Take or Destroy! (27 page)

In HSL 117, Second-Lieutenant Sotheby, standing dry-mouthed with Sergeant Berringer, saw the launch in front stagger in the water, then there was a tremendous thump as the explosives on board went up. In a moment the whole boat was enveloped in fire and Sotheby could see men with their clothes ablaze jumping frantically into the sea and trying to swim away from the spreading area of burning petrol.

‘That’s cuck-cuck-Collier’s lot,’ he said nervously. ‘It looks as if it’s up to us.’

They passed the burning wreckage and screaming men in the water without stopping. The 47 seemed to have missed HSL 117 and was now firing at the last launch in the line, hitting her repeatedly. Sotheby turned to the officer in command, a boy no older than himself.

‘We’ll never be able to gug-get ashore with the dinghies,’ he said. ‘The bastards’ll knock us out.’

‘I can put her bow on the rocks there,’ the RAF man said. ‘Will that do?’

‘It’ll bub-bloody have to,’ Sotheby said.

They moved in until the bow of the launch butted against the rocks that lined the low cliffs and, keeping the engine going ahead, the RAF man held her there.

‘Cuck-come on, Berringer,’ Sotheby said as he leapt ashore. ‘I think we’d bub-better get cracking.’

Hockold had been the first man of the main party across Wutka’s wooden bridge but the machine-gun near the 47 at the end of the mole was dropping his men as they ran. They could see a barrier of wire in front of them dancing and pinging as the bullets struck the strands, and hear the whine as they lifted and whirred into the air over their heads. As they flung themselves down behind drums, crates, and piles of rope and chain, the rush along the mole came to a stop. Hockold joined them unwillingly, his mind seething as he saw the whole plan for Cut-Price falling apart.

‘Mr Rabbitt,’ he said. ‘See if you can get over the wall and on to the rocks, and settle the 47 before it stops the tanks. We’re going to need them!’

‘Right, sir!’ Rabbitt signed to the men alongside him, and with a rush they scrambled over the shelter wall. Two were hit but the others hung down by their hands above the rocks and dropped into the darkness. Two more men had to be left among the rocks with twisted ankles, but the rest began to work their way towards the slip. Then, spotted by machine-gunners near the 75 at Mas el Bub, they had to dive for cover again.

‘For God’s sake,’ Rabbitt snarled. ‘Where are those bloody tanks?’

Hockold and his party were still struggling to reach the shelter of the stone store-sheds at the end of the mole from where they might run for the buildings near the mosque. From there they could work their way to the Roman arch at the Bab al Gawla. They could actually see the arch now, dark against the whitewashed stone of the Boujaffar Hotel. There was a searchlight near the harbour wall and Hockold gestured towards it.

A Bren stuttered and, as the searchlight went out, the firing slackened momentarily so that they were able to make their dash to the sheds, threading through them in ones and twos until they could see the buildings at the end of the mole. But the crew of the 75 at Mas el Bub, using spades, sandbags and wedges, had managed to bring their gun to bear. As it began to blow chunks off the stonework about them, they had to edge back the way they’d come to put the debris between them and the sheds they could safely occupy.

The 75 above the POW compound was firing at short range towards
Umberto
now, tearing her upperworks to ribbons, and the 47 by the palace was firing across the harbour past the bow of
Cassandra
to add to the damage being done by the 75.

‘For God’s sake,’ Amos yelled above the barked orders and the stammer of weapons to add his plea to Sergeant-Major Rabbitt’s. ‘Where are the tanks?’

Gleeson’s tank was a blazing wreck and Meinertz, who had been violently sick, was still wiping his mouth and trying to make up his mind what to do as Murdoch, Cobbe and Captain Cadish roared up the beach in the old Humber brake and skidded to a stop alongside him in the shelter of the cliffs.

‘We’ll get round the back!’ Murdoch shouted up. ‘We’ll pin ‘em down so you can get up the slip!’

‘No, hang on!’ Meinertz’s brains were temporarily addled by shock and nausea, and he was fighting to clear the fog.

A group of men were behind the blazing landing craft and another behind the beached freighter, crouched half in the water waiting for the machine-gunners on the landward end of the mole to be silenced, while the rest had dashed for the cliffs where they couldn’t be touched.

Meinertz stared round him. The gun up above him was something they hadn’t bargained for, its shells pinning down the men on
Horambeb
and
Umberto.

