Death or Glory I: The Last Commando: The Last Commando

by Michael Asher

  Rommel laughed again. ‘You can't give me orders, Field Marshal. The Panzer Army is under my command.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Kesselring grunted, ‘but the Luftwaffe is under mine, and from this moment I am withdrawing all air units to Sicily. By all means, carry out your “lightning thrust”, and see how far you get without air support. The RAF are very near to their bases, and believe me, they will not be holding back.’

  Kesselring stood up, sent his chair scuttering. Bastico followed. Rommel got to his feet more slowly, still shaking his head. Mellenthin, who had been standing quietly in the background, suddenly stepped forward. ‘Gentlemen, gentlemen,’ he said soothingly. ‘Please don't leave. There seems to be a misunderstanding here, but I'm sure we can sort it out.’

  ‘Oh?’ Kesselring said. ‘How?’

  ‘Please, Field Marshal, sit down.’

  Kesselring considered him for a moment. He knew Mellenthin came from a good Prussian family, and was aware of his reputation. He shrugged and let himself be cajoled. He sat down again, and the others followed suit.

  ‘Well?’ he said.

  Mellenthin had remained standing. ‘It seems to me gentlemen that the problem all hinges on one thing – that is, the state of the Eighth Army. While General Rommel says that Allied forces are on the run, you claim that they may still outgun us. What we need, I suggest, is sound intelligence – proof, as General Bastico said. If General Rommel can come up with proof that the situation is as he says it is, then surely you wouldn't prevent an advance that would bring almost certain victory in only ten days? It would be far more cost-effective than a full-scale offensive against Malta.’

  Kesselring shrugged. ‘Does such proof exist?’

  ‘It may do.’

  ‘May isn't good enough.’

  ‘This morning our troops picked up a British courier sent by Auchinleck to report directly to Churchill on the state of the Eighth Army. We don't know the content of that report yet, but we hope to in a couple of hours. Could I suggest, sir, that you make no decision until then?’

  There was a pause as Kesselring took a deep breath. ‘Very well, Major. I will give you twelve hours. If you produce no convincing proof that your position is correct in that time, then by God, my air squadrons are out of here.’

  They stood in silence until the two officers had left the building, then Rommel rounded on his IO. ‘You go too far, Major,’ he exploded. ‘How do you know the girl – what's she called… Runefish… will talk? Even if she does, how can you be certain that what she says will be of use to us?’

  ‘I can't, sir. It was all I could think of on the spur of the moment to stop them walking out. Call it a delaying action.’

  Rommel thought it over for a moment. ‘I'd prefer it if you would consult me next time you have any such brilliant ideas,’ he said. ‘As it stands, though, I don't see that we have much to lose. The OKH may be against me, but I'm certain that the Führer's heart is not in the Malta offensive – he lost too many men on Crete. I intend to send Berndt to talk to him in person. That may take time, though. For now, just make sure I have that Runefish report the moment it's available. Who's doing the interrogation?’

  ‘Rohde, sir. He's the top Abwehr man in North Africa.’

  Rommel stared at him. ‘Rohde – wasn't he one of those scum they deployed to torture women and butcher children illegally behind Russian lines? One of Heydrich's Einsatzgruppen?’

  Mellenthin nodded wryly. ‘He's not exactly the kind of man you'd want to invite to dinner, sir. He's the sort that enjoys hurting people who can't fight back – especially women and children. I remember seeing him once at the Führer's HQ – the Wehrmacht officers refused to shake hands with him.’

  Rommel made a clucking sound. ‘Yet here he is working for the Abwehr. I'm astonished that Canaris would give him the time of day, but perhaps I shouldn't be. Like attracts like, after all.’

  ‘Either that,’ Mellenthin nodded, ‘or Heydrich knows something nasty about Canaris and is blackmailing him to employ his Einsatzkommandos. Heydrich's lot are the dregs – a disgrace to the uniform – but, I'm sorry to say, if anyone's likely to make Runefish talk, it's him.’

  Rommel nodded sympathetically, torn between his revulsion against filth like Rohde, and his desperate need for the information. ‘Poor Runefish,’ he said at last. ‘She won't be fit for much by the time that animal's finished with her.’

