‘Little bit more,’ Fiske said. His voice was strained, but there was no tremor in it.
‘All right. All right.’
Wallace wiped his hands on his jerkin, eased the rock forward minutely. ‘Tiny bit more,’ Fiske breathed. ‘That’s it.’
Wallace jumped to his feet, wrapped a piston-like arm round Fiske’s waist, dragged him the few yards to where the Bren lay, scooped it up like a toy, hustled Fiske another twenty yards across the bridge. There was a slap like a leather belt whacking a table. The air shuddered: grit and shrapnel pattered. Something stung Wallace’s neck. He fell on top of Fiske, heard the thin man curse. He sat up, clocked the mushroom of dirty grey smoke where the booby trap had been. He saw blood dripping down his arm, touched his neck, felt the groove where a hot steel shard had grazed his skin. It was numb and wet: he inspected the blood on his pansized hand, shook his head in frustration. The blast had been puny as mines went, but if they’d been much closer, they’d both have been frazzled. For a moment Wallace felt dazed. Then he caught sight of Fiske’s skeletal face, the coldfish eyes staring at his wound. ‘You bloody nutter,’ he yelled. ‘Thought you was s’posed to be an Ordnance wallah. What the hell did you go and do that for?’
The blockhouse was bigger than it looked from below – a stone-built oblong with yards front and rear, joined by a tunnel that passed through the centre of the building. A wooden gate opened into the rear yard: the front yard was filled with rubble and tufts of dry swordgrass. Both were enclosed by stone walls. In a room opening off the front yard, they found the remains of a wood fire, with driedout tubers of desert plants, and the scuff of footmarks.
‘Somebody’s been here, right enough,’ Quinnell commented: he knelt down to feel the ashes. ‘Not today, but not so long ago, either. Two men, I’d say.’
Jizzard glanced about uneasily. ‘A-rab sheepshaggers. This is where they come to beast their beasts.’
Quinnell stood up, pinned his rifle under one arm, pulled on his earlobe. ‘Aye, mebbe, but where’s the sheep-turds, then?’
‘Whoever it was, they’re no’ here noo. Let’s get oot. This place gives me the creeps.’
The front-yard wall was defended by three stone sangars: on the other side of the tunnel there was a ladder that led up to a flat roof. They found another fortified post up there – a horseshoe-shaped stone emplacement lined with sandbags, sagging and rotten. Jizzard kicked at the nearest bag: it fell apart, spilled sand. ‘Solid as the rock of Gibraltar,’ he scoffed.
Quinnell took in the view. They weren’t that high up – a hundred and fifty feet, maybe – but if you had a machine-gun mounted in this sangar, you’d have perfect enfilade right down the track and across the bridge. It couldn’t be more than five hundred yards away. He watched the small figures of Wallace and Fiske moving along it, saw Fiske lean over the side, saw them exchange words. He slipped his waterbottle from his belt, took a swig. Jizzard lit a fag, followed his gaze.
‘Wallace and Fiske,’ he sneered. ‘As fine a pair of clowns as ye’d meet. Ye’d think they were Laurel and Hardy.’
‘I wouldn’t let the big man hear ye say that,’ Quinnell said. ‘He’d have ye for dinner.’
‘I’d like to see him try.’
Quinnell sniggered. ‘Fiske’s a gouger right enough. There’s many a time I could have throttled him in the slammer.’
Jizzard’s eyes needled him. ‘Ye’ll go through with the job, then, Paddy? You’ve no’ got cold feet?’
Quinnell blinked, pulled again on the lobe of his ear. ‘Caine’s not a bad fellah. He’s a hard man, but he’s not a toff. I don’t know. It doesn’t seem right.’
‘Right?’ Jizzard leaned closer to him. ‘You’re fond o’ playin’ the boyscout, Paddy – patrol medic an’ all that. Underneath, though, we’re the same.’ He held up the first two fingers of his right hand, pistol fashion.
‘Like hell we are,’ Quinnell said. He’d seen through Jizzard’s blarney in the glasshouse. He was a bullshit artist first class – most likely a snitch as well. Quinnell guessed that Jizzard was in his element when the odds were stacked in his favour – a savage when terrorizing helpless civilians.
When it came to combat, though, he’d probably be too yellow even to shoot.
