‘What’s your unit?’
‘I ain’t tellin’ you that.’
Lohman smiled frostily, held up the sawnoff. ‘You were found carrying a banned weapon. I could have you executed.’
‘Never saw it before in me life.’
Lohman chuckled. The giant’s face was pale behind thick bristle: his lips were bruised and swollen, his neck swathed in field-dressings. His trousers had been cut away: his legs were wrapped in bandages from thigh to ankle. ‘Shrapnel wounds,’ the corporal told him, ‘but he had a gunshot wound in the calf, already dressed. Quite nasty.’
‘Which leg?’
‘Left.’
Lohman stuck the shotgun in his webbing, slid out his bayonet, slit away the bandages from Wallace’s left calf, exposed the wound.
‘What are you doing, Sturmscharführer?’ the corporal protested. ‘I can’t let you …’
‘Shut up.’
He put the bayonet away, drew the shotgun. ‘That looks a little painful,’ he said to Wallace. He examined the sawnoff end for a moment, then thrust it powerfully into the wound.
‘Fuck you, fucking Kraut bastard,’ Wallace screamed.
The corporal grabbed Lohman’s arm. ‘Sir, this is not …’
The Sturmscharführer shrugged him off. ‘Don’t interfere. How many of our lads do you think he’s flayed alive with this vicious little toy, eh? There are no haloes here.’
The corporal bit his lip. ‘We don’t have to behave like animals.’
Lohman ignored him, noted with satisfaction that the big man’s wound had reopened: it was bleeding profusely. He raised the shotgun. ‘I want to know where is the blek box. Tell me, and I will stop.’
‘Fuck you … Aaaaaiiiiihhhh.’
Lohman kept up the pressure longer this time. ‘Where is the blek box?’
‘Don’t know nothin’ about no black box.’
‘I saw you with the blek box after the ambush. Where is it now?’
‘Go take a flying … Aaaaaaaaiiiihhhh.’
Lohman thrust the weapon into Wallace’s wound three or four more times, each time with increasing frustration. The big man twisted in agony, clenched his massive fists, but only expletives escaped him. The corporal stood in a corner, glowering.
The Sturmscharführer stood up, sighed. ‘You are a big, stupid man,’ he scoffed. He broke the shotgun, blew sand out of the chamber, took the two cartridges from his pouch, fed them in, snapped the weapon shut.
‘I used to shoot a twelve-bore like this on my uncle’s farm in Breslau when I was a boy,’ he said. ‘Except that it had proper barrels. A cartridge fired from this gun will do great damage, I think.’
He leaned over Wallace, pressed the twin muzzles firmly against the shaggy morass of hair at his temple. ‘Tell me where the blek box is, or I kill you.’
‘Sir,’ the medical orderly pleaded. ‘This isn’t right …’
Lohman’s blue eyes were flame and ice. ‘I’ll do it,’ he snapped.
Wallace spat bloody saliva, flashed Lohman a look of contempt. ‘I ain’t tellin’ you nothink, mate. So do as yer bleedin’ like.’
He looked away, stared at the ceiling.
Lohman felt furious: he was a hairbreadth from squeezing the triggers, when a new voice breathed, ‘Stop. I’ll tell you.’
Lohman glanced over at the other soldier, the plump, fish-headed one: it was he who had spoken. He was still on his stomach, his trout-shaped face crushed against the stretcher. Lohman realized he’d made a mistake in picking on the big man: he should have tried the fat one first.
‘What’s your name, soldier?’ he said.
‘Trubman. Edward. Corporal 833674.’
Lohman turned his eyes back to Wallace: he pressed the shotgun muzzles harder against the craggy temple.
‘Tell me now or I kill him.’
‘Don’t tell ’im nothin’, Taff,’ Wallace croaked. ‘Keep yer mouth shut.’
‘It doesn’t matter, Fred. They’ve had it. Monty’s outflanked the Mareth Line.’
Lohman pricked up his ears: this news was just what he’d expected. He still had a job to do, though.
‘You bloody fool,’ Wallace groaned.
Lohman tickled the twin triggers. ‘Last chance. Where is the blek box?’
