Take or Destroy! (23 page)

‘I wish they’d try something more cheerful,’ Sugarwhite said. ‘Or even just have a fight.’

It was Waterhouse - dogged, irrepressible, profane and riotous - who stopped it.

‘Ringg the bell, verger,’ he sang in a high pitched nasal falsetto you could have threaded a needle with, ‘Ringg the bell, ringg! Till the fuckin’ coggregation condescedd to singg . . . !’

Even the Welsh couldn’t defeat Waterhouse and in the end they took the hint. But the interruption smacked of blasphemy to Sugarwhite, and now didn’t seem to be the time or the place for offending God. ‘Think we’ve got a chance?’ he asked.

‘I don’t give a monkey’s either way,’ Waterhouse yelled and Sugarwhite looked quickly at him, trying to make out whether he really was unconcerned or only putting on a brave face. Bradshaw was still reading, holding a tiny book in his hand, and Waterhouse removed his helmet and ran a hand through his ginger thatch so that it stood up like an old yard-brush.

‘I wish I was like ‘im,’ he said. ‘Standig there as ‘appy as a budgie on a kitchen table. What is it you’re readig, Bulstrode?’

Bradshaw looked up. ‘Omar Khayyam.’

‘What’s that? A dirt book?’

‘It’s not an “it”. It’s a “he”. A Persian poet.’

‘Cad you read Persian?’

‘It’s a translation.’

‘Why are you readig it?’

‘Because it’s the smallest book I’ve got and it goes in my blouse pocket.’

‘Is that the only reason?’ Sugarwhite asked.

‘It’s as good as any I can think of.’

‘Aren’t you worried?’

Bradshaw lifted his head. ‘Of course I’m worried, you bloody oaf!’

Sugarwhite was puzzled. ‘You don’t show it.’

‘Well, I
could
smear my emotions all over the bulkheads, but I don’t think anybody’d enjoy it, do you?’

Sugarwhite frowned. ‘I wonder why we don’t?’ he said. ‘I’m shit-scared really.’

Bradshaw’s smile widened. ‘That’s pride, old son. You’re concerned with what your friends might say, and they feel the same because of what
you
might say. That’s what makes the army tick. It’s what makes all armies tick.’

They were still staring in bewilderment at Bradshaw when Bunch appeared. ‘Right-oh, darlings,’ he said. ‘Time to put your party dresses on.’

As they entered the swept channel in the minefield the talk on the bridge died.

‘This is what they call the moment of truth, isn’t it?’ Hardness said.

Though there was no announcement, the news soon travelled below. A few eyes swept round the ill-lit hold but no one made any comment. Hearts began to beat so hard they hurt the chest and, noticing that his fingers were trembling, Taffy Jones hid them between his thighs as he sat near the ladder. Sweat trickled at his armpits, and the thin slash of fright he’d felt earlier came again, icy against his flesh so that he felt sick. He stared round at the other men, his throat dry, wondering if they could tell he was afraid. They showed no sign of it and he knew that even if they could they’d never judge him.

They were all tense despite their chatter. Only the card players, absorbed in their game, seemed not to have noticed.

‘Five bob,’ Rogers grunted.

‘I’m in,’ Eva said.

‘Me, too.’

‘Your five an’ up three.’

‘Raise five.’

‘I think you’m bluffin’, me dear.’

On the RAF launches on the port side of
Umberto,
the collapsible rubber dinghies were being inflated, making even less room for the overcrowded men, while the extra petrol tanks fitted on deck were being emptied to reduce the risk of fire. Someone started handing out burnt cork and tins of dark makeup. It smelled of olive oil and cocoa, with a bit of something extra that seemed like carbon and was probably lamp-black.

‘Faces and hands,’ Rabbitt said. ‘Make sure you’re well covered. It might save your life.’

Waterhouse dropped on one knee. ‘Mammy!’ he began to sing at the top of his voice. It sounded like ‘Babby.’

When they were all looking like nigger minstrels, they once more checked their weapons and braced themselves again as they’d braced themselves the night before and on the night of the postponement. Speculation and fear galloped through their minds and they felt cumbrous under their kit.

Faintly they heard telegraphs jangle and felt the shudder of the engines become different so that they knew their speed had changed. Then the tannoy crackled. ‘All hands muster at disembarkation stations.’

Bradshaw sighed and put away his book. Near the stern of ML 138 Lieutenant Swann moved his shoulders under his webbing. ‘You ready, chaps?’

