We stopped in some low ground after noon, and rigged tarps out from the sides of the lorries, for a little shelter from the sun.
‘You pays your money, sir, and takes your choice,’ Clare told me. ‘Either we sit on the top of a ridge and can be seen for miles around, or in the troughs, which are a degree or so cooler, but from where we can’t see anyone creeping up on us.’
I asked myself who could possibly want to creep around out there anyway, but wanting to appear interested, observed, ‘You could always put a lookout up on the ridge.’
Rogers looked up from his char, suddenly alarmed. He shook his head, but it was too late.
Clare said, ‘That’s what I usually do, Mr Bassett. I was wondering if you and Rogers’d do first stag when you’ve finished your char. I’ll send someone up for you after an hour.’
Trust me to bloody well walk straight into it.
As we were trudging up the slope, toting a Bren gun and two spare magazines, I apologized to Rogers. We had a half canteen of water between the two of us, and that was supposed to last an hour.
‘My fault. Sorry about that. I should have kept my gob shut.’
His upside-down smile turned quickly to a rueful grin, ‘You’ll know better next time, then, won’t you? You’ll have to watch the Sarge; he can be a bit cute.’
He had dipped his handkerchief in a water bucket before we set out, and wrung it out over the same container so’s not to waste the stuff. Then he spread it over his neck and tucked it under the back of his black beret. I copied him. The damp cotton clinging to my neck, as we climbed, was bliss. We were only twenty feet or so above the trucks when we settled down. I’d always imagined deserts to be dunes of rolling sand. Not this stuff, however – just staggered low ridges of stone and coarse ground rolling away to the north and east for ever. It was an uninviting grey plain of absolutely fuck-all. A few scrubby plants looked dead until you were close to them, and then realized that they were still just clinging on to life . . . and it was so hot I thought I couldn’t breathe.
‘Breathe through your nose,’ Roy instructed me. ‘That will cool it just enough for you.’
At the far end of my line of sight, the desert shook and shimmered in a haze that joined it to the sky. A snake moved from under a stone about six feet away from us. It was less than a foot long and as thick as a finger. A brown, rough-scaled body and a flat triangular head. I’d had a decent relationship with a snake once: this one looked meaner.
‘Desert viper,’ Trigger told me. ‘Bad buggers; they can kill you.’ When I raised a large rock to crush it he held my hand back, with, ‘But that ain’t no reason to go killing it. Watch.’ He tossed a small round pebble close to its head. The snake arched its neck and hissed violently, but then beat a hasty retreat. I eventually lost sight of it. He continued, ‘They’re as shortsighted as fuck. It probably never even saw us; so it never meant you no harm.’ We settled down to keep watch in opposite directions, propped up against a couple of the larger stones. ‘Tell me if you see any flies,’ Trigger told me.
‘OK. Why?’
‘Show you later.’
Clare was as good as his word. We were relieved within the hour.
Trigger sat under one of the awnings with an old copy of TitBits. I crawled inside the wooden radio room on the back of the K5. It was shady in there, but even with the back door and the vents open it was as hot as hell. I felt exhausted and quickly dozed. Maybe sleeping a lot was what Egypt was about. The last thing I heard before I dropped off was Roy sniggering at some of the dirty jokes.
Clare got us moving again at 15.30. If there was now coolness in the air, I hadn’t noticed it yet. He had me call in before we set off. My call sign was Morecambe, just like Watson had threatened, and the Morse strip I had to broadcast was D980BETT571. On the second day the 1 was to change to a 2, and so on. I wasn’t in for one of Watson’s listening watches until the next night, when we were up closer to the old Palestine border.
I wanted to leave the radio pre-set for the next scheduled call in, but the Sergeant cautioned against it. He had me scramble the tuning after each session, in case the truck was captured by the opposition, and they could see at a glance what profile we were using. I suppose that was more professional, but to tell the truth all they had to do was sweep the wavebands until they found us anyway – time-consuming, but more or less fool-proof. I wasn’t all that sure who the opposition were anyway. The wogs or the Israelis? We’d fought both in the last couple of years. If they both decided to come after us at the same time, I couldn’t see us remaining in the Canal Zone for all that long.
Each of the vehicles had a roll of
