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

by Michael Asher

  ‘All right, Harry,’ Caine said. ‘What's your plan? Make it fast, or they'll catch us with our pants down.’

  Copeland scratched his bottle-brush blond hair. ‘Bluff,’ he said. ‘We need to halt the convoy before we open fire. I suggest we use one of the 3-tonners and make out she's broken down. There's so much captured Allied transport around, they'll assume it's spoils of war. Set up the ambush groups and AFVs, just as you said, only no shooting till we locate Runefish. Me and you will stick our heads under the lorry's bonnet. Fred will hide in the cab, ready to brace the Lewis on top. Give Moshe one of the Schmeissers we liberated yesterday, and let him flag down the first wagon. When she halts, he'll talk to the driver in German. While he's doing that we'll locate Runefish and snatch her.’

  Wallace chortled. ‘You think those Brandenburgers are just going to hand her over? You're out of your tree, mate.’

  ‘I didn't say they were going to hand her over. Why, you got a better idea?’

  Wallace looked stumped, and Caine didn't wait for him to reply. ‘My hunch is that they'll keep an important prisoner like that where they can see her,’ he said. ‘In an open wagon or a cab. If I'm right, we'll sight her in the first minute or so. If not we'll have to search the soft-skins under covering fire.’

  There was a snort from Todd Sweeney. ‘That's going to be really easy, isn't it? I mean, they're just going to wait while we do a search. As soon as they click what we're after, they'll hold her hostage. In any case, if we've got men farting about in the killing zone, it's going to hamper our fire.’

  Caine ignored Sweeney's sarcasm. ‘It's not a perfect plan,’ he admitted, ‘but we do have an ambush site straight out of the manual – a blind bend with a gradient, a steep rise on one side, and an open area on the other…’

  Caine considered who to put in charge of the fire-group. Sweeney was senior corporal after Cope, but Caine no longer trusted him entirely. On the other hand, the ex-copper had always been dependable in combat, and if Caine gave him a key role it might stump his continuous second-guessing, which, he thought, arose from a sense of inadequacy. He made a quick decision. ‘Corporal Sweeney, you'll take charge of the ambush party. Harry, we'll use Marlene for the decoy. The White and the 3-tonners will remain here in the wadi with pickets and the Senussi, and this will be our emergency RV. Fall-back RV will be where Gracie piled in.’

  The growl of engines came again, sounding much nearer this time. Caine caught sight of Moshe Naiman's hawkish features. ‘Are you up for this?’ he asked.

  Naiman nodded. ‘I can do it. It's a good plan, and I think it might work.’

  ‘Good man. All right, let's get to it.’

  Within ten minutes the ambush parties and armoured vehicles were concealed in the maquis – a tangled growth of six or seven different species of thorny shrub, rarely more than shoulder-height, growing in a tightly knit jungle on the escarpment. The maquis was hard to penetrate, but it was cut through by enough goat tracks at least to get access to the higher slopes. From there it was a matter of crawling, clawing, fighting their way into the brush: none of them got away without multiple cuts and scratches. Sweeney sited the Bren-gun groups in a rough line, at ten-yard intervals, about a hundred and fifty feet up. From here, the gunners had a field of fire for about a quarter of a mile along the road as far as the bend on their left, and the wadi mouth on their right. The Daimler was scrimmed half-way up the slope on the side nearest the bend, with the Dingo taking flank position on the opposite side, nearest the wadi. The terrain on the other side of the road, beyond the irrigation ditch, was a fractured landscape of bowl-shaped buttes, low ridges, gullies and hillocks – an endless upsurge of corrugations as far as the eye could see.

  Marlene was parked on the left side of the track, about a hundred yards along from the ambush party. While Wallace curled up in her cab, Caine and Copeland leaned over the engine, clad only in khaki drill shorts and boots – they had stashed their weapons in the shade of the truck's chassis, together with sword bayonets and haversacks packed with grenades and spare magazines. Naiman, wearing shorts, shirt and an Afrika Korps peaked cap someone had rustled up, waited tensely by the roadside thirty yards away, the Schmeisser slung muzzle-forward from his shoulder. As they listened to the snarl of motors coming closer, Copeland shot a glance at the young interpreter, wondering if he could pull off the ruse. He was the only man in the squad who spoke German, but with his olive skin and hooked nose, he didn't look much like an Afrika Korps soldier. ‘I used to think those Palestinian Jews weren't much cop,’ he said softly, ‘but Moshe's got bottle.’

