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

by Michael Asher

  He stood up abruptly, cocking his ears: from down in the valley, Caine caught the purr of engines. ‘Ah, my transport,’ Michele announced. ‘Now, we will all move down into the wadi, and wait there for my friend Major Rohde to arrive.’ He glared up and down the line of prisoners. ‘If any of you tries anything – any… how you say… funny business… my men will kill you.’ He glanced back at Rose. ‘You and me, we will make funny business in my caravan, no? Until the Boches arrive.’

  It was a short march over rough ground down into the tree-lined drywash, and just as they broke through the trees into the sandy bed, a column of five lorries pulled up in a roar of motors and a flurry of headlamps. Caine recognized the wagons from the leaguer Michele had shown him at the Citadello, including the mobile command-caravan the deserter-chief had been so proud to call his home from home.

  As the drivers backed the vehicles into the cover of the trees, Michele's men forced the commandos to sit in the sand. Despite the strident orders from their leader, though, few seemed to take much pleasure in what they were doing. Among them there were faces Caine knew – the lined and weathered peasant faces of men he had drunk with, eaten with, laughed with, at the festa two days previously. Some smiled in recognition – a few even winked. It was a very different style from the professional truculence of the Jerries who'd put bets on Naiman's life and thrown Caine into the well the previous day. He reminded himself that these Ities weren't real soldiers at all: the majority had either turned their backs on the war, or were simple farmers who'd joined Michele because they had nowhere else to go.

  Michele detailed about twenty men to stand guard and strutted in front of the prisoners, baring his teeth, his forehead wreathed in shadow. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘I'll show you what happens when a man touches my wife.’ He pointed a finger at Copeland and ordered two of his men to drag him out. Cope knocked them away, got to his feet under his own steam. ‘If you're going to shoot me, shoot me,’ he growled, his large Adam's apple working. ‘I don't need to be manhandled.’

  Caine was proud of his friend's poise, but he'd decided already that he wasn't going to stand by and watch another comrade cut down. In Naiman's case there'd been nothing he could do. This time, though, his hands were free, and his mates were with him. He could see from the dark creases on Wallace's granite brow that he wasn't alone. Wallace and Cope might have their differences, but he knew that, whatever the odds, neither would stand by and watch the other murdered in cold blood. He and Wallace exchanged silent glances, and he saw that the others were also preparing themselves, eyeballing the ground around them for sticks and stones – anything that might be used as a weapon.

  Michele was arguing venomously with the men he'd detailed to execute Cope. Caine didn't know a word of Italian, but it was obvious from the men's dismissive gestures that they were reluctant to carry out his orders. Michele sent them away and called out others to take their place, but these men, too, answered him derisively. A third group he called out behaved in the same way. It quickly became apparent to Caine that there wasn't a single member of Michele's band who was ready to kill a man against whom they had no personal grudge. In the Angela–Copeland–Michele triangle, Michele was the one who had lost face, and his men knew it: he could only restore his honour by killing his wife's lover himself. The more desperately he attempted to get someone else to do it, the more contempt he was generating among his men. This must finally have dawned on Michele, for with a snarl of rage he drew his pistol and pointed it at Cope's blond head. ‘Down on your knees,’ he yelled.

  Copeland shook his head stoically. ‘Nope,’ he said. ‘You want to kill me, you'll have to do it while I'm standing up.’

  Michele looked discomfited and his pistol hand shook. He steadied the weapon and took careful aim, his thumb moving to the safety catch. Caine readied himself to spring, noting that Wallace was about to do the same. The safety catch was off. Caine felt the adrenalin surging through his veins. Michele was only five yards away. He tensed his muscles, was on the verge of jumping, when a voice shouted. ‘Stop.’

  For an instant there was silence. Michele looked around curiously. His gaze fell on Maddaleine Rose, now on her feet among the commandos – a shapely, slender figure in her loose khakis, her soft blond hair silvered by the starlight. It was Rose who had spoken – not loudly, but with the same undercurrent of authority that Caine had heard in the guardroom at Biska. Everyone was looking at her now.

  ‘It's me you want, isn't it?,’ she asked silkily, her wide, dreamy eyes fixed on Michele. Her features in the darkness were serene and composed, her stance suppliant and delicately provocative: the breeze layering the folds of her uniform closely against the opulent camber of her hips and breasts, gave her the look of a draped odalisque from a romantic painting. ‘You can have me,’ she said. ‘You can do anything you want with me. Anything you like. I won't resist. Just let that man go.’

  Michele licked his lips. His face, framed by his long, dark hair, was opaque in the shadow, but Caine noticed the telltale movement as he applied his pistol's safety catch: Rose had already won. She had played her hand perfectly, he thought. By butting in at that moment, by offering herself, she'd allowed Michele to preserve a kind of masculine honour, without having to shoot a man dead in the process. Michele holstered his pistol and smiled truculently at Copeland. ‘You are a lucky man,’ he grunted. He turned to Rose and nodded towards his caravan. ‘Come on,’ he said.

