Fiske moved in with quick lurching strides. ‘We should be cautious, sir,’ he said sharply. ‘Mr Copeland is right. It could kill us all.’
‘Cautious,’ Wallace cackled. ‘You got a bleedin’ nerve, you ’ave. After what happened on the …’ He broke off, looked away, wiped his mouth with the back of a coalshovel hand.
Fiske’s intervention had tipped Caine over the edge. ‘All right, Fred,’ he said. ‘Let’s give it a go.’
Copeland shook his head in exasperation: Wallace boned a meatsaw grin. Caine shouldered his Tommy, picked up the box, noted with surprise that it actually did feel much lighter than when he’d taken it from Fiske at the derelict. ‘Come on, Fred,’ he said. ‘Let’s see what makes it tick.’
He laid the box down five yards away. Copeland and Trubman followed, looked on from a couple of paces: Fiske and Quinnell hung back in the treeshadows. Wallace planted puncheon legs either side of the box, raised the hammer, soughed a breath.
‘Stop that now,’ a wirecutter voice snapped. Wallace froze: Caine rounded, clocked Fiske standing behind them with his Colt. 45 levelled squarely at Wallace. His face was pewtergrey, eyes like dark gimlets. ‘No one touches the box,’ he said. ‘Put the hammer down, Wallace.’
Wallace flexed his massive biceps, stood up, bullhorned laughter. ‘You’re off yer chump, mate. Always thought you was –’
The pistol dropkicked, spasmed flame: a round caterwauled over Wallace’s skull, missed it by inches. The big man bobbed, yowed curses. Copeland’s rifle was at his shoulder, Caine went for his sidearm: there came a strident clack of cocking handles from the nearest jeep. ‘Ah wudnae be hasty,’ a gleeful voice piped out.
Caine saw Jizzard braced behind the twin Vickers in his wagon, not ten paces away, levelling the guns in their direction. Almost simultaneously, Quinnell swept out of Jizzard’s line of fire, stood poised with his legs apart, covered them with his .303. The Irishman’s jowls were granite.
Caine let his hand drop, felt sweat creep down his spine, felt his throat contract. They’re all mixed up with STENDEC in one way or another, Pickney had said, even your crew. Was this what he’d meant?
‘What in the name of shit is this?’ he rasped. ‘You going to shoot us all, or what?’
‘Just lay your weapons down,’ Fiske monotoned. ‘Or yes, we’ll knock off the lot of you.’
Quinnell traversed the muzzle of his rifle. ‘We’re not playing April fools here,’ he rapped. ‘Put your shootin’ irons and gewgaws where we can see them. Don’t try anything funny.’
Caine caught Copeland’s eye, saw his own incredulity mirrored in his mate’s dark face. He eyetrailed Jizzard in the jeep: the Scotsman was a whinger and a bully, but Caine had little doubt he was capable of killing in cold blood as long as he had the upper hand. He licked his lips, nodded to Copeland, lifted his Thompson very slowly, pokeydrilled it at arm’s length, grounded arms. He laid his Colt, bayonet and grenades beside it, looked up to see his comrades doing the same.
Fiske’s lips were taut, his eyes milkblue glaciers. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘move away from your weapons. I want you to kneel down, hands on your heads.’
‘You know this is mutiny,’ Copeland said.
‘Mutiny’s a rebellion against legal authority, so it is,’ Quinnel soured. ‘Youse have no authority over me.’
Fiske aimed his Colt at Caine’s belly. ‘Get down,’ he creaked.
Caine knelt on hard earth, clasped hands over his head, saw Copeland, Trubman and Wallace hunker. He felt furious, not just at Fiske, but at himself. They’d all known that Nighthawk was dodgy: they’d been expecting something from the start.
‘Good, now tie ’em up, Quinnell,’ Fiske ordered.
Quinnell slingbraced his Lee-Enfield, brought hanks of cut rope from his haversack: Caine recognized the vandalized climbing rope from earlier, realized that this move must have been planned even before they’d investigated the derelict plane.
Quinnell leaned over Caine, wrenched his arms behind him, tied his wrists: Caine winced – he still bore the scars of Caversham’s handcuffs there from three days ago. He felt the rope cut into his flesh, felt the ground painful under his knees. He stared at Fiske. ‘Why are you doing this?’ he demanded.
The thin man’s gravedigger face was an iron mask. ‘I’ve got orders to retrieve the black box,’ he said. ‘You’re in the way.’
