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

by Michael Asher

  He heard the scuffle of boots, ducked defensively as a rubber baton whacked him across the shoulders, spudsacked him off the chair. Caine hit the floor yelling, rolled in filth. A Kraut kicked him in the stomach: yellow sunspots blazed behind his eyes. They lifted him up, they stomped on his feet, they sideswiped him through the blindfold, they plonked him down in the chair. He felt his heart thud, braced himself for more, but this time it didn’t come. Instead, he heard an order snapped. He heard booted feet scuttering back: a moment later the hood was whipped off and Caine found himself staring into the bonewhite face of Major Heinrich Rohde.

  Caine gagged in shock: his brassweight skull wobbled. This couldn’t be: only hours earlier he’d seen Rohde vaporized by Netanya’s bomb. He blinked, tried to focus, took in the Nazi’s muscular frame, his immaculate drill tunic, his jodhpurs, his polished jackboots, his peaked service cap with the Abwehr insignia. ‘No,’ he lisped through pumped lips. ‘No. You’re dead.’

  ‘I am very much alive, I assure you, my friend,’ Rohde scraped.

  Caine’s vision was blurred, but there was no mistaking the highpitched, effeminate voice – the voice that had haunted him all these months. He screwed up his face in denial, but couldn’t tear his eyes away. The Black Widow was posed in the disturbing bathing-beauty stance that Caine recalled so vividly, all his weight on one leg, his overwide pelvis cocked provocatively, his spiderfingered hands on his hips. His face was smooth, hairless and bonechina white, his eyes blank and machine-like.

  ‘Your Jewboy very nearly did for me,’ Rohde rasped. ‘Of course, I was expecting something like that. I saw him coming and put the side of an armoured car between us. I am gratified that I did so. Can you imagine the ignominy of being killed by a Jew? That’s two in a family, I believe: your Corporal Yid back in June, and now his brother, Corporal Yid number two. Little by little we rid the world of its pestilence. Surely there can’t be many more of them out there?’

  Caine’s world lurched, his heartbeat gallumphed, his breath jangled. He fought to stop himself spewing his guts. The burns on his neck and thighs stung sickeningly, but the rest of his body felt numb, encased in rubber. Gore dripped down his face: his puffed-up eyelids flapped, his swollen lips shook. How the hell could Rohde have known that Naiman and Netanya were brothers? How could he even have clicked that the suicide bomber was a Jew?

  Caine shivered, tasted bile on his tongue, felt his senses spindrift, struggled to stay conscious: his nostrils bubbled mucus, drool slicked his chin. He glared at Rohde, deliberately summoning up a surge of the blackest hatred, purposely dredging up memories of the Black Widow torturing him with hot irons, of Rohde chopping off Moshe Naiman’s thumb with a cleaver, turning Naiman loose in a minefield, of Naiman dying in agony with his foot blown off, of Caine’s hellish grapple to climb out of the hundred-foot well where Rohde had intended him to die a painful death from starvation. The deep core of revulsion focused his senses, brought him back to earth with a slap.

  The Black Widow seemed to know what he was thinking, and Caine recalled the Nazi’s weird ability to get inside people’s minds. He didn’t avert his gaze, though: he knew there was no escape this time – he had really known it all along. Rohde had outfoxed them. Sandhog had failed: Lightfoot was about to get scuppered; Betty Nolan was dead; most of the ten picked SAS soldiers he’d brought from Kabrit had been killed. He didn’t want to live to see Eighth Army slaughtered through his own incompetence. Whatever happened, though, if there were the slightest shadow of a chance, he would take out Rohde before he died.

  Caine watched with fascination as the major snapped the tentacle fingers of his right hand. ‘Wasser,’ he said.

  One of the guards hurried forward with a chipped enamel mug, held it to Caine’s broken lips. He gulped water greedily, aware that it could easily be snatched away. Rohde watched him with apparent interest, a tight grin on his stringwire mouth. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Very good.’

  The soldier scurried back to the squad. Rohde gave another order: the men filed away through the door, leaving only two guards. The major removed his cap, revealing a billiard-ball head-dome, edged by wedges of corngold hair.

