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

by Michael Asher

  ‘I don't follow you, Harry. A decoy for what?’

  ‘I dunno – to take the heat off someone else maybe. It's just a thought. Anyway, we may as well accept that we missed the boat. The Jerries are going to get whatever it is she knows out of her, so why don't we saddle up and head homewards?’

  Caine shook his head. ‘I'm going after her, Harry, even if I have to do it alone.’

  ‘I hope you're not expecting gratitude,’ Cope said. ‘I know those officer-class bints – they wouldn't spit on you if you were on fire.’

  Now, Copeland sat among the lads, brooding over the problem of snatching Runefish from under Axis noses. ‘You got any ideas?’ Caine asked him.

  ‘All right,’ Cope said at last. ‘If we're doing this by stealth, in daylight, skipper, we're going to need disguise. Last time, I assumed we could get away with being taken for Jerries or Ities in khaki rig, but it didn't work. The only other alternative is to go in dressed as Arabs – two men togged up in Adud's Sunday best, carrying spare clothes for Runefish. We could even take the donkey Adud nicked for extra authenticity, and hope you don't run into the real owner.

  ‘We approach the town hall, wait till the patrol's gone by, then gain entry either by bluster or taking out the doorman. Once we're inside, it's a piece of cake. We knock out the guards, dress Runefish up in Arab gear, wait till the next patrol's passed, and bunk it. The only real problem is that we're going to need some way of knocking off those guards silently. If any shooting starts, we've had it.’

  ‘Now you're talking,’ Wallace boomed, rubbing his hands. ‘It's a good job for my dear old fanny.’

  ‘No way,’ Swan said. ‘Cutting the throats of two or three Itie policemen at the same time, without one of them letting out so much as a screech, is too dicey. We need something that's going to shut them up instantly.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Cope chortled, ‘no one's going to take you for an Arab, you great turnip. Have you ever seen a six-foot-seven Senussi?’

  ‘What about drugs?’ suggested Wingnut Turner. ‘If we could get Adud's relative to slip something in the guards' food…?’

  ‘Nah, too unpredictable,’ Maurice Pickney said. ‘One might go down before the others, for instance, and give them time to sound the alarm. We wouldn't be able to time the effect exactly enough to make sure we were there at the right moment.’ He thought for a second, then his wrinkled, nanny-like face lit up. ‘What about chloroform? I've got some bottles of it in my kit. If we could smash them under the guards' noses it would put them out like a light.’

  Caine looked interested. ‘Good one, Maurice,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘but I'm wondering how we can stop our own boys from being knocked out too. We don't have respirators.’

  ‘A wet towel round the mouth and nose might do it,’ Pickney said. ‘But then there's Runefish – you're right, the stuff would probably put her to sleep before she knew what was happening.’

  ‘Wish we had a couple of Welrods,’ Wallace grunted.

  ‘A couple of what?’ said Caine.

  ‘Welrods. It's a weapon developed by the Special Ops boys – only fires one round but it's completely silent. You just hear a click.’

  ‘I'm afraid our armoury doesn't run to that little item.’

  ‘It's the right idea, though,’ Turner said, his windsock ears flapping. ‘A weapon with predictable results that we could use even if things don't go as expected.’

  ‘Abu na'is,’ a female voice said suddenly.

  The men wheeled round to see that Adud's daughter had spoken for the first time. ‘Abu na'is,’ she repeated, ‘is a drug we get from leaves. We shoot it from bow and arrow. It make sleep but not kill.’

  Caine stared at Layla in astonishment. Not only had she just spoken comprehensible English, she'd evidently followed the gist of the entire conversation. ‘You speak English?’ he asked incredulously. ‘You mean after all this time with us, you speak English? Why didn't you say so before?’

  The girl blushed deeply, and her eyelids fluttered. Adud was looking at his daughter with an expression half-way between anger and admiration.

  ‘My father…’ she stammered. ‘You are all… men…’

  ‘Oh I get it,’ Wallace said, nodding his thorn-bush head. ‘The old boy didn't want us chatting you up, is that it?’

  She blushed again and eyed her father beseechingly, said something apologetic in Arabic. After a moment, the sheikh nodded and his face relaxed.