Nobody answered because they all knew there was no hurry, and it was only Swann getting up his own wick.

‘No panic when we get ashore,’ Swann continued. ‘Just keep together and keep your eyes on me.’

‘Any minute now,’ Belcher whispered, ‘ ‘e’s goin’ to start whizzin’ round in ever-decreasin’ circles and finally disappear up his own fundamental orifice.’

There was an explosive cackle of laughter and Swann whirled. ‘Who’s that? Who’s that laughing?’

Nobody answered and he calmed down, jerking at his equipment and fingering his moustache.

‘Make sure you’ve got all your equipment,’ he nagged again. ‘Cigarettes out. No smoking.’

Belcher turned to the dour ex-fisherman, Comrie, as he stubbed out his fag-end. ‘Do you smoke after you’ve had a bit with your bird?’ he asked.

‘Ah dinnae ken,’ Comrie said with an unexpected flash of wit. ‘Ah’ve never looked.’

There was another cackle of laughter so that Swann looked angrily about him, convinced he’d got a lot of idiots to look after. Nobody seemed to be taking the thing seriously except him.

The first shots were fired at 2347 when the Germans became aware of our approach.

There had been several reports of enemy bombers approaching Qaba, so nobody imagined that the noise they now heard out to sea had any special significance. Despite the depredations of the desert force, there was still enough flak at the airfield and on the outskirts of the town to keep the Tommies high. Fears of a raid were confirmed, however, when Fighter Control at Ibrahimiya telephoned them to expect trouble, and the alarm bells began to ring.

‘Achtung! Alarm! Fliegerwarnung!’

The guns began to swing and the soldiers assembled at their posts, their officers shouting orders. Among them was Private Bontempelli, holding his rifle by the muzzle, its butt trailing behind him in the dust so that it looked curiously harmless. He was chiefly concerned that one of the aeroplanes would get off course and drop one of its bombs not on the airfield where it belonged but on the spot where he happened to be standing. He often wished he could be taken prisoner - painlessly, of course. In fact, he once
had
been a prisoner - in June - but before they could be put in the bag, the tide had turned again and a whole crowd of Afrika Korps lorries had swept round the group, taking the British guards prisoners instead and freeing the disgusted Bontempelli so that he was now back with a gun in his hand and expected to stand up to a charging Scot or a New Zealander or an Australian or a Gurkha, or one of the other barbarians the British employed to fight their wars.

Standing on the roof of the Boujaffar Hotel, Colonel Hochstatter stared at the waning moon. With him were von Steen, Nietzsche, Wutka and Hrabak. Below them were Tarnow and a sergeant, with two telephone orderlies who were waiting by their instruments. Round the harbour area they could see men running, and caught occasional faint flickers as lorries passed with shaded headlamps.

Hochstatter stared at the sky, and wondered again how his wife and two young daughters were faring in far-off Dusseldorf. He hadn’t heard from them for months now and it seemed years since he’d seen them. Von Steen’s thoughts were on his career. A man with a stiff leg hadn’t much future at sea, and in any case, German naval activity at that moment seemed to be dwindling rapidly.

Wutka was watching the stars again and deciding that when the war was over he’d probably take up astronomy. It was a subject he knew nothing about but here in Qaba and in the dusty North African desert the stars had always fascinated him - perhaps because they seemed the only dust-free things he could see. Hrabak’s thoughts were much simpler. His old wounds were hurting and all he wanted was to sit down.

The sound of the aircraft became louder and Hochstatter’s head turned nervously as the telephone rang on the floor below.

The sergeant put his head through the hatchway to the roof.
‘Sie kommen, Herr Oberst!
The Luftwaffe say it looks like a big raid. Radar’s picking up hefty signals from the north-east.’

‘Warn the gunners,’ Nietzsche snapped and the sergeant nodded and disappeared.

There were shouts among the buildings below them and Hochstatter stared at the flickering horizon to the east.

‘I’m glad it’s the airfield,’ he observed.

Von Steen frowned. He had an inexplicable feeling that it
wasn’t
the airfield.

The drone of the aircraft grew louder and Hochstatter’s head went back.

‘Almost overhead,’ he said. ‘Coming in from the sea.’

