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

by Michael Asher

  The rest of the crew brought down the manpacks and stood to in the trees in all-round defence. Maurice Pickney opened his medical haversack, peeled off Trubman’s dressing, examined the wound, wiped away blood, changed the dressing, gave him a morphia shot. Caine squatted beside him. ‘Sorry skipper,’ the signaller wheezed. ‘Didn’t see the bugger coming, did I?’

  Pickney shushed him, turned to Caine, spoke with his mouth up against his ear. ‘It’s touch and go, boss,’ he said. ‘With a gut wound like that, you can’t tell. We’ll have to leave him here.’

  ‘Not on your life,’ Caine hissed in the orderly’s earlobe. ‘I’m not leaving him for the Hun. We’re taking him with us.’

  Pickney looked at Caine, cobwebbed eyes standing out against the corkblack face. Caine thought he was going to argue, but instead he pursed his lips and shrugged. It took twenty minutes to cut poles from the bush, to rig up a makeshift stretcher out of spare rope. While they were doing it, Copeland crept up to Caine, spoke in his ear. ‘We’re not going to make it, skipper,’ he said. ‘We’ve lost too much time. We’ve got less than two hours till the next sentry change, till they find the dead ’uns. If we haven’t hit the target by then, we’re all lucked out.’

  Caine shook his head. ‘I’m not leaving him,’ he mouthed in the sergeant’s ear. ‘We’ve only got to cover a mile.’

  Caine knew what Cope was thinking: covering a mile tactically through thornforest carrying heavy manpacks and a wounded man would be like trekking to the moon. When they pulled out, Pickney, Netanya, Wallace and Gibson carried the stretcher between them, stagged by Caine and Rossi, changing a man every ten minutes: Copeland humped his manpack and ranged ahead as lead scout.

  The thornwood smelled of pitch and gumsap: the branches snagged their packs like sticky fingers. Cope avoided the path used by the sentries, tried to steer them through the less dense undergrowth, but it was hard going, made painfully slow by their heavy burdens. Trubman bore the buffeting noiselessly, his hands clutched over his stomach, but often they were forced to draw him through the scrub at a crouch, covering their eyes against the brambles. Copeland signalled frequent halts: the men froze, strained their ears for reaction. They heard the hoot of owls, the chafing of insects, the chittlings of mice: several times they heard the low murmuring of enemy prowlers, the soft tramp of their boots on the earth.

  Once, Cope steered them around a radar tower, its steel feet clamped in sandbag emplacements, the great scanner yawing above them. Further on, he stopped the patrol and went to investigate an anti-aircraft sangar: he found there only spent shells and an empty ammo box. The SAS team squatted by the sangar wall to sip water from their canteens, and Caine angled a peek at his watch. It was almost 0415 hours. It had taken them nearly an hour to get this far, and he judged they were only halfway. They had to put in the attack before sunup, and it was less than an hour till first light. Caine sucked his teeth, decided they would leave Trubman inside the sangar: he would be safe here, and this position would be their emergency RV.

  They left him lying on a blanket with his rifle clutched in his arms, a full canteen of water and a couple of morphia syrettes. ‘We aren’t dumping you, mate,’ Caine said in his ear. ‘We’ll come back, don’t fret.’ As they moved off again, a dry wind rose, scraping like cello strings in the treeheads. Caine welcomed it because the sound covered their movements: Copeland increased the pace, pausing only when he heard voices or sensed movement. By the time they came to the western edge of the forest, though, the morning star was lying above the eaves of the great abutment and winedark filaments were trickling across the mountains to the east.

  33

  They set their packs among sandmounds caught among the roots of white-thorn and bladegrass, fanned out in the bush, primed detonators, set timepencils, saw to their shooting irons. Caine didn’t want a repetition of el-Gala: he sent scouts through the bush north and south to make sure no enemy was lying in wait. He surveyed the vista, noting that it was slightly different from what he remembered: the vast windcarved reef of the buttress wall reared over them, tilting up out of the plain seventy paces away, its surface scored and grainy in the predawn haze. The acacia forest had previously extended to the foot of the butt: the Boche had evidently cut it back when they’d built the spur line. He could see the narrow gauge rails running on a low embankment across the pebbleshot earth, curving gracefully into the jaws of a cave on his right. His heart jolted. This was the entrance to the Olzon-13 bunker: all roads had led him here.

