Take or Destroy! (35 page)

‘Got the bub-buggers,’ he heard Sotheby whisper.

The blast seemed to send
Umberto
rolling over, so that her torn upperworks heeled against the sky and her mizzen topmast crashed to the deck in a tangle of ropes and blocks and a shower of old rust.

As she straightened herself up and the crew began to hack at the debris, Devenish, propped up alongside the bridge, grinned at the men around him, their faces lit up by the flare of flame.

‘That’ll make the bloody Afrika Korps think!’ he said.

Lifting his head as the pieces of metal and wood and fragments of burning camouflage net stopped splashing into the water of the harbour and spattering into the roadway, Hockold could see
Umberto
in the glare, standing off to the west. Above him, the drone of the last of de Berry’s aeroplanes was fading. The searchlights were going out one by one now and the bark of the anti-aircraft guns had stopped.

Mentally counting numbers, Hockold knew his group had been cut to pieces and he looked around, trying to identify the men who were still with him. Under the grime the blackened faces were almost unrecognizable but he was able to pick out Sergeant Curtiss, struggling with his set to pluck strangled signals out of the interference.

‘Are we still in touch?’ he asked.

Curtiss’s head turned. ‘Yes, sir. Just.’

Hockold looked faintly embarrassed. ‘Tell
Umberto :
“Having
wonderful time. Wish you were here.”
The navy likes funny signals.’

The dressing station in Dr Carell’s bunker was full of wounded now, sitting about in untidy heaps, their clothes cut away to show stained bandages. The place reeked of blood, ordure, sweat and the scent of death.

As Hockold entered, he saw pleading, unsteady eyes and faces close to hysteria. At one end were nine bodies, lying on their backs staring at the concrete roof. Near them a sailor was dying with fifteen bullets in his chest, and an RAF corporal shot through the back of the head was snoring as if asleep. His skin was already grey. Another man’s stomach wound had been plugged, and an orderly was now filling the hole with sulpha. Most were suffering from shock but Hickey was keeping them well doped with morphia while a medical corporal was writing with copying pencil on their foreheads the dose they’d been given. There were a few groans and cries and a low voice muttering in delirium; but for the most part, as they hugged their hurts to them in the modesty of pain, emotion was frozen on each face, so that it possessed its own permanent look of dumb bewilderment and eternal questioning, so sharp that Hockold found himself glancing at his own face in a small mirror hanging on the wall to see if it were the same.

Hickey had straightened up, his white apron stained.

‘We’re leaving,’ Hockold said quietly. ‘Are you ready?’

The American smiled. ‘I guess I’ll stay,’ he said.

‘It was the understanding that the wounded were to be left behind.’

‘I guess I’ll still stay, Colonel.’

‘Very well. And thank you. I hope it won’t be for long.’ Hockold nodded at Carell, waiting, stiffly precise, to one side. ‘Keep him here, if you can. We don’t want him to let his friends know we’re pulling out.’

‘Okay, sir. I can handle that, I guess.’

When Hockold returned to the buildings by the Shariah Jedid, a wounded man had taken Curtiss’s place on the radio. ‘I can keep on sending, sir,’ he said. ‘Make ‘em think you’re still here.’

Hockold nodded. ‘It won’t be long,’ he said. ‘Eighth Army can’t be far away and they’ll come faster than ever now.’

Withdrawing the last of his men, he joined Sergeant Sidebottom. Jacka’s party had just appeared.

‘ ‘Lo, Sidi,’ Jacka said flatly.

‘Sham, Jacka. Greetings!’

Belcher was staring at Waterhouse’s swollen mouth. ‘Fink somebody’s done for you, mate,’ he said flatly.

Waterhouse’s grin was lopsided and bloody. ‘Right id the soddig bouth,’ he agreed.

They moved the wounded to the windows and gave them their weapons, trying to comfort them with grim jokes and rough tenderness. Then Hockold bent over Amos. ‘So long, Frank,’ he said.

Amos nodded feebly, his eyes full of blank uncomprehending pain.

‘We’re going now,’ Hockold said, and Amos nodded again; his eyes watched them all the way to the door.

Withdrawing the last men from the surrounding houses, Hockold set off up the Shariah Jedid towards the back of the town. After a while, they reached the vineyards and then the road. As they emerged, they were recognized by Murdoch waiting by the bungalows near the fuel dump.