Quinnell had done his share of fighting: he’d fought British peelers, but he’d done it for the honour of the Republic, against the traitors who’d sold out to the British empire for the supposed ‘Free State’. Honour and courage were qualities he respected, and Jizzard had neither. He was an uncouth bully whose purpose in life was looking after number one. Quinnell had started out as a hospital orderly: he’d only given up helping to save lives when the Brit bastards had forced him to. He was no ignoramus: he’d read books – James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Michael Connolly – he’d studied the history of the British in Ireland, had been loyal to the green flag. Jizzard would have beaten his own grandmother to a pulp for a few pennies, as long as she was tied to a chair, that was. Whatever he, Quinnell, had done, he’d never done it for profit, and he’d never shirked a fight.
‘We’re not even in the same league,’ he said.
‘Och, I forgot,’ Jizzard snickered. ‘Ye did all those bombings and such for the sake of the guid old Starry Plough. Pull the other one, Paddy, it’s got wee bells on. If ye were so loyal to the IRA, why the hell did ye join the British army?’
Quinnell fixed him with hawkish stare. ‘That’s for me to know, and you to keep your Jock nose out of. And don’t call me Paddy.’
Jizzard avoided the smouldering eyes, smoked, watched the figures on the bridge. ‘Remember Sears-Beach?’
‘Another gouger, bent as they come.’
‘Aye, he is that. But he’s givin’ us a chance to ditch the bloody war. It’s the only chance we’ve got.’
There was a sudden slapping report from the direction of the bridge. They were alert in an instant, crouching behind the sandbags, weapons cocked. Jizzard peeked over, saw the puff of smoke, saw Fiske and Wallace lying prone on the bridge. ‘Those bloody idjits have set a mine off,’ he guffawed.
7
Harry Copeland patrolled along the base of the stump until it turned sharply south, where the track passed through a narrow gap, no more than thirty paces across. It was a natural bottleneck with a shallow gully on the left, falling slightly towards a gunpit that was strategically sited to defend the gap. Cope had a shufti at the pit – it was spacious and oval-shaped, with an embrasure for a machine-gun and a rear ramp by which a tank or field-gun could be run inside. Copeland leaned against the embrasure, used his telescopic sights to sweep arcs of fire. Directly to his front lay a rocky plain dotted with skeleton thornscrub, halfa grass, boulders: off to the right, the green line of a wadi followed the foot of the cliffs. It would be dry now but, in the wet season, he guessed, water must run down the wadi into the gorge. He continued his sweep to the left: his eye lingered for a moment on Wallace and Fiske on the bridge.
From a strategic point of view, he thought, the bridge and blockhouse had been sited almost perfectly. Anyone who wanted to cross these hills had no choice but to come through: there was no going round. Men on foot might cross the gorge further down, but they’d still have to pass through this gap, which was defended by the blockhouse and the gunpit. A small force dug in on this side could easily hold off a much larger one.
Not that they were here to defend anything: the SAS was a striking unit: stealth if possible, force if necessary was the operational credo. No one expected them to make heroic stands. Copeland liked to create contingency plans, though. In the commandos they’d been trained to think two ranks up, and he was always sifting possibilities in a manner untarnished by emotional considerations. Tom Caine was different. He was a very decent chap, but he let feelings interfere with military actions. There would be a clear plan, and Caine would diverge from it – to help someone, to save civilians, to protect women and children. Or he’d have an intuition – a sudden impulse to do something for no reason
he could explain. It was exasperating, having to keep Caine focused on the task in hand. Maybe he did sometimes muddle through in ways Cope hadn’t expected, but the fact was that almost every time things went wrong, it was because he hadn’t listened to Copeland’s advice.
Cope had always been bright. At school he’d been top of the class in everything. He often knew more than his teachers did, a quality that had not made him very popular. Some people unfairly called him a bighead and a know-it-all, but he’d put that down to jealousy. If he’d been born clever, it wasn’t his fault. At home, his father used to hold regular quizzes, pitting him against his brothers. If he didn’t win he would brood for a week.
Cope had never excelled in team games, not because he wasn’t athletic – he’d been school cross-country champion – but because he always thought he knew better than his team mates. Your problem, Copeland, his games master used to say, is that you want to play every position on the field. He’d stuck to sports like running and rock-climbing, in which you didn’t have to depend on anyone else.
