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

by Michael Asher

  ‘Of course,’ Rohde went on, ‘I didn’t know exactly what approach you would take, but my man in your camp was able to keep me informed. You managed to evade the 90th Light Division columns I dispatched, managed to survive the Stuka attack, even to resist the Senussi I sent to meet you …’ His stringlips narrowed into a sour travesty of a smile. Caine watched him, still not wanting to believe that there was a rat among his men. Who could it be? Rossi? With his combat record? Pickney? No way. Audley? With his establisment credentials? Even if one of them was a rat, how had he kept in touch with Rohde? Caine hadn’t even revealed the target until the day after the sandstorm, let alone the plan. It couldn’t have been wireless chatter because they hadn’t had comms with base since that first contact, and the wireless hadn’t even made it up the cliff.

  ‘Not that it matters,’ Rohde went on. ‘Those obstacles served their purpose – they pulled you deeper in, made you more determined to succeed. No doubt it is better this way: I can watch you die myself.’

  He drew himself up: Caine sensed that they were near the end. The beasting had been pure sadism: Rohde had wanted him to suffer. He had also wanted him to know why Sandhog had failed: that he’d been cleverly manipulating it from the start. Caine gulped at the thought: the Olzon-13 might even now be on its way to the Alamein front on Axis aircraft, ready to make a mockery of Monty’s push. That must mean the Axis knew Lightfoot was due to kick off tonight.

  ‘If I had told you a few days ago,’ Rohde was saying placidly, ‘that you would kill one of your closest comrades – that big ape named Wallace, for instance – in cold blood, before your death, you would have savagely denied it, would you not?’

  The interior trembling was even more powerful now. Caine caught his breath, wondering what new horrors this was leading to. ‘I wouldn’t …’

  ‘Oh but you would. You would if I informed you that, should you fail to kill him, your orangutan friend would be slowly tortured to death in the most painful way imaginable. You are that kind of person, Caine.’ He scooped a breath, evidently pleased with himself. ‘Did you know that the Senussi have a rather exquisite way of ensuring a man dies in agony? It is reserved for the most heinous crimes – child-murder or child-rape, for example. What they do is, they collect about a hundred smooth boulders of different sizes, which they proceed to heat in a fire. They stake out the condemned man naked and, lifting the redhot stones with special sticks, they place them one by one on the man’s body, starting with his hands and feet and ending with his stomach and genitals. They begin with the smallest stones and gradually increase the size until the victim is not only being burned, but also steadily crushed to death under the accumulating weight of the stones. I am told it can take hours.’

  Caine’s chest and throat were congested: nightmare images were starting to claw at his head. He had a vision of himself as a child curled up in a dark cellar snivelling pathetically. Was that all he really was? Was that the real Thomas Caine beneath the peeled-off onion layers? Was this how he was going to face his end? He shook his head, tried to rid himself of the image. Rohde saw the movement and grinned: his blackball eyes hardened. ‘That will be the fate of your friend Wallace, unless you kill him first. Conversely, it will become your fate if you do kill him. If Wallace manages to finish you, you will have avoided a long-drawn-out death, but he will be obliged to suffer it in your place.’ He chuckled. ‘Rather an interesting dilemma, isn’t it? If you allow your friend to kill you, you will be condemning him to hell: if you kill him, you will be faced with the same torment yourself. It will be instructive to see how altruistic you really are when the chips are down.’

  Caine couldn’t believe what he was hearing: the Afrika Korps was generally noted for its sense of military honour; only the most demented and sadistic of minds could have come up with such a plan, a scheme intended to reduce soldiers to animals. He faced Rohde, his face twitching, his heart jerking, trying desperately not to betray his dread. ‘We are soldiers captured in uniform,’ he stuttered. His voice sounded fragile in his ears, and he fought to keep it steady, to throw off the icy hand that seemed to clutch at his throat. ‘We are prisoners of war.’

  Rohde guffawed. ‘You are long out of date, my friend. You are special service troops – commandos – are you not? Since our dear Führer signed the Kommandobefehl, Allied special service troops are no longer accorded prisoner-of-war status, not even if they surrender. The order was in place months ago but has never been enforced here in North Africa because Rommel didn’t approve of it. Alas, Rommel is no longer with us, at least not for the time being. In short, I can do what I like with you.’