  ‘Never underestimate anyone in this job,’ Caine whispered. ‘One thing's for sure – however bad it gets, you won't see Moshe with his hands up, shouting “Kamerad”. If the Jerries found out he was a Jew, they'd chop his balls off.’ He was interrupted by the crank of vehicles changing gear, of engines labouring. ‘Here we go,’ he said. He dipped his head under the bonnet just as a German lorry teetered round the bend, followed closely by another.

  Naiman raised his hand, assuming a suppliant expression as he strode towards the approaching wagon. Her cab had two occupants – a bare-chested, tousled-haired driver with a fluffy beard and a slimmer, dark-haired soldier in khaki drills whom Naiman guessed was an officer. He quickly scanned the rest of the convoy as it emerged – another 3-tonner, an open staff car, then a third lorry. He noticed with a pang of apprehension that all the lorries had Schmeisser MG30 machine guns mounted on their hatches. The good news was that the guns weren't manned, meaning that the enemy wasn't expecting an attack. He didn't have time to take in further details, because the leading truck was creaking to a halt. He walked casually up to the driver's side, feeling the Germans' eyes on him, and before the driver could move, had reached up and opened the door. ‘Morning, friends,’ he said, in German. ‘We've got a problem. Can you help?’

  The Brandenburgers considered him dubiously, and Naiman had a second to register the driver's bull-like chest covered in golden down and football-sized biceps. In that instant he knew they weren't buying it. He snapped the Schmeisser's muzzle towards them: before he could fire the huge driver dropped on him with a blood-curdling bellow. Sixteen stone of flexing muscle hit Naiman like a steam-hammer, knocking him flat. He wriggled frantically, feeling the big soldier's weight suffocating him, smelling his sweat, aware of his large hands tearing the sub-machine gun from his grip. Gunshots kicked up dust by his head: he flinched, realizing that the officer, leaning out of the cab, was trying to shoot at him without hitting the driver.

  Naiman's fingers found the trigger: his weapon burped. The driver howled as blood palpitated from his thigh. The officer nose-dived from the cab with a hole in his chest, crunching into the ground a foot away. The driver went limp. Naiman felt wetness soaking his legs and belly. He freed himself from the heavy corpse, his hands on the sub-machine gun slick with blood. He heard a motor grind and squirmed away from the bodies, clocking the tyres of the staff car crunching gravel. There was a hawk-faced officer standing in the car, pointing a pistol at him, and next to him, her face creased with fear, sat a pretty young woman with green eyes and short blond hair.

  A pistol shot took off a piece of Naiman's right ear as he came up blipping bursts, shearing the flesh off the officer's chest. Tatters of khaki and streamers of blood whiplashed the girl's face and hair. The car braked, the girl arched forward, bumped her head on the dashboard. Naiman saw the driver groping for a weapon, pumped steel twice, heard his slugs strike flesh. Smoke drifted, the driver slumped, the girl squealed, head in hands.

  Naiman didn't see the Jerry spotters popping out of hatches, bracing MG30 machine guns. He was blind to Brandenburgers debussing, deaf to the bellowed orders, to the stutter of small-arms, the tracer chomping air. Only the blond woman existed. He made the car in two bounds, wrenched open the door, daubing blood on the handle, snatched the screaming girl, jerked her out. He threw her over his shoulder, sprinted, hurdled the irrigation ditch on the open side of t
he road, raced for the cover of a low ridge. Two Jerries bounded after him: Copeland popped them both in quick succession from a hundred paces.

  Todd Sweeney watched Naiman's action from the escarpment. Dozens of bare-chested Germans in shorts, boots and battle-rig were swarming from the backs of the soft-skin trucks, humping weapons towards the trench. He saw enemy spotters bracing their guns on the cabs, heard the explosive punka-punka-punka of MG30 machine-gun fire, saw tracer patterns curving in on his position. The Brandenburger gunners were shooting blind up the escarpment, rounds clittering in the foliage, shaving bark, dingling stones. Most shots went wide, but Sweeney knew they'd hit someone sooner or later, if only by chance. He hung on until Naiman had carried the girl outside the killing zone, then ordered ‘Fire.’ Three Brens blowtorched flame: ball and tracer racked air, hacked dirt, raddled canvas, punched gaps among the milling Jerries on the track. .303 rounds blistered their bodies, gnashed limbs, sent men bucking, skipping and capering like cake-walkers. From his right, Sweeney heard the snare-drum pump of Padstowe's Vickers starting up.

