Not that anything great and noble had been wrought this time round, Stirling reflected. It had been ten long hours since Audley’s party had arrived back from el-Gala reporting Caine’s demolition squad missing in action. Stirling hadn’t believed it at first, but with a whole day now gone by and no sign of Caine, he was reluctantly obliged to accept that the party might not be coming back. That meant nine trained SAS men – including one of the best officers he’d ever recruited – lost, for no return. It put the seal of doom on current SAS operations: his own parallel raid to Fuja, the previous night, had been aborted without result.
Stirling walked slowly down the wadi watching the lads ready the transport for the move: stripping jeeps and 3-tonners of their scrim nets, backing out wagons from overhangs and tamarix groves, revving motors, unscrewing wheels, removing metal rims, checking tyre pressures, glugging petrol, peering under engine covers. Further down the wadi, Stirling made out the musclebound form of the squadron commander, Major Paddy Mayne, standing at the tailboard of the wireless jeep. Mayne’s broad hand, bandaged against desert sores, lay on the shoulder of the W/T operator, who was tuning in a No. 11 set, a fag in his mouth, big rubber earphones clamped to his head. In the gilded aura of sundown, the figures looked unreal – like images in a peepshow, Stirling thought.
Three long whistleblasts from a sentry high on the cliffs made him jump. It meant ground troops approaching: all along the wadi, SAS men grabbed weapons. Stirling saw Mayne draw his .45-calibre Colt and move towards the bend in the wadi with the speed and grace of a panther. Not to be outdone, Stirling dashed after him on bigboned, stiltlike legs. Before he’d covered half the distance, though, a single battered jeep clanked into view. Tom Caine was at the wheel, and five other SAS men were clinging on for grim life.
The vehicle was a sorry sight, running on naked wheelrims, tyres gone, radiator leaking, enginecover and bodywork gouged with bullet holes big enough to put your thumb through. As she spluttered to a halt, the boys crowded around her: tanned, ragged, bearded, filthy figures in shorts and chapplies. They shouted, gabbled questions, demanded news of mates who’d been on Caine’s op.
Caine slid wearily from the driving seat, held up a bloodsmeared hand for quiet. His eyes were redrimmed, haunted, his head lapped in a squalid field-dressing soaked in blood. Gore trickled from a bandage on his left arm. ‘See to Preston first,’ he coughed. His lips were brittle and black with thirst, his tongue swollen and pastecoated. His voice was so thick with fatigue that his words seemed hewn out of granite. In the back, Copeland, Pickney and Larousse were already passing the pasty-white, half-comatose Trooper Billy Preston into willing hands. A stretcher materialized: Preston was whisked off towards the MO’s truck.
Big Fred Wallace eased himself down next to Caine, and Stirling saw that a dirty dressing had been applied to the giant’s left leg: the bandage was covered in blotches of dried blood. ‘You going somewhere, boss?’ Wallace demanded bluntly.
Stirling eyed him, torn between guilt and irritation at the man’s impertinence. He was about to answer when Paddy Mayne appeared behind him, pressed full canteens of water into the hands of Caine and Wallace. ‘Go easy on that stuff, mind,’ he told them. ‘Your guts will be like potato crisps after a jaunt like that. Drink too much at once and the shock’ll kill you.’
Stirling frowned. Whatever he did, Mayne always seemed to be there before him, quicker with words and actions, ready to help without intruding, knowing instinctively how to relate to the men, how to gain their trust. In return, they worshipped him. Stirling couldn’t help being jealous: hailing from an old, landed family as he did, the one thing he should have excelled in was handling men. It didn’t seem fair that this middle-class upstart, a law student on Civvie Street, should be so much better at it than he was.
He fumbled in his pocket for cigarettes, found none, saw that Mayne had once again beaten him to it. The big Ulsterman was handing round Wills Gold Flake, lighting them with his own bandaged paws. Stirling watched enviously. Wallace took a long, grateful drag, his tiny black eyes fixed on the CO.
‘Well, Corporal …’ Stirling began.
‘Trooper,’ Mayne corrected him. ‘This is Trooper Fred Wallace, late of Sphinx Battery, RHA, one of Caine’s boys on the Runefish run …’
Stirling’s eyes flickered with irritation: Paddy would know everything, from the names of their wives to their birthdays. ‘Yes, of course,’ he said. ‘Lieutenant Audley came in not long after first light and reported your group missing-in-action. I waited ten hours, but I have to confess I’d rather given you up.’
