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

by Michael Asher

  Sweeney cocked his brow. ‘Did you know we've been short of rations since Marlene and Gracie went up?’

  ‘Of course I knew,’ Caine lied, making a mental note to speak to Copeland about it – as the mission's official ‘Q’, Cope should have kept him informed. ‘The answer's still the same, Todd. No one's to leave the leaguer without my orders.’

  ‘If you say so, Sarn't,’ Sweeney said sourly, ‘but I think you're being unduly cautious.’

  Wingnut Turner called Caine over to the 3-tonner Vera's niche, where he was grappling with stubborn screws on the truck's transmission box. The bonnet was up, and a smell like scorched chocolate lay over her engine. Vera's crew was also down to three, Caine noted: Turner, Pte Albert Raker, the thirty-two-year-old ex-Pioneer Corps man with biceps and calves like steel springs and a charge-sheet eleven pages long, and Cpl Barry Shackleton, the ex-Scots Greys farrier, who was one of the few men in the British Army legally entitled to wear a beard and who consequently shaved every day. While Shackleton and Raker cooked stew, Turner showed him the gearbox. Caine knew that the RAOC man was perfectly capable of tackling the problem on his own, but he welcomed the work. It was good to have a mechanical task to divert him from his brooding over Naiman's death and the nagging of his conscience over Rose: it was good to be able to work with his hands. ‘The only problem,’ Turner commented as the last screw popped out, ‘is that the gearbox fluid's finished. Don't know what the hell I'm going to put in there.’

  Caine scratched his stubble. ‘Just whack in some cooking oil or a couple of pounds of margarine,’ he said. ‘We had the same problem with a 3-tonner's gear-bands on one of my first journeys up the Blue. The fitter I was with bought a sack of bananas off a Senussi and packed the transmission box with the skins. There we were in the middle of nowhere, stripping off banana skins and cramming bananas into our mouths, so as to get the old rattletrap moving before the Boche arrived. Worked like a dream, too – got back to base without a hitch. Mind you – I haven't been able to look at a banana since.’

  Leaving Turner to hunt down something that would pass as grease, he visited the Daimler, where he found Flash Murray leaning over the AFV's open inspection-hood while Temple gunned the engine. The short Ulsterman lifted his head as Caine approached. ‘Hear that, skipper?’ he enquired. Caine listened to the motor's rumbling, and thought he knew what the Armoured Corps man meant. ‘Pinking,’ Murray declared. ‘It's the fuel them Ities gave us. It's either dirty or watered down. I suppose we should have expected it from those bloody crooks.’

  ‘I didn't hear you make any objections when you were smooching with that pretty Itie girl, though,’ Caine said, chuckling.

  Murray, a married man, blushed. ‘Should be all right,’ he said, ignoring Caine's observation. ‘We'll mix it with the other – dilute the bad stuff.’

  ‘No need,’ said Caine. ‘Have you got any chamois-leathers in your kit? If you can find some, pour the petrol through – use them as filters. It's a pain in the arse, and it takes for ever, but it'll get rid of all the gunge.’

  Murray's face lit up at this piece of information. ‘Thanks, skipper,’ he said. ‘Amazing what you Sappers come up with.’ About to turn away, Caine caught the lance sergeant gazing at his fresh bush-shirt and looked down to see that the brand-new cloth was already soaked in blood. ‘You better get that looked at again,’ Murray said. ‘What happened in that village, anyway?’

  Caine shook his head. ‘You don't want to know,’ he said.

  Maurice Pickney had long since finished treating Rose, and was now at the Dingo's position. Caine found him there under the outcrop crouching over George Padstowe, who was lying spreadeagled on a blanket, half comatose. To Caine's surprise Rose was there with him, kneeling by the bald ex-marine's head, timing his heart-rate with a finger on his carotid artery. She seemed perfectly fit and at ease despite her injuries, her rough treatment and the trauma of the past twenty-four hours. Caine was impressed. ‘What's the problem?’ he asked.

  ‘Heatstroke,’ Pickney announced. ‘Blighter spent too long in the sun yesterday – insisted on staying on the ridge in case he spotted you coming back. Thought you might need help.’

  ‘Can you do anything for him, Maurice?’

  Pickney screwed up his granny-wrinkled face. ‘Normally I'd use chilled water or ice, but we're a bit short on those right now.’

