Death or Glory II: The Flaming Sword: The Flaming Sword

by Michael Asher

  Hooker, the half-British, half-Belgian son of a Nile Delta cotton manager, found it hard to believe that the skinny type with the jerky movements, the capybara features and the eggshell skull was really the legendary Monty. His eccentric dress – shapeless woollypully, buttondown shirt, civvie corduroy pants, and tankie beret festooned with unit badges – gave such an odd impression that for one dizzy moment Hooker wondered if he’d happened on a Mad Hatter’s tea party.

  Hooker coughed smoke, drooled tea. For the past fortnight he’d been tramping around the Green Mountains of Cyrenaica dressed as a Senussi, speaking Arabic like a native, gathering intelligence on the possible deployment of chemical weapons by the Axis. His mission had been cut short when he’d walked obliquely into an ambush being set up by a platoon of the 999 Afrika Division. Caught off guard, both sides had fired blind. It had been Hooker’s lucky day – the round in his neck was hell on fire but hadn’t done any vital damage. He’d still managed to tramp thirty miles off the mountains to the emergency RV.

  He felt Monty’s gaze fixed on him. ‘I don’t want to press you, Eric,’ he coaxed, ‘but the presence of chemical weapons in the Green Mountains could be a serious threat to Lightfoot.’

  Hooker shovelled a breath, felt all eyes upon him. ‘I understand, sir,’ he said, his voice strained but even. ‘There’s no doubt about it. The Senussi are being used as guineapigs for testing some kind of poison gas.’

  A tremor ran through the audience: Hooker’s expression had become distant, as if he were witnessing some horrific scene visible only to himself. ‘Ghastly stuff is going on there,’ he said, shivering. ‘The centre of all the activity is a crater they call Il-Citadello – the Citadel.’

  ‘The Citadel,’ de Guingand echoed. ‘That name rings a bell.’

  ‘It’s occupied by special troops,’ Hooker went on. ‘A company of 999 Afrika Division’

  ‘Those bastards,’ whooped DMI Bill Williams, a bearlike officer who bawled rather than spoke and whose lenses were so thick that his eyes could not be seen for their reflections. His enormous frame and stentorian voice were misleading. The bluff and hearty manner concealed a sharp intellect that had pitched him from subaltern to general’s rank in little more than a year. ‘Triple Nine is a penal unit recruited from convicted felons,’ he said. ‘Thieves, murderers, thugs, rapists, scum of the Nazi prison system.’

  ‘I thought they were the ones running the country,’ de Guingand chuckled. A splutter of laughter spread round the table.

  Hooker nodded, his eyes blank with pain. The GOC’s features reminded him less of a capybara now, more of a Jack Russell terrier. ‘The Senussi kept on about a fellow they called al-Malaikat al-Mowt. It means “the Angel of Death” in Arabic. They gabbed on about this chap as if he were the grey eminence behind everything. When I pushed it, though, no one knew a darn thing about him, not his nationality, nothing. Some reckoned he was Vichy French, some Jerry, others Italian – I even heard Greek mooted. Seemed to think he was some sort of demon incarnate … some of them swore they’d seen this fellow at the site of massacres, swooping out of the sky like a giant bat.’

  Monty raised his eyebrows. ‘All right, Eric, but let’s leave Senussi superstition aside. What about this chemical agent?’

  ‘From what I gathered, sir, hundreds of Senussi have been forcibly moved to the Citadel over the past few months. If anyone resists, the Huns torch their camp, shoot the men, rape the women, abduct the kids. The Senussi reckon they’ve never seen it so bad, not even when the Ities stuck them in concentration camps in the twenties.’

  He rasped another breath. ‘In the Citadel they’re put in a holding compound. There are other prisoners there, I was told – mostly Ities who occupied the place before the Hun came: ex-colony farmers, Italian forces, AWOLs, political exiles – Bolshies mostly. Every morning, the Jerries choose a group of men, women and children as that day’s test subjects. They’re marched to an observation area. That’s where they’re exposed to the gas: the tests are observed by boffins in white coats.’

  ‘And what are the effects?’ Williams boomed.

