Death or Glory I: The Last Commando: The Last Commando

by Michael Asher

  Caine did a mental body check: other than the familiar scorch of thirst in his mouth, there was no pain anywhere. Everything seemed to be functioning properly, and he found it hard to believe that he hadn't been hit. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a medical orderly trying to beat out flames on something that looked like a giant black cocoon. The next moment, a round punched clean through the orderly's helmet. He went down without a sound.

  Caine tore his eyes away, rubbed split and distended lips. ‘You got water, sir?’ he wheezed.

  ‘Use your own,’ Sears-Beach snapped.

  Caine scrabbled for his bottle, uncorked it with shaky fingers, took a blissful gulp. ‘The section on the outpost,’ he drawled. ‘They're cut off.’

  ‘Leave them. Just get the rest of the troop out when the time comes.’

  Caine's ashlar eyes smouldered like embers about to burst aflame. ‘You don't dump your mates,’ he said.

  The captain gripped his wrist, and Caine looked into dilated nostrils and bared teeth. ‘Don't argue with me, Caine. I'm acting OC, and I said leave them. Now, get back to your troop.’

  2

  By the time he had crawled back to his position the desert had turned orange and gold, the lowering sun casting strange loops of shadow that gave the whole battlefield a surreal look. The furnace heat was trailing off, replaced by a wind that rose like a scream, driving eddies of dust, rasping faces, sandpapering throats and tongues. The pressure of enemy artillery had eased. The dead had been laid reverently outside the trenches, and Pickney was still working his way back and forth from casualty to casualty. Caine threw himself into his slit-trench. Wallace, who always carried a Bren-gun in action, throwing its weight around as if it were a toy, was in there, bracing the weapon on its bipod legs, in stand-to position. Copeland, brewing tea on a Primus stove, raised his startling blue eyes as Caine crouched against the parapet. ‘Prissy's dead,’ Caine said bluntly.

  ‘Shit. Was that the HQ position going up?’

  ‘Yep. Whole bunker got wiped. Sears-Beach has assumed command.’

  ‘That turd,’ Wallace groaned, waving a saucer-sized hand at the hordes of flies that had invaded the trench the moment the heat had begun to wane. Caine became suddenly aware that his chest and arms were black with the creatures. He started slapping them away but quickly gave up: it was like trying to make a dent in water.

  ‘Tea's up,’ said Cope. ‘Anyone without his mug can drink out of his arse.’

  The tea was hot, sweet and strong, thick with condensed milk, and they drank it crunching desperately on hard-tack biscuits, flapping away flies. The only good thing that could be said about the heat, Caine reflected, was that it dampened your appetite. When he and Copeland were done, Cope relieved Wallace on the Bren. The big man shifted his gargantuan bulk, squatting next to Caine. With his wrestler's physique, his forest of stubble, his tangled nest of dark hair, his chiselled features black with powder-burns and his intense, black eyes, he looked, Caine thought, like an ogre out of a children's story. Fred Wallace – rugby-prop, champion boxer and the Commando's best Bren marksman – was so enormous that Caine was surprised that any enemy sniper could ever miss him in combat. Subconsciously, he'd come to regard the giant as unkillable – an elemental force of nature. Wallace could usually be distinguished also by the sphinx tattoo on his left forearm – the insignia of his old unit, F (Sphinx) Battery, 4 Royal Horse Artillery – but both arms were now heavily bandaged, adding extra bulk to his already colossal limbs. Wallace gulped the tea and spat it out in disgust. ‘Call that tea?’ he demanded. ‘It would have been better drinking out of my arse!’

  ‘That's where you can stick it, then,’ Cope said. He noticed that, for all his talk, Wallace didn't tip the tea away.

  When he'd finished his tea, the big man drew out his pet back-up weapon – the twin-barrelled sawn-off Purdey shotgun he carried in a homemade leather pouch slung on his belt. He broke open the gun, checked the chambers and started to clean them lovingly with a dry cloth. He didn't try to oil the weapon: he'd long since learned that oil and sand didn't mix.

  ‘I don't know why you carry that thing,’ Caine commented. ‘It's an illegal firearm. If the Boche find that on you, you really will be for the high-jump.’