Copeland had always known he would become an officer one day. He didn’t think it made him better than men like Wallace. True, Fred could be unruly, and insubordinate, but if you looked beneath the cave-man appearance, he was pretty astute in his own way: a terrific fighter, of course. It was simply that he, Copeland, deserved to be an officer because he was good at planning and seeing how things would turn out: most of the peacetime officers – the regulars – were dunderheads, who hadn’t got a clue. That went for most of the general staff, too.
When the war had come along in 1939, Copeland had been a history teacher in a boys’ grammar school. Everyone was joining up, and he’d thought that the army needed bright people like him. When he’d walked into the recruiting post, he’d expected to be handed a commission instantly: they would be so bowled over by his abilities, he’d thought, that they’d put him down for the planning staff right away. It hadn’t turned out like that. In those early days they’d recruited as officers almost exclusively public schoolboys with plummy accents, whose fathers were stockbrokers or the directors of banks. Copeland hadn’t quite fitted the bill.
‘What can you do, son?’ the recruiting sergeant had asked him.
‘I’m a qualified teacher.’
‘I mean what can you do that’s any use? Can you drive a motorcar?’
‘Yes, but anyone can do …’
‘That’s it, then. Royal Army Service Corps.’
It wasn’t exactly what he’d envisaged, but he had consoled himself with the thought that there was room for improvement. He might not have the right background, but they’d eventually appreciate clever chaps like him.
At the back of his mind, though, he knew that there were times when he hadn’t been quite so clever, when he’d let his head be ruled by his heart. Such as the time he’d urged Caine to take on the Sandhog scheme, to save his sweetheart, Angela Brunetto. It had been obvious there was something wrong about that mission, but he’d encouraged Caine to accept it anyway – he’d been so deeply attached to Brunetto. With her, it had been the real thing – or so he’d thought. Now they were saying that she’d used him – that she’d been spying for the Axis all along.
If the truth be known, the same thing had happened on Nighthawk. He’d actually been en route to OCTU in Palestine, looking forward to his officer training at last, when they’d stopped his vehicle, told him that Caine needed him for a job. They’d only had to mention Caine, and he’d fallen for it hook, line and stinker. It had been a pack of lies from start to finish: the mission seemed straightforward enough on the surface, but was actually as queer as a concrete parachute. Why had he accepted it? Because Tom Caine was his mate. So much for cleverness, he thought.
He heard a low whistle: Caine was waving to him from the edge of the trees. He withdrew from the gunpit, started moving back to the leaguer. He noticed a mountain in the distance, a flintblue fluted pyramid-shape, towering above the escarpment, twenty miles away, maybe more. It was the highest peak he could see, and it was very distinct: the peak was crowned by two rock chimneys, sharp at the ends and slightly curved, like the tushes of a giant boar. Copeland had an excellent memory for topography: he knew he hadn’t seen the peak before, but he thought someone had described it to him not long ago.
8
He found Caine leaning over a map spread out on the bonnet of the jeep. ‘Have a dekko,’ he told Cope.
The map showed their position: Copeland noticed that the road started winding down into the plain less than half a mile beyond the eastern end of the bridge. Somewhere down there a Totenkopf recce battalion was cruising north-west towards this point. Copeland didn’t know much about the Totenkopf: the name meant ‘death’s head’ in German. The Totenkopf Division had originally been formed around Nazi camp-guards. They weren’t part of the regular Jerry army, the Wehrmacht, but came under the Waffen SS. Copeland had never heard of SS units being used in North Africa.
‘How long do you reckon we’ve got?’ he enquired.
Caine inspected his watch. ‘It’s 1445 hours. According to Caversham’s int. the Krauts won’t make it before first light tomorrow. That gives us fifteen hours.’
Copeland frowned. ‘We’d better push it, Tom. We don’t want to get caught with our pants down by a crack Jerry battalion. There’s seven of us. How do you rate our chances of coming through that?’
Caine made a face. ‘You worry too much, Harry. Fifteen hours gives us enough time to blow the bridge and be home for breakfast. Let’s wait and see what Wallace and Fiske have to say.’
