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

by Michael Asher

  The three of them burst into gales of madcap glee. ‘What are we doing, then?’ Cope enquired, still hooting.

  ‘Taking out that lot,’ Caine snickered, nodding towards the silently padding enemy. The spectral crew was still moving in on them, now only a hundred paces away. ‘They must be out of rounds.’

  Copeland noticed them for the first time, looked mildly surprised. ‘What a coincidence,’ he tittered, ‘I've got one round left.’ He worked the bolt on his SMLE, forced his last bullet into the chamber. The three commandos squared up shoulder to shoulder, facing the oncoming Germans, Caine in the centre, Wallace on the left, Cope on the right. ‘Bet I cop for more than both of you put together,’ Wallace chortled.

  There was a second's silence: the two groups – the small one and the larger one – eyed each other. Caine heard another snapped order: the Jerries launched into a ferocious charge, screamed Brandenburger war cries. As the leading man emerged from the smoke-roils into clear sight, Cope shot him plumb through the temple. Caine saw the entry wound, saw flesh and brains jettison from the back-skull, saw the body fly, somersault, clump the deck. The oncoming horde vaulted over it: the three commandos braced forwards to engage them.

  The groups met with a shattering clash of steel on steel. Wallace was bayonet-charged by a squat gorilla with rippling buff pectorals and grinning pearl teeth, as wild-bearded as a berserker. The big gunner squeezed both triggers of the Purdey: the weapon tromboned, guffed gas; twin charges of buckshot pepper-potted skin, scalped hair, flayed the Jerry's limbs to mincemeat. The gorilla went down in a raw lump, his grin a rictus, and was replaced by a cat-eyed Jerry with cropped blond hair, jabbing a bayonet. Wallace shed the shotgun, parried the thrust with his fanny's knuckle-duster hilt. He grabbed the soldier's rifle, jolted it out of his grip: he swung it one-handed, chinned the Squarehead, parted flesh, scrunched jawbone. The Jerry dropped on his knees keening, spewing blood, teeth and vomit. Wallace brained him again and again, until his head was stoven in, and the rifle stock broke off.

  The big man trail-eyed Caine twisting steel out of a Hun's gullet in a spout of gore. He threw the rifle aside and sprang forward, snagging another Brandenburger in the guts with his fanny. As he ripped the dagger out, a python-thick arm viced his neck from behind – a Boche was swinging on his back, heaving him off balance, mashing down on his skull with a pistol stock. Wallace roared, tilted his vast shoulders, skip-danced to fling him off. Another Hun dipped at him with a twenty-two-inch steel blade. Distracted by the Kraut on his back, the big man saw it coming too late. He lumbered sideways to deflect the thrust: the point grooved his chest and embedded itself in the thick muscle of his shoulder. Before the bayonet-man could follow through, Wallace had lashed out with his fanny's hilt, pulped his assailant's nose. He bashed him aside with such force that the bayonet twanged and snapped off, leaving an inch of steel in Wallace's flesh. Bellowing like a wounded elephant, the giant dervish-whirled, thrust back-handed at his rider. He squidged a nostril, gouged an eyeball, felt snot, gore, eye fluid soaking his neck. The Brandenburger squealed and let go of him. As he fell, Harry Copeland rammed almost two feet of claw-sharp iron in through one cheek and out another, pulped tongue, minced palate, mangled teeth.

  Wallace banked around like a great galleon turning, his eyes poison slits, his ruby skin tight, his blackened face hardly human. Copeland clocked the fanny upended in his huge fist, saw his mate's eyes narrow, ducked as he lofted it, harpooning the Jerry Cope hadn't seen, about to pig-stick him from behind. The fanny thunked finger-deep into chest muscle and spare rib. The Jerry clomped back, arms sawing: Copeland rammed his bayonet into soft belly-meat. The Brandenburger slumped, took Cope's blade with him, bent it hoop-shaped. Cope gave up trying to withdraw it. He clicked the catch, released the bayonet, jerked his rifle free, yanked out Wallace's fanny. He chucked the bloody dagger back to the giant.

  Wallace caught the knife without looking, his gaze fixed on something else behind Cope. He advanced, honking, nose-blowing snot, his shoulder gouting blood, his eyes shooting sparkler-fire. Cope lurched round and saw Tom Caine in the midst of five Brandenburgers, who were cutting, stabbing and slashing at him like devils. Copeland clocked a Hun bayonet as it plunged into Caine's side, saw blood pulsate, saw the other Boches cluster about Caine like vultures, going in for the coup de grâce.

