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

by Michael Asher

  Caine and Dumper backed away, covering their arcs. ‘Maybe you will,’ Caine said. ‘Meanwhile, you can regard that as payback for Brian Smith, who, by the way, had a wife and children. Think yourself lucky. At least I only shot you in the knee.’

  The two of them jogged back to the wagons. No one opened up on them, but the gunshot had aroused the camp: Tommies were already milling around the convoy with weapons in their hands, among them the beefy, redfaced Sergeant Ferguson. When they got back to Doris, Caine saw that Wallace had the twin Vickers trained on the crowd, keeping them at a distance: Cope had his pistol to Maskelyne’s head. Caine swung into the seat next to the magician while Dumper hopped into the back. Caine dug his automatic into Maskelyne’s neck, leaving Copeland free to drive. ‘We’re leaving,’ Caine bawled, staring straight at Ferguson. ‘Anyone shoots at us, the Great Maskelyne becomes the late Great Maskelyne.’

  ‘You won’t make it,’ the bulky Ferguson bawled back, his face almost scarlet with fury, chubby fingers itching on his rifle stock. ‘We’ll be after you.’

  Caine smiled. ‘These Vickers “K”s are effective up to a thousand yards,’ he said. ‘Get any nearer than that, and it’s open season: if you don’t believe I’m ready to do you, have a dekko at the state of Captain Glenn.’

  Cope hit the throttle: the convoy lurched forward, combing dust. The gunners swung their weapons, covering all angles, threatening anyone who moved. In less than a minute they had scooted out of the dummy tank leaguer and were grinding across the gravel floor, heading north-west.

  They’d made a little over a thousand yards before Wallace reported a convoy following them – a handful of the decoy Crusaders and battered pickups from the M/T pool. ‘Just keep your guns on them,’ Caine told him. ‘If they get too close, put down tracer.’

  The jeep coursed on: Caine holstered his pistol and grinned apologetically at Maskelyne. ‘I’m sorry about this, Major,’ he shouted in the magician’s ear, ‘I really am. I couldn’t have you stopping my mission, though. It might be an illusion to you, but to a poor ignorant soul like me, it happens to be important.’

  Maskelyne sneered at him sour-faced, his skullhead nodding madly. ‘You’re a bloody idiot, Caine. You won’t even last till sunset. My signallers will already have called up air support: they’ll hound you wherever you go, even behind Axis lines. They’ll bomb this convoy to a crisp.’

  ‘They’d better hurry up then,’ Caine bawled, nodding towards the western skyline. Maskelyne turned and for the first time noticed the darkness gathering there – a writhing fold of grey, red and black creeping across the horizon in a tidal wave, groping tentacles of dust smoke playing across it, diapers of heat haze spangling and flaring in the sunlight, like the scales of monstrous fish. ‘Ghibli,’ Caine yelled. ‘Big one. Been on the way since last night. It’ll be here in half an hour. No one’s going to be tracking us through that.’

  Maskelyne stared at the encroaching dustwall, looking crestfallen.

  ‘It’s all right, Major,’ Caine roared. ‘I wouldn’t dream of depriving the GOC of a man of your calibre.’

  Checking that their pursuers were still well behind, he ordered the convoy to stop. He unlocked the magician’s cuffs, heaved him out into the desert. Maskelyne stood there, head wagging, a frail, bent figure in his civilian shirt and trousers. ‘Your men will get here before the ghibli,’ Caine told him. ‘I’m going to drop a waterbottle and a Very pistol with some flares a hundred feet from here, just in case they don’t see you right away. Couldn’t let any harm come to you – I’m an old Sapper myself.’

  Caine gave him a peremptory salute, and before Maskelyne could answer, Copeland worked the throttle. The jeep skeetered away. Caine dropped the water and flarekit where the major could see them and the small convoy sheered off towards the blackest of sunsets: within thirty minutes the darkout around them was complete.

  21

  They drove through the storm the whole night, popping Bennies, cowled and goggled against the whiplashing dust. Caine had never been in a storm at sea but guessed that it must be like this – the sense of helplessness, like a straw tossed and ravaged by forces of unfathomable power. The desert had come alive, quivering, explosive, like a giant that had just broken free from the shackles of aeons; the cat-o’nine-tails wind thrashed the raw tissue of their minds, lacerating their thoughts, carrying in its shriek the hysterical voices of banshees, the babbling of demented hellions sniggering and cackling in their ears, mocking them, maddening them with taunts that seemed to cut like razors into their innermost fears. The very earth itself was an anvil that some demon skygod was pounding with a great sledgehammer, clashing iron on iron so hard that sparks seemed to starburst and flare inside their heads and through their veins.

