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

by Michael Asher

  It took a few minutes for Dumper to scoop enough cold sand from under Glenda’s body to discover that her camshaft was broken. ‘That’s a poser, boss,’ he told Caine, ‘because we ain’t got no spare, and to repair it we’d need weldin’ gear, which we ain’t got, neiver.’

  ‘We’ll have to dump her,’ Copeland said.

  Caine considered it. He was tempted, but remembered again that Glenda was hefting their rations and most of their jerrycans of water: in this desert, water was the one item he didn’t want to be without. He remembered Trubman’s night-time call about an armoured division in close proximity. Ten miles, Taff had said: they could tow Glenda that far. A division was bound to have an ordnance workshop: he weighed up the wasted time against the water, and born of long parched years up the Blue, plumped for the water.

  He called Trubman. The signaller’s softball face had a green pallor to it, his eyeballs veined with red, but he told Caine the fever had receded. ‘Where do you reckon that division is?’ Caine asked him.

  Trubman blinked and pointed across the plain to the south. Caine looked again across the ribbed brown and grey pumice, acres of slag, tiers of sawtooth escarpments with great buttress skulls looming out of them like polished bone masks, dumps of scree, crooked spires and steeples gristled with a dark patina like cracked rawhide. Dust devils sucked across the flats down there, like constantly meandering drilling spikes, but somewhere, beyond the gleaming alkali lakes and the maze of sculpted stone, Caine thought he saw a wisp of firesmoke snaking above a distant ridge, like the emanation from a single cooking fire; just for an instant, quickly dispersed by the wind. His gaze was drawn towards it: he lifted his glasses, swept the area back and forth – and gasped.

  There, stationary on the plain, a good ten miles off, he thought he saw a vast leaguer of vehicles. He lowered the glasses, wiped grit out of his eyes and focused them again. Years up the Blue had taught him that the human mind could produce almost anything in this desert – vast, iridescent cities, gushing rivers, the pure crystal waters of inland seas. He’d grown accustomed to living in the mirage – the sheer dreamlike strangeness of the landscape never ceased to give him a frisson. Yet he’d have staked his life that this vision was real.

  The leaguer lay on the desert floor without any attempt at camouflage, rank upon rank of vehicles: tanks, armoured cars, Bren-gun carriers, artillery limbers, gun batteries, forward transport echelons, supply wagons, field workshops, field hospitals, signals detachments, mechanized infantry, armoured units in troops, squadrons, regiments, brigades, stretching on and on and on into the gauzy distance, like a vast collection of Dinky toys out of a child’s fantasy. He lowered the glasses, and he noticed that Audley, at his elbow, had spotted it too. ‘It is real, isn’t it?’ the subaltern asked.

  ‘Yeah, it’s real all right.’

  ‘Crikey,’ Audley said, his voice low and slightly awed. ‘It must be 10th Armoured, Bob Gatehouse’s mob. I thought he was up north – what the devil is he doing here?’

  Caine took another shufti: the vision oscillated, now seen with clarity, now losing sharpness with the ebb and flux of light. It was difficult to focus for more than a few moments at a time.

  On his other side, Copeland was crouching down, peeping through his telescopic sights, as if assessing a snipe. ‘It’s wide open, though,’ he said. ‘Why aren’t they scrimmed up?’

  ‘May be preparing to move,’ Audley suggested.

  Caine grunted, but thought it didn’t make sense. If the division was about to move, they’d already have armoured car troops out as forward vedettes: engines would be churning, tanks would be manoeuvring, kicking up a nebula of dust. It was hard to be certain from so far away, but there didn’t appear to be the slightest movement among the massed ranks.

  He took a last look, lowered the glasses. ‘It’s there, anyway,’ he said. ‘If they can’t help us, no one can.’

  Copeland stood up, slinging his rifle. ‘I’m not sure about this, skipper,’ he said. ‘If we make contact with them, Sandhog’s going to be compromised. They’re bound to report us to HQ, and that signal could be intercepted by the Hun.’

  ‘The sergeant’s right,’ Audley nodded, also lowering his binos. ‘We can’t afford to have our presence known.’

  Caine weighed it up a second time. ‘The Hun already know we’re here,’ he said. ‘They just don’t know where we’re going, and we’re not going to tell anyone, are we?’

