The more he thought about it, in fact, the luckier he realized he was. When it was all over, somebody would be bound to ask questions about him failing to appear at Ibrahimiya with the other Italians, but if the British were driven away it was going to be possible to emerge with a prisoner. If the British
weren’t
driven away he could graciously hand over the rifle to the Englishman and surrender instead. He seemed to be covered both ways, and it seemed very much by now as if the raiders were just about everywhere it was possible to be except in Zulfica Ifzi’s room.
Bontempelli was dead right. They were.
Out at the lorry park, Captain Cadish had already extracted fifteen Lancia trucks - more than enough, he reckoned, to carry a hundred and fifty men - and dispersed them around the group of bungalows which he had fortified and stocked with petrol, tinned food and water. Then the rest of the lorries had been driven together, their tanks punctured, and destroyed with a grenade tossed in the middle.
‘Piece of cake,’ Cadish said.
So far it had been a piece of cake for Murdoch too. Expecting the most difficult job of all, he had fallen, in fact, for the easiest, though he had made it easier by the speed and certainty with which he’d moved.
When Murdoch arrived among them, the handful of guards and stores staff at the fuel depot had still been watching the glare of flames from the town and the lorry park and the occasional flash of a bomb to the south on the airfield, and trying to make up their minds which ought to occupy their attention first. They were all either dead, wounded or prisoners within a matter of minutes.
While the survivors were being shepherded into the road, Cobbe, Auchmuty and a few others went round the hundreds of drums which by Wutka’s diligence had already been stacked there, piercing them with ice-picks while By’s great fists hurled them to the ground to spill their contents in the dust. Then the RAF explosives expert and Honorary Aircraftman Rouat placed five-minute time charges and ran.
There was a drainage ditch alongside the road to carry sudden winter downpours to the sea and they all took shelter in it. While they were waiting for the bang, Baldissera’s lorries arrived on the scene. The Italians had wasted a good twenty minutes arguing with the Luftwaffe at Ibrahimiya before it had dawned on them that their presence was no longer required there. The air raid seemed to be over and the alarm about parachutists seemed to be a false one; but, no more keen to face black-faced commandos than they were to face black-faced parachutists, they had turned their vehicles about unwillingly and headed slowly back. They were just approaching the petrol dump when the first charge went off and the stacks of drums went up, less with a bang than a whoof. A whole series of explosions followed, as if a giant were blowing huge breathy belches across the face of the desert.
Without waiting for orders, the Italians dived from their lorries and pressed themselves to the earth while fragments of scrap iron and wood and brick bounced with little puffs into the dust around them. When they lifted their heads again the whole hundred-yard-square expanse of the compound was roaring, sending huge black clouds of smoke into the sky. The heat was so tremendous it created its own draught and they could feel the air being sucked past them to feed the names. Dust and uprooted shrubs began to roll with it and disappeared as cinders into the heavens with the smoke.
‘Holy Mother of God,’ Baldissera said. ‘What happened?’
One of the men behind him started to pray.
‘Siccome Voi, o gran Dio
–
‘
‘Shut up!’ Sergente Barbella gave him a kick, and they began to move forward towards the flames to see what was happening. Eventually they were standing in groups, illuminated by the glare not fifty yards from where Murdoch’s party crouched in the ditch.
‘God damn it,’ Gadish whispered, shocked. ‘We’ll be shooting ‘em from the back!’
Murdoch shrugged. ‘Gey sight safer than shooting ‘em from the front,’ he said.
It was possible to see the glare of the burning petrol dump from the centre of the town, and Hockold knew that Murdoch had done his job well. The mortars that Nietzsche had brought into action before he was killed were now dropping their bombs among the buildings by the remains of the Roman arch, Docwra had been killed, while Cook-Corporal Rogers, a little startled to find the war rather more bloody than he’d expected, was lying on his back among the scattered stonework. Eva bent over him. There was blood on Rogers’ face and he was dazed and shocked. ‘They got me, Tinner,’ he said. ‘Better take me money.’
Eva did as he was told. Then he took another look at Rogers in the light of the flames. ‘Tedden that bad, Rodge,’ he said. ‘Tedden only a scratch.’