The hairs on Caine’s neck bristled. The black box. That was insane. They hadn’t picked up the Mayday signal until after they’d arrived at the bridge, hadn’t known of the box’s existence until they’d found the STENDEC aircraft. Even the decision to investigate hadn’t been a foregone conclusion.
Caine remembered how Fiske’s dismissive attitude to the downed aircrew had played a part in his determination to go and look for them. He recalled how keen he had been for them to take the box, how he’d argued against handing it over to the Jerries. He must have known about it from the start, must have been aware of the derelict plane, known her location, known that Caine’s patrol would pick up the Mayday signal, and – most damning of all – known for certain that Caine would make a rescue bid, especially if he argued the opposite way: I have orders, he’d said.
‘Orders?’ Caine grunted. ‘Orders from who?’
‘From the powers that be, the big cheeses. Does it matter? The same arseholes who made this shitty war, the same bastards who’ll be left sitting on their wallets when it’s all over, after millions of us morons have got scragged.’
‘The legal authorities,’ Quinnell cut in, finishing off Trubman’s tie. ‘The ones who murdered and starved the Irish for generations.’
‘If that’s the case,’ Copeland challenged him. ‘Why are you carrying out their orders?’
Fiske sniffed. ‘We’re all following their orders. They own us. All we can do in this life, my friend, is look after number one and let the devil take the hindmost. That’s what I’m doing.’
‘What about the mission?’ Caine said.
‘Stuff the mission. Let the Huns shaft Freyberg. It’s no skin off my nose.’
Blood drained from Caine’s face. He shook his head in disbelief. Fiske’s orders hadn’t come from GHQ – that was certain: blowing the el-Fayya bridge was crucial to Monty’s push. No, someone had used Nighthawk as a decoy for a spot of private enterprise: it must have been Caversham and Co. The jigsaw pieces fell into place with a snap – the way they’d been dragooned into the scheme, the deployment of ex-detainees, Caversham’s claptrap about personnel whose absence will go unnoticed. The gorillaman had wafted fake photos of Betty Nolan under his nose to forestall his objections. That meant Nolan was dead: probably Angela Brunetto too. He and his crew had been the ideal stooges: reliable, expendable, easily disposable, no one else likely to cause a fuss about it, and – as far as Maskelyne and Glenn were concerned – they had it coming. They’d found the ideal way of getting back at Caine and his chums, while pulling off some secret objective of their own.
Quinnell collected the discarded weapons: Fiske lowered his pistol, shifted closer. Jizzard slipped down from the jeep, jounced over to them. He picked up Caine’s Tommy-gun with its outsize magazine, weighed it in his hands. ‘Always did fancy this trenchsweeper,’ he gloated.
‘Pity you ain’t got the muscle or the guts to use it then,’ Wallace sneered.
Jizzard hit him in the teeth with the butt, mashed his lip. Wallace blew tooth fragments, hoiked spats of blood. ‘Like I said,’ he mouthed. ‘You ain’t got the guts.’
Jizzard raised the Thompson to lamp him again. ‘Stop,’ Fiske yipped. ‘Don’t play with your dinner, Jizzard. Let’s get this over.’
‘With pleasure,’ Jizzard grinned. He inspected Wallace’s bleeding mouth. ‘By the way, big man,’ he said. ‘It was me who cut the ropes.’ He mimicked Wallace’s gruff tones. ‘What I wanna know is ’oo drew ’em from the stores.’
‘Fuck you.’
Jizzard chunked the Tommy-gun’s working parts. Caine stared into the muzz
le of his own weapon: his heart galloped. After all the ferocious battles against the Axis he’d taken part in, he was going to be shot with his own weapon, by one of his own men. It was almost funny. He closed his eyes, thought of Nolan: he was afraid to die, but he was lost without her anyway.
Nothing happened. Caine opened his eyes, saw Jizzard holding the submachine-gun indecisively. His face was creampale in the starlight: he’d lost his cocksure pose. To his right, Quinnell, too, hesitated, his face shiny with sweat. ‘This isn’t right,’ he burst out, glaring at Fiske. ‘I’ll not slaughter comrades in cold blood, so I won’t.’
Fiske’s mouth stayed tight. ‘Comrades?’ he scoffed. ‘What happened to the legal authorities blather, then?’ He turned to the Scotsman. ‘Kill them, Jizzard.’
Caine saw perspiration drop from Jizzard’s slablike chin: he shifted the Thompson, lowered it, backed away. ‘Nah,’ he spluttered. ‘I cannae do it. These lads are our own.’
