Death or Glory II: The Flaming Sword: The Flaming Sword

by Michael Asher

  Caine rolled free, still clutching his Tommy-gun, felt his body soaked in a new layer of warm liquor: he came up unsteadily on to his feet, clocked Larousse’s bagsack corpse beneath him, spun around to see Heinrich Rohde mooching out of the smog, blatting automatic rounds. He fired at him on the swing: rounds brattled, firegas spikehorned: his shots went wide. He clocked the grin on Rohde’s face, clocked the leer in the cashregister eyes, saw the Nazi raise his pistol carefully, clocked the lithe shape of Ricardo Rossi close with him out of nowhere, shrieking, ‘This is for Gibbo, you fucking rat.’

  He saw the vicious little Swiss blade flash, saw it almost sever the Nazi’s thick wrist, saw Rohde’s weapon drop, saw the knife snicker across his throat in an elegant cut. He saw his jaw oystershell, saw blood squall, saw the body slump. Rossi stepped back, pulled his knife: a Hun soldier stepped out of the smoke, shot him pointblank in the back of the neck with an SMG. Caine saw Rossi go stiff, saw a fist-sized clot of charred flesh fork out of his throat. A grenade spiffed up, hurling Caine off his feet. He staggered up: Rossi was gone, Rohde was gone, vanished into the draperies of smoke. A hand gripped his bicep, he swirled, saw Betty Nolan’s wild, sootchased face. ‘Get out,’ she screeched. ‘It’s done.’

  Then they were off, leaping like fauns through the smoke and fire: the movie speeded up, the soundtrack rewired: a feral chorus of bawls and gunshots sleared around them. Caine took Nolan’s hand, saw Cope haring away ahead of him through the smoke and dust billows, one arm round Angela’s waist, half carrying, half dragging her, heard big Wallace panting behind him like a bull.

  They ran like demons, splitting up, leapfrogging, zigzagging, using knolls and ridges and tree cover, dodging, ducking, weaving: gunfire yipped around them, over them. Caine heard slugs tango past his ear, saw Nolan, two yards away, stumble and fall. He checked himself, swore, teetered over to her, saw the milkmaid face bloodstroked, the eyes closed, a thin red groove running right along the centre of her straw-wired skull.

  He stooped over her, his mind blank: he clocked two Krauts moving towards him, running at a crouch, Schmeissers starspitting balefire. Caine heard the gunshots clitterclack, felt his body shutting down, felt his shoulders droop in resignation. There was no time – the enemy had him. And without Nolan it was all pointless, anyway. Sandhog was done: they’d brought it off against all odds. Now it was enough to wait with Betty Nolan and die.

  Bren fire craunched out of a bush five yards away. Caine’s face dropped in surprise: he clocked the two Jerries take off like kites, khaki torsos ploughed up into wine-coloured rings and craters. ‘Get moving, you bloody fool,’ a voice creaked. Caine firemanlifted Nolan’s inert body, tucked the Tommy-gun under his arm, saw Maurice Pickney’s ghost face grin at him out of the thornbush. He staggered over, saw that the medical orderly was sprawled over a bipodded Bren-gun lying in a pool of his own gore, his legs a stew of purple mush and raw white bone. ‘Get moving, you silly sod,’ Pickney gasped. ‘I’ll hold ’em.’

  Caine spat. ‘Don’t be a nutter, Maurice. You’re coming with us.’

  Pickney’s attempt to laugh came out as a rhonchoid splutter. ‘Unless you can carry me as well, forget it. My legs are in more bits’n a Meccano set: I’ve just pumped half a pound of morphia into ’em – can’t even feel ’em any more. Get out, now, Tom, or we’re all batshit.’

  Caine swayed under Nolan’s weight. ‘I’ll be back, Maurice,’ he stuttered.

  ‘For the corpse of an old pervert ? Not worth the time o’ day, mate.’

  Caine champed a broken lip, choked back tears. ‘Maurice, I …’

  ‘No speeches, Tom. You did the job, didn’t you?’

  ‘No, Audley did it …’

  Pickney snickered: blood seeped from his ears. ‘Jesus, what about that for a turnup, then? Still, it’s done.’

  Caine was about to say something else, but Pickney was no longer listening: his goreshod eyes were focused into the background. ‘Our Hun friends cometh,’ he grated. ‘Get thee gone, Tom. See you on the ledge.’

  As Caine scrambled away through the scrub carrying Nolan, he heard the staccato clash of rimfire sprattling out from behind.

