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

by Michael Asher

  While Cope manoeuvered the White under an outcropping, Caine hopped out and went off to relieve his bursting bladder. He returned to find Fred Wallace carrying the limp but still conscious form of Maddaleine Rose into the shade of an immense smooth-skinned boulder. She looked as fragile as a china doll in his huge arms, and Caine was reminded instantly of the way Wallace had handled the orphan gazelle on the march out.

  Caine gripped his Tommy-gun furiously and strode up to the big gunner. ‘Who ordered you to do that?’ he demanded. ‘Who told you to take her out of the wagon?’

  Caine glanced round for Copeland and found the corporal lolling against the car's bonnet, hands folded noncommittally across his chest, a lit cigarette in his mouth. When Caine had hustled Rose into the leaguer the previous night, almost speechless with exhaustion, his mates had clamoured around him shooting questions, slapping him on the back. To their consternation, though, Caine's only statement had been that Naiman had bought it. He'd confounded them further by issuing terse orders that no one was to talk to Rose, or remove her restraints.

  Now, ignoring Caine, Wallace laid Rose gently on soft ground with her back against the stone, where she sat motionless, her aquamarine eyes blinking, rivetted on Caine. Her breath came through her gag in quick, ragged pants. Wallace raised himself to his full height, his thorn-bush mop of black hair bristling. He stared Caine down. ‘No good your lookin' at Harry, skipper,’ he boomed. ‘It's down to me, and if it's insubordination, tough shit. I couldn't stand to see her suffer no more. This ain't no way to treat a lady, and you know it – if you was yourself you wouldn't treat a dog like that. It ain't two days since you excused a pair of skuzzy A-rabs who'd just popped off three of our boys on the grounds they was only babes and give me down the road for wantin' to snuff them. Now, are you going to cut her loose or am I?’

  Caine inserted himself between the big man and the sitting woman, and faced Wallace down. ‘Don't touch her,’ he snapped. ‘I told you, she can't be trusted.’

  Wallace ran a boxing-glove-sized hand through dense black chin-stubble that was quickly becoming a full beard. ‘Skipper,’ he said, his granite brow furrowed. ‘You took a lot of humpty back there, didn't you?’

  ‘It wasn't exactly a night out on the town, if that's what you mean,’ Caine chuntered. ‘We were doing fine until your new pal Runefish here deliberately made a racket that turned out the guard. We were bagged and worked over pretty well by that Black Widow scum. I escaped, but Moshe didn't make it. I want Rose kept under restraint until I know what's going on.’

  Wallace's black eyes were belladonna pinpricks. ‘What's up with you, mate? You just ain't seeing straight.’ He sent an appealing glance at Copeland, who shrugged and blew smoke. ‘I'm not getting into this, Fred,’ he said. Caine remembered abruptly how Cope had laid into him for botching the snipe outside the cave the previous morning. If he'd had his way, this problem wouldn't have arisen: Rose would already be dead.

  ‘All right then,’ the big man grunted, whipping out his fanny. ‘I'll do it myself.’ Caine faced him, bracing his broad shoulders. ‘You want to know what happened?’ he yelled, his voice border-line hysterical. ‘I'll tell you what happened, Fred. First, that Nazi creep applies a red-hot iron to my bayonet wound here. Then, when I won't talk, he chops off Moshe's bloody thumb with a cleaver. When he finds out Moshe's a Jew, it's like he's just won the lottery – makes him tromp around a minefield until his foot gets blown off. Oh, and did I mention that he also shot him in the leg at point-blank range? Moshe might have taken days to die if I hadn't got to him first – I had to crawl through the minefield to get to him, though, and since I didn't have any proper weapons, I had to make him roll over on an anti-personnel mine. That was after I'd climbed out of the hundred-foot well they dropped me into. I should never have taken Moshe with me, of course, but he'd still be alive if Miss Butter-Wouldn't-Melt here hadn't scuppered us.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Wallace whispered. He pondered Caine's words for a moment, and Caine could almost read his thoughts reflected in his broad, open face. ‘It's bad about Moshe,’ the gunner said slowly, with unfamiliar gentleness. ‘Really bad. But he ain't the first one we lost, Tom. How long you going to go on blaming yourself and the lass here for something neither of you could do anything about? Ain't you the one as said you lose mates in war?’

