Pleydell looked worried. ‘It was a bad one, Tom: hit the joint, splintered the bone. In a case like that, there’s always a chance of ulnar nerve palsy. He’s still in shock: touch wood he’ll pull through by morning.’ He glanced at Caine. ‘Sure you’re all right, Tom? You don’t look too hot, either.’
Caine mumbled something, but his words were drowned as the Bombay swept in, a giant black griffin skimming fifteen feet above the line of blazing torches. Her undercarriage hit the surface with a warp of air and an ominous creak of wheels. The drone of her engines was deafening as she taxied to a standstill. The pilot cut engines and the humming died: Pleydell leaned down to grasp the handles at one end of the stretcher; Pickney shuffled round to the other side. Caine beat him to it. ‘Hey, let me do that, Maurice,’ he said.
As he bent to grasp the wooden handles, there was a peehashing in his ears that had nothing to do with the Bombay’s engines. A squadron of heavy bombers was taking off inside his head: a mob of savages was playing his skull with a thumping, kettledrum percussion. Caine missed the stretcher’s handles and staggered forward. He was aware of something collapsing like a dead weight on the playa’s surface but was out cold long before he knew it was himself.
4
The RAF Lysander was a minute from the dropzone when the dispatcher yelled, ‘Prepare to jump.’ With his left hand, Caine clung tightly to the strop clipped to the runningbar near his head and tried to get a purchase on the quivering steel deck. The floor was slick with vomit, the air putrid with the stink of aviation fuel, vibrating with the racket of the Bombay’s twin engines. Caine’s head was spindling, his pulse racing, sweat ribbing his face as he fought to stay focused. There were eleven SAS trainees in the stick, and he was No. 2 – second man out. Only Lieutenant Trevor Sutherland, Black Watch, stood between him and the open door.
The dispatcher bawled, ‘Red on.’ Every muscle in Caine’s body went rigid. Nothing existed but that oblong of light in the plane’s side, the mystic entrance to the slipstream, to the raw yellow surface of the Sinai peninsula a thousand feet below.
The green light twinked: the dispatcher squealed,‘Go.’
Sutherland was gone. Caine heaved his own body towards the door. This was his first jump – first of the half-dozen he had to complete to get his wings and to qualify for his 2 shillings per day parachute pay. He knew he wasn’t going to be a jibber: nothing on earth would stop him now. He teetered in the doorway gasping at the wind on his face, and in that instant he glimpsed Sutherland’s body plummeting helplessly through the sky: his parachute had failed to open and he was tumbling to his death.
Caine awoke bellowing: he was in a hospital room that stank of disinfectant and vomit. Sunlight flooded in slats through a barred window. For a few moments he swished down the tail end of the dream, remembering how it had seemed to him afterwards, swaying at the door, that he’d heard Sutherland scream. The RAF parachute-jump instructors had told him later that this wasn’t possible: the jumper’s voice would have been whipped away by the slipstream. They even doubted that Caine could have reached the door fast enough to see Sutherland’s body plunge into the abyss. He was no longer certain about that himself, but Sutherland’s death had been real enough. Caine had been among the detail sent to retrieve the corpse from the DZ later the same day. Sutherland’s body had been curled up intact in a shallow crater, and Caine knew he’d never forget the expression of sheer terror frozen on the dead man’s face.
Later, the RAF dispatcher had shown him Sutherland’s ringclip – an attachment like a dog’s leash clip – by which the static line was attached to the runningbar in the aircraft. The clip had broken under pressure and had failed to jerk Sutherland’s canopy open. It had been deliberately sawn through: the small ridge of metal left intact was certain to snap under the weight of the parachutist. The dispatcher, who blamed himself for not having spotted the defective clip, had reminded Caine of something his own memory had been trying to deny: that only minutes before takeoff, Caine and Sutherland had swapped parachutes. The sawn-through ringclip had been intended for Caine: Sutherland had died in his place.
The Special Investigation Department – the Redcaps’ plainclothes branch – had interviewed every trainee in the stick, including Copeland, Wallace, Pickney, Trubman, Larousse, Audley and the others, finding no reason why any of them should want to murder Caine. Suspecting political sabotage, they’d handed the case over to Field Security, a division of the Intelligence Corps. Major John Stocker, the Defence Security Officer who’d headed up the investigation, thought the crime pointed to fifth columnists among Egyptian maintenance crews but had never proved anything. The only real result of the case was the banning of Gyppos from work on special service flights.