  28

  Concealed high on the rocky hillside, Caine watched Sheikh Adud plodding up the wadi, leading a donkey on whose bony back his daughter, Layla, was mounted. It was a curiously biblical scene, and he was reminded of Christmas in the village where he'd grown up – carols at the village school, nativity plays at the church hall, parties at the vicarage. He felt a pang of nostalgia, knowing that since his mother had died, and his sister had moved away, he had no real reason ever to go back there. In any case, it had ceased to be home the day he'd left, aged sixteen, to join the Royal Engineers. The only home he'd known since then was the army.

  He wondered how the sheikh had managed to acquire a donkey in the ninety minutes he'd been in the town. He hoped to goodness he'd done nothing to attract attention. Allowing Adud and Layla to go into an Axis-held centre by themselves had been a leap of faith, and every moment they were away had been harrowing: he'd felt very relieved when he clocked them emerging from the town twenty minutes earlier. He'd tracked their progress carefully with his binoculars from that point, and was as sure as he could be that they hadn't been followed.

  The town was marked on Caine's map as Biska, and he guessed it had been an important Italian outpost before the war – the centre of one of Mussolini's model agricultural projects. Trailing the Brandenburg column from the wadi where they'd glimpsed Runefish that morning, they'd passed through valleys where the maquis scrub had been cleared, where white colonial homesteads stood on knolls over-looking acres of cultivated red soil. The agricultural experiment had failed. The fields were full of mouldering crops, punctuated by rusted iron ploughs and the bird-infested hulks of tractors. The white homesteads were derelict and deserted, doors hanging on hinges, roofs fallen in, windows smashed, fences broken. There were a few cows mooning in decaying paddocks, and here and there Caine heard the desperate squeaking of pigs. Once, he even fancied he'd glimpsed the face of a little Italian girl, pale and terrified, in the darkness behind a broken window. He knew he'd probably imagined the little girl – most of the families who'd worked these fields were living among Michele's people at the Citadello, and it seemed inconceivable that they'd left a child behind. Caine didn't blame them for dumping their crops and animals, but having grown up in a community like this one, where every day was a war against nature – in the case of his native Fens, against the ever-present threat of the sea breaking its banks – it gave him a feeling of melancholy. The Ities were colonists in a foreign land, maybe, but they'd made an attempt here to tame the wilderness, to spread civilization, to show the natives how it was done. You couldn't help but admire them for that.

  It had taken them two hours to shadow the Brandenburger convoy to Biska, sometimes moving along well-marked roads, sometimes heading cross-country. Sheikh Adud and Layla had acted as trackers, following the Panzer tracks and fresh tyre-marks. They'd travelled slowly and cautiously, always remaining well out of sight, far enough behind the enemy so that their dust cloud wouldn't be noticed or their motors heard. Wallace, acting lead-scout beside the two Senussi on the White, had kept his eyes peeled for possible ambushes, and the other spotters behind had scanned the skies continually for aircraft.

  Several large dry-washes converged in the hills behind Biska, and it hadn't been difficult to find a narrow branch-wadi ideal for leaguering the convoy. The town itself stood on the edge of an escarpment that swept down into the coastal plain, a grid of streets carved out of the rolling downs amid dense groves of acacias, stone pines and maquis, where a cantonment of flat-roofed, cream-cake colonial oblongs stood on one side of an impossibly wide main stre
et, and a maze of stone-built Arab huts on the other. Surveying the cantonment earlier through his binos, Caine had identified a hospital, a town hall with a block-shaped tower, satellite administration-buildings, a police barracks with wireless aerials sprouting from the roof, a school, and even a sewage plant. The other white buildings, he presumed, were villas once inhabited by Italian officials. The town wasn't exactly flourishing – apart from military patrols and the occasional Arab and his dog, the streets seemed totally deserted.

  As far as he could make out through the dense veil of trees, the Brandenburgers' vehicles were leaguered outside the police barracks, together with some wagons he guessed might belong to the colonial carabinieri – Italian paramilitary police. The Mark III Panzer wasn't amongst them, though. A few minutes earlier Caine had had the satisfaction of seeing her loaded on a transporter and ferried towards the road that corkscrewed down into the valley.

  Caine watched the sheikh and his daughter until they disappeared round the bend into the branch-wadi, then occupied his time in looking out for any possible enemy reactions, until ex-Marine George Padstowe scrambled up the scarp to relieve him. He left Padstowe with the binos and slithered down to the leaguer to hear the news. In the shade of camouflaged awnings and scrim nets, the boys were brewing tea, scoffing bully-beef stew or just sleeping off last night's hangover, dreaming of nubile Italian girls and a lost oasis of ease they would never find again.