  Caine felt agitated, confused, almost on the verge of collapse. As Wallace pressed forward, though, he raised a hand to push him back. ‘Don't try anything, Fred,’ he warned.

  ‘Get out of my way, skipper.’

  Caine balled a fist, but the action was slow and without conviction. At the first sign of movement, Wallace slapped him open-handed across the jaw with a giant, calloused hand, swatting him aside with the same economy of effort he'd used to flatten Copeland at the deserter's camp the previous morning. The blow wasn't as hard as it might have been, but it was enough to make Caine's head spin. By the time he'd recovered himself, the gunner had already removed Rose's gag and was crouching behind her, cutting through her bindings with his fanny. Rose snuffled, and tears fell down her grimy cheeks. Her ocean-soul eyes never left Caine for a second.

  ‘Let's have a look,’ Wallace growled, kneeling in front of her. She presented her small, delicate hands obediently, and Caine saw that her wrists had been chafed raw by the tight cords. The wounds looked ugly. Wallace stroked her small fingers with his enormous ones, making mother-hen clucking sounds. ‘That's nasty,’ he purred, as if he were reassuring a child. ‘Very nasty. I'm going to call our orderly – I'm sure he's got dope for it.’ He yanked a full water-bottle out of his webbing, uncorked it and handed it to her. She took it, but was trembling so badly that Wallace took it back and held it to her mouth. ‘Just wet your lips, ma'am,’ he murmered. ‘That's right. Easy does it. Then maybe a little sip. If you drink too much at once it'll make you bad.’

  Rose sipped, coughed, then sipped again, finally managing to take the water-bottle herself. As she swallowed, Wallace sat back on his rhino-like haunches and looked round for Copeland. ‘You'd better call Pickney, Harry,’ he said. ‘Those wrists could go septic.’

  Caine said nothing, and Cope went off without a word. Wallace turned back to Rose. ‘You hurt anywhere else, ma'am?’

  She nodded, coughed, handed the bottle back to him, then pulled up her trouser-cuffs, showing ankles that were a purple mass of bruises and burns. ‘They clamped electrodes there,’ she said, her voice soft and without rancour. ‘There and here.’ She gestured to her armpits. ‘They used electric shocks.’

  Wallace stared accusingly at Caine. ‘She suffered all that, and you left her tied up without water for seven hours, rattling about in that wagon like a dried pea in a tin-can? You practisin' for a new career with the Gestapo or what?’

  Wallace's words stabbed Caine like daggers. The slap in the face, followed by the sight of Rose's injuries, and her mention of electric-shock torture, had brought him back to earth with a jolt. He felt hard tears well up in his eyes as the enormity of his cruelty dawned on him. He'd been so obsessed with the horror of Naiman's mutilation and death that he'd never even considered the possibility that she might have been dreadfully tortured too. Wallace was right: he'd forced this young, helpless girl to go through a quite unnecessary torment, bouncing about in the back of the AFV over rough terrain with open wounds, without offering her water, food, medical treatment, or even a word of comfort.

  Caine broke out in a cold sweat. His body began to tremble so much that he had to steady himself against a rock. Wallace had hit the nail on the head. This was Gestapo treatment – unadulterated cruelty that he wouldn't even have doled out to an Axis POW, let alone an injured female compatriot. He couldn't believe he'd behaved so pitilessly – it was against everything he'd ever stood for or believed in. Something must have gone wrong inside him, he thought. The long-drawn-out agony of the march-in, the slaughter, the blood, the pain of his own torture, the ordeal in the well, of clearing the minefield, of setting up Naiman's suicide
, and his berserk butchery of the three Jerries, had tipped him over the edge into some kind of demonic dark underworld of the soul.