  Big Wallace helped him lay her in the back of the signals truck. Copeland was already gunning the engine, Angela’s arms wrapped tight around him. Taffy Trubman was slouched over the wireless ops table, but Caine and Wallace didn’t even remember he was there until they’d jumped in and slammed the door.

  ‘Hit it,’ Wallace bellowed.

  Copeland accelerated, wrestling with the steering wheel: the motor churned and steamhammered, the gears dopplered, the balloon tyres creaked and flounced over stones. ‘Skipper,’ the signaller trilled above the noise, his waxy face lighting up like a bulb, ‘I got comms, didn’t I? Don’t know how I did it, but I did. Wasn’t a dicky bird for yonks, then all of a sudden I get a signal as clear as a flippin’ bell …’

  ‘What’s the news?’ Caine bawled back.

  ‘GHQ warns you to be careful about Audley.’

  ‘Talk about old hat.’ Caine guffawed. ‘Audley just saved the mission. Is that all?’

  ‘Nope, it’s not all. Bomber Command has dispatched a Wellington squadron to blow the airstrip to kingdom come, and a Lysander’s already set off to pick us up. Our orders are to head due south out of the Jebel: RV is scheduled for two hours from now, at a disused airstrip in the desert piedmont.’

  He held up a neatly folded Jerry map, wheezing with pain. ‘I’ve got the grid ref,’ he groaned, ‘and I’ve plotted a route. I reckon we’ll just make it, as long as we don’t run into any Axis patrols. Assuming the petrol holds out, mind.’

  Caine let out a long sigh, felt a stream of relief gusting through his body like a cool breeze. ‘We’ll make it,’ he murmured. ‘Thanks, Taffy. You all right?’

  ‘Apart from feeling like a sack of wet shit tied in the middle, you mean?’

  Caine sighed again, felt his head spindle, felt his senses going like the clappers of hell, zipping through the night skies at a thousand miles an hour. He had to grip a wall bar hard to stop himself from passing out: his body ached, head to foot, inside and out, like a single, continuous, festering sore. He blinked at big Wallace, at the bearish torso, the rags weighted with bloodcake and grime, the tangled boars’ hair, the pindot eyes, the troll face streaked with a dozen varieties of dirt and body fluid. He laid a hand on his own bruised chest where the big man had kicked him, wondering if the ribs were broken. Wallace, sprawled against the steel skin of the bucking wagon, followed his movement, his face raddled with embarrassment. ‘I’m sorry, Tom,’ he said. ‘I was so out of it, I didn’t even recognize you. What I saw was someone else … some thing else …’

  Caine shivered. ‘Don’t go there, Fred,’ he warned, forcing himself to shrug, forcing into his tone a casualness he didn’t feel. ‘We were both told that we could save each other a lot of pain. We weren’t ourselves: we were pumped full of that junk. Don’t let’s go there, mate – ever again. The important thing is that we’re here, now, together. The buggers can’t change that …’

  ‘Where’s Maurice?’ Trubman cut in.

  ‘Dead,’ Caine said. ‘At least I reckon he must be. He held off the Krauts so I could get Nolan away. He wasn’t killed in the first contact, but his legs were crippled …’ His voice broke down: he felt tears starting in his eyes like iron studs. ‘I couldn’t carry him and Nolan … I just couldn’t …’

  Wallace was staring at Nolan: Caine followed his gaze, saw her eyelids flutter. He bent over her, stroked her forehead with his grimy hand: she moaned softly. Her headwound had stopped bleeding: Caine was desperately aware that he had no drugs to give her, not even a clean dressing. Everything they’d brought with them had been lifted when they’d been bagged: the main medical kit had gone with Pickney. He told himself that the wound wasn’t deep: it had been a jammy one – just a graze, really. She’d be concussed, but she was going to be all right. He saw her eyes flicker open, green crystal glinting lik
e dawnstars against the bloodgreased, dirtstreaked face. ‘Did we do it, Tom?’ she whispered. ‘Or did I just dream it?’

  Caine took her hand in his, kissed it, felt tears of gratitude flow down his cheeks. ‘We did it,’ he gasped. ‘Audley did it. Private Reggie bloody Higginbotham of the Pioneer Corps, Latrine Detachment, did it. We all did it. Now let’s get the hell out of here.’

  They came down the escarpment just before sundown, halted the van for a few minutes on the piedmont to scan the way ahead. They’d made good time: the RV lay only twenty klicks to the south and they still had forty-five minutes to get there. Nolan had recovered enough to stand up: Caine helped Trubman out to stretch his legs. The signaller produced his last halfpacket of ‘V’ cigarettes, handed them round in celebration. The Green Mountains lay behind them, cloaked in shadows: above the peaks and ridges an eggyolk sun lay frying in diesel clouds, raw colours scalpelling cordillera faces into gateaux layers, bloodbrown, and chocolate cream.

