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

by Michael Asher

  He had barely registered the deeper shadows of the trees around him when he heard the shoooosh of the Very gun: he heard the flare tromba above him, saw the night excoriated like a dark flap of skin, saw the drywash lit up by unearthly turquoise light. Traileyed, he clocked the prickled branches of the thornscrub come in focus around him, took in the maggotforms of dead Senussi in the wadi bed, clocked two live Arabs frozen in midwadi: barechested, spikeheaded men with narrow jaws and eyeballs glittering like beryls. They brought up their rifles: Wallace yanked iron: the Bren tuckered, chundered crimson blunderbursts. The two Senussi carommed forward in gazelle-like leaps, cavorted, twisted, spasmed, jerked: grenade-sized craters slubbered from their backs in gouts of greensick gore. They pitched over, rolled on the sandy earth as the eery flarelight sputtered out.

  Caine heard heavy breathing through the headset, knew Audley was only feet away. ‘Bertie,’ he hissed.

  ‘Here,’ Audley’s voice came back. There was a scuffling in the bush: Caine felt a hand grasping his shoulder, gripped it tight, yanked Audley with him as he sprinted through the bush towards the escarpment. He heard Wallace rear up like a leviathan and tromp after them. Caine didn’t let go of Audley’s wrist until they reached the bottom of the slope, where he stopped for breath, made sure Wallace was still with them. The three of them crouched under the scree, licking parched lips, longing for water none of them had. ‘We downed seven,’ Caine panted thickly. ‘Are there any more?’

  Audley swallowed aridly in the darkness. ‘I don’t know,’ he gasped. ‘I don’t think so. There were five: they made camp here just after the rain. Then two rearguard scouts came in. They must have reported you following, because they all melted into the shadows and left me by the fire. I knew it was a trap but I couldn’t move: they’d have potted me the moment I tried it. You saw what happened when I stood up? I almost got scragged.’

  Caine gave a hollow laugh. ‘You can thank the “great booby” for that: I told you he doesn’t miss unless he means to. Maybe you should drop the idea of putting him on a charge.’

  Audley grunted in what Caine took to be embarrassment, but the sound was covered by a bass growl from Wallace. ‘Where’s Larousse?’

  Audley’s eyes were caverns in the ocean of dark. ‘Dead,’ he said. ‘He put up a fight while they were dragging us down the slope: one of the swine shot him. I saw it happen. I don’t know what they did with the body – maybe carried it off to show the Jerries.’

  ‘Trust Gaston to go down fighting,’ Wallace said. ‘That must have been the gunshot we heard.’

  Caine was quiet for a moment. ‘You sure he’s dead?’ he asked Audley.

  ‘I saw it happen,’ Audley repeated. ‘They put a bullet through his head at close contact range. Larousse was a hard bugger, I know, but nobody could have survived that.’

  ‘How did they get you, anyway?’ Caine asked.

  ‘One of the bastards must have crept up on me when I was on stag, hit me over the head. Next thing I knew I was being dragged up a mountain with Larousse, both of us gagged and bound …’

  Caine wondered if Audley had been asleep when they’d jumped him but didn’t say anything. He put out a hand, felt the lieutenant’s head: Audley flinched as the probing fingers touched a lump in the back of his skull. ‘You must have been hit with a club,’ Caine said. ‘One of those throwingsticks.’

  He paused, remembering how Larousse had saved their skins at el-Gala, wondering why the best men were always the first to die.

  ‘If you was bound and gagged, sir,’ Wallace asked Audley, ‘why did they leave you untied by the fire?’

  ‘Must have been part of the trap,’ Audley said. ‘Who knows how these Senussi think?’

  Caine made no comment. He sniffed, spat dry saliva into the sand. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I want to make Adud’s camp by first light.’

  The night was hatblack, the going hard. First light found them descending a slope of lava plates that clanked underfoot like pigiron into a watercourse full of the savoury scent of wild sage, where spinneys of cork oak, lentisk and juniper swelled in tufts among basalt slabs. Crows and ravens chittered and flew away as they approached. They rested in the trees, unable to speak for the paste clogging their tongues, their swollen, inflamed eyeballs half blind with thirst. The pewter sky was perforated by long strips of magenta, the serried ranks of the hills coming slowly into view, successive toothsawn ridges, each series a little higher than the one before.