  Layla smiled peachily. ‘I study English in Italian missionary school when I am small. It is many years. I am forget much, but some I am remember. You excuse me for not talking… I…’

  ‘Of course we excuse you,’ Caine said. ‘Now, come on, what is this stuff you mentioned?’

  ‘Abu na'is. It come from leaf – a leaf you find here, in wadi. We make medicine. We put medicine on arrow, we shoot. It is not kill, but make sleep like that…’ She snapped her small fingers and let out a chuckle so fresh that some of the men melted visibly.

  Adud chimed in with a torrent of Arabic, looking at Naiman. ‘The sheikh says that poison is women's work,’ he translated. ‘So he can't help us make it, but he could make bows and arrows for us. He says that this abu na'is works a treat – the victim goes out instantly and stays out for hours.’

  There was a pause while Caine weighed it up. ‘It is the kind of thing we're looking for,’ he said, ‘but if it doesn't work…’

  ‘It work,’ Layla cried, clapping her hands in excitement. ‘Senussi use it for… long, long time…’

  Caine smiled at her enthusiasm. ‘Let's do it, then. Moshe, ask Adud to make two bows and a bunch of arrows. Layla, you go with Moshe here and collect as many of the leaves as you need…’

  ‘Just one thing, boss,’ Copeland said. ‘You haven't said anything about roles.’

  ‘You're right, Harry. Listen in, ladies. As Cope said, this is a two-man job. The assault party's going to be me and one other…’

  There was a chorus of boos from the men, so loud that Caine had to remind them that they were meant to be tactical. ‘That's not on, skipper,’ Wallace moaned. ‘You're wounded. Let someone else do it.’

  Caine's expression hardened. ‘There's a big risk of capture on this one, Fred, and we won't be in uniform. That means we'll be regarded as spies, and you all know what the Boche do to spies. This Black Widow bastard will think Christmas has come early. I'm patrol commander and this is my responsibility. I'd rather not let anyone else in for it, but I can't do it entirely alone.’

  ‘I'll do it, skipper,’ Naiman said, his voice like a knife. ‘You're going to need someone who speaks Arabic and Italian. I'm the only one qualified.’

  The proposal was met by a chorus of objections, and Caine realized that every man in the squad wanted to volunteer. ‘We ought to draw straws,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ Naiman cut in. ‘Like I said, it's got to be me. No one else is qualified.’

  ‘He's right, skipper,’ said Cope, shaking his head. ‘I'd give anything to do it myself, but if you don't have a linguist along, you may as well think of another plan, because it's not going to work.’

  Caine blinked guiltily at Naiman. ‘Are you sure about this, Moshe?’ he asked. ‘As I said, the chances of being captured are high. You've got more to lose than any other man here.’

  ‘That's not true,’ Naiman objected. ‘You already said that the Boche don't like spies. Going into action without uniform means you're no longer covered by the Geneva Convention, so I don't have any more to lose than anyone else.’

  Copeland nodded. ‘He's got you there, skipper.’

  ‘All right, then,’ Caine said slowly. ‘I wish I could say you won't regret this.’ He looked at Layla. ‘Now, madam,’ he said. ‘It's all down to your hubble-bubble’.

  29

  Captain Karl Haller, the stringy Brandenburger platoon officer credited with the capture of Runefish, drove out to the airstrip personally to meet Major Heinrich Rohde's aircraft. He found the officer waiting for him on
the runway, dressed in immaculate bush-jacket, button-down holster, high jack-boots, dress jodhpurs and a service cap bearing the insignia of the Abwehr. Rohde was about the same height as Haller himself, but with a more robust physique. His figure fell short of the ideal only in that his hips were a tad too wide, lending him an oddly incongruous hint of the feminine. He was so cleanshaven that his face seemed as smooth as a baby's, though the hair under his peaked service cap was cornfield-gold and slightly receding. His eyes had something inert about them, Haller thought – if an adding-machine were to sprout eyes, then Rohde's were the kind of eyes it would have had.

  Haller was about to jump back behind the staff car's wheel when Rohde said, ‘Thank you, Captain, but I make a habit of always being in the driving seat.’ It wasn't the sentiment but the voice that surprised Haller – it was curiously high-pitched and nasal – almost a squeak – and the speech was telegraphic, like a series of gasps. Far from being comical, the effect of the squeaky voice and the nervous speech, combined with the quasi-feminine hips and the adding-machine eyes, was sinister. It was Rohde's hands, though, that were his most disquieting feature. The fingers were abnormally long and thin, and made Haller think of a spider's legs. He wondered if this was why he'd heard some of the men refer to Rohde as the ‘Black Widow’. Haller had encountered only a few men in his life whom he instinctively feared: Rohde was one of them.

