When I came out of the back of the van, Smart glanced across at me from his jeep. He looked angry, and tapped his watch. Then he raised his arm, and hooked it forward. Wagons ho! He probably didn’t want to be late for his tea.
That evening we stopped later than Clare would have done, and scrabbled around for a decent, defensible camp site and solid ground. We ended up in a wadi with a stone ridge on one side and a softer ridge of coarse stuff on the other . . . it petered out into blown sand if you walked far enough in that direction. The Sergeant suggested a lookout on one of the ridges, but was quickly vetoed by our bold officer.
‘There’s no one out here, Sergeant, except the Red team, and they’re days away.’
‘This is technically a high-alert zone, sir. Terrorists have attacked our schemes before.’
‘Don’t be such an old woman, Sergeant. I’ve told you we are alone, and safe; take my word for it.’
‘Yessir.’
We were setting up the circle for the night, and stringing the barbed wire between the trucks. It was the same bloody simile again, wasn’t it? – covered wagons. Some of the men were digging out scrapes under the trucks to sleep in, or to jump into if we came under fire. Not even Smart could complain about that; it was SOP – that’s standard operating procedure to you. Just after he stopped speaking the inevitable Arab on the inevitable donkey rode into camp, bleating about his eggs. I was sure it was the same one I’d seen last month, even if we were eight hundred miles from there.
Smart drew his pistol. I hoped it was loaded with blanks.
‘Where the devil did he spring from?’
The Arab just grinned hopefully. He had an egg in each hand. Allah be praised they weren’t large enough to be mistaken for grenades.
Clare said, ‘Nobody knows, sir. It happens all the time. It’s a mystery.’
‘He must have followed us. Tell him to go away.’
‘If I just bought his eggs he would go away faster, sir.’
‘Bugger that, Sergeant. Just tell him to push off.’
Clare turned, and spoke to the Arab in Arabic. That surprised and gratified me: it meant that at least one person hadn’t wasted his time out here. There seemed to be a lot of shrugging at one another involved. Eventually the Arab snarled something and turned his mule back, pausing to hawk as he did so. His gob fell close to Smart Alec.
Trigger said, ‘I wonder what he did with his bint. I wouldn’t have minded a look at her.’
I didn’t snap at him, but I wanted to. That was interesting. It was a different Charlie, wasn’t it? Ten minutes later Smart ordered Roy to double out into the sand, and dig a latrine. That was unusual.
What they’d taught me on the last scheme was that when your time came you wandered off into the blue with an entrenching tool, dug a hole and dropped your trousers. Then you covered it up when you were finished. If the security situation was truly dodgy you took a mate with you, and he turned his back as you dropped your kegs, but covered you with his gun. Smart Alec, however, thought that arrangement unsoldierly. Where soldiers stopped for the night a latrine hole was to be dug, all ranks for the use of. What’s more the latrine had to be at least twenty yards away. And what’s more than that, two small slit trenches had to be dug between the latrine and the camp, so you had somewhere to drop into if you came under fire on the way. Smart Alec assured us we were unobserved by hostiles, but he still wanted his latrine and two trenches. All evenly spaced. Even although it was in the softer stuff, it took Roy an hour and a quarter, and he was knackered when he came back. He sat with his back against the Austin’s big front wheel and panted. It was cooling down and there was a light breeze. It probably came all the way from the Med, because there was now damn-all between it and us, and it dried the sweat on Trigger’s body.
He said, ‘Fucking bastard!’
‘Making a fucking point,’ I observed, and handed him a mug of char.
‘Thanks. He’s got it in for me.’
‘. . . only because you took the rise out of him.’
He grinned ruefully. ‘Yeah. There was that. I’ll have to watch my lip.’
‘Because mutiny is a capital offence in the British Army,’ I reminded him.
‘Only when you get caught, sir. I seem to remember some officer telling me that.’
After he finished his char and poured the dregs on the earth between his feet, he stood up and wandered over to the cookie for some grub. The rest of us had already eaten.
The fun started later in the evening. Most of us were gathered around the stove, wearing either jackets or blankets around our shoulders. The stove gave out no light, but a bit of residual heat, and it was cool for the time of year. There was a card school going around a hurricane lamp, and despite his committed view Smart had put two men up in the trucks as lookouts. Maybe the silly bastard was educable after all. When my bowel performed a serious ritual of summoning, I stood up, picked up the entrenching tool and a small torch, and started to move out of the light.
Smart Alec glanced up.
‘Where are you going?’
‘To christen your new bog.’ Factually inaccurate, Charlie. It was no longer a virgin.
‘Bit late.’
I was almost at the legs-crossed stage, so I wasn’t as patient as I might have been.
‘The way I see it is that you’re going to
