Killing Rommel

  “We can’t wait for you,” Jake is telling me. “You’ll have to go back across the Sand Sea on your own and catch us up on your return.”

  I tell him I’ll leave tonight.

  “Like hell you will.”

  The men assemble for the briefing. Groundsheets have been spread, one flap on the sand to sit on, the other lashed upright to the flanks of the parked trucks to form a windbreak. The men have been grilling rissoles for supper; they sizzle tantalisingly in their skillets and smell delicious on the chill desert air. Mugs of tea are passed round. Men take their seats. NCOs have brought notebooks; officers open their map cases.

  Jake and Major Mayne run down the operation, much as they and Kennedy Shaw did for officers and NCOs in the pre-lim at Faiyoum. The troopers know most of the plan already, having wormed it days past from one source or another. They’re fired up. I try to listen but I’m sick with my blunder and the toll it could take on the operation. Already I’m plotting how to cross and re-cross the Sand Sea as fast as possible. Jake is telling the men the latest intelligence on Rommel’s whereabouts.

  “As you know, gentlemen, a hell of a dust-up is about to kick off at El Alamein. Monty’s brought up everything but the kitchen sink and is getting set to throw it all at Rommel. If it works, the Jerries’ll have to pull back.” Wherever the enemy stops, Jake says, our group will go in from behind. Sigint continues undetected by the foe; our radio-intercept fellows are still delivering their nightly bead on Rommel’s whereabouts. With luck, says Jake, we’ll be in place to get in our licks in as few as ten days.

  The briefing finishes. I’m told to sit tight. Jake and Nick Wilder confer with Major Mayne and the SAS team leaders in private. I’m called forward again, with Collie. Jake says he’s changed his mind about sending me back to Ain Dalla across the Sand Sea.

  He spreads a map on the bonnet of his jeep. There are fuel dumps at Gravel Cairn and Two Hills, he says, on this side of the Sand Sea. “But both are tricky to find, and I don’t want you swanning about on your final fumes. You’ll go here instead: the dump at South Cairn. It’s about a hundred and sixty miles, good going most of the way; and it won’t require a re-crossing of the Sand Sea.”

  Jake tells Collie he can’t spare him for this errand; he, Collier, will continue north with the full outfit, taking his jeep and Guns, the weapons truck. As for me, I’ll take the two others—my own truck with Punch, Standage and Oliphant, and the wireless truck with Sergeant Wannamaker.

  South Cairn? My heart sinks. What can this be, but a postage stamp in the middle of a thousand-mile waste?

  “The reason I’m not sending you back across the Sand Sea,” says Jake, “is not that I don’t think you can make it. With Punch and Oliphant, you will. I’m more afraid that your tracks or the patrol itself will be spotted from the air. We’ve been lucky so far. I don’t want to press our good fortune. It’ll be dicey enough at South Cairn, with the Jerries and Italians poking round Kufra. Be careful.”

  I understand that Jake is not angry with me, either personally or professionally. His focus is entirely on the mission. “Have you got anything in your stomach?” he asks. When I say no, he makes sure his own cook puts something together for me. And a round of rum for everyone. He dismisses Collie with a warm handclasp, then leads me, alone, to the far side of his jeep.

  “You’ve been taught as an officer, Chapman, never to pretend to know something you don’t. Now I’ll give you a corollary: never try to make up for one mistake by committing a greater one.” He sets a friendly hand on my shoulder. “Get to South Cairn, load up, and get back. It’s like trotting down to the newsagent for a Daily Express.”

  I try to thank him but he won’t have it.

  “In an odd way,” he says, “your making a hash of this has brought you into the club. We’ve all committed our share of balls-ups. What counts is setting things right and pressing on.”

  14

  JAKE PERSONALLY SUPERVISES the stripping of our two trucks that will set out for South Cairn. It’s dawn. He orders all unnecessary ammunition and explosives transferred to his own vehicles, both to save weight and because he can put them to better use than we can. He rehearses me and Sergeant Wannamaker on recognition signals and on routes north to the RV, the rendezvous point—a place called Garet Chod—where we will reconnect with the full patrol once we’re back from South Cairn. Jake gives us five days to get there. We are allotted enough fuel to reach South Cairn with a few gallons to spare. “This should provide a measure of incentive,” Jakes says without a grin. He needs all excess here for the primary operation. But at the last minute, as we’re waiting for the sun to climb, Nick Wilder and Sergeant Kehoe slip us a couple of full jerry cans, which we stow in the truckbed, inboard of the spare tyre mounted behind the patrol commander’s seat.