  He shifted position. ‘So,’ he said. ‘It is Lieutenant Caine now, is it? It seems that you profited from your little escapade at Biska, my friend … profited at my expense, I might add.’ Caine said nothing. Rohde took a breath, raised a golden eyebrow. ‘Do you know why you are here, Lieutenant Caine?’ he demanded.

  Caine coughed, blinked fast: they could beast him all they liked, but he wasn’t going to be drawn into Rohde’s headgames.

  Rohde snorted. ‘Of course, I’m sure you think you are here to destroy the Olzon-13 gas supplies,’ he scoffed. ‘As you have discovered, though, there is no longer any Olzon-13 here. That alone should be enough to convince you that the mission was a red herring. No, Lieutenant, you are here because I wanted you here: I have been pulling your strings from the beginning. You are here because I brought you, because I lured you into a trap.’

  For an instant, Caine’s temper got the better of him. ‘That’s bullshit,’ he choked. ‘I’m not here because of you.’

  ‘You see,’ Rohde cackled smugly, as if talking to a third person. ‘They said you were too clever – that you’d never fall for it. I knew that was rubbish, of course – that in the end you were just another English clodhopper with a bloated sense of his own superiority, like all the rest. I think I have been proved right.’

  He stood up straight, arched his body, sighed, clicked his heels. ‘I confess I was irritated by your Runefish scheme,’ he went on. ‘Not that I give a bungler like you any credit for it, of course: you weren’t even aware that your mission was a decoy. You were merely a dumb instrument: you brought it off by sheer luck. The Brandenburger captain whose men you managed to kill when you liberated your little friend at Biska was full of admiration for you. He believed you had outwitted me: “a one-man killing machine”, he called you. Garbage, of course. There is nothing special about you, Caine: it was all a fluke, nothing more. They said that to have escaped from that well you must be some sort of superman. I still don’t know how you did it, but I am sure you had help. You know, I had every male Senussi in that town tortured and shot, but no one admitted to being your accomplice.’

  ‘Shot …’ Caine knew he should keep his mouth shut, but he couldn’t keep down the rage he felt: the thought that innocent men had been murdered for his sake was something he couldn’t stomach.

  The major’s face glowed savagely: Caine realized that Rohde had been playing him. He bit into the redblubbed flesh of his lips until it hurt.

  ‘Thanks to you, however,’ Rohde went on, ‘I fell foul of General Rommel; thanks to you and that Rose bitch, what was her real name … Nolan … the Panzer Army invaded Egypt and was held back at Alamein. A temporary setback, of course, but the fact is that you caused us – caused me – a great deal of trouble. I am not in the habit of letting such affronts go unpunished. I left your friend Nolan to the capable hands of my agent in Cairo, Hellfinger : I decided to deal with you myself …’

  Caine ground his teeth at the mention of Nolan: his redpricked eyes swam. The Nazi didn’t deserve even to speak her name: Caine had to stop himself spitting in Rohde’s face.

  ‘My first plan was to have you killed in training,’ Rohde drawled on. ‘In fact, I arranged for a little accident on your parachute course. One of your comrades was killed, but you survived by random chance. Then I realized that my idea was flawed – yes, I admit it. I saw that your death in an accident would be a sad waste of your potential. Your command had great confidence in you, you see – that was your value. As a result of Runefish, you’d been decorated, commissioned – they were calling you the “best desert fighter in Egypt”. It was all hogwash, of course: I knew that you’d simply been fortunate. Remarkable, isn’t it, how even the most intelligent people will do almost anything to deny the idea that our lives are governed by the fall of the dice? A man succeeds by luck an
d becomes swollen with the idea of his own cleverness: he and others will ascribe his good fortune to his skill, his charisma, his intelligence. When he fails, as he inevitably will, they will say that he is not performing up to his usual standard rather than admit that it was all random in the first place. We are addicted to success stories, Caine, addicted to the myth of cause and effect. We do not even want to see that there is no order in the universe …’ Rohde sighed theatrically. ‘The important thing was that your superiors believed that you were special: I knew you were very ordinary, but also that I could make use of their faith. By setting you up with the job of sabotaging the Olzon-13, I could guarantee that no other operation would be launched against us. After all, why waste time with a backup when they were so certain you would succeed? What they didn’t know was that you stood no chance of success: you might as well have tried to piss on the fires of hell.’