  Despite the chill inside, Caine experienced a wave of anger, uncontrollably ferocious – he felt like a terminally frightened child lashing out in blind terror. ‘You’ll just have to fucking well shoot us, you bloody bastard. I’ll never kill one of my own mates: Fred Wallace neither. You can torture us all you want, but you’ll never force us to lay a finger on each other, whatever you do.’

  ‘Possibly true under normal circumstances,’ Rohde sneered, ‘but in this case you’ll have a little extra … encouragement … shall we say? You see, the water you drank so greedily a short while ago was laced with Olzon-13. You can already feel it, can’t you? I think you will find it may alter your resolution. You know, Senussi tribesmen are almost fanatically loyal to their clan, yet small traces of Olzon-13 have induced them to butcher their own wives and children. I’m sure you have studied enough reports to be aware of what it can do.’

  36

  By the time they dragged him out the drug was stirring powerfully inside him. His heart malleted, his body was raddled with panic, his breath came in stabs. It was cold: the sky above the crater was a marble slab teetering with vast rotting excrescences of leprous grey. He shivered as the Jerries hustled him on: his ears pounded, a beaver gnawed at his guts. The light didn’t seem right and the shadows were sinister: every staggering step took him deeper into a nightmare land. The ground itself wouldn’t stay still, the air soughed with an asthmatic wheeze: Caine heard spectral whisperings, demonic voices, savage animals padding behind him. His feet sank into a squelching mush of excrement and decayed body parts: he glimpsed great centipedes writhing in the rock walls, bulges where giant termites moved under the surface, the silver slimetrails of enormous slugs: the cliffs towered over him like the ribs of monstrous dead animals strung with flags of putrid meat. The faces of his Jerry guards held traces of jackal and werewolf: their voices were growls in strange descants, their eyes full of dark hauntings, their gaping mouths reeked with butcher smells.

  Rohde swept in front of him, his sleek black trenchcoat draped about his shoulders: with his broad hips rolling under the garment and his mincing jackboot gait, he looked like a haughty, imperious queen. When they halted at the pit, though, and Rohde turned on him, Caine got a glimpse of the viper-scalped gorgon Medusa staring out from behind the venomous eyes. He gasped and staggered backwards: the guards crowed at him. Rohde’s gorgon eyes gave out a vulturine gleam.

  A mob of spectators in khaki uniform jostled at the Nazi’s elbow: Caine saw rodent faces, jackal faces, toad faces: Dobermann-pinschers in Afrika Korps caps. The creatures rolled bulging eyes at him: pink tongues slavered, leper mouths gobbled, rutwarp snouts dribbled snot. Caine heard feral whines and guttural snarls: he heard bat-wings rustle, heard cloven hooves and clawfeet clack. One of his guards had the head of a cockroach: another sported a gecko’s flicking tongue. Caine heard alligator jaws champ, raven voices croak, saw the filthy half-human beasts paw and snap and slobber as they jockeyed for position. He smelled pigsty smells: dung and hogsweat and sour piss. He knew he was losing touch with reality: it was the most chilling sensation of his life.

  The pit below him looked like a derelict, empty bathing pool: gangrenous tiles, six-foot walls of concrete smeared with claretcoloured blobs. A part of him knew it was where Rohde conducted his disgusting ‘experiments’, his unspeakable carnage of helpless souls. Caine
felt his mind being tugged into the ocean of horror, struggled to hold on to a lifeline of rational thought. He asked himself how many ‘subjects’ had been killed or maimed here, how many had survived? Some had recovered completely: others had gone berserk after they’d been released, committed appalling atrocities on their own families. It popped into his head that the results of Olzon-13 exposure must depend on the individual: Rohde could not know for certain what the outcome would be.

  Rohde gargled an order: Caine saw snapping-turtle jaws where the Nazi’s mouth belonged, saw the mesh-eyes of a praying mantis bulging from his head. They hustled him to where an iron ladder descended: someone cut his bindings. A new wave of fear broke over him, more intense than anything he’d experienced so far. He held on desperately to the edge: he had wanted to die with dignity, to let the Hun see him meet his end like a man. Yet the drug had sapped his determination: he couldn’t help himself. He sobbed in terror, sank his teeth into monkey paws, lashed out onehanded at stinking yellow fangs. They stamped on his fingers, they pushed him down. He let go, slithered the rest of the way, landed on all fours. He pulled himself up, his massive chest heaving.

