What Might Have Been, page 19
His mind ranged ahead of the wind that whistled over the injured aircraft, singing descant to the panting engines. After awhile, he turned from watching imperfectly understood instruments to reviewing what he had been told.
With fingers stiff in their fur-lined gloves, he checked to make certain that he still had the precious oilskin envelope of photographs that he would take with him into the desert. Topmost was the picture of his quarry. He fumbled the packet out and drew forth the photo: Erwin Rommel, general that was and field marshal! hereafter; Rommel with his fox’s grin, his ferocity, and the chivalry that seemed so odd and so familiar. They were much alike, in some ways: both middle-aged, both of less-than-average stature; both with a gift for sensing the presence of the enemy and using the desert itself as a weapon; both quite capable of marshaling and moving heaven and earth to compel men to their goals.
And, in the end, it was their names, as much as any army, that won them their victories. A stocky man, a punctilious man with his careful hats and uniforms, his blue Pour le Merite at the throat. A family man, this Rommel, with a wife he rarely saw. Now that was unlike Lawrence. Rommel had a son, too, and professed himself never to be happier than when he was guiding young people. How did Rommel feel, Lawrence wondered, about sending the young men of the crack Afrika Korps out to die?
Well, Lawrence could show him other young people who would have been glad of his protection: the dead of Europe, the lifeless, accusing faces that grinned sightlessly and forever at the camera. If you can kill him, do so, Churchill had ordered. Dead is safe. But Churchill, as Lawrence had known for years, was a man who well understood the value of inspiration.
What if Rommel could be turned, a knife snatched from a killer and used upon him instead? What if, indeed? Perhaps the cold, the exhaustion, and the thin air had spawned this fancy, Lawrence thought. At such times of stress, intellect and instinct fused, and his mind ranged apart from his waking self in a condition akin to prophecy or perhaps madness. If he could shatter Rommel’s faith ... it might even be that Germany would take care of his death. And Lawrence had had a bellyful of causing death.
Rommel, in “Mammut,” the armored command truck that was a prize from the British, roved where he would, over the sand, to menace Cairo with his Panzers and turn the waste between the British command and his own into a mine field. What if Lawrence joined the Berbers, traveling lighter and faster, anticipating Rommel’s every move until, finally, they could come face to face? It was either inspired strategy, or the ravings of a lunatic; but reason had meant very little in the Wrar thus far.
“Colonel?” came a voice that managed to be deferential and well-bred even through the tinniness of the oxygen. Oxford, Lawrence thought, and probably one of the posher colleges. Trinity, perhaps, or The House.
He laid a hand over the photo, almost guarding it from sight. Rommel was his designated prey, a relationship and task too intimate to be shared by this young lieutenant with the unshaven face, the red-veined eyes, and the keenness of a man for whom such things were but temporary.
“Yes, Lieutenant?”
“We’ll be descending soon. And, see, it’s dawn, sir.”
His eyes closed in relief.
Dawn flashed on the wings of the Liberator Commando and the surviving Spitfires as they descended. Lawrence blinked hard at the violence of the light. The wings burned silver as the water flowing through black earth toward the Delta and Alexandria—which, even now, Lawrence had heard, Mussolini dreamed of entering in triumph. If Lawrence had anything to say about it, Alexander’s city should not fall to such as he.
Cairo. Because of Lawrence’s travels in the East and his work in Carchemish, he had spent two years in Intelligence there. There was little there for him, now: not among the Gallicized aristocrats whose daughters collected gold for their dowries along with Paris gowns; certainly not among the English enclave that politely thronged Shepheards, concerned with tea, tennis, and tonic. For we were strangers in the land of Egypt. He wondered if that had been his thought, or thrust into his brain by his talk with Weizmann and that zealot Aaronsohn.
Help for the East, or, for that matter, for the world, if it came from Cairo at all, might come from the unknown fellahin by the Nile, from whom some advocate might rise as religions rose from the desert itself. For Lawrence, Cairo was a staging point. This war’s incarnation of his old service would brief him, equip him, and send him out into the desert.
His hands clenched and his palms were sweating.
To his horror, he realized how eager he was.
The winter rain poured down as Lawrence rode past the border wire into Libya. For the thousandth time, he thought what a dirty war it was into which he had been thrust. Blackmailed—if a man as guilty as he had a right to use the term—blackmailed and sentenced to a war full of whispers. In Cairo, spies of all the powers rubbed shoulders in safety, greeted each other with circumspect nods before retiring to their mutterings.
Lawrence himself was one such whisper. The rank and file might mutter that he hadn’t really died in that cycle crash in May of 1935; they were entitled to hope. But it was another thing for him to confront narrow-eyed MI officers, present the P. M.’s authorizations, and watch them nod. “Churchill must be desperate,” one man had remarked. Yet even he had stared at Lawrence as at a welcome ghost.
How do you hunt a desert fox? You use a myth, if you can first tame it.
