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

by Michael Asher

  ‘Tom,’ Copeland said: Caine could hear the urgency in his voice.

  He took a sharp inhalation of breath and caught Dumper’s eye once more, hating himself but knowing it was the right decision, knowing that Dumper knew it, knowing that there was really no other way. ‘Just promise me one thing, Sam,’ he said, hewing his words out of stone. ‘When you go, you’ll blow the bloody lot of them sky high.’

  23

  Betty Nolan was woken up an hour before dawn: the cellar door thumped open, the electric light buzzed. She hadn’t been asleep – the handcuffs were too uncomfortable to allow more than a doze – and she was up in an instant, poised on the edge of the bed. The unshaded lightbulb swung on its flex, sending a basket of light rocking across the room. She blinked towards the door, where the Turk, Hayek, stood, feet apart, gold teeth glinting, a gleam in his hard black eyes, a hand rubbing at the bulge in his crotch. Hayek was a powerful man: his shoulders were as wide as Tom Caine’s, she thought, but while Caine’s body tapered gracefully to a trim waist, the Turk was the same width all the way down, his muscles layered in fat – pot belly, flabby buttocks, chubby legs. In his faded chocolate suit he looked like a cartoon caricature of a sawnoff treetrunk with a grim blue head sticking out.

  Hayek shut the door and waddled towards her panting, licking rubbery lips, sweat beading his forehead, still massaging his crotch. Nolan watched him motionless. She’d been expecting this ever since she’d been abducted: the way he’d gobbled her up with his eyes when he brought the lentils and flat bread they fed her twice a day; the way he’d taken every opportunity to brush her breasts or touch her bum. She already knew he was vicious and cowardly: it was the Turk who’d shot Pat Rigby and who’d punched Nolan herself in the eye before hustling her out of the house and bundling her into the carboot. Hekmeth had been beside herself with fury at these actions: Nolan had seen the bellydancer, who scarcely came up to the Turk’s shoulder, slapping him in the face, raking him with her nails till he cowered like a beaten cur.

  Now, Hayek arched over her in the rocking light. ‘Hussain, he come this afternoon,’ he said in lisping, broken English. ‘I think we see you no more.’ He pouted as if offering a kiss, and drew a bloated finger across his throat with a look of apparent pleasure. His sow’s eyes fixed on her, thick lips curdling into a grin. ‘I come say goodbye.’

  As he reached for her, Nolan found that she was shaking: her breath came in shallow stabs. She’d always told herself that the best way to deal with rape was passivity – don’t struggle, let it happen. When the Brandenburgers had been about to gang-rape her back in June, she’d simply lain there, waited for it, expecting to be violated, expecting to die, not caring, because the Nazis had taken away the only man she’d ever loved, and she’d had nothing to live for anyway. Tom Caine had saved her, and now she had Caine. Now it was different: now, every instinct screamed at her to fight.

  She thrust herself forward and up, hit him a glancing blow on the side of his bull head with the handcuffs. He yelled, gritted gold teeth, retreated a foot, felt the shallow laceration on his cheek where the iron had cut into his flesh. As Nolan rolled away, though, he attacked again with surprising speed. Panting, drooling spit, he seized her arm, shook her like a rag doll, slapped her with his big open hand, knocked her facedown on the bed. He grabbed her legs, dragged her backwards so that the upper part of her body remained on the bed, knees touching the bare stone floor. Forced on to her crooked elbows, Nolan yelled and screamed, kicked out at him. She squirmed as his coarse hands slipped under her shirt, groped clumsily at her breasts, pawed her belly. He withdrew them and stood back: he kept one hand pressed on her spine and with the other stroked her buttocks through her KD trousers, probed between her legs. She could hear him moaning softly, sucking breath, could feel his sex straining through his trousers against her. The big hands were working on her belt: he had it undone. He jerked her trousers down to her ankles, groaned with anticipation. He had just begun to pull down her underpants when Nolan heard the door crash open a second time, heard Hekmeth’s contralto voice shrieking out a stream of Arabic obscenities. The hands left her abruptly: Nolan snatched back her legs, half turning to see Hekmeth striding into the room, black skirts and jewellery flying, her float of tousled chestnut hair wild, eyes burning yellow, brandishing a brutal-looking short whip of the type the Egyptians called a kurbag. She waded in on the Turk like a whirlwind, never pausing in her torrent of abuse, laying into him so ferociously that the big man whimpered, ducked, backed away, lifted his arms to fend off the blows, begged for mercy. He deflected most of the lashes with his treetrunk arms, but Hekmeth landed a direct hit on his backside, with a resonant craaack. Hayek jumped, screeched, sobbed with pain. ‘Get out,’ the bellydancer bawled at him, pushing him towards the door. ‘You disgusting animal. Get out of my sight.’

