But it was the aircraft that really bothered him. This thing, with its stubby nose and thick-waisted bulk and clumsy-looking fixed landing gear, seemed to Michael a relic more suited to the last world war than the one in the unfortunate present. As Michael understood, the Lysander had been an antique even on its maiden flight in 1936. This was the year 1941, and what in the world was this thing even doing on a landing strip, much less about to take to the air as soon as the three Spitfire fighters went up. Michael shifted his bottom in the hard leather seat, whose rips were oozing cotton, and mused upon the fact that the Lysander was named after a Spartan general.
He knew what Spartan soldiers said about their shields:
With this, or upon this
.
Somehow, it was not comforting.
The airfield at the Bir Al Kabir oasis was a slapdash construction of tents and prefabricated buildings brought in by cargo planes from Cairo, two hundred and twenty-four miles to the east. The scraggly palm trees around the waterhole were not pretty and the water was not sweet, but even water that smelled and tasted of rotten eggs was life in this climate of a hundred and twenty-two degree days. A hot wind sometimes blew in, nagging at the tents and hissing through the aircraft engines to find their weak places, as more spinning sheets of dust painted machines and men alike the blanched shade of misery.
There was a war going on, and it was not always necessarily Churchill’s British versus Hitler’s Germans and Mussolini’s Italians; sometimes it was the Brit versus the invasion of a hundred thousand biting flies, or the Brit versus the month of burning days so stunning saliva dried within seconds to white crust on the cracked lips, or the Brit versus the empty horizon upon which heatwaves threw mirages of huge lakes that shimmered like molten vats of white glass.
The first of the Spitfire fighter planes was taking off. Woe to the other pilots behind him, including the Cockney kid at the Lysander’s controls, due to the amount of dust the takeoff stirred up. “You must be an important chap, sir,” came the next comment. “Three Spit escort and all, beggin’ your pardon.”
“I have my uses,” Michael answered. The way the Lysander’s engine made the plane vibrate did not make him talkative. The pilot would be throttling up and rolling out onto the runway when the third Spit took to the air, any minute now.
“Roger that. We’re waitin’. Over,” said the pilot through his headset microphone.
The second Spitfire roared off into the sky. The third was taxiing into takeoff position.
Michael checked his Rolex wristwatch. He figured he’d be in Cairo in time for a debriefing meeting at HQ and then on to lunch on the shaded veranda of the Piper’s Club. He hadn’t realized how much he missed their small filets, a platter of orange rolls and a fine cold beer. Two beers would be doubly fine. Then on to sleep for about twelve hours, on sheets of Egyptian cotton.
The third Spit took off, trailing dust. “Here we go, sir,” said the pilot cheerfully, and Michael thought he must be a budding sadist, for the kid gave the plane a little jerk as it rolled forward onto the strip, as if it wanted to leap into the air without benefit of a proper sprint. The noise of the engine was like hammers beating hollow metal drums to a madman’s rhythm, and over that unholy racket Michael could hear what sounded to him like loose bolts jumping in the wings.
“Roger, on our way,” the pilot told his controller. “Over.” He throttled up and the Lysander began to roll.
The Lysander’s chief talent was that it didn’t need a very long runway. They were off the ground in about ten seconds, and Michael placed his hands on his knees and squeezed the blood out of them as the craft rose quickly to meet the three Spitfires circling above the field.
“Goin’ up to fifteen thousand today, sir,” the pilot told him. “Get yourself a good look at the desert from way up there.”
Another look at the desert was the last thing Michael Gallatin needed or wanted.
His entire four-day mission out here had involved looking at the desert. He knew what they’d called him at the airfield: Majorly Strange. That was because after every sundown he drove through the guards’ position in an open-topped Morris truck and drove back in an hour before sunup. They knew that he was a reconnaissance officer, but they were puzzled as to why he went out alone. What they didn’t know was that, once out in the desert at a distance of a couple of miles or more, the recon major stopped his truck, took off his uniform, folded it and put it away, and then Majorly Strange became a creature that the word ‘strange’ utterly failed to describe. Over the sand and fist-sized stones of the hammada he ran westward on four legs, and cloaked by the night he travelled mile upon mile to make note in his human mind of the brutal landscape: the soft pits of sand that could swallow a truck or a tank, the series of dunes that would turn a soldier’s legs and willpower to jelly, the vast flat plains stubbled with cactus that rose to mountains and fell off again into chasms of jagged red rock. He was searching also for the German mines that lay in their thousands under the sand or the stony crust, and these he could smell by the metallic tang of danger that thrust at him, snake-like, as he approached. So much metal, and so much high explosive. The air reeked.
