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

by Michael Asher

  In seconds they were into the leaguer, into a bedlam of enemy shrieks and howls, into a muzz of flaming wagons and toxic gas, crashed into madly turkey-trotting men, pulped bodies under wheels. Caine squeezed iron, tippled streams of .45 calibre left and right at anything that moved. Tracer flew, Jerry small-arms stuttered, rounds blipped across the White's bonnet, bounced at angles from her armour, whanged and fizzled into the night. Caine saw a German gun-crew working frantically to bring an 88mm gun to bear. He tack-tacked a dozen .45 calibre rounds at it, then it was lamped by a 20mm incendiary: the shell bang-flashed, swiped crew and gun to shreds with a blinding light, a heart-stopping swish of flame. Then, suddenly, they were through the leaguer, zooming into darkness and open desert. The guns went silent one by one, the clamour eased to the tap and rattle of fire from the German survivors. One mile clocked up, then two, then five, until the German column was a chain of bright bonfires along the skyline behind them. Caine told Copeland to give the general halt signal. Slowly his nerves let go as the adrenalin tension evaporated. As they rolled out of the wagon, arms round each other's shoulders, he and Copeland collapsed in fits of hysterical laughter.

  There had been no serious damage to the wagons, and no casualties. For a few minutes the commandos couldn't believe that they'd got through. The only one who didn't share the general hilarity was Fred Wallace, who stood watching the others with a mournful face. When Caine asked him what was wrong, the giant showed him the carcase of the baby gazelle he'd found earlier. Her neck had been broken by the jolting of the armoured car during the contact.

  They had pressed on all night, hoping to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the enemy. Once his glee at being alive had faded, Caine recognized grimly that Axis patrols would be after them at first light. They'd had no choice, but their presence was now well and truly known to the enemy.

  Caine was glad not to have blundered over the old slave route in darkness, though, because it was riddled with thermos bombs, sown as a deterrent to Allied traffic. The bombs were hard to see, as they lay in the dust just below the surface, like flocks of venomous serpents. Caine joined Wallace on the hatch to get a better look at the way ahead. ‘Bloody lethal, those things,’ Wallace said. ‘I had a mate in the mechanized infantry was on a wagon that hit a thermos bomb in this area. Ripped the wheel right off, set fire to the cab. My mate hops out to stop hisself getting fried, lands smack on another one. Blew his flippin' leg off, didn't it, poor bugger.’

  Caine shuddered, making a mental note to be doubly cautious. As a Sapper he'd been trained in mine-laying and lifting, and privately considered landmines vicious and inhuman weapons. One of the most traumatic experiences he'd ever had – far worse than being bounced by Stukas – was when he'd been assigned to a mine-laying troop in Tobruk. There hadn't been enough mines to complete the perimeter, so his OC had had the idea of ‘stealing’ mines from the Germans. One night they'd slipped into an enemy minefield and lifted no fewer than five hundred mines before one of the troop had made a wrong move and got his leg demolished. The pressure of that patrol – the danger of a mine going off any second, as well as the ever-present menace of being spotted – was something Caine would never forget.

  Caine told Cope to give the three-blast general-halt signal, and instructed Turner to take the Dingo ahead as pathfinder. A thermos bomb might blow the wheel off the scout-car, but its thick armour would at least protect the occupants. When the snub-nosed scout had covered about a mile without mishap, Caine had the rest of the wagons follow on, hugging her tracks.

  Caine stood at the observation hatch, his eyes riveted to the surface. ‘Keep her steady,’ he told Copeland. ‘No more than five miles an hour. There might be something the Dingo missed.’

  They were within a hundred yards of the scout-car when he called to Copeland to stop. Taking a mine-prod out of his kit, he climbed cautiously from the cab and knelt down in the hard sand a few yards ahead. He probed into the dust, keeping the prod at an angle of 45 degrees. A moment later it came into contact with metal. ‘Here's a naughty one,’ he told Wallace, who was watching from the hatch. ‘Thank God I spotted it.’

  Clearing sand away with his hands, he uncovered not a thermos bomb but a large, flat anti-tank mine. He let out his breath slowly – these things packed a punch big enough to destroy any of the vehicles in his convoy, but at least they were relatively easy to clear. He smoothed away sand until the whole dish shape of the mine was exposed. Then, laying down his prod, he took a deep breath and lifted it with both hands out of the tiny depression, rising very slowly to his feet. Wary of straying from the blazed trail, he moved the mine only three or four paces, then laid it tenderly on the surface. He stepped back, let out a sigh of relief, wiped the sweat off his brow with his hand, and got back in the vehicle. Cope gave him thumbs-up. ‘Good show, skipper,’ he said.