Blackened faces split in broad grins as the two groups greeted each other and thumped each other’s backs. Hockold quietly shook hands with Murdoch.

‘We seem to have done what we came for,’ he said.

‘Did they all go up?’

‘All except the ammunition. But ammunition’s no good if there’s no petrol to carry it to where it’s wanted.’ Hockold glanced towards the south where the racket at the airfield seemed now to have stopped. Over in the east they could still hear the thunder of guns and see the flashes in the night sky.

‘Eighth Army seems a bit nearer,’ he said. ‘I think we’d better head south.’

They were still bent over the injured when Sotheby’s party arrived. As they appeared, Hockold stepped forward.

‘Who’s that?’ he asked.

‘Mr Sotheby, sir,’ Berringer said.

‘Is he bad?’

‘I don’t think so, sir.’

‘I’m glad you cleared the compound. We saw them coming through the town.’

‘We did more than that, sir,’ Berringer said. ‘We captured the 75 and used it to knock out the 47 on the mole. Then we sorted out the 47 behind the palace.’

‘So that’s why they stopped,’ Hockold said. ‘Well done, Sergeant.’

‘Not me, sir,’ Berringer said, nodding at Sotheby. ‘Him.’

After a while, it dawned on the Germans and Italians in Qaba that there were no British remaining in the place except for the dead and the badly wounded who’d been left behind. Warily, they began to emerge.

As the noise died down, it left the town so silent it seemed to be panting, trying to get its breath back. Wild-eyed, shocked men, their clothes torn and stained, their faces covered with dust, came into the streets in groups. A few of the natives started moving among the trees towards the mosque to send up a prayer while it was still possible, to stare at the damage, or inspect their wrecked boats in the harbour.

There were a few prisoners, most of them wounded but also one or two who were unhurt. Among them was Swann, prodded forward by Bontempelli who had taken the opportunity as Swann stumbled ahead of him, his hands in the air, to jam a hurried clip of ammunition into the rifle at last. By sheer coincidence, he bumped into Sottotenente Baldissera leading in the remains of his mixed engineer company. There were considerably less than had set out for the airfield and they didn’t have a single lorry left.

‘For the love of God!’ Baldissera was blackened, filthy and exhausted, his clothes scorched. ‘Look who’s here - Double Ration!’

There was also the indestructible Sugarwhite who rose out of the debris of the shattered roof, still twisted from the pain in his ribs, bloody, blackened and covered with dirt, just as Unteroffizier Upholz stopped the
Kubelwagen
he was driving by the harbour.

They stood and stared at each other. Sugarwhite and the German sergeant-major. One of them tough, middle-aged and experienced, the other young, frightened and bewildered, his face streaked where the tears had run. Sugarwhite’s hair was white with plaster dust, his clothes were torn, he’d lost his Sten gun under the broken roof, and he felt his brain had been shredded by the explosions. But he was the card of the outfit, wasn’t he, and he still had to behave like a card. He managed a grin at Upholz standing by the jeep.

‘Taxi?’ he said, and even Upholz, who knew no English, caught the insult.

And finally Bradshaw. They found him in agony from shattered eardrums, his face blackened so that his eyes looked spectral, just struggling from the debris of the stone warehouse, and pushed him, stumbling, along the mole to where the German officers were standing in a group.

Tarnow, the least shocked by the battle despite his wound, started to question him.

‘How many of you were there?’ he asked.

Bradshaw’s face was blank. ‘I am Lance-Corporal David Evan Oxshott, Number 2089675.’

‘You’d better tell us,’ Tarnow snapped.

Bradshaw couldn’t hear him properly. ‘I am Lance-Corporal David Evan Bulstrode, Number 2089675.’

‘You said “Oxshott”.’

Bradshaw gestured wearily, guessing at the words that Tarnow’s moving lips framed. ‘Oxshott-Bulstrode,’ he said. ‘Hyphenated.’

Tarnow indicated the debris in the harbour and the still surviving
Giuseppe Bianchi.
‘Why didn’t you blow them
all
up?’ he demanded.

Bradshaw knew what was worrying him and he glanced at his watch. It was still going and the minutes were ticking by. ‘We did,’ he said. ‘Or we shall. There’s a delayed action charge on that one.’

Tarnow’s face went white. ‘When?’

Bradshaw grinned. ‘Any minute now.’