  Despite his shattered condition, Caine felt pricked. ‘No chance?’ he repeated feebly, lifting his chin. ‘What do you mean, no chance?’

  Rohde snorted. ‘But surely you must have guessed? You must be even more of a Dummkopf than I thought.’ He bowed his head slightly, his eyes slitted with pleasure. ‘I had a man in your team, Caine. I controlled Sandhog right from the start.’

  Caine’s vision whirled: tomtoms pounded his ears. Rohde was messing with him, feeding him a line: the Nazi bastard sensed that his deepest conviction was his loyalty to his men and was deliberately undermining it.

  Caine had often felt intuitively that Sandhog had been compromised – an intuition confirmed by the dying Roland and the deceased POW – but he had never entertained the possibility that one of his own men was a traitor. It was true that no one outside his team was supposed to know his route in, or the location of his target but, in the real world, the accidental leakage of information was frequent. There might be a rat out there somewhere who was feeding intelligence to the Hun but, among his own men, never.

  He tried to ignore the red torment of his body, the agonizing smart of his burns. He licked his lips, dryretched, raised his bloody chin. ‘You’re barking,’ he mumbled. ‘There’s no stooge among my lads. And you didn’t set me up for anything. You couldn’t have known I’d get the mission. I nearly turned it down.’

  Rohde snickered at him contemptuously, shouted something at the guards. A moment later the door clumped open and two figures came in – a longnecked woman in tattered khaki drills with a slender face and a cap of golden hair and a blackbearded man in mufti whose greasy shoulder-length mane shrouded his face like curtains. The girl’s hands were tied behind her back: the bearded man stumped behind her awkwardly on a prosthetic steel limb, prodding her between the shoulderblades with the muzzle of a hunting rifle. This brutal action raised Caine’s hackles long before he recognized the couple: the blonde was Angela Brunetto, the Italian woman who’d once helped him and his mates escape the Hun, whose letter to Harry Copeland had brought on Sandhog. The peglegged man was her husband, Michele. Only months ago they’d been the kingpins of the Italian deserter and ex-colon community here in the Citadel. Now they were pale shadows of their former selves.

  Angela didn’t look at Caine. She tried to hang back, her chin lolling on her chest, her eyes fixed on the floor. Michele jabbed her with the rifle. ‘Come on,’ he spat. ‘Aren’t you happy to see him? You’re the one who bring him here.’

  As Angela stumbled towards Caine he saw that she was thinner than he remembered – almost emaciated; her face was bruised and streaked with tears, her eyes puffy and dark-bagged, her blond hair full of dirt. She’d evidently endured beating and humiliation, yet Caine was proud to see that there was still defiance in the way she held her lean body, a hint of challenge in her eyes: the pouting sulkiness of her lips looked even more pronounced than it had been.

  She stood trembling in front of Caine, shoulders drooping, head bowed. Michele cracked her behind the kneejoints with the riflebutt: she cried out and collapsed on to her knees, swearing in Italian, her eyes sparking. Michele batted her twice around the head with his open hand. Rohde chortled. Caine bristled, his muscles straining against his ropes. ‘Don’t touch her,’ he croaked.

  ‘Shut up,’ Michele snapped, sweeping back his drape of oily hair: Caine glimpsed a parched yellow face framed by the matted beard, red-edged eyes that no longer held any trace of human feeling, that seethed with the ferocious intensity of a wild beast. It struck Caine suddenly that Michele was mad. The Italian jutted his chin, gestured at his prosthetic leg. ‘See what she did, Caine,’ he bawled. ‘The filthy puta shoot me in the foot. Over your bitch girlfriend. You were there, Caine. She shoot me in the foot and it turn gangrene and I have my leg cut off. This fucking little Jezebel turn her own husband into a cripple …’

  ‘You were crippled from the start,’ Caine grated, unable to stop himself.

  Michele gripped his rifle so hard that his knuckles turned ashen: he took two stomping paces over to Caine, bent over him, spat full in his face. Caine didn’t react: he stared back unflinching into Michele’s tortured features. ‘So you became one of the bullies you used to rail against,’ he panted. ‘Funny how everything becomes everything else.’