  Copeland puffed smoke, one arm still around Angela: since they’d been reunited earlier that day, Caine thought, they’d hardly let go of each other for a minute. ‘Well, we did our bit,’ Cope said. ‘In a few hours Lightfoot will be rolling: at least it’ll be Olzon-free.’

  Trubman looked troubled. ‘There’s something else, mind,’ he said suddenly. ‘Something I haven’t told you, I mean. Today is October the twenty-fifth, isn’t it, boys?’

  Caine had to think. ‘Yep,’ he said. ‘It’s the day Lightfoot kicks off: 25/26 October 1942.’ He took in Trubman’s doleful countenance. ‘Cheer up, mate, for Chrissake. I know you copped a bad one, but you’re going to be all right. We’ve all been through the mill, you know. Jeez, I came within a whisker of getting clobbered by one of my best mates.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ Trubman said dismissively. ‘No, it’s something they told me on the net. I haven’t quite got my head round it yet: in fact, for a while there I thought I might be hallucinating.’

  ‘Yeah, well join the club,’ Caine said.

  ‘What is it, Taffy?’ Nolan asked, sensing something serious in the wind.

  Trubman’s eyes narrowed: he blinked at the others warily, as if he was about to reveal something disturbing. He took in a deep breath. ‘They told me Lightfoot has already started,’ he said.

  Caine stared at him: his stonegrey eyes gleamed in the twilight. ‘What do you mean, already started ?’

  The signaller sucked air into his plump cheeks nervously, looking as if he expected to be assaulted. ‘Lightfoot wasn’t set for tonight,’ he said. ‘It was set for two days back, October the twenty-third. We were told it was tonight, the twenty-fifth, but Eighth Army’s already been on the move now for forty-eight hours. They must have given us the wrong date in case we got bagged and the Hun made us talk. When you think of it, it would have been mad to trust us with the real date, anyway …’

  Copeland let go of Angela suddenly, crushed out his cigarette stub with a chapplie. ‘Nice one, Taffy,’ he chuckled. ‘Good joke – ha ha ha.’

  ‘It’s no joke, boy,’ Trubman said, his voice shaking. ‘I’m tellin’ you, Lightfoot kicked off two days ago. They announced it over the net …’

  ‘Ah, that’s it,’ Copeland said, relieved. ‘Axis propaganda.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s what I thought at first: only there’s a code they use to show it’s authentic, and this had the right code. The report said that Monty’s deception plan worked like a dream. The Axis thought he was going to push south, but he pushed north instead. Took Rommel completely by surprise: he wasn’t even in North Africa. The Kraut GOC was General Sturm, and the first thing Monty did was send a unit to take him out …’

  He stopped: there was a yawning silence. All eyes were on him now. ‘It started with a huge artillery barrage,’ he went on timorously, ‘The Sappers cleared out a lot of Axis minefields and the armoured divs. moved straight through. There’s been a lot of fierce fighting, but so far it’s been a major success.’

  Caine stared at the signaller’s mole-like features. Copeland watched him, fascinated, as though he’d been confronted with some impossibly complex problem at chess. ‘But wait a sec,’ he said at last, ‘that means we took out the Olzon-13 two days after the battle started … Is that right?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Wallace chimed in, ‘and that just don’t make sense.’

  ‘Yes, it does,’ Nolan said grimly, sitting up. ‘If Sandhog was a decoy.’

  There was pindrop stillness as her words registered.

  ‘You mean a hoax?’ Wallace roared. ‘I don’t believe it: it can’t have been.’

  ‘Fred’s right, it’s impossible,’ Caine nodded. ‘Stirling would have told us.’

  ‘It’ll have been much higher up than Stirling,’ Nolan said. ‘Higher than G(RF), higher even than the DMO or the DMI – so high-level that only Monty and a handful of brass could have been in on it.’

  ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute,’ Wallace said, flapping a huge, scabbed hand. ‘What exactly are we sayin’ here?’

  ‘I’m saying that you were sent on Sandhog not to take out a deadly secret weapon, as you were told, but to convince the Axis that the push was coming forty-eight hours later than it really was.’

  There was another silence while their exhausted minds ticked over.

  ‘It ain’t possible,’ Wallace gasped.

  ‘Look,’ Nolan said. ‘The Axis took it for granted that you’d hit the Olzon-13 on the eve of Lightfoot. The fact that you were scheduled to hit it on 25 October would be, for them, confirmation that the push was coming on that date, not before. What they didn’t know was that you were sent in late deliberately, to deceive them. By the time you got there, Lightfoot would already have kicked off.’

