Quinnell leaned back on his haunches, tried to stop himself blowing up. Since they’d jumped Caine and the others, Fiske had given more orders than the GOC, in that dry-as-leather officer’s drawl that made Quinnell’s flesh creep. He’d had doubts about this job all along, and now, only a few hours on, he regretted what they’d done to Caine and his crew. All right, he was an Irishman and had no loyalty to the king and all those other bloodsuckers, but this wasn’t about the king. This was about your comrades, your mates. The king didn’t come into it: you didn’t let your mates down. And if the truth be known, Fiske was more of a snob than Caine was, anyway.
Quinnell wiped sweat off his forehead. He was just about to rise when there was a yell from the shadows. ‘Hey, look at this.’
Fiske took a shufti in the direction of Jizzard’s voice: Quinnell stood, jerked his .303 from the brace, followed Fiske into the night.
They found Jizzard staring at a small graveyard of military vehicles and equipment – piles of artillery shells, a brace of jeeps with missing wheels, a punctured water-bowzer, two broken and rusted 3-tonners and what looked like a perfectly intact armoured Bren-gun carrier with a field-gun yoked behind.
As they came up, Jizzard blinked at them in the starlight. ‘Take a wee look at this,’ he gasped. ‘Most of this stuff’s diss, but the Bren-carrier looks all reet, and that gun’s sound as a bell.’
‘So what?’ Fiske sneered. ‘More junk.’
Quinnell ignored him and examined the field piece: it was a long-barrelled six-pounder anti-tank gun on a carriage, with small wheels and an armoured shield. He stepped on the yoked arms and scrambled into the back of the carrier: there were six-pounder shells stowed there, and a couple of jerrycans strapped to the hull: he opened one and found it full of petrol. The interior was covered in dust, but, as far as he could make out, the engine seemed undamaged. He found a field-telephone set, with a long cable, neatly coiled in the rear: there was even an ammunition box packed with No. 36 Mills grenades.
He peered over the side at the others. ‘She’s sound enough, so she is. Didn’t you use to drive one of these things, Mitch?’
The Scotsman poked at his stubbled jaw. ‘Used to be in a carrier platoon. Wee bit rusty, mebbe, but, aye, I’ve driven one. Ye nudge the steerin’ and the drive wheel warps the track, slews her left or right. Wee bit more and the track locks, and she swings around.’
‘Hey, what’s this nonsense?’ Fiske growled. ‘Get out of there, Quinnell. These things only do thirty miles an hour – we’ve got the jeep.’
Quinnell clambered down silently. A working carrier, with a six-pounder gun, plenty of ammunition and a field telephone: they would be a boon to anyone trying to hold the El-Fayya bridge – it would make all the difference. He thought of Caine’s crew, wondered if they were still trussed up, or whether they’d managed to get free. Of one thing he was certain, Caine wasn’t the kind of man who’d abandon his task willingly. The kind of man, he, Quinnell, ought to be: the kind he could yet be, if he returned with this artillery-piece. Even at thirty miles an hour they could make the gorge by first light. It wouldn’t remove the stain of betrayal, of course, but it would rid him of that terrible burden of guilt. Quinnell knew suddenly and without a shadow of a doubt that he had to go back. Fate had given him a second chance: the means to restore his honour. But he was going to need Jizzard’s help.
He stole a measured glance at Fiske: the thin man had left his rifle in the jeep: he was wearing a Colt .45 in an unbuttoned holster. Quinnell took in the shielded dark eyes, the twitching slender fingers. ‘Ye can keep the jeep, Fiske,’ he said. ‘I’m takin’ the gun back to Caine.’
Fiske let out an astonished guffaw. ‘You’re insane. The Jerries will have you for breakfast.’
‘Mebbe, mebbe not. But the most insane thing I ever did was listen to you.’
‘You think Caine is going to welcome you back with open arms? He’ll never forgive us for what we did.’
‘That he won’t. But maybe I’ll be able to forgive myself.’
Fiske bit his lip: his fingers played for a moment on his pistol-butt: Quinnell was ready for him. His rifle was in his hands and there was a sproocckkk of working parts as he rammed a bullet into the breech. ‘Try it and I’ll kill ye. I mean it, Fiske. I’m havin’ no more of your shit. It’s done. I’m going back.’
Fiske raised his bony hands contemptuously. ‘This is sheer craziness.’ He glanced sideways at Jizzard, who was frozen to the spot: he stared wide-eyed at them both. The Bren was still slung on his back.