  They dragged Glenda out of the mishmish with hi-lifts and sandchannels. They yoked her to Veronica with a tow rope and hauled her down off the dunes on to the gunmetalled valley floor. For two hours they moved across the thirsty plain, the wagons chafing dry on the sunracked surface, rumbling through sloughs of chalkdust so fine it turned the men once more to ghosts and set their teeth on edge. The wagons wound around flat shelves of rimrock, past boulders that had fallen from above and shattered: they wove in and out of canyons where sand had dredged itself into low drifts, where the wind stopped, where the heat hung in heavy wraps in the clints and crevices, emerged again to traverse playas that shimmered like a billion shards of splintered mirrors, to watch the distant ridges rippled in the heat like folds of blown silk. By midmorning the maze was behind them and they were drumming across open serir where the desert surface had warmed and the heat haze melted into mercury lakes and sparkling streams that seemed to encroach nearer and nearer, until the wagons were ploughing ruts along a sandbar, surrounded on every side by a bejewelled and glittering sea.

  They breasted a gravel bank, and there it was in front of them: the whole vast divisional leaguer, like a great highseas fleet at anchor, flotilla after flotilla, echelon after echelon, squadron after squadron, filling miles of desert, as far as the eye could see. The closest vehicles, a squadron of tanks, were only five hundred yards from them. Caine surveyed the massed lines, trying to take in their true extent: hundreds, perhaps thousands, of vehicles of every size and shape, leaguered up in precise logistical order. Except … except, Caine thought, as his jeep bumped nearer, that there was something fishily unreal about it – the lack of scrim, the fact that it hadn’t stirred in two hours, the rigidity of the ranks, the apparent lack of tents, of cookfires, of swearing, sweating Tommies. It felt almost as if it were a ghost division, a wagon graveyard, a mothball fleet dumped in the desert in a precise configuration and then abandoned. Yet not abandoned entirely, because there were soldiers about – here and there amongst the serried lines, Caine glimpsed the occasional moving figure in KDs.

  ‘Recognition signal, skipper,’ Copeland reminded him.

  Caine picked up the big Very pistol, shoved a green flare into the breech and snapped it closed. He was about to fire when he clocked movement in front of him, heard the rumble of motors. The tank detachment nearest to the convoy had suddenly come alive: half a dozen ironclads were already wheeling from a broadside leaguer configuration, pointing their prows directly towards the intruders, kicking up curlicues of dust.

  Caine squinted at them, recognizing the hunched, hardshouldered lines of Mark III Crusaders, six-pounder gunbarrels bristling on their turrets. The tanks lumbered slowly forward trailing dustspouts, their engines, to Caine’s desert-tuned ears, sounding feeble and underpowered. It was slightly over the top, anyway, he thought, sending six light tanks to investigate a brace of Willys Bantams and a couple of desert-scarred Bedfords, one of them crippled. These buggers weren’t taking any chances, he thought.

  He raised the Very pistol, squeezed the trigger, heard the pop, saw the splash of green. He watched the tanks for two seconds, but there was no answering flare. Instead there came a sudden sharp salvo of ordnance, a crisp bump, bump, bump, BUMP of shellfire. Caine and his crew ducked, but Caine smelled no burning-glass odour, heard no familiar croak of shells poaching air, no eardrum crease of bursting shrapnel. ‘Bastards,’ Wallace roared, shaking a boulder fist at them. ‘Didn’t you see the bleedin’ Very light?’

  As if in reply, the Crusaders reamed off a second v
olley. Caine heard the crack of ordnance, and this time felt the air tremor, sniffed cordite, glimpsed wedges of blue smoke lufting like parachute canopies over the gunbarrels before being whipped apart by the wind. Yet still the shots had a muted sound to them, as though the gunners were using wrong-calibre shells. ‘Stop, stop!’ Caine bawled at Copeland. ‘They think we’re enemy. Hands up, quick.’

  The wagons slewed through folds of talc, skewed to a halt. Caine snapped back his goggles, stood up, raised his hands slowly. He watched the Crusaders trundling towards him like gigantic sheepticks, wondering if they could be the enemy. Was this whole thing a setup designed to draw in unsuspecting Allied units, like sirens’ singing, and then butcher them when they came in range? He thought of Trubman’s night-time message: a big net of friendly signals traffic Ours. Big tank leaguer, about ten miles away I’d reckon. Happen it’s a whole division. There was surely no way the Axis could fake that.