  Down on the track, Caine and Cope skirmished forward along the track while Wallace laid down covering fire from behind, with the Lewis gun on Marlene's hatch. Copeland saw a shock-haired, black-bearded machine-gunner on the forward Jerry truck pivoting the MG30 towards him. He hunkered down, aimed through his scope, shot the gunner in the solar plexus. The German went squinch-eyed as if belted with a sledgehammer. He flew backwards off the cab, fell almost on top of Caine.

  Caine side-stepped the fallen corpse. His Tommy-gun was back-slung and he had a Mills grenade in each hand. Copeland saw him bite out split-pins one after the other, saw him lob the dark pineapples through the truck's open window. Caine dropped and rolled away. A massive Brandenburger with a wrestler's physique and shaggy hair leapt down on him, sword-bayonet glittering. Cope fired without his sights, cleaving the Jerry's chin, sending him riffling back, hands pawing air. Two more Germans, coming up to support their mate, ran into the grenade blast – a funnel-shaped side-swipe of shrapnel and black smoke stabbing out of the lorry's cab like a giant penny-poke, taking the door with it. The wagon lufted a foot in the air and crashed back on her wheels, her bodywork shredded: poison fumes billowed, chrome-yellow flame hooshed, steel chips tickered, glass shards flew.

  Cope advanced through the smoke, saw Caine hefting his Tommy-gun with its pregnant mag, boosting rounds from the hip at the gunner on the second lorry. He missed. Cope saw the MG30 barrel tilt at Caine in slow motion, saw the grin of triumph on the Brandenburger's face. He heard a brace of mortar bombs crake down on the cab, saw them whip apart in spines of steel and fire-opal blaze. The lorry fireballed, the machine gun ruptured, the gunner soared off on wings of fire like a great black burning bird.

  A hundred and fifty yards up the scarp, hidden in the maquis, Wingnut Turner, manning a Bren, saw the truck disintegrate. He pulled iron on an empty chamber, cursed to himself. He told his No. 2, Victor Bramwell, Coldstream Guards, to switch magazines, and while Bram was clicking the fresh mag into place, Turner observed the rear lorry of the convoy attempting to reverse back round the bend, out of the killing zone. He cocked the weapon, toggled it left, sighted up on the Jerry driver, put a double tap through the cab. The German's skull imploded like a punctured balloon.

  Two Brandenburgers, crouching at the roadside, glimpsed Turner's muzzle-flash. They zeroed in: their Gewehr rifles walloped. 7.92mm rounds riffed foliage: a slug hit Vic Bram-well in the throat, whizzed out of his ear in a spliff of blood and bone mash, yawed off Turner's helmet, splattered him with grunge. Bram-well sagged. Turner swore. He saw the Jerry shooters leg it behind the truck and double-tapped again and again, ribbing their bare backs with .303 ball. He saw them dry-swimming, twitching in the road. He saw another clutch of mortar bombs cruise parabolas, skew down on the rear truck, strike with a single baruuumph. As she blew, ammunition boxes on her back detonated: hot tracer cartridges went off like pinwheels in orange and blue.

  Turner heard a motor gunning, stared in shock as a German AFV chirred into view from behind the bend. ‘Where's the Boys?’ he gasped. ‘Hit that bloody wagon.’

  Gunner's Mate Gus Graveman plumped down next to Turner with the heavy 5.5 mm Boys anti-tank rifle. Graveman, the richly bearded former Royal Navy commando who reminded Caine of the Player's Navy Cut sailor, cocked the mechanism. Turner splayed the bipod legs. Graveman zoned in the sights, beaded up on the AFV between body and turret, pulled iron. The Boys twitched, clumped, spunked gas: the round fried air. Graveman followed it through, clocked no damage to the Jerry wagon. ‘Bloody crappy piece of junk,’ he swore, ratcheting in another big shell. He fired again, but Turner knew it was useless: the AFV's armour was just too thick. The two watched helplessly as the great ironclad trawled up the verge straight towards Marlene, where Wallace was working the Lewis gun.