The Germans glanced at each other. Then Bradshaw was bundled into a house, and Hrabak and Tarnow began bawling at the sergeants. A few men who’d wandered down the mole to stare at the wreckage began to run back into the town; others were sent to clear the harbour area. Within three minutes there wasn’t a living soul in sight. No Germans, no Italians, no Arabs.

Five minutes later
Giuseppe Bianchi
went up. Devenish had done his work well, and they all heard the charge go and ducked their heads. A fraction of a second later, the ship split wide open. The funnel went clean over the wall into the sea. The masts shot into the air as if they were javelins hurled by a giant hand. A huge ventilator lifted across the harbour and dropped with a clang in front of headquarters. For about two minutes pieces of metal and wood and iron showered on the town, shattering tiles, removing roofs and doors, flattening the dome on top of the mosque as if it were brown paper instead of copper, and completing the ruin of the Mantazeh Palace. Palm trees were stripped of their leaves and reduced to bare poles. Most of the surviving Arab boats in the harbour became matchwood, and those that didn’t were washed up on to the roadway by an enormous wave.

What was left of the Boujaffar collapsed like a pack of cards, burying a sergeant and six men who were dragging out the bodies of the commodore and the ship’s captain who had died there. So did half a dozen houses along the front and the warehouse where Bradshaw had sheltered. Wutka’s wooden bridge dissolved into splinters and a long stretch of the mole was reluced to scorched and torn concrete as stark and empty as the moon.

. . .
with resultant assistance to the army advancing from El Alamein. Qaba was occupied for the Eighth Army on 10 November.

By the time Operation Cut-Price slipped back into Alex on 1 November, it was already becoming clear that the Axis had been dealt its first real body-blow of the war.

Every unit of the Eighth Army was on the move now, passing swiftly through the destruction they had wrought, even staff cars, ambulances, water carts, signalling vans, rear workshops and casualty clearing stations racing to get ahead, nobody knowing where their headquarters were and nobody giving a damn. Nose to tail they were pouring past all the old familiar places, tanks and guns without end, their tyres and tracks making marks like zip fasteners in the sand.

The news of the victory had been flashed from a destroyer which had met the remains of Babington’s little fleet, and everybody aboard
Umberto
became conscious of a wonderful feeling of elation. They’d fought their share of the battle, and though for them it had taken only around half an hour - in some cases a mere matter of minutes - it had been fierce throughout and they’d done exactly what they’d set out to do. A few hadn’t survived, a few had been hurt, a few were missing, and for most of those who’d returned, it was enough fighting for the rest of the war, enough even for a lifetime. Indeed, a lot of them would scrounge free drinks off it for years to come, and would certainly bore their relations with it for the rest of their natural lives.

The signal, ‘Smash-hit’, had reached Alexandria within minutes of
Giuseppe Bianchi
going up, and had been relayed to Murray by telephone. During the whole of 31 October, he and Kirstie McRuer had held on to their patience and their nerves as they’d waited, still not quite able to absorb the full implication of the news that was coming in from the desert.

A great wedge had been driven into the German line and their counter-attacks had achieved nothing but the destruction of their own tanks. Rommel, the great myth, the ever-successful general, had been out-thought for once and attempts by Stukas to halt the advance had come to a dead stop in an inferno of anti-aircraft fire. The Littorio, Trento and Trieste Divisions were known to have vanished in the maelstrom and the 21st Panzers very nearly so, and the whole landscape was a mass of derelict vehicles sending up their spirals of smoke to the empty blue sky.

Then, in the afternoon, with the belief already growing in every heart that the tide, which had run so strongly against Britain for so long, had turned at last, news came in that the navy had picked up Babington’s ships. There were smiles at once, but faces fell again when it was learned how few there were. When the little fleet sailed into the harbour, half of Alexandria turned out to watch them arrive.
Umberto’s
funnel looked as though it had been peppered again and again by a gigantic shotgun, her main mast was gone with the top of her mizzen, and her wheelhouse was a mass of blood-stained splintered planking and punctured steel.

The cheers that greeted her died as she came alongside and the ambulances drew up and the wounded were helped ashore. The unwounded survivors followed, a little overbold now -- even Taffy Jones, quite recovered and as noisy as ever. Then the telephones began to ring. In Bryant’s office. In de Berry’s. In Murray’s.