  The tanks were spreading out in ten-pace intervals, smoke and dust clinging to them like dirty cloaks. Again, it struck Caine that something was wrong: he couldn’t yet put his finger on it, but he was sure there was an anomaly here. Maybe it was the ungainly way the tanks moved, drawing light, almost slouching, lacking the gravitas you usually felt when you sighted tanks; maybe it was the tinny bleat of their motors, the absence of the rampant clunk of steel tread that always sowed dread in Caine’s heart. And what about the ordnance – six-pounders were big shells, after all? Surely they couldn’t be firing blanks? He suppressed a sudden urge to snigger.

  The Crusaders teetered to a halt in a rough crescent, and Caine saw men scrabbling out – men in khaki drill shorts and black berets carrying Lee-Enfield rifles trimmed with hessian. The Tommies didn’t rush them in an untactical clump but advanced steadily in cautious arrowhead, five yards apart, eyes wary, weapons at the shoulder. They looked more like well-drilled footsloggers than tank crews.

  Caine slipped out of his seat with his hands still up, his face chalkpowdered and ethereal from the fine dust of the plain, his eyes standing out in the centre of goggle rings like inkblack holes. He watched the Tommies approaching. At point of the arrowhead, there walked a man with captain’s pips on his KD epaulettes – a big man with swimmer’s shoulders, horsefaced, blubberlipped, clip-moustachioed. His teeth were like shovels; there was a hint of conceit in his eyes and a touch of self-satisfaction in the set of his long jaw. Even going tactical, he had a way of walking, of rolling his shoulders with a slight peacock strut, that Caine thought he would have recognized almost anywhere.

  Roger Glenn, ex-King’s Royal Rifle Corps, had been a troop officer in the Middle East Commando when Caine had been an NCO there. Caine hadn’t really known him well, had heartily disliked what he did know: now, though, he was happy enough to see a familiar face. ‘How come you didn’t answer my recognition signal, sir?’ he demanded, grinning – a red slash on a clown’s whiteface. ‘Or were those salvoes a salute to old pals?’

  Glenn halted a couple of yards from Caine and peered at him. Caine saw that he wore a bush shirt, shorts, suede boots, and a black beret with Royal Tank Regiment badge. He was holding a big Colt automatic attached to a regulation lanyard round his neck, and it was pointing at Caine. He didn’t return Caine’s banter, nor make any move to shake hands. Neither did he let his weapon drop. He looked over Caine’s shoulder at the desert-grimed vehicles and the ragged, dust-blanched crew with an air of supercilious authority, as if he’d spotted some misdemeanour. Caine was unpleasantly reminded of Sears-Beach. The tankies took up positions around the SAS column, and Caine glanced at them: beetred faces and beetle eyes, sandfly-bitten torsos, limbs chapped with desert sores. They had no welcome, no cheery hailfellow for comrades: they still had their weapons trained on the SAS. Caine wondered why, as tank crews, they’d been issued with .303s rather than SMGs or pistols. The Lee-Enfield was notoriously awkward to handle in the confines of a tank.

  ‘Sarn’t Caine,’ the captain said slowly, in a voice as clipped as his moustache. It was a flat statement rather than a greeting. ‘What are you doing here?’

  Caine let his arms drop without being told: his men did the same. ‘Good to see you, too, sir,’ he replied, ‘and it’s Lieutenant Caine now, by the way.’

  ‘Really?’ Glenn raised an eyebrow – an action more like a regimental drill movement than an expression of surprise. ‘I’m a bit out of touch, old chap.’ He squinted frogeyed at Copeland and Wallace but made no effort to greet them. ‘Same old crew, I see,’ he said.

  Caine focused on the RTR badge directly above Glenn’s left eye. ‘Never had you down as a tankie, sir,’ he said. ‘Always thought you were a greenjacket through and through.’

  Glenn snorted. ‘I’m no more a tankie than you are,’ he said, curling back dry lips to show the slablike teeth. He peered at the SAS wagons again, and Caine guessed he was looking for insignia. ‘Still on special service?’

  When Caine didn’t reply, Glenn continued. ‘Ditto. They call us 103rd Royal Tank Regiment, of course.’ He let out a hollow horselaugh. ‘But it’s a special service stunt all the same.’

