Death or Glory III

by Michael Asher

  Jizzard was a heavy Scotsman with red hair, shifty brown eyes, a doorstep chin and an intimidating expression. He was an ex-gunner who’d come to Egypt with Layforce, and had spent his leisure time running a protection racket among Cairo shopkeepers: until the MPs had got wind of it. Quinnell was shorter, with a head like a bloodhound and features that seemed to change abruptly from the responsive to the ferocious: broad lips, intense brown eyes, bull shoulders. He looked strong and confident, but his voice was almost girlishly soft: he blinked when he talked. A self-confessed IRA man in Civvie Street, he’d gone AWOL in Cairo when they’d tried to arrest him for subversive activities. Both he and Jizzard had holed up for a while with deserter gangs in the Delta before the Redcaps had nabbed them.

  Fiske was the odd man out. An ex-officer in a past life, he’d been caught redhanded with his fingers in his unit’s till. He was tall, gaunt and stiff-faced, with grave eyes, tight lips, a toucan nose and ears like dockleaves. Caine felt there was something inert hidden in his frozen gaze and wirestrip mouth. He looked fit, but his movements were stiff and jerky: he reminded Caine of a mechanical toy.

  Caine’s first impression wasn’t favourable. The job of blowing the el-Fayya bridge seemed uncomplicated, but he knew that Murphy’s law always applied behind enemy lines. Copeland, Wallace and Trubman had proved themselves in combat: he wondered how the three tenderfoots would hold up. He hoped that all would go according to plan. Then he wouldn’t need to find out.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I don’t know you, but I’m taking you on the word of Colonel Caversham. You’ve all had commando training, and you’ve all seen action. Just keep your noses clean, do what you’re told and you’ll be all right.’

  He left them to their new kit. Maskelyne showed him into the refectory, where men of all ranks were sitting at trestle tables or queueing for plates of eggs, bacon and sausages at a cookhouse bar. ‘Your chums are here,’ Maskelyne told him. ‘Don’t forget, briefing 0900.’

  Caine looked around, saw his mates sitting at a table on the far side of the room, tucking into breakfast. They weren’t exactly exuding an air of camaraderie. Fred Wallace was hunched over his plate, glowering like a grizzly, his lantern jaw working like a trap as he forked in bacon. Perched next to him, Harry Copeland looked as though he’d turned out for church parade. His BD suit was immaculately pressed, SAS wings up over his double MM ribbon, his newly acquired pips a flash of blue on his shoulders. Taff Trubman sat slightly aloof from the others, wearing his wrinkled leather jerkin, his face inscrutable, eyes dim under steelrim glasses. Caine knew the signaller had finally completed his SAS parachute course. He didn’t have his wings up, though, and he wasn’t wearing his corporal chevrons or medal ribbons either.

  Caine got his plate filled, drew a halfpint of tea from the urn, went over to join them.

  ‘Well, well,’ Wallace guffawed, ‘look what the cat dragged in.’

  Trubman nodded to him. Copeland got up, clapped him on the back. ‘I’ve got a present for you, skipper,’ he said.

  He pointed to a bulging kitbag on the floor. It had Caine’s name stenciled on it. Propped against it was the Thompson sub-machine gun that was Caine’s pride and joy – the weapon he’d modified to take 50- and 100-round drum magazines securely, and had fitted with a bayonet-lug.

  Caine picked up the weapon, cradled it, proved the works. ‘Where did you get my kit?’ he asked Cope.

  ‘Maskelyne gave it to me.’

  Caine pulled on the tight flesh of his chin, wondered how Maskelyne had managed to get hold of his personal weapon and equipment. He’d left it at the SAS depot at Kabrit when he’d gone to Ismaeliyya on a 48-hour pass. ‘This weapon was locked in the armoury,’ he told Cope. ‘How did he get it out?’

  ‘Used ’is magic wand o’ course,’ Wallace chuckled.

  Caine laughed.

  He laid the Tommy-gun on the floor next to Cope’s SMLE sniper’s rifle: he seated himself at the table.

  ‘They hauled me off a lorry two days ago,’ Cope told him. ‘They said you’d requested me for a special job. When I arrived here there was no sign of you. I was starting to think you weren’t coming.’

  ‘Same story with me, skipper,’ Wallace grunted through a mouthful of sausage.

  ‘You, you big dollop,’ Cope smirked. ‘You were in the cells at Suez: they marched you out in handcuffs.’