  ‘Have you thought of methylated spirits?’ Rose suggested. ‘It would cause a chill by evaporation.’

  Pickney's face crinkled again as he considered it. ‘Not a bad idea, ma'am,’ he said. ‘I should have thought of that. We've got plenty of white spirit for the cookers. If we swabbed his whole body down with it, it might just do the trick. Have you had medical training, too?’

  Rose wiggled her slim shoulders. ‘Just the basics,’ she said. ‘By the way, we can drop this ma'am business. My name is Maddy.’

  Pickney looked embarrassed. ‘You're a commissioned officer, ma'am,’ he said. ‘We're all just grunts.’

  Rose smiled, displaying her charmingly overlapping front teeth. ‘I want to be a grunt, too. Call me Maddy, please. That goes for everyone.’

  ‘Right you are, ma'am… I mean, Maddy.’

  Though Rose still wore the same dust-caked, bloodstained khakis, she had evidently cleaned up her face. When she stood up, Caine noticed for the first time how much she differed from Angela Brunetto. Both girls had precisely the same shade of blond hair, but while Angela's had been cut in fashionable Judy Garland style, Maddy's was short-cropped and provocatively boyish. While Angela was tall, slim and angular, Maddy's figure, though still sleek, was fuller and a touch more robust, with the wiry strength of a dancer. While the Italian girl's expression had held a hint of hardness, her mouth moody, her manner challenging, Rose's full lips, misty ocean-soul eyes and long eyelashes gave her a sleepy, dreamy quality that was disturbingly feminine. Far from being the martinet he'd originally taken her for, she seemed all soft edges: modest, sympathetic, anxious not to appear special or exalted, and only too ready to please.

  The white-spirit trick worked, and when Padstowe started visibly reviving, Caine stuck his head through the lower hatch on the Dingo to find Trubman at the wireless op's post. ‘Anything?’ he enquired.

  The Welshman shook his carp-like head. ‘Latest report from Rome Radio is that Rommel's forces are moving towards the border. That was at first light today, 22 June. Looks as though he's poised for the invasion of Egypt.’

  Rose's face was suddenly transformed, as if an invisible hand had passed over it, laugh-lines flashing like a neon network from the corners of her eyes to her chin, sultry lips drawing back in ecstatic glee over gleaming white teeth. For a split second her whole countenance glowed. ‘Yes,’ she whispered.

  Caine gasped. ‘What's that about?’ he asked.

  ‘What do you mean,’ she enquired.

  Her face was back to normal now, as if it had never been any different, and Caine thought he must have imagined it or misheard what she said.

  Rose and Caine walked back to the White together. Caine would rather have avoided being alone with her, but to have forced it would have appeared doubly offensive. He handed her the changes of kit, and for the first few minutes there was an awkward silence. Then Caine asked shyly how she was feeling. She showed him the bandages on her wrists and ankles. ‘I'm fine,’ she beamed.

  ‘It must have been bad,’ he commented uncertainly. ‘I mean… the electric shocks.’

  Her face clouded. ‘I don't really want to remember, Sergeant…’

  ‘Tom…’

  ‘Tom…’ She glanced at him. ‘No worse than being dropped in a well, I suppose. Of course, I didn't hold out too long. I spilled the lot.’

  ‘No one can blame you for that. Everyone breaks in the end.’ He paused. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘the way I treated you was unforgivable. I deserve to be hung, drawn and quartered for it.’

  ‘Maybe,’ she agreed, ‘but then so do I, for getting you bagged. I can't believe
that I actually spat in your face. But if we're both going to spend the rest of our lives saying sorry, we'll never get anywhere. At least you didn't shoot me.’

  ‘I was a hair's breadth away from it.’

  She gave him a long look of appraisal, her eyelashes fluttering. ‘I don't think so, Tom,’ she said, her voice soft. ‘You're not a woman-killer. I saw that in your eyes a second before you were knocked down by that door.’

  ‘You seem very sure of yourself.’

  Maddy stopped and turned towards him, her face grave. ‘I once saw a man cut a woman's throat in the act of raping her, in a nightclub in Cairo. You remember the Lady Goddard case?’

  ‘Yes, I read about it. You witnessed that?’