  ‘Fear,’ Hooker said. ‘A fear that makes you think everyone is out to kill you, that gives you the urge to lash out at any stranger who gets near. At least, that’s what I was told by the few Senussi I met who’d been exposed to it and recovered. Apparently some go bonkers and get over it quickly, others never recover. One fellow I heard of cut the throats of his own children, wife and two brothers, then topped himself. Two parties of men tore each other apart with their bare hands. A woman who’d been in the Citadel invited three Senussi to roll her in the hay, then cut their balls off with a rusty knife. Bled to death, the lot of ’em …’

  ‘Good God,’ Monty grunted.

  Hooker closed his eyes, his senses beginning to drift. The wound in his neck was throbbing savagely.

  ‘Sir,’ Airey appealed to the GOC, ‘I really think he should have that wound looked at …’

  ‘It’s not a problem,’ Hooker wheezed. ‘I’m all right, sir.’

  ‘Did you see any of this with your own eyes?’ Monty enquired.

  Hooker gulped, put a hand to his throat. ‘I did see some things I’ve never seen before. Men and women running round their camps stark naked, tearing out their hair, howling like animals. Citadel returnees throwing themselves over cliffs. One morning they took me to see this chap hiding in a cave. They reckoned he’d cut his father’s block off with an axe then butchered his mother and sister. From what I could tell, he was blubbering on about demons, and the Angel of Death.’ Hooker halted for another brief introspection. ‘I was about to leave, when this chap peers at me from the shadows of the cave. My God, his face: the sheer horror on it – you’d think he’d glimpsed Old Nick himself …’

  The officers stared back at him, transfixed. Most were war veterans who’d got their knees brown long ago, but Hooker’s tale had induced an atmosphere of dark foreboding, as if evil spirits were lurking there in the gloom. ‘My God,’ the GOC said again.

  He was about to add something when the tentflap was thrown back, letting in a gush of warm sunlight, wafting with it the dapper figure of Major Paul Stanton, the TacHQ medical officer. ‘That’s quite enough, sir,’ he announced fearlessly. ‘This man’s got a bullet in his throat and it needs to be surgically removed pronto. Could you let me have my patient now, please?’

  Monty spent the breakfast break strutting along the seashore, hands clasped behind his back, like an exotic wading bird. He was worried and, as if to prove it, the old battle scar on his chest was acting up. It brought back Ypres, 1916, where, as a subaltern in the Warwicks, he’d headed a bayonet charge. There he was, waving his sword about like a cretin, until a Hun round had smacked into his chest and blasted out the other side. If it hadn’t been for the sheer luck of one of his men falling dead on top of him, shielding him from further harm, he might not have come through it at all. He’d survived by chance and willpower, got promoted captain, got awarded the DSO. It was only by a whisker that he’d missed the Victoria Cross.

  A different war, a different world. The subaltern of Ypres was now General Officer Commanding Eighth Army. Taking over from Auchinleck that August, he’d been shocked to discover that the rank-and-file had acquired a loathing for the general staff. Enlisted men would turn their backs on his car rather than salute him. In his entire career, he’d never encountered such low morale.

  Careful PR had changed all that. He’d spent weeks visiting units in the field, shaking hands, doling out endless rounds of ‘V’ cigarettes, making certain his face was known to the men. Speaking in the down-to-earth language they understood, he’d dismissed everything the Eighth Army had done previously as ‘wrong’ and made it clear that the only general capable of defeating Rommel was Monty himself.

  The Lightfoot breakout was due to kick off on 23 October, and Montgomery had poured vast resources into its secret complement, Bertram, a brilliant and complex deception strategy. Bertram actually hinged on
two simple factors – the date of the offensive, and its direction. Here, in the midst of stark and coverless desert, where a man could spot enemy movement miles away, the GOC had to make the Axis believe that his forces would use a route different from the one planned, on a date other than the one intended. To convince them, he and his planners had to devise one of the greatest illusions in history.

  Even the threat of chemical weapons had to be judged in the light of this illusion. Poison gas deployed during Lightfoot’s early hours might be disastrous: the same substance delivered two days later could be a damp squib. The questions that concerned GOC most were how to use his intelligence sources and how to manipulate his actions to Bertram’s best advantage.