  They were driving along the track from the airfield, hugging the edge of the escarpment, and Haller could see the coastal plain spread below him like a hand-woven Persian kilim, stretching as far as the turquoise haze of the sea.

  ‘I understand you had some trouble overpowering the prisoner,’ Rohde said, glancing at Haller out of the corner of his eye. The captain couldn't decide whether or not he was being derided.

  ‘She got off a shot at me from a .45 Colt, if that's what you mean, sir,’ Haller said. ‘Missed though. Slug hit the wall, fragmented, and the bits whizzed round inside: it was amazing no one was hit. Anyway, I soon took the weapon off her.’

  ‘Curious that she should miss a shot at almost point-blank range,’ Rohde said.

  ‘She didn't seem to know what she was doing. I felt she was just carrying the weapon as a decoration, never expecting to use it.’

  ‘Really?’ Rohde's tone was definitely sarcastic now. ‘You think they'd issue a .45-calibre weapon to an untrained woman?’ He chuckled. ‘It would have been embarrassing for a Brandenburger captain to have been shot by a dame, eh? Funny, though: she'd evidently been trained well enough to operate a wireless – not an accomplishment every staff courier is capable of. You also reported that she made an attempt to escape?’

  ‘That was a farce – only a fool would have tried it with a whacking great tank standing there. She was lucky she didn't get snuffed.’

  ‘Ah yes – the Special Duties troops who needed a Mark III Panzer to arrest a slip of a girl.’

  Haller looked daggers at him. If it had been anyone else, he'd have challenged him there and then, and to hell with his superior rank. He could sense, though, that Rohde wasn't a gentleman. This was the type of fellow who'd shoot a comrade in the back without a qualm, then swear it was an accident.

  ‘The tank was there because of the threat of attack,’ Haller said, keeping his voice even. ‘I don't know if they told you, sir, but two of our platoons have been wiped out by enemy raiding groups in the past two days. One of our units was carrying out reprisals in a Senussi village. The other had left the same village earlier, taking with them a girl whose description was similar to that of Runefish, but who obviously wasn't her. It might be coincidence, but it sounds as if this raiding party could have been looking for Runefish. That's why I requested the Panzer – to cover us when we went in.’

  ‘Why haven't these raiders been located?’

  ‘The Green Mountain is a big place, sir. There's plenty of cover. Anyway, everyone's so taken up with the victory at Tobruk.’

  Rohde let out a sceptical grunt. ‘Since when did the Allies send a search-and-rescue mission to snatch a downed officer? If they were sent after her, it suggests that Runefish knows something special. If so, I intend to find out what it is.’ He swerved suddenly to avoid an Arab family with a donkey-cart, and the car lurched to within a foot of the edge. He let out a string of curses. ‘Filth,’ he spat. ‘Subhuman trash.’ Haller gripped the seat tightly and gritted his teeth as the car skidded and veered back on to the track. ‘I should have just pulped the rats under my wheels,’ Rohde squawked. ‘It's human manure like those wogs that we're fighting this war to eliminate, Haller. Make no mistake about it, history is shaped by racial struggle – it is the purity of race that decides the fate of nations. We Germans are the pure-blooded descendants of the Aryans, and it is our destiny to dominate and rule the others, as lords of the earth. The sub-humans will be eliminated – the Führer is very clear about this. The dirty Jew traitors first, of course, then the Poles, the Russians, the Slavs. Between you and me, I don't rate the Italians as a master-race. They're useful to us now, maybe, but afterwards… You can't understand the British, can you? They could have been almost our equals, but they've thrown their lot in with the Jews and sub-humans. Tainted blood, I suppose.’

  ‘What about the Americans?’

  ‘Huh,’ Rohde scoffed. ‘A bunch of dirty mongrels.’

  Haller would have laughed, but Rohde spoke with such hushed conviction that it sounded as if he were reciting a religious text. The captain sensed that to have made fun of it would be tantamount to blasphemy in Rohde's eyes.