  Caine blinked, confused, then took another shufti at the Crusader tanks parked in formation two hundred paces away. Glenn caught the glance and chuckled. ‘Taken in, were you? Good show.’

  It fell into place with an almost audible shuck – the shaky progress of those Crusaders, the underbred sound of their motors, the eery absence of clank, the flat effect of their guns, the lack of whistle and thump. He stared back at Glenn, his eyes wide inside their circles. ‘They’re dummies,’ he said. ‘It’s a decoy unit.’

  ‘Bingo,’ Glenn guffawed, baring his big teeth at Caine as if he’d just come up with the answer to an immensely hard riddle. ‘ “C’est un illusion,” as my boss would say. There ain’t no such outfit as 103rd Tanks – in fact, there isn’t a single real tankie among my boys here. Sleight of hand deceives the eye, what, old chap? Good, though, aren’t they? Come and have a gander.’

  Now the secret was out, Glenn seemed to relax. He holstered his pistol and waved a wide hand at a beefy soldier nearby. ‘All right, Sarn’t Ferguson. Let ’em pass.’

  He turned to Caine. ‘I’ll hop in with you,’ he said. ‘Tell your lot to follow on.’

  From a hundred yards, at last, it was easy to see that the ‘Crusaders’ weren’t the real thing. The giveaway was the rims of four rubber tyres protruding from beneath plywood frames cut in the shape of ‘tank tracks’. Standing close up, Caine saw that the decoys had been designed with great care. ‘Fifteen-hundredweight Morris chassis,’ Glenn told him, slapping the wooden body affectionately with a wide hand. ‘Tubular frame with plywood and canvas. Gun barrel’s industrial piping, of course. Look absolutely authentic to shuftikites at two thousand feet.’

  Caine was stunned. ‘What about the tracks, though?’ he asked. ‘I mean, aren’t rubber-tyre marks a bit obvious from the air?’

  Glenn led him around to the rear of the dummy, showed him flailchains attached to a wooden arm that could be lifted and lowered by hand. ‘We drag these along to make dust and disguise our tracks,’ he said. ‘Not like having real tank tracks, of course, but if we need something more distinct – a false trail, say – we’ve got a special wagon for it. If we’re lucky, we can borrow a genuine tank.’

  Caine thought of the feeble salvo of shellfire. ‘You fire blanks?’ he asked.

  Glenn snorted again. ‘Not out of industrial piping, old chap. No, no, no.’ He delved into his haversack and came up with an ordinary No. 36 grenade. ‘Good old Mr Mills,’ he tittered. ‘Chuck a few of these and Bob’s your auntie.’

  ‘But why … ?’ Caine was going to ask why an armoured division would deploy fifteen-hundredweight trucks with pipes for guns and grenades for sixpound shells, when the incredible answer hit him like a knuckleduster. ‘The entire division … ?’ he whispered, aghast. ‘You mean the whole leaguer is …’

  Glenn watched the penny drop with an expression that was a hair’s brea
dth off gloating. ‘Dummy? ’Course it is, old chap. Didn’t strike you as a bit curious that the wagons weren’t scrimmed and never shifted once since you spotted us? Yes, of course, we clocked you up on the dunes. Most of the tanks and AFVs are rubber inflatables, but the lorries are canvas and chickenwire. Welcome to Maskelyne’s Travelling Circus.’

  ‘Who’s Maskelyne?’

  ‘My boss. Jasper Maskelyne. Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of the Great Maskelyne, old chap? The world’s greatest illusionist? He’s one of those music-hall magicians who saw corking bints in half then stick them together again.’

  Caine shook his head, mystified. ‘And he’s here? In the desert?’

  ‘A major in the Sappers, no less. He’s the one behind all this.’

  There was a short pause while the two men weighed each other up. Caine was awed by the scale of the deception; he was happy to be back in the company of comrades, but the feeling was marred by a memory of Roger Glenn from commando days. The captain had been on the directing staff during Caine’s training in the Middle East Commando – one of those sadistic officers who’d taken pleasure in shooting as close as possible to the recruits during live firing attacks. Caine’s mate Brian Smith had been shot dead in such an exercise: Glenn was suspected of negligence, but SID had never brought a case.