‘One of our lads … stole it.’ Trubman’s jaw worked desperately. He was in agony from the wounds in his arm and back. He was finding it difficult to breathe, even more difficult to speak.
‘Stole it? You expect me to believe this?’
‘It’s true. He was a deserter. Took off in a jeep last night … about … eight o’clock.’
‘Then why did you not pursue him?’
‘We had to defend the bridge, see.’
Lohman thought about it: deserter sounded bizarre and improbable, but he couldn’t immediately see any motive for a lie. If the box had really been moved, whether it was by a deserter or otherwise seemed unimportant.
‘I counted eight of you here,’ he said. ‘Why only seven at the ambush?’
Trubman gulped air urgently: snot dribbled from his nostrils.
‘We picked up two men last night … they’d been hiding out here …’
Lohman absorbed the information with interest: at least the numbers tallied. Eight Brits had defended the position: one had gone off with the black box.
‘Where did he go, this man?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘And the other two? The ones who ran away from the pit. They went after him?’
Trubman moaned: his eyes flickered. Lohman realized that he was about to pass out. He doubted that he’d get any more. There were only two possibilities: either the box had been hidden here, or it had gone: it seemed more likely that it had gone. If it had been moved the previous night, the chances of finding it were slim. On the other hand, there was only one way out: the old highway across the Matmata Hills.
He lowered the shotgun, stood up straight, nodded at the corporal. ‘You can give them the morphia now.’
At the door he paused, wheeled round, tipped his tinlid forward. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘the fight you put up here was really something. Pity you will hev to sit out the war in a prison camp.’
He clicked his heels, saluted lightly, turned to go.
37
Jasper Maskelyne and Miles Caversham dined on bully-beef stew in the refectory at St Anthony’s, then took a jeep and drove five miles across the desert to temporary landing ground LG101. They were followed by a 3-tonner carrying a ground crew with petrol-tin flares and an Aldis lamp. The airstrip was shielded by overlapping ridges visible only as denser areas of darkness: a gilded moon like a clipped sovereign formed a hub for unspanned nebulas of stars. The evening wind was cool: the MO4 men had put on duffel coats and cap-comforters. They placed the Aldis lamp at the end of the runway: the ground crew laid out flare-tins every five yards.
‘Not a good idea to light them till we hear the aircraft, sir,’ Maskelyne said. ‘Just in case.’
‘In case what? The Axis haven’t had a kite over Egypt for months.’
‘It always pays to be on the safe side.’
They left the flares unlit, and went to sit in the jeep. Maskelyne produced a hip-flask of cognac, offered it to Caversham.
The colonel took a swig, handed it back, consulted his watch.
‘She’s due in about 2100 hours,’ Maskelyne told him.
‘Good. Let’s hope she’s carrying the black box. It’s been long enough.’
Maskelyne swigged Cognac: Caversham contemplated the night.
He saw himself as a man who knew what the war was really about: it was about preserving the establishment; that is, the way of life of the wealthy, the landed and the well bred: the kind of people who ran military intelligence. The rest were just minions. Caversham despised men like Caine – nobodies who were ready to risk their lives for their country, quite ignorant of the fact that their country was in reality a small elite who didn’t care how many of them were sac
rificed, as long as they remained supreme. Not that he would ever dream of sharing such a view: the illusion of democracy and the authority of the people had to be maintained.
The scion of a brewery empire, with an estate in Wiltshire, Caversham belonged among the elite by birthright. He’d served in the Royal Engineers so long ago that he hardly remembered it. He was a surveyor and mapmaker by trade, but also a brilliant linguist, whose fluent German had landed him a posting with the British mission in Berlin in the late 1930s. There, he’d got to know some of his counterparts in the Abwehr: Prussian aristocrats with backgrounds similar to his own, who had no sympathy with Hitler or the Nazis. Despite the war, he’d maintained contact with one or two of them secretly. That was how the Nighthawk scheme had come about.
‘You think it’s going smoothly, then, sir?’ Maskelyne asked.