Rogers’ head lifted. ‘You sure?’
‘ ‘Course I’m sure.’
Rogers heaved. ‘Then give us back me wallet,’ he said.
As he struggled to sit up, however, another of the mortar bombs dropped nearby with a nerve-shattering crash and he forgot his money, even the wound that had knocked him over, and dived for shelter with a yell of fright.
The explosion left another man sprawled grotesquely over a captured Spandau and a second badly wounded. Sugarwhite and Willow struggled to lift him out of the rubble, Sugarwhite -- his hurt ribs making him catch his breath -- wondering as he strained under the weight, if it was as difficult for a dead man to be hoisted into heaven. Carrying the injured man into the bunker, smeared with his blood and with his arms flopping round them in a parody of affection, they were shocked by the pain they faced. There was a stink of death in the place and they were glad to get away.
‘God,’ Willow said, his mouth trembling. ‘There’s more stiffs than living in that place!’
They wormed their way back to their shelter among the rubble and, as they gripped their rifles, a German ran from the buildings across the Shariah Jedid towards the mosque in an attempt to outflank their party. Sugarwhite shot him before he reached shelter and he rolled over in a whirl of arms and legs. Almost immediately a sergeant appeared in an alley between the buildings, waving and shouting other men into a rush, and Sugarwhite shot him, too. But as the rush died away in a spatter of fire from the ruins of the Roman arch, the mortar began to fire again. An abrupt crash lifted him from the ground and slammed him down again with a force that jarred his teeth and knocked the breath from his body. His helmet seemed to be crushed on his head and his lungs became filled with a rush of sand and grit that scraped at his injured ribs.
He gave Willow a stiff wooden grimace that was meant to be a smile. ‘They’ve got us taped,’ he panted.
A shell from the 75 above the POW compound whacked into the rubble, and while the stones and dirt were still falling on them the Germans tried another rush. Sugarwhite brought one of them down and Eva shot another, and the rest dived back into shelter. Then the mortar started again, the crashes seeming to shake the flesh loose over their nerves.
‘I reckon we ought to move over a bit,’ Sugarwhite said.
He had just heaved himself painfully to his knees, looking for a better shelter, when another shell from the 75 exploded alongside them and the shock wave snatched him up like a rag doll in the shrivelling heat of a molten flash and flung him head-first into the wreckage of the Roman arch.
Willow lifted his head and stared with haggard eyes at the pair of legs sticking stiffly up in the air. ‘Poor old Abdul,’ he muttered.
The main party was under heavy pressure from three sides. Unafraid of death because it seemed inevitable, it had always been Hockold’s intention to draw as much fire as he could so that the demolition parties could work unhindered. But, whatever his own fatalism, he felt he owed life to the rest of his party, and with the mortars, the two 47s and the 75 above the compound firing at them, he could see their numbers dwindling away to nothing.
Another mortar bomb landed with a deafening crash, and bricks and stones bounced among them.
‘I think it’s behind the hotel,’ Amos said. ‘Let me have a go at getting it. I can get into the Shariah Jedid and to-and-fro a bit round the back door.’
‘How many men will you need?’
‘Ten should be enough with Sergeant Sidebottom.’
Collecting his men, Amos snatched at a haversack containing ammunition and, waiting for a lull in the firing, dived for the trees across the road. They made one of the houses opposite without difficulty and, as Sidebottom shot the lock off the door, they burst inside. The house was furnished luxuriously and there was even a piano. Waterhouse crossed towards it and, caparisoned as he was for war, his concave cheeks black, his ginger hair over his eyes, he began to pick out the National Anthem.
‘Nice tone,’ he observed in his flat catarrhal voice.
As the rest of the party arrived they gathered round Amos. ‘We’re going further up the street and through that door there,’ he said. ‘Ready?’
‘Right,’ Sidebottom said.
As they dashed out again, they were spotted and a machine gun on top of the naval barracks opened up. They flung themselves into the doorway, arid a flying splinter of stone whipped over Sidebottom’s shoulder to lay Amos’s forehead open from his eye to the hairline.
Pausing to blink away the blood and the shock, he shook his head in an attempt to get his senses back. With an effort, he succeeded and looked round at Sidebottom who was watching him.
