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

by Michael Asher

  Heart bumping, he watched the Blenheims completing their turn. Wallace clattered out of the White with a Bren-gun slung backwards from his shoulder, grasping a bundle of recognition panels in one hand and a Very pistol in the other. He thrust the pistol at Caine, and together they jogged clear of the convoy, the panels flapping like flags behind them. An instant later they were joined by Sweeney's co-driver, rugby-player Dick Hanley. Caine spun round to see the planes swooping down on them like giant bats: 20mm cannons ratcheted, shells kicked up spurts of sand, stitched ladders of dirt and rock fragments across the desert floor. He heard the whine of shrapnel spinning off stone, clocked the other four men from Gracie proned out around the lorry, heard ricochets as rounds fizzled and snapped over their heads. The air reeked of scorched chalk dust and smoke.

  Caine reminded himself that the recognition signal was one white Very flare. He lifted the Very pistol, squeezed metal. There was a dry click: the weapon misfired. ‘No. Christ, no!’ he swore. The shadows of the bombers lifted overhead in a concerto of screeching engines and shrieking guns: Caine and Wallace dropped and rolled, ate sand and gravel. Hanley stood his ground, shaking his ham fist at the soaring aircraft. A second later his body split apart at the seams, exploded in a gush of blood and tissue, grilled skin, dismembered limbs, mushed body-parts that splattered the desert for twenty yards.

  The shadows passed. Wallace leapt to his feet, his face a pallid death-mask of fury, gimlet eyes blinking at the gory mess that had been his mate. He swung the Bren-gun into his scarred arms, cocked it with a clank and lifted the stock to his shoulder, sighting up on the receding planes. ‘You bastards!’ he roared. ‘I'll have you, you Brylcreem bastards.’ Caine flung himself on the giant, grabbing the Bren's muzzle, jerking it down. ‘Fred,’ he said. ‘Fred. They're ours.’

  Wallace struggled, brushing him away, his eyes fixed on the swiftly vanishing bombers. ‘Ours?’ he rasped, his voice strained and distant. ‘Maybe you ain't been with us, Tom, but they just blew my mate to pieces. If I get hold of those Brylcreem Boys, I'll show them who's ours.’ He tried to yank the Bren away but Caine held on tight. ‘It was a mistake,’ he gasped. ‘You won't make it right by shooting them down.’

  Wallace gave a last jerk, and Caine let the weapon go. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘They're out of range. Go on – waste ammo.’

  Wallace stared at the Bren in his hands, glanced at Caine, flashed a glare of pure hatred after the aircraft, then let the weapon drop. A moment later he doubled over and vomited furiously into the sand.

  Within minutes the convoy had regrouped. The troops poured out of their vehicles and rushed over to see what had happened. Cavazzi and Oldfield from Gracie had been grazed by shrapnel, but apart from Hanley there were no major casualties.

  They buried all they could find of the ex-Gunner's remains where he had fallen and built a cairn of stones over the grave. Caine noted its latitude and longitude so that the body could be retrieved later. As he turned away, he felt the boys' eyes on him, some of them smouldering with resentment, as if he himself had been responsible for Hanley's death. He wondered if that could be true. If he had recognized the aircraft as ‘friendlies’ earlier, would it have made a difference? Would it have mattered if the Very pistol had worked? He doubted it – it had all happened too fast.

  He stopped in front of them and passed round a tin of Player's Navy Cut cigarettes. ‘It's hard,’ he said, feeling a lump growing in his throat, ‘but you can't blame the RAF. We're going in the ‘wrong’ direction, and we don't have ground-to-air recognition markings: if we had, the enemy would be down on us like a ton of bricks. The RAF can't know the positions of every friendly patrol, and in any case, our mission is secret. It's one of the risks we have to take.’

  Several of the vehicles had shell-holes punched through their bodywork, and tyres and fuel tanks had been punctured. One of Gracie's coil-springs had been damaged, but otherwise there seemed to be no serious mechanical problems. The lads set to work changing wheels, repairing punctures and treating fuel tanks with soap – a temporary measure that would do until a longer stop. There were no spare coil-springs, so Caine instructed the crew of the damaged lorry to jack her up on the ‘high-lift’, and collected an inner tube and some wire. Caine called Wingnut Turner to help. ‘What are you going to do, skipper?’ Turner asked.