‘Come on, Mitch,’ Fiske said. ‘You’re not going to put up with this lunatic, are you?’
Jizzard scratched his stubble, shuftied Quinnell. ‘Why don’t we just take the carrier? Leave this turd and his bloody black box to rot, and hoof it?’
‘And get picked up by the Kiwis and shot as deserters? Die of thirst in the desert? Not me, mate. We owe Caine and the lads, and I’m goin’ to pay my debt. Now’s your chance to do the same. I know ye’ve got it in ye, Mitch: under the blarney there’s a brave man waiting to come out.’
Jizzard drew his palm across chapped lips. ‘We could die there,’ he stammered.
‘Aye, we could. But one thing’s for sure: no one will forget what we did.’
‘Don’t listen to him, Jizzard,’ Fiske interrupted him. ‘Be smart. You weren’t cut out to play the hero.’
Jizzard raised his chin. ‘Who sez?’
‘I know you. You’ve spent your whole life squirming out of situations like this. Why change old habits now?’
‘Squirmin’ …?’ For a second Jizzard was so tongue-tied he couldn’t speak. He felt a flush of almost feverish rage: deep down he’d always known that he was a stoolie, a bully, a coward. He’d pushed people about because he’d been scared. He was scared now: shit-scared of that black box, of what would happen to him when they got it back – if they got it back. I know ye’ve got it in ye, Quinnell had said. He didn’t know if the Irishman had meant it. He’d spent his whole life ratting on others, even on Taylor and the deserter gang. I know ye’ve got it in ye. Even if it killed him, he suddenly and desperately wanted that to be true.
He spat on the ground, sent Fiske a look of disgust, stepped towards the carrier, climbed over into the front compartment. He laid the Bren against the mount behind the extended hull-turret, brushed dust off the vertical steering wheel. He jabbed the starter: the engine wheezed, spluttered. He jabbed again: the engine roared and died. He frowned, hit it a third time: there was a guttural roar from the rear section: the motor grumbled, the air was suddenly full of fumes. He let out a yell of triumph. ‘We’re in business.’
He lifted his head over the side in time to see Fiske and Quinnell grappling furiously: Fiske had grabbed the stock of Quinnell’s .303 and was trying to pry it from him. Quinnell was powerful, but Fiske’s limbs were steel cables: finally, the thin man rammed the Irishman against the side of the carrier, let go of the rifle, turned and hared off into the night. Jizzard drew his pistol, aimed after the mechanically loping figure. ‘Sure, let him go,’ Quinnell grunted. ‘We’ll see no more of him.’
26
A clawhammer was doing a job on his insides: Caine opened his eyes, found Quinnell staring at him. The pain was brimstone: he closed his eyes, opened them again.
‘Thought we’d lost ye there, sir, so I did.’ Quinnell’s voice seemed to echo around the walls.
Caine was lying on a stretcher in one of the blockhouse rooms: a makeshift aid post. He recalled snatches of the journey back: Jizzard’s face over the side of the Bren-gun carrier; Quinnell pressing a shell dressing into his side: smells of cordite, dirt, burning gasoline.
‘What the hell …?’ he wheezed. His words were barely audible even to himself.
‘Don’t try to talk, sir. You may be in shock. Just wiggle your hands and feet a wee bit, will ye?’
‘Shock? Bloody right I am. Last I heard, you deserted.’
‘Just wiggle your hands and feet, now
, sir.’
Caine felt himself doing it, sensed tension in his extremities.
‘That’s all right. No spinal injuries there. Hard to tell with gunshot wounds. By the look of it, the round hit soft tissue between the ribcage and pelvis. In and out, no bother.’
Caine groaned: Quinnell loomed over him with a morphia syrette. He tried to pull away: his responses were sluggish. He hardly felt the jab.
‘Should be OK, now,’ Quinnell said. ‘I didn’t want to give ye morphia till ye came round. Ye feel a wee bit cold?’
Caine clutched the Irishman’s wrist: his fingers closed around it with a pressure that surprised him. ‘What are you doing here, Quinnell? You and those other turds left us in the lurch …’
Quinnell didn’t try to pull away. ‘Aye, so we did, sir, but we had a change of heart. Just lie back. The morphia’ll start working in a minute.’