  Even before sunset, visibility had been down to a few yards, and after, when the undersea whorls of brown and bloodcrimson had become impenetrable black, it was like driving along the bottom of a churning swamp. They drove on, senses numbed, nose to tail, unable even to hear their own motors, all their focus given to staying with the tail-lights of the wagon in front. It was Caine who guided them: starblind, he was forced to use his prismatic, and that meant stops at frequent intervals, and each time a trek for him of twenty-five paces into the stinging blackness, to get the compass clear of the wagon’s magnetic field. The convoy’s headlamps were invisible after only a few paces into the dark and, in danger of getting lost for ever, Caine lashed himself to the jeep by parachute cord and was hauled back in like an anchor.

  These halts were agonizing, fretful minutes when the drivers couldn’t hear their engines idling, when the weight of the storm seemed to press down on them like deep water, crushing their bodies, squeezing the air from their lungs. They coughed and spluttered and spat rackingly through their headscarves, clawed with wild spasms at the dirt in their eyes, as if to rip the very eyeballs from their sockets. In those fraught intervals they would wet their broken mouths with gobs of water sucked from cloth, would top up fuel tanks in pairs, arms entwining each other for fear of being blown away, hands clutching at wagon bodies in case they were ripped out of the wan circle of the headlamps, chugging petrol blindly through filtered funnels, splashing themselves with fuel they couldn’t afford to waste. Men would piss into the storm without getting down from the vehicles only to find themselves soaked in their own warm, blowback urine, the wet patches instantly wadded with damp dust, like fur.

  They were lost in the trackless dark forest of the soul, a murkwood of whipping demon trees whose branches flailed and clutched at them, tried to jerk them out of their vehicles as they passed. The sand-hail in their faces stung them, forced them to turn their heads aside, yet still they crawled on through the maelstrom, through the sickening, mindfrenzied lunacy of the ghibli, which seemed to leach them dry of courage, hope and manhood, to whittle them down to trembling, terrified boys.

  Caine tried to concentrate on the object of the Sandhog mission, to remember that the ghibli was their ally, making them untrackable, yet the wall of noise, the wailing gusts of the storm that seemed to come in crushing waves, wave after wave like a flowtide in a typhoon, rising and falling as if the desert were taking giant breaths, threatening at any moment to tip over the wagons, chased any logical sequence of reflection from his mind. It was hard even to recall who he was or how he’d got there, why he was fighting, what the war was about. He was tormented by spectral images of Betty Nolan’s body, flayed and broken, voices of souls he’d maimed and killed, whose lives he’d blighted or cut short, lisping in his ears: I’ll get you, you bastard, I’ll get you, I’ll get you, I’ll get you – a serpentine hissing through the torrents of the inked-out night.

  He tried to keep his senses rigidly set on his compass, checking it every few minutes with his torch, scrabbling sand from his goggles and from its face, instructing the driver to adjust direction left or right, even if the jeep was a fraction of a degree out. Often, in his fatigue, the compass needle swam out of focus and it needed all
the strength he could muster to bring his concentration back. He was terrified that the storm had affected the compass readings: he knew that their course was no more than an imaginary line in his own mind, yet he gripped on to it as the only real thing in the madness, the clew of thread that would take them out of the maze.

  The headlamps blinked bosseyed and feeble into the darkness, sometimes picking out rocks and boulders that had to be avoided, obliging Caine to make frantic compensatory calculations in his head. The night was a labyrinth of tunnels without beginning or end: it seemed that they had been trapped there since the dawn of time and would be stuck there for ever. Caine kept his eye on his watch, but the hours passed without meaning – signifying nothing more than the movement of hands on a dial. They had given up hope that dawn would ever come, and yet, after almost ten shattering hours of travel, Caine thought he was beginning to see lighter shades among the swirls of grey and black.