Copeland shrugged. He had another gander at the twin-fanged mountain he’d seen earlier, then found it on the map. ‘Jebel Halluf,’ he muttered. ‘That’s the one Johnny talked about.’
‘What?’
Cope pointed to the distant peak. ‘See those twin chimneys, Tom?’
Caine looked at the feature through his binos. ‘Yep, quite unusual,’ he said.
‘You remember when Johnny gave us a debrief on Stirling’s capture?’
‘Johnny Cooper? Yes, of course.’
Cooper was the SAS ‘A’ Squadron officer who’d been with David Stirling when he’d got bagged at the end of January. They’d been on a hush-hush mission behind Axis lines in Tunisia, had lain up in a wadi for the night and had woken up to find themselves surrounded by Germans. Cooper, an officer called Mike Sadler and a French sergeant had somehow escaped: they’d made it through to friendly lines. They claimed the honour of being the first Eighth Army soldiers to link up with the Anglo-American force.
‘I asked him to show me on the map the exact place where the Huns got Stirling,’ Copeland went on. ‘He mentioned that jebel as a reference point. Said you could see it from the wadi where they got snatched.’
Caine nodded: Stirling’s disappearance seven weeks earlier had brought on a crisis for the SAS. Until then, nobody had realized how much of a one-man show it had been: Stirling had been the only one who knew what was going on: it had all been in his head. Since he’d gone, they’d had a couple of temporary commanders, both outsiders. Neither had lasted.
Caine yanked the flesh on his chin. ‘But Stirling’s party didn’t come this way, Harry. Must have been on the other side of the hills.’
‘Yep. I was just thinking, you know … Johnny reckoned the Axis had information that Stirling was here.’
Caine snorted. ‘More like his party was knackered after a week on Bennies, and got caught napping. Stirling used to pop those pills like boiled sweets.’
Copeland laughed. ‘Maybe. But Johnny’s no idiot. He swore there was a tip-off.’
‘If there was, it can only have come from inside GHQ. We’ve always known the Axis have spies in –’ He broke off suddenly, remembered that Copeland’s sweetheart, Brunetto, had been suspected of spying within GHQ.
Copeland shrugged. ‘Anyway, it makes you wonder how safe we are.’
‘Yep. That must be why Caversham was so keen to use men whose absenc
e wouldn’t be noticed.’
Copeland cracked his knuckles. ‘Stirling always used to call GHQ the layers of fossilized shit, but in the end he had the same old notions. Remember when he chucked a grenade into a Jerry guardhouse at Berka, then reckoned it was murder?’
Caine cackled. ‘Where’d we be without honour, Harry?’
‘That’s just it, mate. We’re up against a team that plays with different rules.’
‘That’s probably what the Jerries say about us.’
There came the low, flat booomphhhh of a detonation from behind the hill. ‘What the Dickens …?’ Caine gasped. ‘Come on.’
He grabbed his Tommy-gun, jogged towards the bend in the cliffs, cocking the gun as he ran. Cope unslung his SMLE, ran after him. They crossed the gap, followed the gully down to the gunpit, jumped inside. Caine squinted through his binos, saw a billow of bluegrey smoke lying on the air at the far end of the bridge. He realized he couldn’t see Wallace or Fiske: he caught his breath, recalled what Cope had said only a minute ago about the possibility of compromise. Could the Krauts have been expecting them? He surveyed arcs left and right, then saw Fiske and Wallace stumping towards them off the bridge, Fiske with an edgy clockwork stride, Wallace with the shambling gait of a bear. They seemed unhurt.
‘Not a contact, anyway,’ he said, relieved.
‘Sounded like a mine.’
They heard boots padding behind them: a moment later Jizzard and Quinnell slipped into the pit, crouched down looking over the parapet. ‘Saw it from up there, sah,’ Jizzard told Caine. ‘The silly sods set a mine off, that’s all.’
‘That’s fine and dandy then,’ Caine said. ‘Only alerted any Axis troops within ten miles. You clear the blockhouse?’
‘We did, sir,’ Quinnell said. ‘We found the remains of a fire and footprints. Two men – might have been Arabs, might not.’
Caine nodded. ‘Keep your eyes peeled. Get over to the leaguer, start sorting out the safety-fuse. We’ll have a brew, lay the charges after these two report.’
Death or Glory III Page 5