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

by Michael Asher

  ‘He’s one of ours,’ Caine said. ‘We’re not leaving anyone to the mercies of this Angel of Death bastard. Remember that Senussi village? We’ve seen what he’s capable of.’ Cope went quiet: Caine thought for a moment. ‘Here’s what we’ll do,’ he said. ‘Me and Fred will go after the prisoners. Harry, you’ll take charge of the rest of the boys. Move the kit about a mile up the wadi in case any of Sidi Mohammad’s lot come back …’ He stopped and looked at the girl. ‘Layla, you go with Harry: see where they take the equipment. Then run to your father as quick as you can and bring him back with the donkeys to pick it up.’

  He sensed her hesitation. ‘No, Caine,’ she said, her voice low. ‘I stay with you. Now I find you I don’t leave you again.’ There was a tenderness in her voice that Caine couldn’t ignore: despite his misgivings, he touched her hand. ‘Please, Layla, do as I ask. We have come to kill the Angel of Death: to free your people. This will help.’

  She heard the gravity in his voice, nodded reluctantly. Caine got out his map and examined it in veiled torchlight. ‘Is your father’s camp where it was?’ he asked. Layla nodded again. ‘Good. When he has picked up our equipment, please tell him to take it back to his camp, not to the meeting place. We will meet him – and you – there.’

  Caine turned to Copeland again. ‘Right, let’s get cracking. You’ve got Netanya with you for liaison.’ As Cope stood up, Caine pulled him aside. ‘If we’re not back by last light tomorrow, go ahead with the plan as best you can.’

  Copeland paused, and though Caine couldn’t see his face well in the darkness, he could imagine the frownlines of disapproval. ‘Very good, skipper,’ he said.

  27

  Johann Eisner jumped ashore from the felucca, left the boatman to tie up at the jetty. He glanced up- and downriver, took in the ripe and seamy odours, the fantrails of gilded light etched on the water from an afternoon sun lodged like a yellow eye above lawns and whitewashed villas. He saw nothing amiss: anyone watching the boat from a distance would, anyway, see two Nile river rats wearing dirty gallabiyas of striped pyjamacloth and shapeless tarbooshes perched on cropped bullet heads. The only giveaway would be the tips of Eisner’s polished black shoes under the long shirt, but he told himself that no one would be looking close enough to notice them, nor the fact that his face lacked the boatman’s crusted soapstone features, the vine of furrows from sunblasted years navigating the Delta.

  Eisner was mistaken: his arrival had been noted by Field Security watchers sited in the vacant house across the river, one of whom was even now gabbling urgently on a field telephone to John Stocker. Eisner’s thoughts were all for Betty Nolan, holed up in the cellar of his stepfather’s villa, in the very room where he’d been humiliated as a youth by Idriss’s taunting, by the mocking laughter of teenage girls: the room where he’d stifled that laughter with knife and garotte, though not for ever, since it still haunted his dreams. He knew Hekmeth was in the house: his adopted sister had done well in abducting Nolan. Who gave a damn if some other bitch had got herself shot in the process? He regretted the job that had kept him in Jerusalem for more than a week, but what mattered now was finishing Nolan. He intended to get that over with, and talk to Hekmeth later.

  He followed the mosaic path through the rosegarden, past the swimming pool and into the cool shade of the covered verandah, where he hastily shucked the soiled gallabiya and tarboosh behind trellis screens. He put on dark glasses, slipped out his stiletto. He passed through the open garden door, went down the stairs towards the cellar.

  When the cellar door flew open Nolan was ready: she’d been preparing herself for Eisner’s arrival since morning. The fact that he was here meant that either Field Security hadn’t staked out the house at all or that they were watching but had somehow missed him. Whatever the case, it was down to her: not only her life but Tom Caine’s depended on what she did in the next few minutes. Hekmeth’s brief account of Eisner’s youth had provided her with raw material, out of which she’d fashioned a strategy: she had secreted the knife under her pillow. Whether Eisner would go for her at once, or whether she’d be able to engage him in dialogue, she didn’t know: she’d allowed for both options.