  Wallace held up the twelve-bore to the light and peered happily through both smoothbore barrels. He took a pair of buckshot cartridges from his webbing, slotted them into the chambers, snapped the gun shut. ‘Purdey's got me out of more scrapes than I've had hot dinners,’ he said. ‘I couldn't part with her now.’

  Cope turned back to watch his arc. ‘Hey,’ he said a moment later. ‘A red Very light has just gone up from the outpost. Is that important?’

  Caine squeezed next to him and peeped over the brim of the trench, catching the tail-end of the Very flare. ‘That's the distress signal,’ he said. ‘It means they can't hold out any longer.’

  The sun had already gone down and the landscape was drained of its wild sunset colours. The furnace wind had dropped, but trails of smoke and dust still drifted languidly across the desert like gossamer veils. Caine pointed out a gully that ran at right angles from the bottom of the salient as far as the outpost ridge. ‘I'm going to bring those lads in,’ he said. ‘I'll work my way up that wadi. It should give me cover from fire, especially after dark.’

  Wallace pressed his massive frame between Caine and Copeland. ‘I'm with you, skipper,’ he said.

  Caine shook his head. ‘You're wounded.’

  Wallace grinned, his teeth pearly white against his powder-blackened face.

  ‘You don't call this wounded, do you? I've had worse than this on a night's boozing in Cairo. Anyhow, you'll never do it on your own.’

  Cope released the Bren's stock and sat back on his haunches. His ostrich-like features had taken on a cast of disdainful superiority, as if he were in the presence of a couple of dim-witted pupils. ‘I think you may have overlooked one small factor, mein Herr,’ he said to Caine. ‘Some of those boys will be stretcher-cases. What, so you're going to carry half a dozen men each? Pardon me for being a dunderhead, but how's that going to work, then? You're going to ferry them one by one? By my reckoning, that's going to take at least three and a half hours to clear the lot. I reckon the enemy is going to have rumbled it by then, apart from the fact that you're both going to be shattered after a couple of runs.’

  Caine nodded. It was true that he hadn't considered the stretcher-cases.

  Copeland leaned further over the edge of the trench and pointed down the salient to a knot of lorries that had formed part of the supply column. Most were wrecked and smoking, but not all. ‘I reckon there's at least one 3-tonner down there that's in good nick,’ he said. ‘We could drive it up the wadi and shift the lot of them in one bash. If we've got juice, we needn't head back to the Battle Group RV. We could drive straight to the fall-back at Jaghbub. Can you find the way?’

  ‘Yep, I can find the way,’ Caine said, ‘but I don't know about “we”. I'm not having you getting in the shit for me.’

  ‘What d'you mean?’ Wallace demanded. ‘It's “commando initiative”, innit? If those lads get caught with their fannies, they're dog meat.’

  ‘Sears-Beach didn't see it that way.’

  ‘Sears-Bitch is a bonehead – you know that. That chump wouldn't know “commando initiative” if it got up and poked his eye out. He should of stuck to the Shepheard Hotel Short Range Desert Bar-pushers, or whatever crappy outfit he used to be in.’

  ‘Yeah, and if we do get in the shite,” said Cope, grinning, ‘we'll just say you ordered us to do it.’

  Caine gave in. He knew he shouldn't be putting their lives at risk like this, but their loyalty moved him almost to tears. ‘This calls for a sacrament,’ he said. He brought a crumpled brown envelope out of his breast pocket, and offered it solemnly to the two men.

  ‘What's this?’ Cope enquired.

  ‘Bennies,’ Caine said. ‘We'll need them if we're going to get away with a stunt like this.’


  3

  There were still a few minutes of light left when they made it to the 3-tonner. Before leaving, Caine had passed command of the troop over to Corporal ‘Todd’ Sweeney, the next most senior non-com after Copeland. He told Sweeney to extract the unit the moment darkness fell, and to make a tactical withdrawal to the Battle Group RV behind the ridge. There would be transport waiting to take them back to Jaghbub. Sweeney, a tight-lipped, balding ex-military policeman with a barrel chest and a head like a football, didn't seem happy with the order. ‘What am I supposed to say if Captain Sears-Beach wants to know where you are?’ he demanded. ‘I don't like bullshitting my superiors.’