It seemed to be up to him.

‘Let’s go,’ he said.

They were still in darkness, though the harbour and the slip were a blaze of light from the loading clusters. There was no longer any point in regarding the black-out, and Hochstatter had switched on everything he could find.

As they reached the bottom of the slipway, Meinertz saw that it was narrower than he’d expected; only just wide enough for the Honey to get up it. Here was a job that seemed to call for care and precision, but at the top a 47 was waiting for them, and on the cliffs above the bigger weapon which it was also clearly his job to knock out.

‘Up the slip, driver,’ he said. ‘And go like the clappers!’

The gears crashed and the driver, knowing well what would happen if he missed his aim and the outside track crumbled the edge to topple them upside down to the sand, stared with wide eyes as the slip drew nearer. The tracks were throwing up the sand behind them in showers now and the men round the brake watched with grim fascination.

There was a violent clang as the tank lurched on to the stones; then it was clattering up the uneven slope, swinging and rolling on the heavy boulders that made up the surface. Its bogeys rattling, its springs creaking, as it reached the level ground at the top it seemed to leap into the air, its tracks spinning wildly; then its nose banged down and it disappeared from sight.

The driver had kept his eyes on the edge of the slip every inch of the way, but there wasn’t time to think much before they arrived with a crash by the harbourside, sending a native felucca, parked there for repairs, reeling away, its mast whipping like a riding crop as the tank barged against it. As it rolled over, its planks splintered, and crashed to the beach, Meinertz realized that the 47 he’d been expecting was just beyond where it had stood and was waiting for them to appear, its barrel trained towards the top of the slip.

‘Keep going!’ he shouted. ‘Keep going!’

There was a tremendous bang and a screech of metal as the gun fired, tearing off the Honey’s starboard track and slewing it completely round so that it was almost facing the other way. But the gun was a wreck too, beneath them, and its crew were dead underneath it.

As the tank came to a stop, Meinertz, his nose bleeding where he’d banged it on the butt of the machine-gun, became aware that the whole inside of the tank - radio, ammunition racks, every nut and bolt and rivet -- was now sharp and clear in an icy white light. They’d been picked up by the searchlight on the cliff near the other gun.

Dazzled, he tried to pull himself together and swing his own searchlight, but it was a puny affair compared with the one on the cliff and he knew that beyond the glare the crew of the gun would be struggling to bring the barrel to bear on him.

‘Get that bloody light,’ he yelled. ‘Driver, bring her round!’

The screech of the gears told him they were stuck.

‘Gunner.’ He screamed. ‘Traverse right! Get that light, for Christ’s sake!’

Caught by the overspill of the light, he saw the end of a gun barrel, dropping lower as the crew fought to depress it further. The flash and the crash against the outside of the tank came together. Fragments of metal flew through the air and for a moment Meinertz thought he was dead. But, as he realized that the shell had actually missed them and exploded on the concrete alongside, he began to yell again.

‘Get that light!’

‘For Christ’s sake, sir, the turret’s given up!’

As the gunner, his eye to the hot rubber of the sight, fought with the traverse handle, shouting despairingly, ‘It won’t bear! It won’t bear,’ Meinertz yelled again.

‘Driver! You’ve still got one good track! Use it!’

As the outside track jerked, the old Honey lurched another foot to the right and the gunner’s voice cracked with his excitement. ‘Got her, sir!’

The gun roared, deafening them, and Meinertz saw the flash as the shell hit the emplacement below the big grey barrel. Living up to expectations, Meinertz’s gunner had missed the searchlight completely but, with a shot as lucky as that which had destroyed
Umberto’s
popgun, he had placed his shell right in front of the 75.

‘Give ‘em another while their heads are ringing!’ Meinertz screamed.

The crew of the gun were as stupefied by the explosion as the crew of the Honey had been, but they were slower to react so that Meinertz’s gunner got his next shell in first and they saw the gun barrel lift and swing in a dipping half-circle as if it were free of its moorings.

‘Got the bastard,’ Meinertz said with satisfaction. ‘Now the searchlight, gunner!’

The gun banged again and this time Meinertz’s gunner hit what he was aiming at. The shell struck even as the crew were hurriedly switching off for safety, and the dying red glow was lost in the glare of the explosion.

