn out your pockets and wallets on the table there. You first, Gaukrodger.’

Unwillingly, the big man laid his belongings on the table.

‘This everything?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Anything of particular value to you?’

Gaukrodger squinted at the articles on the table. ‘Just the photo, sir,’ he said. ‘It’s me ma.’

‘Take it. And your money.’

As Gaukrodger picked up the photograph and the money, Babington swept the other articles to the other end of the table. ‘Label ‘em, Dysart, and give him a receipt. You next, Smith.’

Smith’s pockets contained much the same - fags, matches, a bundle of obscene photographs, and a dozen contraceptives in paper packets.

Babington stared at them. ‘You must go at it like a ferret,’ he said mildly.

Smith grinned. ‘Them Egyptian bints, sir.’

‘No wonder you’re not very big. You don’t give yourself a chance.’

Babington went through the personal belongings of all six, taking everything except treasured photographs and letters. When he’d finished, he had a pile of packets of cigarettes, matches contraceptives, even a few letters and unwanted photographs of girls. He looked at his list, then up at Dysart who was grinning at his men. ‘Now you,’ he said.

Dysart’s cheerful expression faded. ‘Me, sir?’

‘Why not?’

Dysart began to fish in his pockets. There was a contraceptive among his belongings, too. ‘I see you go in for it as well,’ Babington said dryly. ‘Letters?’

Dysart stared at the dog-eared papers. ‘There’s a mess bill I haven’t paid.’

Babington grunted and looked up at the six men. ‘Right, shove off. And keep it quiet. And I mean quiet.’

As the door closed, Dysart gestured at the table. ‘What’s all this for, anyway, sir?’

Babington smiled. ‘You’re going to be picked up dead in the harbour,’ he said.

It had taken Devenish half an hour to round up his men and equipment and get them into a couple of lorries. Two hours later, watched by Hockold, they were getting to know what made a ship tick and, clambering round the bowels of a freighter with his men, Devenish suddenly discovered a new excitement in his job. This was better by a long way than being aircrew and dropping bombs.

‘One bang in the hold of a petrol carrier,’ the naval lieutenant who was leading the conducted tour pointed out, ‘and the bloody lot’ll go sky-high. If the hatch is closed, you’ll need one of these.’ He swung what looked like a four-foot iron spanner. ‘That’ll unclamp the dogs.’

By this time, two Honeys were parked on the quayside alongside Landing Craft (Tank) 11, and Hockold found Lieutenant Carter pottering round the cabin of the vessel, singing to himself. There was a gin bottle on the table and he seemed to be sorting out papers; judging by the way he was tossing them to the floor, he didn’t have much use for most of them.

‘Eternal Father, strong to save,’ he sang,
‘Whose arm doth bind the restless wave....’

‘Bumph,’ he announced cheerfully in his cracked, boozy voice as Hockold appeared. ‘Don’t believe in filling in forms.’

Hockold looked round. The place smelled like a bar. ‘You going to be able to do this job, Carter?’ he asked sharply.

Carter lifted an eyebrow. ‘You been hearing the stories?’ he asked.

‘What stories?’

‘About me being slung out of the Merchant Navy and only getting in this lot because of the emergency.’ He gestured at the bottle. ‘That was the cause of it. That and the bitch I married.’

‘I’m not interested in your private life,’ Hockold said. ‘Only if you can do the job or not.’

Carter grinned. ‘I can do the job,’ he said. ‘With one hand tied behind my back.’

The tank men were young and, as usual, covered with oil. A lieutenant called Meinertz was in command of one Honey and a sergeant called Gleeson the other. Hockold studied the high-sterned, square shape of the tanks and turned to Meinertz. ‘You know what you’ve got to do?’ he asked.

Despite his youth, Meinertz had eighteen months’ experience in the desert behind him and was only in Alexandria because he was supposed to be resting. He nodded and smiled.

‘Think you can do it?’

‘Sure we can, sir. My gunner couldn’t hit a bull in a barn door at the moment - he’s new out here - but I’ll get him out in the desert and see that he gets some practice.’

‘Anything you want?’

Meinertz glanced at the Honeys. Nothing except a Panzer Mark IV, he thought.

Leaving Meinertz, Hockold called on Babington. He was sitting at his desk, staring at seven brown paper bags.