  They were heading north now, towards the Jebel Akhdar, the ‘Green Mountain’ massif, where the great sand waves of the Sahara broke against reefs of foothills, covered in moorland and dense acacia scrub. The convoy passed relics of former battles – huddles of trackless tanks peppered with shell-holes, AFVs charred and blackened, wrecked Bren-gun carriers, the scorched skeletons of trucks, the hulks of aircraft in loops of blistered earth. Caine avoided approaching these mementoes of death.

  This pre-Saharan belt was the country of the Senussi – Bedouin descendants of the great Islamic brotherhood that had once controlled the caravan routes across the whole of Libya from their monastery at Jaghbub. Their camps and semi-permanent hamlets lay scattered through the foothills, often sited so cleverly that they remained unseen. The Senussi were hostile to their Italian colonial masters and therefore classed as friendlies by the Allies. Their hostility ensured that, unless on a punitive raid, Axis forces mostly stayed close to their garrisons.

  There was plenty of cover here. Before the heat had begun to kick in, Caine halted the convoy for breakfast in a shallow wadi sheltered by rock overhangs and groves of camel-thorn. There was a gentle breeze, carrying the scent of juniper and wild thyme from the mountains. Caine sited sentries with Bren-guns on every vantage point, then sat down to eat the breakfast Wallace had whipped up – tinned sausages and tinned bacon in a stew with fresh onions, ship's biscuits and tea. As Wallace ladled stew from the dixie into their mess tins, Cope made a face. ‘What do you call this?’ he enquired. ‘Talk about stew. Looks more like pigswill. Pity you didn't save Bambi. We could have had a couple of gazelle steaks.’

  Caine saw Wallace's huge fists bunch on the ladle, and thought for a moment Cope was going to get it round the ears. ‘Guess what,’ he growled, making an obvious effort to restrain himself. ‘It is pigswill. That's what I usually serve to pigs.’ They were none of them in the best of humours, thanks to Benzedrine withdrawal. ‘This is damned good,’ Caine cut in hastily. ‘I don't care what they say about compo-rations, this grub is better than you'd get at Shepheard's.’

  Wallace held up an onion that looked no bigger than a golf-ball in his massive hand. ‘This is the secret,’ he said. ‘Best way to stop desert sores.’

  Cope snorted, but Caine nodded seriously. Desert sores were the bane of the Eighth Army, but they had nothing directly to do with the desert. They were a form of scurvy resulting from a diet lacking in vitamin C, very similar to the affliction suffered by sailors in olden times. Caine was just thinking that this was yet another parallel between the desert and the sea when Copeland said, ‘Something's burning.’

  ‘It ain't the stew,’ Wallace growled.

  Cope was sniffing the breeze. ‘No, really,’ he said. ‘I smell burning.’

  Caine inhaled air, taking in the distinct odour of fire-ash and smoke.

  ‘We'd better have a look,’ he said.

  They finished their breakfast, then scrambled up the escarpment behind them. Lying flat on the top, Caine spotted a pall of black smoke rising perhaps three miles away. He dug out his binos and scoped the source of the fire, making out an Arab se
ttlement – a sprawl of mud-brick buildings sited on a steadily rising convex masked by furrows, hillocks and thick acacia groves. He caught the flash of sunlight on the windscreens of trucks.

  ‘There's a Senussi village down there,’ he said. ‘Looks like they've had a visit from someone unpleasant.’

  They crawled off the lip of the hill, sat back among the rocks. ‘I think we ought to do a recce,’ Caine said. Copeland made a face. He had half guessed what was coming, and saw a whole new Pandora's box of complications being opened up. ‘It's none of our business,’ he said.

  ‘It could be our business,’ said Caine. ‘This is the area where Runefish went down. Anyway, we ought to know the dispositions of enemy troops. One little shufti won't hurt.’

  Cope read the grim determination on Caine's lips and jaw and clocked the faraway look in his stone-burned eyes. ‘Famous last words,’ he said.