  Johann Eisner stood in the doorway, watching her with a vulture stare. He was dressed all in black; the wraparound lenses of his shades enhanced his wolfish features – a tall, leanjowled man with a mat of black hair, a thinbridged nose, razor jaws and a slim neck emerging from broad shoulders. He looked almost exactly as he had the last time Nolan had seen him: in the act of sodomizing Mary Goddard while slitting her throat with a vicious little curved stiletto. She held back a gasp. That very weapon was in his hand now – the knife that had ended the life of Goddard, Sim-Sim, Susan Arquette and God knew how many other women.

  ‘Betty Nolan,’ Eisner said gloatingly. He shut and locked the door, and oiled into the room towards her. ‘What a pleasure. You don’t know how much I have looked forward to this moment.’

  Nolan said nothing: she sat handcuffed on the end of the bed nearest the pillow. Eisner moved in on her, took off and pocketed his glasses, touched her chin with cold fingers. Close up, his face was almost nondescript, the kind of face she’d sometimes seen on skilled actors, the kind that had no definite nature of its own but came alive when assuming someone else’s character. His eyes, though, were sinister and disturbing: there was a mesmeric quality to them that made Nolan wince. She suppressed the feeling by sheer willpower: not for the first time, her life depended on her acting skill.

  Eisner’s eyes awled her. ‘The real Betty Nolan,’ he said. ‘In the flesh. No more dressing up, no more doppelgangers. I’d know you anywhere – I knew you even when I saw you in the uniform of a naval officer in that staff car …’

  This wasn’t strictly true: he’d recognized her face, but it had taken him some time to remember she was a cabaret girl he’d once seen at Madame Badia’s nightclub. Not just any cabaret girl, but the girl who’d walked in while he was giving that hag Mary Goddard the business. Nolan was the only eyewitness to that … incident. The only one who’d witnessed any of the incidents: the only one able to swear that it was really him who’d done it. That was why he had to get rid of her. ‘You caused me a lot of trouble, Betty,’ he said. ‘All that nonsense about Maddy Rose. You led me a wild-goose chase, in the course of which I had to punish your friend Sim-Sim for her obstinacy. She was quite an animal.’ He snickered, licked wet lips. ‘I gave it to her till she begged me to stop …’

  He was panting, his eyes far away, excited by the memory of his brutal rape and murder of a defenceless girl. He let the stiletto blade tickle Nolan’s throat: she didn’t pull back, neither did she look petrified. This irritated him, and with a savage movement he cut down the front of her blouse, peeling it away from her breasts. He touched her nipples with the point of the knife, one after the other. Nolan sucked air through clenched teeth. She didn’t scream.

  ‘That witch I found at your flat … Susan, was it? She was quite a beast too, but not the real thoroughbred, not like you. I shall enjoy –’

  He didn’t complete the sentence, put off by something in her eyes – a hardness he had never encountered before in his victims. Up to now Nolan hadn’t shown any of the normal symptoms of fear: it confused and disconcerted him.

  He swallowed dryly. ‘I am going to do you the way I did Mary Goddard. I’m going to ride you and cut your throat.’ His breath was coming in ragged stabs, his tongue snaking out: the very idea of doing it to her aroused him. ‘The last thing you will ever feel is me inside you.’

  Nolan forced herself to look directly into the smouldering eyes: she kept up the iron stare by pure determination. ‘I’ve faced death before,’ she said, almost nonchalantly. ‘Why don’t you get on with it instead of just mouthing off ?’

  She knew at once she’d hit the mark: Eisner’s razor jaws dropped. His features sagged and he took several steps back. Nolan followed up her advantage with a streetfighter’s sureness. ‘I know the answer, of cour
se,’ she said, cupid lips pouting contempt. ‘It’s because you’re more afraid of me than I am of you …’ She sniggered, and to her ears it sounded satisfyingly genuine.

  Eisner blinked: his eyes had lost their hypnotic sheen. He suddenly looked pale and feeble. ‘That’s nonsense,’ he snapped. ‘Who’s been …’

  ‘Is it? I don’t think so. When you were a youth, you murdered and sodomized the young girls your stepfather tried to make you have sex with because they laughed at your impotence, and you couldn’t stand it. The truth is you’re terrified of women. You can’t do it to a girl unless she’s turned to jelly with fear and completely in your power.’ She paused, spat on the floor without taking her eyes off him. ‘You can do what you like to me, but I’m not going to beg you to stop, and I’m never going to be in your power.’

