before the real sand began. 'Get off the road and dig her in.'
They all bumped cautiously into a dead-end wadi, ran for a hundred and fifty yards, then stuck. Everybody except the gunners leapt out and started smothering the truck in netting and bushes. The gunners watched and automatically lit cigarettes. None of the vehicles had windscreens, so it was near impossible to smoke on the move.
Tyler scribbled a quick message on a signals pad and showed it to de Carette. It gave their position, then: No clue French. Lost two men and one Chev air attack. Other Chev probably immobile. Task unlikely completion. Details follow. Tyler.
De Carette nodded. 'Does one need more detail?'
Tyler made a grunting chuckling noise and gave the signal to the Sergeant. 'Encipher that and get it off as soon as you can, never mind about proper call times. We'll be back by dark.'
One of the gunners called: 'Planes, Skipper! Up north.' He used a deliberately husky voice, as if aeroplanes five miles away might overhear, but de Carette now knew how he felt.
'Start up!' Tyler shouted. They drove out of the wadi and on southwards at a sober speed to keep down the dust.
'They're comin' this way, sir.' his gunner said. They called him Yorkie, a solid squat boy from a Yeomanry regiment.
'What are they?'
'Stukas I reckon. Bugger 'em. There in't no hurry, sir.'
De Carette had instinctively accelerated, but speed was no use against an aeroplane until it was actually attacking you.
'They 'ave us.' Yorkie said. De Carette let the jeep coast, looking back over his shoulder. The two crank-winged Junkers 87's were following straight down the line of the track and as he watched, their engines began to strain, reaching for more height.
He drove on slowly, glancing upwards. The first Stuka nosed carefully over, with the precision of a marksman bringing a target rifle into his shoulder. Yorkie muttered filthy words. The Stuka dived almost vertically but not very fast, a crippled black shape against the pale sky.
'This in't our 'un,' Yorkie said. 'We'll get 'is mate.' He swung up the K guns and fingered the triggers. 'Could you keep 'er still a moment, sir?'
De Carette turned the jeep sideways and stopped. The Stuka was already right overhead, going for Tyler's jeep, a quarter of a mile down the track. Yorkie started firing as the Stuka let go two small bombs and began a sharp pull-out.
Tyler's jeep swerved wildly away off the track and two yellow-black spouts of smoke jumped up behind him. The jeep seemed unharmed. So did the Stuka.
''Ere comes our 'un,' Yorkie said, and went on swearing calmly as he changed the pans on the K guns. But he wouldn't be able to elevate them enough to shoot at a a dive-bomber coming from right above.
'It seems so,' de Carette said, surprised at how cool he sounded. He was terrified. He had been in a few night- time air raids in Egypt, and under artillery fire three times. But those had been impersonal, random affairs. Now a man in an aeroplane had chosen to kill him. There had been a choice and that man had decided to kill him, de Carette, rather than somebody else. It was unbelievable. As it toppled into the dive, the second Stuka looked like a gun barrel with wings.
He hauled the jeep around and accelerated furiously north, back up the track and into the diving aeroplane, hoping to force it to steepen its dive even further. But he was going too fast to look up.
'Bombs away!' Yorkie called. De Carette wrenched the wheel, almost overturned the jeep, and crashed into the cover of two bushy dunes. An explosion and a blast of hot air slapped him in the back. He froze, trying to decide if he were hurt, and there came another, longer explosion.
'You bastard! You bugger!' Yorkie screamed in delight. 'That's t'first time tha's done that trick, you fucker!'
Shakily, de Carette looked around. A quarter of a mile south, there was a long smear of rich fнame and smoke rising beside the track. The Stuka hadn't quite managed its pull-out. He had never felt so happy that somebody had died.
De Carette backed nervously out of the dunes. They lit cigarettes and watched the first Stuka circling. After five minutes it flew away and they drove down to find Tyler. He was cannily hiding his jeep in the drifting smoke downwind of the burning wreckage.
'Are both of you all right?' he asked. 'And the jeep? Good show. Well-' nodding at the fire; '-that's one on the profits side.'
Tyler's gunner was a Birmingham boy with a bush of fair hair and a skin that turned red rather than tanned in the sun and wind. He was called Gunner, a nickname that had baffled de Carette until he realised it wasn't because he fired the machine-guns – which they all might do – but because he came from the Royal Artillery. Now he and Yorkie were wrangling like puppies because Gunner was quite sure (so he said) that it was his shooting and not a pilot's mistake that had crashed the Stuka.
'Do we go back now?' de Carette asked.
Tyler frowned at the sky, then the track north. 'I don't like leaving them, but… that Stuka probably radioed our position. We'd do best to keep on south. It might draw attention away from the Chev. Hell's teeth, come back here, you moron!' Gunner had gone searching in the wreckage for a souvenir. He scampered back with a battered inspection plate that had sprung loose.
'Did you know they was Eyeties, Skip, them Stukas? They had the three what's-its on the tail. The markings. I didn't know the Eyeties had Stukas.'
'Well, I did,' Tyler said. 'If you join Uncle Adolf's club, you get a badge and free Stukas. Italy, Hungary, Rumania, all of them…' But he still made a note of it for his report.
This, de Carette thought, is a man who takes war seriously. He may be leading small patrols across the desert, but he knows somebody who knows what aircraft Hitler is giving his Balkan friends, and he remembers.
For an hour, they hurried away from this new sky-marker, stopping just now and then to look at rubbish beside the track. They found cigarette packets, mostly Italian, broken wine bottles and a few German food tins that could be months old and still unrusted in that climate. But nothing French.
Finally they stopped for a brew-up and a very late lunch of biscuits and cheese, pickles and tinned fruit. To his own surprise, de Carette found he was getting a taste for the spicy English pickled onion.
As the excitement of action wore off, the mood turned gloomy as they remembered Bede and Griff.
'He was all right, was our Griff,' Gunner recalled. 'You always got a laugh out of 'im. And Jamie, he was all right, too.'
'Aye,' Yorkie said in a kind of sigh. 'He were all right. Bit serious, mind, but there's worse things to be. And I liked that Griff.'
'Right then,' Tyler said firmly. 'It cost them two men in that Stuka. But you won't shoot any more down with the guns all fouled. Let's get on with it.'
They cleaned the guns, refilling the magazines and drove on south, a last stretch of the hand to reach a probably mythical ally. They were just about to turn back when Tyler's jeep suddenly stopped and he raised his arm. De Carette braked and waited, well back. Tyler jumped out, carrying a Tommy-gun, and ran into the dunes east of the track. Everybody lit cigarettes.
After about five minutes, Tyler re-appeared and waved them up. Leading onto the track was a wide, shallow wadi, its sandy floor plaited with tyre tracks. And a twinkling scatter of cartridge cases. Yorkie got down and picked one up, sniffing at it. 'Aye, it's German, and recent.20-mil. Likely they've had a scout car down 'ere.'
'They did,' Tyler said quietly. He nodded up the wadi. 'Go and take a look,' he told de Carette. 'Stay on the side; the track just might be mined.'
Two hundred yards later, the wadi opened up into a perfect flat camp-site – except that it was far too close to the track. That was one mistake this French unit wouldn't make again. The burned-out hulks of the three civilian trucks seemed somehow far more miserable than the two military ones. North Africa was covered with wrecked army trucks, and also with little humps in the sand like those along the windward side of the dunes, each marked by a small board chopped off one of the truck bodies.
There were sixteen graves, the names laboriously scratched into the wood with indelible pencil. A lieutenant,