  Caine's pulse raced. He was glad that she'd intervened to let Cope off the hook, but he was no more prepared to let her sacrifice herself than he had been ready to see Copeland shot down. He was half on his feet when a single gunshot blasted out of the night, as hollow as dry thunder in the confines of the wadi. Caine and his commandos fell flat on their faces: the guards ducked and shifted on their feet trying to work out where the shot had come from. Caine was up, and a heart-beat away from an attempt to snatch Rose, when a willowy female figure in khaki appeared out of the darkness, stopped in front of Michele, jabbed an automatic pistol towards him.

  It was Angela Brunetto, and she looked furious: ‘Stronso,’ she yelled. ‘Bastard piece of merda. Worthless dog-turd. These brave men saved my life and you hand them over to the same cats' piss Tedesci who murdered Carlo? Is this the way you repay them? You are not a man, you are a cockroach. You bring shame on us all, and now you make it worse by forcing this woman to fuck you? First you fuck every whore and trollop in the camp: you fuck Carlo's girlfriend at his own wake; now you take girls by force. You don't deserve to be chief here, because you are not a man. I am more a man than you. Let these English go, or I will shoot you now. My first bullet will go smack in your balls…’

  There was a tense silence. Caine was expecting Michele's men to intervene at any moment, but none of them shifted. It seemed that Angela's action had evoked some sympathy – perhaps they too had noticed how Michele had hit on the dead Carlo's girl the day his death had been announced. Maybe they were fed up with his posturing.

  Michele made a grab for Angela's pistol. She held on to it tenaciously, clawing at his neck with the nails of her right hand. There was brief tussling match, then the weapon blammed, speared fire, spoofed gas, pumped out a shell-case. Michele howled as a round tore through the top of his left boot and shattered the bones of his foot. He leapt into the air spliffling blood, landed in a heap on the sand, and sat there clutching hysterically at his foot, crying, ‘You bitch. You shot me, you fucking bitch.’

  At almost the same instant Caine heard the growl of engines and the creak of brakes from further down the wadi. A second later there came the murmur of German voices and the slamming of wagon doors. ‘The Tedesci,’ Angela whispered, looking around wildly. ‘They're here.’

  Caine's commandos were already standing up, poised to leg it, but uncertain whether they'd be shot down like dogs by their Italian captors. Caine saw Angela draw herself up and take instant command. ‘Get to the vehicles,’ she told the deserters. She pointed at the moaning Michele.
‘Take that heap of shit with you, and let's get out of here, or they'll have us for dinner.’

  If the loyalty of any of the Italians had been wavering, it was forgotten in the urgency of the moment. As the men lifted Michele and jogged towards their wagons, Angela turned to Caine. ‘You leave now,’ she said. ‘I have sent old Adud and his daughter to where you left your vehicles. They wait for you there. Good luck and God go with you.’

  She turned to Rose and smiled, and for an instant the two blond women, of almost equal height, hugged each other. The deserters were gunning their engines, and Caine could hear shouts in German drifting out of the darkness from further down the wadi. ‘Get going, lads,’ he yelled at the commandos. ‘Take Miss Rose back to the wagons.’ They doubled off in the direction of the homestead with Rose among them, and Caine realized that only one man was missing. When he spun round to thank Angela, he found her wrapped tightly in the arms of Harry Copeland, lost in a deep, passionate kiss that seemed never-ending. ‘Come on, mate,’ Caine hissed.

  Cope broke away, and for a fleeting moment, he and Angela stared into each other's eyes. ‘I'll be back,’ Copeland said.

  She touched his lips with the tip of a slender finger. ‘In another world,’ she whispered. ‘In another life.’

  As she turned to sprint to her wagons, Caine saw tears glistening in the dark pits of her eyes. Then, just as the first Jerry silhouettes emerged from the shadows of the wadi, Caine and Copeland dashed off like greyhounds for the cover of the trees.

  43

  All night blown grit scoured the convoy like emery-cloth, but at sunup the wind dropped, and the desert packed down before them in ebony plains spandrelled with light, in dried-out playas like crystal eyes, in curried sand-sheets, flurries of fishscale dunes, dark hills like majestic galleons setting sail, in sand-scoured knolls, cliffs grooved and sculpted into spectral shapes. The Green Mountains had long since faded into darkness: the day sparked up so brightly that the sunlight hurt their eyes.