In the end, Lawrence left Cairo almost unnoticed. Weighted against General Auchinleck’s preparations of the Eighth Army to defend Tobruk against Rommel, even the appearance of a shadow from the last War was no more than a simple ruse: welcome, if it succeeded, but not expected to accomplish much. Auchinleck, in fact, had snorted and chuffed that the P.M. was pulling rabbits out of a hat again—damned mummery!—but he was welcome to try. He, however, was preparing for what had been named, rather grandiosely, Operation Crusader; Lawrence hoped that it had somewhat better luck than the Crusaders he had chronicled long ago in school.
Unlikely Crusaders, to resent an ally. But that had been the way of it in what Lawrence thought of as “his” war too: professional soldiers might envy his results, but did not trust him. Allenby, he remembered, had handled him with the care that he had used for explosives. Still, he had ridden with Allenby into Jerusalem. Now there was a Crusade!
Once again, he had the sense that knowledge that he needed was being withheld. It infuriated him. For God’s sake, what did he care for their games of powers and principalities? His honor, if he could claim to possess any, lay in the safety of the men with him and, perhaps, in any chance he might have to expiate some of the fresh guilt that had gnawed his liver since he had seen the pictures that he carried as a talisman. In the last war he had carried a battered volume of Malory.
Here he was, in the desert he had longed for, yet it was a sea of mud, not the red sand and glowing ghibli of the North, nor the vast austerities of Arabia. Nor did he wear the white robes of a sharif of Mecca, but drab and coarse garments, heavier—but not heavy enough to keep out the rain. They clung, leechlike, to numbing skin, draining the endurance from him.
All the stillness that he remembered had vanished. North Africa was full of noises: the sputter of overused engines, polyglot curses, and overwhelming all, the steady rainfall. It seemed impossible that these sounds should ever change or fade.
But one of Lawrence’s guards (were they set to spy on him as well as guard him?) stiffened and drew closer. That had been a new sound, not the ringing in his ears. He reached for his pistol and slid off the safety.
He had been told to be prepared to encounter friendlies: here, apparently, they were. He was trying to remember the proprieties of greeting Berbers, as opposed to the many Arab tribes with which he had dealt, when the newcomers’ leader rode up to him.
Berbers were fined down by their life; this man’s sodden clothing outlined a stockier frame. As he neared, Lawrence saw that under the mud, the exhaustion, and the deep weathering, the man’s skin was pale and his eyes light.
“Colonel Lawrence, sir?” said this “Berber,” carefully coming to not-quite-attention before saluting in the native style. The intensity of his gaze was almost an assault.
Lawrence nodded.
“Thank God, sir! I’m John Haseldon.” His eyes gleamed and he all but peered into Lawrence’s own, standing too close for English tastes, let alone his own, as Semites always did. Lawrence groaned inwardly.
“What news, sir?” Haseldon asked. “Where is Rommel now?” he asked. Cairo headquarters had told Lawrence that he had been in Rome for his birthday, November 15.
“Wouldn’t you have more recent news than I?” Lawrence asked.
“He landed safely in Africa, more’s the pity. Anwar here,” Haseldon gestured at a man indistinguishable from the other riders, “says that he and his brothers have seen him at Beda Littoria.”
“We’re headed there?”
Haseldon nodded, chewed things over, then spoke again.
“Sir, you’ve been at Headquarters. Any chance,” he asked in a rush, “that Rommel will bypass Tobruk?”
Lawrence shook his head. “None at all.”
The Italian General Bastico had argued for it, and Rommel had flown off to Rome to confer with Mussolini. The Eighth Army had men and tanks enough to hurl against the Afrika Korps, but the Afrika Korps had Rommel, man and myth.
Another man might have relished this contest. Lawrence rode with water dripping in miserable rivulets down his kuffiyeh and wished that the newcomer wasn’t quite so energetic. “It’s good you’ve come, sir,” said Haseldon. “Glad to have you here; we can show you quite a nice bit of action.”
“Like the whole Eighth Army?” Lawrence asked.
“A little livelier than a major action,” said this Haseldon, who wore his native dress with as much ease as once Lawrence had done. “Mad” English, as brave as he was crazy; and with the colossal bad fortune to have come to manhood after the singularly unfortunate event of Lawrence’s involuntary celebrity. Haseldon, apparently, lived as a native among natives . . . and behind enemy lines. God help the bloody fool, thought Lawrence.
“What have you planned, then?” Lawrence asked, and beckoned Haseldon to ride at his side. The indigs with him nodded, one chief acknowledging a second. Gravely, Lawrence turned to them, saluting in the Arab fashion because Berber courtesies had quite flown from his memory.
“First we ride.”
“And then?” If this downpour got any worse, they might as well ride into the sea.
“Cozy little raid on headquarters at Beda Littoria, sir,” said Haseldon. “I’ve been living outside of Rommel’s HQ there for quite some time now.”
“Is that where we’re headed?”
Haseldon shook his head. “First, we head out toward Cyrene to pick up a few commandos that’ll be dropped off by sub.”
I knew nothing of this! Lawrence thought. For a moment, The P.M. will learn of this! thundered in his mind. Then, he fought against the disastrous laughter that could turn too easily into hysterics. Would I believe someone who claimed to be me, either?