  She spat a second time, her eyes wild, she edged imperceptibly nearer the pillow. ‘That’s the only way you can do it, isn’t it, Hussein? And even then only if the girl is bellydown so she can’t see your face and you can fuck her as if she was a man.’ The scoffing, jeering laughter Nolan produced was one of her finest ever performances, and it struck home like a .50-calibre needleround. Eisner’s face went ghastly white, his knifeblade jaws gobied, his mouth frothed. ‘Hekmeth …’ he shrieked. ‘Hekmeth told you …’

  ‘You’re not a man, Hussein,’ Nolan continued, still snickering. ‘You’re a pathetic, impotent, little kid …’

  Eisner ran at her bullroaring, his eyes popping, his mouth a foaming, demonic gash, his stiletto glinting in the lightshafts. It was just what Nolan had been waiting for. She flopped on her back, brought her knees up to her chin as if winding back a crossbow. The instant Eisner came in range she kicked him powerfully in the testicles, both feet together, with every ounce of strength in her body. It was a magnificent kick, and it hit bullseye: Eisner grunted in pain, shivvered backwards across the room, squinched the wall. He was only dazed for a second, but that was all it took for Nolan to grab the knife from under her pillow: she caressed its blade between her cuffed hands, stood up, raised it high above her head.

  Nolan had once seen Tom Caine kill a German soldier by throwing the Jerry’s own bayonet at him, left-handed, at close quarters. It had been an incredibly skilled act, especially for a right-handed man, and though she’d been horrified at the time, it had saved her life. Caine always said a knife was no good unless you could throw it: since Runefish, she’d had him coach her in knifethrowing and had practised day in, day out until she had it mastered.

  She hadn’t anticipated being handcuffed, but in principle it was no different. Before Eisner had collected himself enough to attack her again, she had flipped the knife with all the power and accuracy she could collect. It wasn’t the best throw she’d ever made, but it was good enough. The blade snagged him at the base of the neck, glanced off the clavicle, sliced through muscle, pierced the windpipe. Eisner’s eyes trapdoored: he rocked back, gore and froth sudding: to Nolan’s disappointment, though, he didn’t fall. ‘You bitch,’ he gobbled. ‘I’ll do you. I’ll have you.’

  He took a staggering step forward. She backed away, tipping over the bed to form a barrier between them: in that moment sharp yells echoed from the corridor outside. Nolan heard the Turk, Hayek, babbling like a loony, heard the distinct thrubb-thrubb-thrubb of a Thompson sub-machine-gun explosively loud in her ears, heard the bashowww-bashowww reverberations of a pistol: birdcaws of pain, staccato curses in Arabic, thumps and wolfhowls. Then a fist or a foot lammed the door as hard as a steel ram and a cultured English voice bawled, ‘Field Security. Open up there.’

  Eisner froze in midstride, almost comically nonplussed, Nolan’s knife still dangling from his throat, blood bubbling from the wound in crimson dobs, his eyes diamondbright with torment, cleft between rage and fear, between revenge and self-preservation. He ripped his gaze from Nolan to the door. The wood boomed, jumped in its frame as someone hurled their whole weight against it. Eisner ground his teeth, tore Nolan’s knife from his flesh, darted for the open bathroom, plinked bloodspots on the floor as he moved. Just as the main door was rent from its hinges and burst open, Eisner slammed the bathroom door shut and shucked the bolt.

  Nolan giggled uncontrollably, covered her breasts with cuffed hands, clocked John Stocker’s diminutive figure stride in through the fractured entrance, a look of brutal purpose written on his studious, professorial features, cyanic eyes beneath thick lenses glittering, a hot Colt .45 in his hand. She glimpsed other khaki-clad men moving in the corridor, treetrunk legs writhing like pythons on the floor, scented sour gun gas, heard stomps and screams from somewhere else in the house. Stocker looked at the bloodspatters, ranged her face piercingly. ‘Where is he?’ he rasped.

  Nolan nodded at the bathroom. ‘In the shithouse,’ she giggled. ‘Where he belongs.’

  28

  Nolan walked through the hallway into Stocker’s office at 8 Midan Sheikh Yusif, the converted Cairo townhouse that served as a base for Field Security. She wore a freshly laundered khaki drill skirt and blouse, a chipbag cap tilted on her blond curls. Not wanting to go back to the flat in Garden City where Pat Rigby had been shot, she’d checked into the Continental in Ezbekiyya Square. She’d wallowed in a hot tub with an iced beer, confident that Stocker would already have informed Caine that Sandhog was compromised. She’d covered the bruises on her face with daubs of makeup: despite the experiences of the past week, her eyes hadn’t lost the dreamy, far-off, acquiescent expression that drove most men half out of their minds and Tom Caine to distraction.

