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

by Michael Asher

  Their eyes zeroed in on the solitary form – apart from the steel bird above, the only moving thing in the whole vast landscape. Five minutes back they'd heard the far-away bark of a single gunshot from that direction, but not having clocked anyone, had put it down to an echo or auditory illusion. Sweeney was lolloping on doggedly, thumb-up-bum, chuffed with his bag, entirely oblivious to the enemy aircraft poling up behind him. It was suddenly, horrifically evident to both Cope and Wallace that the 110's pilot couldn't miss him, couldn't help but deduce his destination from his direction of travel. They both froze, knowing it was too late to warn the ex-Redcap without exposing themselves and revealing the leaguer's position.

  They looked on helplessly. Only a minute before the aircraft's shadow ghosted him, Sweeney seemed to become aware of her presence. Instead of going to ground, though, he jettisoned his catch and began to run.

  ‘No. No. No. Get in cover, you stupid bastard,’ Wallace honked to himself. ‘Get down. Play possum. Do something…’ As they watched in horror, the big bird shucked sky, cruised low towards the running man, as if trying to scoop him off the desert floor. They saw the German pilot and rear-gunner in the big cockpit, the black and white Luftwaffe cross painted on the fuselage, heard the thun-dersquall boom of the twin, wing-mounted engines, heard the curiously deadened blatta-blatta-blat of the 7.92mm machine gun in the aircraft's nose. Wallace's eyes boiled as he observed the pattern of dust licked up by the gun like a long ladder in a nylon stocking. He cocked the Bren's mechanism, tromboning the knob forward with a clack. Cope dug his fingers into his bulbous bicep. ‘Don't shoot,’ he warned. ‘There's nothing we can do.’

  Wallace swore, his eyes groping the strike pattern as it converged with the sprinting Sweeney: he saw the man jackknife, vanish momentarily into a spray of dust-spume, fancied he heard a shriek of pain, then saw him lying on the desert floor like a curled-up turd. The big Messerschmitt flitted over the prone body, righted herself, chandelled up gracefully, poled towards them on a wide drift-angle. ‘Get down,’ Copeland grated. Wallace pressed his face more deeply into the dirt, watching out of the corner of his eye as the aircraft swooped over their position, barnstormed across the top of the escarpment behind them and began to gyre into a long turn. The dragon roar of wave-shifting aero-engines reached Copeland's ears. ‘She's spotted the leaguer,’ he whispered. ‘She's coming in for a bombing run.’

  Wallace was no longer watching the 110, though. His hawk eyes were on the horizon, where he'd just spotted something else: four black smudges like a flight of dark geese reaming out of the heat-haze at their ceiling altitude of about ten thousand feet. ‘Stukas,’ he grunted.

  Cope fixed the dive-bombers with needled eyes. As they droned nearer he saw their angled gull-wings, the spatted, fixed undercarriages, the underwing gondolas. They were homing in directly on to the cliff wall where the vehicles were parked, and Copeland suddenly had no doubt whatsoever that the bomber pilots knew the column was here. He and Wallace watched, rivetted, as four dark shadows swished across the desert at 150 mph. About a quarter-mile from the cliff the aircraft suddenly changed vector, angle-pitched, dumped altitude. Their engines dopplered out. With red warning lights flashing on their gull wings, ‘Jericho Trumpet’ sirens cranking up, emitting bloodcurdling banshee wails, the four Stukas fell like stones into a breathtaking sixty-degree freefall.

  Wallace shifted the Bren-muzzle, but again Cope jabbed his arm. ‘Don't try it,’ he hissed urgently. ‘You'll never hit them on the dive, and even if you did, they're fitted with a device that releases the bombs automatically, then rights the crate. The pilots pass out from G-force. Wait for the pull-out – they're sluggish on the recovery.’

  ‘It'll be too damn' late, then, mate,’ Wallace said.

  Hugging the rock floor of the overhang with Rose close by, Tom Caine had heard the 110 rumble over the wadi. Now, he was aware of nothing but the squeal of Stuka sirens, the dread-bolt boom of their engines, the bumpa-bumpa-bumpa of 20mm cannon, the ricky-tick of machine guns, then the droning countertenor of fifty-pound bombs, the crumping barrroooomm as they hit the deck outside the overhang. The earth quaked, the air squinched, white-hot grapeshot spiralled, dust and smoke welled into their space like a tidal wave. Caine heard the sirens fade out, engines shift frequency-wave as the dive-bombers lufted, steeple-chased the cliffs. He lifted his head, broke into a fit of coughing, and pulled himself to his feet. Rose dragged herself up, looking stunned but unhurt. It had been a fine feat of combat flying by the Luftwaffe pilots, Caine knew, but the White had been well concealed and they'd been shooting blind. The bombs had exploded in the wadi and, miraculously, none of their cannon-shells had penetrated his overhang.