  The tiles under his feet were undulating as if worms were writhing below them: the walls of the pit were lubdubbing, respiring rhythmically in and out. Caine smelled an abattoir smell: fat flies and bloated flesh and putrefaction. He had only just taken stock of his surroundings when there was a heartstopping roar that almost paralysed him: in that moment a giant creature came hurtling at him out of the hazy background. The thing was of no fixed species – ogre, dragon, Cyclops, minotaur – it was the beast from out of his racial memory: only in his most demented fevers had Caine dreamed of such a thing. He almost fainted with terror. The drug in his bloodstream urged him to flee but he couldn’t move. The beast sprang: the spring of every monster every man had ever known since the dawn of time. Caine had a vision of a monstrous frame hanging in the air, steam-shovel arms raised, iron fists bunched, long calf and thigh muscles distended, every ligament in the titanic physique tensed to strike. It was only in the instant before he moved that he realized the monster was Fred Wallace.

  Wallace was naked but for fouled shorts and chapplies, his darkfurred skin a network of bloodstreaks, a map of wounds like red clawmarks across his chest. Caine saw the goliath face framed in the shag of flying gypsy hair, the deep-jowled chin glistening with saliva, the slab-like overhang of the Neanderthal brows furrowed, the swollen lips stretched back from a set of bloody teeth like broken ninepins, pinball eyes blazing with murderous fire: if ever Wallace had looked like a hellion from the darkest depths of a child’s nightmare, it was now.

  In that moment, though, all Caine’s terror melted: his fear double-helixed, switchbladed into fighting fury. He clocked an opening: he stepped forward, he batter-rammed a salvo of deadly whacks to his friend’s jawbone, cramp cramp cramp cramp. Caine saw the dark, glittering eyes lose focus, saw the fire in them go out. The gunner’s own ramlike punch missed Caine’s head, glanced off his shoulder, sent Wallace sprawling: his huge form humped into the tiles like a downed aircraft spraddling sand. The big man rolled sideways; his palmtrunk arms thrashed. Before he could heave himself up, though, Caine dropkicked him below the left ear. He heard the smack as his foot connected: Wallace’s alligator skull snapped sideways, blood trickled from his ear. He howled, shook his shockbush head like a great buffalo, stunned.

  For an instant, Caine’s drughazed senses cleared: the howling minotaur creature on the floor was not a creature: it was Fred Wallace. How was it possible that he, Tom Caine, had become so brutalized that he could see his most faithful friend as a beast? What kind of inhuman fiend did that make him? He checked an impulse to kick Wallace again: more waves of ferocity coursed through him, but now it was fury at Rohde, whose demonic mind had devised such a way of reducing a soldier’s most noble qualities to their opposite. He wasn’t going to do this. The Olzon-13 drug had already drawn him into Rohde’s maze, reduced him to experimental rat. No more. He was going to fight the drug by sheer willpower: he and his mate were going to die, but they’d do it with dignity. Caine drew a rattling breath, moved towards his mate through the pulsating channel of the pit. ‘Fred,’ he whispered. ‘Fred.’

  Wallace had raised his body on his elbows: Caine put out a trembling hand to help him up. The gunner grasped it with his frypan mitt: Caine felt the warmth of his friend’s body flowing into his, and for a moment he sensed that they were no longer enemies, no longer fighting each other to the death. Wallace staggered to his feet: Caine let go his hand. ‘It’ll be all right, mate,’ he said hoarsely, his voice hardly recognizable. ‘Don’t play that bastard’s game. Don’t fight.’

  Wallace’s shaggy head turned towards him, and Caine saw with a shock that he was looking at a stranger. It was Wallace all right, but a Wallace who did not know him, who was not aware, even, of his own identity: the shell of Fred Wallace with a Martian staring out from behind the scarred and ravaged face. The big man’s alien eyes blinked: he backed away, shaking his basket head, gasping for air.