  Wallace looked abashed. ‘All right, maybe they did. But if they ’adn’t mentioned your name, skipper, I’d have skittled ’em, wouldn’t I?’

  ‘What’s this about you chinning Paddy Mayne? That must have been a first.’

  Wallace’s forehead rimpled, the pitbull eyes went dark. For a second, Caine had a vision of the Wallace he’d once been forced to fight under the influence of a disorienting drug: an ogre from hell. He put the image aside, reminded himself that the real Wallace was a man whose heart matched his giant’s frame, who liked children and animals, and who was as loyal to him as a brother.

  ‘It weren’t Paddy’s fault – it were the rozzers, wannit? See, after I lamped him, there was a bit of a kerfuffle. The Redcaps moved in to break it all up, and I’m the one that cops it. Always happens: they go for the big bloke. They slam me up in the chokey: next thing I know some morons are marchin’ me out, saying Captain Caine wants me for a job. When I get here, of course, there ain’t no Captain Caine – just like Harry said. There’s only that creep Maskelyne yakking on about how he’s sendin’ us off on some scuzzy scheme in Tunisia. Almost throttled him. They locked me up in the cellar. I’d of rotted if his majesty here hadn’t ordered ’em to let me go.’ He rumbled with laughter. ‘Should of seen him handin’ it out, skipper. Second Lieutenant weren’t in it.’

  Copeland brushed imaginary dust off his shoulder-straps. ‘From now on, Trooper Wallace, you will address me as sir.’

  ‘’Course I will, sir. You can kiss my hairy arse, an’ all.’

  Caine chuckled, attacked his bacon and sausages: he felt a surge of gratitude that his mates were with him. He squinted at Trubman. ‘What about you, Taff ? I heard you got RTU’d.’

  Trubman reddened. ‘They said I wasn’t SAS material, see.’

  ‘Those pisspots,’ Wallace butted in fiercely. ‘You survived two big schemes: you got medals. What the hell do they want, Santa Claus?’

  Trubman sighed. ‘They don’t twig signals, see. Stirling did, but after he got bagged it all went to pot. Jellicoe calls me in and says that ‘A’ Squadron’s retraining for mountain warfare. Says I’m not the right stuff. So there I am at the transit camp, waiting for RTU, when a couple of bruisers arrive and say you’ve requested me. Not a dickie-bird about what the job is. I thought it must be all right, seeing as it was with you.’

  It was more than Trubman usually said. Caine warmed to him, felt privileged that these men trusted him. He hoped he was worthy of that trust: everything he’d heard about the way they’d all been dragooned into Nighthawk, though, left him in doubt.

  ‘Did you apply for a movement order, Taff?’ he enquired.

  The signaller shook his mole head. ‘Nope. They said it was all on the QT.’

  Caine peered sideways at Copeland. ‘What about you, Harry?’

  ‘Same story.’

  ‘You, Fred? They show you any paperwork?’

  ‘Not a damn thing.’

  ‘So there’re no orders, no plan, nothing written down. And if you’re wondering about me, they snatched me from a hotel in Ismaeliyya early this morning. First heard about Nighthawk two hours ago.’

  There was a tense silence as they took this in.

  ‘I thought it might be a tit-for-tat thing for Sandhog,’ Copeland said quietly, ‘but no one in their right mind would go to this much trouble to get rid of us. There’s got to be an Op. Nighthawk, even if they’ve been short on details.’

  ‘Nighthawk shitehawk,’ big Wallace poled in. ‘Watch yer backs, boys.’

  Cope passed around Player’s Navy Cut. Caine cracked his Zippo, lit the ciga
rettes, wrapped the lighter away in its rubber condom.

  ‘Any news of Brunetto?’ he asked Copeland.

  For a second, Cope’s face caved in. His sweetheart, Angela Brunetto, an Italian defector who’d saved their lives more than once, had been missing since February. She’d been working in the DMI’s office as an Italian translator. One day, she’d simply failed to turn up for work. She’d vanished without trace.

  Caine watched Copeland, feeling for him. He recalled the photographs Caversham had shown him: for an instant he wondered if it could have been Brunetto in them, not Nolan. After all, the two girls were near lookalikes. It wasn’t possible, though – not unless Brunetto had been deliberately got up as Nolan. Even then he’d have known the difference. Brunetto didn’t have Nolan’s waiflike look: her features were smouldering and sultry.

  ‘The Field Security lads claimed documents had been nicked,’ Cope said. ‘Papers she had access to, that kind of thing. They reckoned she was a spy. Said the whole business – you know, her and me – was a set-up to plant her inside GHQ.’