  ‘Wouldn't that be rather a big programme, sir?’ he enquired, trying to keep his face straight. ‘I mean, eliminating all those millions.’

  ‘Nonsense. It's only a matter of ruthless efficiency – of designing the perfect killing machine. When I was with Heydrich on the Polish cleansing operation, we managed to rub out no less than 97 per cent of the Polish ruling class.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes.’ The high-pitched voice sounded excited. ‘In Russia with the Einsatzgruppen, we eliminated virtually every single Jew in the operational area: men, women and children – the lot…’ He stopped abruptly, as if he sensed he'd gone too far. ‘Of course, it was entirely necessary. The Russian Jew is the root source of Bolshevism. They had to be utterly degraded and liquidated, you understand.’

  ‘Of course, sir,’ Haller nodded. He was relieved to see that they were now entering the town. Rohde was obliged to slow down as the track threaded through the wood-and-stone huts of the Arab quarter. He drove in silence for a moment, then said, ‘Can you describe the scene in the cave when you entered?’

  Haller tried to recall the details. It had happened only that morning, but it already seemed an age ago. ‘Yes… let's see… there was a wood fire with the remains of some papers and an attaché case on it. The papers had been more or less destroyed, but I did notice something odd. She needn't have lit the fire at all, because the briefcase had its own ingenious little self-destruct mechanism.’

  Rohde looked intrigued. ‘Maybe it failed,’ he suggested.

  ‘Maybe, but my impression was that she didn't really know how it worked. Anyway, one of my boys pulled the docs out of the fire, but there was hardly anything left except a title page with a single line in code. I sent that with my report.’

  ‘Yes, it has been decrypted. Continue.’

  ‘There was a sack spread on the floor with a wireless set on it – what the Tommies call a ‘biscuit-tin’ transmitter. The whole thing, with the power pack, weighed only about six kilos. We found a wire antenna camouflaged outside the cave. I assumed this was the set she'd been transmitting from, sending out her SOS signal.’

  ‘Ah, the transmission. I spoke with Captain Seeholm, whose 621st Wireless Intercept Company triangulated the signal. It seems that the girl was transmitting non-stop for more than three hours. It takes a good direction-finding unit twenty minutes to dee-eff a signal. Surely she must have known that? You don't find it odd that she should
expose herself in that way?’

  Haller shrugged. ‘Runefish doesn't strike me as being very bright, sir,’ he said. ‘One of those upper-class English types who look on everyone else as servants and who muddle through life by having the right connections. I got the impression she's out of her depth.’

  Rohde considered this in silence, and Haller saw the town hall looming up in front of them. ‘Will you see the prisoner now, sir,’ he asked.

  ‘Give me a few moments to organize myself.’

  ‘Then we'd better head for the police barracks.’

  Rohde nodded and turned the wheel sharply. Two Arabs who'd been leading a donkey across the street leapt out of the way, shouting in terror. The staff car clipped the donkey's back leg, shattering it instantly. The animal pitched over in the dust and lay there quivering. ‘Watch where you're going, morons,’ Rohde yelled as the car completed her turn and shot towards the police barracks. As she sped away, Haller looked back at the two Senussi, who were now crouching over the injured animal. He noticed with interest that both men were carrying homemade bows and sheaves of arrows. Interesting: you didn't see those old traditional weapons around much any more, he thought.

  ‘Was that him?’ Naiman whispered to Caine, as the car swept away.

  Caine nodded. ‘Major's rank, Abwehr insignia, nasty-looking customer with blank eyes. Who else could it be?’

  ‘We haven't got much time then.’

  Caine was wondering what to do about the donkey, and a thought struck him. The town hall was only about a hundred yards distant – a white building of intersecting angles, looking as if it had been made from a giant's set of toy building blocks. Dominated by a flat-roofed tower with tiny windows, it nestled in the shade of some huge, umbrella-like Aleppo-pine trees, its main door opening off the street through a porch under mock pillars. Caine could see a guard seated behind one of them and got a glimpse of a red bandanna. ‘We'll drag the donkey over by the door, under the shade of a tree,’ he whispered. ‘We'll make out we're going to cut its throat, to put it out of its misery. The guard will almost certainly come over to see what we're doing, or to move us along. Then we'll give it to him.’