  There was no trace of water in the wadi. Caine dragged himself along the sandy bed to the nearest bend, wafting away Parthian hordes of flies that had homed in on them with the light. The sand was dotted with the abscesses of ants’ nests, crisscrossed with tiny highways. As Caine knelt down, his hand dislodged a flat stone: a black scorpion scuttled away. Caine mashed it to yellow pus with his foot.

  He started digging with his bayonet: Wallace and Audley joined him. They found damp sand elbow-deep: Caine took off his cap comforter, pressed it into the pit, brought it up heavy with moisture. He offered it to Audley, who took it and lapped a mouthful greedily before handing it back. Caine dipped it in again, offered it to Wallace. The big man waved it away, crouched over the hole on all fours like a great, sprawling lion, stuck his shaggy head inside, imbibed liquid that had gathered at the bottom of the seep. They stayed there for thirty minutes, downed about a cupful of water each: when they moved off again the sun was ballooning up beyond the edges of the hills to the east, a beetroot-coloured globe exploding into a blinding gold fireball as it heaved itself beyond the rim of rock.

  They followed the wadi up into the hills, Caine navigating with map and prismatic compass. An hour after sunrise they came across a Senussi village of mud and thatch hovels in a tight grid on the shore of the drywash. Caine was so relieved to find the place it took him a minute to understand it was deserted. Some of the hovels had been smashed, others burnt to heaps of charred mudbrick and blackened wood. They searched the village for water, found only shattered terracotta waterpots, hanging goatskin waterbags as shrivelled as old prunes. Dust devils spun between the cabins: the men found goat and sheep carcases in convoluted shapes: fleshless skulls with vacant eyepits, packets of tangled bone in yellow skins rockhard from the heat. They found a dead camel, its serpentine neck drawn back so far that the skull lay upon its hump, its intestines and windpipe torn out by vultures. The narrow streets were littered with broken pottery, fractured buttergourds, milking pans, fragments of clothing, battered tin trays: bits of basketry and skeins of tentcloth hung from doorposts in heat-perished shreds.

  A hundred paces out of the village lay a row of leafless thorntrees where a colony of yellowhead vultures flapped at them dismissively. Beyond the trees they found a deep well without bucket or rope. Caine peered over the rim, dropped in a pebble, heard the plunk as it struck water. He estimated that it lay at about sixty feet. ‘We could climb down,’ croaked Wallace. ‘You’ve done it before, ain’t you, skipper?’

  Caine shuddered, recalling his life-or-death struggle to climb out of a well like this on the Runefish mission back in June. ‘There’s no way you’re going to get me in there,’ he rasped.

  The giant wasn’t listening: his huge body had tensed. He was gazing across the lavablack scarp to the north where a dim figure was making its way down a track. The man was a half-mile away, a silvery comma, insubstantial as a wisp in the hazy meltlight. He appeared to be pulling something. The three of them went to ground. They lay there for minutes watching the figure suspended in lattices of gauze shimmering in and out of focus. It had drifted within a hundred yards before Caine realized they were looking at a Senussi Arab leading a donkey, a spindleshanked old man with a Father Christmas beard and skin like sundried leather. He was clad in an offwhite turban that framed his face, sepia robes that fluttered in the breeze, and carried a Mannlicher rifle slung across his back. It wasn’t until he halted the donkey five yards away, though, that Caine recognized the network of wrinkles, the anchor nose, the ste
ady black eyes of Sheikh Adud, Layla’s father, his old friend from the Runefish op.

  30

  Caine awoke to find Harry Copeland shaking him, his face drawn with fatigue, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing. ‘Sorry, skipper. I know you’re knackered. We all are. But we’ve got plans to make.’

  Caine saw the eagerness on his mate’s face, remembered the reason he was here: to rescue Angela Brunetto, the Italian girl he had fallen for. In the months before Sandhog, Copeland had never talked much about her: even when Caine had dropped hints, he’d pretended not to know what he was talking about. Yet Caine knew he was desperate to find her: this time, he guessed, Cope had no intention of letting her go.

