Rosa painted on its bow, for which he silently thanked Van Dyck-was swung out on its davits, ready to lower. Of the three-man crew, the AB Scheldt was already aboard, settling the oars in the oarlocks, and AB Vandermeer was trotting from the forecastle. The signalman was standing by the boat, working the shutter on the Aldis lamp, and Ratter was just emerging from below, Enfield in hand. “It’s loaded,” he told DeHaan. “Eight rounds on the clip.” He handed DeHaan extra clips, which he stuffed in the pocket of his oilskin. Meanwhile, Patapouf, the assistant cook, was running toward the boat. What now? Cocoa?
DeHaan grabbed Ratter by the sleeve, pulled him close and said, voice low and tense, “What the hell is he doing here?”
Kees, standing by the winch a few feet away, saw what was going on. “Braun’s got a sprained ankle,” he said in an undertone. “Patapouf’s the listed replacement.” DeHaan grimaced, nothing to be done about it, and climbed into the boat.
The boat swayed as Patapouf struggled over the gunwale, then settled himself on the bench, chin held high with bruised French dignity. He’d seen the officers squabbling and knew that it was about him. Turning to DeHaan he said, “I served in the army, Captain.”
Rifle in hand, heading for God only knew what on the beach, DeHaan was embarrassed, and nodded that he understood. Ratter put a flashlight on the seat next to DeHaan. “If you need help, two short, one long.”
“Lower away,” Kees said, as the winch engine produced a squirt of steam and began to grind.
At the oars, Scheldt and Vandermeer worked against the heavy sea as the boat rode up the waves and smacked down in the trough, and, even with DeHaan and Patapouf bailing away, the water rose to their ankles. When they were halfway to shore, the man on the beach started signaling again, which gave them a position fix, a few hundred yards east of where the tide was driving them.
“Signal back, Cap’n?” Vandermeer said. He was a tough kid, short and skinny, with fighting scars on his face, who’d been hired off the dock in Shanghai.
“No,” DeHaan said. “We don’t know who else is out there.”
A fast ride in, once they hit the shoreline, and they vaulted over the side and ran the boat up the gravel shingle, then dragged it higher, into the dune grass, safe from the tide. It was raining harder now, and their oilskins snapped in the wind. DeHaan took the flashlight, and handed the Enfield to Patapouf. “Know how to use it?”
“Yes, sir. I think so.”
“What’d you do, in the army?”
“Cook, sir, during the war, but they taught us how to shoot.”
DeHaan handed him the extra clips.
They headed east, footsteps crunching on the shell litter. Ten minutes, fifteen, twenty. Then, an English voice, somewhere above them, almost lost in the rumble and crash of the surf. “Who are you, then?”
“From the boat,” DeHaan said. “Captain DeHaan.”
They saw him as he rose, silhouetted against the sky, Sten gun pointed at them, then swung aside. “Glad you came. It’s a fucking horror up there.”
“Where?”
“Few hundred yards inland.” He joined them, looping the Sten’s strap over his shoulder. “I’ll take you,” he said. “If I can find it-should’ve left fucking breadcrumbs.” Was it Sims’s sergeant major? DeHaan wasn’t sure, the man’s watch cap was pulled down over his forehead, and he was limping. “Stepped in a hole,” he said.
“Who are you?” DeHaan said.
“Aldrich. Sergeant Aldrich.”
They set off along the beach. After a few minutes, DeHaan said, “What happened?”
“Christ-what didn’t!” They crunched along for a time. “We left one guard and our Arab with the boats-ahh, skyline here, gents.” He bent low to the ground, scurried up the dune, over the top, and down the other side, to a twisting, stony path flanked by broken boulders. “Bloody fucking thieving bastard, turned out. He ran off with them. Or someone did. Or who fucking knows. Anyway, we couldn’t find Wilkins and we couldn’t find him.”
“And Major Sims?”
“Couldn’t find him either.”