  ‘Never,’ Wallace thundered. ‘Those dipsticks don’t know their arses from their elbows. She skewered her old man in front of us.’

  ‘That’s what I told them, but they didn’t want to know. She was an Itie, they said, and Ities are the enemy. That didn’t make sense either, because they must have vetted her before they gave her that job. They made a big deal of pointing out that it was her letter that drew us into Rohde’s trap on Sandhog.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Caine said. ‘Except that Rohde was really being drawn into our trap. They must have missed that.’

  ‘They missed a lot of things. I saw Stocker – you remember, the Field Security chap? He knew about Brunetto from the start: helped her get the job. The blighter threw me out of his office.’

  Which didn’t sound like Stocker either, Caine thought. The major had made his mistakes, certainly, but he was normally as keen as mustard. Caine mulled it over uneasily: a cold finger touched his neck. He had the same dreamlike feeling he’d been experiencing on and off all morning, ever since Glenn had swung for him. Only six people had returned from the Sandhog mission, two of them women. Now, the two girls – first Nolan, then Brunetto – had gone. The four male survivors – himself, Copeland, Wallace and Trubman – had been pressganged into accepting a hazardous mission. Not only had the scheme been planned by officers who had every reason to hate them, but no one else in the world knew where they were.

  4

  They were only minutes off target when the Bombay’s pilot spotted the Messerschmitt hanging like a dark mosquito over the dawn-shaded peaks of the Matmata Hills. His heart dropped. He cursed the delays that had prevented him from reaching the drop-zone in darkness. He spoke on the interphone, told the dispatcher to abort the Nighthawk drop.

  Caine was braced at the fuselage door, head aching from the tightness of his pudding-bowl helmet, shoulders raw from the weight of his parachute kit. He watched the desert waft past, a weave of amber and black a thousand feet below: he waited edgily for the order to jump. The flight had been an endless hell of booming aero-engines, gut-wrenching turbulence, cold, puke, gasoline fumes. He knew they were late, knew that jumping in daylight might leave them exposed: whatever lay in store for them out there, though, it had to be better than this. He glanced round at the faces of his patrol, illuminated in the first pale flush of light. All of them – even Big Fred Wallace – looked as sick as pigs.

  The dispatcher, a brawny flight-sergeant in RAF battledress with an outlandishly long moustache and Brylcreemed hair, touched Caine on the arm, leaned over to yell in his ear.

  ‘Drop’s cancelled, sir.’

  For a moment, Caine thought he hadn’t heard right. ‘What?’

  ‘We’ve got trouble. Me 109F. Pilot’s about to take evasive action.’

  Caine looked round furiously at Harry Copeland, found pinpoint eyes darkcupped beneath his helmet. ‘You hear that, Harry? They’re bottling out.’

  Copeland’s mouth tightened. Before he could speak, though, the aircraft banked viciously. Thrown against the dispatcher, Caine grabbed at the doorframe to steady himself. His face was only inches from the sergeant’s. ‘Listen, you tell that damn’ air-jockey that we’re going to jump, I don’t care if the whole bloody Luftwaffe’s out there.’

  The aircraft shuddered, dipped, rattled: the dispatcher clutched at the interphone-bracket, shook his head. ‘Can’t do it, sir. Pilot’s the boss.’

  Caine felt white-hot anger churn his guts: he shot out a broad hand, seized the sergeant’s collar, heaved the upper part of his body through the door into the slipstream in a single fast movement. He held him there. ‘Tell him, or you take a nose-dive. It’s a bloody long way down.’

  The RAF man squirmed in Caine’s iron grip. ‘We’ll lose the aircraft.’

  ‘Bugger the aircraft. Get us on the deck.’

  He shoved the man’s body further out into the slipstream, saw the slicked hair whipped up in the wind.

  ‘All right. All right. Let me go.’

  Caine yoiked him back, dekkoed the patrol, saw pudding-bowl heads waggle, saw uneasy hands gripping strops, saw harness-trussed bodies leaning into the yaw.

  ‘But, sah,’ Jizzard wheezed. ‘You cannae do …’

  There was a low lub-dub-dub of machine-gun fire: a fat 20-mil round jounced through the fuselage, skimmed the Scotsman’s helmet, greased the fuel tank, snapped out the other side.

  ‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ Jizzard screeched.

  ‘Shut up,’ Copeland snarled.

