Death or Glory III

by Michael Asher

  ‘Yep, but they still said it.’

  A slug tickered stonework, flew off with an electric whaaaazzz. Cope ducked: Trubman didn’t flinch. He seemed to have passed through some sort of barrier, Copeland thought: or maybe he was just plain exhausted.

  He squeezed himself in next to the signalman, lit a cigarette.

  ‘You’re as good as any of ’em, Taff: better than most. Got the MM twice, didn’t you?’

  Trubman smoked morosely, eyes distant. ‘It was my father, see. I’m from Merthyr Tidfil – slagheap capital of the world: dah was a miner, like his dah before him. Would have liked me to go down the pit, but reckoned I wasn’t up to it. Never amount to anything, you won’t, boy, he used to say. No good at sports. Can’t play rugby. Couldn’t knock the skin off a rice pudding. Even when I enlisted he said I should have gone for the Fusiliers. Royal Signals, he said. That’s for nellies, that is.’

  Copeland punched his arm. ‘And here you are with the nellies. Does he reckon they hand out medals on a plate with chips?’

  ‘He’ll never know, will he? Died in a pit collapse two years back, see.’

  Stray rounds plinked the parapet, huzzed off in sparkling glimmers.

  ‘Jerry’s spotted us,’ Cope said.

  ‘Yep,’ Trubman replied, his voice croupy. ‘You got any more of them stay-awake pills? Either that or I’ll have to peg my eyes open with matches, see.’

  Cope gave him two Bennies, took two himself: they shared a canteen of water to wash them down. ‘Don’t stand too close,’ Trubman said. ‘This stuff makes your breath stink like rotten fish.’

  ‘Did you spot Tom and the others?’

  Trubman removed his glasses, cleaned them on his sleeve. He squinted at Cope, his dim brown eyes gauging him like feelers. ‘They’re holed up in the berm at the foot of the cliff. You can see them from here if you stand up, but I wouldn’t want to stick my nob over that parapet.’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it.’

  Caine removed the Bren from the embrasure, cocked his Tommy-gun. Wallace tossed a piastre to decide who would drive. Caine knew he’d be hampered by his wounded arm, but that applied equally to his shooting ability. In any case, Wallace won the toss. ‘Just give her all you’ve got,’ Caine said.

  They laid Grimshaw face down in the jeep bed: Wallace had reversed the wagon into the ramp: no manoeuvring was needed to get her out. He checked tyres and fuel: Wallace adjusted the seat, jumped in with a creak of springs. Caine clambered into the gunner’s place next to him, attached the Bren to the forward mount with Wallace’s help: he reckoned he could handle it well enough, but he’d have to shoot across the driver’s front. He made sure the mag was full, that he had his wallet of spares. A shot fishtailed over them with a decelerating drone. Caine loaded the Very pistol with a blue flare. He was aware that firing it would alert the enemy, but that had to be weighed against securing covering fire.

  He took a deep breath: he felt like he did before a parachute drop – painfully alert, as if he’d just stuck his head in an ice-bucket. His mind was hollow, unfocussed on anything but the way ahead – everything was blank but the course of that one-minute dash under fire. A minute seemed nothing, but Caine knew that Wallace was right: once the bullets were flying, it would be forever. He broke out in goosebumps: his guts churned. He glanced at Wallace, saw his scalloped forehead shiny with sweat. They locked eyes for a second. ‘Ready.’

  Wallace nodded, his great jaws set. Caine hooked iron: the flaregun popped. Wallace toed the starter, engaged gear, whamped the throttle. The jeep wheeled out of the berm: Wallace yanked the wheel sharp right, changed gear, shoved the throttle to top: the motor chirred, treads crunched gravel, the wagon bucked, lurched, skidded across stony ground. Caine had the sensation that they were moving in slowtime, that everything had gone quiet: he was hardly even aware of the shivering Jerry broadside from the gorge, the bullets that screeched over them. His world was only Wallace’s Quasimodo shoulders hunched over the wheel, the pancake hands gripping it as though he wanted to wrench it off, his forehead furrowed, his Neanderthal face rocklike with concentration. Caine swivelled the Bren, hoiked the trigger, heard the blatta-blatta-blatt, saw lances of explosive gas lick out across the bonnet. The noise was deafening: he heard nothing else – not until the high metallic stridor of the Vickers and Browning began shrilling out from the blockhouse above. Even then, he only half registered the sound: the jeep seemed to be floating on an air-cushion through turbulent cloud.

  Copeland was back in his own sangar when the flare budded above him, laddered into blue threads.

