‘Was that you and Gibbo bazookaing that lorry just now?’ he asked.
‘Yep. Stroke o’ luck, I reckon.’
‘Not luck. Bloody good shooting, mate.’
The landscape to their rear was clear of smoke, and Dumper pointed out a string of black beads on the skyline – the second Jerry column. It was still some miles away but it was closing in fast. ‘We’ve gotta get out of here, skipper,’ Dumper huffed, ‘or we’ll get fried.’
At that moment, three figures emerged from the sandmist. It was Wallace and Cope, dragging with them a Jerry prisoner. ‘Hey, skipper,’ Wallace rumbled, ‘look what the cat dragged in.’
The Jerry looked aggrieved and irritated rather than afraid. His long face was dark with scabs and burns, his eyes redburred, his hair matted blood. ‘I know you said no prisoners,’ Copeland cut in, ‘but I reckon we need to know why this column’s here.’
Caine weighed it up – as usual Copeland had grasped the situation with remarkable clarity. He did have questions to ask, but what they would do with the prisoner after that, he didn’t know.
‘Tie him in the other jeep,’ he said. ‘We’ll take him with us. Are all the boys clear of the fire zone?’
‘Yep,’ Cope said, as Wallace hurried the German off towards Dorothy. ‘I didn’t see Audley, though.’
‘He’s still in his jeep,’ Dumper chortled, gesturing his maimed hand behind them. ‘The bugger must like it there.’
There was a sputter of rifle and sub-machine-gun fire from the direction of the blazing German trucks. The SAS men ducked as rounds huzzed, snatched air. Caine peered into smoke, made out dark figures skirmishing forward. ‘Here they come,’ he spat. ‘Start her up, Harry.’
Cope pivoted into the drivingseat as Wallace ran back and jumped in behind. The big man braced the Vickers and made a second attempt to clear them. Caine popped Tommy-gun taps; Dumper blebbed rifle rounds; Copeland toed the starter. The engine stuttered, faltered, died. Caine’s heart twisted: he remembered a round clunking through the radiator. He potshotted Jerries racing out of the sandmist, getting closer now. He saw a German topple. Cope tried again, still no luck. ‘The motor’s hit,’ Caine gasped.
‘It ain’t,’ Dumper soussed. ‘I bleedin’ checked it, di’n’ I ?’
The engine engaged. Copeland revved, jabbed the horn, sounded the three short, three long blast signal for Move out, follow me. As he racked up first gear, there was a delighted howl from Wallace: he’d finally managed to get the guns cleared. He ratcheted rounds into chambers. Caine just had time to hear the engines of the other wagons firing up before the sound was drowned out by the thunder of twinned Vickers ‘K’s.
15
The four vehicles streaked away from the battlesite, each enveloped in a bolus of fine dust, leaving neat sets of double rail tracks, white on the dark serir. Caine guided the column towards the hogsback ridge he had pointed out to Audley earlier. It was less than a hundred feet high, he reckoned – a single spine of shattered putty-coloured shale stretching across the plain – but it would give temporary cover while they made for the dunes. They’d had a good headstart. Of the first Axis column, only two wagons were serviceable: with the dead and wounded, it would take the Hun time to get their act together. As far as that went, Caine’s ploy had worked. The other column was too far away to catch up easily, as long as the SAS didn’t hit a stick. Caine closed his eyes and said a silent prayer to a Providence he didn’t really believe in that the going would stay solid.
‘Skipper,’ Wallace rasped from behind, ‘there’s a smoke cloud over that ridge. Not dust, know what I mean? Smoke.’
Caine shoved back his goggles, observed the ridge through his binos – with the jeep rattling along at top speed, it was hard to keep the lenses trained. For a second or two, though, he managed to zero in: Big Fred’s ‘Mark 1 SAS eyeball’ had again hit the spot. Tatters of dirty grey smoke were straggling over the outcrop, too dark and static to be dust. There was no doubt about it – something behind the hogsback was burning, or had been until recently. Caine kicked himself mentally for not having clocked the smoke in the rush to get away. The Hun column had come from this direction. Had they left behind a damaged wagon? Was there a nasty surprise waiting for the SAS there? Or was it something else? Subconsciously, Caine hedged around the obvious explanation, the answer to the riddle that had been tugging at him since they’d first sighted the enemy: What happened to the LRDG?