  Maurice Pickney ducked under the White's awning and came over to check Caine's wounds. The graze on his left hand was almost healed, but the wound in his side was still giving him problems. Pickney examined it, declared that it wasn't infected and doled out another batch of sulphenamide pills. While the orderly was adjusting Caine's dressing, Wallace appeared with three pint-sized enamel mugs, handed one each to Caine, Copeland and Pickney. ‘Get that down yer,’ he rumbled. ‘Put hair on yer chest, that will.’ They took the mugs and Cope sniffed at the dirty brown liquid with a sour look on his face. ‘No point asking is there?’ he said. ‘Smells like a mixture of benzine and piss.’

  ‘Fresh piss, though,’ the big gunner winked. ‘I just pissed in it meself.’

  Caine and Pickney gagged; Wallace chortled. ‘It's the Long Range Desert Group special, innit. Two parts whisky, two parts rum, six parts lime juice, dash of curry powder, pepper, and Worcester sauce. It's a desert pick-me-up – gets the old circulation going and stops desert sores.’

  Caine took a gulp, and the mixture hit his throat like a whiplash. His eyes bulged. ‘This is damn' good,’ he gasped hoarsely. ‘Hits the spot.’

  ‘Got the recipe when I was with the LRDG,’ Wallace said, looking pleased. ‘It'll sort out last night's hangover all right.’

  Cope drank, his big Adam's apple working, and Wallace watched him expectantly. Copeland's face seemed to seize up in mid-gulp. ‘It's… it's… lukewarm,’ he said, trying to restrain a retch, not quite succeeding. ‘You could… have… a bath in that.’

  Wallace's pinhole eyes shot skyward, his broad, dark-stubbled face assuming an expression of mock solicitude. ‘So sorry, O great and wonderful pasha. Only it's about a thousand flipping degrees centigrade out there, and we just don't happen to have the icebox with us today.’

  He was interrupted by the arrival of Naiman, Adud and Layla, sweeping in under the scrim nets. Wallace pulled up petrol cases for them. Caine saw that Naiman had removed the dressing from his ear: the upper lobe was mangled and shapeless but was scarring properly. ‘I've just debriefed them, skipper,’ the interpreter said. ‘They've done a superb job of scouting.’

  ‘Did they find Runefish?’

  ‘Certainly did. She's in the town-hall building, held in a locked room opening off the reception.’

  ‘What, they actually saw her in there?’

  ‘No, not quite, but you know Adud has a bunch of relatives in the town? Well, by good luck it turns out that one of them works as a servant at the town hall, and he saw them bring Runefish in this morning. She's being guarded by the carabinieri. There are two in the guardroom outside her room, armed with rifles and pistols.’

  ‘All right,’ Caine said, smiling broadly at this key information. ‘What about the Jerries?’

  ‘They're on patrol outside. The sheikh doesn't know how many are on stag at once, but probably four divided into pairs, with another four on stand-by in the barracks. The two-man patrols circle the whole admin area in opposite directions, a patrol passing the town hall every five minutes or so. There's a doorman at the town hall – a carabinieri who sits on the porch outside. He's armed with a rifle. The door is unlocked while the sentry's there.’

  ‘How many Jerries and how many carabinieri?’

  ‘The Jerries are just the Brandenburg platoon you clocked at the wadi, but the carabinieri are in company strength – about a hundred maybe – the sheikh isn't good on exact numbers.’

  ‘All right. I know it's a long shot, but did they get any idea about what they intend to do with her? How long she's going to be held, for example. Are they going to shift her to another location?’

  Naiman looked smug. ‘One thing I asked about is whether she's been interrogated yet,’ he said. ‘The answer is a definite no. Adud's relative told him that this place is a sort of occasional base for the Brandenburgers, and they often bring people here for interrogation – spies, Senussi troublemakers, that kind of thing. He said he's seen some horrendous stuff. Apparently they're waiting for an officer to arrive from Benghazi this afternoon to interrogate Runefish. The bloke's name is Rohde, Major Heinrich Rohde.’

  ‘How the hell do they know that?’