  He stiffened. ‘That’s them,’ he yelled. ‘They’re breaking out.’

  Trubland dropped fire from the roof. Cope saw the jeep come into view, speeding along the concave part of the rock face below them. He clocked whoffs of smoke from Jerries holed up along the gorge, heard the rattle of musketry, the ricka-ticka-tick of machine-gun fire. He fed the Vickers another pan, cocked the works, hammered long sprawls of ball, tracer, armour-piercing, flayed the slategrey air with lashes of quivering light. Then he saw something that took his breath away. A six-wheeler Jerry AFV was trundling across the bridge, a giant angular bug with a gun-mounted turret and half a dozen Totenkopf troopers hanging on to her skin. Copeland stopped shooting, waited for the AFV to hit the mine necklace the boys had laid: he didn’t know its exact position, but he knew they’d planned to cover the bridgehead. He watched as the armoured car ramped off the bridge and sailed forward. Nothing happened: there was no detonation. At the same time, Cope spotted two more armoured cars, also carrying troops, approaching the bridge from the far end.

  The first AFV was crawling directly towards the gap: troops dropped off her back, deployed among sparse cover. ‘Cutler,’ Copeland bawled. ‘See to that wagon.’ Cutler was already picking up the bazooka. Cope saw him heave it to his shoulder, switched back to the scene before him: the AFV’s cannon trumped.

  The shell hit paydirt fifteen paces from the jeep; a dreadbolt wallop rocked the surface, raked up a mousse of vermilion fire. Caine felt the gutpunch, felt the jeep turn turtle, smacked into the deck, passed out in a snowstorm of dazzling white. He awoke lying on his left side, opened his eyes, felt his mouth coated with petrol, felt his face puffed like a balloon, eyes heavy as fishweights: his left arm burned, his lungs felt seared. He clocked Wallace, only a yard away, trying to raise himself on arms gone to jelly. Grimshaw was a couple of paces behind: the shock had brought him round: he was worming for the nearest boulder, pistol gripped tight in bloodcaked hands. The jeep lay on its side, wheels spinning: the air was a peasoup, alive with the whine of hurtling rounds. Hot lead chipped stones, punched through the jeep’s hull with metallic snaps.

  Caine saw the Jerry AFV mosey towards them, machine-gun ribbing fire. A fan of Jerries advanced behind her, slipping from rock to rock. Machine-guns yammered out from the blockhouse. Caine saw a Jerry’s head squelch crimson, saw another’s chest mauled with rings of black flesh.

  Wallace was on his feet: he took two strides to the jeep, grabbed the discarded Bren, braced it: Caine saw the splurt of fire, saw Wallace knocked off his feet by a slug that skewered his calf, saw him crash with the Bren still rattling, saw mercury splits leap into the sky. Caine’s Tommy was lying in the dust: he reached for it, climbed blearily to his feet. He saw Kaiser helmets bob across his front at fifty paces, belted out bursts at them one-handed: the shots went low. He made for Wallace, saw the armoured car’s turret rotate towards him. An anti-tank rocket squealed over his head, hit the AFV with a tympanic barrrooooommmffff, in a jagged swastika of light. Her turret was sliced off like an eggtop: whitehot steel hunks flew. A big Hun in a peaked cap trotted out of the miasma with fixed bayonet, showing pavingslab teeth. Caine dropped him with a double tap that blew his mouth away. There was a crunching blow in his right side, as though an engine block had fallen on him: he staggered, hiccupped air: the world went cateyed.

  23

  He surfaced a second time to t
he slap of detonation from the bridge, guessed that one of the No. 2 mines had gone up. He opened his eyes, saw a lacquered sky, whiskbroom cirrus, cottonfluff pads. Another bazooka rocket torpedoed over him: he watched its smoketrail shred the blueness, heard its rhonchoid scrape, heard the distant ka-thump as it cherrybombed in.

  He rolled over on to his side, found that he was lying in a brown mush of blood and sand. Pain hit him in savage waves: his left arm felt like it had been plunged in vitriol. He groaned, looked down to find a fillet of red meat hanging off his abdomen, just above the pelvic bone. A mass of flies swarmed on it: he held his good hand over the wound, brushed flies away. His senses strobed: his mind swung towards darkness. He took a dozen sharp breaths to keep his wits together.