  Caine and Copeland had run into dense fire from Jerries holed up in the irrigation ditch, and were proned-out on the road shooting back at them. The AFV passed behind them, past the halted convoy, through the tunnel of smoke: they both saw her emerge on their right at the same moment, her 40mm cannon groping towards Marlene like the feeler of a giant snail. Caine made frantic hand signals to Wallace, a hundred yards back along the road, yodelling, ‘Fred, get off there. Now.’ He didn't have a chance to see if Wallace made it, because just then the cannon kerblunked: the sky folded, the earth heaved.

  Caine felt a rip-roaring swell of air, a deadening of eardrums, a hot poultice on the chest. He dekkoed sharp right, clocked Marlene brassing up in sunburst sears of flame, squirming black smoke, ripples of shrapnel like black silt. He heard another crump, heard a shell scrape air, saw the Jerry armoured car's gun-turret lopped off like the cap on a soft-boiled egg. There was a numbing concussion as the wagon tipped over on her side, and a thrashing human torch dropped out of her mangled turret. A slice of jagged armour plate buzzed over them, hit the desert fifty yards away.

  Up the escarpment, Sweeney had seen Marlene go up, and had observed the bulb of smoke from the Daimler on his left as Flash Murray took out the German armoured car. Through roiling smoke he could just see Caine and Copeland lying on the track, still hammering shots into the irrigation ditch, where he thought almost all the surviving Jerries were holed up. Sweeney directed the Bren-gunners to drop fire into the ditch. Down to his right, he saw the figure of a gigantic soldier in scorched khaki shorts jogging towards Caine's position, clutching a sawn-off shotgun. He couldn't suppress a wry smile. ‘The big dollop made it then,’ he murmured.

  Ten yards to Sweeney's left, Turner dropped fire into the trench until the smoke from the burning wagons was too dense to see anything. He sensed that the Brandenburgers down there were all dead or too badly wounded to move. He stopped shooting, noting that the other gunners had also ceased fire. A second later the engine of the Dingo burst into life. Although Turner couldn't see her, he guessed that Padstowe was taking the car down the scarp, rat-tat-tatting .303 ball as he moved.

  Caine heard the Dingo's engine hum, heard her Vickers rattle then abruptly stop. He tottered to his feet, sniggered stupidly from concussion. His eardrums were numb, his head lurching: he coughed, choking on cordite fumes. He took in the five vehicles burning on the track, and realized that it had gone strangely quiet. There was no shooting from up on the escarpment, probably because the smoke was now too dense for the gunners to see their targets. The Jerries in the ditch had ceased fire too – they were either dead or too badly injured to fight.

  He stared groggily around and noticed something odd. To his extreme left, two hundred yards away towards the bend, a group of dark Jerry figures was forming up steadily in ranks on the road. He blinked and shook his head, thinking for a moment that he was dreaming. The Germans fixed bayonets with rigid drill movements, as if on parade: he heard the slap of rifle stocks, heard an order bellowed out, saw the ranks of soldiers advance. It suddenly came to him that this wasn't a dream: that these were all that were left of the Br
andenburger platoon. Every man who'd survived the shoot-out had crawled down the irrigation ditch and mustered at the far end for a counter-attack. Their problem, Caine realized, was that they were out of ammo: the brave buggers were coming on armed with only cold steel. They had no way of shooting back at their ambushers on the heights, so they were homing in on Caine – the only enemy soldier they could see.

  He was brain-numb, concussed from the shock of the ordnance: the thought of taking cover never crossed his mind. He tried to tot up how many rounds he had left; he came to the conclusion that he was out. He drew his bayonet and clapped it on the special lug he'd made for his Tommy-gun. At that moment, Harry Copeland dragged himself up, equally shell-shocked, licking dry lips, aching for water. He saw what Caine was doing, snorted with laughter, fumbled for his own bayonet. ‘What happened to the bloody Dingo?’ he demanded.

  As if in answer, three sharp detonations echoed off the dense smoke, followed by bursts of Vickers fire. ‘Under attack,’ Caine growled.

  He clocked movement to his right, and recognized Fred Wallace easing out of the smoke-shrouds with a stunned look on his Neolithic face. He was carrying nothing but his sawn-off twelve-bore. His fanny was slung from his belt, his shorts were ripped and bloody, and his body was black with powder burns. ‘Gunner Wallace,’ Caine drawled. ‘Get over here.’

  The giant swayed drunkenly over to Caine and Copeland. ‘Lost me bleedin’ Bren, didn't I?' he growled, clicking back the shotgun's hammers one-handed and drawing out his fanny. He held up the commando knife. ‘Good job we got these back, innit?’