two sergeants, a corporal, the rest privates. All French names; presumably none of them native troops. Why hadn't they given them the dignity of upended rifles jammed into the sand as markers? Because they were in Arab territory. A rifle was hard currency here.
Even the smallest battle is horribly untidy. The ground was littered with bits of clothing, cooking tins, tools, patches of dried blood, more cartridge cases and a sprinkling of black and grey ash from the dead fires. All the wreckage was quite cold, even where it had burned hot enough to melt the metal. More than a day ago. Two?
'Vous кtes Anglais, n'est-ce-pas?'
De Carette whipped around, jabbing the safety on the Tommy-gun as it came up level. A man was standing in a small gap between the dunes, ragged and dirty, with a bloody bandage around his left calf and propping himself on a crutch that was a charred plank. As his heart slowed down again, de Carette saw that under the tiredness and the thin beard the man was younger than himself. And the baggy trousers and flared jacket were certainly French.
He lowered the gun a fraction. 'Je suis Lieutenant de Carette, Chasseurs d'Afrique.'
The man grinned and sagged with relief, then tried to pull himself to attention. He croaked: 'Soldat de la premiиre classe Gaston Lecat, mon Lieutenant.'
De Carette washed and re-bandaged the wound while Yorkie brewed hot water and Gunner kept watch. Tyler asked the questions, in his careful but fluent French, and de Carette was a little miffed that he seemed to know more about the French army in Africa than he did himself. Yes, they had come up out of French West Africa once the old Vichy Colonel had managed to go down with malaria and the young Major decided it was time they got into the real war. They might have been searching for somebody called General Ledere – was there such a man? No, they didn't have a wireless transmitter with them. It was back at the fort, too big to put in a truck. There had been about forty of them, he thought, and they'd been on the road for eight, or was it ten?, days. They hadn't seen anybody except a few Arab camel drivers, who told them there weren't any Germans down here…
Tyler and de Carette swapped sour looks.
And, of course, the Italians. The Italians who had come up the same track behind them, the day of the attack. They'd pulled off into the dunes for lunch and left a guard hidden down by the road, and he saw this convoy of Italian motor-cars go past. Five of them and one truck. The Italians in the cars seemed to be officers and two women. Yes, the Major had thought that was odd, too. So he'd taken Sergeant Foulque and probably it was four men and one of the Chatellerault machine-guns and gone off in two cars to follow.
And the rest of them had waited – and that night there was the attack. A blast of fire and grenades sweeping the camp, quickly followed by the pumping twenty-millimetres of scout cars charging up the wadi. He himself had never even found his rifle in the darkness, he'd just run until a bullet knocked him spinning down the dune and he hadn't seen anybody since then. He'd crawled away into the night and watched the glow of the burning trucks and heard at dawn the noise of digging, and then the Germans had driven away. He had waited all day, then all night, for the Major, but…
And, just like that, Lecat fell asleep, with a half-full mug of tea and rum in one hand and a burning cigarette in the other. Tyler carefully took the cigarette and ground it into the sand. 'He's lucky to be able to do that, not to get hysterical or weepy when it's all over.'
'You think it is all over?' De Carette gestured around.
'For him it is. He's found a new commander, the kitten has a new mother and doesn't have to do his own worrying any more. Most soldiers are like that, thank God.'
De Carette looked down at the relaxed, very young face behind the wispy blonde beard. 'He is only a lance- corporal, one stripe above nothing… So they did come this way. And they got caught. We have made our mission.' He may have sounded bitter, hating to see French soldiers come off second best. But three years or more raising and lowering a flag over a Sahara fort was no training to meet the Afrika Korps.
'And what about the Major?' Tyler asked.
'He was caught as well.' Now he was sure he sounded bitter.