  ‘It was the most horrible thing I've ever seen. I entered the ladies' room just as he was finishing it, and he turned and stared at me. In that instant I knew I was looking into the eyes of a man who got real pleasure out of hurting women, who wasn't even human – not at that moment, I mean. He was possessed by something… he would have murdered me too, except that he heard someone coming. Taking out those three Germans was different – you had no choice. I'm not pretending it was a pretty sight. It revolted me, if you want to know the truth. But I never doubted that it had to be that way. If you'd shot them it would have alerted the garrison. You had to take them on hand to hand, and once they were down, you had to make sure they stayed down, otherwise we wouldn't even have made it back to your leaguer. I never had the feeling you were doing it for pleasure. Call it a woman's intuition, if you like, but I'm certain that whatever orders you've been given, you would never have shot me down in cold blood. Not in a million years.’

  Caine didn't know how to respond to this: on the one hand it seemed like a compliment, on the other an accusation of weakness. He cradled his big Thompson protectively, gazing up and down the wadi: the rock-shelters and overhangs interrupted the smooth flow of the rock wall like cavities in teeth. He was pleased to see that the men had done their scrimming-up professionally. None of the wagons was visible, even from this distance. A slight breeze was blowing up from the desert, riffling the loose white sand on the surface of the wadi bed. He turned his eyes back to Rose. ‘You may be right,’ he said, ‘but if that's the case, why did the brass choose me for the mission?’

  ‘I can think of at least one good reason,’ Rose said, a half-smile on her face. ‘They didn't want me executed. If I judged the situation that critical, anyway, I didn't need an assassin's bullet.’ She opened her mouth and pointed to a large, ugly back tooth. ‘See that?’ she said. ‘It's a Bakelite insert, held in place by gutta percha. Contains one hundred per cent potassium cyanide. I only have to bite through it, and it's curtains in sixty seconds.’

  Caine winced and examined the false tooth with concern. ‘Is that thing safe? What if you were knocked over and bit through it by accident?’

  ‘It survived a parachute jump. Anyway, I might still need it.’

  They continued walking until they came to the White's overhang, where Copeland and Wallace, now clad only in shorts and chapplies, were crouching over a spirit-stove, surrounded by compo tins. ‘Here, let me do that,’ Rose insisted.

  She went behind the vehicle, changed into her new set of khakis and emerged rolling her sleeves up and looking business-like. The shorts and drill trousers were too big for her, but somehow their looseness only served to emphasize the lean femininity of her curves. She knelt down and started sorting through the compo. Soon she was making a stew of tinned bacon, soya-bean sausages and tinned potatoes. When it was on the go, she took some flour and tinned margarine and started making pastry, rolling it out on a discarded map-board, with an empty beer-bottle as a rolling pin. While she was working, Pickney turned up again to doctor Caine's wound, and shortly they were joined by Adud and Layla, who both welcomed Rose regally.

  Layla explained that they'd decided to leave: they had some relatives living in the area with whom they intended to seek shelter. They seemed cut up about the news of Naiman's death. ‘They always told us Jews were bad people,’ Layla said, ‘but they were wrong. Moshe… he was a very good boy… very brave.’

  Caine asked directions to his final RV on the Maqtal plateau, and Adud spent some time talking, sketching in the dust, showing Caine the best way of approaching it. Finally, they got up to go, refusing Caine's offers of cash. ‘God knows,’ Adud scoffed. ‘What we've done cannot begin to pay for the lives of those of our people you've saved,’ he said, with Layla's help, ‘and in any case, the thanks is to God.’

  Layla took Caine's hand, searching his face with her black eyes. ‘You saved my life, twice,’ she said. ‘You are always welcome among our people. Wherever we are, our place is yours. Thank you.’

  ‘The thanks is to God,’ Caine said, smiling.

  Naiman had once told Caine that while Arab greetings were drawn out, their farewells were short and sweet. This proved to be true. After shaking hands with Caine's group, the two Senussi simply shouted, ‘Peace be upon you,’ to the others, collected their few belongings and set off up the wadi. When Caine looked for them a few minutes later, they'd already vanished.

  ‘Well,’ Maddy said, as she served them stew and hot pastries in their mess tins, ‘you really scored a hit with that girl, Tom.’

  Caine's cheeks pinked. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You didn't notice? She only had eyes for you. Maybe men don't notice these things.’