  The Turk retreated through the door yelping, covering his bottom with his hands. The door slammed shut. For a moment, Hekmeth stood there doing the pouting thing she did with her lips, fighting to control her breath, watching Nolan struggle ineffectively to fasten her trousers with cuffed hands. The bellydancer was a striking sight, Nolan thought, bedecked in rings, bracelets, earrings, anklets and necklaces: mobile red lips, heavily kohled eyes, intricately hennaed feet and hands – not beautiful, perhaps, but alluringly feminine: to a man she would appear to ooze sensuousness. With a final curse, Hekmeth flung the whip on the floor, stamped her highheeled foot in fury. ‘Disgusting beast,’ she raged. ‘Imbecile. He shoots your friend for no reason; hits you in the eye for no reason. Now he tries to assault you against my orders. Bloody, bastard, shit, Turks.’

  She brushed back a wayward strand of hair, produced a key from the pocket of her dress, bent over and unlocked Nolan’s handcuffs. Nolan thanked her. She finished pulling up and securing her trousers with hands that were still shaking, her breath coming in pants. It wasn’t the first time Hekmeth had allowed her to remove the cuffs: she’d had a few minutes’ respite every morning, when the bellydancer had helped bathe the sores on her wrists. Nolan knew she could have made use of her free hands before now: the cellar was large, with its own WC, and had evidently not been built as a jail cell. There were plenty of objects she could have used as weapons – shards of the small mirror in the toilet, for instance. Hekmeth had the body of a gymnast: she would be strong from constant exercise, but Nolan had a good eight inches on her and had been trained in unarmed combat. If it came to a scrap they’d be well matched, she thought. For the moment, though, she knew better than to attempt anything. She couldn’t say exactly what Stocker was up to, but she was confident that this house was even now under surveillance by his watchers. She couldn’t risk taking action until she was certain that Eisner was around.

  Nolan’s kidnapping had been a Field Security cockup. By feeding her new address to the traitor Clive Beeston, Stocker had hoped to flush Eisner out. FS had had Nolan’s flat staked out the day she’d been kidnapped: they’d watched the whole show. She hoped fervently that Stocker’s bloodhounds hadn’t lost her abductors’ trail on the way here, because if so, she was up the creek without a paddle and the whole sacrifice had been a monumental waste.

  It was never meant to happen like this. Stocker had anticipated that Eisner himself would make the snatch: the plan had been for Field Security to arrest him or take him out. Instead, Hekmeth Fahmi had arrived at her flat with two bruisers, one of whom – the Turk – had shot Pat Rigby. The FS watchers could have captured Hekmeth and her men, of course: Nolan supposed they’d held off, hoping the bellydancer would lead them to bigger fish.

  That hadn’t happened either, at least, not yet. Nolan had been locked in the cellar for eight days, waiting for Eisner to appear. Since FS hadn’t moved to pull her out, she assumed they believed he would turn up sooner or later: perhaps they had intelligence on his movements from other sources. She wished he would get a move on, though, and prayed that Stocker’s men would act promptly when he did come: she’d seen Eisner in the act of s
odomizing and murdering Mary Goddard and – as the Turk had suggested in his own crude way – she doubted that she’d survive long once he arrived.

  Nolan had spent much of her confinement dreaming about Tom Caine: she’d drawn comfort from imagining herself in his strong embrace. On the other hand, the assignment had been made more difficult by the knowledge that she now had someone to live for. She wondered how he’d reacted when he’d discovered she was missing: Stocker certainly wouldn’t have told him the truth: that she was being used as live bait in a failed Field Security plan. She was sure that, given the opportunity, Caine would stop at nothing to find her, even if he had to rampage through Cairo scouring every house.