  ‘It's a trick I learned with my Sapper squadron. An inflated inner tube will pass muster for a coil-spring until we can do a proper job.’

  The two of them crouched under the truck, and while Caine held the tube between the axle and the chassis, making sure it was clear of the exhaust system and the driveshaft, Turner wired it firmly into place. Caine called for the air pump to be attached to the lorry's engine. He clipped the air line to the tube's nozzle and shouted to Sweeney to start up. ‘Give it forty pounds,’ he told Turner.

  When the boys let the jack down minutes later, the truck seemed as stable on her springs as if they were all factory-new. ‘That will last for hundreds of miles,’ Caine told the fitter, glancing in Sweeney's direction. ‘As long as the lorry's driven carefully, that is.’ Turner grinned and gave him two thumbs-up. They were startled by the sound of hands clapping, and turned to find that almost the whole unit had gathered to watch. From the men's admiring looks, Caine guessed that they no longer held him responsible for Hanley's death.

  13

  Johann Eisner, aka Hussain Idriss, was sitting at the bar of Madame Badia's nightclub with a whisky and soda in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Tonight he was neither Hussain nor Eisner but Captain Sandy Peterson, an officer of the General List. No one would have recognized him as the taxi-driver who had shadowed Maddaleine Rose only two days earlier. He wore immaculate khaki drills, his hair was dyed blond and cropped military-style and he sported a trim moustache of fine horsehair attached with gum to his upper lip.

  The club was dimly lit by lamps held within potplants, and the air was fuggy with tobacco smoke. Eisner sipped his drink slowly and stared at the half-dozen young women on the stage, clad in diaphanous pseudo-Arabian Nights costumes, swaying sensuously to the swirling percussion of an Egyptian band. The club was by no means packed – a few couples, the usual smattering of wealthy Greeks and Turks with their entourages, knots of prim staff-officers in uniform and others on leave from the Western Desert. Club hostesses gathered expectantly at their tables like exotic birds around a water-hole.

  Eisner finished his whisky and set the glass down on the bar, nodding to the barman for a refill. ‘Don't drown it this time,’ he said. The barman, a mild-faced Armenian in a spotless white shirt and black bow-tie, sported a genuine handle-bar moustache that shamed Eisner's false one. He held up a bottle of Dewar's White Label. Eisner nodded again, and watched him as he poured out a measure, then added a squirt of soda from a siphon. ‘Nice set of girls you've got here tonight,’ Eisner said.

  The Armenian pushed the glass towards him and winked. ‘If there is one you fancy, I can introduce you, sir.’

  Eisner winked back. ‘The night is yet young, my friend – what's your name?’

  ‘My name is Joseph, sir.’

  Eisner took a deep breath. ‘I wonder if you could possibly help me, Joseph,’ he said. He slipped out of his wallet a two-by-three-inch copy of the photo he'd taken of the blond Wren officer in the GHQ staff car. He had trimmed the shot carefully so that the Wren's hat and scarf had vanished and only the face remained. ‘I'm looking for this girl,’ he said. ‘Her name is Betty, and I think she may have worked here.’

  The young man held the shot close to the bar-light, and Eisner looked on, trying not to betray his anxiety. He'd been obsessed with the idea that he knew this girl from the moment he'd glimpsed her at Maadi, but it was only after he'd developed the shot in his darkroom that he'd been forced to admit what part of him had been trying to deny: her name was Betty, and she was a cabaret girl at Madame Badia's. He had never spoken to her and didn't even know her full name, but he did know that she'd witnessed an unple
asant event that had occurred here one night, twelve months ago. The only other living witness to that event was himself.

  This was his first visit to the club since that night, and he had returned with some trepidation. In fact, for the past two days he'd been fighting a desperate rear-guard action with himself. His instinct for self-preservation told him that returning to the scene would be suicidal, yet he'd been egged on by the same ruthless force of curiosity that had made him a spy in the first place. Betty's transformation from cabaret girl to Wren officer was intriguing enough, but the fact that she'd been assigned a mission worthy of a suicide pill was a mystery he was powerless to resist. The club was his only lead.