  The ground looked different: limestone nodules had become jewels as big as carbuncles: the earth swarmed with carthorse-sized ants. He tried to focus on the bridgehead: saw it infinitely far off. A pall of smog hung over it: Axis vehicles there were on fire. He moved his head slightly, clocked the nearer AFV, a giant broken cockroach belching gulps of rancid gas. The shattered bodies of her Totenkopf crew lay around her like a necklace, some of them smouldering. German dead were scattered across the field as if slashed down by a great scythe. Jerries had taken cover in shallow scrapes behind trees and rocks: they were still shooting. Rounds clipped stones, spittlebugged dirt. Curries of fire curled out from the blockhouse above him, keeping Fritz in place. It was clear that the Totenkopf attack had lost momentum.

  Wallace was humped in the dirt by the overturned jeep, swearing obscenely: his left leg was a mess of gore and blackened cloth. He lifted his puddingstone head, met Caine’s eyes. His face was puce-coloured, his pupils needlepoints. Caine looked for Grimshaw, spotted his head pop up behind a swordgrass clump. Blood slopped inside his smock: a vice tightened on his guts. It felt as if a horse had kicked him there, like the horse that had killed his father: what an irony that both he and his dad should suffer the same fate. Rounds beetle-buzzed, hit stones, tore off in disconsolate soprano wails.

  He knew he had to force himself to move. It would be too easy to give in, to fade away and never come back. He fished for his Tommy, drew it to him by the sling, dragged it towards Wallace at a crawl. He struggled to keep his mind clear. Slugs pranged through the jeep’s chassis. It took forever to cross inches of ground: by the time he and Wallace were head to head, the giant was trying to raise himself again: he’d taken a round in his right calf: it had skimmed bone, missed the artery. He was still losing blood, but Caine didn’t think it was as bad as it looked. He reached in his pocket for a field dressing, remembered he’d used the last one on himself. Wallace blinked at him, strobed pinpoint eyes.

  ‘Hold on, mate,’ Caine choked. ‘We’ll get out of this.’

  Wallace wiped blood off his lips with shaky knuckles. ‘That’s a good one, that is, Tom.’ His voice was a hollow rasp. ‘There ain’t no way out.’

  Caine knew he was right. None of them was going to make it without the help of Copeland and the other two up in the blockhouse. It would take at least two men to pull them out: that meant reducing covering fire by two thirds – and that was the only thing holding the Boche back. Even if Cope risked it, he’d have no more than an even chance of survival. The problem was that he almost certainly would risk it, and that would jeopardize everything.

  A round whopped past his ear. Caine realized the bullet had come from behind, glanced back to see Grimshaw doling out fire in single shots, his Colt pistol lodged against a stone. He was bawling like a madman. ‘I’ll ’ave yer, yer bastards. Come on. What’s wrong with yer, bleedin’ Nazi wankers? Ya … Death’s Head? I’ve shit ’em.’

  Caine grinned. ‘That’s the way Shorty. Fight to the last bullet.’

  ‘I say we rush ’em,’ Wallace croaked.

  Caine felt a titter gurgle in his throat. ‘You can’t even stand up.’

  ‘Who says I can’t? If we lie here much longer, mate, Harry’s gonna come and get us, and then he’ll be scragged an’ all. I ain’t waitin’ to be butchered like a pig in a poke.’

  For a moment, Caine thought he must be hallucinating: maybe he was dead already, maybe he hadn’t survived the jeep-crash. But no, the pain was too vicious, too real for that. He cursed, tried to moisten his lips with a sandpaper tongue. What Wallace had just said sounded crazy, but Caine saw reason in it. If they stayed here, Copeland would make an attempt to get them: if enemy fire kept up they would both be hit again. Fred was right – better go out now, on their feet, in a blaze of glory. The only thing was, he wasn’t certain that he could get on his feet, let alone Wallace. He drew his Tommy-gun in, gripped the butt under his shoulder, felt for the grooves on the forward stock. He was comforted by the feel of the weapon: it had been part of him for so long. He saw Wallace fumble for his Purdey, saw him lift the sawnoff in his knobby hand with a moan. ‘How we gonna do this?’

  ‘I’ll count to three. On three, we get up and give it to ’em. That’s it.’

  Caine wasn’t afraid. The pain was agonizing: any escape from it had to be welcome. He’d suffered enough – they all had. When he’d lost Nolan, something in him had died, anyway. He’d taken on Nighthawk knowing that it stank like rotten fish – he’d only agreed on the slimmest chance that he might get Nolan back. It’s a lie, just like it always is. The whole fucking war’s a lie – Fiske was bloody well right about that. No one gives a toss about Thomas Caine or his men. Fuck the brass – Alexander, Monty, Freyberg – the lot of them. They’re all out for number one, out for the nobs. They can stuff their bloody medals. Nolan’s dead. Who cares about life without her? I’ve done what I had to. I made my stand.