  That was the reason she’d failed to give him any inkling of the plan when she’d seen him in hospital: she’d been tempted, but she knew that, should he learn of it, he would try to stop her at any cost. Caine would surely be away on the Sandhog mission by now. She wondered how they’d compelled him to take that assignment while she was still missing: she was sure they’d have had to do it by force.

  Nolan crawled into a sitting position and asked Hekmeth if she could use the bathroom. ‘Leave the door open,’ the bellydancer said.

  The lavatory was an Arab-style drophole in the floor. After using it, she peered into the cracked little mirror on the wall, gasping at the sight of her face. Her cheek was an angry crimson where the Turk had slapped her, her left eye still a purpleblack pit where he’d punched her over a week before: her lush blond hair was as mussed and knotted as esparto grass – almost as wild as the dancer’s. Her full lips were cracked, her teeth the colour of nicotine: only her seagreen eyes remained bright, as if she’d polished them daily. They were almost exactly the same colour as Hekmeth’s, Nolan thought.

  She dabbed her cheek with a damp cloth and emerged to find the bellydancer sitting elegantly on a camp-chair near the bed, her small hands playing with a silver cigarette case embossed with her initials. Hekmeth opened the case, handed a cigarette to Nolan and took one herself. Nolan accepted the cigarette with a hand that was still quivering slightly: she sat down on the bed and watched her fingers, trying to control her breathing, trying to will her heart to stop its thump. Hekmeth fitted her cigarette into an ivory holder and lit it with a gold Ronson: when Nolan’s hand had stopped shaking, she lit hers too.

  Hekmeth blew smoke at the ceiling in a long gust. ‘I’m sick of those Turk imbeciles,’ she said. ‘I should never have taken them with me –’ She broke off abruptly. ‘Your friend – the one in hospital – I had news of her yesterday. She’s not going to die, but she’s still unconscious.’

  Nolan shivered. ‘I hope Pat will be all right,’ she said. ‘She didn’t deserve that.’

  ‘Deserve?’ Hekmeth scoffed. ‘Who deserves anything? It’s the bloody war, that’s all. Just the bloody war.’

  Hekmeth’s voice was harsh, but Nolan perceived that her manner was phony: a way of covering up guilt. The bellydancer didn’t add anything and Nolan saw an opportunity opening itself up. ‘Tell me,’ she said timidly, ‘how did you get my new address? It was supposed to be secure.’

  Nolan thought Hekmeth might resent the question, get angry, clam up. Instead, she seemed proud of the fact that she had access to inside information. Her eyes sparkled and her mouth twitched with a hint of smugness. ‘I have a friend in GHQ,’ she smirked. ‘A very good friend.’

  ‘You mean Major Clive Beeston?’ Nolan said bluntly, watching the dancer’s face fall in astonishment. ‘Field Security knows all about him, Hekmeth. They know he’s the source of the leaks on raiding forces: they’re watching him, and when he goes down he’ll take you with him. Why accept that? After all, you aren’t a German, you’re an Egyptian: your loyalty is surely to this country, not to theirs?’

  Hekmeth blinked: for a moment she looked shaken, but she recovered her equanimity with remarkable speed. Nolan guessed what she was thinking: the mention of Beeston’s name could have been a shot in the dark – maybe Field Security weren’t sure about him at all, maybe Nolan was just testing the ground. Hekmeth took a deep drag of her cigarette, her green Circassian eyes fixed on Nolan’s. ‘It’s just the war,’ she repeated. ‘It pulls everybody in, even if you don’t want it. You should know that: you were a cabaret dancer, weren’t you? I saw your act at Madame Badia’s once …’ She broke off, sniffing slightly. ‘You dance very well, even if your voice is nothing special.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Nolan said, grinning at the left-handed compliment. ‘I’ve seen your act, too: you are every bit as good as they say you are.’

  Hekmeth bowed. ‘It’s a pity we both didn’t stick to cabaret. You got dragged into the war. We both did … and we both have our reasons. I’ve no idea what yours is …’

  Nolan let a last small puff of smoke pass between her full lips and crushed out the cigarette butt under her shoe. ‘My fiancé was murdered by the Nazis,’ she said softly. ‘I wanted to get revenge – I didn’t care if I was killed … but then I met this other man … anyway, I do care now.’

