Harkaway's Sixth Column by John Harris

seen, a column had been erected. It was a standard column that the Italians put up quickly, and it had been only a day’s job for Guidotti’s men to pour wet cement into a cast to produce a concrete fixture announcing that the fascist forces of Italy had entered the southern hemisphere to bring the light of the civilized world to the dark places of Africa.
    It was brand new in white shining concrete, its edges sharp and clear. On top was a bust of Mussolini - all chin, helmet and Roman determination, and opposite, near the flagpole, all strapped and buckled authority, was a sentry.
    Standing by the three camels under the eucalyptus trees, Harkaway studied it for a while.
    ‘You know,’ he said quietly, ‘that’s what we should go for.’
     
    Leading them away from the lights in the centre of the town, Harkaway headed for the dark areas under the trees. The plot of land behind the wall where the column stood was full of date palms, gum trees and bougainvillaeas.
    ‘We could tackle it from the back,’ he said. ‘We could get into that garden and lay the charge from the other side of the wall. It should be enough to knock Mussolini’s hat off.’
    Leaving Grobelaar as lookout with the camels, the other three moved quietly into the garden between the trees. The old house was silent, the windows shuttered, the verandah dark. Reaching the wall, Harkaway dug at the mud bricks with his jack-knife until he had made a sizeable hole. Across the marketplace, the Italian gramophone was still grinding away at ‘Santa Lucia’ and the Italian soldier was still singing in opposition in a high tenor voice. Every now and again lorries ground past and once there was the harsher machine-gun sound of an army motorcycle.
    ‘It’s a good job this wall was never expected to keep out invaders,’ Harkaway muttered. ‘It’s falling out on its own.’
    Scrabbling with his fingers, he pulled away the rubble and dug again with the knife until the illumination in the marketplace showed as a small speck of light at the base.
    ‘We’re through,’ he murmured.
    Gooch’s eyes were flickering about him as Tully took over. Enlarging the hole, he lay flat on his face and finally pushed his head and shoulders through. As he withdrew, they heard Italian voices on the other side and Harkaway gave a wolfish grin in the darkness. Clearly, the hole couldn’t be seen from the other side of the column.
    Digging beneath the plinth, he scooped out the soil then began to feel with his fingers along the back of the column itself. Cast in three parts which had then been cemented together, the column consisted of a base and a narrower top half in the shape of a fasces on which the inscription was inset, with the head of Mussolini resting on top. Similar columns were being raised all over the new East African possessions.
    Finding the crack between the bottom half and the top half, Harkaway scraped at it and, finding the cement of poor quality, managed to make a hole. Pushing his explosive through, he jammed it hard into the gap he’d made and plastered it up with mud which Tully made by the simple method of urinating. A second charge was stuffed into the hole beneath the plinth where he used the stones and dirt he’d dug from the wall to tamp it down in a hard wad. Finally, he laid a third small charge just behind Mussolini’s head at the top of the column, and led the cordtex fuses through the hole in the wall and away into the shadows. ‘Ready?’ he asked.
    Gooch nodded, and Harkaway gave his cold smile then, lighting a cigarette, sucked it into a glow and applied it to the fuse. There was a faint crackle and a fizz and he watched it for a second moving along the base of the wall.
    ‘Time we left,’ he said quietly, and they slunk away through the shadows to the road.
    There was no sign of Grobelaar but they eventually saw him walking towards them on the other side of the road. As they hurried towards him, Harkaway gestured and, as he turned to