Caine didn’t ease his grip: he suddenly realized how vulnerable he was. Quinnell might have given him a fatal dose. Then it hit him that the deserters – the mutineers – Jizzard and Quinnell, had just pulled him off the field under enemy fire. His head spun. What the Dickens is going on here?
Quinnell extricated his wrist, laid the syrette in a mess tin, wiped his hands on a rag. ‘If ye’ll just lay back and let the potion do its job, sir, I’ll tell ye the good news.’
‘Wallace and Grimshaw …?’
‘Och, they’re all right. The big fellah’s already up and about. Sure it’d take an elephant to squash him. The other fella, now – Grimshaw, is it? He’s over there.’
He gestured: Caine turned his head, saw Grimshaw laid face down on another stretcher. He seemed to be asleep.
‘Copped a bad one in the backside, but he’ll pull through.’
Caine swallowed, tasted blood. He tried to shake off the heaviness, to sort out the confusion.
‘Fiske?’ he murmured.
Quinnell chuckled. ‘Not him, sir. That wanker’s off up the Blue with the wondrous black box. Good luck to him. Never did like Fiske, nor that box, whatever it might be. Now, Jerry’s poised for another go, and you’ll need all the help ye can get.’
Caine couldn’t remember clearly what had happened after the jeep had turned over, wasn’t certain how much of it he’d dreamed. Did I really make a suicide pact with Wallace? No, that’s insane. I must have imagined it. I thought I saw Maurice Pickney on the battlefield. That’s not possible either. There was a salvo of rockets from the bazooka. The Jerry attack lost momentum.
‘Yer man Cutler played a blinder, so he did,’ Quinnell said. ‘Blasted the AFVs on the bridge with the bazooka, detonated a minefield, blocked the approach. The footsloggers melted away – what was left of them, poor sods.’
Caine tried to get up, felt his arms tremble. ‘They’ll soon have them shifted. You said they’re ready for another go.’
‘Aye, they are, sir, but ye see, we evened the odds a bit. We brought back a present from our wee jaunt.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘We came across a vehicle dump – all British stuff. Hun must’ve captured it and left it there to collect later. Some was diss, but there was a working Bren-gun carrier, and …’ His face lit up with triumph, ‘a six-pounder field-gun.’
For a second Caine didn’t believe it. He tried to stammer something, but Quinnell steamed on.
‘That was when we decided to come back. Couldn’t let that stuff go to waste, not when it would give you a chance. So we towed the thing back, shells an’ all. ’Course, Fiske wasn’t happy about it, but there was two of us and we had the jump on him. He was all taken up with that black box. We let him go, turned round. Mebbe it was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done, but here we are.’
Caine watched him incredulously. ‘And Jizzard agreed to this?’
Quinnell smirked. ‘In a manner of speaking, sir. Sure, he had a crisis of doubt halfway back. In the end, though, he gritted his teeth and went through with it. Even drove the Bren-gun carrier into the eye of the Hun attack to pull you out. I always had Jizzard down as a jibber if ever there was one. It’s queer the way a feller will turn when the chips are down.’
Caine grunted: the pain in his side was already beginning to taper off. He closed his eyes, felt himself drifting to sleep: he snapped them open. ‘Give me some Bennies. Preferably a lot.’
‘Ye don’t want to be taking Bennies on top of morphia. Ye’ll end up in cloud-cuckooland.’
‘Better that than lying here. The next attack’s going to need every one of us, six-pounder or –’
He was cut off by the pop of a mortar from the yard outside.
27
Harry Copeland was lobbing mortar-bombs, keeping the elevation low. He watched them raunch in slow parabolas, saw them rupture around the gunpit in fingerpokes of smoke. The Hun might think this is the prelude to a counterattack. They don’t know we have the six-pounder yet. Let’s keep it that way. Cutler, Wallace and Jizzard would soon be at the pit towing the gun behind the carrier. If all went well, they’d haul it into place under the cover of smoke: a nice surprise for Fritz when he advanced.
Copeland had been astonished to see Quinnell and Jizzard back at the blockhouse that morning: he’d been too engrossed in the firefight to do anything but call them a couple of insubordinate fuckers. He hadn’t mentioned anything about punishments or courts-martial – the fact that they’d brought the Bren-carrier, the field-gun and the field telephone convinced him that they must really have had a change of heart. If they wanted to help, he’d told them, they could unhitch the gun, dump the phone set, get the carrier round to the base of the spur and liberate Caine and the others. Quinnell had leapt at the chance. Jizzard had turned white: he’d needed some serious encouragement.
