for some cousins from Alexandria, and Sarah was in her room. Lately she had shown less energy and enthusiasm for her social life. She had been ill a month earlier with one of the debilitating stomach complaints that were Cairo’s special weapon, and was taking a long time to recover. Her skin looked yellow and she complained that the heat was relentless. Faria and I were worried about her.
It was dark outside. I could hear dance music being played on a gramophone somewhere nearby.
‘Are you awake?’ Xan murmured. His voice set up minute vibrations inside the drum of his chest.
‘Yes.’
He sighed and shifted position, combing his fingers through my hair and adjusting the position of my head so that it rested more comfortably in the hollow of his shoulder. I felt the weight of happiness, almost tangible, defined even more sharply by the constant counter of anxiety and by the certainty that we would have to part again very soon.
‘I love you,’ he said simply.
I smiled dazedly, my mouth moving against his skin. We lay and listened to the tinny scratching of the music, the small noises of the apartment.
‘Before Jessie arrived this afternoon you mentioned Tellforce,’ I began at last.
The name of the secret force had been in my head all afternoon. I didn’t want to hear how closely Xan was associated with it, but I couldn’t unlearn what I already knew. Once we had acknowledged his involvement, I reasoned, maybe we could jointly put the thought of it aside until it was time for him to leave again. And if I knew more, it might be easier for me to help Xan to forget it as far as possible.
‘This is between us,’ Xan murmured.
I twisted my head so I could look into his eyes. ‘I swear.’
‘Do you know what we do?’
From what he told me that night, which was only the bare facts, together with what I knew already, I was able to put together the picture.
Tellforce was an irregular group of officers and men who had been recruited for their knowledge of the desert and the ways of the desert. They knew the shifting contours of the sand seas, and the extreme heat and cold, and the brutal force of sandstorms. Before the war the officers might have been mining engineers or hydrologists or Arabists, but now their job was one of the most demanding of all the special operations. They drove patrols of heavy specially adapted trucks deep into the desert, moving far behind enemy lines and spying on their manoeuvres. They kept twenty-four-hour roadside watches from the sparse shelter of wadis or patches of scrub, and from these uncomfortable hideouts they counted every single truck, tank and car that passed, noted their numbers, and estimated the numbers of occupants. Collecting these snippets of information meant that Tellforce patrols were always at risk of being spotted by enemy convoys or aircraft.
They were also known as the desert taxis because they delivered commando raiders to their targets and then searched for the survivors and brought them out again. And they made their own lightning strikes on trucks, fuel and supply dumps and parked aircraft whenever an opportunity for sabotage presented itself.
‘I see,’ I said at last.
I had always understood that Xan must be involved in special ops of some kind, but the reality was even more daunting. The desert taxi service was always busy, and by definition in the most dangerous places. I passed my tongue over my lips, feeling them as dry and cracked as if we were out in the desert now.
‘Don’t worry,’ Xan said.
‘I won’t,’ I lied.
‘Hassan is always with me.’
I remembered the impassive tribesman who had driven us out to the oasis beyond Giza, and instead of the car I pictured him and Xan perched in the cab of one of Tellforce’s 30 cwt Ford trucks.
I imagined the truck driving full tilt at a wall of yellow sand and ploughing up the face of the dune above a bow wave of dust, then rocking for an instant on the sharp crest. The monochrome immensity of the Libyan desert would stretch ahead, maybe with a tell-tale flash of sun reflected off metal or the dust plume of an enemy convoy in the distance, before the truck plunged under its own momentum down the cliff on the other side. There would always be the risk that the vehicle might tip over itself and cartwheel to the bottom.
‘We have been at Kufra,’ Xan continued.
‘We were out on a patrol alongside the Palificata and we happened to spot some unexpected enemy tank movements. Mark III Panzers. They just materialised out of nowhere, fifteen of them.’
I listened, keeping my breathing even to counter the swell of apprehension.
‘We were a half-patrol, just five trucks and a command car. We had been moving mostly at night and were about to leaguer under camouflage for the day when the forward vehicle signalled a halt. Luckily we had dune cover so we held up and watched them go by.’
Xan slid his arm from under my head and fumbled for a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his discarded shirt. He lit one and leaned back against the pillows. I waited for what seemed like a long time.
‘That was what I had to tell Boyce.’
Relevant SIGINT and HUMINT, information gleaned from enemy signals traffic or human intelligence reports from reconnaissance patrols like Xan’s were Roddy’s raw materials. It was his job to assess and collate them, then build up a picture for the central command of our section of Intelligence. The work was done as quickly and as efficiently as possible. Eventually the information was passed for encoding and onward transmission to commanders in the field.
‘Yes. Then what happened?’
Xan exhaled.
‘We watched them go by,’ he repeated. The lines drawn in his face told me that wasn’t all.
‘We waited. I started to hope that they must have missed the other half of the patrol too, even though they were in a much more exposed section than we were. Then after fifteen or twenty minutes we heard the Panzer cannons start up.’
I understood, then. Tellforce trucks and a command car would stand no chance against the armoured tanks’ high explosives and armour-piercing shells.
‘I gave the order to the men to hold off. We could have pushed forward after the tanks and done what we could, but …’
The silence uncurled between us. Doing what they could would have meant only one possible outcome.
‘The firing stopped after a few minutes and then we did move in.’
Xan described the scene in only the barest and most unemotive words. At first it was impossible to see anything through the smoke and churned-up dust. Then, as his little convoy crawled in the tank tracks, they came upon all that was left of the second half of the Tellforce patrol. Three of the trucks were on fire, the incinerated occupants spilling out of the doors or lying huddled in the sand. Most of the men were dead, the others badly wounded. The tank commanders probably assumed that they were coming up to the outposts of a more significant force. They had smashed straight through the isolated patrol and rolled on in search of bigger objectives.
The dust began to settle and the sun appeared as a pale disc above the eastern horizon. Xan left one detachment of men
