For King and Country. David Monnery

At this moment he was thinking about the two officers and how different they were, and wondering whether he felt more comfortable with Farnham’s cool seriousness or the more popular Morgan’s dashing enthusiasm.

      Such thoughts were far from Ian Tobin’s mind. He was thinking, as usual, about sex. When he wasn’t thinking about it he was worrying that he thought about it too much, and when he did think about it he found it disturbing that he could think about it with anyone, and not just with Megan, even though he was sure he really loved her. At the moment he was most concerned at the thought that he might die a virgin, without having it off with anyone. He and Megan had agreed to wait until they were married, but at times like this he couldn’t help thinking that the man sitting on his left had a surer handle on what was really important.

      Mickie McCaigh was also thinking about sex, reliving the moment two nights earlier when Lucia had flicked aside the shoulder strap on her dress and revealed that she was wearing nothing underneath. Her breasts had been so damned perfect, and the way she had arched herself back over the end of the bed…He sighed and tried to think about something else, not wanting to leave the plane with a throbbing erection, and smiled as he remembered his father’s last words of advice. ‘You’ll probably have to kill a few men,’ the old man had told him, ‘so make sure you make love to even more women. It’s the only way to hang on to your marbles.’

      McCaigh was doing his best – in fact, so far he was well ahead – and he had a sneaking suspicion the old man had been right. It was all completely crazy anyway – jumping out of a plane over Italy because some jumped-up little twerp in Germany had invaded Poland five years ago – but he was seeing the world and its women, and he felt as sane as he ever had.

      The dispatcher opened the bomb bay, adding the howl of the wind to the rumble of the plane’s engines, and the eight men got to their feet. With the padded helmets on and the Stens slung across their backs they fixed the static lines to the suggested points on the fuselage and double-checked that they were secure – in Africa, during the formative months of the SAS, several men had fallen to their deaths when chutes failed to open.

      The wait for the word to go seemed endless, but finally the lights changed colour, the dispatcher mouthed ‘good luck’ to the lead jumper and almost shoved him through the hole. The other seven followed in quick succession, for even an extra second’s delay could land someone out of sight of the man in front, and the moon had already disappeared behind a thickening layer of cloud. It was going to be dark on the ground.

      The eight ghostly shapes drifted down, each man concentrating on keeping himself balanced as his eyes sought definition in the darkness below. The landing zone, according to the briefer back in Salerno, was mainly bare plateau, but the ‘mainly’ was worrying, and no one wanted to be the odd man out, landing in the only tree for miles around and breaking his neck.

      In the lead position Morgan saw the ground suddenly rise up to meet him, and just about had time to appreciate the lack of trees – the intelligence gathered from an Italian restaurant-owning family in Soho had obviously been accurate – before his feet were touching down on a gently sloping section of the plateau. He went into the roll, and was on his feet again almost instantly, pulling in the billowing chute like a fisherman gathering a net.

      As expected, the clouds were thick enough to render the moon almost irrelevant, and visibility was severely limited. From where Morgan stood he couldn’t see much more than a football pitch’s worth of sloping grass, interspersed with outcrops of rock. He hoped no one would be landing on one of those.

      No sooner had this thought flashed through his mind than a metallic crash echoed across the plateau.

      Morgan started walking back down the line of descent, half dragging and half carrying the bundled chute, compass in hand. At least his sense of direction hadn’t deserted him. He was walking south, as his instinct had told him he was. On a clear day, or even a clear night, he would have been able to see the Adriatic some thirty miles away to the left, the snow-covered peaks of the Monti Sibillini some fifteen miles in front of him, but at this particular moment the known world was about a hundred yards in diameter, and seemed to be shrinking.

      The noise had been made by Corrigan, who had landed on grass but rolled into a clutch of rocks. He announced himself unhurt, but the biscuit-tin radio he was carrying – so named for the Huntley & Palmer tin in which it was packed – looked significantly the worse for wear.

      ‘Good job we brought two,’ Farnham said, examining it. By this time the whole team had converged on the site of Corrigan’s fall to earth.

      ‘Mickie, Ian – start digging,’ Morgan ordered, tossing the jump helmet in their direction and fixing his beige beret at an appropriately rakish angle. He stared into the distance, imagining what lay ahead. If the Halifax navigator had done his sums right they should be about seven miles to the north of the Potenza valley town of San Severino. And about a thousand feet above it. According to the Soho restaurateurs the journey down from the plateau would offer all the tree cover they needed for the hours of daylight.

      There were also several hill villages en route, and how their occupants would react to the appearance of British soldiers was harder to predict. According to the informants in London some villages were more hospitable than others, but they had disagreed violently as to which was which. The Oxford Italian history don subsequently consulted by Intelligence was not surprised. ‘The villages around there are all walled,’ he explained, ‘and not because they’ve been worried about foreign invaders. Those villages have been fighting each other since the fall of the Roman Empire.’

      Morgan grinned at the memory and turned to see how the excavation was going. It was almost complete. One last shovel full and the eight chutes were pressed into the hole, the sections of turf carefully relaid.

      McCaigh straightened up and took a first real look at his surroundings. ‘Hard to imagine Vera Lynn bursting into song in a place like this,’ he muttered.

      They set off in single file, Stens at the ready. Beckwith took the lead, with Morgan only a step behind him, clutching the map which had been drawn in the British Museum map room and further detailed – if the stains were any guide – during a spaghetti sauce-making competition. Not that it was needed for the moment, for all trace of the moon had now vanished and they could hardly see a yard in front of their faces. Bunching to keep in contact, the column of men was looking more like a conga line than an armed raiding party.

      Progress, not surprisingly, was slow, and to make matters worse rain began to fall. Fitful at first, it soon became a steady downpour.

      They continued south, hoping that their starting point had been where it was supposed to be, silently cursing the rain and whatever else came to mind. Hitler, army food and the Americans were high on most lists, though the pecking order varied.

      About an hour after starting out, with everyone soaked to the skin, they finally reached the edge of the plateau and started downhill. Another ten minutes and they found themselves descending a wooded valley. It was too late for the trees to keep them dry, but Farnham thought it a good place to dig in for the rest of the night and following day. He suggested as much to Morgan, who overrode his instinctive desire to push on and reluctantly agreed.

      By this time it was almost two in the morning, and much of the next hour was spent in excavating two cross-shaped hides. Both were about two feet deep, with an arm for each of the four occupants and a central well for their equipment. The men’s groundsheets, supported by cut branches and covered in foliage, offered both concealment and shelter from the rain. ‘We might be soaked to the skin, but we’re not going to get any wetter,’ Morrie Beckwith announced hopefully.

      ‘Someone shoot the bugger,’ came a voice from the other hide.

      For the next sixteen hours six of the eight men only left their scrapes to relieve themselves in the surrounding trees. It was still raining when dawn came, though by this time the heavy downpour had subsided into a drifting mist. Visibility didn’t improve much until around noon, when the mist suddenly grew thinner and wafted away, revealing brightening clouds in the branches above. These too soon broke apart, revealing not only the sun but an arc of mostly invisible