  At first it seemed just another hallucination: after twenty minutes, though, he was certain of it. There were spangles of yellow and white in the storm, and he could feel its power waning: the blast waves were hitting them less frequently, and with less force. Visibility extended, first to three yards, then to six. Suddenly, Caine realized that he could hear the noise of Doris’s motor over the moan of the wind. It felt as if someone had just switched off the storm’s vast generator, as if the giant bellows were pumped out, the raving-mad monster had lain down to sleep, the demons had closed the great blast-furnace doors of hell. Then, suddenly, there was light enough to douse the headlamps. Moments later, unbelievably, the ghibli was gone.

  The men stared around them lead-lidded and dropping with fatigue, at a new, silent world. It was like a rebirth. Not only had the storm passed, it had passed completely and utterly, as if it had never been. The air was motionless, clear as a bell, the pickled black and tan desert laid out before them like a newly washed skein of cloth. And there, almost near enough to touch, it seemed, the peaks of the Green Mountains stood folded in shadow, jutting out of the desert in tier after tier, crag after jagged crag, like raw, unfinished faces jostling to peer over each other’s backs. The men leered at the sight, blowing grit from their nostrils, scratching at their eyes, hardly able to take it in.

  Caine ordered a halt, snapped back his goggles for the first time in centuries, and raised his binos. He observed desert piedmont, dry meadows of saltbush and swordgrass, jumbles of boulders, deep dumps of scoria giving way to steep wadis and re-entrants and, beneath the peaks, a smooth brown wall of cliff. He lowered the glasses, got out his map, studied it with dustpasted eyes. There could be no doubt, he thought. Unless he’d gone quietly insane in the night, that was the Shakir cliff ahead of them. He felt a surge of gratitude that almost overwhelmed him: ten hours’ slog across the darkest gallery of hell, and yet they’d come out within five or six miles of the landfall he’d been heading for. It was a miracle they’d made it through the ghibli at all.

  He knew he couldn’t ask the men to go any further at this moment. Audley, Gibson, Rossi, Trubman and Netanya had already thrown themselves bellydown on the clean desert surface, as if kissing a long-awaited shore. Larousse, Pickney, Dumper and Copeland sank into the sand dazed and shaky, staring into midspace like aircrash victims, unable to believe they’d survived. Caine clambered out of the jeep with the ponderous actions of a diver. Stretching his big shoulders and pectorals, though, he felt lighter, as if a great weight had lifted off his back. The dark hauntings of the night – Nolan’s kidnapping, wounding a fellow officer, abducting a superior, seemed distant memories, events that had occurred in a parallel universe. The silence that had enveloped them since the motors had stopped was uncanny, as though something were missing from the world. ‘Get a grip, lads,’ he croaked at them. ‘Stay switched on. Remember, we’re behind Axis lines now.’

  Wallace was the only man moving, clanking pannikins, glugging liquor from a flagon, breaking eggs into a kingsize pot. The boys watched him, mesmerized. Caine arched duststiff eyebrows, not quite believing what he was seeing. ‘Eggs?’ he grated incredulously. ‘You got eggs?’

  ‘Been savin’ ’em for sommat like this, skipper,’ Wallace answered hoarsely. ‘Desert special, innit? Rum, limejuice, crushed dates and raw eggs. We’re dead parched, mate. Try an’ cram down bullybeef and biscuits now, you’d boke it back up – if yer can get it down at all. This stuff’ll have us buzzin’ like bluebottles in two ticks, you mark my words.’

  Pickney, sitting in a heap a yard away, raised his head and nodded wearily. His eyes were bloodragged and opaque, his face, already prematurely wrinkled, looked like raddled treebark. Like some of the others, he’d spent part of the night riding in the back of Veronica, but since her canvas cover had been tied back to prevent the wind splitting it like a taut sail, he’d found no refuge there. No one had slept. Almost everyone had stagged the jeep drivers at some time during the night: Caine, as navigator, had been the only one unable to stand down from point.

  ‘He’s right, skipper,’ Pickney grunted. ‘Liquid is what we need. Add a couple of teaspoons of salt to it, Fred. Stops the body losing water.’

  ‘Right you are, mate.’