If they hadn’t just come out of a ferocious contact, the sight that met their eyes as the column swung round the butt end of the ridge ten minutes later would have made them spew. The gutted frames of the five LRDG Chevvies lay in a rough semicircle, each in her own patch of scorched and bloodspattered ground strewn with blackened bits of motor, twisted weapon shards, reeking tarpiles that had once been tyres, shapeless ammoboxes, bloated jerrycans, melted-down dashboards with wiring spilling out like flayed intestines. Bodies were everywhere – smouldering, lying humped in the sand, appallingly burnt or disfigured, maimed, disembowelled, surrounded by torn, blistered and bloody body parts. Caine saw one corpse that was black from head to foot, limbs brittle as charcoal, eyes eggpoached in their sockets. Not far away he saw an enormous black Nubian vulture perched like an incubus on a man’s chest, pecking out his tongue. The pall of putrid smoke that lay over the scene smelled like the stench from a burnt-out abattoir.
Cope stopped the column twenty yards from the wrecks, and they studied the scene in silence. The battle here had been short, sharp and extremely violent. ‘That ground patrol didn’t do all this on their own,’ Dumper mouthed. ‘There was aircraft in it, I’ll be bound.’
‘Yep,’ Wallace agreed. ‘Must have been early morning. We never heard nothing, know what I mean? Them wrecks is very near burnt out.’
‘An ambush,’ Caine concluded. ‘The Krauts lured them here, away from the RV maybe. Banjoed them from behind the ridge.’
He snatched his Tommy-gun from the seatbrace and made a move to jump out, but Dumper gripped his arm. ‘Take it easy, skipper,’ he growled. ‘The Hun has a nasty habit of boobytrappin’ wrecks like this. Could of sown Thermos bombs, AP mines, any shit.’
With a sudden burst of fury, Caine raised his Tommy-gun, cocked it, stitched half a mag of .45-calibre bullets across a broad arc. The others winced at the racket: the rounds punted up puffs of sand and gravel but set off no explosions. The vulture spread ragged wings and lurched clumsily into the air, a long ribbon of black and red flesh hanging from its beak. Caine fired his last round at it, but missed. As he made his weapon safe he noticed Copeland giving him a tightlipped frown. ‘Skipper,’ he said, a hint of exasperation in his voice, ‘there’s nothing we can do here. If we delay, we’re just handing ourselves to Jerry on a plate.’
‘Them aircraft could come back, too,’ Dumper added, and Caine could hear the apprehension in his voice.
‘Listen,’ Wallace grated.
Caine cocked his ear, thinking that the big man was referring to Axis motors. Instead, from somewhere nearby, there came a faint but distinctly human moan. It came again, louder this time. ‘Someone’s alive,’ Caine said, looking incredulous. ‘There’s a survivor here.’
A second later, all four of them were out of the jeep with their weapons at the ready, spreading out ten yards apart, sticking to the ground Caine had cleared with his Thompson. The corpses were clad in tattered, ripped and scorched British Army battledress with greatcoats and cap comforters, confirming that the engagement must have been fought in the early morning, before they’d stripped down to their shorts. That was more than six hours ago, and Caine wondered what the Jerries had been up to since. The surface was chopped up by superimposed tyretracks, showing that there’d been a lot of manoeuvring of wagons, but that didn’t tell him much.
Caine crouched to examine a cadaver lying chest up: a bearded face, blue with death. The trooper’s stomach was gouged out, a crimson pit full of black blood and greyish-white guts. The lower part of his left leg h
ad been ripped off; the notched white bone of a kneejoint protruded. Caine stood up and clocked Harry Copeland leaning over another body – a headless man slumped chestdown over a Bren-gun. Cope looked as if he was wondering whether to salvage the weapon. ‘Don’t touch it, Sarn’t,’ Dumper yelled from behind him.
The little Cockney waddled up and asked Copeland to stand back. He lay down full length behind the corpse, extended a stubby arm around its chest and yanked it over on top of him. There was a flash, a deafening spattercake thud, a gout of gravel and sandsmoke. Caine and the others hit the deck. The Bren flew into the air, zeezed over Copeland’s head, smacked earth five yards away, a bent and broken gunmetal spider. Dumper, protected from the blast by the headless corpse, jumped up with a scowl on his face. ‘Grenade,’ he spat.
‘How the hell did they know we were coming?’ Caine heard Cope demand.