  Caine panned the lenses left into the dun and greywashed dark: the sky was still benighted, but Venus was sinking, the seep of red ochre on the hills growing rich. He observed the sagebrush around the cleft where the warm springs lay, recalled how his crew had bathed there on his previous trip. He eyetracked the rails south for a quarter of a mile to where they rounded the edge of a long stone slab – the same slab on which scores of Itie deserters and ex-colons had once gathered to greet him by lamplight. In his mind’s eye he pictured the entrance to the main cave, the vaulted cavern where he and his commandos had once feasted, where he had danced and smooched with Lina, the girl later raped and murdered by the Hun. He recalled how the tents of the Ities had been pitched in the trees near the slab, remembered how Copeland had been caught there in bed with Angela Brunetto by her husband Michele.

  He knew from aerial shots how the view would look from the slab now: to the right, the Jerry M/T park standing at the end of the narrow defile that formed the Citadel’s ‘main gate’, and to the left, the prefabricated admin block and the compound where the prisoners were held. Beyond the slab, on the other side of the massif, lay the 999 Division bivouac lines. He thought of Audley, hoped that he and the Senussi would by now be in position outside the defile, awaiting the signal to launch their attack.

  He studied the whole sweep of the spur line, taking in every detail, fitting in the details with the images on the maps and aerial photos he’d memorized. He glassed out the rock wall, his gaze coming to rest once again on the bunker mouth. There was no sentry post and no sign of prowler guards: the Germans were obviously relying on their perimeter defences, confident that the Citadel could be attacked only by air.

  Caine let the glasses down, rubbed suetclogged eyes. All that remained was to get the Lewes bombs across those seventy yards of open ground and into the bunker before it grew light. The chemical weapon that threatened to crush the greatest Allied offensive of the war so far, the poison that had brought so much death and suffering to the Green Mountains, would be destroyed in the next half-hour.

  Copeland tapped him on the arm, passed him blue pills. Caine swallowed the Bennies with a gulp of water. Almost at once he felt the amphetamine rush, felt his fatigue melt away, felt relief from the accumulated strain of the past few days. The team had survived against all odds, but he’d lost three good men in the process: he regretted it acutely. All the more reason, though, why they should bring off Sandhog: failure wasn’t an option. As for Betty Nolan, it was too late to save her, perhaps, but he would mourn her loss in good time.

  The scouts returned, reported all quiet. Caine hacked a deep breath. ‘Are you ready for this?’ he asked Copeland.

  Cope nodded. ‘Let’s go for it,’ he said.

  Caine was about to rise when Wallace cupped his elbow. Three German troopers were strutting along the spur line, sub-machine-guns slung from their shoulders: they looked smart, alert, competent: the SAS men pressed deeper into the swordgrass, but the sentries didn’t even glance their way. They lay still until the guards had rounded the end of the butt: Caine was about to move again when he heard the peanut-box rattle of a motor: a motorcycle and sidecar combo sputtered along the railway track, knobby tyres spooning up saffron dust – two Boche in khaki drills, a thirty-cal Schmeisser mounted on the sidecar bonnet. Caine lay still, itched for them to pass. He watched the combo shrink into the distance through one slitted eye: the moment it was out of sight he rose, listened, beckoned his team forward. ‘Here w
e go, lads,’ he said.

  They hammered across the open ground in an untactical bunch, scrambled over the spur line, lurched on, stooped in the shadows by the cave mouth, their backs to the rock wall. There was some scrub here – not good cover, but good enough until it came full light. Caine detailed Netanya and Pickney to keep watch, had Wallace and Cope take their manpacks, led his five-man demolition squad into the tunnel’s maw. It was matt-black inside, but they used their torches, sniffing firedamp and nitrate, tracking the rails around the twists and turns. A bevy of bats divebombed them, flittered out towards the soapy light.

  They rounded a bend and found themselves against railway buffers in a huge cavern: the roof arched high above them, and the thin wires of their torchlight fell on a huddle of vats perched on low iron legs, a couple of horizontal tanks like ships’ turbines, banks of brass pressure gauges, tangles of pipes, pumps and rubber hose, racks of rusted cylinders. There were block-and-tackle cables hanging from cross girders like strands of giant cobweb, piles of glass demijohns in fitted baskets, clusters of oil drums, a silent generator radiating a lattice of wires attached to bare lightbulbs affixed to the walls. The stone floor was covered with debris: screws of newspaper, fag butts, beerbottle shards, enamel mugs holed and shapeless: half a dozen broken down garage trolleys with T-shaped handles stood in a ragged dogsleg by the buffers. The cavern smelled of sulphur, grease and industrial lye.

