‘Fuck knows, Charlie. I’m not Geronimo.’
‘What next?’
‘Phone God; ask him what he wants us to do . . .’
We didn’t have a telephone. I tapped out a placatory message to Watson with my key: his hour was almost up anyway. He still had an immaculate hand in terms of his Morse sending, and his first return was to ask if we were OK, which meant that he had it back together again. I replied so far so good, and told him the rest. He asked me to wait five, which meant that he and M’smith would be scrutinizing the charts. When he came back he asked us to look out for animal tracks out between north and NNW . . . on a heading of say, 330 or 340 – and if we found them to follow them out. The afternoon was drawing in, so I sent, tomorrow. He replied, OK. No dissent from Watson was unusual: he probably realized that another day wasn’t going to make any difference.
When we looked carefully where Watson had told us to look, we could see the scrub and the grass had been trampled or broken more frequently than any of the stuff around it . . . not that the breaks looked all that recent.
I muttered, ‘I hate it when he’s bloody right all the time.’
‘We’ll be heading in the right direction anyway, Charlie,’ Hudd pointed out. ‘We have to head north to Van or Tatvan before they can get us out.’
‘Tatvan and Van? I take it that they are towns rather than ruined trucks parked in the desert somewhere.’
‘I don’t know as you’d quite say towns, Charlie. Depends on yer definition.’
At least Hudd had spoken about getting us out. That was a start. I don’t know why I hadn’t worried about it before. We sorted ourselves out in preparation for our second night on the plateau. Hudd showed me how to set snares in the brush.
‘What for?’ I asked him.
‘Rabbits maybe; the snakes have to live off something. Rabbit for breakfast is brilliant.’ I thought that the vipers were more likely to catch lizards and mice, and I wasn’t going to start chewing on those: you could take the Special Forces thing too far in those days. But I kept my mouth shut.
We had to range a bit further this time for scraps of dead wood and clumps of grass, and we made a bigger fire that evening, further away from the aircraft. Hudd cooked us another pan of Roo Stew which we washed down with warm tea.
‘Last tea,’ he warned me, ‘until we find water. There are melt streams down in the foothills, but I won’t take any chances.’
‘I was trying to remember what beer tasted like.’
‘And did you?’
‘No.’
‘Don’t put any more stuff on the fire. When it burns down, we’ll turn in.’
He climbed up into the black bomber before me. I sat by the embers of the fire and smoked a last pipe. I thought about the boys. They would have been asleep for a couple of hours already. The bar in Maggs and the Major’s pub would be smoky and noisy. Maybe someone was playing the out-of-tune piano in the corner. I wondered if Flaming June had made up with her lost soldier, and if Captain Holroyd and his lovely wife were propping up the bar at Abu Suier. When I crawled into my sack up in the black bitch’s belly, I was thoroughly dissatisfied, and it was all my own fault.
When I was in my fifties, and living in a decent-sized city for the first time in my life, I found myself drawn to the art galleries. I had an immediate affinity with the surrealists, because, as far as I was concerned, they were actually realists in a deeper sense. Surreality is all around you; all you have to do is look . . . and if you’re already wondering where this is going, it’s all because of the guy who knocked on the door the next morning.
The knocking on the aircraft’s door wasn’t assertive; it was just a polite knock. The sort a neighbour uses when he comes to call. Neither Hudd nor I had heard him approach, but we managed to scramble up to the door together. I opened it. Hudd poked his Stirling out, and when nothing happened, his head. Nobody shot at it. My head was there after a decent interval, but then I always was a nosy bastard. A small man, in an immaculate grey lounge suit with a pinstripe, was sitting astride a donkey. He had a parasol to ward off the sun, and a beaming smile on what looked almost like an Asian face. About thirty, narrow-featured and exceptionally handsome. I’d bet he never had a problem with the girls.
‘Good morning,’ he said in an exquisite English accent, ‘. . . beautiful morning.’
Hudd was momentarily speechless, so I took over. ‘Good morning.’
‘I saw your fire last night, and thought I’d ride over to say hello.’ Then he laughed and said, ‘Hello.’
Hudd said, ‘Wotcha.’
‘We brought you some breakfast.’
‘Nice of you.’
Then our visitor enquired, ‘I suppose you’ve come for the money?’
I started to laugh; couldn’t help myself. Hudd snarled, ‘Shut it, Charlie.’
But the Asian, Indian or whatever he was, said, ‘He’s English, sir . . . let him laugh. English passengers told jokes as the Titanic sank; quite admirable actually.’ He’d expressed our dilemma quite neatly, I thought, because my problem was with one of the words he’d used. He’d said, ‘We brought you some breakfast.’ The we in question were a dozen tribesmen sitting around us in a half-circle on small ponies and donkeys, and they were armed to the teeth. One even had what looked like one of the .303 machine guns from the Stirling slung across his back.
I said, ‘I don’t suppose our goolie chits are any use?’
Smiler replied, ‘None
