Hellfire (2011)

by James Holland

  About the Book

  August, 1942. North Africa. The desert war hangs in the balance. Although their retreat has finally been halted, morale in the British Army is at rock bottom. When the commander of the Eighth Army, General Gott, is killed, it seems that foul play is at work. An impenetrable Axis spy circuit could be compromising any hope the Allies have of stemming the Nazi tide.

  Jack Tanner, recovering from wounds in a Cairo hospital, is astonished to receive a battlefield commission which will propel him into a very different world when he returns to action. Fit once more, he finds himself facing the full onslaught of Rommel’s latest offensive.

  In its aftermath, Tanner and his trusty sidekick Sykes are recruited to work behind the Axis lines in a desperate attempt to take the fight to the Nazis. But the murky world of subterfuge, deceit and murder they find themselves in is a million miles away from the certainties of the battlefield and somehow they must discover who they can trust in the cat-and-mouse world of counter-espionage.

  Hellfire sees Tanner fighting his way through his most dangerous adventure yet – one that takes him from the dark backstreets of Cairo to the open Mediterranean and finally to one of the decisive clashes of the entire war – the Battle of Alamein.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Maps

  CAIRO: August 1942

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  THE WESTERN DESERT: August and September 1942

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  ALAMEIN: October and November 1942

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Glossary

  Historical Note

  About the Author

  Also by James Holland

  Copyright

  For Rachel, Ned and Daisy

  CAIRO

  August 1942

  1

  Friday, 7 August 1942, around eleven in the morning. The heat hung heavily over the city, like a shroud. However, in the first-floor flat just off Sharia El Maghrabi, which was home to the Polish Red Cross, the air was close and certainly hot, but not oppressively so. In part this was due to its position. Although east-facing, the apartment block stood in a small street behind the Continental Hotel. Since they were on the first floor, the grand nineteenth-century building shielded them from the worst of the morning sun, while by the afternoon it was almost entirely in the shade. The women had also worked out that by having the windows open, the shutters closed and both overhead fans whirring at full speed, the heat was manageable. One of the fans squeaked irritatingly, and the draught they made caused loose paper to flap listlessly, but this was a small price to pay.

  The flat had four rooms: a living room, a single bedroom, a bathroom and a small kitchen. It had been donated anonymously the previous October, when General Sikorski had suggested that the few Polish ladies in Cairo set up their own Red Cross office. With countless Poles now freed from Russian internment, making their way south through the Soviet Union, then heading west towards the Middle East, it seemed only right that the tiny Polish contingent in Cairo should do what they could to help their countrymen.

  There were four full-time staff, led by Countess Sophie Tarnowska, and ten volunteers. Work began early, before the heat of the day. That was when the packages were made up in the bedroom – bundles of clothes, shoes, perhaps even some other basics, including tins of food, toothbrushes and cigarettes. When this was done, the women would spend their time writing letters, or purloining more supplies. As the central Allied hub in the Middle East, Cairo was about as well stocked with supplies as anywhere, but everything had to be donated, and there was a war on, and they were vying with the International Red Cross and numerous other charity organizations for what could be spared. They had quickly discovered that the personal touch worked best, collaring men of influence at parties, or even making appointments to see them during the day. Face to face, a bit of flirting, a generous display of leg and cleavage, and determined eye contact made all the difference.

  It was because Sophie and her sister-in-law, Chouquette, had just set off to see the new United States assistant military attaché, and because the morning volunteers had already left, that only two of the staff remained in the flat. Both were at their desks in the main living room, writing letters to go into the packages. Boxes of goods filled the centre of the room, giving it a cluttered air that the rest of its contents did not: four differing tables made up as desks, four chairs, a tall metal filing cabinet, on which stood a tray of drinks, and a small chest of drawers. A signed picture of Sikorski and a map of Poland hung on the whitewashed walls, and that was it.