  He brushed away flies, sat up, recalled that he was in Adud’s camp – a score of goatshair tents pitched in the shade of tamarix and arbutus trees on a wadi side. It was late afternoon, cool, the sky full of banked-up drumheads like floating foam mountains, veiling the sun. He glanced at his watch and saw he’d slept seven hours. ‘Are we secure?’ he enquired.

  Copeland ran a hand through his dirtpasted thatch. ‘Adud’s got scouts out,’ he said. ‘Static and prowler. His lot haven’t forgotten Umm ’Aijil: they’re dead wary of the Jerries jumping them.’

  Caine nodded, looked round, scrabbled dust from his eyes. Audley and Wallace were still asleep: Pickney, Gibson, Rossi, Trubman and Netanya were sitting or moving around in the treeshade, sorting kit, stripping and cleaning weapons. He looked for Dumper and Larousse, then recalled suddenly that they were dead: two more steady men, lost due to his own foolishness, his own inadequacy.

  A wave of despair broke over him: Betty Nolan must be dead too, by now: the Sandhog mission had been dogged by bad luck and worse decisions. The LRDG escort had been wiped out; the enemy had been waiting for them before the Shakir cliffs; the wireless had been smashed; a party of traitorous Senussi had bumped them by night: Caine recalled with horror how Gibson and Rossi had sawn off the heads of two dying Arabs, like savages. He watched the cowboy and his mate, sitting crosslegged together knee to knee, polishing M2 rounds. They looked peaceful, contented to be in each other’s company: it seemed impossible that they were capable of such barbarity. Then, with a shudder, Caine recalled how, only four months back, he himself had rammed a gunbarrel down a German’s throat until his gullet burst. Despite all the horrors he’d seen, he still clung to one basic conviction: human beings weren’t barbaric by nature: it was the nature of war to bring out barbarity in them. He spat dry saliva, remembering something else: it was 24 October. Monty’s Lightfoot push was due to start on the night of October 25/26. That meant the Olzon-13 had to be taken out before tomorrow night.

  He got to his feet, scanned the wadi. There were goats corralled in pens of piled stone, slatribbed donkeys nosing doubtfully among the swordgrass, fat-tailed sheep penned up behind fences of Sodom’s Apple stalks. There were brownskinned women with tattooed chins wearing ragged cotton shifts that clung to their slender bodies: he saw a woman shaking a goatskin slung from a wooden tripod making buttermilk, another on hands and knees milling grain on a stone quern, another feeding a snotnosed infant at her breast. There were men with treebark faces and lizard eyes in parchment-thin shirts, hooded cloaks, baggy trousers, smoking small brass pipes, cleaning antique weapons, building cookfires, brewing tea. Boys with coxcomb tufts of hair and girls with oiled plaits moved along the wadi sides chanting and hurling pebbles at flocks of sheep and goats. These tribespeople had mobbed him as he’d slouched into the camp behind Adud that morning, the women ululating, the men clamouring to shake his hand, crying ‘Caine, Caine,’ as if he were some kind of saviour. Those people were relying on him too.

  Copeland brought him tea, gave him a cigarette, sat down beside him, his SMLE across his knees. He described how, the previous night, they’d lugged the heavy manpacks of demolitions gear, working in relays, three men humping, two men covering, making only a hundred yards a time, changing over, going back for the other packs, working like galleyslaves, until Layla had arrived with Adud and the donkeys: how the old man had been horrified to hear about Sidi Mohammad and his renegade Senussi, how he’d helped them rope their burdens on donkeyback, guided them here in the pitchdark of the early hours. Caine listened until his mate had finished, then told him how they’d snatched Audley, how Larousse had been killed. ‘That chap was a real scrapper,’ Cope said gravely. ‘He’s going to be sorely missed.’

  They were interrupted by two Senussi who arrived carrying between them a tin tray laden with rice and roasted goatsmeat. Copeland woke up Wallace and Audley: Pickney warned them not to pig out on the rich food. ‘Take it steady,’ he said. ‘Our guts are as shrivelled as paper bags. Overdo it and you’ll drop dead, I promise you.’