  Caine blinked, took in the air of abandonment with a sick feeling in his gut. Gibson and Rossi dumped their manpacks, slouched across to the vats, ran their hands over peeling paint, fingered stopcocks and standpipes. Copeland left his two packs on the floor, shuffled over to examine the pressure gauges. He looked round for Caine, caught in his torchbeam Caine’s dark overhang of a frown, the glint of quartzite eyes. ‘The needles are all at zero,’ he said. Caine heard cold dismay in his voice.

  ‘An’ these here stopcocks are open,’ the cowboy drawled indignantly. ‘All of ’em.’

  ‘Fucking empty,’ Rossi chimed in.

  ‘Not a fucking dickybird,’ the cowboy echoed. ‘There ain’t nothin’ here, boss.’

  Caine dryswallowed, licked skinned lips, knuckles tight on the stock of his Thompson. He didn’t want to accept it: not after all they’d endured. There was dead silence as the full horror of it hit them. Fred Wallace picked up two cylinders from the racks, held them out sideways like dumb-bells – an unconscious gesture of crucifixion. The canisters were obviously empty: they seemed featherlight in his boxing-glove hands. He hurled them down with a thunderous clang that made everyone jump: he spat viciously, tossed his jungled hair, his mandrill face a web of furrows in the torchlight. ‘Jerry seen us comin’, skipper,’ he ranted. ‘We’ve been fuckin’ had.’

  Shaking his head incredulously, Caine stomped to the nearest vat, hammered it with the side of his fist. It gave up a hollow ring. It was true, then: the vats were empty. If the Olzon-13 had ever been here, it wasn’t any longer. He thought of el-Gala. ‘Jesus, not again,’ he spat.

  At the same moment the muted snarl of motors drifted down the gallery from the outside. ‘Oh my Christ,’ Copeland said.

  They jogged up the tunnel in a cluster, dropped their manpacks, threw themselves down by Netanya and Pickney at the bunker mouth. They clocked half a dozen Hun wagons drawing towards them out of the slategrey halflight – motorcycle combos, roofless halftracks, three-ton trucks. They stared into the yellow flush of headlamps, looked up the black nostrils of machine-guns, saw Hun faces – opaque eyes behind dust goggles, mouths like fusewire twists. Further back, dozens of Jerries in battlekit were debussing from the open backs of lorries left and right, and more of them were coming up from the rear.

  The SAS team lay squeezed together either side of the rails, spreadlegged in the full blaze of the headlights with a battery of MG30s zeroed in on them. Caine knew that a single burst from one of those weapons could blow them all to Valhalla: the Hun had them cold. They might withdraw into the bunker, but there was no escape that way: the enemy would flush them out with gas or flame-guns, or simply wait till they died of thirst.

  The Hun wagons leaguered up in a broken crescent around the bunker entrance: Hun soldiers with rifles and sub-machine-guns muscled into the gaps. Caine saw gun muzzles pointed at him, felt the heat of the headlights, saw the Jerries jostle back to let through a tall officer in a glossy trenchcoat, polished jackboots and a high-crowned cap. He halted at ten paces. ‘Lay down your weapons,’ he gasped. His voice was breathless, high-pitched, mezzo-contralto: it made the hairs on Caine’s neck bristle, set his teeth on edge. He knew that voice. He peered at the officer, clocked a robust torso, long legs, an oddly feminine flare of the hips, eyes like pitshafts in a bone-coloured face. His gaze came to rest on the man’s fingers – abnormally long, like the legs of a tarantula. Caine would have recognized those hands anywhere: this was Major Heinrich Rohde of the Abwehr – the man who’d tortured Betty Nolan, who’d caused the death of Moshe Naiman. Caine had last seen him four months earlier through the sights of a Bren gun, and had tried his best to kill him. He’d often hoped he’d succeeded: now he knew he had not.

  Rohde took another step forward. ‘Lieutenant Caine,’ he breathed. ‘Tell your men to put aside all their weapons, and stand up slowly with their hands on their heads.’

  For a moment, Caine couldn’t believe he’d heard Rohde call him by his name and rank. When he’d encountered the Black Widow last, he’d been a sergeant: how could Rohde know he was now a lieutenant? How could he know Caine was there at all? None of the men had turned a hair, and Caine felt a surge of pride at their steadiness. He knew they would fight if he ordered it, but as things were they wouldn’t stand a chance. There was no option but to surrender: what worried him most was the fate of Manny Netanya – if Rohde discovered he was a Jew, there was no telling what he might do.

  Rohde’s blackballed eyes beaded the cavemouth. ‘Lieutenant Caine,’ he repeated. ‘I shall have your men shot down like dogs if you do not order them to surrender in the next thirty seconds.’