‘I’m all right,’ he said. ‘Come on. Inside.’
They had reached the entrance to what had clearly once been the home of some wealthy Egyptian. As they smashed the door open they heard a scream and, whirling, Amos saw a plump, terrified girl in a yellow dress crouching behind it, holding an enamel jug to her chest. They were in a small tiled courtyard, with a fountain surrounded by plants. The roof was open to the sky; bullets had smashed the leaded window and shattered the figure of a dolphin in the centre of the fountain so that the jet was spraying wildly across the floor. The wet tiles were covered with plaster, glass, and fragments of pottery, stone and wood, and the girl’s cheek had been cut by a splinter. She was obviously quite certain she was going to be raped.
‘Tell her to shut up, Sergeant,’ Amos said, his forehead dripping blood on to his blouse. Sidebottom crossed to the girl and began to address her in his quaint mixture of English, Egyptian and Indian Army pidgin.
She stopped screaming and said something, but her wide, shocked eyes never left their faces.
‘She says her old man’s the caretaker, sir,’ Sidebottom reported. ‘He had to go home because he was ill. They were comty feloose so she took over for the night. She’d locked herself in.’
‘Tell her she’s all right.’
Sidebottom spoke to the girl again, bending over her so that she cringed back, her wet skirt up over her fat thighs, her feet pulled under her, her hands still clutching the jug, her eyes staring at them in terrified black orbs.
Amos had been watching through the back window and had located the mortar established on a small patch of green behind the Boujaffar, its bombs sailing over the low out-buildings into the Bab al Gawla.
‘I’ve found it,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’
Leaving Sidebottom and two men to cover him, he led the rest of the men through the back door. But they were seen by a group of riflemen on top of the Boujaffar and the first man out was flung back against the wall, his Sten hitting Waterhouse in the face, so that he went down with a crash, stunned and bleeding from a split lip. Amos was also hit, this time in the cheek, and it sent him spinning back against the wall while the girl behind the door screamed again as the bullets came through, bringing down ugly enamelled pottery and plates ranged on shelves along the opposite wall in a shower of flying fragments, and making the plaster jump into the air in a cloud of dust and grit.
Amos shook his head, spattering the girl’s dress with blood from his torn cheeks as he spat out broken teeth. His mouth was a livid gash and he could hardly see for the pain, but he grasped his Sten and waved soundlessly towards the door. Sidebottom threw a grenade and the mortar disappeared in a cloud of smoke. Two or three German heads popped up from a shallow trench just behind, and as Amos, half-blinded and desperate, shot at them they disappeared again at once.
Gagging on his words, he gestured ahead and the party pounded across the patch of grass to the trench. Among the Germans was an elderly sergeant who was crouched with his head pressed against the earth, waiting for death. Dazed by his third wound, Amos couldn’t bring himself to drive a bullet between the thin shoulders and instead he jabbed the German with the muzzle of his gun and indicated that he should shove his hands in the air.
As they grabbed the mortar and headed back to the houses, with the two surviving Germans, the men on the top of the Boujaffar started firing once more and, even as they stumbled back into shelter, Amos was hit in the face yet again. He spun round, his jaw broken, his tongue shredded, and fell with a crash into the room where the girl was crouching.
As he sprawled on his back on the wet floor, Sidebottom bent over him and dragged out his field dressing. Amos feebly waved it away but he couldn’t speak and as Sidebottom stared down at him, he saw the girl crawl to the broken fountain with the enamel jug and begin to fill it. Pulling open the field dressing he silently handed it to her and, dipping it into the jug, she knelt on the swimming tiles alongside Amos and began to bathe the blood from his face.
The silencing of the mortar brought some relief for Hockold’s party, but the 47 across the harbour had got their range perfectly now and the buildings were literally falling apart about their ears.
A group of German sailors led by a young ensign burst out of the barracks further along the waterfront and rushed at them, yelling. Hockold shot the officer and his slender body bowed backwards while his feet were still moving forward. But they were moving more slowly now, almost as though they were feeling their way in the dark, and as they came to a stop, the youngster half-turned and went down with a crash on his side, to roll over, one hand groping at the air. The yells of his men became reedy and shrill as the rush died away.