  Suddenly, he bounded forward bullbellowing: Caine stepped back, snapped out a defensive kick. Wallace’s sausage-fingered hand closed on Caine’s ankle like an iron pincer, jerked him off centre, swung him round with all his force at the nearest wall. Caine smashed into the concrete, flipped forwards, his vision dimmed, his consciousness teetered on the brim of darkness. He had the hazy impression of the giant looming over him: before he could dodge, Wallace lamped him in the jaw with his right fist, smashed him again with his left. Caine’s jaw cracked: toothshards flew, gore gushed from his nose and mouth. He hit the wall again, slithered down with his head buzzing, with a million cicadas chafing in his ears. He didn’t even register the excited grunting and yapping from the beasts above.

  As Caine sprawled on the tiles, Wallace kicked him savagely in the side. Caine’s whole body jumped with the force of it. It felt as if something had ruptured inside him, but there was no pain, only numbness. Caine heard his own voice in his ears telling him that he had to get up: if he didn’t, he was finished. Wallace didn’t know him: it was too late to salvage his dignity. He’d lost Betty Nolan, he’d failed to bring off Sandhog, to save Lightfoot. He’d failed even to save his friend from a lingering death.

  Caine heard the animals grunt and jibber, heard sauerkraut voices, heard something metallic hit the tiles. Wallace knelt with one giant knee on Caine’s chest, crushing the air from his lungs. Caine’s eyes dickered open and he saw that the giant was grasping a length of lead piping in his hand. So that was it, he thought, the death instrument. Rohde was making it easier for him. Wallace roared again: Caine felt an ironglove hand snake round his throat. The big man held him down with his knee and his left hand, raised the pipe in his right, his blunt primeval features strained, teeth rictusing, eyes blank. Caine fought for breath, clutched at the throttling hand. ‘All right, Fred,’ he gurgled. ‘Go on. I forgive you, mate: I’m just sorry I let you down.’

  This was it then: there was no point in struggling. His body had stopped shaking: no longer felt afraid. At least he could face death with whatever grace was left to him. He saw the lead pipe raised for the deathblow, felt Wallace’s fingers squeezing his neck, felt the darkness calling. His senses guttered: from the deep inner dark there came a familiar beat of steel on steel, the rhythmic clash of hammers, the smell of scorched metal and charcoal from his father’s smithy. He was twelve years old again and matching blow for blow with his father, watching the steel magically taking its shape on the anvil. Caine had often wished that he could have remained there for ever, in the world as it was before his father’s death, before his stepfather, before the army, before the war, before his mother’s suicide: he had never dreamed then of becoming a soldier. Even when he’d joined up as a youth, he’d never dreamed of the hardship, the suffering, the loss, the guilt, it would entail. He would have been happy working with metal till the end of his days.

  His father stopped work,
laid down his hammer, wiped the sweat off his brow with a ragged sleeve. ‘What’s wrong, boy?’ he asked.

  Caine thought for a moment. ‘It’s just that I didn’t succeed in the end,’ he said. ‘I lost Betty, I lost a lot of good mates, I shot one of our own officers, and I didn’t even bring it off. I didn’t save Monty’s push.’

  His father smiled. ‘You know, son,’ he said. ‘Life isn’t a competition: they’ll tell you it is, but it isn’t. It isn’t a balance sheet of profit and loss. Who’s to say that one fine morning in spring smelling the trees and the flowers isn’t worth all the hardship you’ve been through? Who’s to say that one day with a good woman who loves you isn’t worth years of messing about?’

  Caine mulled over his father’s words. ‘So is it time, Dad?’

  His father chuckled, picked up his hammer, weighed it in his calloused hand. ‘You know, you’re a grown man, Tom. That’s up to you to decide …’

  Caine heard metal clang, thought for a moment that his father must have dropped his hammer. Then Wallace’s fingers released his throat, the colossal weight left his chest. Caine opened his eyes, rasped air. Wallace was kneeling beside him: the lead piping was lying in the dust. Wallace’s troll face was creased up like a baby’s, and tears were flowing down his grizzled cheeks. He eyed Caine as if he’d just come out of a dream. ‘I can’t do it, Tom,’ he sobbed. ‘I didn’t even know what I was doing: the fucking bastard nearly got me to kill my best mate.’