  He rushed to the entrance, peered out across loose scree along the wadi. His heart tripped a double-tap: Vera and Judy were both on fire. He couldn't see the wagons themselves, but he could see a torrent of flame and black smoke pouring out from the places where they'd been hidden. They'd been positioned too close together under their overhangs, too exposed to enfilade attack, he thought. He guessed that both had been struck by either bomb-shrapnel or 20mm shells that had ignited the explosives and petrol on board.

  Caine gawked at unexploded fifty-pound bombs stuck nose-down in the sand with only their fins showing, took in blazing bits of truck fuselage, flimsies still full of petrol, bloated the size of pumpkins from the heat and the expanding gas: he saw sprawled, mashed bodies on the sand, saw commandos milling around with fire extinguishers. He left cover and sprinted towards the burning wreckage, closely followed by Rose; he clocked a heron-legged man running straight towards him down the wadi – Harry Copeland. The three of them almost collided, dived for cover behind a nest of boulders. ‘What's the damage?’ Caine demanded.

  ‘Never mind that now, skipper,’ Cope hallooed. ‘Didn't you clock the Messerschmitt 110? She's coming in for another run. Now she'll have a clear target.’

  Caine craned his neck to look for Messerschmitt and Stukas. The aircraft were invisible, but he could hear their engines humming behind the escarpment like bluebottles. ‘Get out of it,’ he screeched, waving to the circling men. ‘Get under cover. They're coming back.’

  The commandos distanced themselves from the flaming lorries, tumbled behind rocks, crammed themselves into crannies. Crouching among the boulders, Caine saw the 110 reappear out of the sand-mist as she completed her turn, posturing for another run.

  ‘Judy and Vera are written off,’ Cope panted. ‘Two men dead – Flogget and Shackleton… and one wounded.’

  He pointed to what looked like a mud-coloured bundle lying in the sand about a hundred yards distant. ‘Todd Sweeney,’ he honked. ‘He must have gone out to shoot gazelle.’

  ‘That idiot. I ordered him to stay in the leaguer.’

  ‘Yeah, well, when the 110 came over, the bloody prick kept on going, straight towards the leaguer. It must have been as clear as daylight to the pilot where the wagons were concealed, and sure as shit he relayed the position to the Stukas. Sweeney was hit in her strafing run, but he's still alive: I saw movement.’

  Rose's mouth twitched. ‘We can't just leave him there,’ she said. ‘He'll be killed.’

  Caine and Copeland eyed the fighter-bomber now sailing directly towards them, losing altitude fast. It was a sobering sight. ‘There's nothing we can do,’ Caine said.

  ‘Bollocks,’ Rose yelled, and Caine noticed with alarm that she was poised for a run. He put out his hand to stop her. ‘Don't be a fool…’

  Rose dodged the hand and was off out of cover into open desert, running, weaving, cross-cutting, towards the inert Sweeney. Copeland watched her, dog-eyed. ‘She's fucking mad,’ he said.

  He was speaking to thin air, though, because Caine had already darted out and was bounding after her. Copeland blanched and brought up his SMLE, beading the 110's cockpit through his scope. The plane was still well beyond range.

  Out on the serir, Rose had reached Sweeney after a breathless twenty-second sprint, saw a
hole the size of a hub-cap in his shoulder, ascertained that he was still breathing and started to drag him back to cover. Hiking up behind her twenty yards away, Caine saw the puffin-nose of the Messerschmitt as she loomed down from a few hundred feet, heard the twin engines scrape, saw the 7.92mm machine gun spliffing white-hot needles of light from the nose-cone, heard the bell clappers of its strikes, saw the deadly beetle-stitch of bullets crinkling up the desert directly towards Maddy. Time froze: the Messerschmitt was out of focus, a nebular blue mass hanging in the air. Then Caine was on Maddy, grappling her slim waist with his strong arms, carry-dragging her five yards sideways. They fell on top of each other in a jumble of limbs just as the crate's liquid shadow strafed them, and in that second a single crack rang out from the base of the cliff.