  Breathing hard, Michele took a halting step back. ‘It was you who change everything here, Caine, not me,’ he spluttered. ‘We do fine till you come. The Boche know we are here, but they never bother us. Not till you come. It was you who bring them on us, Caine: is you, not me, who is responsible for the horrors – the massacres, the murders, the madness …’ He clenched a knotted fist and stared at it. ‘I am the hand of God, that’s all. I bring the divine wrath down on these people, the ones that betrayed me, the filthy Arab pigs who helped them.’ He stared back at Caine, his eyes smouldering insanely. ‘They call me the Angel of Death,’ he chuckled, ‘and that’s what I am. But is you who make it happen, Caine, is you who will rot in hell.’

  Caine’s eyes were suddenly wild. ‘You … ? ’ he whispered. ‘You’re the Angel of Death? You –’

  ‘With a little help from me, of course,’ Rohde cut him off smugly. ‘Michele has been … how does one say … the front man. He has displayed a certain genius for organizing retribution, I admit, but of course, I have always been there to give advice, to help him out …’

  Caine felt Michele’s saliva running down his face. His stomach churned: he felt ready to explode. Instead, he clamped his bruised jaws shut. His eyes bulged. He watched dumbly as Michele grabbed Angela by the hair, yanked her head back, whacked her with his riflebutt. ‘Tell him,’ he screamed.

  Angela whimpered. Michele let go of her and, when she raised her head again, Caine saw that fresh tears were streaming silently down her face. Her eyes locked his. ‘I’m sorry, Thomas,’ she sobbed. ‘Is true. They make me write that letter. They say they kill me, kill my friends … Now I wish I die. Now I know they kill you, they kill Harry …’

  Michele was making manic faces at her. ‘Harry,’ he mimicked, ‘that cocksucking pig. Yes, he is here. Now I go to him, and you go with me, and I cut his fucking balls off right in front of you, you watch caro Harry bleed to death, you whore, bitch …’

  He whipped round towards the door so fast that he almost overbalanced. ‘Stop,’ Rohde snapped. The Nazi’s features were twisted with amusement. ‘We will handle Copeland in good time. First we will deal with Caine.’ He glanced at Angela, who had fallen into a sobbing heap. ‘Take her away, my friend, but don’t touch Copeland until I give the order. You’ll have your revenge in due course.’

  Caine watched them go: the numbness in his body was wearing off, and he tried to steel himself mentally against the new surge of pain. There was something else there, too: a deep, harrowing sense of fear, of abject dread, was beginning to seep through his veins. Its presence surprised and irritated him: he’d faced death many times before and he’d always been able to resign himself to it. Now he was starting to quake internally: there was something unnatural in this new sense of terror he felt, as if some evil spirit had sudde
nly invaded his body. He tried to ignore it, to sift through the data he’d absorbed: Michele Brunetto, an Italian army deserter, had helped the Nazis use his own people as guineapigs in trials of a chemical weapon, had organized massacres and atrocities against the Senussi; Angela Brunetto had written the letter that had cemented the Sandhog mission, on Rohde’s orders. He felt no rancour towards her, although he knew that without the letter he probably wouldn’t be here: he just wished this unexpected rush of horror would go away.

  Rohde was standing in front of him again, a leer of triumph on his face. ‘So you see, Mr Caine,’ he said, shaking his head with mock pity, ‘this has been what you English call a setup – a small payback for your Runefish mission …’ He wiggled his tendril fingers. ‘Ach, who were they going to send, Caine? You were the only Allied officer who’d ever been in the Citadel. It had to be you. You nearly turned it down, you say? Of course, I knew there was that possibility, but not after Signora Brunetto’s letter reached you. You could not turn down a plea for help from a woman, could you, my friend? Not since you failed to stop your own mother committing suicide …’

  It was so unexpected that Caine lurched up, forgetting his terror, forgetting that he was confined, that his body was covered in weals. He groaned as pain engulfed him: his whole body shook. How could Rohde possibly be aware that his mother had killed herself, and that he, Caine, had arrived home too late to help her? It had been the most traumatic experience of his life, and one he’d kept strictly private. Not even his closest friends knew about it, and now this Nazi slimeball was holding it up to ridicule: Caine felt that his innermost sanctum had been violated. He’d never believed in clairvoyance or crystal balls but he was beginning to think that, despite all his talk of chaos, Rohde was really capable of reading minds.