The helicopter sagged. A whistle blew and he wanted to laugh at the out-of-place half-time sound of it. His mouth was full of coffee-grounds, accumulated bile-dust of day after day passed in the unnatural forced drive of exhaustion; He existed for a moment in emptiness, a human spent cartridge suddenly without senses. He shook it off, recalling his love of life and power of endurance. Two men nearby slumped over their benches as if they had worked too hard, or as if bent in shock at some mistake in their pay-packets. Another screamed in rage and pain because the machine seemed to have packed up on him.
Noise died as smoke cleared. He reloaded, senses sharp, danger always in silence and emptiness. A paratrooper stood up and rushed forward, arm swinging back, a brave fellow with nothing to live for. Frank fired three times, and as the man folded the missile curved towards them, slow, gentle and sure. Bullets cracked through the explosion. Warm dust and flesh threw him sideways. The aarif stood and shouted orders, and Frank unhooked his granades. The engine roared back into dominance, and the machine tried to lift, blades driving smoke in a large circle.
The aarif knelt, and two men near him went down. An LMG trained on the cockpit spat whole magazines away. Frank ran and hurled three bombs. None reached the machine, hid it from view of every gunner. He swore, and hugged the ground, disappointed at not hearing the final rending smash-up. Someone ran over him thinking he was dead, and leapt across open ground in front. He clipped on his last magazine, and followed.
A fist of light threw him back, hot smoke boiling in as the helicopter exploded. He crawled away, a terrible ache in his shoulder.
They withdrew from blackening fire and carnage, a beacon-signal for French reinforcements. Nothing remained that needed assistance, but it would draw them nevertheless, and they had to move speedily down, after fighting into the flames to collect arms and ammunition.
In the forest they were five men less, but they had rifles and machine-guns for another dozen. In such an army there were always more men than guns. Frank could barely carry his own. The fight had taken twenty minutes of their lives, and he felt the accumulation of twenty days travail tearing him apart. He kept up with their running, Makhlouf at his side wherever possible on the narrow track.
Feet shook as he followed the rough steep steps of a cliff face, fifty metres’ drop over the tops of cedars, corpse-grey backbones and poisonous dark-green cauliflowers and a midday pullulating heat pulling him dizzily down towards them. A continuous high-pitched note humming through the back of his head made it difficult to keep his eyes open. He saw Makhlouf in front, in startling three-dimension, swaying along under a load of guns and pouches, and a spare beret like a red ear hanging from his pocket. The soft clarity of his movement was like an exceptionally marvellous painting come to life. Beyond him were others, blurred in dull brown going down through the trees. Only the nearest man was in focus, and he had no voice, no sounds penetrating his ears as roundedly as Makhlouf did his eyesight. He was black from the fire, sooted and corked, and all were unrecognisable one from another by face or race, united in moving quickly along a rocky valley, a track devoid of trees.
Helicopter-engines muttered, homing onto the smoking chaos they had fled from. They ate half-cooked beans, and supped from a few tins of condensed milk, which gave energy but choked him with thirst. His shoulder burned, but there was no blood. To touch it would be putting a hand into the fire. Both hand and fire lodged in his one body, but longed to stay apart, to widen the gap until it disintegrated out of pain and life.
Chapter Thirty
John Handley boarded the steamship El Djezair at Palma, carrying his own luggage, and dressed in a pale grey suit. It was the end of September. The sky was hazy along the line of Majorcan mountains, but clear blue over the pinnacles and buttresses of the cathedral. The boat funnel was already churning, and a tree of smoke shadowed the baking sunclean quay. ‘Yes sir, she’s my baby’ pounded from the bar radio, and a group of people were handclapping its rhythm as a steward showed him to a plastic deckchair along the port side of the boat. Smells of food and fuel oil permeated everywhere.
He stood at the bar with a bottle of lager, toasting himself in his brother’s style: ‘Here’s the sky on your head!’ After backpedalling from the quay, the ship steamed slowly into the widening bay. In ten hours he would land in Algeria, but his purpose was muted after many delays in Paris, time spent establishing FLN contacts whose addresses had been given him by Richard. At last he had been accepted by them, and received a laissez-passer from the FLN Provisional Government.
Tunes being played were composed at the time the ship was built, he thought, the jogtrot of the French colons from the twenties and thirties. Studying their faces, he saw that it was all finished for them, that the dance of gaiety covered brave despair which their flushed and half-cheerful faces would not admit to. A Frenchman danced with his wife, half young and half carefree, dark and good-looking, but her expression was growing towards that of raddled anxiety, of the soon to be dispossessed. He did not imagine it. The boat reeked of racial venom that the blue sea could not wash away. The Algerians of tourist class kept apart, less noisy at their separate tables. John had read and heard enough in Paris to know why. It was a boat whose passengers showed neither joy nor anticipation for the end of their journey, as if they would not stay long in the place they were going to.
In the dining-room an elaborate and stultifying four-course meal was served, and John saw how scrupulously and tactfully the stewards had assigned places at table so that no Moslem sat with Europeans. Facing him was a Spaniard with a business in Algiers, who wanted to know why an Englishman should visit Algeria at this stage of its history. He would do much better to come in a couple of years when the rebels had been finished off. He scoffed at the idea of John being a tourist. What was there to see, in any case? He’d lived there forty years, and there was nothing, nothing now but filth and laziness, barren mountains and sand, and a handful of rebels causing trouble, Algerian riff-raff who had undone all the good of civilisation. ‘And as for the people, they’ll cut your throat if you go beyond the suburbs of Algiers.’
‘I won’t let that worry me,’ said John, standing up to go back on deck. His ineffable middle-aged gentleness worried the Spaniard, who stood by him later at the rail. John would have preferred an overnight journey, for there was nothing to see except the occasional steamer passing from east to west. The bar was closed after coffee, and people wandered up and down, or dozed on deckchairs as the boat rattled its way across the sea he had last sailed on coming from Singapore in 1945.
‘You mustn’t go beyond Algiers,’ the Spaniard repeated.
‘I thought a million French troops had made the country safe at last?’ John said, wanting to get rid of him and study his maps in peace. Richard had procured a thick packet of large-scale survey maps for him, of areas where fighting was heaviest, and of zones said to be already liberated by the FLN.
‘It will never be safe for us, not with ten million troops.’
John pitied him, yet wished he did not exist. The man was frightened, and because John was not, saw a danger of losing the protection that his fear gave him. If everyone were afraid they could at least learn how to feel safe. Those who were not tainted with fear were traitors, saboteurs, or innocent foreigners who did not realise what was at stake. They weren’t pulling their weight, and detracted from the collective fear needed to give vital energy for the defence. And because John was an outsider the Spanish — Algerine felt as if the finger of the world were pointing at his insecurity and guilt. John asked what business he had in Algeria, and he replied that he owned a farm near Algiers, and a block of flats in the town. He was sixty-five, and if he lost both, he would starve. ‘So you see, we can’t leave.’