‘Seven dead men there,’ he said. He turned one of the bags upside down and spilled out letters, keys, money, cigarettes, lighter, photographs and a contraceptive. ‘Belongings of Lieutenant Jeremy Edward Dysart, RNVR,’ he said. ‘They’ll be placed in the pockets of Captain Matteotti, of
Umberto Uno,
who will be found floating in the harbour the morning after you leave. Captain Matteotti doesn’t know it, of course, because he’s already dead.’

‘How about the ship?’

‘Going ahead all right. Steel plates and concrete ready with the extra conning positions. You’ve already got two collapsible crates on the fore deck full of Oerlikon and we’ll have two more aboard tonight. How are you doing for demolition experts, by the way, because I think I can lend you one or two.’

‘It so happens,’ Hockold said, ‘that the RAF got in first.’

‘The RAF won’t know how to blow ships.’

‘This chap will. He’s got quite a reputation and he’s already aboard a ship in the harbour finding out all about it.’

Babington looked disappointed. ‘I was going to supply you with a sub-lieutenant and a party of jolly jack tars.’

Hockold smiled. ‘I’ll be glad to have them,’ he said. ‘But your sub-lieutenant can’t blow four ships at once. The RAF stays in charge.’

‘This is a naval operation.’

‘It’s a combined operation.’

‘Oh, well-’

‘Don’t back away, Babington,’ Hockold said sharply. ‘I want your party. I want anybody I can get.’

‘Funny you should say that,’ Babington mused. ‘Because I’ve got this American as well: Captain Cornelius H. Cadish. Nice chap. Been sent here to learn. He has twenty men he could bring along too.’

‘No special terms of reference,’ Hockold said shortly. ‘They do what everybody else does.’

‘I’ll put it to him.’ Babington looked up. ‘About the minefield at Qaba: you were right. There isn’t one. The gap’s wide open. I shall have the chart in front of me when we go in.’

Hockold stared. ‘Are
you
going?’

‘As you said --’ Babington’s face cracked into a grin ‘- this is a combined operation and, if we’re going to have a nice little nocturnal jolly ashore, I might as well look after the seaborne end.’

The men were hardened in the desert by rigorous training under expert instructors.

The defences of Qaba had taken a turn for the better and Colonel Hochstatter was feeling much happier.

Headquarters had suddenly gone mad. Balloon equipment, searchlights and light and heavy flak had been ordered up and, in addition to Zohler’s damaged Mark III, two captured British Honeys and a damaged Grant had been sent to the town. Since the Honeys were too light for the Western Desert and the Grant had its gun mounted in a side sponson, it was thought they might be of more use to Hochstatter than they would to the panzers. Finally, two 75 PAK 97/38 guns arrived.

Schoeler eyed them without much enthusiasm. ‘They might have sent us something better,’ he complained. ‘They’re only French 75s on German carriages. They’re hard to handle and they’re unstable when they’re firing.’

Nevertheless, they were better than nothing, and he found sites for them behind the POW compound on the Ibrahimiya side of the town and alongside the searchlight at Mas el Bub. And when two further 47s and two captured two-pounders arrived, he began to change his tune as he realized he was beginning to build up quite a formidable battery.

‘If we’re not careful,’ he said, ‘they’ll be pressing
Panzer-jägers
on us.’

This wasn’t all either, because there had been a signal to the effect that eight hundred men from a
Pionier-Lehrbataillon
on their way from Tobruk were due to pass through the town with all their transport and were to be held for harbour defence until further notice. It was quite clear army headquarters was growing concerned about the coming British attack, and the whole of the rear area was being showered with demands to clear the line and get things moving before it started. Hochstatter had heard, in fact, that all was not as well with the Afrika Korps as appeared on the surface. Thanks to the RAF and the Royal Navy, which regularly intercepted stores and reinforcements from Europe, units were under strength, and it was well known that water supplies in the forward areas were now considered to be critical. There were even alarming rumours that the fighting troops were undernourished and that the sickness rate was rising, while the British, always well supported, were growing stronger every day.