They trudged on in silence, the path turned to dreamscape-low canyons of splintered rock shining wet in the rain, scrub trees and brush, terrain that forced a tack every few yards, over ground which rose and fell so that, with a blank horizon, it seemed as though the land had closed behind them. “He took two men,” the sergeant said, “and they went to circle round the flank, and that was that. When we finally got those bastards to give up, we went looking for him, but..” DeHaan felt his foot slide, tried to catch himself, then fell flat on his back. “Careful, there,” the sergeant said-a comic line, now that it was too late to be careful. “The whole bloody mess was more than we bargained for,” he went on, as DeHaan got to his feet. “You’ll see.” When they were again on their way he said, “We called out to them, whistled, flashed a light, but they were just, well, gone. It ain’t all that rare y’know, I was with the expeditionary force, May of ’40, up by the Dyle River in Belgium, and it happened all the time.”
A rock wall appeared from the darkness, the sergeant stopped and said, “Ahh, this bugger.” He stood still, looked to one side and the other, then said, “It goes to the right here, doesn’t it. Yes, right.” Down a narrow defile into a valley of rocks, then up a steep slope, some kind of flint, where DeHaan tried to use his hands but it was like broken glass. Lost in this place, he thought, you would give up. A few minutes later they came to a wadi with a foot of fast water rushing through it-so fast they had to fight to keep balance as they crossed. The sergeant worked at climbing the bank on the far side, sand crumbling away as he tried to get a foothold, then hauled himself up on the third try and extended a hand to help the rest, saying, “Come on now, Mabel.”
“Do you think they were taken?” DeHaan said.
“Taken,” the sergeant said. “Something took ’em, yes, that’s about it, isn’t it.”
At last, a gulley, where mounds of gray rags lay amid tangled wire in a few inches of water. The survivors of the whole bloody mess, DeHaan realized, soaked and exhausted, with a manned Bren at either end. At the middle of it, the lieutenant struggled to sit upright. “Well, damned glad to see you, ” he said, a smile on his dead-white face. One pant leg had been sheared off and his hand was pressed against a bandage wrapped around his thigh. “We will need a lift,” he said, apologizing for the inconvenience. Silently, DeHaan counted the men in the gulley- eleven-and realized they could manage with one boat. The lieutenant saw what he was doing and said, “Four dead, five missing, including the major, I’m afraid, and two so badly wounded we had to leave them.”
DeHaan knew there’d been twenty, plus Sims, and thought he’d miscounted, until he discovered a German officer in with the rest, lying on his side with his hands tied behind his back. Sitting next to him, his guard, one of those teenaged soldiers who looked thirteen-a pinched face, out of some Victorian slum, spattered with blood. On the floor of the gulley, broken aerials, steel boxes with dials and gauges, each of them trailing snarls of copper wire, and two concave disks-one a parabolic mirror with a cracked face-about three feet wide. Some or all of it bolometers, DeHaan thought.
“Looks like you got what you came for,” he said.
The lieutenant nodded. “And a Jerry. Technician, from the insignia on him.” DeHaan could just make out the pinion wheel of an engineering officer on the man’s sleeve. “So a good raid, if we make it back. Could’ve been cleaner, of course, but they had a little protective force, French officers and Tunisian troops, and they just had to make a fight of it. Didn’t last long, but…” In the sky, a distant whine, and all the men looked up as it grew louder, then faded into the distance.
“Fucker’s back,” one of the men said.
“He knows we’re down here,” the lieutenant said. “We cut their telephone lines but we didn’t get the radio, not right away. And one of the officers shot off a couple of flares.”
“Last thing he did,” the sergeant said.
“We don’t know who he was signaling,” the lieutenant said, “but we took fire from a second unit as we left. So, they’re out there, somewhere.”
DeHaan looked at his watch. Maybe an hour until daybreak, he thought. Using his Sten as a cane, the lieutenant got to his feet. DeHaan and his crew took a share of the captured apparatus, DeHaan carrying two of the metal boxes. One of them had been smashed in the middle, as though someone had tried to disable it with a rifle butt, and the glass in the gauges was shattered. On top of the control panel was a
brass plate with a trademark, Zeiss, and, below that, WRMEPEILGERT 60.
The trek back to the beach was slow, hard work; the lieutenant, and one of his men, needed help in order to walk and DeHaan, near the head of the column, looked at his watch more than once. The magic boxes were light at