‘They didn’t,’ Dumper growled. ‘They’re just a bunch of shicers.’
Caine heard a motor purr behind him and turned to see Audley approaching at the wheel of Dorothy. There was a hint of querulousness behind the fading patent smile. Larousse was poised over the guns behind him, perusing the scene with watchful black eyes: the German POW lurched uncomfortably in the co-driver’s seat, his hands lashed to the pintlemount of the forward gun. He looked scared now, as if anticipating punishment for the carnage in front of them.
Caine waved Audley back. ‘There might be someone alive here,’ he bawled. ‘Go and keep an eye on the enemy.’
‘We haven’t got time for this, Caine,’ Audley said, his voice cracking. ‘They’re right on our tails.’
‘We’re not ditching any wounded.’
Audley tried to switch on his engaging smile but couldn’t quite manage it. He had just turned the jeep when Dumper yelled, ‘Over here, boss.’
The surviving LRDG man was lying in a shallow depression behind a nest of boulders, where he’d been invisible from a distance. As the four of them closed in on his position, a distinctly cultured English voice groaned weakly, ‘Don’t come … any closer. I’m booby … trapped.’
Caine scoured the area with hooded eyes. Once again, though, it was Wallace who clocked the obstacle. ‘Tripwire, skipper,’ he said. ‘Over there, in the rocks.’
It took Caine a moment to spot the wire. He knelt down on one knee, slinging his Tommy-gun across his back. ‘Fred,’ he said, ‘I want you to go and get Pickney. The rest of you keep back. I’ll see if I can disarm whatever’s on the end of that wire.’
Cope was starting to fidget. ‘Tom,’ he said, ‘the Jerries’ll be here any minute.’
‘I know,’ Caine replied, ironfaced. ‘Audley already said that.’
He fell on his belly and started to crawl towards the nest of stones, keeping his eyes fixed on the tripwire. One end was tied to a peg stuck in the ground, the other disappeared behind the rocks. It took him only a minute to find the ‘spudmasher’ grenade attached to the end – the wire had been tied to a ring on the bomb’s arming pin. Caine’s fingers, deft from years of tuning engines, quickly secured the pin and detached the ring from it. ‘All clear,’ he murmured.
He looked down into the depression and saw lying there on his back in a patch of goredyed sand an officer he recognized. It was Captain Olly Roland of the LRDG, the man who was to have commanded their escort. Caine shuffled quickly down to him and saw that the skin of his scalp had been peeled back, hair and all, like a flap of thick parchment, exposing a mass of oily blood vessels and grey matter. Roland didn’t try to look at Caine: his face was a sootblack mask: there were two vacant dark caverns where the eyes had once been. Both his hands had been sheared off, probably by a bomb, Caine thought, because his arms now ended in cooked black stumps, which he held crossed over his chest like a dead Egyptian pharoah. He had an ugly gunshot wound in the shoulder with an exit hole so big Caine thought it must have been made with a round as thick as a man’s thumb. One of his legs lay at a crooked angle, reduced to streamers of roasted flesh and sawtoothed bone. Roland’s bearded face was covered in dried blood that had cracked like old leather, the blackened skin taut from pain and loss of blood. That he was still alive, Caine couldn’t credit.
‘You’re all right, sir,’ he said, his voice hollow. ‘The orderly’s on his way.’
Roland’s empty eyesockets stared up at the cloudless sky. ‘Caine? That you?’ he croaked, his voice a wispy trickle.
Caine slid out his waterbottle, uncorked it, held it to Roland’s broken lips.
‘Just a sip, sir,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll get you out of here.’
Roland drank a little. When Caine lowered the waterbottle, the officer’s scabbed lips were moving as if he were making an effort to speak. Caine put an ear close to his mouth.
‘Don’t be … a stupid … bugger,’ Roland hissed, so faintly that Caine had to strain to make out what he was saying. ‘I’m not going anywhere. I just needed … to tell you. The Boche. Knew we were here. They knew. Someone. Told them.’
‘That’s impossible, sir,’ Caine said softly.
Roland panted, licking the bleeding, suppurating lips with a bloated tongue, rocking his shoulders from side to side as if attempting vainly to get up.
‘They knew. I tell you,’ he gasped. ‘They were looking. For us. For you.’