Copeland watched the smoke puffs spread like tentacles across the gap between the escarpments. He stopped hurling bombs. There was a yip of smallarms fire from the direction of the bridge. Jerry knows something’s going on, but he doesn’t know what.
The door behind him creaked: Cope turned to see Tom Caine swaying towards him, still clad in his bloodsoaked smock: he was carrying his Tommy-gun in one hand and his webbing in another. He knelt unsteadily next to Cope, ashfaced, his eyes redthreaded, glassy with amphetamine glow.
‘How you doing, Tom? You shouldn’t be wandering about.’
‘Not the first time I’ve been wounded, mate.’ Caine’s words came out slightly slurred. He laid his weapon on the ground, slung the big web pouches across his shoulders. ‘Hurt like hell at first, but can’t feel it now. Quinnell fixed me up. Can you believe those blighters, walking back into the firing line cool as cucumbers after trussing us up?’
‘I know: they came bearing gifts, too …’ Cope nodded at the field telephone still in its haversack: Trubman had rigged it up with batteries: Wallace and Jizzard were playing out the cable that would connect it with the gunpit.
Caine raised his eyebrows: Quinnell had told him about the field-gun, but hadn’t mentioned the phone. He followed the cable with his eyes, saw that it fell over the precipice, snaking down into the lake of smoke that lapped against the buttress wall across the gap. ‘What’s going on down there?’
Copeland looked smug. ‘Wallace and Jizzard are shifting the six-pounder into the gunpit …’
‘Wallace and Jizzard?’
‘Apart from Fred, Jizzard’s the only gunner we’ve got. I told Fred to keep his mouth shut and settle any scores later. Cutler went with them to help set up the field telephone and bring the carrier back. When it’s all shipshape, we’ll be able to direct our artillery from up here.’
Caine snorted; artillery sounded grandiose for a single six-pounder. He had to admit it, though: the gun gave them a fighting chance.
He scanned the battlefield, realized he hadn’t seen it from up here in daylight: it was high noon, the sky loaded with seafroth in helixes and crescents, punctured by lightspots like peacock-tail eyes. The plain was stark, bisected by the hard dirt track – a barren reach of gr
avel and rubblescree, catclaw thorns, peppergrass clumps. Caine took in the windlines of fieldgrey corpses, the overturned jeep below, the pyres of black smoke from the Jerry AFVs – one was just a couple of hundred yards off, two or three more on the bridge. It was true then – Cutler had blocked the bridge with his skilful use of the bazooka. He deserved a medal for that.
Caine groped in a pouch, found his field-glasses, surveyed the edge of the gorge: Kraut soldiers were dodging between cover there, but they hadn’t removed the obstacle yet: every time they showed signs of concentration, Trubman kept their heads down with a machine-gun blast from the roof. Copeland had the bazooka near at hand, ready to whack any AFV that threatened to bulldoze the smoking wrecks out of the way.
‘What do you reckon they’ll do?’ Caine asked.
Copeland shrugged. ‘Their best bet would be to wait till sunset, but I don’t reckon they have the time – not if they want to catch Freyberg from the rear. I think we’ll see a rolling infantry assault, maybe in company strength, supported by armoured cars.’
Caine rubbed his chin. ‘You reckon we can hold them?’
Copeland’s Adam’s apple bobbed. ‘Ammunition’s low, Tom. We’ve got enough for one more attack, but after that we’ve had it.’
‘If only we knew what’s going on with Freyberg. Once the Kiwis are through Tebaga, we can withdraw. Taff get comms yet?’
Copeland shook his head. ‘He’s been trying his best, but no luck so far.’
There was a sudden burst of fire from Trubman on the roof: chunka chunka chunka chunk.
Caine looked up. ‘Hey, Taff, go easy on the ammo, mate.’
‘I tell you, skipper,’ the Welshman’s voice descended, ‘Fritz is getting ready to attack.’ He’d hardly finished the sentence when Caine heard the tubercular chirrup of mortar-bombs a fraction of a second before they struck the plain with a low descant of barooooommms. The ground wobbled, smoke mushroomed, shrapnel shards went teeeeeeeeee. Copeland and Caine covered their heads: Caine was the first to look up: he saw ragged smokepads blossom across the battlefield, saw them coalesce into waves and vortices edged with violet and brown crud.
Death or Glory III Page 17