‘I think we should sit on our bums here until we can take off,’ Morton suggested. ‘But not too long.’ He indicated the cigarette ends that lay under the surrounding trees, the bare patches of oily ground, the marks of tyres and the discarded British petrol cans. ‘By the look of it, this is a favourite camping ground for motorized troops and when the Italians take over properly there’ll probably be a lot of ’em round here. We’ll make a dash for it after dark.’
‘Oh, will we?’ Caccia snorted. ‘We’d catch a right old cold if we ran on to mines. Especially me in the driver’s cab. We’ll do it in daylight. Dusk perhaps. We might make it at dusk.’
‘Suppose we run into a patrol?’ Clegg asked.
‘We could wear the Italian hats and things,’ Morton said. ‘I speak good Italian.’
‘Oh, do you?’ Jones was clearly going through one of his periods of nervous tension. ‘Perfect, is it, then?’
‘Yes, you stupid little man!’ Morton snapped. ‘I’ve spoken it all my life.’
‘So how does that bloody help us?’
Morton stared at Jones as if he had crawled out from under a stone. Sometimes he looked as if he had. ‘We have Caccia,’ he pointed out. ‘He speaks Italian because his family speak Italian. Cleggy has a few words. Even you, you little Welsh twit, can speak the few phrases we use in the sketches.’ Morton gestured, suddenly in control of the situation. ‘That makes two who speak it well and two who can get by with a few words they’ve picked up. Che bel tempo. What lovely weather. Fa freddo. Fa caldo. It’s cold. It’s hot. We ought to be able to bluff our way past with that. Jonesy could always have a go at “Santa Lucia”. Surely that would convince them.’
‘In a Bedford lorry?’
‘The war’s been going on long enough out here for there to be a lot of each on either side.’
‘We’ve got British div. numbers,’ Caccia pointed out. ‘They stick out like the Rock of Ages in a fog.’
‘Then let’s get an Italian div. sign and you can screw it on over the one we’ve got.’
For the first time they began to discern a glimmer of hope. ‘Think we can do it?’ Clegg asked.
‘You saw the lorries back there,’ Morton said. ‘What’s to stop us going out after dark and helping ourselves?’
‘And then?’
‘Then we set off east. A bunch of Italians led by a German officer.’
‘You?’
‘My German’s as good as my Italian.’
‘They told you so in Berlin, I suppose?’
‘No. Innsbruck and Munich.’
Clegg managed a grin. ‘Well, that makes everything all right, doesn’t it? Lancelot Hugh Morton’s going to save us and win himself a Victoria Cross.’
‘Boy,’ Caccia said. ‘What it is to have courage on our side!’
Morton looked at them stonily but they knew it was an idea and they accepted that at least they’d be doing something. They’d been running simply because nobody had thought of shouting ‘Stop’. Now that Morton had offered them a plan – even if, as they suspected, it was a bloody awful plan – it was better than nothing. The desert was big and easy to hide in and, until they were forced to give up, nobody fancied ending up behind barbed wire.
Hatless and with his uniform devoid of British insignia, Warrant Officer Rafferty stood in the doorway of the wrecked warehouse where they’d hidden their vehicles, and peered out into the growing darkness.
Even as they had discovered their dilemma and decided to disappear southwards into the desert, another column of trucks and light tanks had appeared up the hill and an Italian military policeman on a motorbike had waved them to get out of the way into the town.
‘I’m thinkin’, sir,’ Rafferty had murmured under his breath to Dampier, ‘that we’d better do as he says.’
Dampier had looked startled. ‘Go into the town?’
‘We don’t seem to have much option, sir. If we go the other way someone will want to know why. There are plenty of ruins in Zuq, so we’ll collar one of the old warehouses and use it to do somethin’ to disguise ourselves so we can slip out again after dark.’
It hadn’t been difficult to find a shed near the harbour that had been wrecked by a bomb. It was built of corrugated iron, had a distinctly drunken look about it and was minus one end. To hide their nationality they had parked the vehicles stern-outwards and carefully draped blankets across the tailgates to hide the British army signs until they could do something to remove them. There was room for no other vehicle and nobody could get past.
Nobody came near them, although throughout the evening Italian vehicles in columns roared into the town towards the vehicle park at the old fort, and in the darkness they heard the squeak of brakes, the sound of excited laughter and the clank of chains as tailgates were dropped and men climbed out. By this time the wind was fading.
‘Got any ideas, Mr Rafferty?’ Dampier asked.
‘We can try going south, sir. That’s what we did when we were cut off in 1940. Tomorrow night, perhaps. Unfortunately, we don’t have much food or water. Come to that, not much petrol either.’
Inevitably Clutterbuck set up a wail. ‘What about me?’ he said. ‘If I’d stayed with 38 Light Aid Duties, I’d ’ave been all right. Dow and Raye’ll be waitin’ for me, I bet.’
‘I bet they won’t,’ Dampier snapped. ‘They’ll have heard by now that the