‘Audley?’ Caine hissed. Staring about him, he clocked the blackhaired, squarejawed subaltern’s face grinning at him among the crowd. As they locked eyes, Audley bared dazzling white teeth, gave him the thumbs up. Caine looked away, reminding himself that he and the ex-Guards officer had a bone to pick. He pulled the fag from his mouth, breathed smoke from his nostrils. ‘We’d have been here a lot earlier, sir,’ he told Stirling, ‘if it hadn’t been for the Stukas. We got jumped on the way back …’
He paused, recalling how dawn had come on them as they broached the hinterland’s high soda plains, bringing with it a sea mist as dense as cream. They had enjoyed its cover for an hour but, almost the moment it had faded, they’d been made by a Ghibli shuftikite which had evidently been looking for them. The Stukas had jumped them within twenty minutes.
Caine’s team had just had time to scramble out of the vehicles before the bombs and straffing-rounds struck. Two of the jeeps had taken direct hits and gone up like rockets, showering them with shrapnel shards. Caine had copped a three-inch laceration on the scalp, Wallace a peppering in the right leg. A redhot fragment had ripped a ligament in Larousse’s thigh, and both Copeland and Pickney had been sprayed with minute splinters that reduced their hands and faces to red pulp. Preston had been hit in the arm by a spiralling steel splinter that had opened up the elbow joint and exposed the bone.
The third jeep had been holed but was still serviceable. Caine had plugged her radiator with bits of PE from the Lewes bombs: they had no water, but the lads had kept the radiator topped up by taking turns to urinate into it – a hallowed SAS tradition. It had worked, but it had been a painful journey across sharp hammadas which had shredded the tyres, across sandsheets so soft they’d spent more time out of the jeep than in.
The Stukas hadn’t reappeared. They’d made use of the heat gauze to mask their progress from the air but still it had remained agonizingly slow. The jeep’s suncompass had been shot off in the attack and Caine had been obliged to revert to navigation by prismatic, which meant halting the vehicle regularly to get a fix. The lack of tyres meant keeping to a snail’s pace, anyway, and they might have gone round in circles all night had Wallace’s hawk eyes not picked out the tiny figure of the ‘A’ Squadron sentry, a cardboard cutout silhouetted high on a ridge, from five miles away.
Pickney took charge of Cope and Wallace, leading them off to the sawbones’ wagon. Stirling glanced at Caine’s wounds. ‘You’d better go to the quack and get your dressings changed,’ he said.
‘I’m all right, sir,’ Caine said. ‘I’d rather get debriefed while it’s still fresh in my head.’
Seeing that Caine was unsteady, Mayne put a massive arm around his shoulders and guided him into the main cave, where he sat him down on a petrol case. ‘All right, Tom?’ he said. ‘Sure, I don’t want you going down with delayed shock.’
‘Yep,’ Caine said. ‘I’m fine, thank you, sir.’
‘Don’t give us that balls. Hurts like hell, so it does.’
‘It doesn’t. I can’t feel a thing.’
Mayne brewed tea on a spirit stove. Stirling came in, sat down beside Caine, shook hands with him. ‘Whatever the case,’ he said, ‘I’m delighted you made it.’
For a moment none of them spoke, and the word ‘debacle’ flickered ominously in Caine’s mind. He watched Mayne at work. All his movements – the way he coaxed a flame from the cooker, poure
d water into the kettle, or set out the mugs – were assured, economical, precise. From the surface, you would have taken him for a hardnosed bruiser, he thought. In fact, he was kind and solicitous, as graceful as a ballet dancer, though Caine would never have made that particular comparison to his face. Sixteen stone of solid muscle, Mayne was both a champion boxer and a rugby international who’d been capped for the British Lions.
For all that, though, ‘Paddy’ remained a paradox. The vets had warned Caine not to rub him up the wrong way: after he’d had a few, he could switch from Jekyll to Hyde in the blink of an eye, and when that happened neither friend nor foe was safe. Stirling was as different from Mayne as chalk from Cheddar: diffident, understated, a dreamer whose head often seemed to be in the clouds. Caine had no doubt that he was brilliant, but in battle he’d rather have had Mayne at his back: the Ulsterman had a sureness about him, an air of cool confidence that made you feel you’d follow him through the jaws of hell.