  He nudged Wallace. ‘You ready, then?’

  The big man blinked: blood trickled from his nostrils. ‘See you on the other side, mate.’

  Caine sluiced a rattling breath. ‘Trooper Grimshaw,’ he yelped. ‘Covering fire.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’ The voice was so faint that Caine couldn’t tell if he’d imagined it. He and Wallace locked eyes, looked away. ‘One,’ Caine counted, ‘Two … Thr–’

  He didn’t finish the count: his jaw seized up and something went snap in his head. He became aware of a figure walking nonchalantly out of enemy lines directly towards them – not a Jerry, though: a Tommy with a withered, skeletal face, spitting-cobra eyes, in a soup-bowl helmet, carrying a rusted Bren. Caine gasped in shock: the soldier was Cpl Maurice Pickney, RAMC, deceased. He seemed almost to be floating above the ground, his legs moving, his feet not quite connecting. Suddenly, Caine was aware of the same burnt steel smell, the same spine-chilling voice he’d heard back in the derelict aircraft. Don’t do it, Tom. Don’t move. Help is coming.

  The ghostly Pickney drifted nearer: he seemed to pass right between them. Caine felt a waft of cold air, shivered. ‘Did you see that?’

  The big man stared at him, confused. ‘What? Why did you stop?’

  Caine didn’t look behind: he heard the ghostly voice trailing off into the distance. Shouldn’t have taken the black box, Tom. I warned you what would happen. You brought all this on yourself by taking the black box.

  The words were replaced by the contralto tipple of a Bren: Caine heard a tracked vehicle’s rattle, glanced over his shoulder just as a Bren-gun carrier bumped around the bend in the rock wall. She was an ungainly vehicle like an iron boat, with a gunmuzzle protruding through a slit in her forward turret, splattering spurts of gunfire in skipping threads. Caine gripped his weapon hard in disbelief. The rattletrap shot directly towards them, rising and falling as if she were breasting choppy waters: for an instant Caine thought she would roll right over them. At the last second, though, she swerved, slavered to a halt broadside on. A carrot-top head appeared over the side: foxy eyes, a doorstep chin, a face only just recognizable under stubble, filth and soot. ‘Your transport is here, gentlemen,’ Mitch Jizzard declared.

  24

  When the orderly told Major John Stocker that a Captain Elizabeth Nolan was waiti
ng in the interview room, the DSO’s only reaction was to remove the pipe from his mouth. He betrayed no more surprise than a curl of the lower lip. ‘Did you see any ID?’ he enquired.

  ‘She didn’t have none, sir. No paybook, noffink.’

  ‘What’s she like?’

  ‘Corkin’ blonde, sir. Nice legs, knockers like …’

  ‘That’s quite adequate, Corporal. Show her in.’

  Stocker, a stoutish, balding man with a forehead like a cupola and thickframed glasses, laid his pipe in an ashtray, glanced round the room. It hadn’t changed much since Nolan had last seen it, he reflected – cluttered with overstuffed bookcases, academic ornaments – all the drooping furniture he’d salvaged from his room at Cairo University, where he’d once been a professor. In his creased and ill-fitting battledress, he looked more like a boffin than a soldier, but many had found that it was a mistake to underestimate him. He had a mind like Occam’s razor: he was capable of a ruthlessness that had been known to make senior officers quail.

  Stocker wasn’t as surprised by Nolan’s visit as he might have been. Until a couple of weeks earlier he’d believed her dead – killed in the car crash that Tom Caine had survived. When his men had picked up Jizzard, though – the night Bill Pike and Celia Blaney had been shot – the Scotsman had been ready to sing. He’d told Stocker he’d been due to RV that night with a man called Taylor, and a blond girl known as Maddy: whether those were their real names, he had no idea.

  Maddy had been Betty Nolan’s cover name on the Runefish op. It might have been coincidence, but Stocker had had a hunch. He’d quizzed Jizzard about the girl, found out that the deserter gang had picked her up the previous November: she’d been involved in some sort of accident, and wasnae playin’ with the full deck, as Jizzard put it. Stocker had been intrigued: Jizzard’s description of Maddy not only matched the Nolan he knew, it also tallied with the picture of the female hijacker Driver Davis had given. Stocker knew it was rare for the deserters to use women: most deserter girls were civilians, the majority Egyptian or foreign prostitutes who’d found an easy ticket among the gangs.