  Tanja Zanowski drew another piece of writing-paper from the drawer in her desk and placed it in front of her. It was white, with a stark red cross at the top, headed ‘Polski Czerwony Krzyz’ on one side and ‘Polish Red Cross’ on the other. She paused for a moment and looked up towards the window. She could hear outside the endless hubbub of the city: the traffic, the horns, the muezzin making the call to prayer, his reedy, wailing voice carrying over the din. Yet the shutters muted the noise so that in the flat the air seemed quite still, despite the fans – so quiet that she could hear a fly buzzing noisily.

  She looked down again at the paper in front of her. My brave fellow countrymen, she wrote, please take heart that there are Poles here, in Cairo, working on your behalf. Working to help you. We know you have suffered under the cruel yoke of the Bolsheviks but you are free of them now. They were lines she had written a hundred times before, but now, as the fly settled on her bare arm, she stopped and whisked it away.

  ‘Hold on,’ said Ewa, from the other side of the room. She stood up, clutching a fly swat, then moved towards the wall beside Tanja’s desk, where she paused, her eyes following the fly. At last it settled, and she struck, with a loud crack. ‘Got it!’ she exclaimed, looking at the squashed fly stuck to the bare wall.

  Tanja smiled. ‘Good shot.’

  The lone telephone rang, and Tanja started. Ewa was already standing so she stepped quickly towards Sophie’s desk and picked up the receiver.

  ‘Polish Red Cross,’ she said, in English. Pause. ‘Yes, one moment.’ She held it out to Tanja, and mouthed, ‘It’s for you.’

  Tanja pushed back her chair, stood and took the phone. ‘Yes?’ she said.

  ‘Hello, darling.’ Her heart quickened.

  ‘Oh, Harry, how lovely!’ she said, smiling.

  ‘Let’s meet in the usual place. In half an hour?’

  ‘But of course! I’ll be there. Don’t start without me!’

  She put the receiver down, then glanced at Ewa, a smile on her face.

  ‘A date?’ grinned Ewa.

  ‘Oh – just a man I’m having lunch with.’

  ‘Who? Is it the one who was all over you last night at Madame Badia’s?’

  Tanja went back to her desk, picked up cigarettes, compact and lipstick and put them into her bag. ‘Might be.’ She flashed another grin at Ewa.

  ‘He was very handsome. You are lucky, Tanja.’ E
wa turned back to her desk, then added, ‘I wish I had your looks.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Ewa. Anyway, he’s off duty earlier than he expected, so I’m going to join him. You never know, maybe he can fix some provisions for us.’

  ‘If he’s a cavalry officer, perhaps he can.’ Ewa faced Tanja. ‘At least tell me his name. It’s hardly as though it’s a state secret.’

  ‘All right,’ said Tanja, as she looked into the mirror of her compact and repainted her lips. ‘He’s called Harry Rhodes-Morton. I really don’t know much more about him than that, but he seemed very sweet and he’s offered me lunch and I’m not going to turn down a free meal. Not at the Continental, at any rate.’ She shut her compact, put it back in her bag, said, ‘See you a bit later on,’ and walked out of the flat.

  She sighed heavily. Thank God for the Polish Red Cross. A job in which slipping out to meet people – whether young officers or military attachés – was part of the brief. An additional rendezvous could easily be hidden …

  Outside, the heat hit her like the opening of an oven door. She could feel it coursing through her flesh. She could smell Cairo too – the stench of animal dung and refuse, of scented smoke and dust – and the sound of the city, which had been clear yet remote in the flat, was now a dramatic cacophony. And there was the familiar stark hue, which seemed to be permanently washed over everything during the day: pounding sunlight filtered by smoke, dust and fumes. Cars and carts jostled with people. In front of her, a cart laden with green tobacco leaves rumbled past, the man whipping the mule and calling out to someone on the far side of the street. Several men in suits and tarbooshes walked past, while a street hawker in traditional robes squatted at the side of the road, a box of partly green oranges beside him. Across the road, several Australian troops, distinct in their wide-brimmed hats, were arguing with an Egyptian.

