young man.
“Excuse me, what are you doing?”
“What does it look like?”
“I have orders to keep that line clear.”
“And if you’d been at your post, it might still be.”
He was obviously one of the new boys, low on combat experience, tasked with manning the phones to keep him from smashing up one of the new Spits.
“Look, you can’t just come in here—”
“Don’t make me pull rank on you.”
“My orders came from the AOC himself, Major.” The schoolboy smirked. “That’s who you’ll be pulling rank on.”
Max wasn’t in the mood to drag out the conversation.
“Just bugger off. Better still, bugger off and find Ralph for me.”
Ralph’s name was what did it. Ralph was royalty.
For Max, though, Elliott was the one who mattered right then. It was time to call his hand, find out just what he knew, because it was certainly more than he’d been willing to reveal up until now.
Elliott, however, seemed to have disappeared from the face of the earth. There had still been no sign of him at the Ops Room, or anywhere else for that matter. It was possible that the man who’d answered the phone at the Y Service offices had been lying, but there was no way of knowing. Even if Max took himself off to Valetta, he’d never gain entry to the offices. Access was strictly limited to a select few.
He had just settled on his only course of action when the young flight lieutenant returned.
“Ralph isn’t here.”
“Well, he’s not down at Ta’ Qali, because I was just there.”
“He took himself off to the hospital this morning. No one’s seen him since.”
The Dog could do that to a man, if it bit him hard.
Outside, the heavy artillery opened up, which meant that Kesselring had finally got round to sending his bombers. They were too late to take out the Spitfires on the ground, but just in time to mess up Max’s plans.
“Damn,” he said, pushing past the young pilot onto the terrace.
They came from the northeast and they came in numbers, darkening the sky over Naxxar. The big guns scored a couple of early successes, one of the 88s vaporizing in a ball of fire, another spiraling earthward. A swarm of new Spitfires raced to greet the attackers, engaging with the covering force of 109s. For the past month or more the RAF had effectively been spent as a defensive force, yet here they were, back in action, wreaking havoc. It was a remarkable sight, captivating, although someone still had the presence of mind to call, “Tin hats, gentlemen, if you’re staying out.” Moments later, the first shell splinters started to rain down on Mdina.
Max remained indoors during the raids, pacing with frustration, desperate to be gone. But the planes kept coming, and precious hours ticked agonizingly by. He might have risked it if there’d been less at stake, but if he didn’t survive, what chance did Lilian have? The sporadic whoops and cheers from the terrace suggested that the Germans were receiving a battering, but somehow it didn’t matter. Nothing else mattered.
The last wave of bombers was still droning off to the southwest when he finally mounted his motorcycle. The light was beginning to fade, and he drove carefully through Rabat, eyes scanning the road surface for shrapnel. If he shredded a tire now, well, it didn’t bear thinking about.
He left Rabat by the same road he’d taken with Lilian just a couple of days before, the one that led to Boschetto Gardens. This time, though, he carried on past, following his nose. His sense of direction was notoriously poor—something he’d inherited from his father—but even he knew that Elliott’s cliff-top house lay to the south. He also knew that the only route in and out was somewhere to the east, so if he could just pick up the road he’d taken there from Valetta …
He never got a chance. The motorcycle coughed, sputtered a few times, offered one last burst of speed, and then died on him. He knew the symptoms well enough by now and cursed himself for not having checked the gas tank before setting off from Mdina. He wheeled the machine out of sight behind a stone wall. There were few landmarks of any note to guide him back to the spot, so he snapped off the branch of a carob tree and laid it on the wall. When he was done, he struck out cross-country.
The terrain was as bleak and barren as any he’d come across on the island.