  Wallace slammed into them like a whirlwind, ramped out with blade and knuckle-duster, snapped jaws like twigs, popped out eyeballs, crushed cheekbones, splatted noses, sawed through necks like roasted hams. Cope leapt to join him, rifle butt arching, smashing, cleaving bone, grinding flesh. Cope and Wallace stood back to back, parrying, thrusting, cutting, driving back Jerries. Huns howled soundlessly, ditched weapons, pitched over fingernailing wounds, retching, vomiting. Two of them rolled back on their feet, grabbed their weapons, went in for a second assault. They walked into a sudden spurt of .303 ball from the advancing Dingo that sent them skittling backwards.

  Wallace tugged Caine up, saw blood spurging from his side. He clocked a No. 36 grenade in his blood-soaked palm, saw a split-pin in the other, guessed Caine had been planning to plant the Mills as a booby-trap under his own body. Now it became his parting gift to the last of the Brandenburgers. Caine's eyes fell on two Jerries monkey-running back to the irrigation ditch, and he tossed the pineapple after them, yelling. ‘Hey, you've forgotten something.’ Caine, Cope and Wallace lamped flat as the grenade detonated: the blast barbecued air, flipped over the retreating enemy like straws.

  The Dingo had been delayed by a pair of Jerries who'd crept up the ditch in the opposite direction and attacked her with grenades. Now, as she cruised out of the smog, Wallace scrambled up to see Padstowe tilting his guns at an acute angle, pumping lead into any Jerries still moving. Taffy Trubman peeked over the hatch and added a few rifle shots to the mix for good measure. Padstowe stopped shooting: silence came like an ebb-tide after the ear-shattering blare of the Vickers. Wallace saw the ex-Marine pull up his smoking guns, wipe gun-black off his face and bald pate. His eyes showed up like white slits in a dark mask. He licked blackened lips. ‘Now that's what I call a good dusting,’ he said.

  The spell of silence was fractured by the cries of Sweeney's group moving at last from their positions on the escarpment. No one, not even Cope, had foreseen how long it would take them to descend tactically through the dense maquis. Caine felt the heat of the nearest conflagration on his face, boosted himself to his feet. Wallace was already leaning on Cope, trying to extract the bayonet point from his own shoulder with gore-smeared fingers the size of liverwurst sausages. Caine clutched at the wound in his side – it was pumping blood, and he groped in his shorts for a dressing. He would have murdered for a drink.

  Todd Sweeney wove around the Dingo, his helmet tilted over one eye, his Tommy-gun at the ready. After him came Wingnut Turner, his Bren slung crosswise, still smoking. Sweeney scanned the ambush site, took in the five burning wagons, the staff car, the toppled AFV, the smouldering cadavers. He stared at the blood-drenched figures of Caine, Wallace and Cope – barely able to stand up, in the centre of a circle of mangled dead, like the survivors of some brutal gladiator's carnival. His eyes lingered on the smoking remains of Marlene, and a momentary expression of hilarity crossed his face. ‘So the bluff worked then?’ he said.

  Wallace yowled like a maimed animal as he wrenched the fragment of steel from his wound. He gripped Cope's shoulder with one hand, holding the point up like a trophy with the other, his breath coming in bursts like a steamtrain. He stared at Copeland as if he'd never seen him before. ‘We scuppered them, didn't we, mate?’ he panted.

  Cope stared round-eyed at the savagely mutilated bodies lying about them, as if he'd just woken from a dream. Wallace opened his mouth to add something, coughed instead, keeled sideways, crashed like a felled tree among the enemy corpses.

  Most of the ambush group had now descended and was assembled around the halted Dingo. They had brought with them the bodies of Vic Bramwell, and a
second man KIA, Mick Oldfield, who'd been hit when the Jerries raked the brush from below: they laid them reverently on the hot ground. Maurice Pickney pushed through the squad, carrying his medical chest. Cope crouched beside Wallace. Pickney set the chest down. ‘He'll be all right,’ Caine groaned, holding the open dressing to his side. ‘Hide like armour plating, that bloke. Let's grab the girl and get out.’

  ‘Oh yes, the girl,’ Sweeney said. ‘Where is she?”

  Caine scanned the ground and pointed to a low bank, not twenty paces away. Sweeney swivelled towards it, but Caine held up his hand shakily. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I'll do it.’