The guns were still silent and the searchlights had not yet opened up, and it wasn’t until the first missile came whistling down to explode fifty yards from a parked Junkers 52 that Ibrahimiya finally came to life. As the men started to run, the first of the flares filled the sky with a white eerie light. The guns began to bark and the searchlights snapped on, probing with their silver beams. An aeroplane was caught in the over-spill of light like a small fish and flickering pin-pricks began to sparkle round it. At once it began to take violent avoiding action, the anti-aircraft shells following it as it went into a dive.

Despite the warnings of a heavy raid, the Tommies seemed to be approaching only in ones and twos and small groups from widely dispersed directions. Then a nervous
Flakartillerie
corporal and his men, manning an isolated gun position on the eastern perimeter of the airfield, saw parachutes. They appeared briefly in the glow of the searchlights, then disappeared; then another two or three were seen, then more and more. Hurriedly counting, and adding a few for good measure in his panic, the corporal reached for the telephone.

‘Fallschirmjager!’
he yelled into the mouthpiece. ‘Paratroops!’

The telephone in Hochstatter’s office shrilled again, and the sergeant called up to him.

‘Sir!’

Hochstatter almost fell down the stairs, and in a moment Nietzsche heard his voice.

‘Paratroops? Where?’

‘We have them on the airfield,’ the Luftwaffe colonel at Ibrahimiya yelled. ‘We need every man you can spare!’

Hochstatter also began to shout. ‘I have no men to spare! I have instructions from headquarters to maintain a strong hold on this place!’

‘Look -’ the Luftwaffe colonel’s voice was harsh ‘ - if they land men here, you might as well go out of business!’

Hochstatter put the telephone down and signed wearily to Nietzsche.

‘Send them the Italians.’

As the few lorries they could muster rolled to a stop near the Roman arch, Private Bontempelli decided that fighting parachutists was something that just didn’t appeal to him. He didn’t enjoy the thought of being hurt and he hated loud noises. He’d once been in a gun position at Bardia when the gun had fired, and it was as if someone had crammed his head inside an oil drum and tossed in a hand grenade.

He could hear Sottotenente Baldissera and Sergente Barbella shouting now, and on an impulse he turned abruptly into the shadows and headed for the latrines.

From the ships they all heard the drone of aircraft.

‘Thank God the RAF’s on the dot,’ Hockold said, realizing for the first time that since the operation had started he had hardly thought about death. Preoccupation with Cut-Price had driven it from his mind and he forced himself to concentrate on what he had to do so that it would stay that way.

Below him in the hold, Taffy Jones was also trying desperately not to think too much about death and had succeeded in starting a heavy argument, involving everybody near him, on whether you could dodge the army by failing the medical through drinking too much alcohol, eating too little food and having too little sleep.

‘When I took my medical,’ Bradshaw said blandly, ‘the chap next to me couldn’t do the necessary when they told us to fill the test tubes. I offered him some of mine. He was pleased to accept.’ Bradshaw smiled. ‘I considered it a very comradely action.’

As usual it stopped the argument dead, and Taffy was just searching his mind for something else to get them all going again when the first of the RAF’s bombs went off on the airfield. As the searchlights snapped on, against their pale glow the men on the bridge could see low-flying cliffs and even the shape of buildings. They could pick out the Mantazeh Palace on the headland and the square outline of what they knew from the mock-up to be German headquarters.

A shaded light winked from
Umberto,
and
Horambeb
closed up on her port side. On the starboard side, LCT 11 also closed in until she was swinging in the wash from
Umberto’s
bows and the helmsman was having difficulty steering her. On HSL 116, Lieutenant Collier caught the signal too, and signed to the officer in command.

‘Time to turn off,’ he said, and the HSL began to swing to port, leading the other two RAF launches in a slow curve towards the low cliffs below the prisoner of war compound. ML 146 had led the Fairmiles after the landing craft, the gunners working the breeches of the three-pounders to make sure they were loaded and ready. ‘For what we are about to receive,’ Lieutenant Dysart said.

The word went round to stand by. Cigarettes were put out and there was a last minute rush to use the latrine buckets. On the bridge of the landing craft, Lieutenant Carter decided that, having got this far without mishap, he might be entitled to another quick snifter and dragged out his hip flask again. On the flimsy launches, lacking armour and heavy weapons, everyone held their breath, all isolated in their own enclosed oases of loneliness, throats dry, stomachs twisted with the gagging feeling of fear. Only Lieutenant Swann was trying to persuade himself that he was looking forward to action.