  So she'd spat in his face, sworn at him, called him a few names – so what? Just when he should have been offering her support, he'd treated her as viciously as that psycho Rohde – worse, because at least in Rohde's case there had been a logical reason for it. Caine had no reason except vindictiveness – the pain he'd inflicted on her was completely gratuitous. His head ached. The blood drained from his face. His breathing came in short gasps. He felt as if he'd just woken up from a bad dream. He couldn't explain why he'd behaved like this – it was as if he'd been possessed by an evil spirit for the past eight hours – as if some black shuck that had always lurked inside him had suddenly broken free. Now, he wanted to run away and hide, to flee until he fell off the edge of the world, to conceal himself, to go anywhere to get out of her sight. ‘I'm sorry, ma'am,’ he stammered. ‘I…’

  ‘Sergeant Caine,’ Rose said quietly, focusing her luminous green eyes on him again. ‘You don't need to apologize.’ Her voice was faint but firm and steady. ‘You don't know me, and you had every right to be cautious. It must have been a real shock when I reacted like that at the town hall, and then the terrible loss of your comrade. I lost a close friend once in similar horrible circumstances, and I know how savage it can make you. It might be poor comfort, but I want to say how grateful I am. I know you've risked your life over and over for me, and I'll never forget that.’

  Caine could hardly believe his ears. He'd been expecting a haughty tirade of officer-class invective – the kind of arch abuse she'd poured on Naiman and himself at Biska. He felt so revolted with himself that he would have welcomed it, accepted it as his due. Her statement disarmed him totally. It wasn't only what she'd said that astonished him but the way she'd said it. Her voice was quite devoid of the knife-blade arrogance he'd heard in Biska town hall. Even her accent was different. This voice was so warm and intimate, in fact, that it might have belonged to someone else.

  Copeland reappeared under the overhang. ‘Maurice'll be here in a sec,’ he said. Caine nodded and turned back to Rose, who was still staring at him, her face full of sympathy. ‘I am so, so sorry about your friend,’ she said. More tears etched clean grooves across the filthy cheeks. ‘Believe me, if it could have been any different… if I could have done anything to stop it… I would have done.’ Her tearful eyes searched his face for understanding, and it hit him like a second bang on the head that she held herself responsible for Naiman's death. ‘The way I spoke to you back there,’ she whispered, ‘… I was taken by surprise. When you pointed that pistol at me, I didn't know what to do. You see, I'm just a courier, and I never expected my aircraft to be shot down. They tried to prepare me for the worst, but of course you never really think it's going to happen to you. I was lucky – I was able to bale out when the plane got hit, but my poor pilot – Flight Sergeant Orton – he never had a chance. I'm certain he went down with the crate. Anyway, they mentioned the possibility of a search-and-rescue team in my briefing, in the event that the worst happened, but I never took it seriously. Even if the idea of a rescue mission was at the back of my mind, I wouldn't have expected you to get there so soon – not to get there at all, really.’

  Caine stared back vacantly, and it was Copeland who spoke for him.

  ‘I don't quite follow you, ma'am,’ he said, moving closer to the group. ‘If you didn't expect us, why did you transmit your emergency call for more than three hours yesterday? If you hadn't done that you wouldn't have been bagged –’

  ‘I suppose I just panicked,’ she cut in quickly. ‘As I said, I'm new to all this.’

  Caine felt sick and confused. He no longer seemed to have a clear idea why he'd been sent up the Blue. Wires had got crossed: there had been some kind of massive cock-up somewhere, but he was too tired to work it out. ‘I'm sorry, ma'am,’ he stammered again. ‘I… back there in the town… I'd almost made my mind up to dump you…’

  Rose's long eyelashes quivered, and she closed her eyes for a moment. He guessed she was picturing his ferocious butchery of the three Brandenburgers: he remembered how her eyes had bugged out with horror when she'd seen him sawing through the big Jerry's neck. She was a staff courier, not a combat vet: even though her life had been at stake, it must have been deeply traumatic for her to witness such feral savagery. However genuinely grateful she was, she must think him no better than a beast.

  When Rose opened her eyes they were stonily calm. ‘You should have dumped me, Sergeant,’ she said. ‘It would have made things so much simpler. You could have saved yourself and your men. Now, I'm not sure if any of us will escape… I didn't expect to be rescued, you see, and it wasn't necessary. I'm expendable. I volunteered for this job knowing that… if something went wrong… I wasn't likely to get out alive. What happens to me doesn't matter. All we can hope is that –’

  She was interrupted by the arrival of Pickney, who slammed his medical box down without ceremony. ‘I'm sorry to break this up, skipper,’ he said, ‘but how about letting me do my stuff?’