The frail sound of his voice trailed off: his eyes glazed, the rocking ceased. Maurice Pickney pushed through the onlookers and squatted next to Caine, plumping down his medical chest. He made a quick, careful inspection of Roland’s body, his old maid’s face grave, his cured leather brow creased. He felt for a pulse, put his ear to the captain’s mouth. He shook his head. ‘He’s gone, skipper,’ he said.
Caine stood, picked up a drone of motors and a grating of gears from beyond the ridge. It was the enemy convoy. He could tell from the sound distortion that it was further away than it seemed, but there was no doubt it would be here soon. The others were staring at him, faces tense.
‘Skipper,’ Copeland said, making an obvious effort to skim the tension from his voice. ‘We have to get out of here. Think of Sandhog. We can’t afford to get bagged.’
Caine stepped away from the dead man. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’
16
As Caine’s jeep passed the 3-tonner Veronica, the cowboy stuck his buckskin face out of the open window. ‘Boche are about a mile back, skipper,’ he said. ‘They’re huggin’ our tracks, but me and Rossi just left them a little present – a baker’s dozen of No. 2 mines.’
Caine gave him thumbs up. ‘Nice work, Gibbo,’ he said.
Before Doris moved into position at the head of the column, Caine eyewalked the desert to the north: he spotted the Axis wagons approaching, a file of silver limpets riddled with heatgauze. They were advancing slowly, yet it seemed to Caine that they exuded a sense of purpose, the tenacity of bloodhounds on a sleuth. He knew it was only too easy to imagine such things up the Blue, but Roland’s phrase, They knew we were here, kept tapping at his head like a woodpecker.
He snapped back his goggles, trained his glasses on the edge of the dunefield ahead, trying to gauge how far off it lay. The sun was past its apogee, and the dunes appeared to be inflating steadily, as if some giant were filling them from immense bellows. Caine put the distance at fifteen miles. ‘Full throttle,’ he told Cope.
The desert here was scattered with nodules of sandstone, windcarved into statues like giant chalices – wide heads on lean stalks. The surface was ribbed with shoulders of snuff-toned earth, peppered with spike-brush, esparto grass, little explosions of desert sedge. Between the fertile gashes, long spits of sand lay in low drifts, slumping into shallow sandtroughs where the heat haze rose in trembling swirls, like smoke. The wagons had been going for no more than ten minutes when Caine heard a series of dull thumps from far behind: the cowboy’s mines had been tripped. ‘That’ll give the buggers something to think about,’ Wallace crooned.
A few moments later, Audley’s jeep pulled alongside Doris.
‘Just had a gander at the Huns,’ Audley shouted. ‘Gibbo’s calling cards bagged at least a couple of them. The convoy’s stopped.’
‘Not for long, though,’ Caine bawled back. ‘They’ll be on our tracks again soon enough.’
‘Hold it, skipper,’ Wallace skirled in his ear. ‘Glenda’s hit a stick.’
Caine swore. This was just what he’d been afraid of. As Cope turned the jeep round, he saw that Glenda had hit mishmish so deep that her wheels were submerged. Her driver, Netanya, was trying to extricate her by revving her fast, only succeeding in digging her further in. Veronica had already halted some distance away. The cowboy was still at her wheel, but Rossi had taken Dumper’s place on the observation hatch. The stumpy fitter was at the stick, testing the sand around Glenda with a steel rod.
The two jeeps pulled up near Veronica simultaneously. Caine jumped out and leaned across Dorothy’s bonnet. ‘Backtrack five hundred yards,’ he told Audley. He pointed to a low terrace of scalloped sandstone. ‘Take up a defensive position at the end of that ridge, where you’ve got a good view. If the enemy gets within half a mile, give ’em a burst to keep their heads down, and beat it back here quick.’
Audley nodded at the German prisoner tied to the Browning’s pintlemount.
‘What about him?’
The Jerry looked barely conscious, and Caine felt a pang of sympathy for him. ‘Gaston,’ he said, looking at Larousse. ‘Move him to Veronica and cuff him in the back. Make sure he’s secure, mind. I need to talk to this bloke.’
As Larousse led the prisoner towards the other truck, Dumper hurried over to Caine, still hefting his steel rod. He looked hot and bothered. ‘It’s a crashdive job, skipper,’ he reported, wiping sweat off his oversized head. ‘The mishmish goes down for ever. This rod is six foot and it went in all the way, no effort. It’s goin’ to need some real periscope work.’
Death or Glory II: The Flaming Sword: The Flaming Sword Page 11
