The Secret Servant - Lyall Gavin. Страница 42

"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, 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…