A hand of great strength pulled at both legs, threw him with a crash onto the stones. The air was on fire, and he covered his head with folded arms. There was no sky left, nor light. He did not know how long he lay there, but similar earthquakes erupted all around, and he was riding a sea of stones, explosions punctuating the continuous wind and wirehowl that lay at the root of his bruised ears. He seemed to have been down for hours, then staggered towards the ineradicable noise. The group he had been with was nowhere to be seen.
At the twin-engined plane he unhooked two grenades and planted one to explode at each huge wheel. He ran to another and did the same. Blinding light opened in a split second as fighter-planes further on the airfield fell like collapsing beds into a heap of fire and dust, then burst into flames. His own planes exploded, one an old Dakota so full of petrol that a column of smoke roped over it, and he ran back towards the wire, screaming at the shock of heat.
To see such priceless and beautiful machinery burning brought a feeling of shame. It was obscene to destroy engines by these shorthand sadistic explosions after so much effort and precision went into making them. To pulverise machinery would have been a pain to his manhood, except that these planes were used to hunt and burn them out. His hair was singed, face blackened by smoke. There was time to smile at his reflections, sentimental mixed feelings that never lead to vacillation because what you wanted to do was always stronger than what you felt about it. Through the smoke there was one last plane intact, and he ran towards it. He tied a length of string to his unpinned grenade and threw it up and over the cockpit, where it hung, and he unwound the string and laid a heavy stone on it, so that the bomb would stay high and do the work of two.
A black cloud lifted, gave a great push as he ran between burning huts. Others were turning back to the wire, shadows in the distance emerging from the smoke. Exploding bombs forced them to the ground. Frank ran on. There weren’t enough to meet the counter-attack. Some were trying, bullets spitting around him. He waited for them to come through the gap in the wire. Mokhtar ordered a halt to their firing. The approach lights of the airfield had been destroyed, leaving patches of light and darkness according to how far they were from the fires. A huge transport-plane overhead that had been trying to land now turned south when rifle-fire struck it from the hills. Houses were burning in the European district. A great roll of wire burst into the air.
Retreating shadows melted into the cover of smoke and flames, some showing their backs, while the better-trained flattened and moved only when the wish rather than necessity took them. Mokhtar saw him and came over. ‘We leave,’ he said. ‘Too many counter-attacks. We can’t hold them.’ Bombs from their own mortars fell in front.
They ran over the fallen posts, split and flayed by dynamite, wire and glass underfoot. ‘Where are they?’
‘They’ve gone back,’ said Mokhtar. They lay behind rocks. Frank emptied a magazine at encroaching figures who, he thought, might be Germans from the Foreign Legion, so sent off another clip for Stalingrad. They rushed across an open space and sun-fires behind made them hard targets, but several fell and they drifted away. Mokhtar gathered survivors and drove them through the safe ground of a gully. Frank caught a final view of the airfield burning, burning planes, light-beams, threading smoke, corpses and wasted wire.
They climbed. Frank was lighter of ammunition and grenades, but felt like a lead man going up, impossible to lift himself. Shells exploded from the town, and small arms fire rippled overhead.
‘Are we the last out?’
‘Absolutely. Except the wounded,’ — who were still shooting or being slaughtered. ‘Both,’ Mokhtar said. ‘And the dead are being killed again.’ Planes had taken off to drop flares over the hills in front.
Chapter Twenty
The horizon of obvious retreat was lit up green and blue. Night no longer existed. They turned east instead of north, the burning town in view all night. Bonfires had been started on the hillsides and peaks while the attack was still going on, and now they became white and orange under the flares, a warning to keep away from the direction they burned in. Helicopters were machine-gunning around their flames. A tongue of napalm licked up a mountainside, a sudden pictorial manifestation that made him shiver with horror. From white, it turned red, rose into a column of deep orange, shooting a smoke-pillar through the greenish light of the flare that preceded it. Handley should be here to paint this, Frank thought, though maybe it would be better for him and all concerned if he imagined it, otherwise such confrontation might burn out the spirit of his genius. It’s enough to destroy any painter, though I’d like Handley to see it, because he’s the only one I can think of whom it might not ruin.
They joined others, walking as quickly along the ravine as they dared without slipping twenty feet into the dried river-bed below. Most had guns, but no ammunition. A few had unused grenades swinging from their belts. Frank had a clip of thirty rounds. Mokhtar, who carried a revolver and a long sheathed knife, grunted and hounded, pushed them along, threatening to kill any who dropped behind, and Frank preferred being on his own in the belief that he would have a better chance of getting clear. The effort of each step was too intense, and for the first time he felt no automatic urge to go on and on and increase the rate of his advance. His only desire was to slow it and stop, drag behind and separate from the others. But he kept on because safety still lay with numbers. Four months had taken the guts out of him. Perhaps tonight would be the worst, and all would be well if he could pull himself along by the light of each star, drag into the fire of another day. Fortunately, there was the insistent sparkling cold to beat at night that tried to get a grip on you, pierce through despair and sharpen your marrowless bones. The mixture of sensations — climate, terrain and the terrors of your own soul — made you walk. Mountainous shapes ahead, shadows, noise of planes passing that could not see them, frightened him. When they stopped he shivered. A sliding stone caused his hands to shake, made him wish for brandy and cigarettes, tea and food. But there was nothing — from now on walking through emptiness and touching the last emptiness in yourself. How long, how long? There was no sense in hoping to get out, looking beyond it to another state, because this was life, all there was, the vast dark area of the end that wanted you to die before letting you free from it. It encircled him, and to be encircled was to be blind.
By day they hid. He crawled along the rancid rocky oven of the earth. The sun festered on to his grey hair and blackening skin. He spent days on his belly. He was a snake. He lost his mind. The file of soldiers made a feeler from the laager of lorries, and winding up the hill passed a dozen yards away, noise and stone chips dancing around. One of the others, farther up the slope, stood and fired. He was shot dead, and the patrol carried two of their own wounded down the hill. He lay still, nursing himself on the rockbed of his cunning. In the darkness of the night he saw mirages of the day, visions of snow-mountains that Shelley had passed on to him. Glacier peaks were forested with pine and spruce, and there were green fields on the lower slopes, huts and scattered houses, cattle, camels and mud dwellings, lower and lower, descending to scorching saltflat and sand and the immense grey stone of the wilderness, and finally to the endless ocean of sand-dunes. He ate live scorpions, scooped mud, went back to the beginning of creation. By the seashore of the desert, in sand-cliffs, were tunnels that he lived in, tunnels lined with white bricks, and he walked among them. An explosion would come, because Algerians wandering by the surf mimed out a warning. In one of the cool corridors he waited, wondering if the tunnels would collapse and bring eggtimer sand pouring down on him to suffocation. He stood up and listened, waited. From the bowels of these brick-lined tunnels came a muffled roar, and the walls he looked at shook, but stayed intact and safe. Somewhere below, that he would never reach or visualise, the air had grown into combustible gas and had exploded, shaken the deepest foundations of his life and vision, opened the hiding-places of himself and all that his heart had never thought of to desire, and all that he had always been too terrified to face or wish for.