He threw the weapon down in disgust, wheeled to face Fiske. ‘You’re the big effendi,’ he said. ‘You wannae shoot them, do it yersel’.’
Fiske raised his pistol. Quinnell knocked it aside with his rifle-butt. ‘No,’ he bawled. ‘We’re not murdering our own boys, Fiske, I don’t give a flying shit what our orders are.’
Fiske’s eyes were cold marbles: he examined his own weapon in silence for a long moment, then, to Caine’s surprise, replaced it in its holster. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we don’t want their blood on our hands. My orders were to ensure that they were not in a position to stop us. I think we can say we’ve effectively done that.’
‘Aye,’ Jizzard huffed. ‘Let the Krauts decide what to do with them. Our hands are clean.’
Fiske wheeled round jerkily. ‘Quinnell,’ he ordered. ‘Tie their legs. Jizzard, put the black box in your jeep. Put the other wagons out of action – we won’t be needing them. Let’s get this pathetic excuse for a show on the road.’
17
The farm stood on saltcrusted earth among tilted datepalms, on one of the minor channels of the Delta. They arrived about midnight, breathless after bowling helterskelter along dark backroads: the moon was down, the sky a gown of black silk and purple gauze, sequinned with stars. Maddy stopped the jeep at the gate, hooted: unseen hands dragged open the doors. She drove into a yard of shadows, crossbeamed with bars of windowlight. She pulled up, let out a long ooofff of relief, flopped over the steering wheel.
Most of the space was hidden in darkness: stucco walls like bad teeth, denuded palm planks, cart hulks, fragments of tractors, perished tyres, oxidized engine blocks, teetering dovecotes limed with guano, a collection of vehicular oddments the deserters kept going on rubber bands and chewing gum – an Itie lorry, a saloon, a pickup, a couple of motorbikes. The walls enclosed the derelict farmhouse – a mudbrick oblong with a concave roof on the point of collapse. Halfdressed men and sloweyed girls drifted out of the shadows, ambled drowzily around them. Where’s the goods? Where’s Jizzard?
‘Rozzers musta nabbed ’im,’ Taylor whickered. ‘Field Security was waitin’ for us, see. Must’ve ’ad a tipoff.’
‘Calvin ain’t goin’ to be happy.’
‘Calvin can get stuffed. We on’y got away by the skin of our teeth.’
Maddy slithered out of her seat, leaned heavily against the jeep’s hull, waved away questions. She felt drained: her hands were still shaking, her fingers were stiff with the redhead’s blood. Taylor hustled her inside the house, through an unkempt room that smelt of piss and hookah tobacco, sat her down on a palliasse in her lamplit sleeping quarters. He stroked her face with his big hands, kissed her neck. Maddy moaned: the thrill of dodging death, of outrunning the hunters, had left her hot. For an instant she was tempted to surrender. She felt grateful to Taylor for rescuing her from the streets, for protecting her. All she knew about him was that he was an orphanage brat who’d joined the army because it was the only job he could get. He was crusty and quick-tempered, but he could also be kind. She knew that he was devoted to her, craved her like a drug. Yet, as always, something stopped her from giving herself to him. She went rigid, pulled away. ‘I can’t,’ she said.
Taylor insinuated his face into hers, ate up the soft eyes, the pillow lips, the faraway, almost pleading expression. Resistance was just a game she played, he thought. She knew it drove him wild, made him mad to have her, to screw her until she begged him to stop. He dragged her down on the palliasse, crushed her under him, raked her hair. ‘You like it,’ he growled. ‘You love it.’
Maddy was aware that there was something in her that derived pleasure from knowing that men lusted after her, just as there was a part of her that desired to be roughly handled. She kept a tight lid on those feelings, though: they weren’t for Taylor.
‘For Christ’s sake, stop,’ she said. ‘You’ll never have me like this.’
She went limp under him, as if all her fight were gone, her face set in a glower of determination that Taylor recognized: she was about to play the old limp-rag ploy. He sighed and let her up. He fetched a bottle of whisky from a cupboard, removed the cap, gulped liquor. Maddy adjusted the oil lamp, caught sight of herself in the cracked mirror hanging on the wall. Someone was lurking there, someone she didn’t recognize – a dishevelled girl with bloody hands, bitten nails, ratty hair, soapfilled eyes: someone she might have known long ago, whose name she couldn’t recall.
She lit cigarettes, gave one to Taylor, took the whisky bottle from him. She swallowed amber fluid, felt it bite at the back of her tongue, shuddered. She set the bottle on the table, smoked.