  Wallace moved through the group, doling out liquor into the tin mugs proffered. When he came to Copeland, he hesitated, bypassed him ostentatiously, and left him till last. Cope made no comment, but Caine snorted softly, realizing that there were some grudges that hadn’t simply melted away with the night. He lit a Black Cat, sought out Dumper. The little corporal looked as if he’d aged ten years. He had a cigarette stuck in his mouth and was studying the photo of his wife and daughters as if he’d just been restored to them. ‘See what we’ve got in Veronica, Sam,’ Caine told him. ‘Water, rations, ammo, explosives.’ He took a sip of Wallace’s concoction and coughed. The liquor burned his mouth and throat, but almost at once he could feel it steaming through his blood like a battlecruiser, standing his sluggish organs to attention with shock. He leaned against Doris, exhaling smoke, studying his filthy, bedraggled, bearded crew, seeing sleep possess them, seeing the Benzedrine hangover kick in behind their eyes. He spat in the sand.

  ‘Don’t go to sleep, lads,’ he said, his voice clearer. ‘We’re not there yet. Another ten miles before we make landfall, then we’ve got a spot of cliff-scaling to do while it’s still light. As soon as you’ve had your drink, pack your manpacks, check your escape kits and personal gear. Be back here in five for briefing.’

  No one chuntered, not even Audley: Wallace’s brew seemed to work on them like magic. Most asked for more and jacked down Bennies with the second helping. In a few minutes they were on their feet with a new fire in their eyes, handing out kit, dusting off weapons, stuffing bandoliers of ammo into webbing. Caine packed his gear from the back of the jeep, but was interrupted by Dumper, who stumped up with a frown on his gnomelike face. ‘There’s good news and bad news, boss,’ he said. ‘Bad news is all the bleedin’ water flimsies sprung leaks in the night, and the jerrycans was on Glenda. I reckon there’s only enough water for one bottle apiece.’

  Caine swore. ‘What’s the good news?’ he asked.

  ‘We’ve got fuel, some rations, ammo and grenades, Lewes bombs, mines, spare explosives, bazooka rounds, mortars and mortar rounds. Decoy kit’s all right, and so is the climbin’ gear.’

  He paused and Caine nodded. ‘The main thing is that we can do what we came to do.’

  ‘No problem then,’ Dumper said, ‘but we’re a bit exposed here, boss. Don’t you fink maybe we ought to scrim up?’

  Caine glanced around: most of the lads had finished their packing and were heading back for the briefing. ‘Not worth it,’ he said. ‘We’ll be off in a tick.’

  As the men were settling down, Caine took another dekko at the landscape. They were well into the piedmont here – undulations of black gravel, wide expanses of heatcracked clay, glittering saltpans, rock ribs sporting overhangs and suncarved turrets, knots of acacias like broken umbrellas, twisted and bowed by t
he wind, copses of old tamarix with coiled trunks as thick as ships’ hawsers. A flight of sandgrouse took off from the shade of an overhang not a hundred paces away, a flurry of wings, a piping of plaintive birdcalls, a glimmer of light as they banked into a rough arrowhead and slewed off towards the hills.

  Caine turned to see that the lads were assembled, eyeing him expectantly. ‘All right, boys,’ he said. ‘Here it is – what we’ve come for: Op Sandhog.’ He paused and took a breath. ‘There’s a big crater in the Green Mountains known as the Citadel: a few of you saw it on the Runefish mission back in June. It was then used by Itie deserters and ex-colons, now it’s a Hun base where they’ve been testing a chemical weapon, a disorienting agent called Olzon-13. I can’t go into its effects now, but basically it sends folk berserk: soldiers exposed to it are likely to end up bumping off their mates. You can imagine what would happen if it was let loose on gunners or tank crews – or pilots, Jesus Christ. Our Int. boys think the Jerries are planning to use this stuff to slow down the Eighth Army during Monty’s Lightfoot advance, due on 25 October. If they do, the whole push is likely to turn into a shambles. Sandhog is therefore vital to Lightfoot’s success – which is why, if you are wondering, I was prepared to shoot a fellow officer yesterday, and to abduct another. Major Maskelyne was planning to have us arrested by the Redcaps for compromising his decoy plans, thereby stuffing Sandhog. I regret what I had to do, but we are under direct orders from the GOC, and that couldn’t be allowed at any cost. Sandhog is crucial to the whole outcome of the campaign. Our task is to get into the Citadel by stealth, locate the underground bunkers where the Olzon-13 is being stored and destroy it. Our secondary tasks are, one, to take out the local commander: all we know about him is that he’s nicknamed the Angel of Death – and, two, to liberate any prisoners – Itie deserters, Senussi or anyone else – we find …’