  He beckoned to Copeland and together they limped towards the bank. Peering over it, they found Moshe Naiman, nursing a wound in the ear, perched in blood-soaked sand with a blond-haired, green-eyed young woman clad in a khaki drill shirt and trousers. The girl had a cut on the forehead, and both of them were covered in blood from head to foot. They were laughing uncontrollably. When Naiman caught sight of his two mates, he stopped laughing and pointed his Schmeisser in their direction, his eyeballs huge and white against the dark gore on his face. Recognizing them, he dropped the weapon. Caine stared at the woman. ‘Are you Runefish?’ he enquired.

  The blonde looked suddenly bewildered. ‘I'm not a fish,’ she said.

  Naiman snorted. ‘This isn't Runefish, skipper. Not unless they're recruiting Wrens from the Italians now, that is.’

  24

  Twenty minutes of bone-shaking brought them back to the cork and arbutus groves where Gracie had piled in – although there was almost no sign of the 6-tonner's crash now. As Cope pulled up in deep shade, Caine instructed him to get the wagons leaguered. ‘Tell the lads not to put down roots,’ he moaned through gritted teeth, spitting dust and sand. ‘I want the Lewis guns manned, and pickets with Brens on all arcs. The boys can get a brew and some scoff. A few minutes to get ship-shape and we're off.’

  Caine's wound felt like fire. He leaned heavily on the door of the White and watched with a sinking feeling as Todd Sweeney strode over to him with the familiar simian roll, his helmet still askew on his beach-ball head. ‘So, where to, skipper?’ he enquired, a gloating smile on his face.

  ‘I'll let you know,’ Caine said, drawing a ragged breath. He expected Sweeney to push off, but instead he stood his ground. ‘So it was all for nothing,’ the ex-MP went on. ‘Attacking the village, the grind across the Jebel, bumping the column – the casualties, the lost wagons – all wasted. Instead of Runefish, we picked up some enemy civilian bint.’

  Caine realized that the palm branch he'd offered Sweeney hadn't worked. He glowered. ‘Isn't there something you ought to be doing, Corporal? If so, I suggest you clear off and do it, before I look for that grease-gun Pickney used this morning and stick it right up your arse.’

  Sweeney walked away, still sneering. Caine bit his lip as he watched him go, reflecting that, even if his observations were negative, they were once again true. All their costly efforts had been squandered on a snipe hunt, and right now he had no idea where they were going. Thanks to the loss of Judy and Marlene, they didn't even have enough petrol to make the RV with the Long Range Desert Group. He was furious with himself: instead of locating Runefish's downed aircraft and making a systematic search around it in ever-increasing circles as they should have done, he'd got drawn into contacts with the enemy, the very thing he should have avoided. He'd followed hunches and red herrings, and all it had brought them was casualties, lost wagons, lost time, fruitless effort. He considered returning to the coordinates St Aubin had given him, but at once he dismissed the idea. After hitting the village, the whole area would be buzzing. It would soon be buzzing here, too. No, the only bet for now was to retire further into the mountains: he had no idea what the next step should be.

  He forced himself to limp over to where the Daimler and Dingo were parked together in a broad pool of shade. Flash Murray and Shirley Temple were scouring the Daimler's barrel with a ramrod while Trubman fiddled with the wireless and Padstowe, his face still soot-black, chugged petrol into the Dingo's tank from a flimsy, through a funnel. Caine gave Murray the thumbs-up. ‘Mean shooting, Flash,’ he said. ‘That Jerry AFV could have done for us. That's twice Hun armour has turned up when we didn't bargain for it.’

  ‘That was my fault, skipper,’ Padstowe cut in, screwing shut the cap of the petrol tank. ‘I cocked up the recce, didn't I?’ Caine heard the embarrassment in his voice and remembered how Sweeney had blamed him and Cope for missing the AFV at the Senussi village. ‘It happens,’ he said. ‘You couldn't have got any closer.’

  He noticed that Trubman had removed his headphones, and enquired if he'd picked up anything on the emergency net. ‘I've been trying since we left the ambush site, skipper,’ Trubman said. ‘I'm still getting nothing.’

  ‘Keep at it,’ Caine said. ‘It's our only hope now.’

  He was about to turn away when Trubman added, ‘I was listening in to Rome Radio on the Phillips short-wave.’ Caine glanced back at him sharply, and the Welshman reddened again. ‘There's no security risk, skipper,’ he said quickly. ‘The Phillips is receiver-only. We use it for getting the Greenwich time signal.’

  ‘That's all right, Taffy,’ Caine said. ‘I'm familiar with it.’