  ‘But even if Sandhog did involve a decoy element,’ Copeland objected, ‘taking out the Olzon-13 must still have been an important part of it, surely? I mean, it still had to be taken out, right?’

  Nolan shook her head sadly. ‘Wrong,’ she said. ‘War’s fluid, Harry. The Olzon-13 weapon would only have been an effective threat on the first day of the offensive. Two days later, it’s already become a side issue: the situation’s changed, the train’s left the station, the window’s closed. Think of it. We only saw three Heinkels at the airstrip – nowhere near enough to carry the whole stock.’

  ‘Yes, but that was only the advance guard, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Maybe, but for all we know the Axis might have lost most of their transport aircraft by now and couldn’t even ship it to the front if they wanted to. That’s just one example: there are dozens of other variables that will have changed in the past two days.’

  ‘It still don’t make sense,’ Wallace insisted. ‘I mean, Rohde musta known Lightfoot’s real date – at least, he wudda known if it’d started two days back.’

  ‘He didn’t though, did he?’ Nolan said. ‘You heard him as well as I did. He said, “We knew that you must attack on the eve of Montgomery’s big push – around 25 October – tonight, in fact.” The only thing he’d forgotten, or didn’t want us to know, was that at least one of the reasons they reckoned Lightfoot would start tonight was because that was the date Sandhog was scheduled.’

  ‘But how could he have got it so wrong?’ Trubman demanded.

  ‘Hold on,’ Wallace said slowly. ‘Didn’t the bugger say sommat about the wireless net bein’ jammed?’

  A look of profound understanding crossed Trubman’s broad features. ‘Of course,’ he croaked, slapping his thigh. ‘That’s it. That’s why I couldn’t get comms all that time. I knew there was nothing wrong with the transmitter. The whole net was jammed.’

  ‘It must have been jammed by our “Y” Service boys,’ Nolan said. ‘Lightfoot is already underway but, until an hour ago, the Germans here didn’t know about it, because the Allies were blocking their comms. Two days on, and they were still waiting for it to happen.’

  ‘The great shadow-play,’ Caine murmured.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Something Maske
lyne said. “All missions are part of the great shadow-play,” he said. “The war that you believe is being fought out on the plains of the Sahara is actually being fought out inside your own head.” I hadn’t got a clue what he was talking about at the time, but now I’m starting to see.’

  ‘Now hold on a minute,’ Wallace spluttered, as if the penny had only just dropped. ‘Are you saying that we went through all that shit for nothing? The dead, the wounded, the beasting, gettin’ pumped with that drug, me and Tom trying to snuff each other out, Audley, Pickney – all that was just wasted …’

  ‘Even if the Olzon-13 hadn’t been destroyed today, it wouldn’t have changed anything,’ Nolan whispered. ‘We were just part of the shadow-play, don’t you see? Just passing shadows. Whatever we’d done, whatever happened to us, it wouldn’t have made any difference at all.’

  39

  ‘Monty said Lightfoot would take eleven days,’ Stirling declared, ‘and he was right. Say what you like, the little ferret knows what he’s doing.’

  Caine thought about the men he’d lost on Sandhog: the anguish that he and the other few survivors had gone through, just to help deceive the enemy: he’d almost ended up getting his brainbox aired by one of his best mates. ‘Perhaps so, sir,’ he said, stubbing out his Player’s Navy Cut in a cutglass ashtray, ‘but maybe he shouldn’t play his cards so close to his chest. That way, I might have come back out of the Blue with more than three of the ten men I took in with me.’

  They were sitting at a table in the Shepheard’s Hotel dining-room: the place was full, buzzing with talk, electric with the clink of cutlery, alive with the sway of waiters in tarbooshes, scarlet cummerbunds and pure white gallabiyas. As Caine knew to his cost, the restaurant was meant to be ‘officers only’, but Stirling had made Copeland, Wallace and Trubman ‘honorary officers’ for the evening. The three enlisted men were perfectly at their ease: they were currently leaning back in their chairs, scarred and battered but smart in freshly starched KDS, toking luxuriantly on cigars, glasses of brandy in their scabbed, disfigured hands. Betty Nolan and Angela Brunetto sat together, both clad in the identical khaki-drill uniforms of honorary captains. Blond-haired and bright-eyed, they might almost have been twins, Caine thought, except for the fact that, while Angela’s expression was smouldering and sultry, Nolan’s was misty and almost child-like.