  Following through with his sights a hundred yards away, Copeland saw the red rosebud in the pilot's face, saw him hump over the controls. The big bird ripsawed over and past him, tail-planed low, pancaked into the hillside with a stomach-retching shock-wave, caroomed apart in a balloon of gore-coloured fire. The earth buckled; the air barrel-rolled; a parachute-shaped tongue of smoke whiplashed from the wrecked fuselage, sending stones and gravel cascading down the cliff. The aircraft hung there for a second, then the fuel tanks pitched up flame and split apart, sending shrapnel high in the air, streaming down the cliff like dark rain.

  A hundred yards away, Caine and Rose felt the blast. Caine was attempting to pull Rose back into cover while she swore and beat at his chest with her fists. Caine had seen the strike pattern hit Sweeney for the second time, blowing him to bits only a second after he'd dragged Rose out of its path. ‘He's dead,’ he shouted in her ear.

  They got back to Cope's position only just in time to see the four Stukas go into strafing configuration. They watched the gull-wings as they lost height, braced themselves for a second onslaught. Instead of going into a nosedive, though, the aircraft banked abruptly, swept around to the north, zoned off towards the Green Mountains. Caine watched them soaring through the galleries of cloud over the hills with an incredulous look on his face. ‘They broke off,’ he said.

  ‘They must have been recalled,’ said Rose. ‘That means they want us – or me, anyway – alive.’

  A moment later Fred Wallace's big form came shambling down the scree and along the side of the wadi. He didn't pause to inspect the burning trucks or the dead men, but scrambled directly to Caine's position. ‘Skipper,’ he wheezed breathlessly, ‘there's a dust-cloud on the top of the escarpment, just the way we came. I reckon there's a big Jerry convoy after us.’

  Caine nodded. ‘That's why they stopped the attack,’ he said. ‘You were right, Maddy. They want us alive.’

  There was no longer any point staying in cover. If they remained where they were they would be encircled by their pursuers. If the Stukas really had been reined in by the ground column, it suggested that another attack was unlikely. They stayed in the wadi only long enough to give Sweeney, Shackleton and Floggett a hasty burial, then mounted their three remaining vehicles, headed off along the base of the mountains towards their final RV.

  41

  Leaning on the White's hatch with Rose in the co-driver's seat below him, Caine coaxed the tiny column along, navigating with map, compass, and Mk I commando eyeball. He chose to follow narrow goat-tracks that meandered in and out of bald, rocky outcrops, crossed great lava fields of black volcanic clinker, tipped down along the powder-dry beds of wadis, oscillated through wild expanses of tussock-grass and drab camel-thorn. Occasionally they came across places where Senussi tents had stood – oblongs of boulders, broken straw shelters, the discarded bric-a-brac of nomad camps: bent and holed cooking pots, broken hobbles, useless waterskins. They found well-heads where the earth had been trampled by the hooves of goats, sheep and donkeys, but of the Bedouin they saw nothing. Adud had told Caine that many Senussi had moved to the northern side of the mountains to take advantage of the rains that had been abundant there this year.

  Just before sunset they bounced across an undulating plain of brown upland reminiscent of the Yorkshire moors, covered in stunted thornscrub, stands of razor-sharp esparto grass, the strange waxy growths of Sodom's Apple bush. The wind was heavy with the scent of wild thyme. To their right, the patchwork quilt dropped away gradually to open desert; to their left it rose towards an escarpment whose face had been hacked and chiselled by natural forces into the gaping maws of rocky ravines.

  As the sun slipped behind the sawtoothed edges of the hills, the column arrived at a junction with a broad dust-track that coiled off to the left. Caine halted the wagons, and scanning in that direction with his binos, saw the last shards of sunlight mirrored back from the whitewashed walls of a human settlement. It was a group of Italian colonial homesteads sited on a low ridge, dominating the country for miles. The buildings reminded him of the abandoned Italian agricultural project they'd passed through near Biska.

  Caine told the lads to take a break. The commandos piled stiffly out of the wagons, stretched, relieved themselves, glugged water, lit up cigarettes. They had last eaten twelve hours previously, and Caine knew they were hungry. Almost all the remaining rations had gone up with the 3-tonners, and in the excitement of the last twenty-four hours the ‘three-days ration per wagon’ rule had been neglected. With the help of Cope, Wallace and Rose, Caine laid out his map on the White's long bonnet. Scouring it by torchlight, his finger came to rest on the fork at which he thought they'd arrived. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘There is a colonial scheme marked here.’

