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

by Michael Asher

  Wallace’s face changed as if a new thought had come abruptly into his head: he grabbed the metal bar, sprang up. In two striding paces he was at the ladder, climbing it. Caine lunged to his feet, ignoring the pain that hit him like a ballhammer. The menagerie above them was reeling and yelling: any second now gunfire would rain down. Caine dived for Wallace’s legs: just as he felt the giant fall on top of him he heard a machine-gun sprattle, heard its shells fall thumpa thumpa thump. It took him a moment to realize that the sound had come from far off. As he and the giant rolled on the tiles, he glanced up, saw that the insects had lost interest in them. The swarm was scattering: Rohde’s praying-mantis eyes were focused on some object that Caine couldn’t see.

  He heard the tocka tocka tock of a Schmeisser MG then the distinct clatter of a Bren-gun, much nearer – a steady, familar ba-bamm, ba-bamm of disciplined double taps. Caine heard rasps and croaks from far beyond the pit: the whomp and singed breath of a charge going off. The creepy-crawlies above them had gone haywire, jumping, stridulating, keening: Caine saw creatures stagger and collapse. He heard the pattercake karoooomfff of a shell exploding, a crescendo of smallarms fire. Then a second shell detonated among the Huns right next to the pit: a hiss of scorched air, a blinding white starburst, an ear-grinding rent paper rip.

  Caine couldn’t remember later how long they’d lain there with debris falling on them. It wasn’t until he climbed the ladder that he realized his body was a mass of cuts and lacerations: he was bleeding from the nose and mouth and his side was purple where Wallace had delivered his final kick. The big gunner hauled him over the rim with the same titan’s hand that had almost throttled him: up there, smoke and dust spiralled, machine-guns yammered, gunshots railtracked air. The earth was littered with German soldiers, dead, thrashing, mutilated, some with missing limbs. The dead and wounded still had a hint of jackal or pig in their faces, Caine thought: some of the severed limbs looked like the appendages of giant bugs. He saw one Jerry screaming for his mother: the man was no more than a head and a goreslathered torso: his legs and arms had been plucked out by the blast. There were kidneycoloured patches in the sand. There was a shallow crater where the shell had burst, but Caine guessed it must have detonated a haversackful of anti-tank grenades, because he didn’t believe one round had done all this.

  Caine shakily picked up a Jerry rifle, stared at it, hunkered down, looked around wide-eyed: 999 Div. men in bloodcaked KD were staggering about in the foreground, others were running towards the admin barracks fifty yards off to Caine’s front. Scores of ragged and emaciated prisoners – Arab, Itie, men and women – were milling about. The gates of the prisoner compound seventy paces to Caine’s rear hung open. They’d been wrecked by a charge. The huts inside were on fire. A Jerry halftrack was parked far to Caine’s left, between him and the entrance defile: her 40mm cannon was trained on the tents tucked around the side of the central buttress where the last of the 999 company had set up a perimeter defence. It hit Caine that the wagon must be manned by friendlies: it could only have been her gun that had fired the fatal shot.

  He clocked a smoke-crease, heard the deadhand clap as the halftrack’s gun perdunked: a heavy Schmeisser MG truckled out tracer in its wake. He saw the shell splat apart among the Jerry tents: saw smoke fungus, dust and gravel slew. He could see two figures crewing the guns on the back of the halftrack: who were they, he wondered? One appeared to be dark-haired, the other blond: there was a suggestion of the feminine about them, but he supposed it was a trick of the light.

  Some of the liberated prisoners were executing wounded Krauts with weapons they’d taken off them: others had moved behind low ridges and rocks and were ruckling fire at the Hun defensive lines. On the far side of the wagon, men in desertstained Senussi robes and turbans were lumbering about in the MT park at the end of the defile: Caine saw Senussi figures in the observation hatches on the cabs of Hun three-ton lorries bracing the machine-guns mounted there.

  Caine clacked the working parts of the Jerry rifle, crouched among the dead and mutilated Boche, the dismembered insectlegs, the iodine-coloured stains in the sand. The earth had stopped lurching but his head was still buzzing from the effects of the drug. He had no idea how long he crouched there, no idea of the sequence of things. The 40mm cannon on the halftrack stonked, but Caine couldn’t say if this was the first or second time.