The colonel nodded. It had been only three days since Caine’s team had taken off from this same airstrip, in the Bristol Bombay that had dropped them in Tunisia. Caversham knew the drop had gone reasonably well: the RAF special operations dispatcher had reported to him personally. There’d been a delay that had made it necessary to jump in daylight, and a small problem with a Messerschmitt, but Caine’s stick had landed on target: the reception committee from Fraser’s composite SAS squadron had been waiting for them on the DZ, with equipment and jeeps.
They’d heard nothing since, but that didn’t bother him. He knew his chickens. Caine, being Caine, wouldn’t have failed to respond to a Mayday call, any more than a signaller as good as Trubman would have failed to pick it up. That big oaf Wallace would follow Caine into the jaws of hell. Copeland would have argued, but in the end would have backed them up.
As for Fiske, Sears-Beach had assured him that the man was as cold as a razorblade, and twice as bright. He’d make sure that Caine and his men weren’t … as Sears-Beach had put it … in a position … to hamper the operation.
Maskelyne screwed the top back on the flask, slipped it into his pocket. He twirled his fingers, produced a cigarette, offered it to Caversham, who shook his head.
Maskelyne put the cigarette in his mouth, rubbed his hands together, opened them to reveal his Ronson lighter. He lit the cigarette pensively. ‘The only problem I can see is Fraser. He’ll know that Caine and company were in the field.’
‘He won’t know we recruited them. When Caine and his men fail to return, he’ll just assume they were captured or killed.’
‘Yes, sir, but he’s bound to report it to SAS HQ. They’ll find out we were behind it, and ask what authority we had to hive off their men, and, in particular, an officer on sick leave, and others who were off the active list.’
Caversham bared chiselled teeth. ‘They won’t find out it was us. If they accuse us of anything, we’ll just deny it. Remember, there are no records: no roll call, no movement orders, no written plans.’
Maskelyne’s skull-head wobbled nervously. ‘They’ll blame me. They’ll say Glenn and I were out for revenge.’
‘Forget it, Jasper. None of this is personal: in war one has to make harsh decisions. We needed Caine and his crew to get the black box. Thereafter, they became expendable. I don’t deny that they behaved appallingly towards you, nor do I deny that I would be distressed if they returned safely and spilled the beans, or claimed Nighthawk as an SAS coup. However, that’s not relevant. Keep your mind on the black box: it contains secrets that could give us victory. That’s what counts.’
Maskelyne seemed unconvinced. He was one of the British army’s most accomplished deception artists – the man who’d moved the port at Alexandria by sleight of hand, and deceived the Axis into bombing somewhere else. He knew better than anyone that, in war, things were rarely what they seemed. Maskelyne hailed from no such exalted background as Caversham: his father had been a bank-clerk in Wimbledon, and he’d started his career doing magic shows for children. It had been a long grind up to the pinnacle of fame as the Great Maskelyne. He was astute enough to sense that Caversham looked down on him: he was aware that he was nothing more than a useful tool.
‘How can you be sure the black box really contains what you think it does?’ he enquired.
Caversham pursed his fat lips smugly. ‘That’s classified.’
Maskelyne looked as if he’d been slapped in the face. The colonel pulled his coat around him defensively. Well, let him. He’s unforgivably nosy and extremely acute. Knows far too much already. Caversham couldn’t risk telling Maskelyne the real story, but neither could he fob him off with a cover-tale: the ex-magician was sharp enough to see straight through it. It’s not that I really have anything to hide. My motives were pure. I’ve been given a rare chance to bring off a triumph that will help ensure Allied victory. If the price I’ve paid was Caine, and a few SAS men and ex-prisoners, it’s a small price. All right, if the truth be known, I also sacrificed David Stirling. He wasn’t a nobody: he was one of us. But he had to be got rid of. If he’d had his way MO4 would no longer exist.
In early January he’d been contacted by one of his former Abwehr associates, a Prussian junker codenamed Groot. He’d known Groot personally before the war – a secret anti-Nazi conspirator from the group British intelligence called the Schwarze Kapelle. Caversham hadn’t seen him for years, but they had a complicated series of recognition codes and safeguards to ensure that neither had been compromised.