  My crew on Te Aroha IV are Punch and Standage. Oliphant and the SAS gunner, Pokorny, will stay with the main outfit, partly to save weight and partly because Pokorny has taken it badly, being left out of the real action. The wireless truck’s crew are Wannamaker, Grainger and Durrance. Jake has taken Marks, a crack gunner, for himself. We make a breakfast of bacon, biscuits, tinned peaches and hot sweet tea whitened with condensed milk, then set off as soon as the sun’s high enough to throw a shadow on the sun compass.

  Navigation in the desert is like navigation at sea. Since there are few features or landmarks, you have to use the sky. The same techniques are employed by desert travellers as by sailors: compass headings and dead reckoning while in motion; sun and star shots when you’re stopped. Standage is our navigator; Punch takes the guns. I drive. The sun compass is a disc about three inches across, marked off into 360 degrees and set horizontally in a mount between driver and navigator on the crown of the dash. A thin metal rod rises vertically in the disc’s centre; it casts a shadow like a sundial. The navigator aligns the disc so that the shadow falls on the desired heading. Every half hour he adjusts the disc a few degrees to match the sun’s true course across the sky. The driver’s job is to steer the truck so the shadow doesn’t move. It’s not as easy as it sounds. Standage is an ace navigator, trained under Mike Sadler—the best ever, I’ve been told—who’s heading north now with Major Mayne. What’s tricky about dead reckoning in the desert is that the ground is never entirely flat; you can’t maintain a bearing the way a ship can at sea. A desert navigator has to compensate mentally and mathematically as his truck jinks round hills and salt marshes, across wadis and dune lines. One degree out in a run of a hundred miles will put you off target by three miles. That could be life and death. Standage stays glued to sun compass, speedometer and watch. X minutes on heading Y at speed Z equals our position, more or less. Each time I veer half a degree out, he shoots me a sharp look.

  “It’s the tyres that knock you out of true,” Punch says when we stop to repair a puncture and to equalise inflation. He means that the sun’s heat and the friction of running over stovetop-hot ground make the air in the tubes expand; psi goes up but not uniformly; one tyre will read 40, another 60. Standage times the re-start to the second. I wait with my foot on the accelerator. “Now,” he says and off we go. Sergeant Wannamaker in the wireless truck keeps his own nav log, also recording heading, time, and distance.

  I have never seen terrain this level. It’s like driving on linoleum. The featureless flat gives no sense of velocity. Time goes elastic. A minute feels like an hour and vice versa.

  I’m talking to Standage about Einstein. Relativity. I took a course in college on Special Theory. “A man rides in a lift which is falling at the speed of light. In his hand is an electric torch, turned off, which he aims at the floor. Now the question: When the man switches the torch on, how fast will the light travel to the floor?”

  “Light plus light,” says Standage.

  I tell him that was my answer too. But no, nothing can go faster than the speed of light, even travelling at the speed of light.

  “Balls,” he declares.

  On we hum. The desert is broke
n now by low basalt ridges, against one flank of which long sand slopes have been built up by the wind. We skirt these, not in wide swooping curves, but by geometrics—“squaring round”—to keep our reckoning true. Twenty miles on, the ridges become higher and sharper, forming barriers in which we must find gaps and low saddles. Speed and direction keep changing. Fatigue becomes a factor. You can’t tell how hot you’re getting with a breeze on you and humidity near zero. Our brains are probably cooking under our Arab headgear, or what we’ve fashioned out of rags and straps to make keffiyehs. I can hear the petrol sloshing in the two jerry cans Nick Wilder and Sergeant Kehoe gave us, on the truckbed just behind my seat. My gaze holds riveted to the sun compass. In desert this flat and empty, you don’t need to look ahead. I’m reviewing time and fuel in my head. One hundred sixty miles to South Cairn at twenty per makes eight hours. We kicked off at 0815. Figuring a one-hour lie-up at midday and a half-hour to brew up at teatime, we should be closing in on our goal by 1745. Sunset is 1851 for 29 September. That gives us an hour of daylight to search the area. My foot presses the accelerator.

