There were three of them left now. The rest were dead, spread out in the desert at extravagant angles like thrown-away broken dolls. All the armoured cars had been hit and there was no chance of escape with the vehicles. Still they fought on, encouraged by McLeod, his arm hanging shattered at his side, the blood streaming down from it in torrents.
By now the Germans had them surrounded. Yet they seemed scared to press home their final attack, on account of the armoured car armed with the two-pounder cannon. They didn't know, of course, that McLeod and his two companions had only armour-piercing shells left; not of much use against infantry.
Still McLeod, feeling, at times, he might faint at any moment due to the loss of blood, was grateful for the 'pea-shooter', as they had called the ineffectual weapon contemptuously. It gave them time to try to raise the base and give the location of the Germans. Perhaps Jeeves might be able to spare one of his obsolete planes to attack them, though McLeod doubted it. He knew just how short both pilots and petrol were at the Habbaniyah Base. Still, he could try.
Now, as the sweating radio operator with the bloodstained bandage wrapped round his head tried to raise Habbaniyah, McLeod waited for the Germans to attack again. He knew they would. The Germans never gave up; they were almost as fanatical as the Japs. That's why they had to be defeated. If Iraq fell into their hands, Persia would follow, and eventually the whole of the Muslim Middle East. If the Japs attacked in the East, as everyone expected them to do sooner or later, and started to march westwards, India would go over to them, they'd link up with the Germans in the Middle East, and that would mean the end of the British Empire. Not that he was a one hundred per cent advocate of the Empire – it had its defects. But it was a damned sight better and cleaner than the Jap and Jerry empires, or any other one that would follow it.
"Sir." It was the gunner manning the two-pounder who broke urgently into his reverie. "Here the friggers come again, sir." He pressed the trigger of the co-axial Vickers machine gun and sent a burst of tracer winging in the direction of the SS, who had risen from their positions to the left and were stumbling forward in a kind of awkward run in the deep sand.
Abruptly the front rank of the slow figures was galvanized into violent action. They danced, waved their hands and were bowled over, howling with pain, like a bunch of puppets at the hands of a puppet master who had suddenly gone crazy. Still the next rank came on, stumbling and falling over the writhing bodies of their dying comrades, advancing with deadly purpose, and McLeod knew they'd keep coming like this until they killed their enemies or were killed themselves. This was the last German assault. "Use the popgun – anything. Radio operator, man your weapon." He picked up the Tommy gun he had chosen for himself and, standing upright in the turret of the damaged armoured car, loosed off a violent blast.
"Tommies!" Dietz gasped, as the firing erupted once again and his grenadiers began falling all around him. "Don't the tea-drinking swine know when to give up, blast their eyes!"
It was obvious to him and the Vulture, ready to lead the second stage of the final attack on the other flank, that they didn't. They'd stand and fight to the bitter end, and the Vulture knew he couldn't waste too many men on this handful of stubborn Tommies. The Führer would never forgive him if he allowed his Fire Brigade, SS Assault Battalion Wotan, to be wiped out in this godforsaken place to no real purpose.
He cursed as yet another half a dozen of Dietz's grenadiers went down under the fire from the embattled little position on the top of the hill. This couldn't go on, he cursed again. He had to do something, something drastic to finish off the buck-teethed Tommies once and for all.
Then he had it. He'd burn the swine out.
McLeod felt very weak now. His vision was blurred and he felt he might faint from loss of blood at any moment. He could see that his two companions were in no better shape. They had both been wounded once more in the last German attack, and the sergeant who had manned the Vickers had been particularly badly hit. The end of his long nose was white and pinched, a sure sign that he didn't have long to live. Still he stuck to his post. They'd die here, he told himself, but they'd make the Germans pay the price.
For a moment or two, as the small-arms battle gave way to desultory German sniper fire, his mind wandered and he remembered how it had been when he had first come out to Iraq straight from the trenches in France. It had been a revelation to get away from the mass slaughter of trench warfare, the eternal Northern French fog and drizzle, to this country of the glaring sun and the breathtaking heat.