Taylor squatted on the palliasse, ogled her with resentment, wet his lips. She smoked the cigarette down, stubbed it in the ashtray, saw the bloodstains on her hands as if she hadn’t noticed them before. She examined her fingers curiously, scrubbed at the stains with her broken nails, thought of the dead sergeant, the wounded redhead. The girl had called her Betty Nolan: the name had hit her like a bomb. The woman had recognized her, she was sure of it. If not, why did Betty Nolan sound so right? She tried to remember, found herself straining after fleeing phantoms at the edge of her memory: it was impossible to follow them into the abyss beyond. Tears of frustration pricked up in the corners of her eyes: she held on to the table, broke down in rattling sobs.
Taylor stared at her one-eyed, then laid aside his eyepatch – a distinguishing mark whose removal could change his appearance quickly: both of his eyes were sound. He watched Maddy with an owlish face. ‘’Ere, what the ’eck’s the matter with you, girl? We bin through worse than that.’
‘The redhead,’ Maddy said. ‘She knew me.’
‘Don’t talk daft. She was delirious.’
‘She called me Betty Nolan.’
‘Betty Nolan? That don’t mean a damn’ thing.’
Taylor got up with slow deliberation. Maddy faced him: salt slivers tracked her cheeks. She wiped them away with blooded fingers. ‘You killed that sergeant. You shouldn’t have done it.’
Taylor screwed up his stone-carved face. ‘What was I supposed to do, eh? They wasn’t playin’ pattercake.’
Maddy shivered, wrapped her arms round her shoulders. ‘We have rules, Taylor. No killing, remember.’
‘Maybe the rules ’ave changed.’
‘Who says?’
His Adam’s apple tightened. ‘It come from the top, from Calvin. ‘’Is orders is to knock off anyone as gets in the way.’
‘You lying swine.’
Taylor’s black eyes swam. He pinched her arms with powerful fingers, shook her. ‘No bint calls me a liar.’
Maddy slapped him with an open palm. He recoiled, his mouth blowfished. ‘I’ll bleedin’ kill yer.’
He pushed her shoulders with both hands. Maddy lost her balance, tripped over the palliasse, fell backwards: her head clunked the solid wall. For a moment she lay on the floor, stunned: her senses somersaulted, tiny electric charges pinprickled her body, arclights strobed and spindled, constellations of memory starburst lik
e popping Very flares, dazzling images blew through her head like shards of a shattered mirror: yellowblue desert, sandcoloured armoured cars wheeling, guffs of white smoke, men with gore-red wounds, a machine-gun clattering, shells thumping, veloursheened desert night seen from an aircraft, a parachutist broken on stony ground, a beautiful Senussi girl tossing raven hair, an officer with powerful shoulders and a blunt, freckled face, the crump of a car hitting the dark meniscus of the Nile. Betty Nolan, she thought. Captain Betty Nolan. Honorary Captain Elizabeth Jane Nolan, GM and bar. I am charged to record His Majesty’s high appreciation … Names and faces elbowed, jostled for room. ‘Johann Eisner,’ she murmured,’ Heinrich Rohde, Mary Goddard, Hekmeth Fahmi, David Stirling, John Stocker, Angela Brunetto, Tom Caine.’ She paused, drawn by the last name. A barrier collapsed, a veil dropped: her throat caught, her eyes filled with tears. ‘Caine,’ she whispered. ‘Sergeant Tom Caine. Lieutenant Tom Caine. Lieutenant Thomas Edward Caine, DCM, DSO. Lieutenant Thomas Edward Caine, DCM, DSO, 1st Special Air Service Regiment.’ She opened her eyes, saw Taylor crouching over her with a mournful expression. ‘It were an accident, darlin’,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to push you that ’ard.’
18
He was belly down, wrists and ankles bound tight: his jaw was numb from contact with the earth. Caine felt a deep, visceral hatred for Fiske and the others, and for whoever had put them up to this treachery, but his chief loathing was reserved for himself. The worst aspect of it was that, not for the first time, the bastards had anticipated him. The only thought he’d had when the last echoes of the jeep’s motor had dopplered out in the night, though, was that Fiske had gone off with the Nobel 808. That meant Nighthawk had failed before it started: even if they got free, they no longer had the means to carry it out.
Big Wallace grunted, strained at his bonds. ‘Cocksuckers,’ he guttered. ‘If I ever get my hands on them fuckin’ rats, I’ll wring their scrawny necks, I’ll … Christ, these bleedin’ ropes are tight.’
Death or Glory III Page 11