‘What’s the ground like, sir . . . or is that a silly question?’
‘It is – because this is Egypt. The bloody ground is changing all the time. If you go too far north you’ll be in drifting sand, but further south there are some decent wadis . . . or at least there were the last time anyone looked.’
‘What’s the tasking?’
‘Whatever communications the Army wants; they’ll take one of their own signallers this time . . . and you’ll be his relief. When he’s not working you’re to monitor any air traffic you can detect. We particularly need to know if their Lancasters are serviceable or are just heaps of junk sitting on their airstrips looking threatening. One more thing . . .’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘Take more underwear than you own; you’re going to be working this time, and you’ll sweat your bollocks off in that radio room.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Don’t mention it: I’m known for looking out for my people.’
It was already so hot that I was stuck to my seat. Before I got up I asked him, ‘What was that massacre Yassine was so worried would happen again?’
‘It wasn’t a massacre, Charlie; it was a police action in Ismailia in January last year. The Army was ordered to disarm a group of Muslim Brotherhood policemen holed up in their barracks and in a clinic of some sort. At the end of the day they’d killed three or four of us . . . and we’d killed forty or fifty of them. We used Centurion tanks to winkle them out, shelled their building to smithereens, and even fired on the Governor’s mansion.’
‘If we killed fifty Egyptian policemen for the loss of three, it sounds a bit like a massacre to me. They were probably armed with bows and arrows. Is there anyone around who was there at the time?’
‘Why, Charlie?’
‘I’d like to ask someone how it happened, sir. Maybe it explains the strange looks most of the wogs have been giving me since I arrived.’
‘And what kind of look would that be?’
‘. . . as if they bloody hate me, and want me dead, sir.’
‘Can’t you just accept that they do, and leave it at that?’ As I left his office he asked me to send Nancy over to see him – that boy’s going flying again – and added, ‘Don’t go asking silly questions, Charlie. You don’t want our side to end up hating you as well.’
That was exactly the sort of attitude that had put Hitler into the Reichstag, and I wondered why we had forgotten that so quickly.
With the erk who drove the runway sweeper I watched Nancy take off. I had cycled out to the edge of the strip like others used to do in the old days when I was setting off for Germany. Even when it was raining there had always been someone there to wave goodbye: we British can be a sentimental folk. Oliver was sitting in the back seat of one of those new Gloster Meteor trainers, which had a long glazed cockpit cover that looked like a humped greenhouse. The aircraft itself was unpainted, and in places the aluminium bloom had dulled its surfaces.
Nancy turned to look at me, and raised one hand in salute. So did the pilot. Nancy himself was wearing a canvas helmet and dark grey rubber ox mask, so I could only see his eyes. I think he was smiling, but I had that horrible feeling: Ave Cæsar, morituri te salutant. Then the noise level from the twin Rolls-Royce jet engines took over, and dust and sand was lifted in a cloud behind it. Once the pilot let the brakes off they thundered away past me like shit off a shovel. The aircraft lifted from the runway, catching the light a couple of times with a couple of brilliant dazzling flashes, then banked, turned to starboard and disappeared – still low – out into the northwest.
Nancy had raised his hand once more, as they passed me. I never saw him alive again.
They were overdue after three hours, and an hour later Control started the process of phoning around all the other RAF stations with runways on the Canal Zone – seven or eight in all – as well as a couple of emergency strips. I walked out to the end of our strip in the twilight, sat in the dirt, and watched out to the north and west. After an hour I saw a shooting star: a meteor perhaps. For a while the lion sat opposite me on the other side of the runway, maybe twenty yards away. In profile she was like a miniature sphinx. Her tongue lolled out, and she was also looking out to the northwest. When she thought it was no longer worth waiting, she got stiffly up, and slid away into the shadows. Minutes later I heard a jeep’s engine. It was dark, and Pat Tobin had come out looking for me. We drove to the stores shed, and had a bit of a party with the lads.
I was hung-over when I drove the radio truck out of the compound at Deversoir, and clipped one of the concrete-filled oil-drum barriers that did little to protect us from homicidal natives on camels. The drum burst, rolled some distance and ended up alongside the shack everyone used as a