  He fished a tin of Player's Navy Cut out of his haversack – the same tin Michele Brunetto had given him at the Citadello – handed cigarettes to the others, taking one himself. He lit them with his Zippo lighter, then replaced it carefully in its protective condom. ‘We haven't seen any Senussi in the area,’ he said, pulling on smoke, ‘so this may be our only chance of finding food before we reach the RV. I think we should at least give it a shufti.’

  Copeland regarded him doubtfully, his blue eyes lambent with shadow. ‘The Senussi will have looted it long ago,’ he said.

  ‘Yep, I'm sure they will, but at the last place – near Biska – we saw cattle, and I heard pigs squealing. We might find the same here.’

  ‘The Senussi keep cattle, don't they?’ Rose said, pursing her lips. ‘Why wouldn't they have snaffled them if they had the chance?’

  ‘They don't keep pigs, though,’ Wallace beamed, patting his stomach with a steam-shovel hand as if to emphasize its emptiness. ‘Muslims don't eat pork.’

  ‘I don't think we ought to risk it, skipper,’ Cope said, letting his cigarette dangle from the side of his mouth. ‘The Jerries might find us there, box us in.’

  Caine dribbled smoke through his nostrils. ‘I don't think they'll follow us at night,’ he said. ‘In darkness, a big column would be reduced to five miles an hour on those lava paths. I know it's full moonlight, but don't forget we're still over two hundred miles behind Axis lines – more if Rommel is advancing as fast as they say. They'll have shufti-wallahs up at sparrowfart, and they'll be too confident of catching us in daylight to bother tracking us in the dark. They don't know we've got an LRDG squadron coming to collect us tomorrow.’

  ‘I think we ought to have a look, then,’ Rose said.

  ‘We'll take the wagons a mile on down the road,’ said Caine. ‘Then we'll double back and turn off at this junction. We'll brush out our tyre-marks for the first quarter-mile along the dirt track. If there are any Krauts on our tail, that should put them off the scent.’

  The settlement was a different configuration from the one they'd passed through near Biska. There, the homesteads had been widely dispersed, but here the farms were huddled together in a single group – about a dozen houses built around a large central mud square. The central area was dominated by a water tank on teetering iron stilts and a broken-down windmill, both liberally peppered with bullet holes. The place was eerie in the lapis-lazuli moonlight. A couple of tractors lay on their si
des at the periphery of the square, their motors smashed, corroded parts spread out across the flat earth. Beyond the settlement, towards the hills, hundreds of acres of over-ripe wheat stood bleached and riffling: to the south, the hillside rolled down into a wadi thickly forested with trees.

  The households were all of a standard pattern – flat-roofed angular blocks standing in groves of Aleppo pine, eucalyptus and pencil-cedar, each farm with its own small kitchen-garden of olives, figs and almond trees and its own cluster of outbuildings. The white walls looked clean in the moonlight, but closer up it was clear that the whole place had been thoroughly looted and wrecked. Doors hung off their hinges, windows were jagged shards, the small yards were littered with torn clothing, broken utensils, sticks of splintered furniture.

  There was no sign of life, but as soon as the column pulled up in the square, Caine smelled pig. ‘I'd know that smell anywhere,’ he told Wallace. ‘We used to keep pigs when I was a lad.’

  ‘That explains a lot,’ Wallace chuckled.

  Caine ordered the boys to search the entire settlement, starting with the outhouses, and taking Cope, Wallace and Rose with him, set off for the nearest homestead. They were passing in front of the farm's termite-eaten picket-fence, towards the outbuildings, when Wallace growled. ‘Shh. Hear that?’

  They halted, cocked their ears. Caine heard nothing for a moment, then picked up what Wallace had noticed: a deep panting, coming from the interior of the nearest farm. It was distinctly human, like someone in the grip of a heavy fever. Caine made a silent hand-signal to the others to cover him, and holding his Tommy-gun at the ready, inched towards the gaping black aperture of the homestead's door. The heavy breathing grew louder as he approached. He was within three yards of the door and about to call out when he heard the frantic scuffle of feet on dry stone: something the size of a baby rhinoceros plummeted out of the doorway squealing, charging directly towards him. Caine just had time to take in a bloated body, poisonous pin-prick eyes, a pink snout, long, sharp teeth, when a single shot snapped out from behind. Dodging instinctively, he heard the creature shriek like an enraged infant, saw it pitch over with a round drilled cleanly through its skull. As it slammed to the ground a yard distant, like a heavy, damp sack, he realized that it was an enormous pig.