  To Caine’s right, a scabfaced Italian woman with knotted hair, pendulant breasts showing through the rags of her dress, shot a wounded German in the back of the head. Some of the released Senussi were bashing in the skulls of their former guards with sharp stones. The two wounded Krauts were still staggering about in the foreground. Wallace picked up a Gewehr-41. Caine saw him squat with the rifle at his shoulder: he saw the gunner’s hunched hairy back, tawny skin a crude theatre of cuts and lesions. Wallace lined up the sights, squeezed steel. Caine saw the rifle jump, saw the muzzleflame, watched the bodies marionette. Wallace stood up, walked over to the shrieking, limbless Jerry: he pressed the bore of his weapon into the man’s forehead and shot him twice.

  Some of the ex-prisoners were slitting the throats of wounded Germans with bayonets: some Jerries were still running towards the admin block. Caine looked for Rohde but couldn’t see him: instead he glimpsed Michele Brunetto, hopping along jerkily on his pegleg, forcing Angela ahead of him at gunpoint. Caine stood up abruptly: two words burned into his shellshocked and lacerated mind. ‘Harry Copeland,’ he thought.

  37

  A stringy German lieutenant and a squat sergeant had set up a Schmeisser on a tripod at the door of the admin block. From ten yards away, Caine heard the gun’s breechblock chaw on a vacant chamber, knew they were out of juice. ‘Come out with your hands up,’ he bawled at them. The Jerries hobbled into the light, hands held shoulder-high: they were wearing kaiser tinlids and open trenchcoats over their shorts, and both had open shrapnel wounds in their bare legs. Caine and Wallace moved in on them: Caine saw drained, doghaunted faces, wondered blearily why they had on their coats. He saw the sergeant’s weasel eyes flicker, clocked a hand worming under the folds. The officer saw the movement too, his face stretched in warning. ‘Dummkopf,’ he hissed. Even before Caine had clocked the Walther pistol in the sergeant’s hand, he’d pulled metal: his weapon whipsawed, gouted smoke. He saw a smiley face open in the sergeant’s gut, saw viscera grope out of the mouthslit like squidlegs. The Hun dropped the pistol, spreadeagled forward, arms arcing wide. A shot from Wallace popped the lieutenant’s eyeball, hit skullbone, emerged from the side of his head in a scarlet and greybanded flush. The big man leaned over him, pumping shot after shot into his chest, his mandrill features expressionless: he would have kept on firing until the mag was empty, oblivious to anything else, if Caine hadn’t gripped his bare forearm and hissed, ‘Steady on, mate. He’s dead.’

  Caine kicked open the door into the passage where he’d last seen Harry Copeland being dragged away: the entire building was graveyard-still. The interrogation rooms where he and Wallace had been tortured were closed: the only open door lay at the far end of the passage on the right. Caine had taken two steps towards it when a gunshot stopped him in his tracks. He and Wallace exchanged a glance, moved cautiously down to the door. Caine heard commotion: wolfhowls and ape-jibbers: a string of horrendous expletives in Italian. He peered around the doorjamb, clocked a surreal, almost comical sight. Michele Brunetto was sprawled on the floor, his arms flailing as he tried to grasp the prosthetic leg that had been placed just out of his reach. His hunting rifle lay on his other side, equally tantalizing, equally inaccessible: Michele’s eyes were wild black scallops: his rancid hairdrapes flopped, his arms spasmed, his inkvine mouth frothed and cursed: he flipped his scarecrow body from side to side as if trying to decide which object was the more crucial, unable to get up, unable to reach either. A few yards away, Harry Copeland and Angela Brunetto were standing, bodies entwined, fitting together like complementary bits of a Chinese puzzle, their arms around each other, eyes clos
ed, lips bonded in an endless and eternal kiss.

  The vision seemed to awaken Wallace from a kind of walking trance. ‘For Chrissake,’ he grunted. ‘Don’t you know there’s a flippin’ war on?’

  Copeland and Angela broke up: Angela kept her eyes riveted on Cope as if afraid he’d vanish. Copeland blinked at them as if he’d just returned from a voyage to a faroff land: his face was stonegrey, his body bore the livid alphabet of torture, his hair was greased with gore, yet his eyes shone like storm lanterns. ‘What the hell kept you?’ he grinned.

  Caine nodded at the writhing Michele. ‘What happened here?’ he enquired. ‘This bloke was gunning for you.’

  Cope smiled at Angela. ‘She saved my life. That arsehole was going to slit my throat and God knows what else, but she got her hands free, banjoed him from behind. Went down like a skittle.’

  Caine heard the sound of a wagon scalding to a halt outside: all four of them tensed. Michele heard it too and began to squeal for help. Wallace gave the sprawling Itie a kick in the stomach. ‘Just give me a reason,’ he growled.

