Perhaps he thought I was going to plead or apologize, but I whispered, ‘Go fuck yourself, idiot.’ In for a penny in for a pound: my dad used to say it all of the time. Smart flushed like a girl being asked to dance by a bloke she didn’t fancy. I looked up as I turned away from him. Five geese flew high over us in a nice tight V formation. Where the hell had they come from? Maybe Nancy would be up there one day.
The tanks soon split. They’d taken a few hits the night before, and their sandy-coloured armour was marked by bright streaks of bare metal where the wog bullets had bounced off, but the tankies were made of sterner stuff than us, and lurched off into the sand again. They were friendly guys, but quite mad.
We got a recall. Roy and I were sweating in the radio wagon when a string of signals came through for the Brown Jobs. They were in code, but he recognized the form, without summoning his own signaller.
‘Come home, sir; all is forgiven.’
‘Not in my case.’
‘What did you expect, sir . . . throwing shite all over the Patrol Leader like that?’ It was a phrase someone had used to describe the Lieutenant which everyone had quickly adopted. It wasn’t insubordinate, because it described his role accurately. It also made him sound like a Boy Scout, so he bloody hated it.
‘I didn’t mean to. I just didn’t think.’
‘I’ll bet he did: all bleedin’ night! Can you imagine him lying there waiting for the next handful to arrive . . . and having to keep quiet and put up with it? Bloody wonderful, sir. I’ll take him his messages now. It will take ’im an hour to decode them.’
I got a big signal on one of my sweeps. Its bearing was moving too fast across the terrain to be anything except an aircraft, and it wasn’t that far away. Now what? I gave Watson a quick burst to let him know I was on to something, and then went back to it. Then there were two. The signals didn’t seem to have that air of urgency which screamed operations, so I reckoned it was a Gyppo air force reconnaissance mission out over the Delta, or the salt marshes behind Port Said. Watson had wanted to know if the Gyppo air force Lancasters were airworthy – I reckoned he had his answer.
You have to wonder about the War Office and the RAF sometimes. What idiot had thought it was a good idea to sell the Egyptians half a dozen of our old war-surplus Lancasters, which might then be used to bomb our own boys? It’s almost as if the people in the room trying to run the Army in the Canal Zone never spoke to the guys in the room next door, who were busily flogging off the RAF’s spare kit. If a bunch of renegade Nazis had come back from Brazil and asked to buy a squadron of Spitfires, would the mad sods in Whitehall have set the cash registers ringing? – sadly the answer is, probably, yes. They never ever bloody learn.
Roy Rogers came back.
‘What’s up?’ I demanded.
‘The scheme’s been scaled back, just as I thought. The patrol coming up from the south got lost, and ran out of water. Everyone is panicking, and the Air Corps is trying to get an Auster down to them. What a cock-up!’ The Army Air Corps ran their own artillery-spotting and reconnaissance aircraft.
‘Can’t say I’m sorry. Are we going back then?’
‘Not immediately. The covered wagons will remain here for the time being, whilst we set off through Indian country to find those bloody tanks.’
‘Who do you mean by we?’
‘You and me, Kemo Sabe. Our master has ordered it, and we must make it so. We have to take one of the jeeps.’
‘Why don’t we just signal them?’
‘I asked him that, sir.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Security, Mr Rogers. Walls have ears.’
‘He’s off his fucking head! There are no walls out here – just miles and miles of fucking desert.’
‘I take your point, sir . . . although I remember there’s some sort of ruin out there somewhere. He thought the tanks might be making for it.’
‘. . . and I’m one of his radio operators. What happens if he wants to signal the RAF?’
‘Our man Baloo will have to sub for you until you get back sir. Mr Smart-Watkins has his punishment strategy for us well worked out. It’s going to be as hot as a Dutch whore’s fanny out there this afternoon.’ It happened again. I was made slightly uncomfortable by Trigger’s phrasing – that was interesting. But when in Rome, and all that.
Baloo was the army’s own sparks – a big hulking bear of a man, hence his nickname. He was a bit of a slow thinker, as I’ve already indicated, but he came from Cardiff so what did you expect? Every one had nicknames then. Just why are modern men so reluctant to accept one these days?
‘Will Baloo manage?’
‘He will, if you preset your dials and switches for him, sir, and tape over the dials so he can’t change things.’
‘What a cock-up!’
‘I said that before, sir.’
‘I agreed with you then as well.’
We set off after we had fed and watered. We had a jeep, a map, an old field compass and a precious gallon of