  They left the rest of the group in the wadi and went off in the White scout-car. Hugging the available shadow, Cope managed to get the wagon to within half a mile of the village before judging it too hazardous to proceed. Caine told him to stop under a low butte, and leaving Wallace with the wagon, the two of them climbed to the top.

  For the second time, Caine swept the village with his field glasses. What he saw appalled him. The settlement consisted of twenty or thirty wattle houses, some of them with black tents erected in the yards. Many of them were on fire. The German troops in the streets were in at least platoon strength, and they were rousting Arabs – men, women and children – from their dwellings, and marching them at gunpoint, with prods, kicks, and rifle butts, to the village square. It was there that most of the activity was focused. Caine lingered over the scene for a moment, swearing avidly under his breath, then handed the binos to Copeland. ‘Take a look at that,’ he said. ‘The village square.’

  Cope could hear the disgust in his voice.

  He took the glasses and zeroed in on the square. ‘Jesus wept,’ he exclaimed. ‘They've erected some kind of gallows. They're hanging the villagers one by one, they've got them herded together – oh Jesus… they're even doing the children.’ His voice quavered. ‘I can see three, no four corpses – they're hanging the dead ones up from the walls of the mosque.’

  When Caine took the binos back, he saw that Copeland's face was as drained of colour as it had been when he'd ordered him to evade the bombers. They stared at each other for a moment. ‘We've got to do something about this,’ said Caine.

  It suddenly occurred to Cope that they might be skylined, and he yanked Caine's arm, pulling him back off the top. They lay side by side in clumps of esparto grass just below the brow. ‘Skipper,’ Copeland said urgently, ‘there's bugger all we can do. This isn't in our brief.’

  Caine snatched off his black beret and rolled it in his palms. ‘We'll have surprise on our side,’ he said. ‘If we go in with the AFVs, all guns thundering, they'll never know what hit them.’

  Cope shoved his body backwards to get a better view of Caine. ‘Let's just think about this, Tom,’ he said. ‘Whatever happens, we'll take casualties. Even if we stop what's going on, it will only focus the enemy's attention on us. They're already after us for hitting that gun battery. They'll know we're here. They'll hunt us down with aircraft and big battalions. Any action we take can only jeopardize our mission, you know that. Why did you let those bogus Guardsmen go the other day? Why did you tell Fred we couldn't attack an enemy column?’

  ‘That was different. That would have meant lumbering ourselves with prisoners. There are civilians down there – women and children. They're powerless.’

  ‘All right. Let's call in an air strike.’

  Caine shook his head. ‘It's not going to happen, Harry. We're five hundred miles behind enemy lines. Even if the RAF had the capability, they'd never get here in time. No, we're here. It's down to us.’

  ‘Consider what's at stake,’ Copeland said, his voice almost pleading. ‘If we don't get to Runefish before the Hun, it could jeopardize tens of thousands of lives – maybe millions. It could change the whole course of the war.’

  For a moment, Caine's determination seemed to waver. It was an impulse like this, he remembered, that had cost him his commission in the Royal Engineers. Then his jaw set firmly again, and he regarded Cope with his rock-steady gaze. ‘I'm not giving up on Runefish, Harry,’ he said, ‘but this is happening now, and we can stop it. Sometimes you have to follow an intuition that's deeper than orders, not just blindly do as you're told.’

  Cope snorted. ‘They warned me about you, Tom. They said you think orders are a basis for discussion.’

  ‘Yet here you are,’ Caine said. ‘You volunteered to come with me.’

  He replaced his beret, pulling it tightly down to one side. ‘Look,’ he went on, ‘I don't deny that I've dropped myself in the shite over stuff like this before, but in the end – if we survive – we've got to live with ourselves when it's all over. That's why we pulled out our wounded mates the other day, wasn't it? We knew we might get in deep crap, but we did it because if we'd abandoned them we couldn't have looked each other in the eye.’

  Cope shook his head in exasperation. ‘These aren't our mates. They're not even really our allies.’

  ‘They're people,’ said Caine gently. ‘Just women and children, caught up in a war that's none of their bloody business.’ He paused. ‘I'm going in, Harry. I'm not ordering you to go with me, but whatever happens, I can't leave this. Not women and children, not even for Runefish. I'd have it on my conscience for the rest of my life.’

  Cope let out a long sigh. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I'll do it, but on the condition you tell the lads that anyone who objects isn't obliged to go.’