  ‘Well, I thought you'd like to know: at 0520 hours this morning, 20 June 1942, the Panzer Group penetrated Tobruk's perimeter. Waves of Stukas cleared the minefields. Last report, at 1400 hours, puts Rommel himself at King's Cross, overlooking Tobruk town. They predict he'll be inside by last light.’

  Caine swallowed hard and shook his head. Before he could speak, Padstowe cut in. ‘Rome Radio? That's just Axis propaganda.’

  Caine shrugged, staggering slightly. Murray leaned the ramrod against the Daimler's turret, wiping his hands on a greasy rag. His emerald eyes took in Caine's ghostly face and the blood-soaked dressing. ‘You sure you're all right, skipper?’ he asked. ‘You ought to get that looked at.’

  Caine nodded. He pottered back to the White and plumped down heavily on a petrol case, still holding the dressing to his wound. It felt as if he'd been branded with a red-hot iron. He wanted morphia but didn't have a syrette: Pickney was busy probing Wallace's shoulder with forceps and Caine didn't want to distract him. The giant was stretched out under a tree – the same tree under which MacDonald had endured the grease-gun operation. Caine found it hard to credit that MacDonald was dead, and that they'd been laughing and joking here only two hours before. He suddenly remembered that Vic Bramwell and Mick Oldfield were dead too: five men taken out in one day, eight men KIA all told: Hanley snuffed by friendly fire, Rigby, and Cavazzi lost at the Senussi village, O'Brian, Jackson and MacDonald, killed in error by Arab kids, and Oldfield and Bramwell shot in the ambush. Apart from himself and his two close mates, there were only a dozen men left standing: the Daimler crew, Murray and Temple, orderly Pickney, signaller Trubman, interpreter Naiman, RAOC-man Turner, ex-MP Sweeney, former Marine Padstowe, Bluejacket Graveman, Gunner Dave Floggett, Barry Shackleton, the ex-farrier from the Scots Greys, and Albert Raker, the ex-navvie from the Pioneer Corps. Caine felt momentarily weighed down, not only by the losses, but also by a terrible despair, a feeling that there was no hope, even for those who had made it this far.

  Copeland was sitting on the White's running-board inspecting his SMLE sniper's rifle. His carefully zeroed-in telescopic sights had been off-centred during the bayonet fighting, but he was relieved to see that there was no damage he couldn't fix. Cope's straw-coloured hair was so stiff with gore and dust that it looked as if it had been deep-moulded in place, and he wore dressings on his neck and left arm, like trophies. ‘You all right, Harry?’ Caine asked, straining to get the words out. Cope nodded. ‘Do me a favour when you're finished. Go with Adud and cut those Senussi boys free. You can give them their weapons back, but no ammo. I don't want to find out that I was wrong about them.’

  ‘Got it, skipper.’

  Naiman had cleaned himself up and now wore a pad
ded white dressing on his mutilated left ear: with a matching one on the right, he'd have looked like a hook-nosed rabbit, Caine thought. He had also sorted out the Italian girl, who now displayed a white blob of bandage on her temple. Caine waved them over. With the blood and dirt gone, he saw that the woman had a long, slender face under the crop of golden hair, with jade-green eyes, high cheekbones, a small nose slightly turned down at the end and full lips that gave her a hint of sulkiness. She was long-necked, tall and willowy, her khaki drills hand-tailored to bring out her small, pointed breasts and the elegant curves of her figure. She wasn't classically beautiful, but there was a sensuality about her that was unmistakable, Caine thought.

  ‘You don't look like an Italian,’ he blurted. ‘You look more like a German.’

  Her face twisted, her jade eyes wild with fury. ‘Don't dare call me German,’ she snarled. ‘I hate those Tedesci pigs…’ She spat venomously into the sand through bared teeth. ‘They killed my brother, Carlo. They shot him in the head. I hope you English finish them all.’

  There was an awkward silence while Caine weighed her up. She sounded genuine enough: her voice had a low, mannish quality and her accent was distinctly Italian. He flushed out a fresh pack of cigarettes from his haversack and tossed it to her. She caught it deftly with her left hand and opened it with long fingers. Her nails, filthy and broken, had obviously once been well manicured. She took out three cigarettes, handed one to Naiman and stuck another in Caine's mouth. As she leaned over, Caine had the impression that he was in the presence of a big, sleek cat. She put one between her own sulky lips and Naiman lit all three of them with a match. The woman was quiet for a moment, inhaling smoke. Caine told Naiman to bring petrol cases, and they both sat down. She blew out a long trail of smoke, and her eyes met Caine's. ‘You were at the village, no?’ she asked. ‘I saw the headman and a girl here. You bring Carlo's body?’