  Tanja took a deep breath and walked on down Sharia El Maghrabi in the direction of the opera house. She was wearing khaki drill, a light shirt and narrow skirt that came down below her knee, and on her head a soft peaked khaki cap. It was something Sophie had insisted upon when General Sikorski had asked her to set up the Polish branch of the Red Cross. She had done so because the light clothes were so well suited to the heat, and Tanja had been grateful, partly because they were, as Sophie had insisted, practical, but more because they made her inconspicuous, despite her striking looks. One barely could walk twenty yards in Cairo without seeing another serviceman or -woman. Khaki drill had become as common as the flowing white cotton galabhiyas worn by most Egyptian men.

  Reaching Opera Square, she crossed the road and turned right, down Sharia Abdin, then after a hundred yards, she turned, at the edge of the old Islamic Quarter, down a narrow side-street, which was sheltered from the sun by the buildings either side and by the many canopies that stretched out from under the balconies above. The muezzin called again from a mosque as she walked past men and women sitting in doorways, past shops and yet more carts. A mule brayed, someone shouted, and the wail of the muezzin droned out once more. Good God, but it was hot. She paused outside a general store, saw a cat eyeing her suspiciously, then looked briefly around and stepped inside, heartbeat quickening. The smell of incense and food was strong. It was dark inside and cooler – much cooler. Stacked shelves lined the walls, while below the counter was piled with fruit, beans and nuts. Flies buzzed lazily.

  The old man sitting silently behind it indicated that she should go through to the back of the shop. No one else seemed to be around.

  She pushed through a beaded curtain into a room scented powerfully with incense. The floor was thick with rugs and lined with cushions, and lying against the far wall, smoking a hookah, was an Egyptian in a suit and tarboosh, about thirty years old with a lean, lined face and a neat, pencil-thin moustache.

  ‘Madame,’ he said. ‘A pleasure as always.’

  Tanja stood where she was. ‘Hello, Artus. You have a message for me.’ A statement not a request.

  Artus reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘I took the trouble to write it out for you first.’

  Tanja took it, read it, reread it, then passed it back.

  ‘You had better be quick,’ said Artus. ‘There’s not much time.’

  ‘No,’ said Tanja. Without another word, she left.

  Back through the shop, out on to the street. Another quick glance either side. Good. No one about. She turned right, back the way she had come before rejoining Sharia Adli Pasha, then nimbly crossing the busy thoroughfare. Thirty yards further on, she turned down Sharia Al Khasa, a quieter residential street. A row of gum trees lined one side, providing dappled shade and sheltering the apartment blocks behind. Passing through a gate, Tanja trotted up a small path, climbed the half-dozen steps past the bougainvillaea and nodded curtly at the bawaeb, a beady-eyed old man who stared up at her from his mat just inside the entrance. A few more yards, and – yes – the lift was down. She wrenched back the lattice metal door, stepped inside and pressed the button ‘7’. The lift began to rise, ticking as it did so, each floor passing as though in cross-section. Tanja tapped her feet and clicked her tongue against her teeth. With a jolt, the lift came to a halt, and Tanja stepped out, fumbling her key from her bag.

  The dark corridor was deserted. Good. Key in the cream-coloured door, and then she was inside the familiar surroundings of her flat, with its odour of compressed heat and scent. She walked briskly into her bedroom and to the tall wardrobe. Reaching up, she felt about and pulled down the book – a comic German novel for children called Hausboot Muschepusche. Of course, the content was irrelevant: it was the pages, words and letters within it that mattered. She took it to the table in the kitchenette and began to work out the code.

