Thinking about it, being deemed not all that clever is an epitaph that Piers would have absolutely hated. It cheered me up no end.
They dug up a lorry. Well, half a lorry anyway. The rear end of an old AEC Matador buried deep in the sand. Clare had found it eventually by watching the compass swing as he moved around it, and by drawing intersecting vectors in the sand. The wagon was under the place where they all crossed. It had a steel box body with rear doors, having probably been an artillery tractor in an earlier life. Trigger had them all stand back, and then screwed about it a bit for booby traps. Apparently it was one of his specialities, but he didn’t find any. Then he rattled up and down its metal side with a big screwdriver for a bit. The noise set my teeth on edge.
‘Gets rid of the scorpions,’ Clare told me later. ‘They scarper when they get the vibrations.’
‘What about snakes?’
‘Yeah. There’s always a couple down under the frame, but the noise usually sends them about their business as well. But, you’re right – when the bold boys start working on it I make sure they’re careful where they step, and wear leather gauntlets.’
A bright kid called Muzzard spelled me for an hour so I could get some grub. He was a complete novice, but he picked up the principles of the sweep very quickly . . . I thought he showed promise. He was supposed to yell for me or Clare, of course, as soon as he heard something. He didn’t though, and I got some lunch and a cuppa in peace. I wandered up to the excavation before I settled down again. The Matador’s cargo space was filled with ordnance, motor spares, petrol and water. Clare’s team were checking the safe date on the metal cases and wooden boxes, and replacing those that were out of date with fresh stores from one of our trucks. The stores being replaced were detailed by entries onto about thirty different forms.
‘CIO – CII. That means count it all out, and count it all in,’ Trigger sang out, when he dropped in for a chat. ‘. . . a good military principle.’ The radio wagon was as hot as hell. I sat in my shorts and boots, and the perspiration poured off every inch of my body. My shorts were as wet as if I’d just come out of the sea with them on.
‘Want me to give you ten minutes?’ Roy asked.
‘No, I can manage, but thanks.’
‘OK. Just shout.’
I saw him slogging up the dune with a spade. They were nearly all up there by then, burying the fucking thing all over again. By the time they finished smoothing out the sand with mats dragged behind them, it was difficult to know anyone had ever been there: the first breath of wind would do the rest.
There were a couple of times in the next few hours when I was tempted by Rogers’s offer. No signals. Or nearly no signals anyway. There was a bleating in the distance I could barely make out, so I yelled until Clare ducked his head into the shack.
‘What is it?’
‘Dunno. It comes on, and then fades.’
‘Can you read any of it?’
‘No.’
‘Let me know if it comes back.’ I saw him look down at his watch and trigger the sweep hand on the stop. That was interesting. Exactly half an hour later I called him back.
He asked, ‘Same signal?’
‘Yes. Probably a hundred miles away, unless he has a dodgy battery.’
Clare stopped the sweep arm of his watch, grinned and said, ‘Good. You can secure; then clean yourself up, and let’s get out of here.’
The penny dropped a few minutes later. I had heard the recall, and the content of the message was immaterial. The interval between the end of the signal and the beginning of the next was everything: a thirty-minute gap to tell Clare to clear off. I rubbed down with sand, and changed my clothes. At Trigger’s insistence I piled so much foot powder between my toes that my boots and socks puffed smoke with each step I took.
He said, ‘You’ll lose all the skin between your toes, but if you can keep them dry at least they won’t get infected. Stick it under your arms as well.’
‘Why doesn’t it happen to you?’
‘Who says it don’t? We just learned to live with it.’ Uh-huh? ‘Smoke break?’
Clare swapped over with Rogers, and kept his promise. He taught me how to drive a four-by-four. It was like heaving a tank about, but I liked that odd grab of extra traction from the front wheels when you least expected it. He had me drive into some softer stuff, just in order to prove the wagon could pull itself out again. I was sweating again, but only in the small of my back. Clare had three days’ growth of beard – all the others did as well; it made them look like pirates.
‘What have we been doing out here, Sergeant?’
‘On a scheme. In the RAF you’d call it an exercise.’
‘In the RAF we’d call it replenishing a stores dump, and I’ll bet it’s one that’s not supposed to be there.’
‘You know, Charlie . . . mind that rock; you might have 4WD but things that size can still break your springs . . . where was I?’
‘. . . You know, Charlie?’
‘Yeah, there’s such a thing as seeing too much.’
We camped thirty miles from the buried Matador, and the Arab came in that night with his eggs and his woman. We bought more of the former, and Clare firmly declined the woman again.
‘Has the Sarge ever said yes for the woman?’ I asked when Clare was out of earshot.
‘No,’ Trigger told me, ‘but I think about it a lot.’
We didn’t see the Arab again.
Three nights