'He must have gone up the track before we reached it; he left about forty-eight hours ago. And what do you think about the Italians, Henry T 'I don't understand it, Jean.' It was a tiny joke, switching nationalities on each other's names. – Tyler was trying to cheer him up. 'From Ghadames?' That was the walled village – a town by desert standards – down on the edge of the Sahara, a hundred miles south. A strong Italian garrison, when last heard of. The French must have bypassed it without explaining to Lecat.
'Just officers and women in cars,' Tyler brooded, 'and one truck, probably with their baggage.'
'Jйsus. Can they really be leaving their own men?' Italian garrison units had no great reputation for gallantry, but this…
'It looks very much like it. Ghadames could be wide open – if we can get a message through. Sonnez le boute- selle.'
They went north, Lecat jammed crossways among the supplies in the back of de Carette's jeep. The sun dwindled on their left, so that would be where any wise enemy would set an ambush, but they saw nobody. Perhaps the action over the last two days had persuaded even the camel drivers that their own journeys weren't immediately necessary.
They passed the strewn wreckage of the Stuka, still smouldering in places, and reached the area of the wireless truck just before sunset. Surprised, de Carette saw Tyler drive steadily past the wadi and round a bend in the track that put it out of sight. There he stopped and de Carette pulled up beside him.
Tyler looked grim. 'There should have been a guard on that wadi. The boys know a jeep when they hear one. Come on.' He and Gunner took Tommy-guns and moved off into the hummocks. De Carette got out to sit at the guns of Tyler's jeep, just in case. By the time he'd slid into place, he found he had a lit cigarette in his hand.
Gunner came back about twenty minutes later, trailing his Tommy-gun by the sling in a hunched, disconsolate plod.
'They've gone. Just gone, Chev and all. The Jerries got 'em. They left a Volkswagen that got stuck, like.' He started rummaging in the back of the jeep, and came up with one of the British four-gallon petrol tins. 'Skipper wants a couple of gallons and some high-tension lead and a spark-plug.'
'What for?' de Carette asked.
Gunner looked at him gloomily. 'You could take 'em to him, sir, if you wanted.'
'I will.'
Gunner poured off half the petrol into the jeep's tank, and de Carette took the can back over the hummocks. Where the Chev had been there was a scatter of camouflage nets, torn bush, empty tins, cartridge cases – all the usual rubbish of an action. Fifty yards back down the wadi, Tyler was waiting by a Volkswagen that was jammed to its hub caps in soft sand. All its doors were open and there was a mess of blood on the driver's seat, but no holes in the bodywork. Somebody in the Chev had got off a burst that had hit the driver in the head or chest and the little car had run wild into the very obvious patch of sand.
'Why did they not pull it out?' de Carette asked. Given a heavier vehicle and a tow-rope – which was as vital in the desert as water – it was a simple job, even if it took a little time.
'I imagine they had one or two men wounded, bleeding badly, and I hope some of our boys to guard as well. They'd be in a hurry. But I wouldn't be surprised if they came back for it.' Tyler lifted the engine cover at the back; it was the open military version of the Volkswagen, technically a Kьbelwagen.
'It may be booby-trapped,' de Carette said.
'It isn't, but it's going to be. I'd rather do it with a mine or some 808, but that was all in the Chevs. So now we have to improvise.'
He undid the lead from the furthest in of the two right-hand cylinders, a difficult one to get at, or even see properly. He connected part of the extra length of wire to the lead and pushed it through a hole he had already bodged in the fire wall that separated the engine from the back seat. Under the seat, there was a small stowage compartment for the battery, the jack and some tools.
Tyler punched a hole through the thin cap of the petrol can and threaded both pieces of wire through it, then attached them to the spark plug: one lead to the normal terminal, the other wrapped around the screw thread. The far end of that wire went to the negative terminal on the battery. Then he placed the petrol tin very carefully, screwed the cap gently on, and put the seat in place above it. Back at the engine, he arranged the plug lead so that, unless you looked very closely, it still seemed to go to the cylinder.
Military drivers are taught to check their vehicles much more regularly and closely than most civilian drivers