  Monty joined the rest of the crew around the table in his mobile command vehicle, a giant pantechnicon the size of a mobile library, festooned with maps. As he entered, John Airey called his attention to a stereoscope set up astride a pair of aerial photos lying on the tabletop. As chief of G(R), Airey was Hooker’s boss, a foxylooking needle of a man in wireframed spectacles, with torpedo shoulders and a narrow waist. Monty peered through the lenses at the aerial shots. ‘This is the Citadel,’ Airey told him. ‘The only direct Int. we have on it was gathered by a commando party that happened on the place during the Runefish mission, last June …’

  Monty looked up at him. ‘Runefish? I read that report. Amazing feat. Pulled off by that ex-Sapper commando sergeant … Abel no … Caine, wasn’t it? And the young woman … what was her name?’

  ‘Nolan.’ Airey nodded. ‘Elizabeth Nolan. They gave her the George Cross …’

  ‘That’s right, I remember. That slip of a girl could teach us all a thing or two about guts, eh? Magnificent. What happened to them by the way?’

  ‘I’m proud to say that Nolan is one of mine,’ said Airey. ‘She’s with the new G(RF) raiding forces planning cell at GHQ. Caine and what was left of his boys mostly got mopped up by Stirling’s SAS.’

  Monty pulled a face. ‘I’ve met Stirling,’ he said. ‘Spoilt brat, absolutely potty. His SAS mob have made a pig’s ear of every op.’

  Airey made a sound in his throat that might or might not have been agreement. ‘Getting back to the photos, sir,’ he went on, ‘you can see clearly that there are signs of Axis activity in the crater … tented camps, what look like a prisoner compound and admin block, MT park … no sign of a production area or storage tanks, but …’ He pointed to a curving dark line. ‘There is a small-gauge spur line, which disappears under the rock overhang. Leaves the crater by way of a narrow defile. If you look a bit further down here, sir, you’ll see that there’s an airfield under construction nearby. That’s where the railway terminates … looks as if they’re building a warehouse there too.’

  Monty put the stereoscope aside, squeezed his narrow chin between finger and thumb. ‘So the storage tanks and production area are underground?’ he asked. ‘The railway shifts gas cylinders to the airfield, where they’re loaded on to planes?’

  Airey stood up straight, stretched cramped limbs, removed his glasses. ‘That’s about the size of it, sir – or will be, when the airfield’s complete.’

  ‘Good. Well done, John. Now let’s study this, gentlemen. Take your seats, please.’ There was a scuffing of chairs as the officers took their places around the table. Montgomery steepled slender hands. ‘Have we any idea what this agent is? I mean, what exactly are we up against?’

  The massive Williams nodded to a thin waif of a major in ill-fitting KDs sitting quietly at the end of the table. He had a hairless pink face and was bald except for tufts of hair sprouting above each ear. ‘This is Major Cyril Beacham,’ he announced in foghorn tones, ‘one of the top Ordnance Corps boffins on chemical warfare.’

  Beacham turned pinker, his eyes glued to a dossier open in front of him. ‘Er … Well, sir,’ he stuttered, eyes still downcast, ‘I … er … have several reports here from MI6, dating back as early as 1938, about what we call a … a DA … a “disorienting agent” named Lysergsäure Diethylamid – commercial name, Olzon-13. It’s been under research by the Sandoz pharmaceutical company in Zurich for years. Now, the effects of Olzon-13 seem to match those described by Captain Hooker. Basically, it induces the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia in healthy subjects. That means intense suspicion of others and a tendency to act aggressively towards them. In a war situation, that could mean armed men turning their weapons on each other. A standard respirator would give some protection, but this agent requires only microscopic amounts to be effective. As far as we know, there’s no antidote, but we might find one given time.’

  There was silence while the staff took this in. Once again the hiatus was broken by Monty. ‘Thank you, Cyril,’ he beamed. ‘So, we know where it’s coming from, and what it is. The big question is, how to make absolutely certain it’s out of the picture.’

  De Guingand chewed a pencil thoughtfully. ‘Two options, sir,’ he said. ‘Air or land. Air would be preferable – quick and clean …’

  ‘Not effective, though,’ Bill Williams lunged in. ‘Bombing raids are hit or miss affairs at the best of times.’