  Hekmeth snorted, stabbing out her own cigarette underfoot. ‘You really do pick them, don’t you, darling?’

  Nolan gazed at her, bemused. ‘What do you mean?’ she demanded.

  ‘Nothing.’ Hekmeth sighed, standing up. She took Nolan’s wrists, jammed the cuffs back on, locked them. Nolan knew she could have resisted, but this wasn’t the time. Not yet. ‘Anyway,’ Hekmeth said, standing back. ‘Hussain will be here this afternoon. I won’t have responsibility for you after that.’

  Nolan remembered that the Turk had mentioned Hussain’s arrival: it was the promised event that had prompted his attack. ‘Hussain … ?’ she said. ‘You mean Johann Eisner?’

  ‘We always called him Hussain. Even when he was a kid we called him that.’

  Nolan kept her face deadpan, taking care not to betray her interest. The fact that Hekmeth and Eisner had known each other as kids was a vital clue to Eisner’s background: the first they’d ever had. She stored the remark away, refrained carefully from asking more. ‘You know what he’s going to do to me, don’t you?’ she said, exaggerating the dread on her face, even managing to squeeze tears into the corner of her eyes. ‘He’s going to kill me.’

  Hekmeth guffawed. ‘Nonsense. He only wants information. If you give him what he needs, he won’t harm you. It’s not personal. It’s just the war.’

  ‘It’s not, and you know it,’ Nolan rasped, her voice rising, deliberately hysterical, challenging for the first time. ‘He wants to kill me because I witnessed a rape and murder he committed. The Mary Goddard case, you remember? I saw him in the act at Madame Badia’s, and he’s never forgiven me. It’s nothing to do with the war.’

  Almost before the words were out she knew she’d gone too far. Hekmeth’s face was distorted with rage. ‘You bitch,’ she shrieked. ‘They tried to frame Hussain with that case, but it was all lies. He’d never do that to a woman. What do you know, you whore? When we were kids he looked after me like a sister – never, ever touched me. It’s the damned lies of you British, trying to smear his name. You strumpet … I should have let that animal have you. I wish I had …’ She picked up the discarded whip, and for a moment Nolan thought she meant to strike her. Instead, she dug the leather thong into Nolan’s chin, pressing her head back. ‘You think you’re clever, don’t you, bitch? ’ she spat. ‘Well, let me tell you something. That man you care about will soon be as dead as a doornail. He’s not coming back from his mission.’

  Nolan’s eyes went wide with shock: this time the dread on her face was genuine. Her pulse raced, her face drained of colour. ‘How do you know that?’ she asked, her voice quavering. ‘You’re bluffing. How could you know?’

  Hekmeth’s features were almost satanic, her normally attractive mouth twisted into a rictus of cruel satisfaction. ‘See,’ she sniggered bitterly. ‘You don’t like it – not when it’s someone you care about. I know because Hussain has an agent with your man – what’s his name … Keen? Kaynes? Hus
sain has infiltrated his group – that snooty Stirling’s ridiculous parashooters. Your handsome prince is walking straight into a trap.’

  Her eyes lingered on Nolan’s face for a moment, as if she were savouring the effect of her words. Then she turned in a swirl of trinkets and dark skirts and made for the door. A second later she closed it with a bang.

  24

  Nolan barely noticed her departure. She sat motionless, hands gripping the bed’s steel frame, knuckles bleached ivory. The word ‘trap’ had hit her like a bullet, crushing the air from her lungs. She closed her eyes, fought to regain composure. It couldn’t be true, surely? Hekmeth was just getting her own back for what she’d said about Eisner. But she’d known Caine’s name: that couldn’t be a coincidence, and if it was true, he was in mortal danger. Whatever happened now, she had to get out of there, to warn GHQ, to warn Caine. She gasped as it struck her that Caine might already be dead. Tears like tiny jewels popped out in the corners of her eyes, and she wiped them away with trembling, cuffed hands.

  She sat frozen for a long while, steadily forcing herself back into operating mode. By a huge effort of willpower, she deleted any speculation about Caine from her mind. She would give the problem all her attention when she was in a position to do so: to be in that position, she had to get out of here alive.