In those days, they had all been a little like the legendary Lawrence of Arabia. He had been their hero and they had aped him in dress and habits. They had worn Arabic togs and eaten Arabic food, including sheep's eyes swallowed whole. Most of them had learned Arabic too, and had been advocates of the nomadic Arab way of life, aware of the distinction between them and the city dwellers who had tamely accepted the Turkish yoke and had been unprepared to fight for their freedom as the Arabs under Lawrence had done.
He – they – had been wrong of course. The Arabs, 'the sons of the desert', as the cheaper British newspapers had called them, had been just as vile and venal as their former Turkish masters. Lawrence, a terrible pervert, as they had discovered much later, had led him and all those keen, clean-living young Englishmen of that time astray. For nearly a decade the English Arabists and their diplomatic masters at the Foreign Office, who had subscribed wholeheartedly to the Arab cause, too, had been fooled into supporting the 'sons of the desert'. They had allowed them to build up their little kingdoms and principalities, while the oil discovered all the time in their remote desert wastes had become ever more important. Then these nomads, who, back in the early '20s, had been penniless illiterates living in their black tents, surrounded by a bunch of half-starved dependants they called their tribe, had begun to show their true selves. With British help they had gotten rid of the Turks. Now they wanted to rid themselves of the British, too, and they had been prepared to use any means to do so. Finally they had turned to the sworn enemies of the British Empire, Italy and Germany, and the same people who had sworn eternal friendship to those young idealistic British officers so long before, would now gladly stab them in the back if they could.
McLeod sighed. What a waste it had all been! What a waste, in reality, his own life had been too, year after year out here under the searing sun, which had burned the very sap out of him and had turned him into the ageing, embittered man he had become: a man without family, without a future, without interests, save these same hawk-nosed people whom he now detested. He sighed again. Perhaps it would be better if it ended here in battle. At least he'd go down fighting, instead of becoming some crusty old fogey, retired to Cheltenham, who wrote angry letters to The Times on subjects which interested no one.
"Sir." It was his sergeant.
"Yes?"
"They're coming again, sir. Near that bunch of camel thorn at three o'clock, sir."
Wearily, as if his head was worked by rusty springs, McLeod turned his head to the right and looked in the direction indicated by the NCO.
A couple of riflemen were advancing warily towards them, rifles at the ready, with, between them, another German, unarmed, it seemed, with his shoulders bent almost as if he were a hunchback.
Suddenly McLeod had it, though his brain was too exhausted for him to take in the full import of what he had just recognized: something he had not seen since it had frightened the living daylights out of him at the Third Battle of Ypres, back in '17. "Oh my God!" The exclamation came tumbling out of his abruptly gaping mouth involuntarily.
"What is it, sir?" the sergeant asked, busy tapping the antiquated Vickers machine gun round so that he could focus on the strange little party advancing upon them warily, obviously ready to hit the sand if they came under direct fire before they reached 'the dead ground', some fifty metres from the stalled armoured car.
McLeod could hardly bring himself to say the word, but he knew he had to. "Flame thrower!"
The sergeant took his hands away from the Vickers, shocked beyond belief, his sunburnt face abruptly ashen. "Holy Christ! A flame thrower, sir!"
McLeod wasted no more time; he knew he had none to waste. Once the flame-thrower party reached the dead ground, the three defenders would be finished. He jerked up his Tommy gun and pressed the trigger hard. Nothing!
He pressed the trigger again. Once more there was no response. The sub-machine gun lay impotent and silent in his hands. He had a stoppage.
Somehow the three Germans seemed to guess the defenders were in trouble. By now the Englishmen should have been firing at them. They wasted no time. "Alles für Deutschland!" Wildly they yelled the battle cry of the Armed SS, rushing forward, the deadly pack bouncing up and down on the back of the man in the middle. "Tod den Tommies!"
Crazily McLeod cried to the operator with the bloodstained bandage around his head. "Knock out the man in the middle... For God's sake!"
