ever do. But de Carette could see what would happen if they came to rescue this one. They'd be in a rush. One could be arranging the tow-rope, another might lift the cover just for a glance in case somebody had wrecked the engine overnight. He might not even bother to do that. But almost certainly one of them would try the starter, to see if the battery had gone flat. And that new plug would flash in the vapour coming off two gallons of petrol that nobody knew was down there under the back seat.
They started back to the jeeps in the reddening light.
'I never thought I'd feel glad we still had one of those damned tins,' Tyler commented. The 'damned tins' were Cairo's idea of petrol cans: flimsy things that leaked if you even looked at them nastily. Mostly the LRDG used the far tougher German version, whose nickname was already becoming a generic for an efficient liquids container: the Jerry-can. But you couldn't punch holes in those.
They drove a few miles north and just before sunset turned off the track, well off, to make supper.
It was a gloomy meal. For once even Tyler seemed too drained to do more than insist that they light a fire and get hot food. They ate in silence, except for de Carette trying to reassure Lecat, whose morale was slumping as his saviours slid into their own melancholia. Luckily, he was too tired to stay awake longer than it took him to eat.
Tyler sat wrapped in a great-coat and brooded over a map-board by torchlight, a mug of rum-and-lime in his hand.
'How did they get t'Chev going?' Yorkie muttered. 'Her looked bad to me.'
Gunner stared at him in the last flickers of the sand-and-petrol stove. 'What d'you think our boys was doing all afternoon while we was getting our balls bombed off? It could a been just the hose. I could fit a new one meself in half an hour.'
'It looked like t'radiator to me. They would've filled it with porridge, most like.'
'Best thing to do with porridge, that.'
'There's nowt wrong with porridge.'
'Bloody Scotties.'
'Tha knows bloody well where Yorkshire is…' They mumbled on, huddled against the side of a jeep and swapping cigarettes automatically.
De Carette sat down beside Tyler. 'That Boche commander must not be a fool, John.'
'No… he's handled his side of things pretty well. Where d'you think he's based?'
'The village?' It was the only possible answer. About forty miles north the map marked a small village with a water hole, just off the track and on the edge of the Grand Erg Oriental, the real sand sea that stretched west and south into the Sahara itself, impassable even to a jeep. If the Germans weren't in the village, there was no logical place for them to be.
'Yes… they've probably got a dozen French prisoners and our boys, they'd need somewhere to lock them up.'
'John,' de Carette said suspiciously, 'you do not want to go into that village…'
'I'd like to rescue our people, but if we can just reach the wireless Chev we could get a message through. It'll save us three days drive back to Zella – even if the Stukas don't get us.'
This man does take war seriously, de Carette thought. He is proposing to invade a village, almost certainly a walled one, which must hold at least one armoured car and a platoon of infantry – if it held anything they wanted to find.
But then his vision of the war expanded and he saw over half a million men tangled in battle along the North African coastline. All Captain Tyler had left to lose was two jeeps and five lives. It was sheer bad luck that one life was called Henri de Carette.
They moved out at ten o'clock, with a sliver of moon due to rise around four in the morning. For them, it was probably safest to drive in the dark with headlights blazing confidently, and if anybody recognised them as jeeps that needn't mean anything. The Afrika Korps used as many jeeps as it could capture, just as the 8th Army used Volkswagens, Opel trucks, Steyrs and all the rest.
About midnight, they reached the turn-off for the village and stopped short to examine the wheel-marks by torchlight.
'There's been a scout car in and out here,' Gunner reported. 'But we knew that anyhow. And the Chev for a cert. And some lorry, and a Volkswagen. But we knew that, too.'
Tyler stared up the little track. There was a distinct horizon where the stars ended, but you might not see a moving man at more than fifty yards. They daren't trust the map to tell them how far the village was, so two of them walked well ahead of the now lightless jeeps and their noise.
It was nearly two miles before an unnatural square shape hardened against the sky. They parked the jeeps off the track and Tyler, de Carette and Gunner went forward to reconnoitre.
The village had a wall, all right, squeezing it tight so that the outside houses and wall became part of each other. Feathery date palms stuck up among the buildings, giving the whole ramshackle place the look of a big flat flower bowl. The wall had no value against attack: it could be climbed in seconds. But here the usual enemy was the sand, ebbing and flowing with the winds and able to swamp an open village in a few days. There were occasional drifts piled as if they were trying to lift like a wave and break over the top of the wall, but none had made it yet. The only other way in was a single gateway blocked with two heavy but rickety wooden doors. Wood had to last a long time in the desert. And it could have been an abandoned cemetery for all the sound and light coming out of it.
They crept around it at a distance where they hoped they, wouldn't be seen – unless somebody had night glasses – and then made one cautious foray up to look at the wall itself. The Romans might have begun it, the Foreign Legion would certainly have done some of the patching, and two millenia of villagers the rest.
They were fingering the flaky mud covering and crumbling stonework when the first motor started.
Instinctively they crouched, Tommy-guns raised, but common sense said that if you've spotted an intruder the first thing you do isn't to start a motor vehicle. Tyler waved them outwards, and they scuttled away into the night. Behind them, another engine coughed and then a third.
'The first was a truck,' Tyler decided. 'The second was different, maybe the scout car. Would you agree?' he added politely.
'John, it is whatever you say.'
'They're not just running up their engines. They're coming out.'
But it was a couple of minutes after they reached a place to watch the gateway before there was a flash of headlights inside and the gates were dragged slowly open.
Three vehicles drove out. A squat four-wheeled scout car, then unmistakably, the Chev, and finally a four-wheel truck.
'Blast, blast, blast,' Tyler muttered.
'Will your Yorkie start shooting?' de Carette asked nervously.
'No,' Tyler said firmly, like an order aimed a mile down the track. 'Not if he wants to stay in LRDG.'
In that clear night there was no afterglow from the headlights; one moment they were lighting the dunes with their rocking beams, then they were out of sight completely, leaving just the engine noise. They listened for well after that too had faded before starting to walk back, gloomily.
'That wasn't a fighting patrol,' Tyler said. 'They might be evacuating completely, or they could be just taking prisoners and wounded up to Mareth or somewhere, and be coming back in daylight. We can't get the Chev's wireless now.'
'If there's one in the village, Skipper,' Gunner said, 'we could go and sort of liberate it, like.'
'Could you make a German wireless work?' de Carette asked. He saw only the heads turn in the darkness, but knew he was getting an incredulous stare, and mumbled an apology. If you were prepared to drive across unmapped deserts for a thousand miles, you'd better believe you can make anything work.
'Let's go and sort t'buggers out – if they're there,' Yorkie said.
Tyler waited a moment for de Carette to cast his vote, then said quietly: 'Right. We'll do it in two stages…'
27