  Michele’s jaws snapped, his eyes smouldered. ‘I’ll kill you,’ he spat, drooling saliva. ‘I am the Hand of God. I’ll kill you all.’

  Wallace’s face went poker-red, he pointed his rifle at Michele. ‘You slimy piece of shit,’ he said. ‘You sold your own people down the river … why I ought to …’

  ‘No,’ Caine snapped. ‘Leave him, Fred. He’s not going anywhere. Once the ex-prisoners find out where he is, he won’t last long.’

  There were footsteps in the passage. Caine and Wallace wheeled round, weapons at the ready: in that moment Michele made a superhuman, angerfuelled effort to grasp his rifle. His hand closed around the stock: he brought the weapon to bear on Caine’s back. There was an almost imperceptible swish of air: Michele’s jaws snapped, his eyes beaded, his head cricked backwards with the force of the knife that had just blossomed out of his throat. The rifle clattered on the floor. Caine and Wallace gaped at Angela, who had broken away from Copeland’s arms and was still poised elegantly like a ballet-dancer, her hand raised in the act of throwing. Cope was staring at her stun-faced. Michele lay motionless: gore curded from his mouth and nostrils. Angela took two lithe-legged strides towards him, crouched down, drew the knifeblade out of his flesh. When she stood up there were tears in her eyes: she examined the blood on the blade as if wondering if it was real. ‘It was his knife,’ she said without looking at anyone. ‘I take it from him to cut my ropes, to free Harry. I cannot let him do what he want to do.’

  She flung the knife down in disgust and it skittered across the floor. ‘I’m sorry, Michele,’ she said, her eyes fixed on the bloodless face. ‘But you deserve this. You betray us all.’

  Wallace picked up the hunting rifle, broke the stock over his bare knee. ‘So much for the Angel of Death,’ he rasped.

  Caine heard English voices in the passage, tore his gaze away from Michele’s corpse. He squinted outside, clocked Maurice Pickney and Ricardo Rossi shambling towards him carrying their Garands and clad in full battlekit.

  Caine’s face lit up with pleasure. ‘You’re alive,’ he croaked.

  Rossi watched Caine quietly, his stud eyes standing out like poolballs on his sallow gravedigger’s face. Pickney’s features crinkled along a thousand perforations. ‘Alive, ’course we’re bloody alive, skipper. Who’d you think blew up the gates of the prisoner compound, then? We hid in the forest after you lot got bagged, picked up Taff Trubman. He’s all right – you must have heard him on the Bren-gun. He covered us while we took out the guards and set the charges up. We laid a Lewes bomb with a timepencil on the gate and then put an incendiary inside.’

  Caine nodded, delighted. ‘You should both have a medal for this …

  ‘Already got one thank you very much.’ Pickney winked. ‘Maybe if we’d bagged the Olzon-13 –’

  ‘Was that your vehicle outside?’ Caine interjected.

  Pickney nodded. ‘Yep – Jerry signals van we nicked from the MT park. Trubman’s in there now trying to rig up the wireless …’ Pickney cut himself short, his rawshag granny’s face beaming. ‘You don’t know yet, do you?’

  ‘Know what, for Jesus’ sake?’

  ‘Who was firing shells from that Jerry halftrack. The one that saved our bacon …’ He broke off again, a maddening secret smile playing around his brownpaper lips. ‘You better get out there now, skipper. There’s someone there you’re going to want to see …’

  Betty Nolan was standing by the wagon’s cab, staring over her shoulder nervously, when Caine lurched out of the admin block. She saw him and froze, rooted to the spot, her face drained of colour. Caine halted, stared at her: his head swam dizzily, his body swayed. This wasn’t fair, he thought: the Olzon-13 was still deluding him, and this was the worst trick of all. He blinked, shook his head, trying to make the vision go away, but it didn’t. Betty Nolan was still there in front of him, her face gaunt and gunblack, her uniform in tatters, her blond hair wild as sawgrass, but the same Betty Nolan, the same oceangreen eyes, the same ripe lips, the same melting look on her face.

  Caine swallowed, feeling an overwhelming desire to touch her, to prove to himself that the vision wasn’t real. He took three steps towards her and it seemed that he was crossing a yawning, endless chasm of space and time: then they were locked in each other’s arms. Caine could feel her soft breath against his cheek, feel the warm flesh of her body yielding to his, feel her hands in his hair, stroking his face. It was only then that he allowed himself to believe that this wasn’t a dream brewed up by the drug in his bloodstream, wasn’t a ghost conjured by his exhausted and tortured mind. This really was Betty Nolan, the woman he loved and would always love, alive, in the flesh, and impossibly … here. He kissed her, felt her responding, felt himself drawn into her as if by the irresistible power of an ebb-tide carrying him out to sea. Time skewed to a stop, the battlesounds dimmed: a million questions coursed through his head like a torrent, but he ignored them: it didn’t matter how she’d survived, how she’d got here. All that counted was this moment.