  Caine let a sad half-smile play out. ‘No one will object,’ he said. ‘You know that as well as I do.’

  It took only minutes to get back to the leaguer. Caine called the lads together and explained the situation in the village. He added that this was strictly a ‘volunteer’ job, and that no one was obliged to take part. Not a single voice was raised in objection.

  In normal circumstances, Caine would have made an immediate plan and a fall-back plan. There wasn't time for this, however – he was aware that every minute they delayed meant another innocent life lost. He traced a rough map of the village in the sand. ‘It's laid out like a cross,’ he told them. ‘There's a sort of main street that runs north–south, meeting a narrower west–east street in the square. Most of the Jerries are concentrated in the square, and we didn't spot any pickets out. These boys aren't watching their backs – and so much the better for us. We estimate they're in about platoon strength, but we'll have surprise on our side. Our target is the square, and we'll go in hard. It's crucial that we take out at least two thirds of the enemy in the first three minutes. Don't give them a chance to counter-attack. Heavy weapons: we saw one Schmeisser MG30 mounted on a truck in the square – it'll be on our right. There are three soft-skins, no AFVs. Lance Sergeant Murray, your task is to take out the Schmeisser MG30 with 20mm rounds and destroy the lorries. Our other two wagons will engage enemy personnel with Vickers ‘K’s. I need the best gunners we've got… that will be Gunner Wallace on the Dingo, and Lance Corporal Jackson on the White. No wild shooting – if we hit any civvies it'll spoil the whole show. The rest of you will ride the AFVs. As soon as we hit the target area, you'll deploy and advance to contact. Bren-gunners take up tac positions in doorways or behind walls, others engage the enemy hand to hand if you have to. Lump the blighters with all you've got in the first three minutes. Our aim is to kill or capture all the enemy – don't let anyone get away.’

  The barrel-chested ex-Redcap Todd Sweeney was watching Caine as if he'd have liked to find a flaw in the plan, but couldn't. ‘We're going to need cut-off groups, then,’ he said sourly.

  ‘Yep, I've got that thought out. We can't spare groups, so I want one man on each side of the village. I need four good shooters who can take out escapees from a distance.’ He considered it f
or a moment, and chose Trooper Mick Oldfield, a hatchet-faced ex-bank clerk from the Inns of Court armoured-car regiment, Lance Corporal George Padstowe, a seasoned ex-Marine, Vic Bramwell, the eighteen-year-old ex-Coldstreamer, and Private Albert Raker, a squat and powerful ex-Pioneer Corps man.

  ‘What about our trucks, skipper?’ enquired Robin Jackson, the ex-King's Rifle Corps machine-gun champ.

  ‘They'll stay in leaguer here, under camouflage scrim. Lance Corporal Turner, I want you to keep with the wagons – pick three good men to stay with you.’

  The skeletal RAOC fitter twisted one of his spade-sized ears unhappily. ‘Aw, skipper,’ he protested, ‘I wanted to go in with the lads.’

  ‘You'll see plenty of action later, Wingnut,’ Caine said. ‘I need you here in case there are any problems with the transport.’ He didn't add, ‘if I become a casualty,’ but Turner knew what he meant, and resigned himself to a passive role. ‘When the action's over,’ Caine continued, ‘I'll call you in with a red Very light. Any questions? All right, ladies, let's saddle 'em.’

  As the lads climbed aboard the three AFVs minutes later, Caine was proud to note that there wasn't a hint of the bravado that to him denoted ‘windiness’. These men were steady – that was the highest compliment you could give soldiers in the British Army. They had all seen combat before, and no longer nurtured illusions. ‘Crows’ always wanted to prove themselves in action, and that could lead to stupid recklessness. He knew what it was like from his own initiation under fire. At first there was an exciting adrenalin rush – you saw your mates get killed but somehow it didn't matter because it wasn't you, it didn't seem real. You felt that you were special, invulnerable, different, and what happened to them would never happen to you. For Caine, that sense of immunity had been ruptured the first time he'd been wounded – by shrapnel from an 88mm shell that had written off his lorry and left him with steel fragments in his shoulder and scalp. After that, the feeling of being ‘special’ had begun to evaporate and he'd started to understand that, if he didn't shy from battle, it wasn't because he was ‘brave’ but because he was terrified of letting down his mates, and of showing his fear.