  39

  Caine was pleased to have an excuse to leave. After the way he'd treated Rose, he felt he wouldn't ever again be able to look her in the eye. He had to admit, though, that he was totally confused – especially by her last remarks. Since her bindings had come off, he'd found no trace at all of the woman he thought he'd glimpsed in the guardroom at Biska. The sea-green eyes, the boyish cap of golden hair, the full lips: they were all there, but it was as if they'd been reassembled in a different way. There wasn't the slightest trace of that impassive death-mask that had sent shivers down his spine. On the contrary, she was sweet – shy, self-effacing, dreamy-eyed, compliant – quite without the despotic manner she'd seemed to possess when he'd first encountered her. She had a wistful, waif-like, almost elfin touch that under normal circumstances, he thought, would have driven a lot of men crazy – would have driven him crazy.

  She was just a courier, she'd said: she hadn't expected to be shot down. Yet she'd endured horrors, loneliness, torture and privations that few people ever encountered, even in the war, almost without a whimper. She'd thanked him humbly for rescuing her, then told him he should have dumped her in Biska. The statement had hit him like a slap in the face. He remembered the way she'd lain passively in the dirt as the Jerries prepared to rape and murder her, as if totally resigned to it – almost as if she felt she deserved it.

  That there were unexplained holes in her story – the three-hour SOS transmission, for instance – no longer troubled Caine deeply. He reminded himself that while she was an officer of field rank, he was no more than a grunt NCO. Her mission was top secret, and there could well be security aspects – signals protocols, for example – that were beyond his ‘need to know’. It really didn't matter now. What amazed him was how rapidly everything had changed. He'd started up by hating Rose for betraying him and Naiman to the Jerries, had sworn that he'd never, ever forgive her for Naiman's death. Yet he'd ended up by admiring her and despising himself. He'd begun by regarding her as the devil incarnate, and ended up by feeling attracted to her. It was confusing: it was almost more than he could take.

  He stepped out into the broad sunlit swathe of the wadi, glad to have the hot sun on his face. He marched towards the rock shelter harbouring Judy, where Copeland had stashed the spare sets of khakis Michele's mob had given them. He wanted to replace his filthy, blood-stained kit – he reminded himself to pick up a couple of sets for Rose while he was about it. The sun was higher now, and the early morning dust-clouds had dispersed, leaving only a tight white fireball in a pure methylene sky. Further up the wadi the cliff walls shattered into jagged crags, braised and abraded into surreal shapes – a coiled serpent, a gallery of jellyfish, a giant, bloated infant with a stump for a head. Across the wadi he could make out the ranks of top-heavy pedestals – yardangs was the geological name. Now the shadows had diminished they looked more like a forest of giant toa
dstools than petrified Black Gods, but still their presence lent the landscape an eerie sense of otherworldliness, as if his unit had leaguered up on Mars.

  Judy's crew was brewing tea under the rock overhang when Caine came in. There were only three of them left now – Bombardier Dick Flogget, a trim, pugnacious five-foot-five ex-Gunner from Newcastle, the heavily bearded former Royal Navy commando, Gus Graveman, and Caine's old nemesis, the truculent, barrel-chested ex-Redcap Cpl ‘Todd’ Sweeney. Caine greeted them, and declining tea, swung on to the lorry's tailboard using the scaling rope, and started poking about among the stores. When he swung down ten minutes later with three fresh suits under his arm, he was accosted by Sweeney, stripped down to shorts and chapplies, Tommy-gun slung from his side-of-mutton shoulder. He was swigging milky tea from a pint mug. ‘Got the right one this time, then, Sarn't?’ the ex-MP sneered. ‘Or aren't you certain? Is that why you're keeping her tied up?’

  For a moment, Caine seriously considered rearranging Sweeney's beach-ball face for him: it was an action long overdue. He thought better of it though. ‘Not any more,’ he said. ‘That was just a temporary precaution until I could make a positive ID.’

  ‘I see. Listen, skipper, I spotted gazelle tracks in the wadi – lots of them. I fancy going off to bag a couple. Some fresh meat would be just what the MO ordered.’

  Caine tapped the stock of Sweeney's Tommy-gun. ‘You won't bag many with this,’ he said. ‘Gazelle move like the clappers. In any case, the answer's no. Stay with the wagons until further notice.’