  He knew deep down, though, that it wasn't these facts that had tipped the balance: what had ultimately brought him here was the terrifying discovery that she was the woman he had locked eyes with that night. It was terrifying because it seemed that, despite his lifelong denial, there was some unseen power that was inexorably forcing him to confront his own fate.

  In the end, he'd deployed the rational thinking that had always been his saving grace. One of the first lessons he'd learned in security work was the difference between threat and risk: a threat was constant; a risk could be modified. He had modified the risk by assuming the identity of a British officer – a guise he hadn't used since his early days in Cairo. He had retrieved his khaki drill uniform and his service cap with the nondescript badge of the General List. The General List touch was ingenious, he told himself, because it didn't tie him down to any particular unit, and the fact that many GL officers had grown up abroad would explain any slight ‘strangeness’ in his accent or behaviour. If asked, he was one of dozens of Egyptian-born Englishmen whose fathers worked in the cotton trade.

  The club was in Zamalek, a former private house in its own grounds with a terrace overlooking the Nile. As he strutted in through the open door with an air of propriety he didn't feel, the giant tuxedo-clad doorman had asked him to deposit his Smith & Wesson at the reception. Eisner had handed it over with every sign of resentment, though the truth was that he'd never expected to be allowed to take it into the club. He'd worn it only to distract attention from the viciously sharp stiletto strapped to his leg.

  Once through the inner door, his confidence had returned. No one had given him a second glance – and why should they? After that night the police had been looking for a well-dressed, clean-shaven Egyptian wearing a tarboosh and dark glasses. There was no reason to identify that man with a respectable, fair-haired British officer on a night out.

  The barman was shaking his head. ‘I'm sorry, sir, but this is not a good shot – a little out of focus. As far as I can say, I've never seen this girl. I'm sure she doesn't work here, but she may have done in the past. I wouldn't know – I've only been here a few weeks. The name Betty does ring a bell, but you'd have to ask someone who's been here longer.’

  ‘I see. And who might that be?’

  Joseph pointed to one of the scantily dressed girls in the floor show – a lithe, fair-skinned beauty with glistening black hair. ‘Her name is Sim-Sim,’ the barman said. ‘She's been working here the longest of all the girls. When the performance is over, I'll call her.’

  Eisner nodded and sat back with his drink to enjoy the rest of the show.

  Ensconced with Sim-Sim at a table minutes later, though, he began for the first time to feel uneasy. Close up, she proved even more of a jewel than she'd appeared on the floor: her pale face, made slightly sultry by the frame of rich tresses, possessed what he thought of as an aristocratic cast. He regretted the fact that she'd covered her sleek figure with a black cloak. From a distance he'd guessed she was an Egyptian Copt, but she turned out to be a Lebanese Christian from Beirut, and spoke both English and French.

  Sim-Sim smiled at the champagne he bought her and at his compliments on her dancing. All was going well until he produced the photo of Betty. Then her black eyes seared him. ‘Why are you looking for Betty?’ she demanded.

  ‘So she did work here, then?’

  ‘Yes, she did work here, but not any more. Why do you want her?’

  Eisner related his cover story: they'd met at an Embassy party a year ago and had fallen for each other. They'd spent the night together, and in the morning she'd vanished, leaving only this photo behind. ‘Like Cinderella's glass slipper,’ he chuckled. He'd never forgotten her, and now, after a stint of active service, he was trying desperately to get her back.

  He was a good actor, and the story was eased down by a couple of glasses of champagne. By the time he'd finished, he hoped that she'd be less hostile. She wasn't. ‘You must be a very special man,’ Sim-Sim said drily, ‘because when she worked here, Betty was the only cabaret girl who didn't date clients. She was popular, but she never went with anyone.’

  Eisner sighed. ‘I'm not special, just lucky,’ he said. ‘That's why I've got to find her.’

  Sim-Sim drew the cloak around her more tightly. ‘I'm sorry,’ she said, ‘but I can't tell you anything about Betty.’

  ‘Why not? Where's the harm? I only mean her well.’

  She swept back her silky hair and put down her champagne glass, leaning forward and fixing him with a black stare. ‘Betty witnessed a terrible crime here,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you read about it in the newspapers?’

  ‘I don't think so.’