  “Sir.”

  It’s Standage, noting the speedo.

  “Sorry.” I ease off.

  “You can goose ’er, Chap. Just lemme know first.”

  By ten the sun is up full. It is impossible to convey the heat of the Libyan desert to one who hasn’t experienced it. This is fever unearthly; it is heat as one might imagine it on Venus. We have come up on a track used years ago by the Italians. It angles off to the southwest, toward Kufra oasis, but Standage has the heading from maps made by earlier LRDG patrols so, he assures me, we can use it and not throw out our calculations. The trace itself consists of two double tyre tracks. Iron boundary stakes mark the route at intervals of a kilometre. We speed past in the mounting heat haze. Something small and round sits in the tiny square of shade at the bottom of each post.

  “What are those, Punch?”

  “Birds.”

  I squint.

  “The little buggers migrate over this mess. Them’s the weak ones, that fell out.” They’ve got no chance, Punch says. “They just sit and wait to die. Then the wind blows ’em away.”

  Standage’s log ticks over at eighty miles. The mirage surrounds us. Wannamaker on the wireless truck is waving for us to make our midday lie-up. The shadow on the sun compass has become too short to navigate by.

  We draw up in the centre of a pan shimmering with sunblast. This is no longer Venus heat; it is Mercury heat. Surface-of-the-sun heat. The mirage is so extreme that a division of tanks could drive past half a mile out and we wouldn’t see them. For the past two hours no one has thought of a thing except the pint of water he’ll get here. The men rig the tarpaulins for shade and turn to their individual tasks.

  Standage’s job is to fix the patrol’s position by “shooting the sun” with the theodolite. Grainger assists on the chronometer. It’s basic nautical navigation and it works. Punch looks to drinking water and checks the covers protecting the guns and the blankets that will shield the seats and steering wheel from the heat of the sun. My bit as driver is to inspect engine and tyres, oil, water, radiators and belts. In this heat, rubber melts and metal expands so much that you have to watch things you never would do in a temperate climate. Tyres work off their rims; tie rods warp; leaf springs blow their bindings. Every gasket has to be checked to be sure it still holds its seal.

  Finished, I stride back to Wannamaker, Grainger and Durrance to be sure they’re all right and to stretch my legs. The No. 11 wireless set is mounted behind the cab in an outboard compartment on the right-hand flank of the truck; a drop board folds down to make a writing surface. Wannamaker and Durrance assemble and erect the poles for the Wyndom aerial; when it’s up, Grainger checks in with Jake on the wireless. Jake’s patrols will have halted for midday too. Signals are sent by key in code. “One seven” means “Safe and stopped.” Grainger taps it out in under a second. In a few moments, “Nine nine” comes back: “Message received, carry on.” Then another “Nine”: “No further instructions.” Back go the poles into their cradles on the side of the truck; Grainger unhooks the aerial wires and stows them.

  We plunge into the shade under the trucks. Punch’s thermo reads 128. “Not that bad,” he says.

  “Hullo,” says Standage. “Who’s this?”

  Two birds have alighted. They touch down on the sand alongside our left front tyre and hop into the shade under the chassis, where we three lie on a groundsheet, propped on our elbows. We perk up at the appearance of these visitors. The birds are past fear; when Punch sets out a canteen cap of water, they tread right over our hands to get it.

  “Don’t wanna go back out into that heat, do ya, mate?”

  The second bird drinks from the palm of Standage’s hand.

  “Ride along with us then, be our mascots.”

  But a minute later we look round and they’re gone.

  “Makes you feel sad, don’t it?” says Punch.

  The two trucks are parked side by side so that we can talk, both crews, without having to get out into the sun.

  I go over our position with Wannamaker and Standage. Eighty miles to South Cairn. If we get rolling again by 1300 and keep our speed near twenty, we should strike the AOP, the area of probability, with an hour and a half of daylight. I’ve decided to skip the teatime “brew stop.” To the others, I broach the notion that when we get moving again, we take our speed up as fast as we can without overheating. “What we burn up in fuel, we save in minutes of daylight. I don’t want to be groping round in the dark, trying to find tins of petrol buried under boulders. Everyone agree?”