  Wallace and Copeland snorted, and Caine attacked his stew vigorously, slightly abashed. ‘Now this is good,’ he murmured, spooning bacon and potatoes. ‘I really needed this.’

  When the others had gone off to relieve the sentries, Maddy sat down on a poncho, assuming an easy cross-legged posture, and began methodically cleaning the mess tins and cooking pots with sand. Her manner was unpretentious, and Caine marvelled that she'd managed to reach the rank of First Officer without losing the human touch. For the first time he wondered if the compliant character she'd shown him could be an act conjured up for his benefit. He recalled Copeland's comments about ‘Sirens’, whose sweet singing lured sailors on to the rocks. Was Rose the type of woman who could adjust chameleon-like to her surroundings? Did she perhaps have the ability to be what other people – men – most wanted her to be? Wasn't this, in a sense, what all women did?

  On the face of it, she seemed completely open and unreserved, yet Caine sensed that beneath the candid manner she was holding something back – that there was a sadness inside her belied by her warm, cheerful style. He knelt down to help her. ‘You said you “spilled the beans” about your message,’ he began. She nodded, apparently unembarrassed about it, and Caine felt encouraged to press on.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I was wondering – since the enemy already know – what the real story is. I mean, I was told some pack of lies about Assegai – a new glider-bomb system – but none of us really swallowed that.’

  Maddy studied his face, and he suddenly became aware of her proximity – of a flux of energy between them. It flowed both ways and it was almost palpable, yet he knew that neither of them would ever admit it. When he'd first met her in the guard-house of Biska town hall, he'd thought her almost nondescript. Now he felt that he couldn't have been more wrong: she was beautiful. She had the same high cheekbones as Lina – the Italian girl he'd danced with at the deserters' camp – though instead of reminding him of Mongol hordes, Maddy's features somehow evoked images of Vikings, jade-green seas, desolate blizzards and melting white snows. When she smiled, her cheekbones stood out, and tiny, almost invisible lines spread from the corners of her eyes, as far south as the dimple in her chin. Her lips had an expressive, almost compulsive quality – she smiled easily, showing the slightly overlapping front teeth that Caine found entrancing.

  ‘Tom,’ she said seriously, ‘you deserve to know, but I can't tell you. Better not to know anything until you're out of it.’ Her eyes were like freshwater torrents, flooding his. ‘I promise you one thing, though. If we get through this
– and that's still a big if – I'm going to take you to dinner at Shepheard's Hotel to prove to you that everything is forgiven, and to share the whole story.’

  He scratched his nose, grinning self-consciously. ‘That's a generous offer,’ he said, ‘but they don't allow sergeants in Shepheard's.’

  Maddy's ironic chuckle went on for longer than Caine thought his remark warranted. ‘Really?’ she breathed softly. ‘Well, there's always a first time for everything…’

  She was interrupted by three shrill blasts from a sentry's whistle, and when she glanced questioningly at Caine, he was already cocking his Thompson. The skin on his face was taut. ‘We've got visitors,’ he said.

  40

  Cammed up with Wallace in a natural sangar half-way up the screeside, Harry Copeland stuck the whistle back inside his top pocket and tried to draw a bead on the pilot of the Messerschmitt 110 that was trawling above the sarir like a mottle-feathered kite. The big twin-engined fighter-bomber was honing in at only two thousand feet, casting a menacing aquiline shadow on the pale desert surface. Wallace changed the elevation of his Bren-gun and tweaked the sights. ‘Don't move,’ Copeland hissed. ‘She's spotting. She doesn't know we're here.’

  Cope scanned the line of the cliff through his telescopic sights to make sure all the wagons were invisible, the men in cover. They'd done a good job: nestling in the dark cavities along the base of the scarp wall, their scrim nets covered with sand and brittle vegetation, the vehicles would be impossible to discern from that altitude – even their tracks had been brushed out.

  Cope was shifting his gaze back to the looming aircraft when Wallace nudged his arm. ‘Who the hell is that?’ he gasped. Cope eye-scoped the bed of the serir across the wadi: a single, dark figure was moving down there, heading straight for the cliff. Cope squiffed through his sights, recognized a football-headed, barrel-chested man in khaki drills, tabbing along with a sort of rolling simian gait. He was carrying a rifle and something that looked like a furry pack on his back. ‘It's Todd Sweeney,’ he said. ‘He's bagged game.’