Caine’s involvement with the SAS had kicked off a few weeks before the incident, when, one night at Shepheard’s Hotel, he’d been accused of impersonating an officer. David Stirling had been there, and had seen off the MP who’d confronted Caine – his old nemesis from the commandos, Major Robin Sears-Beach. At his flat the following morning, Stirling had offered Caine a field commission in the SAS.
This wasn’t pure chance. Stirling admired Caine’s achievement on Runefish, a decoy operation designed to persuade Rommel to invade Egypt instead of going for Malta. The ruse had been effective: Rommel had advanced, believing he’d reach Cairo in a week, only to be thrown back decisively by Claude Auchinleck at Alamein. Although the aftermath hadn’t gone quite as planned – instead of retreating, Rommel had dug in opposite the Eighth Army on the Alamein line – it was a major turning point in the campaign.
Runefish was also a nodal point in Caine’s career: not only had it brought him the DCM and a reputation as one of the best desert warriors in the business, it had also brought him Betty Nolan, a former actress recruited by special ops division G(R) to play the role of ‘Wren First Officer Maddy Rose’ – a GHQ courier bearing the bogus Runefish material. Since then, Nolan had filled up Caine’s life.
Surprisingly, though, he’d hesitated before accepting Stirling’s offer. When Caine joined the army, he’d realized that he had it in him to be a leader – that if he towed the line, the sky was the limit. Even though the gentry still ruled the roost, it wasn’t unheard of for talented privates to end up even as generals.
At the same time, though, Caine wanted promotion on his own terms. It was a kind of squinted vanity, maybe, but he had a reputation for ‘treating orders as a basis for discussion’. He’d already held a commission once in the Royal Engineers, and had lost it because he didn’t see eye to eye with his commanders. He did want his commission back: he thought he deserved it, but he didn’t want to be put in that position again.
He was ready to sacrifice his life for his country, but he didn’t feel that it ought to be squandered. Personally, he reckoned Runefish, at most, a qualified success. Of the twenty-two men he’d led up the Blue, only five had come back – all of them wounded. Most people would have said that it was worth forfeiting a small number of men for the good of the majority, but Caine never saw things that way. He carried a private cross for every man killed in action under his command.
Stirling had told Caine that the SAS was a unit without a rigid chain of command: a unit in which there was comradeship between officers and enlisted men. The idea, he said, was to operate in small groups of maybe five men apiece, each man so highly trained that the group could swing a hammer out of all proportion to its size. The SAS way was economy of force. Though parachute trained, they weren’t conventional airborne troops: they operated behind enemy lines using stealth if possible, force if necessary. They would never fight a dingdong scrap with big battalions, never be used as ‘cannon fodder’.
Caine didn’t buy any of this. He’d heard the ‘rank doesn’t matter’ guff jawed about in the commandos by officers who privately despised the enlisted men and had no intention of giving up their privileged status. The ‘no cannon fodder’ idea wasn’t original either. The brass had made the same claim a
bout the commandos but had wasted their training on badly planned raids, delaying actions, massed advances-to-contact with bayonets fixed. Still, whatever pie-in-the-sky Stirling was peddling, Caine had eventually let himself be persuaded. He didn’t want an RTU to the Sappers, and with the old Middle East Commando disbanded, there really didn’t seem to be any other place to go.
He’d agreed to join the SAS on one condition, though: that his mates Copeland and Wallace would be taken on, too. Stirling had signed them up, had even offered them promotion: the reversal of his normal practice of reducing NCOs to troopers on recruitment. Copeland had been made up to sergeant. Wallace had scoffed at promotion and remained a trooper – the best rank ever invented, he maintained. Two more of Caine’s mates from the Runefish op had volunteered for the SAS: medical orderly Maurice Pickney and signaller Taffy Trubman. The overweight Trubman had dropped out of the course but, not wishing to let a first-class W/T operator slip through his fingers, Stirling had kept him on anyway.
