‘Why us?’
‘Why not?’
There was an early bit of moon – I hadn’t been kidding him about that. The air whined in through a couple of tears in the canvas roof. To our left out on the Great Bitter Lake, a tugging little wind lifted small waves that sparkled in the moonlight. Billions of stars, of course – I’ve never seen starry nights like the starry nights in Egypt. They would have driven Van Gogh mad. Hang on a mo, he was half mad in the first place, wasn’t he? From time to time I saw a flash of white as the sail of a Gyppo fishing boat caught the light. It would have been a wonderful drive if I hadn’t been sitting on a small arsenal of things to kill people with.
We dropped further south every minute, passing Fayid and Abyad on our right and RAF Fanara on the left. Watson didn’t speak much; occasionally he whistled, but it was stuff from shows – hardly my scene. At RAF Kasfareet you could see the aircraft lined up like toys – Vampires, and a few tired old Hastings transports. If you had parked up aircraft like that in the war, someone would have dropped out of a cloud and destroyed the lot in one low pass; but these were different times. We hit a shite-hawk feeding on a road kill somewhere south of Geneifa – I reckoned that made the score British armed services two, Egyptian wildlife nil – and trundled past Hodgson’s Camp into the suburbs of Suez before dawn. I’d even managed an hour’s kip along the way.
A wooden barrier across two oil drums and six MPs with side arms means stop in anybody’s language. They had two of those brand-new Land-Rovers at a checkpoint. I know what Pat Tobin had said about his, but they looked a bit flimsy to me.
The sergeant in charge saluted Watson and asked, ‘Wing Commander Watson sir?’
Watson yawned before he replied, ‘Yes and Pilot Officer Bassett C. That’s Bassett with two esses and two tees. Make sure you get the spelling right if all we get out of this is a couple of grave slabs.’
The sergeant visibly relaxed, ‘It won’t come to that, sir. The address you are interested in is on the very edge of the Arab quarter – quite classy actually – we won’t need to venture in far. Are you allowed to tell me what this is about?’
‘ ’fraid not, Sergeant. The buggers don’t even tell me half the time!’
‘Very good, sir, but a word of caution if you don’t mind.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Things are a bit tense at present. We’re getting a lot of pilfering by the wogs, and High Command is pretty fed up.’
‘Thank you. We’ll bear that in mind. What sort of things are they stealing?’
The copper looked round to make sure none of his team was earwigging. He leaned into the cab and whispered, ‘You won’t believe this, gentlemen, but they stole a battle tank, all thirty tons of it.’
‘You’re right,’ Watson told him, ‘I don’t believe it. Shall we get on? My man is going to sleep here.’
I don’t know why it is, but I’ve always found that having a boss who’s a good liar is quite reassuring. Maybe that’s one of the qualifications for becoming a boss in the first place. Either that or they teach you it in Bosses’ School.
The address I had for Yassine was a villa in a wide, short cul-de-sac. If this was the Arab quarter, then I wanted to be a Suez Arab, not a pretend British airman living in a tent in the middle of a sandpit. The houses, behind high mudbrick walls, were big and airy, and had large cultivated gardens with specimen trees, and exotic flowers. In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree . . . that’s Coleridge, for the ignorant among you. I wondered how far we were from Xanadu. That brought to mind a soldier I’d once met who had hidden behind a poet’s gravestone while a tip-and-run Messerschmitt machine-gunned him for fun. It’s funny, the thoughts that run through your head when you’re shit scared.
The idea was that we’d be accompanied by a Land-Rover and three men; they would remain with our truck, at the end of the road and out of sight, in a small open park. They were supposed to come in and get us if they heard gunfire. I’d heard better plans, but for the moment my mind would not come up with one.
One of the MPs confided in me, ‘Not your usual wog houses, are they, sir? Most of them live in things made of dirt: they can fling them up in minutes.’ He was being a bit hard, but I knew what he meant.
‘What were these places?’
‘Suez Canal Company villas, before the French pushed off. They look out over Port Tewfik and the Gulf. Really pretty. One of them used to be a nice brothel before that Free Church bloke got all iffy, and made us close it down.’
The Free Church bloke was a well-known brigadier who’d done some terribly brave things in the war, went mad and then found religion. He had been a pain in the arse wherever he’d served ever since. That last sentence contains a clue as to what eventually happened to him, and why he was dishonourably discharged in the end. You can’t get away from the puns, even when you try.
Watson and I walked up the shadowy lane until we reached an old door set in a brick wall. The door looked far older than the wall itself. We had both strapped on revolvers, and I carried the Stirling. I didn’t actually want to, but I couldn’t leave it in the Bedford, and I wanted Watson with it even less. There was an Arab script for the number 5 –