He fell silent and Haseldon, respecting his moods, was silent until they camped. He and his men crouched too closely together, showing Lawrence their maps. Here was the grain silo, followed by a row of bungalows. Soldiers there, Lawrence pointed, and Haseldon nodded, before indicating a larger mark on the map.
“That building, the ‘Prefettura,’ set back in a grove of cypress . . . that’s where he lives. It’s dark, isolated.”
Lawrence nodded. “So, now what?”
“Now, we wait.”
“For the sub?” Lawrence asked. Haseldon ducked his head, and Lawrence waited, testing. Had the man been warned not to confide totally in Lawrence? Who had warned him of that, in any case? In Wellington’s words, this was an infamous army, each officer keeping secrets, and no trust anywhere.
The night dragged on as they waited for the rhythmic splashes, camouflaged in the persistent rain, of the commandos’ arrival. From time to time, Haseldon stared at Lawrence, then at his maps.
“Was it like this?” he finally blurted, “when you took Aqaba?”
“Much drier,” Lawrence observed, and a grin spread across the younger man’s taut face. “We had the desert to cross, and we knew that the guns were fixed to face seaward. That much could put our minds at rest. ...” And curiously, that much was true. “What may have made it easier, though, was that all we faced were some Turks and nameless Germans. Not Rommel.”
The younger man gave a quick, relieved sigh. “Waiting’s the hardest part,” he admitted.
“Waiting for the trains to come was always the worst. You always wanted to push the plunger and explode the track long before it was safe to. Sometimes we did. Usually, we lost those—”
A sharp hiss brought both men around, their hands snatching for sidearms. Three men waded out of the water, and Haseldon started forward. Lawrence found himself tensing, ready to leap forward should there prove to be yet another betrayal . . . but it was all right; they were shaking hands. In the dampness, Lawrence heard names: Keyes, a major, and the men under his command, Campbell and Terry. Haseldon guided them toward what soggy hospitality he could offer, and Lawrence faded imperceptibly among the Berbers.
At midnight, Major Keyes and his team headed for the Prefettura. Haseldon started out of hiding but “Get back!” Keyes gestured. Then he strode forward and pounded on the front door, demanding admission in German, pushing past the sentry.
Two shots were fired, and the house in the cypress grove went dark.
Lawrence reached Haseldon’s side just as a burst of fire exploded, filling one room with light as if it were a stage on which a man, mortally wounded, fell, and another staggered. Just in time, Lawrence caught Haseldon’s arm.
“Ours?” Haseldon whispered hoarsely.
“Either way, you can’t help them,” Lawrence warned him. Haseldon was younger, stronger than Lawrence; if he wanted to break free, he was going to, unless . . . surreptitiously, Lawrence drew his sidearm.
“The man who fell. He wasn’t wearing a German uniform. They may be dead, dying—”
“Just you hope that they are,” Lawrence told him, holding his eyes, which were white and staring in the dark. Not so heroic now, is it, watching men die for your schemes? If the man wanted to play desert hero, that was one lesson he’d better learn tonight. “That was the worst part. We didn’t want to leave our wounded for the Turks, but sometimes— Shh! Who’s coming?”
A dark blotch wavered toward them, and Lawrence snapped the safety off his weapon and readied it—until Haseldon forced the barrel of his pistol down.
“Wie geht’s?” he called.
“Terry!” The commando’s voice shook. “The major’s dead. Campbell’s down . . . the bastards had guards there . . . but not Rommel ... he never stays here, I heard.”
It was exhaustion, not judgment, in the fugitive’s eyes, but Haseldon flinched.
“They say Rommel’s near Gambut at Ain Gazala.”
Haseldon pounded his fist into his palm. “God, I could kill myself! We’ve got to get the bastard!”
“He can’t stay here,” Lawrence muttered, careful to keep his voice down so Terry couldn’t hear him. Memories of old retreats came to his aid. “Get him away from here. They had to have some plans for getting the team out. What were they?”
“Right,” Haseldon nodded sharply. “Hitler’s got standing orders to shoot commandos on sight.” He gestured, detaching five Berbers who surrounded Terry and, despite his protests, bore him away. “Take him back to Gyrene, and keep him safe till pickup,” he ordered.
Haseldon sank onto the ground, and Lawrence divided his attention between him and the Prefettura. He had played decoy before. What if an old, weary native straggled by to gain information? Given that a raid on the place had just occurred, he’d be lucky if he weren’t shot, that’s what, he told himself acerbically. For the first time in his campaigns in a Muslim world, he wished for a flask of brandy; Haseldon looked as if he could use it.
“We should leave, too,” he hinted, but the man sat, all but unstrung. His courage was all of the quick, gallant kind; eager to act, but equally swift to despair. Rommel was said to be of that sort, too.
Haseldon nodded, and they rose. Seconds later, though, the renewed downpour forced them to huddle into what shelter they could contrive. “The roads will be washed out,” Haseldon muttered through chattering teeth. “The wadis will be flooded.”
“Maybe he’ll drown,” Lawrence soothed him.
“We’ve got to do something!”
“We will.” Fraud that he was, he knew how to fill his voice—even in a whisper—with conviction. He would inspire, would use this man too to bring him to Rommel. And then what?