  ‘He's a sort of regular here, apparently. Not Afrika Korps, they said. Intelligence – probably Abwehr. He is not a very nice fellow. Adud's relative said he's seen him cripple people with massive electric shocks, hang them up with meat-hooks through their necks – even pour burning petrol on their genitals…’

  ‘Jesus.’ Caine closed his eyes for a moment, wondering what agony his hesitation at the wadi had cost Runefish, hoping desperately they could get her out before it came to that.

  ‘Just so long as he doesn't use Wallace's “LRDG special”,’ Copeland cut in. ‘Imagine having that stuff poured on your bollocks.’

  Caine tittered, peered at the remaining liquid in his cup, set it on the ground. ‘Any description of this Rohde?’ he enquired.

  ‘A tall, balding fellow,’ Naiman said. ‘High forehead, clean shaven, crafty eyes like a fox – shifty. Long, thin fingers. The informant told them he's a real pussy-cat. He's never been known to show mercy or give anyone a break – even the local Jerries and Ities are scared of him. Apparently they call him the ‘Black Widow’.

  Caine nodded. ‘All right, what time is this “Black Widow” expected?’

  ‘They weren't sure – late afternoon, maybe four. He always comes by aircraft – usually a Storch – and lands on the airstrip about five miles outside the town.’

  Caine glanced at his watch: it was 1230 hours. ‘That means we've got three and a half hours to break her out.’ He turned to the Senussi and shook hands with them both gratefully. The gamble he'd taken in sending them in alone had paid off. In fact, he was astonished at the detailed intelligence they'd gathered. It was all he could have asked for and more. ‘You've done a wonderful job,’ he told them. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Is nothing,’ Adud croaked. ‘The thanks is to God.’

  Caine paused. ‘By the way, where did you get the donkey?’

  Adud eyed him uncomprehendingly. Layla took a breath as if about to say something, but then stopped herself. ‘Adud nicked it,’ Naiman chuckled.

  When the laughter had died down, Caine stood up, suddenly businesslike. ‘Moshe, call the boys for an immediate O group. We've got to decide how to go about this.’

  He briefed the lads on Adud's information, then threw the field open to ‘commando initiative’. Wallace wanted an all-out frontal assault like the one they'd done at Umm 'Aijil, but Caine vetoed it. They were facing la
rger enemy forces this time, and they were down to only a handful of men. ‘They've got wireless contact,’ he said. ‘They'll call up a flight of Stukas from one of the local bases before you can say Benito Mussolini. No, Fred, it's got to be done by bluff and stealth.’

  ‘Yes, and bluff really worked last time, didn't it?’ Todd Sweeney said, snorting. ‘Ended in a ding-dong scrap and we didn't even get the right person. I can't understand why you didn't bump Runefish off back there in that wadi and be done with it, skipper. Then we wouldn't be here, risking our lives. We'd be on our way back to the Wire by now. Squeamish, was it?’

  ‘Yes it was,’ Caine rejoindered sharply, ‘as squeamish as you were when you proposed putting Cavazzi out of his misery but didn't have the guts to do it yourself.’

  Sweeney's mouth clamped tight, and Caine shot him a hard look. Two could play at that game, all right. Yet, as usual, Sweeney had hit the bulls-eye. Caine could have blamed the arrival of the Storch aircraft for his botching the hit, but the truth was that his hesitation had done it. Although Copeland would never come out openly in support of Sweeney, Caine could tell from his dour face that he hadn't forgiven him. ‘We muffed our orders, skipper,’ Cope had told him earlier. ‘One shot and we'd be on our way back now, mission accomplished. Why did you bottle out?’

  ‘It wasn't right, somehow,’ Caine had struggled to explain. ‘There's something fishy about this whole story. Why did Runefish start transmitting so suddenly, and keep it up for more than three hours? She must have known that the enemy would triangulate her position.’

  Caine himself wasn't sure whether he was sincere, or just trying to cover up what Sweeney was now rightly calling his squeamishness over taking out the girl. After all, his questions were easily explained: Runefish probably hadn't had any idea that the commandos were in the vicinity when she'd started transmitting: she'd just panicked. People didn't always behave rationally under pressure, and women weren't the most rational of creatures at the best of times. ‘There's so much that's iffy about this jaunt, skipper,’ Copeland had commented. ‘I mean, I never liked the odds of us finding her, anyway. It wasn't even an outside favourite. It's as if they just sent us out as a kind of decoy… as if our presence here was enough.’