  ‘You ain't got a problem, then, have you?’ Wallace grinned. ‘Sears-Beach ain't your superior: he's a bloody moron.’

  ‘Tell him the truth,’ Caine cut in. ‘Say we're missing in action.’

  As an afterthought, the three of them had handed over their fannies to Sweeney for safekeeping, and Caine had felt an unexpected reluctance to part with his dagger. True, being captured with an unorthodox weapon would hamper any attempt to present a cover story, but on the other hand, it was the commandos' symbol – both their cap-badge, and the mark of their ‘specialness’. Caine had had to tell Wallace to relinquish his fanny twice before the giant pressed it reluctantly into Sweeney's hands.

  As they reached the wagon, the RHA battery on the ridge launched a walloping barrage, splitting the darkness with seams of blinding white light. They hurled themselves flat with their hands over their tin lids and didn't move until the bombardment stopped. There were answering booms and flashes from the German 88mms, but Caine judged the elevation too far above them to worry about.

  He sloped off to make a quick inspection of the vehicle, and was back in five minutes. ‘Looks like the driver took a round in the head,’ he said. ‘Sniper job. Ten to one he stalled the engine. I doubt that the lorry was hit, because she's carrying a load of “flimsies”. If she had been, they'd have gone off like a rocket.’

  Copeland nodded. ‘Flimsies’ were four-gallon cans of petrol, packed two to a wooden crate, so called because of their notorious tendency to leak. Cope could never understand why the Allies hadn't adopted the German-pattern ‘jerry’ can, which was so much more efficient. ‘That'll solve the juice problem, anyway,’ he said.

  ‘Yep, but we'll need to get rid of some if we're going to fit the boys in.’

  They moved to the lorry, where Copeland and Wallace started passing flimsies out of the back. Caine removed the dead driver and laid him in the sand. He jumped into the cab and examined the starter, gear lever, pedals. Just as he'd guessed, the gear lever was stuck in first. The fuel gauge showed that the tanks were almost full.

  He jumped down, checked the tyres, then took a peek under the bonnet. The engine looked sound. He closed it, hurried round to the tailboard and found that the others had dumped enough flimsies. ‘You take the tailboard,’ he told Cope. ‘Fred, there's a hatchway up in the cab roof, with a pintle-mount. Can you fix the Bren there?’

  ‘I'll have a look.’

  ‘How many mags did you get?’

  Wallace had collected .303 ammo from the rest of the troop, but still had only three full magazines. ‘If we get into a contact,’ Caine said, ‘fire only singles.’

  Caine was in the driver's seat and about to hit the starter when Cope banged on the back of the cab. ‘How are they going to know it's us?’ he demanded urgently. ‘They'll be on a hair trigger up there. We don't want 'em opening up on us.’

  Caine cursed himself silently. He fumbled in his haversack for the Very pistol he'd brought. ‘Thanks, Harry,’ he said to the back of the cab. ‘Talk about dunderhead – I completely forgot. The signal is a blue Very light. I'm firing it now.’

  He stuck the pistol out of the open window and squeezed the trigger. There was a bang and a pop, followed by a flash of brilliant blue light. Caine and Wallace sat frozen until it faded. As if in answer, there were more crashes of artillery fire from the top of the escarpment. Caine noted that the interval between salvos was getting longer and guessed that the gunners were covering themselves as they limbered up. They must be almost out of shells by now anyway.

  Caine reloaded the Very pistol in case it was needed. Then he toed the starter and the engine burst into life. Close up it sounded like thunder, and Caine had to remind himself that in the vastness of the theatre, with hundreds of vehicles lumbering about and big guns firing all over the place, the enemy would never pinpoint its location. ‘I'm keeping her in first,’ he told Wallace. ‘We're going without headlights, so mind you keep your beady eyes on the road.’

  Caine was the scion of generations of village blacksmiths, and had fire and steel in his veins. He had been at home with motor vehicles ever since he had learned to drive a tractor at the age of twelve. An apprentice mechanic in Civvy Street, he prided himself on his ability to handle them. Managing a big lorry in the desert at night wasn't all that easy, but as a Sapper mechanic he'd been attached to 7th Armoured Division – the ‘Desert Rats’ – from the start of the war. He had as much desert driving experience as anyone, and more than most.