He used his heightened sense of direction to place these minefields on the map he’d learned to carry in his head, and so on he went alert for German patrols or the movement of troops and armored vehicles or the almost imperceptible blue lamps of an enemy outpost whose machine guns were trained on a maze of barbed wire, tank traps and Bouncing Betty mines designed to burst up from the ground and explode red-hot shrapnel into a man’s groin.
His job was to find a path for the British Army to move westward and destroy the Afrika Korps’ seige of Tobruk, which had trapped over twenty-four thousand Commonwealth soldiers in a ring of steel since the tenth of April.
At the airfield on his return, Majorly Strange would retire to a radio room and send his findings to his contact in Cairo in a code based on British nursery rhymes. Therefore the future of the war in North Africa and the lives of many thousands of men hung on the likes of Old King Cole, Strutting Cock Robin and the hungry wolf at the door.
“Easy peasy,” said the pilot. “Lemon squeesy.”
They had taken up their position just behind and below two Spitfires with the third guarding their tail. They flew east. The Lysander’s engine noise became a dull rumble. Michael did not care to sightsee what his sight had already seen, so he closed his eyes and tried to rest.
Yesterday had happened one of those rare encounters that made life, to Michael, such an interesting mystery. Such things could not be written in books and be believed.
He’d been walking to his quarters after he’d sent the radio codes when someone had fallen into step beside him.
“Excuse me, sir.
Major
?”
“Yes?” Michael was tired and ready for sleep, his senses a bit dulled. He saw the young man in the dusty Western Desert Force uniform and the two-bar chevron of the corporal’s rank. The corporal saluted, Michael returned the salute and then smiled and offered his hand. The young man took it.
“I thought it was you, sir!” said the young man, with an equally dusty smile. He’d been wearing goggles and around his eyes was the only area the desert hadn’t gotten to.
“Our company pulled in for water awhile ago, sir. May I ask…what you’re
doing
here?”
“On duty,” said Michael.
“Oh…yes, of course. Well..I felt I had to do my duty too, sir. What with all this going on. She asked me if I wouldn’t rather have joined the Navy, but I told her I’d had enough of the sea.” He paused to make sure the major understood. “We were married last April, sir. Marielle and I. Three years to the day we met.”
“Billy,” Michael said, “that’s wonderful to hear.”
“Thank you, sir. I think
she’s
pretty wonderful, myself.”
“I have no doubt. Your company’s heading east?” Michael saw some of the trucks around Bir Al Kabir’s pool, and he noted the direction they were facing. “Yes sir, we’re being pulled back. Last night we ran into some pretty stiff opposition. A few Jerry tanks out looking for trouble.”
Michael nodded. Whatever had happened, Billy’s story was an understatement. When he was on his recon runs, Michael never failed to see the flash of artillery on the horizon, and sometimes he heard gunfire and the hollow
whump
of grenades going off as close as two hundred meters. There might be a lull between official Army battle operations, but there was never a lull in the small battles that went on between companies and platoons out on the raw edge of reckoning.
The major and the corporal talked for a few minutes and then it was time for Billy to return to his men. “Goodbye, sir,” he said, and Michael wished Billy Bowers and his bride all the good fortune in the world. They saluted each other, and they went on.
At fifteen thousand feet above the desert, Michael had a dream of a wolf tumbling from the sky. He opened his eyes with a jolt. “Everything all right?” he asked the pilot, in a voice more reedy than he would have wished.
“Fine, sir. Just relax.”
Michael checked his watch. A grand total of nineteen minutes had passed since they’d left the airfield. He gave an inward groan and shifted again on the seat as much as the belt would allow.
“Oh,
Keyrist
!” whispered the pilot, and Michael’s heart jumped because he knew something had just gone terribly wrong.