It was a disturbing situation, and Hochstatter knew that General Stumme had made a depressing report to Berlin on his position and the bitterness that existed between the panzers and the Luftwaffe. It was obviously essential that Hochstatter’s supplies should be set in motion as quickly as possible but all Hrabak could do was seize the lorries which dragged in the guns, and organize parties of men to push drums on handcarts, and Arabs with camels to haul them on sledge-like constructions of poles. His conscripted engineers, sailors, convalescents, artillerymen, pioneers and Italians began to wish they’d never seen North Africa. It was hot and dusty and some of them were even beginning to loathe their beloved leaders who had brought them there.

None more than that homesick skiver, Private Gaspare Bontempelli. He was sick of the war, sicker still of Qaba, and sickest of all of the Germans for giving all the dirty jobs to the Italians. People like himself from Naples were used to going hungry, but gracefully and to the accompaniment of music and beauty; not, as in Qaba, to the Germanic shouts of Sottotenente Baldissera, a dedicated Fascist who tried hard to model himself on the brisk young men of the Afrika Korps, and Unteroffizier Upholz who, despite his lower rank, had the power to tell even Baldissera what to do.

Bontempelli sighed. There had been a time earlier in the year when he’d thought it was all coming to an end as the British had bolted back from Gazala, and they had moved up through deserted British camps towards Cairo. The windscreens had flashed in the sun as they’d dropped down from Sollum, already visualizing waving palms and water and green meadows, and the unlimited lust to which they were entitled as conquerors at the expense of terrified Egyptian women. They had joked of having harems and being appointed governor of Heliopolis, but when they’d stopped the only thing that had interested them was to fling off their clothes and rush stark naked into the indigo Mediterranean. Cairo could wait a day or two longer.

Unfortunately, Cairo was still waiting. Rommel had tried to outflank the British, but his favourite trick hadn’t come off for once and they had come to a stop. Now the Eighth Army was supposed to be receiving reinforcements, and instead of the luxury and lust, they’d got only the burning sand of Qaba, itching skins, sores, dysentery and jaundice.

Bontempelli stared with reddened eyes at the four ships in the glittering little harbour. Then a butterfly landed on the drum he’d been pushing, and as it palpitated there it reminded him somehow of the white body of Maddalena Corri in Taranto and how he’d seen her shuddering with suppressed excitement as she’d waited for him to make love to her. He drew a deep painful breath, stifled by his own erotic thoughts, and forced her out of his mind. It was time he went to see Zulfica Ifzi again.

Zulfica Ifzi lived in the Borgo Nero among the close-huddled houses of whitewashed mud-brick, and even if she weren’t as beautiful or as fragile as the lost Maddalena, at least she was hot-blooded and moved well in bed. Because Qaba had been occupied by the British for so long, her sole conversation at first had been ‘Hello, Angleesh swaddy! No spikka other bints,’ but she was young enough to learn and had the Eastern habit of oiling her body with perfumed unguents which made contact with her all the more exciting.

Bontempelli shuddered and shook his head as he tried to force the picture from his mind.
‘Maria, Madre di Gesu,’
he murmured agonizedly. ‘Preserve us all.’

Then he became aware of Unteroffizier Upholz staring at him from the door of the hut where he had his office, and as he returned to the ship, Sottotenente Baldissera appeared in front of him, small, strutting, his hands on his hips, his arms akimbo, his jaw with its neatly combed Balbo beard thrust forward in the style of Mussolini.

‘Daydreaming again, Double Ration?’ he asked.

‘Si,
Signor Sottotenente,’ Bontempelli admitted.
‘Un poco.’

‘What about?’

‘Women, Signor Sottotenente.’

Baldissera’s adam’s apple worked because it was something he often dreamed about himself. ‘Then don’t,
ragazzo mio,’
he said. ‘The Germans are watching.’

The position was surprisingly similar at Gott el Scouab where quite a few of the Cut-Price Commandos were beginning to regret their hasty decision to volunteer.

Their life was still dominated by the fierce influence of the sun. Every day they saw it rise from under the eastern rim of the desert and, growing rapidly in heat and light, climb its course across the glaring sky. Cut off from the rest of the army, they knew only hard work, the emptiness of the desert - and the flies. Because the Italian prisoners had never been careful with the disposal of their rubbish, there were millions of them at Gott el Scouab, enjoying the moisture in human sweat and swarming round the ears, nose and mouth. Desert sores drew them like magnets, and whenever food was put down they arrived in their squadrons and brigades and divisions for first bite.