When the kettle had boiled, Mayne poured tea in enamel mugs, mixed in Carnation milk and sugar, added fingers of one hundred degree proof Woods rum from a stone jar stashed in his haversack. They drank the tea in silence, savouring it. Caine felt the legendary Woods ‘rocketfuel’ bite. ‘By God, that’s damn’ good,’ he coughed. Mayne handed him another gasper, took one himself. Stirling relit his pipe, raised his eyebrow at Caine.
‘The Ities ambushed us on the landing ground, sir,’ Caine said. ‘They were in company strength – very good discipline, too. I took a long shufti before we went in, didn’t hear so much as a burp out of place. We found out the planes were all dummies: we’d almost got back in cover when they banjoed us.’
‘There’s no doubt they were expecting you, then?’
‘No doubt all all, sir. It was too well planned to be random chance. We lost three men dead, Ashdown, Penfold and Lennox …’
He heard the catch in his own voice as he called the honour roll. He’d lost men before, but he never got used to it. As always, he held himself personally responsible for the deaths of his comrades: he should have spotted the enemy, should have sensed something amiss. He wondered if he’d been too hasty, if he’d been lured from caution by vanity, by his greediness to knock out thirty Axis kites on his first airfield op.
Caine remembered that he wasn’t the only one who’d returned from a raid. ‘How’d it go at Fuja, sir?’ he enquired.
Stirling bit his lip: a shadow crossed his face. Mayne scowled, stamped hard on his fag-butt as if crushing a cockroach. Stirling’s single long eyebrow puckered: his brown eyes gleamed. ‘I’m afraid Fuja was equally catastrophic,’ he said. ‘We also ran into a company of Ities lying in ambush. Fortunately, I sent Paddy ahead with a recce party. If he hadn’t spotted them before we went in, we might not be here to tell the tale.’
‘Hah.’ Mayne grinned. ‘How many times is that I’ve saved your bacon now, sir?’
Stirling scowled. ‘All right, Paddy,’ he said. ‘Yes, you’ve pulled our fat out of the fire on numerous occasions, but really, who’s counting?’
‘No one,’ said Mayne, suddenly embarrassed. If there was one thing Stirling detested, it was lineshooting, and Mayne agreed with him. ‘I’m sorry, sir. I just want to make sure I’ll not be reassigned to a desk at Kabrit.’
Stirling guffawed. His ‘bag’ of aircraft had never been in the same league as Mayne’s, and it was rumoured that, earlier in the year, he’d had the Ulsterman assigned to admin duties, simply in order to outdo his ‘score’. SAS operations had suffered in consequence: while Stirling was brimful of original ideas for the regiment, he was notoriously unlucky when it came to carrying them out.
Stirling returned his gaze to Caine. ‘We managed to withdraw without casualties,’ he went on, ‘but that isn’t much compensation for failing to knock out a single Axis crate.’
‘Och, ’twas the same story at Benghazi last month,’ Mayne said bitterly. Caine noted that his reedy voice sounded incongruous in such a hefty man. ‘Same at Tobruk. Seven hundred casualties: a cruiser and two destroyers scuppered. Now el-Gala and Fuja. Last couple o’ months has been one ballsup after another for special service ops: Axis saw us coming every time. They say walls have ears, and loose lips sink ships, but I don’t believe it. I reckon we’ve got a rat in GHQ –’
He was interrupted by the sound of a scuffle from beyond the hanging tarpaulin: a string of roared obscenities, the distinctive snap of a fist hitting flesh. ‘What the devil was that?’ Stirling demanded.
He lifted the flap and the three of them peered out.
3
Lieutenant the Honourable Bertram Audley lay sprawled in a heap in the sand, clutching bloated lips, staring wide-eyed at Fred Wallace. The gunner towered over him, his Neanderthal countenance transformed with rage. Mayne asked no questions but reacted with characteristic speed. Skipping out through the cave door, he whacked Wallace on the jaw with a clout that smashed into the big man with the impact of a charging baby rhino. There was a crack like a snapped sapling: Wallace sat down hard on the ground next to Audley, his eyes blank and distant.
‘What the hell is this about?’ Stirling demanded. Audley and Wallace picked themselves up, dusted sand off their drill shorts. Wallace, rubbing his jaw with a hint of surprise in his eyes, jabbed a sausage-sized forefinger at Audley. ‘Can you believe this, sir?’ he spat. ‘He asked me to be his servant. He deserts his post, leaves us in the lurch, gets three of our mates whacked, then he has the nerve to ask me to skivvy for him. I’d rather skivvy for Benito Mussolini.’