One of the Spitfires veered away and dove to the right. Through the plexiglass canopy Michael saw the glint of metal rising from the earth. Two airplanes? They were coming up fast, from about twelve thousand feet. He made out the shapes of German aerial predators: Messerschmitt Bf 109s, painted in desert camouflage hues. The one in the lead had a solid black tail with the Nazi symbol painted in white upon it.
“Jesus! Jesus!” said the pilot, whose head was on a swivel searching for more enemy fighters. To the credit of his nerve, he kept the lumbering Lysander steady. Then the black-tailed 109 flashed past between the Lysander and the second Spit, on its way to a higher altitude. The Spitfire behind Michael’s plane took after it. “
Steady
!” the young man said suddenly, and very loudly; he was speaking to himself.
The second Bf 109 came up firing. Tracers zipped across the sky. The remaining Spitfire on point tipped its wings over and fell away. Michael saw it roll in order to get a position behind the 109 as it passed. The Spitfire’s wing guns sparkled, and again tracers reached out for their target but fell short. Michael looked out the canopy to his left and saw that the black-tailed 109 had gotten on the rear of the first Spitfire and was gaining on it. The Spit jinked to the right; the Messerschmitt followed. German tracers shot out in a pattern that might be called beautiful in any other situation, and as the Spit jinked to the left the bullets caught it and tore pieces of metal from the fuselage. The Spit dove and the black-tailed 109 dove after it, even as the third Spitfire got on the 109’s rear and hung there at incredible speed.
“That’s Rolfe Gantt’s 109,” the Cockney pilot said, his voice thick with both fear and awe. “We’re gettin’ out!” He throttled up, the engine screamed as much as a sand-scraped antique engine could, and the Lysander nosed down with an effect that lifted Michael off his seat and made the belt feel as if it were slicing him in two. He had no inclination to scream, but the desire was there.
They went down fast.
Suddenly something was coming down faster. The burning front half of a Spitfire, its wings and fuselage pierced by machine gun bullets and fist-sized twenty-millimeter cannon rounds. It fell past the Lysander, its control cables dangling from the torn-away rear half, and the black-tailed 109 turned away from the tumbling wreckage.
Michael watched the Messerschmitt evade tracers from the Spit on its tail. The aircraft was ascending again, and suddenly it cut its speed and rolled to the left and the Spit went past it just a little too far. As the Spitfire tried to correct its course, the black-tailed 109 made a complete roll and came up shooting at the Spit’s belly. Pieces of metal flew. A bright red flame rippled along the right wing. The Spitfire turned over on its back and the 109 raked it with a burst of cannon shells. Ebony smoke and crimson flames erupted from the Spit’s engine, the prop froze and the aircraft went down to the desert ten thousand feet below.
Michael craned his neck to see the third Spitfire fighting for its life in a battle with one German eagle, and then the black-tailed ace joined the fray. Tracers flew in every direction. The planes crisscrossed each other. But in a matter of seconds, the 109 with the camouflage-painted tail made a mistake of timing and ran into a line of slugs that floated sinuously across the sky. Black smoke bloomed from the engine. The prop spun off, one blade missing. As the 109 started to fall in a slow spiral, the canopy was pulled open and the pilot jumped with his parachute pack on his back. He disappeared from view.
“Down, baby,
down
!” the Cockney pilot shouted, about to tear the Lysander’s wings off. In the rear seat was a man who was bracing himself with hands, elbows, knees and feet and seeing his thirty years of life pass before his eyes.
The remaining Spitfire and the Messerschmitt came down twisting and turning around each other. Michael watched, transfixed, as their pilots battled for position. Tracers hit empty air that had not been empty the second before. A collision was narrowly missed. One plane zoomed upward and one shrieked down. Michael realized, with dry mouth and feverish brain, that the black-tailed 109 was turning toward them in an elegant curve, and it was going to get them in its gunsights.
The tracers reached out. Slowly, it seemed. With great, deadly and terrible grace.
The Cockney pilot abruptly chopped the throttle and turned the plane on its side to fall to the left, but the tracers were upon them and there was nowhere to hide.
The feeling, to Michael, was as if the aircraft had run over a cobblestoned road.