The operator fired. And again. Both his slugs missed, digging up spurts of sand at the SS men's flying feet. McLeod slammed the butt of his Tommy gun against the turret of the armoured car in one last desperate burst of rage and frustration. He fired the next instant. The stoppage was cleared. The weapon was working. Too late!
Gasping like ancient asthmatics in the throes of some final attack, the three Germans flung themselves full length into the dead ground. McLeod tensed for what was to come.
He didn't have to wait long. There was a sinister hiss. It was like some primeval monster emerging from the slime to utter its first fiery foetid breath. The very air seemed to tremble. A crack like a rod being struck against a hollow piece of metal. Next moment a blue, oil-tinged bar of flame swept out from the dead ground, seeking its prey.
McLeod felt the air being drawn from his lungs by that terrible, all consuming heat. Frantically he choked for breath. To his front the sand blackened at a tremendous rate as the spurt of flame ran towards them. It engulfed the front of the armoured car. The paintwork immediately spat and bubbled like the symptoms of some loathsome skin disease. McLeod dropped the useless gun; he'd need it no more. Next moment the flame had surrounded him, blinding him at once, the greedy little red fingers tearing at his flesh, blackening it and splitting it, the flesh beneath a cooked pink, and then it was all over and he was dead, and the Vulture was yelling his new order above the crackle of the dying flames. "We march west... SS Assault Battalion Wotan – move out!"
***
Jeeves was sitting in the sandbagged bar of the officers' mess, morosely contemplating the quarter of a bottle of Haig, when the news came. Outside, the Iraqi artillery was laying on a tremendous barrage and, with the enemy SS battalion on its way, he guessed that the last attack on Habbaniyah Base would commence within the next few hours – and that would be that. "Don't be vague, order Haig." He repeated the sales jingle of the whisky company, wondering if this last bottle would hold out to the end of the great siege. He wouldn't like to fall into Iraqi hands sober. "That would be very unwise – remember Kut," he said, half aloud, in the fashion of nearly drunk men who are beginning to wax philosophical. "Those men suffered at the hands of their captors."
It had been about then that young Adrian Smythe-Jones had strode into the bar, full of good cheer, his slightly weak face beaming. "Good news, sir!" he cried across the room, which in a proper pre-war regular RAF mess was not the done thing.
Jeeves frowned. He didn't like the pilot, with his 'Pilot Officer Prune' handlebar moustache and the top button of his tunic undone as if he were a survivor of the Battle of Britain, one of the bloody few, which he patently wasn't – he was still in training. He spun round and snapped, "What do you mean – good news? There's no bloody good news left in this bloody world, young man."
The young pilot wasn't put out. "But there is, sir," he persisted. "Fifteen minutes ago, I buzzed the Hun column. The old kite wasn't up to bombing. She'd gone and got a poxed-up bomb – "
"For God's sake, get on with it!" Jeeves interrupted him angrily.
"Well, sir. They're off."
"Off where?"
"Heading west, well away from the base. To my way of thinking, they're on a westerly course for the Syrian frontier. Do you think I could have a beer, sir? My mouth's like a monkey's armpit."
"Have a bloody barrel, if there's that much left in the mess!" Jeeves cried exuberantly, for, as if to confirm the young pilot's information, the intense Iraqi artillery barrage had ceased with startling suddenness, leaving behind it a loud echoing silence.
It was only later, when the great news was spreading through the mess, and outside to the exhausted 'erks' who had been getting ready for the final battle, that Air Commodore Jeeves reminded himself to ask, "Any sign of Squadron Leader McLeod, Smythe-Jones?"
The young pilot raised his head from his pint glass, the foam dripping from his absurd moustache. "Not a sausage, sir," he answered a little thickly. "But I suppose he'll turn up sooner or later. You know these old Iraqi hands. They always come up smelling of roses, sir."
"Yes, I suppose you're right, young man," Jeeves agreed reluctantly. "Smelling of roses, what."