  Your men, Caine thought: your men, your choice. He recalled the Black Widow’s uncanny ability to probe human weakness: how he’d grasped from the start that Caine was the type who’d rather sacrifice himself than let his comrades die. Caine laid down his Tommy-gun and his Browning, rose cautiously to his feet: Rohde recognized him and gave him a wolflike smile. Caine had to force the words out through rage-glued teeth. ‘Do what he says, lads. Put your weapons aside. Stand up. Slowly.’

  The men wove up in a teetering bunch, leaving rifles, Bren-guns, pistols, on the ground. ‘Is that him?’ Netanya hissed from the side of his mouth. ‘Is that the bastard who killed Moshe?’

  ‘Yes, but …’

  Rohde raised an inquisitive eyebrow, and in that second Netanya rushed straight at him, his lank, sinewed body jerking, jawhasps going like traps, eyes feral, mouth locked in a silent scream of revenge. It took Caine a tick to see that he was carrying a primed Lewes bomb. He felt his lips forming round a ‘Noooo’ that never came out: he’d already slipped into the sort of trance he’d experienced just before the contact with the Jerry column: time went pussyfoot, objects loomed limpid, garfished up larger than life. He saw Netanya galloping like a hurdler in slow motion, saw Jerry faces blanch, saw Huns reel back, knocking each other down like dominoes, heard the Lewes bomb detonate in a rip-roaring barrooomm. The air mulekicked: Netanya’s body melted in a blowback of flesh and smoke, Rohde vanished: a motorcycle combo keetered perpendicular, turned a breakback somersault, landed with a crunch atop its team. Caine scooped his Thompson, loosed the safety, spittlebugged rounds: the gunner on the second combo flipped, the driver’s tunic scalloped out in crimson burrs.

  ‘Run!’ Caine bawled.

  The SAS lads had their weapons: they were already moving. Wallace welted grenades; Copeland hurled smoke canisters. The bombs bunked dirt, keedled off in a frayed salvo: air flumped, grit and shrapnel blew, shellbrown smoke whoofed across the Hun wag
ons in wads. Caine saw a truck bonnet flame up like a gasjet, saw steel skew and rumple, saw glass shards fly, saw blazing bodies lollygag out of the cab, heard Hun voices wail. Before the Jerries were on their feet, the SAS men were hurtling out through the blazing leaguer, running like a whirlwind, leaping over Hun heads, vaulting the railway bank, ballclacking bullets in long spleens of fire.

  Caine hit bush, heard his men crash through it like spooked beasts, heard the clitterclat of machine-guns behind him, saw tracer rounds fingerpoke the leaden air. He swivelled, dropped into a crouch, glimpsed blazing wagons through swills of smog and black pyres like hearse-plumes. He clocked Jerry heads bob behind the railway bank: he smelled sourgas, clocked white commas of gunsmoke, arrowheads of fire. Squads of Jerries were pepperpotting across the open ground on his flanks: fire and movement with bayonets fixed.

  Caine couldn’t see his men in the forest but he could hear the pump of their Garands, could hear their Brens tockatick. He slotted his Tommy-gun to the shoulder, sighted up, squeezed steel, felt the gun jump, sprayed enemy skirmishers, saw two of them bowl over and snaffle dirt. The cowboy moved in spirit-like, squatted beside him, bevelled teeth gritted, eyes bugging, rifle at the armpit. ‘The Very, skipper,’ he hissed. ‘We need a …’ A Jerry slug thumped between his shoulderblades, stove in his neck: his face ballooned, his jaw uncottered from behind in a mesh of teeth, bone splinters, rent ligament. His lean body tippled into the dust. Caine ducked, lurched in shock, heard a spine-curdling howl of anguish that could only have come from Rossi.

  A tub-framed Jerry yomped out of the gauze, screaming, waving his rifle: Caine fired from the waist, saw red pustules volcano up across the Hun’s chest and neck, saw him sledge out. Incoming rounds peeled air from all directions: he sensed enemy movement left and right. He groped in his pouch for the Very pistol, eyeballed another Jerry skittering in from his front, a lanky, stoatfaced trooper with a Schmeisser SMG muzzle-spitting at the hip: slugs sawed treebark, spiffled leaves. Caine fired his Tommy one-handed, clocked a fist-sized hole open up in the Jerry’s thigh. The man screeched, timbered almost on top of him: blood whooshed from his limb in long scarfs. Caine cocked the Very left-handed, pulled steel. Air rushed and popped, green light girandoled. A lead weight clumped his head, crushed it sideways: a vice gripped his skull, a whirling cyclone sent him spinning down a red-vaulted slide into a serenity of dark.