[What Might Have Been 02] Alternate Heroes Read online

  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, eîther?

  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 Cyrene, 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?

  He knew now what his own role must be. Somehow he must reach Rommel; must get close enough—no, he did not think that the P.M. meant to turn him into an assassin. This attempt might draw the German out of his lair just long enough for Lawrence to catch his attention. That would be the moment of supreme risk: catch the general’s attention, avoid being shot, and then, somehow, convince him … of what?

  God only knew; and these days, God wasn’t speaking to one Thomas Edward Lawrence. Let it go for now, came the voice of instinct within him that he had learned years ago to trust. Wait with the trees, the bodies, the Germans.

  The rain poured down like the Nile from its mountain cataracts, and Lawrence hunched over, trying hard not to think.

  Dawn came, then night, which they spent huddling in Haseldon’s mean shelter well away from Beda Littoria, then another dawn. Carefully chosen men crept back and forth. The last one came at a run, nearly tripping over himself, almost incoherent with his news. Rommel was sending his own chaplain to conduct the services for three Germans and the dead English major.

  “Rommel won’t come,” Haseldon mourned. “He’s got a war to fight.”

  “So do we, man,” said Lawrence. “And the first thing is to live to fight it. That chaplain won’t come all by himself. Let’s move!”

  To the West lay only the shore. Safety lay in Egypt; but between them and Egypt were Tobruk and Operation Crusader. Time after time, they dodged the trucks and tanks that crawled like rats up and down the escarpments, crept past smoking rubble, lay flat as aircraft, English or German, flew overhead. Their supplies ran out, but—“Stealing from the dead…” protested Haseldon.

  “Would you rather starve with your work undone?” demanded Lawrence, and forced himself to open the first pack he found.

  Lawrence had been hunted before; had lived with a price on his head. But never before had he fully understood what it was like to flee too lightly equipped and armed to do anything but cower as the armies raged by. Their retreat stretched out, seemed endless, compared with what now seemed the effortless progresses by truck or beast. Haseldon’s grimy face had long since fined down; his blue eyes looked like sky piercing through a skull’s eyesockets. He was being remade in this retreat, forged into a man stronger and madder than anyone would wish for him. Knowing what it felt like, Lawrence would stand godfather to that second birth. He doubted that it—or he—would live much longer, unless more luck than he deserved rode with them.

  Their luck held all the way to Sidi Omar, on the Egyptian border. “Down!” The ground shook. Overhead, shells burst, staining the afternoon sky with flame and smoke.

  “Look!” Haseldon pointed at a lean-to, set up behind an army truck. Painted on the truck’s side was a red cross. “That’s one of ours,” he whispered. “Our truck; our field hospital. Thank God.” He let his head fall into his hands.

  In whose hands? Lawrence refused to ask. He glanced at the armored vehicles. “Do we go in?”

  “Let’s investigate.”

  Crouching low to the ground, Lawrence dodged around the smoking carcass of a tank. Old scars and surgeries screamed pain at him, but he ignored them.

  A blow thrust him to the ground. He writhed around to grapple with his attacker. It was Haseldon, his face and body twisting as a bullet hit him. Swearing hopelessly in Arabic, Lawrence wadded up his headcloth and thrust it against the wounded man’s side, where it turned red and sodden far too rapidly. Now it did not matter who controlled that field hospital.

  “Bear up, lad,” Lawrence whispered. Before he could remember that he was old, sick, and half-crazed, and that he hated to be touched, he swung Haseldon’s arm over his shoulder and started across the field toward the wretched hospital. The bursts of light, the shaking of the ground as each shell exploded—all faded from his consciousness; his horizons narrowed to the next step, the step after that.

  The command to stop came in German and was reinforced with a warning shot and men in his path, barring his way to the surgery. Speaking or looking up might be fatal. He eased Haseldon to the ground.

  “That one’s done for.” The soldiers spoke over his head. Lawrence turned Haseldon’s face away, afraid that its pallor would betray them both.

  “Just as well. Those Berbers are treacherous little beasts.”

  “Still, if the English are wasting supplies, we should…”

  “You can’t disturb the surgeons now. They’re operating on Colonel Stephan of the Fifth Panzer.”

  There was a murmur of dismay. “When was he brought in?”

  “Around noon. He’s got a bad chest wound. Shrapnel. The General wanted the English surgeon, this Major Aird, to put a pressure dressing on it, so Colonel Stephan could be flown out. But the doctor insisted on operating, said Stephan would die if he didn’t.”

  Someone shouted an order in harsh German from the lean-to.

  “They want the armored cars to pull back?” the soldier standing nearby demanded. “So the noise won’t disrupt the surgery? Maybe we could put up little curtains to make the operating room more gemütlich, too.”

  “Schweig; they’re operating on one of ours. Tenderhearted, those English.”

  “What about the natives there?”

  “Let them wait. They’re worthless.”

  The roar of engines as the armored cars withdrew made Lawrence shudder. He had hoped that playing the role of fugitive, aiding a wounded tribesman, might win him help from the English surgeons. But clearly the Germans were not going to let him get near the surgery. They were just going to let Haseldon die here, weren’t they? And why? Because he wasn’t one of theirs. Lawrence thought of the photos he carried, then of Tafas. “The best of you brings me the most Turkish dead,” he had said then. Atrocious: the stiffened bodies in the desert; the bled-out bodies in the grave pits; the sight of a man who had admired him dying in his arms. As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, the line ran through his head. They kill us for their sport.

  Fingers stru
ggled toward his, and he grasped Haseldon’s hand as firmly as he might. “Sorry,” came a faint whisper.

  “No one could have done better,” Lawrence replied, “and I’ll remember.” He heard Haseldon struggle for breath, and drew him closer, holding the dying man’s head up until it lolled back, and Lawrence knew that he was dead.

  The ground had stopped shaking. Now only the tramp of booted feet, not bombshells, made Lawrence tense. A crowd of Panzer officers was leaving the tent.

  “We’ll return again tomorrow on our way back into Egypt,” one of them told the bloodstained man who accompanied them out of the operating room.

  Last of all, as if in defiance of protocol, was a general, not too tall, somewhat stocky, wearing an Iron Star and a blue order, Pour le Mérite, at his throat.

  Lawrence knew that face from his pictures, from the waking nightmare that his life had long been. He waited until all the others had passed. Then, in an undertone, he called, “Herr General Rommel!”

  Unsnapping the catch of his holster, Rommel strode toward him. Lawrence took a deep breath and raised his head, and Rommel halted. His hand went up, and his mouth opened and closed on Lawrence’s name.

  “So, do ghosts now fight alongside the quick and the dead?” Rommel asked, elaborately sarcastic, in his heavily accented Swabian German. “A fraud, of course.”

  “I am quite what I seem to be,” Lawrence stated in the carefully cultivated German of the Oxford scholar he had once been.

  Rommel gestured with distaste at Haseldon’s body, half-sprawled over Lawrence’s knees. “So I see.”

  Lawrence grimaced and straightened Haseldon’s body on the ground. Any moment now, Rommel would shout for guards to take him away, if he didn’t just draw his Luger and kill Lawrence himself. “Apparently, your assassins had never heard of German efficiency. I survived.”

  Rommel stared down at Haseldon, and Lawrence followed his glance, saw the glazed stare of filming blue eyes, and shut them with a convulsive motion of one bloodstained hand. He had a sudden impulse to pour dirt over the dead man’s face. “He was under my command,” Lawrence said. “I’d be grateful if he had a decent burial.”