  The Bombay listed: the men were almost thrown off their feet. Caine clung on to the doorframe, heard an engine splutter, smelt smoke. The big bird dropped altitude: Caine felt his stomach lurch. The men swayed on her strops until she righted herself. The flight-sergeant hung on the bracket, lifted the interphone with quivering fingers, spoke into it. He put it down shakily: his face was peacoloured: sweat trickled down his cheeks. ‘Port engine’s hit, sir. She’s still cranking, but Jerry’s coming round for another run.’

  ‘Blow her out of the sky,’ Big Wallace roared: the giant was leaning almost horizontal, all his colossal weight on his strop. ‘Ain’tcha got no bleedin’ guns on this crate?’

  ‘Vickers “K” mounted in the nose-turret. No gunner.’

  ‘You flamin’ great dickhead. We’re SAS, ain’t we?’

  The giant was already unshackling his static line: Caine stopped him.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ he growled. The aircraft wobbled, skipped, porpoised. Caine detached his line from the bar, shuftied Copeland: his mate had braced himself against the fuel tank: the fingers that gripped his webbing strop were white. ‘As soon as I give the all clear, take the stick out, Harry. I’ll be right behind you.’

  Cope swallowed. ‘Got it, skipper.’

  Caine leaned back against the fuselage, stared at the dispatcher. ‘I’m going to the nose. Tell the pilot to stay on course.’

  The sergeant nodded uncertainly. Caine squeezed past his men, felt Wallace’s chip-pan hand on his shoulder. ‘Good luck, skipper.’ With the parachute on his back and the container on his legs, it was impossible to move fast: he shuffled along the cabin to the nose, felt the plane buck under him, saw wan light spill in through the turret’s Plexiglass. The space was confined: too much of a squeeze with his parachute on: he released the catch, dumped it on the floor, dropped his container. A second later he was sitting in the gunner’s chair with the Vickers ‘K’ in both hands. He checked the pans and the big aero-sights, wrenched the cocking handle, lifted the weapon on its mount. Below him to the right lay a moonscape of hills: the wasteland of stone and rock Caversham had called hell’s back door. To the left lay the opal plains of the desert.

  He peered through the sights: at first he didn’t see the Me109: then he clocked her, a flea-sized blip coming straight at him. He felt a spasm of panic, fought it down. The Messerschmitt was a sleek thoroughbred – the fastest thing in the air: compared with her, the Bo
mbay was an outdated, lumbering bear. He’d blown up enough 109s to know that the latest versions carried two remotely fired .20mm cannons mounted in wing-pods. The Vickers was a first-class weapon, ideal for aerial shooting, but he’d never fired one from an aircraft: it seemed an impossible dream to hit anything travelling at almost four hundred miles an hour.

  The Bombay pitched. Caine ground his teeth. For Chrissake, keep her steady. His eyes locked on the Jerry: she was bigger now, growing visibly in his sights. Suddenly, threads of scarlet tracer leapt out from her wings: light-beams converging on a point somewhere in front of him. A shell smashed through the Plexiglass, scattered fragments, whined past his ear. Caine gasped, ducked, blinked, sloughed a breath, focused on the 109: he waited until she was dead centre of his sights, pulled iron. At that moment the Bombay juddered again: Caine watched his own tracer-lines go wild. He swore: his heart pounded: the Messerschmitt loomed nearer. Something went click in his head: for a second it seemed he was no longer breathing. His heartbeat slewed to a murmur, the roar of the Bombay’s engines faded, time itself seemed to stop: the Me109 seemed motionless in his sights. He squeezed the trigger: even before the muzzle-cone spurted fire, even before he saw red tracer-lines scintillate, he knew he’d done it, knew he’d hit her fuel tank. The Jerry’s wings tipped almost imperceptibly: then her fuselage blowfished out in swelling knuckles of crimson: she blew apart in three broad stabs of smoke and fire.

  Caine didn’t wait to see where the wreckage fell: he’d already spotted something else: a couple of miles away to the north, tiny squares of purple, standing out against the pastel skin of the desert. It was the drop-zone, where Fraser’s reception committee would be waiting, with their jeeps and demolition gear.

  Caine scrambled out of the turret, struggled frantically with the parachute and container. He heaved himself to the main cabin, clocked expectant faces, hooked up his static line. He gave a double thumbs-up. ‘What are you waiting for?’ he bawled. ‘Get the hell out of it, now.’ The patrol were almost on each other’s backs as they fell out into the sky.