‘What are you on about?’ Mayne snapped.
‘Lieutenant Audley ’ere was detailed to give us covering fire, sir, but when we got bumped, where was he? Buggered off and left us, that’s where. I heard Mr Caine call for him three times. If it weren’t for Corporal Larousse’s bravery, the whole lot of us wudda got scragged. He run out on us, loses us three good lads, then he only has the cheek to ask me to be his bloody servant.’
Audley, trying to stem the trickle of blood from his nose with a wad of handkerchief, drew himself up. He was nowhere near Wallace’s height, but he had the poise and good looks of a filmstar: liquid blue eyes, curly dark hair, and teeth so white they might have been painted. ‘I did not desert my post, Colonel,’ he said, appealing to Stirling. ‘Just after Lieutenant Caine’s group went in, I spotted Axis troops advancing from the rear. They hadn’t seen us, so I decided to go after them and bump them before they could do any damage. We followed them, but they vanished into the night. It was at that point that we heard all hell break loose from the landing ground, and it was every man for himself.’
He spoke in the cutglass drawl that befitted his status as the son of a marquis, ex-Coldstream Guards officer, winner of the Military Cross. His words had the weight of utter conviction, as if the authority of the landed nobility that had lain behind him for centuries couldn’t possibly be challenged. He glared at Wallace. ‘Desert my post? Never. How dare you impugn the name of the Audleys? Ask Buxton and Creasy – they were with me.’
Wallace’s ogre face cracked a grin. ‘I already talked to them, sir. They said you told ’em the enemy was there, but they didn’t see sweet FA. Said you ordered ’em to leave the post.’
Audley sent another appealing look at Stirling. ‘After all, sir, I was in charge, and I don’t doubt my eyesight is better than theirs.’
Stirling nodded, apparently satisfied; Caine and Mayne looked dubious. Audley dabbed at his nose. ‘I want this man charged with assaulting an officer,’ he sniffed.
Stirling regarded him gravely. ‘That’s a serious charge,’ he said.
He glanced at Mayne: both of them suddenly burst out laughing. Audley stared at them in astonishment. Caine was puzzled for a moment, then he remembered that, when Stirling and Mayne had first met, Mayne had just been expelled from 11 Commando for beating up his adjutant: in the SAS, the occasional thumping of a superior was frowned upon but not considered a particularly heinous crime.
Stirling’s
chocolate-coloured eyes twinkled at Wallace. ‘It’d better not happen again,’ he said. ‘but I think you can consider yourself duly punished.’
After dark, waiting on the landing ground for the Bombay to arrive, Caine helped Mayne ignite the petrol-tin flares that would guide in the aircraft. The regimental quack, Captain Malcolm Pleydell, had washed his wounds, changed his dressings, administered sulphenamide. Caine still felt shaky but had turned down the chance of flying back with the wounded. They stood at the end of the line, watching the petrol tins gush orange flame, like rows of Chinese lanterns. ‘Don’t worry about Audley, Tom,’ Mayne told him. ‘I don’t believe in his phantom Axis troops, but even if they did exist, dumping his post like that put the whole squad in jeopardy.’ He sighed. ‘Between you and me, it’s not the first time he’s screwed up.’
‘Why does the CO put up with him?’ Caine enquired. ‘I thought the idea of the SAS was to take only the best.’
‘It is.’ Mayne grinned. ‘At least, in theory. It’s like the all-ranks comradeship bollocks they used to talk about in the commandos: it’s one thing to gob off about it, another to put it into practice. Everyone’s got his Achilles’ heel, Tom: Stirling’ll recognize a man’s merit, all right, but he still has a slight yen for the old school tie. The Honourable Bertie gets excused because he’s son of a marquis, and all that rot …’
He was interrupted by the drone of aeroengines. ‘Here she is,’ he grunted. ‘Right on time.’
The Ulsterman picked up an Aldis lamp, began to flash signals to the aircraft. Caine went to see off his wounded comrade, Billy Preston: he was lying on a stretcher ready to be slotted into the plane, attended by Pickney and by Medical Officer Pleydell, a humorous-looking man with a high forehead and a ragged beard. Caine saw that Preston was bleachfaced. ‘Is he going to be all right, Doc?’ he enquired.
Death or Glory II: The Flaming Sword: The Flaming Sword Page 2