  It was Nolan who pulled away first. She saw the questions in Caine’s eyes, saw the words forming on his broken lips, laid a finger across them. ‘Tom,’ she gasped. ‘Audley’s a traitor. That’s why they sent me. He’s probably kept the Krauts informed about your movements the whole way …’

  It took Caine a moment to grasp what she was saying. ‘Audley? He can’t be: Stirling himself recommended him for the mission.’

  ‘Stirling made a bad mistake: Audley’s not even his name. He’s the rat, Tom. I got here too late to warn you, but there’s still time …’

  ‘Time? What do you mean? Sandhog has failed.’

  ‘Listen, Tom. The Olzon-13 is at the airstrip. I saw it. There’s still a chance to take it out: I don’t reckon it’ll be airloaded till sunset. But Audley’s gone down there, maybe to warn the Hun that we’re around …’

  Caine was still staring at her, trying to think clearly, trying to loosen his mind from the last remnants of the Olzon-13, struggling to assimilate the new information, trying to deal with her resurrection from the dead. Audley … he couldn’t believe it. He hadn’t believed Rohde when he’d said there was a mole in his camp. Audley had been a pain, yes, but he was so … so English. And yet … and yet, when he thought about the way the officer had behaved … the way he’d ‘lost’ the wireless … a hundred small details: oddities that went unnoticed at the time, or had been interpreted as incompetence.

  He forced himself to release her, became aware of the shooting from the 999 Div. bivouac lines – the clattershot of rifles, automatics tickertacking, the pershomp of grenades, the airscrape and percussion of mortar bombs.

  Nolan hit him lightly on a pectoral with her fist. ‘Focus, Tom,’ she pleaded. ‘I last saw Audley ninety minutes ago. He was heading for the airstrip on foot. It’s a long walk from where I saw him, so if we’re quick we can still catch him up before he warns the Jerries …’
<
br />   ‘Warns them?’ Caine said slowly, as if the idea had hit him for the first time. ‘But wait a sec. I mean, the Huns here must have a wireless – Rohde’s disappeared, too. Surely they’ll already know what’s happening …’

  Nolan shook her head: her phosphorescent eyes gleamed. ‘Whatever they know or don’t know, we’ve got to try and take out the Olzon-13 while it’s still on the ground. Monty’s push starts tonight. The whole Eighth Army is depending on us. We can still bring off Sandhog, Tom, but we have to hurry.’

  A boom of shellfire made Caine jump: he felt the air warp, saw a dome of smoke rise over the Jerry tents. He hefted an eyebrow at Nolan. ‘What about the Krauts?’ he asked. ‘Those Senussi and Itie civvies can’t hold them for ever.’

  ‘We’ve got the upper hand for now,’ she told him breathlessly. ‘The Senussi are manning the 40mm, and they’ve set up a two-inch mortar they found. They’ve got the machine-guns from the Jerry trucks cranked up. I’ve got all the ex-prisoners stood to with captured weapons. Adud’s taken charge … and Layla … I’ve asked them to contain the Huns here for another hour so we can get away …’

  She was interrupted by the arrival of the others, all but Angela laden down with the SAS equipment they’d retrieved from the store – manpacks, Lewes bombs, rifles, pistols, beltkit, tinned rations. Big Wallace lugged a hessian sack full of German small arms on his back; he looked like a wild and savage Santa Claus. Angela recognized Nolan and embraced her. Wallace dumped the sack in the wagon, strode round to Caine grinning through bloodscabbed lips, holding up his Purdey sawnoff in one hand and Caine’s oversize Tommy-gun in another. ‘Congratulations, skipper,’ he grunted, nodding at Nolan. He pressed the Thompson into Caine’s hands: ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Now it’s time to get reacquainted with another old mate.’

  38

  Caine took his leave of Layla crouching behind a low ridge near the halftrack with Hun rounds squiffing air above them. She had tucked her lush hair under a black headscarf and, with her ankle-length dark robes, she reminded Caine of an untidy but rather beautiful nun. ‘You only need to hold them till we’ve had a chance to get out,’ he told her. ‘After that, scatter in small groups across the hills.’