  Grainger scrambles under with tins of bully, which he passes out with a wink and a grimace.

  LIBBY’S

  CORNED BEEF

  PRODUCT OF BRAZIL

  Can we really face beef in this heat?

  With his knife, Grainger pokes a hole in his tin to break the vacuum. He snaps the key off the bottom, notches it into the nib of the sealing strip, then winds this back round the tin’s equator till the bottom half, which is wider than the top for just this purpose, comes off. A tap with the heel of his hand and a slab of gelatin-sided, pinkish-grey meat plonks on to his mess plate.

  “Biscuits. Bully. What more does a man need?”

  Wannamaker concurs with my suggestion of getting to the dump early. “Nothing’s ever where you think it is in this desert. And it can get damn spooky after dark. Patrols have shot at their own mates more than once.”

  By 1315 we’re ready to go. But the sun is too close to directly overhead to throw a good shadow on the sun compass. I tell Standage to set our course magnetically, and we start anyway. The delay kills half an hour. Terrain has become ragged now; we’re tacking round a series of basalt ridges. Each jink makes our navigation more iffy. My overheated brain starts working. What happens if we don’t find the dump? We’ll be out of fuel five hundred miles on the wrong side of the Sand Sea and over three hundred from Jake and Nick. How dependent we are on these fragile and fallible machines! I find my ears straining at the tiniest irregularity. Punch grins down from his box seat. “A bloke never listens so hard to a motor as he does out here, eh, Mr. Chapman?”

  He’s caught me.

  “I swear,” he says, “sometimes I can hear the tick of each tappet.”

  We zig round another ridgeline.

  “What kind of work do you do back home, Punch?”

  “Raise ducks. Serious operation; five breeding ponds, a hatchery.”

  “Who’s looking after it?”

  “Brother. Wife.” As he speaks, Punch keeps his eyes peeled for aircraft. He says he’s got three brothers in the service, one here in North Africa in the RASC, two in the Navy. The last one at home, excused from service, looks after all their affairs.

  “You miss home?”

  “Can’t think about stuff like that, sir. Drive yourself daft if you do.”

  1400. The day gets hotter as the sun descends. I find m
y thoughts running to something Stein said in night leaguer during the Gazala battle, not long before he was killed. He asked whether I was still having that dream about my mother on the lake. I said I was, but lately with a curious alteration. “I’m not weighted down by the iron garment any more. Remember, the one you interpreted as a knight’s armour. What do you think? Is that progress?”

  Stein has a theory about inner evolution. A man matures, he believes, from archetype to archetype: from Son to Wanderer to Warrior and from there, if he’s lucky, to Lover, Husband, Father; King, Sage and Mystic. “It could be,” Stein says, considering the evolution of my dream, “that your journey no longer requires the knight’s armour, since you’re living it out in the flesh.” He gestures round our leaguer to the tanks and armoured vehicles. “You’re ‘in armour’ now, aren’t you?” And he laughs. “What could come next but Ascetic, Anchorite, Renunciant?” Stein predicts I’ll be drawn to the Inner Desert, another metaphor. Now, I think, here I am.

  Is there anything to this stuff? Is the soul really governed by such interior architecture, and if so, to what end?

  I’m snapped out of this reverie by the thwack-thwack of a fan belt shredding. The water temperature needle buries itself in the red. We coast to a stop and turn the radiator into the wind. Wannamaker, two hundred yards to the right, carries on a quarter of a mile to the shoulder of a ridge and there takes up a position where he can see all around and provide cover.

  When we catch up, ten minutes later, Wannamaker has dismounted beside some tyre tracks he doesn’t like the look of.

  Germans?

  “Armoured cars,” he says. “Two of ’em.”

  He can’t tell how fresh the tracks are. Could be two days or two hours. Meanwhile our wireless truck has developed a hiccough of its own, a bent steering-rod, making the front wheels track in a hard wobble. If we don’t stop and hammer the thing straight, we’ll have tyres blowing all the way back.