Caine hadn’t been awake long when a FANY nurse bustled into the room and informed him he was in the 15th Scottish Military Hospital. He’d been shipped in on a stretcher the previous day, she said, together with an SAS trooper named Preston. Caine had been out cold for twenty-four hours, suffering from delayed shock and concussion. When he asked about the trooper, though, the nurse’s face went tight: he knew at once that Preston hadn’t made it.
She changed the dressings on Caine’s head and arm and left him brooding on the inequality of war – why Preston, not him? Caine had been in harm’s way more times than he’d had cold breakfasts, yet here he was, still alive, while Preston was dead. The worst thing was that the longer you survived, the closer your death sentence seemed to hang over you – it was like getting near the end of the pack in a game of Snap when no one had snapped yet. The spring was always winding up.
He dozed off: he dreamed of Betty Nolan, and the three Huns he’d had to kill with his bare hands to liberate her. When he awoke, he found himself gazing into her seagreen eyes. He blinked, thinking that he was still dreaming, but when she picked up one of his scarred, calloused hands between her two smaller ones, he could feel her flesh and bloodwarmth flowing into him. She was real, and her presence in the room was magical – the drab monochrome sterility of the place seemed to explode into brilliant colour. There could never be anything common about Nolan, Caine thought. She was perched elegantly on the side of his bed, her well-turned legs folded, looking like a model for a recruiting poster: khaki drill bushshirt and highwaisted trousers, triple pips on the shoulderstraps denoting the honorary rank of captain that went with her job in G(RF), the new raiding-forces planning cell. Above her left breast pocket she wore the ribbon of the George Cross she’d won on the Runefish op.
Nolan’s corngold hair was rich and heavy. She had let it grow out since they’d first met, and now wore it combed back on one side and swinging forward on the other, Rita Hayworth-style, allowing a single kiss curl to caress her cheek. The eyes were soft, filmy with what might have been suppressed tears, her lips slightly parted, displaying the charming slight overlap of her front teeth. Caine felt her breath on his forehead as she bent down to brush his lips with her own. ‘Oh, heck,’ she whispered, sitting back, pointing to a half-bottle of Haig’s whisky and a packet of Player’s Navy Cut cigarettes on the bedside locker. ‘Now I’m going to have to give you those.’
Caine put his arm around her slim waist, feeling the curves beneath the starched uniform. When he looked into her eyes, it was like gazing at a miniature lightshow inside crystals, depths within depths. He saw the hint of challenge there, coupled with the melting submission he’d noticed the first time they’d ever kissed – that dreamy, faraway look that drove him crazy, that made him want to undress her then and there. He kissed her open mouth. ‘I’ve missed you,’ he said. ‘I can’t wait to be with you.’
Nolan kissed him back. ‘I suppose catching a Blighty one – or two – wasn’t all bad,’ she said.
‘Now you’re here, it was worth every twinge.’
Caine’s eyes sought out the scar on the side of Nolan’s neck, where, four months previously, a Hun bullet had punched through her flesh, just missing her collar bone. It reminded him of the last action they’d fought on the Runefish mission, an action which, at the time, had seemed without the slightest chance of survival. They had survived against all the odds, though, and every day since then had seemed an unexpected bonus.
Nolan extricated herself from his grip, rocked back, fished in her bag. She came out with a new, brass-coloured Yale key on a keyring. She gave it to Caine. ‘What’s this?’ he asked.
‘It’s the key to my new flat. I’ve been moved.’
Caine opened his mouth to ask why, and she placed a finger on his lips. ‘There’s no problem,’ she said. ‘The old place was compromised by Eisner, and … with his threat and everything … you know …’
Caine frowned. Before the Nazi spy Johann Eisner had escaped from custody three months earlier, he’d told one of his interrogators, ‘I’ll see that Nolan bitch in hell, if it’s the last thing I do.’ Not only was Nolan the one witness to his rape and murder of a woman in a Cairo nightspot, but she had also indirectly brought about his arrest during Op Runefish.
‘Just a precaution,’ Nolan said. ‘I’m sharing the place with a Wren – Pat Rigby.’
‘Pity,’ Caine grinned, taking the key. He was about to kiss her again when the FANY nurse appeared and announced that visiting time was over. Nolan got up hastily and gave him a peck on the forehead. ‘Don’t leave it too long,’ she said.