  They ate sparingly from the tray, Arab style. When they’d finished, Layla came over with a spouted jug of water and a huge kettle of tea. As she poured water over their hands in turn, Caine couldn’t help looking at her. The previous night he’d seen her only by moonlight, and he’d forgotten how ravishing she was: liquid brown eyes, haughty, arched nose, heartshaped lips, waistlength tumble of glossy hair, the sandglass swell of her breasts and hips. She splashed water over his hands, showing teeth like polished nacre, commiserated with him for the loss of Larousse. Caine thanked her again: he remembered the touch of her hand, the warmth of her body close to his on the wadi floor, the hint of sandalwood, the supple strength of the arm he had gripped. Then he recalled with a start how this same beautiful woman had leapt on the back of one of her fellow tribesmen and slit his throat with a knife. He thought of Betty Nolan: he watched Layla undulating away with a quiver of disquiet, disgusted, not with her, but with the terrible sleeping demons that war could awaken in men and women alike.

  As they were finishing the tea, Adud came over at the head of a dozen or so armed men: Caine knew they must be the entire fighting strength of the clan. There was a spring to their step that he’d noticed before among the Senussi, as if they were bursting with an energy they could scarcely control. Yet they carried themselves with dignity, too, despite their parchment rags: they wore bandoliers of bullets and carried their rifles clasped muzzle forward over their shoulders. Caine had his men stand up to shake hands with them. Working down the row of Arabs, he saw Fred Wallace freeze suddenly, step back, glare ferociously at two Senussi in front of him. ‘I ain’t shakin’ hands with these buggers,’ the giant said.

  The ceremony broke down: the Senussi stared at Wallace, astonished at this unheard-of breach of protocol. Caine hurried over to him and realized with a shock that he knew the Arabs the giant was refusing to greet. They were Salim and Sa’id, two brothers, who, during the Runefish mission, had been responsible for the deaths of three of his commandos. Wallace’s pinprick eyes smouldered at them. ‘Never,’ he spat. ‘We’re not takin’ them with us, skipper. These sods killed O’Brian, MacDonald and Jackson. Have you forgotten that?’

  Caine hadn’t forgotten: neither could he forget how Wallace had itched to put bullets through the boys’ heads, and how he, Caine, had forbidden it. They were teenagers, slimbuilt and wiry, alike as peas, except that Salim’s face was edged with a slim whisker of beard while Sa’id’s was cleanshaven. They hung back, watching Wallace’s movements, cateyed. Caine was perplexed: he was aware that refusal to greet a man was an unforgivable insult to the Senussi. He needed these Arabs as allies on Sandhog, and unless he could get over this hiccup, the entire mission might founder. ‘Fred,’ he said softly. ‘It was an accident, remember? They took us for Jerries.’

  ‘Accident? Yeah, maybe: but them lads is still dead, ain’t they?’

  Wallace was going to say something else, when Sheikh Adud and Manny Netanya poled up together. They had evidently struck up a relationship: both Adud and Layla had admired Netanya’s half-brother, Moshe Naiman, who’d died on the previous mission. The sheikh spoke to the youths: they answered respectfully. He added a short explanation to Netanya, who turned his cadaver’s face on Caine. ‘These boys have ne
ver forgiven themselves for the deaths of your men, which they truly regret,’ he explained. ‘They offer themselves to you because they wish to make amends. They pledge themselves to fight to the death on your behalf.’

  Caine glanced at Wallace: the giant was still glowering. ‘How do we know they’re tellin’ the truth?’ he demanded. ‘They might’ve been workin’ for the Boche all along, like them A-rabs last night.’

  ‘We’ll just have to take their word for it, mate,’ Caine said. ‘We need these blokes: if you don’t shake hands with them, we’ll lose the lot, and the whole scheme will be up the spout. We’ve come too far to let that happen.’ He paused, shaking his head at Netanya, who was about to translate his words to Adud. He turned back to Wallace. ‘I believe them,’ he said.

  The big gunner swallowed hard, spat into the sand: for a long moment, Caine thought he might stump away. Instead, Wallace raised his enormous chest, took a gargantuan breath, stepped towards the youths with his pansize hand out: Caine could sense the effort it took his friend to do it. Wallace shook hands with both boys. There was a palpable relaxation of tension: the greeting ceremony resumed. Minutes later, all of them, Senussi and SAS men, were seated in a big circle in the shade of the tallest tree.