Groot had passed him some intelligence that had made him sit up. It concerned a prototype German aircraft of a completely new class – a silent aircraft, Groot called it – that had been lost on a test flight in Tunisia. The aircraft had been carrying a very special cargo: a black box containing an experimental electronic counter-measures device called STENDEC. Developed by German scientists at Peenemünde, the device could produce an effect that deceived enemy radars into indicating that a huge airfleet was on the move. It could also be used in ships, giving radar images of non-existent battlefleets. The silent-aircraft prototype was designed to elude enemy radar shields, making the STENDEC equipment mobile and undetectable.
Caversham had known at once that STENDEC was the kind of invention that could win the war. It could deceive the enemy into thinking that an invasion was coming in one place, when in reality it was coming somewhere completely different. He didn’t know much about radar, but it sounded plausible, and Groot was a solid source. He assumed that Groot had brought the information to him because they were old friends, and because Groot knew and trusted his superior talents. At this stage, he could have shared the int. with the DMI. Instead he’d kept it under his hat. If there was any kudos to be gained in this affair, he wanted it to be his.
There was only one catch, Groot explained. If the Allies got the STENDEC device, the Abwehr would be blamed and demoted. They had to have an intelligence coup of their own that, even if not of the same calibre, would at least show Axis command that they were doing their job. Caversham had thought long and hard about it, and had come up with David Stirling.
Stirling’s SAS had been highly successful in disrupting Axis lines of communication, and had put the wind up the Panzer Army. With that success behind him, and a bit of wheeling and dealing with old school chums, Stirling had wormed his way into the confidence of Winston Churchill. Not only had he proposed to make the SAS a brigade with himself as the brigadier, he’d also suggested amalgamating all the special ops outfits, including MO4, under SAS command. The thought that MO4 might be disbanded had appalled Caversham. Stirling was gentry all right, but he, a seasoned player of the game, didn’t relish the idea of serving under an upstart who’d been considered an incorrigible delinquent only eighteen months ago. If Caversham wanted to do something to secure MO4’s existence, he first had to get Stirling out of the way. Groot’s request for a tit-for-tat coup provided him with a perfect chance.
It hadn’t been difficult to rope Stirling into the scheme, or to feed Groot the location of a certain RV in Tunisia, where the Boche would be waiting for him. Some of his men had unexpectedly escaped, of course:
even Stirling had got away initially but thankfully been recaptured.
Thereafter, Groot had released details of the location of the STENDEC aircraft and the black box. All Caversham had needed was a crew of special service troops who could retrieve it without being missed: Maskelyne had asked for expendable commando-trained volunteers from the detention centre. Provost Corps officer Robin Sears-Beach had come up with the idea of using Tom Caine.
Caine didn’t matter, but Stirling did. Caversham had sold out one of his own for the black box: he wasn’t proud of it, but sometimes, in war, you had to make harsh decisions.
Maskelyne touched his arm. ‘She’s coming in,’ he said.
The ground crew lit the flares: a path of fire blazed up, peeling back the darkness, casting the airfield in a bronze glow. Caversham and Maskelyne saw shadow figures scurrying off the runway. The sound of the aero-engines grew louder: a moment later they watched the medium bomber touch down, taxi forward with her twin propellers churning. By the time the Blenheim had come to a standstill, the flares were almost out. Caversham felt excited. Any minute now he would be taking possession of the black box, the object he’d expended so much time and trouble to obtain. This would be the high point of his career.
They hurried towards the aircraft carrying torches, arrived in time to see the pilot climbing down from the side door. He was clad in a fleece-lined flying jacket and helmet.
‘Where is it, Willington?’ Caversham demanded. ‘Where’s the black box?’
Willington was a very young, very spindly RAF pilot officer with a stiff moustache and a laconic manner. He stuck a pipe in his mouth, reconsidered it and brought it out again. ‘Sorry, sir,’ he said. ‘We didn’t get it. Chaps didn’t turn up. Never put the panels out.’
Caversham bit his lip. ‘You were given orders to return to the RV at the same time every night for as long as it takes.’
‘With due respect, sir, if we run into a flight of Messerschmitt 109s or something, our goose is well and truly roasted. Navigation’s a nightmare, too: either there aren’t any landmarks, or there are too many, all the same.’
Death or Glory III Page 24