  It took a short while – five minutes – but with the numbers all written down in pencil on a scrap of paper, she returned to her bedroom and this time opened the wardrobe. The door creaked and from behind her dresses she pulled out a battered suitcase – it had accompanied her on the long, traumatic journey south from Poland nearly three years earlier. Back then, it had been stuffed with a few clothes, family photographs and treasures – jewels that had mostly been sold since. Now, however, it contained a small transmitter-receiver, around six inches wide and nine long, which she carefully took out and brought through to the living room. Setting down the case on the sideboard, she took out the small metal box, connected it to the accompanying battery pack, fixed the antenna, then took out the Morse tapper and screwed it in. It was a familiar process, but her heart was pounding and her hands were shaking. Come on, she told herself. Calm down.

  She switched the set on, heard it buzz, checked it was tuned to the correct frequency, then held out her hands. They were still shaking, so she took a cigarette from the box on the table, lit it, inhaled and closed her eyes. Another deep breath. Then she began to tap out the numbers: 716, 713, 719, 717, 725, 715, 762. GENERAL. 821, 817, 842, 864. GOTT. 783, 744, 725, 743, 736, 762, 721, 753, 732, 783. BURG EL ARAB. 638, 629. ZU. 971, 972, 996, 922, 968, 8510, 967, 996, 915, 966. HELIOPOLIS. It took a little time.

  638.813.811.824. ZWEI.

  735. 834. 952. 842. 921. HEUTE.

  755.623.763.942.823.913. SIEBEN

  919, 947, 954, 744, 767, 714. AUGUST

  When she had finished, she switched the radio to receive, placed the flimsy headphones over her ears and waited.

  A minute passed, then another. ‘Come on,’ she mouthed. ‘Come on.’ She tapped her fingers on the table. The flat was so still, so quiet. Dark too. Only faint light managed to force its way through the shutters. Outside the sounds of the city rumbled faintly.

  Suddenly there was a crackle of static. Tanja snatched up her pencil, listening to the coded numbers: 811, 925, 617, 618, 927, 923, 821, 943, 923, 853, 863, 881, 911, 943, 982, 841, 864, 831, 951, 961, 975, 856. The static stopped with a whine and, after a moment, Tanja turned off the set. Taking the book, she began to decode the message, each set of num
bers a single letter. EMPFANGEN UND VERSTANDEN, it read. Received and understood.

  Five minutes later, Tanja was back down on the street, engulfed by the midday heat once more. She put on her sunglasses, tried to resist the urge to glance around and behind her, and instead determinedly looked straight ahead. She thought about the impact her transmitted message would have. She knew perfectly well who General Gott was: formerly the British commander of XIII Corps and, as of yesterday, the new commander of Eighth Army. The sweeping changes had been the talk of Cairo the previous evening. At Shepheard’s and then Madame Badia’s there had been talk of little else – until Harry Rhodes-Morton and his friends had descended on her. Even they had been unable to resist telling of their glimpse of the Prime Minister. Churchill had certainly shaken things up during his few brief days in the Middle East: Auchinleck fired, a number of other senior commanders fired, and now a new army commander and a new C-in-C Middle East.

  She was wondering what von Mellenthin would plan to do with the information when she heard her name called. She looked around and saw Ewa hurrying towards her across Sharia Kamil Adli.

  Surprised, Tanja instinctively put her hand to her chest, then immediately regretted it, knowing it revealed a guilty conscience.

  ‘Caught you!’ said Ewa.

  For a brief moment Tanja froze, but then she saw Ewa was smiling. Relief. ‘Damn!’ she said, with as much composure as she could muster. ‘Yes, you have, rather.’

  ‘Just thought you’d nip back home first?’

  ‘Yes – a quick change of knickers. I’m sorry, Ewa.’ She glanced at her conspiratorially. ‘I suppose I didn’t strictly need to but I’m just so bored of writing those letters. Is that a terrible thing to admit?’ She placed a hand on Ewa’s arm. ‘Are you very cross with me?’

  Ewa laughed. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘You won’t tell Sophie, will you?’

  ‘Really, Tanja! What do you take me for? In any case, I don’t know what you’re worrying about. Sophie would hardly have minded.’