For a brief moment there was a silence that seemed to smother even the sounds of battle from the harbour behind them, Then, as Meinertz and his crew dropped to the ground beside the wrecked Honey, Murdoch came roaring up the slip in Hockold’s old brake to shoot past them, unnoticed by the Germans in the houses at the bottom of the Shariah Jedid, and disappear among the trees by the mosque, followed by the rest of the group from the landing craft, running as fast as they could go.

The POW compound and a lorry park were attacked.

Sergeant-Major Rabbitt’s party had watched Meinertz’s little battle from the rocks just below the slip.

‘Jesus,’ one of the Stooges said. ‘These cavalry boys certainly do things in style.’

With the destruction of the guns, the machine-gunners at the end of the mole where isolated and, as Rabbitt’s party dashed to the slip and tossed a couple of Mills bombs over the top, the survivors threw down their weapons and raised their hands.

As they did so, Hockold lifted his head. To his surprise he was still alive, and it seemed a good idea to utilize what little time he had left in securing the centre of the town and organizing a defence. Though a lot of the loading clusters and harbour lights had been shot out, the searchlights at Ibrahimiya probing the sky for de Berry’s isolated groups of aeroplanes were destroying any pretence at darkness.

There was wire beyond the sheds, stretching from Meinertz’s wrecked Honey to the mud at the other side. A soldier flung himself down across it, and Hockold used his body as a stepping stone and dived for the shelter of the buildings at the end of the mole. As he vanished, a machine-gun near the Shariah Jedid came to life and the man following him was caught by a slicing burst which spun him round and flung him into the wire. Its barbs snatched at his uniform and held him half-upright, one arm outstretched, the hand dangling crazily every time the wire moved.

With Hockold already using his Sten, the fire from the troublesome machine-gun slackened and more men crossed. Watching from among the sheds where he crouched, Taffy Jones found he couldn’t make himself follow. He desperately wanted to display the sort of courage the others were showing and had made the first rush down the mole in a blind panic, forced onward by the still greater fear of what his friends would think if he stopped. But now, since the first terrifying crashes of shells had started around them and the shuddering stutter of machine-guns had knocked men over alongside him, nothing he could do would produce any further response from a body frozen by terror. This wasn’t at all what he’d expected. From the day he’d volunteered for the commandos, he’d been living in mute and unspoken fear of what battle would be like. But, though he had all along imagined something terrible, he had never foreseen anything as terrible as this.

Sergeant Freelove noticed the expression on his face and, used to the momentary panic of soldiers in the first shock of a fight, he gave him a shove. ‘Get on, man!’ he shouted.

But Taffy was even stricken dumb in the paralysis of fear, and Freelove literally dragged him to his feet so that, exposed to the firing, he had no option but to run, panting, his equipment clanking, to leap the wire and fling himself, breathless, his tongue stuck dry and tacky to the roof of his mouth, down again among the others.

A lorry was moving nearby, heading away from the buildings. Someone threw a grenade at it and the petrol tank exploded and it went up in flames. A man jumped out and started to run, and Taffy saw that he, too, was burning brightly.

The obscurity of the smoke gave them a moment’s grace, and the men around him jumped up again and began to run across the road and through the trees by the mosque to gather round a group of small mud-brick buildings nearer the arch. Trying to keep up with them, Sugarwhite saw a few fleeting figures in the dark and was just going to shoot when in the nick of time he recognized them as Arabs. A couple of lurching shapes appeared - camels which, sleeping among the trees by the mosque, had stumbled to their feet in alarm at the din and were bolting with hobbled legs. As he ran, one of them blundered into him and he went over, stunned, while the camel appeared to trample all over him before a stray bullet caught it and it collapsed, blowing blood through its nostrils, it’s bound feet threshing the dust.

Perspiration streaming down his heavy handsome face, Taffy watched Sugarwhite go down. Then Sergeant Freelove gave him another kick so that he leapt up in alarm and went after the others, running with clattering equipment for the mud buildings at the side of the mosque. The raking stutter of a Bren was answered by a rippling crackle which, even through his panic, he knew came from a Spandau, and he flung himself down again. Wriggling under a hand-cart containing half a dozen drums of petrol and a water-skin used by Arab labourers, he hunched tensely against the wheel, frantic unintelligible words coming between his lips in the anguished whine of a bullied child.