  ‘The middle-aged wife of a very high-up British diplomat was raped and murdered in the ladies' room. Her murderer was an Egyptian who'd been her lover, to whom she'd betrayed her husband's secrets. He was selling them to the Germans. When she discovered that he was having an affair with another woman at the same time, she denounced him publicly, right here in the club. He followed her into the ladies' room, raped her in an obscene way and cut her throat. Betty came in while it was happening – she was the only witness. The man might have killed her, too, but he heard the doorman coming and jumped out of the window. The police investigated it, of course – British Intelligence, too. They asked Betty a lot of questions, but up to now, no one has ever discovered the murderer's identity. He wasn't a regular at the club – no one had ever seen him here before.’

  ‘That's a horrible story,’ Eisner said. ‘It must have been terrible for Betty. Excuse me, though – what has it got to do with me?’

  The girl sat back, looking down at her hands. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘You are a nice, respectable British officer, but there's at least one person out there who has good reason to want Betty dead. That's why I can't tell anyone about her.’

  Eisner shifted in his seat, weighing possibilities. He noticed that Joseph, the barman, was watching him from the shadows, and he could see the immense mass of the doorman through the connecting door. He pushed his chair back, sighing again. ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘You've been a loyal friend to Betty. I'm sorry to have bothered you.’

  He got to his feet. He was just about to leave when Sim-Sim said, ‘Tell me, Captain, have you ever been in the club before?’

  He whipped round and met the deep black pools of her eyes. ‘No,’ he said. ‘This is my first time. Why?’

  She shrugged. ‘Oh, it's just that there's something familiar about you, that's all.’

  He bowed slightly, and forcing himself to walk with dignity, made for the door.

  From behind the bar, Joseph saw him go. When he was out of sight, he picked up the telephone and dialled. ‘Is that Major Stocker?’ he asked quietly a moment later. ‘It's Corporal Tankien here. You asked to be kept informed if anyone came in asking about Runefish? Well, someone just has…’

  Beyond the partition, Eisner was strapping on his Smith & Wesson by the reception desk. A little to one side, there was a dark tunnel that he knew led to the ladies' room. He glanced in that direction, asking himself why its proximity should make him feel nervous. After all, whatever horrific crime had been committed there twelve months ago, it had nothing to do with him.

  14

  On the third morning out of Jaghbub, Caine's commando hit the T
arg al-'Abd, the ancient slave route that cut across the bulge of Cyrenaica. This, Caine knew, was the frontier of the Axis heartland, and it marked the start of the advance-to-target phase of the op. This was the area where Maddaleine Rose's plane had gone down.

  Caine's crews had been driving all night on Benzedrine, partly because Caine wanted to broach the track in daylight, but mainly because of a stroke of bad luck they'd run into just after last light. Clearing a ridge at full speed, they'd hit an enemy leaguer – an Afrika Korps 88mm anti-tank battery, with about ten trucks and half a dozen guns. The German gunners had evidently just bedded down, but the camp was directly in front of Caine's column, only a few hundred yards away, and there was no chance of avoiding it. His mind racing full throttle, Caine ordered Cope to give three long and two short honks on the horn, the signal to form into line abreast and assume action stations. There had been no time to stop and discuss it. Copeland slammed closed the forward and side hatches. Caine grabbed his Tommy-gun from the seat bracket and lodged himself in the observation hatch next to Wallace, who was already hunched over the Vickers. The wagons were ranged into a rough-dog's leg, and Caine saw Flash Murray, at the hatch of the Daimler, manoeuvre the AFV forward. ‘Charge!’ Caine yelled, but the order was drowned by the crump of a two-pound shell from the Daimler's gun. A gush of yellow lightning torched the half-light: a Jerry truck whamped up in flame.

  Caine's wagons were reeling down on the leaguer at forty miles an hour. The machine-gunners opened up almost at the same moment: their guns line-squalled, doled out blinding sabre slashes of crimson fire, wove a deadly web of orange tracer that dusted the desert surface, sliced into Axis vehicles. Two more enemy trucks went up in sears of red and black. Next to him the Vickers ‘K’s shuddered and clunked, dead cases plinked into gunny-sacks: Wallace pumped through mags at light-speed, whomping drumfire.