Read Back to Battle for Free Online

doesn’t happen to you. You were asked for by name, by the way. The woman seems to know you. Teresa Axuriaguerrera. Know her?’
    Kelly’s heart gave an unexpected thump. Did he know her? Not half he didn’t! It was like something coming out of the past, what had been a pleasant dream suddenly becoming flesh and blood in front of him.
    ‘Yes, sir,’ he said briskly. ‘I know her.’
    ‘Then–’ Corbett knew Kelly well and he shot him a sidelong glance ‘–you’d better get on with it, hadn’t you?’

 
     
Three
    They flew him up at once to Biarritz where a Frenchman called Leduc was standing by to pilot him into Santander. The arrangements had all been made ahead of him and Badger was already inside Santander Bay waiting for him to send her the refugees.
    It was a risky flight, and a regular service machine had been shot down only three days before by Italian fighters, but in the first light of the day the little Beechcraft skimmed over the water at only three hundred feet, level with a filmy cloud bank, tattered, thin and insubstantial as a cobweb. It was easy to identify Badger in the bay, and with her, her sister ships, Blanche, Brazen and Beagle, all lying close to the Spanish nationalist cruiser, Almirante Cervera, with the German battleship, Graf Spee, half a mile away, holding a watching brief. Leduc gestured at the sky.
    ‘Keep your eyes open,’ he said.
    There appeared to be a panic at Santander, because Nationalist machines had bombed the aerodrome only a few hours earlier and men were busily filling in the craters. Leduc took a look at it, laughed, seemed to shut his eyes and landed between the holes, wriggling like a snake. Parked at wide intervals round the perimeter of the field were Russian monoplane fighters like grasshoppers, their stubby fuselages on bow legs. They were said to be the fastest fighters in Spain.
    The game was already clearly up, though. The advancing enemy troops were Italians and Moors with a formidable artillery support of 65 mm weapons, German ack-ack, and six-inch and three-inch guns, an artillery orchestration twice as powerful as Kelly had seen even when he’d been a spectator from the Senior Officers’ War Course at manoeuvres in England. There were also said to be plenty of Fiat-Ansaldo tanks, with machine guns and cannons, and plenty of air cover from Italian Fiat fighters based at Villarcayo. The bombers were German, escorted by new German Messerschmitt monoplanes operating from Aguilar del Campo. In reply, Santander had the eighteen Russian fighters, a random collection of worthless bombers, chiefly old French Bréguets and Potez, and seventeen even more worthless Gourdoux which were supposed to be dive bombers. They had hardly any automatic weapons, a few six-inch guns from Bilbao, a few 75s, and one four-inch battery The guns were of all nationalities, ammunition was faulty and there was a shortage of telephones.
    The newspapers, marked by vast blank spaces where the censors had been at work, seemed to consist largely of slogans and the sayings of demagogic politicians. Nobody seemed to take much notice of them and Kelly suspected that the men who thought them up were keeping well out of the firing line. One day, he thought cynically, there might be a war in which they would see the unprecedented sight of a politician with a bullet hole in him.
    Finding a room at the Hotel Jauregui, he was just brushing his teeth with a mouth full of peppermint foam when the tap water failed. Flinging his toothbrush into the bowl in a fury, he managed to clear his mouth and, going outside, found militiamen and girls washing, shaving, making up their faces and collecting water by an artificial lake, watched by the swans that inhabited it. Already long-range machine gun bullets were flitting through the trees, and as he left the hotel, aeroplanes came over and dropped bombs. A house was blown to pieces and a fine thick dust came floating down to dull the tram-lines and lie in the