  He nursed the vehicle slowly into the gully, his eyes pinned on the way ahead. Daylight had faded out completely, and there was no moon – he drove by feel and starlight. Potholes, rocks and sudden drops were the main threats, but there was also the danger that Jerry had mined the area or sowed it with thermos bombs. The one thing he fervently hoped was that there was no enemy night-patrol hidden in the darkness. Once the lorry was spotted they would be damned lucky if they got out – with all that petrol in the back, a single round could turn them into a fireball.

  He gripped the wheel hard, hunched over, his heart throbbing, his breathing rapid. Every yard covered safely was a small victory. The lorry bumped and rattled over the stones. Occasional flashes of cannon fire ripped the night sky open above them, making Caine wince. Once again he had to remind himself that the artillery duel was nothing to do with them.

  ‘Stop!’ Wallace growled suddenly. Caine's heart bumped.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Something down there.’

  Caine put the gear lever in neutral and applied the handbrake, while the giant dropped from the cab, landing on hands and feet like a big black panther. He disappeared into the darkness and shortly reappeared on Caine's side, his tiny black eyes holding pinpricks of starlight. ‘Step in the wadi bed,’ he said. ‘About two feet. Can you make it?’

  Caine told him to stand back. He put the truck in gear and inched her over the edge of the step. There was a second's hiatus before the front wheels dropped and the big balloon tyres bounced on the hard surface with a wobbling of suspension. Caine moved the lorry forward until her back wheels had cleared the step. He applied the brake, dropped out of the cab and shouted to Copeland. The three of them set to work collecting boulders to build a ramp so that they could take the step easily on the way back.

  It took only a few minutes. Back in the hot seat, Caine drove forward slowly, all his senses alert. The truck rocked and grated over rough boulders. Occasional 88mm shells whizzed overhead. The ridge was only a thousand yards from where they'd started, but it seemed an age before they arrived. Then, while Wallace and Cope covered him from outside, Caine made a three-point turn, expecting shots to ring out from above every second. He cut the engine and joined the others in the lee of the escarpment, where they crouched close together for a moment, taking slow sips of water from their canteens. Though the air had cooled slightly since sunset, the ground still throbbed with the heat it had soaked up in daylight hours. They watched enemy shells star-bursting on the Box behind them. Return fire from the RHA was desultory now, and Caine guessed there was only one gun left, firing for effect. That meant the entire Middle East Commando – or what was left of it – had gone. They would soon be joining the defeated remnants of the Eighth Army from the entire length of the Gazala Line, limping back to Egypt in a vast motor fleet – the worst defeat th
e British had suffered since Dunkirk. For a moment an unexpected loneliness engulfed him. He found himself thinking about Todd Sweeney, and hoping the rest of his troop was safely on its way to the fall-back RV.

  He put it out of his mind. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘We go up spread out five yards apart, and carefully does it. We don't want any accidents.’

  The ridge was loose shale, no more than thirty feet high. It was an easy enough climb, but far too noisy for Caine's liking. What if the lads had failed to spot the Very light? What if they were walking into an ambush set up by their own men? Caine broke over the ridge and spotted a movement, a faint flutter of white in the darkness. He fell flat just as a weapon cracked. A bullet soughed past his ear. ‘Don't shoot!’ he screamed. ‘Don't anybody shoot. It's Tom Caine, No. 1 Troop.’

  ‘Caine?’ a reedy voice came out of the darkness. ‘Hell's bells, about bleeding time.’

  Caine moved forward cautiously and almost bumped into Jake Campbell, a wiry corporal formerly of the Highland Light Infantry. Campbell looked to be in a bad way – his face was covered in concussion cracks, like old porcelain, and both his head and his left arm were swathed in bandages – hence the white flash Caine had glimpsed in the darkness. Campbell held a .45-calibre Colt automatic pistol in his right hand.

  ‘You never could hit a barn door at twenty paces, Jake,’ Caine said.

  ‘Lucky for you, brother.’

  Cope asked if he'd clocked the blue Very light. Campbell nodded shakily, and Caine saw that he was on the verge of collapse. He put his arm round the corporal's shoulders to steady him. ‘Thank God,’ Campbell whispered. ‘Mr Green promised, but we thought you wasn't coming.’