  Monty’s beady gaze shifted to Air Vice-Marshal Coningham, who gestured towards a dishevelled RAF squadron leader at the end of the table – a squat man wearing a flying jacket over his khakis: blue chin, bushy eyebrows, carroty hair. ‘Squadron Leader Mark Bentham,’ Coningham said. ‘He’s had personal experience of the Citadel.’

  ‘Certainly have, sir,’ Bentham said in a smoky voice. ‘Very nearly lived to regret it, too. I flew recce over that crater when the first reports came in. They’ve got the approach sewn up tight as a duck’s proverbial – whole show is protected by ranks of radar detectors and scores of 40mm ackack guns. I took a fortymil shell in the tailplane. Only got out by the skin of my teeth … Thing is, sir, the fact that all the key plant is underground, in rock bunkers, would rule out an approach from that particular angle, but it wouldn’t mean –’

  ‘It’s obvious to me,’ the GOC cut him off rudely, ‘that if all the key installations are below ground, an airstrike isn’t even an option.’

  The squadron leader stared at Monty flabbergasted, the wind taken out of his sails. He opened his mouth, shut it again, glanced expectantly at Coningham.

  The air vice-marshal frowned, shifted uncomfortably in his seat, took a long breath. ‘I think that might be a rather hasty conclusion, sir,’ he said in a clipped, pedantic tone. ‘I believe the squadron leader was going on to say, that, since the enemy will have to bring the gas out of the bunker sooner or later, and will presumably shift it by train, the best approach would be to wait until that point in time and send in our strike while it is vulnerable, that is, while it is being moved. We could set up an OP in the area – a G(R) team with a wireless, say – who would keep a twenty-four-hour watch on the railway, and vector us in …’

  The GOC was already shaking his head. ‘No, no, Mary. Our air resources are too precious to be squandered in that way. The losses would be far too high to contemplate …’

  ‘Excuse me, sir,’ Coningham insisted, evidently irritated by the GOC’s refusal to listen. ‘Our assessment is that, using this approach, our losses would be no more than 10 per cent.’

  Montgomery still wasn’t listening. ‘Nonsense,’ he scoffed. ‘No, my mind’s made up, Mary. Our only option is a sabotage raid: we need to get men inside those caves.’

  There was an awkward silence as the officers mulled over this statement. To most, Coningham’s proposal seemed sound: they had never heard Monty so apparently inimical to air power. And if the GOC had already decided on strategy, why bother consulting the experts in the first place?

  At last, Williams said, ‘It would have to be a special service unit, sir. What about the LRDG? They’re the only decent raiding outfit we have.’

  ‘They aren’t trained in sabotage,’ de Guingand said curtly. ‘Their role is forward reconnaissance. No, with the commandos gone, the only group capable of doing this job is the SAS.�
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  Monty made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a raspberry. ‘That bunch of misfits? By God, we’re really scraping the barrel.’

  There was an uncomfortable shifting of feet and elbows: it subsided only when Airey brought out two sheets of pink foolscap from his folder and passed them to Montgomery. ‘This letter was handed in at our Cairo office yesterday by SAS sergeant Harold Copeland,’ he said. ‘It was addressed to him, smuggled out of the Green Mountains by a G(R) agent. Perhaps you should take a shufti, sir.’

  With a mystified glance, Monty spread the pink sheets out on the table in front of him. The text was handwritten in ink in an italic script whose neatness was marred by smudges and crossings out. Although perfectly intelligible, the content was so full of clangers it had obviously been written by a foreigner. Monty read it through with mounting interest: it was a catalogue of horrors and atrocities committed by German forces in the Green Mountains – murder, rape, arson, abduction, massacre and the use of human prisoners for testing chemicals. Monty saw that it closely corroborated what Hooker had told them earlier, but what surprised him was the conclusion: ‘You, my dear Harry, and your good friends, Thomas and Fred, and the other boys. You must help us as we helped you when you were here. You are our only hope. For the love of Jesus Christ, I beg you to come and set us free.’ It was signed ‘Angela Brunetto’.