  Stocker and Stirling were waiting for her, smoking pipes, ensconced in patched and overstuffed armchairs that Nolan guessed had once graced Stocker’s study at Cairo University. The whole office was redolent of the classics faculty: a blackboard with names scrawled on it in white chalk, a packed library bookcase, a notched desk piled with dogeared books and files, a battered typewriter, a telephone, dusty tumblers, half-empty bottles of spirits, a pipe rack, tobacco jars, an artist’s impression of the Parthenon, a bust of Socrates. The officers stood up to return Nolan’s salute – a purely gentlemanly gesture, since both outranked her. They could have remained seated without violating regulations, but Nolan was a valued warrior, and too attractive a woman for that.

  Nolan sat down on a rickety sofa, lit a cigarette: a glance at Stocker’s face told her all was not well. That Eisner had escaped, she already knew. Who could have guessed that the ceiling of that bathroom held a concealed panel, opening into an escape shaft that led directly down to the Nile? It must have been cleverly hidden, because she’d used that room scores of times, even scoured it for a way out, and had never found it. Stocker’s man had crawled along the shaft following the bloodtrail: he’d concluded that Eisner had probably got away by swimming underwater, perhaps to a boat moored midstream.

  Hekmeth and Beeston had been arrested: they were currently being held at the Detention and Interrogation Centre at Helwan. Stocker had been debriefing them all evening, but neither could throw any light on Sandhog, other than Hekmeth’s claim that Caine had a traitor on his crew.

  Stocker lodged his pipe against an ashtray, removed his glasses, began cleaning them with a piece of four-by-two: a clear sign that he was agitated.

  Nolan noticed, and felt suddenly apprehensive. ‘What’s wrong?’ she enquired. ‘Don’t tell me it’s too late?’

  Stocker shook his head. ‘Hard to tell,’ he said. ‘Sandhog has been out of comms for two days: Caine hasn’t checked in, and we can’t raise him. That means either his set is U/S or …’

  ‘… he’s been bagged,’ Stirling completed the sentence. He, too, looked worried, Nolan thought. That didn’t surprise her: both the future of the campaign and of the SAS itself depended on Sandhog. Stirling had almost as large an investment in Tom Caine as she had.

  Nolan stubbed out her cigarette, halfsmoked. She was about to say something when Stirling continued.

  ‘There’s news, though. Yesterday, Caine’s group called at the
HQ of one of Maskelyne’s dummy units in the Western Desert asking for help with vehicle repairs. The visit apparently ended with Caine shooting one of the officers and forcing Maskelyne himself off at gunpoint. They dumped him in the desert: his men picked him up promptly, but he wasn’t at all a happy camper. The provost marshal now has a warrant out for Caine’s arrest. Major Sears-Beach is reportedly over the moon.’

  Nolan looked at him aghast. ‘I know Caine,’ she said. ‘He’d never have done that without a good reason.’

  Stirling chortled mirthlessly. ‘Damn right,’ he said, ‘and I know what the reason was. Maskelyne felt Caine had compromised his operation: if any of the SAS got bagged, they might spill the beans. He tried to abort Sandhog. Caine’s under strict orders to bring off Sandhog at any cost: he wouldn’t have accepted that for a minute, even if it meant doing something drastic. Caine’s that sort of boy. He was right to resist: his mistake was contacting Maskelyne in the first place.’

  Stocker nodded and replaced his glasses. ‘Is there any news of the missing LRDG unit?’ he asked.

  Stirling whoffed smoke, shook his head. ‘Roland’s troop wasn’t with Caine when he arrived at Maskelyne’s position yesterday. Maskelyne reckoned they’d already fought an engagement: if so, the LRDG might have been so badly mauled they couldn’t carry out their escort duties, and Caine went ahead without them. The problem is that we’ve lost comms with Roland, too. There’s a Waco spotter out but they haven’t found any trace yet.’

  Stocker sighed. ‘Looking at the map,’ he said, ‘I doubt Caine will have reached his objective: he has two days to run before the deadline. In view of what Hekmeth has told us – that there’s a stoolpigeon in his section – it is possible he’s been bagged –’