Harkaway's Sixth Column Read Free Page A

with a deeply lined face and a cheap glass eye that stared unblinkingly at you like the glass eye of a doll.
    ‘I suppose we’d better bury the poor bastard,’ Tully said.
    Gooch unstrapped the spade from the side of the truck and began to dig. The ground was stony and difficult and the hole they scooped out was shallow.
    ‘It’ll have to do,’ Harkaway said.
    They laid Watson in the hole, but only after Harkaway had removed his binoculars, identity discs and watch, and been through his pockets and stripped him of anything that might be of value. There wasn’t much - a few cigarettes, a little money, a letter from a girl in Nairobi. They also removed his boots and khaki peaked cap because they thought they might be useful and it seemed silly to put them under the soil.
    As they threw the sandy earth over him, Tully looked at Harkaway. ‘Do we say a prayer?’ ‘Know one?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Then we’ll not bother. I don’t suppose he’ll mind.’
    ‘He wasn’t a bad bastard,’ Gooch offered as an epitaph.
    Harkaway threw the boots and the cap in the back of the lorry, and shared the cigarettes and money among them. Tully offered his share of cigarettes round at once and they lit up and stood drawing at them for a while, all of them deep in thought.
    So far Grobelaar had said nothing. Now he spoke. ‘Kom, kerels,’ he said. ‘Kom. Let’s go.’
    They were just heading for the lorry again when Harkaway stopped. He was staring at the plain, his eyes narrowed against the sun’s glare, a handsome rangy figure with yellow foxy eyes, holding the cigarette in his fingers, the smoke dribbling from his nostrils, and as the others joined him, he gestured. Below them, heading north-east, they could see small specks trailing feathers of dust. Nobody spoke, merely watching as the specks drew closer and they could identify them as lorries. There was a long column of them, led by armoured cars.
    ‘Eyeties,’ Harkaway said flatly. ‘Heading for Hargeisa. From Jijiga in Abyssinia.’
    By now the vehicles on the plain were passing through Eil Dif along the road they’d been travelling on themselves before they’d turned into the hills. As they watched, another CR42 flew past, just to the south, roaring along in a wide curve to reconnoitre the land ahead. They watched it as it turned and headed north-east. Soon afterwards they heard several dull thuds.
    ‘Bombs,’ Tully said.
    The sound seemed to bring a realization of their plight. They were a hundred miles from the coast with a whole enemy army between them and safety. Not long before they’d been deriding the Italians, but it didn’t require much imagination to realize, no matter how indifferent they might be as soldiers, that there were more than enough of them to stop any attempt at escape. The future suddenly looked very bleak.
    Harkaway lifted the binoculars they’d taken from Watson’s body. With them he could see the passing lorries were full of men and bristled with weapons.
    ‘They’ll be making for Berbera,’ he said.
    ‘They’re welcome to it,’ Tully said bitterly.
    ‘What do we do now?’ Gooch asked. ‘Give ourselves up?’ He sounded shocked.
    ‘Isn’t much alternative, is there?’ Tully said gloomily, only too well aware of what being a prisoner of war meant because the Italian radio had been full of the thousands captured at Dunkirk.
    ‘They might not get to Berbera,’ Harkaway pointed out calmly. ‘There are road blocks and demolitions, and they’re waiting for ‘em at the Tug Argan gap.’
    ‘They’ll never stop ‘em,’ Gooch said. ‘Watson reckoned they had twenty-five thousand men for Somaliland. We’ve got the King’s African Rifles, the Black Watch and a few odds and ends. They’ll be in Hargeisa by tomorrow and in Berbera in a week. Only one thing to do.’
    ‘You fancy spending the rest of the war in a prison camp?’ Harkaway asked.
    Gooch was silent. He’d heard the same broadcasts Tully had heard. ‘How long