5
On the stage of the Kit-Kat Cabaret, Hekmeth Fahmi gazed back at the sea of smoky faces, barely visible to her in the subdued light. She soaked up the applause, tilted her golden body in the spotlights’ flush, swung her cape, blew kisses, flung back wild chestnut hair. Men in the audience wolfwhistled, shouted encores, tossed flowers. She caught a red rose and held the stem between her teeth: the cheering reached a crescendo.
Tonight, Hekmeth had certainly lived up to her reputation as ‘Cairo’s most rousing exotic dancer’. She had capped her famous bellydance routine with the cloakdance, an act that was both aesthetically beautiful and stunningly erotic. Wielded with skill, the heavy cloak could produce perfect helixes, vortices, swirls and veronicas that seemed to cast a silver shimmer around Hekmeth’s equally perfect body in a continuous diaphanous flux. The act was a difficult one and needed constant practice but, once again, the crowd had loved it.
With a last shower of blown kisses, she draped the cloak around her bare shoulders and hurried offstage. One of her assistants, Hayek, a beady-eyed, cask-chested Turk with a soft paunch and legs like palm-planks, had positioned himself in the tunnel. ‘Excuse me, miss,’ he said. ‘The major is waiting for you in your dressing room.’
Hekmeth’s musselshell eyes flickered like green switchblades in the lamplight. ‘What the hell is he doing there?’ she demanded. ‘Why did you let him in?’
Hayek shifted his bulk from one treetrunk leg to the other, blinking: Hekmeth was probably half his weight: her head scarcely reached his shoulder, yet she was like a paperwasp when aroused. ‘He insisted, miss. Said he had something for you. Something important.’
Hekmeth didn’t take her eyes off Hayek for a long minute. Then she inhaled sharply, flounced off down the tunnel. She pushed open her dressing-room door, saw Major Clive Beeston standing stock still by the divan, his back to the full-length mirror. He was only a little taller than Hekmeth, and perhaps forty-five years old, with a narrow cleanshaven face lined with deep furrows, a yellow moustache, grey eyes under goldwire spectacles. He wore smart battledress and carried a service cap with the Intelligence Corps badge tucked neatly under his arm in the prescribed manner.
Hekmeth strode up to him, dropping her cloak, exhibiting her body clad in its tiny black bikini decorated with sequins and tassels: she wore concentric necklaces of rare beads, hoop earrings, bracelets and anklets that c
hinked as she moved: her small hands and feet were stained brown with henna. Beeston watched her weak-kneed, breathless, taking in her small but flawlessly proportioned body: erect breasts, strong hips, the ripe belly with the jewel in the navel that automatically drew a man’s gaze. Her face was mobile and expressive rather than beautiful. Her lips weren’t unusually full, yet there was something she did with them, some soft puckering of lips over teeth, that was irresistibly seductive. Her skin was smooth and tawny, her green eyes – inherited from her Circassian grandmother – were of an almost feline intensity, her hair was an exotic, floating wilderness of bushy brown. Beeston knew that he would do anything to have her: lie, betray his comrades, give away secrets – perhaps even kill.
She halted in front of him, touched his lips with a finger, picked caressingly at his breast pocket, pressed her mouth close to his ear. ‘What are you doing here, Clive?’ she whispered.
Beeston tried to slip his arms round her waist, but she giggled teasingly, angled away from the groping hands. The major gasped, aching to take her, to press her down on the divan with her legs around him, to explore her, to possess her completely. Despite her seductive manner, though, he sensed that she was angry with him. ‘I got the address,’ he stammered. ‘I thought I’d surprise you.’ His voice was husky with lust.
‘I told you never to come here, darling.’
Beeston clenched his fists as if to stop his hands seizing her. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘but I had to see you. I couldn’t wait.’ He paused and looked at her with beseeching eyes. ‘You don’t know what a risk I took getting it. I had to approach the special allocations officer and feed him a cock-and-bull story about security measures. If I hadn’t been with the DMI, I shouldn’t have got away with it at all and, in any case, if anyone asks who enquired he’ll remember it was me.’
Death or Glory II: The Flaming Sword: The Flaming Sword Page 3