  They halted in the middle of a featureless vanilla sand-sheet, three dirt-specks on the pastel emptiness, and as Caine jumped down from the White, he felt as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. Not that he believed they had outrun the enemy – he knew it wouldn't be so easy: it was just that huge open spaces like this gave elbow room to the spirit. Adud and Layla, who had guided them through the night, seemed to feel the same. They'd spent much of their lives in the maze of the Green Mountains, yet they became visibly more tranquil here on the open plains.

  Copeland lay down on his back and lit a gasper, bleary eyes strafing the desolate sky. He'd driven all night clammed tight as a barnacle, wrestling the steering wheel so hard that desert sores had broken out on the skin of his hands. Caine knew Cope was worried that Angela hadn't escaped the Boche, and was wondering whether he'd ever see her again. When Rose knelt down beside him, bathed and bandaged his sores unasked, Copeland merely smiled.

  He was the second casualty she'd tended at that halt. A few minutes earlier, Wallace had been rolling in the sand, whimpering in agony with muscle cramps in the left leg. Rose had crouched by him, spoken to him softly, massaged his tree-trunk limb. When the iron-hard tendons had begun to free up, Maurice Pickney marched over, told the giant that he hadn't been taking enough salt, forced him to glug down a pint of brine. Wallace recovered quickly, shambled off to help Murray, Turner and Padstowe charging the tanks with the last of the petrol. ‘The LRDG better bloody well be there,’ Murray declared. ‘This Itie petrol won't get us any further than the RV. It'll be a bloody miracle if it gets us that far.’

  Caine was concerned. If things were as bad in Egypt as Rose had implied, it was possible that the Runefish mission had been ditched. They didn't have enough fuel to get home – not even much past the RV, as Murray had suggested. Without the LRDG they'd have to foot-slog it back to the Wire. He and his men were exhausted: they'd been racing in top gear almost non-stop all week on Benzedrine and adrenalin: they'd narrowly escaped a scragging in several very close encounters with the butcher. Tabbing three hundred miles across sterile desert, on half a cup of pee or something per day, wasn't exactly what the doctor ordered.

  Trubman hadn't made wireless contact with HQ in a week, and Caine debated whether it was worth chancing an attempt. He decided against it. The enemy must know roughly where they were, but triangulation would give them an exact fix. Any W/T transmission might bring Stukas tumbling out of the skies like batshit.

  Rose made tea on the spirit-stove, and they drank it with lashings of Carnation milk and ship's biscuits – almost the only rations they had left. They were just finishing off the tea when Fred Wallace pointed out a faint grey-brown stain on the north-western horizon. At first Caine thought it might be a sand-storm brewing up, but Wallace shook his mace-like head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It's them. The Hun.’

  They started off again, following Caine's sun-compass readings, adjusted by directions from Adud and Layla, notching three arrow-straight groove-lines across the desert. There were too many stoppages for Caine's liking. The White copped a puncture. Both the White and the Daimler got bogged down in mishmish. The AFVs were four-wheel drive, and easier to extract than 3-tonners, but it couldn't be done without a burst of hard labour by the whole squad, shifting at least half a ton of sand. They worked frantically with hands and shovels, aware always of that dark cloud behind them, aware that it was encroaching nearer by the minute.

  Three times they saw flights of aircraft – black raptor shapes against the marble-streaked expanse of the sky. They had to freeze or run for cover. The planes made no attempt to strafe or bomb them, though, and Caine decided that either the pilots hadn't seen them, or, as Rose had suggested, that Rohde had given orders to take them alive. Just after mid-day, when the armour-plating on the AFVs was too hot to touch, they came over a rise and saw a vast purple wall truncating the eastern horizon. Caine identified it from the map as the Maqtal plateau, a continuous cliff-wall rising here and there to peaks like knucklebones and canine teeth, lying directly across their line of advance.

  Caine halted the convoy, jumped down, scanned the falaise with his binos. He already knew that the rendez-vous point with the LRDG lay along the Maqtal, but his map wasn't detailed enough to show a pass, and from here no sign of a way through was visible. He called Adud and Layla, and the old man pointed out a twin-tooth peak, just identifiable through the sheen of dust. He explained with Layla's help that there was a gap in the rock just to the right of this double peak – a gorge that ascended gradually to the plateau. ‘The wadi is blocked by a steep rise at one end,’ Layla translated, ‘but my father thinks that with the help of God you can get your cars up. It is not more difficult than the Hag's Cleft at Shallal.’ Since they no longer had a winch, Caine wasn't altogether comforted by this revelation. He reminded himself, though, that if the LRDG weren't there, it would hardly matter one way or the other.

  He lit a cigarette, folded the map on the hot bonnet of the White, making careful measurements with his protractor. He traced the RV coordinates to a point on top of the plateau that he was certain must lie near the head of the pass. He took a map-bearing on the RV, converted it to magnetic, then had Copeland manoeuvre the White until the sun-compass angle coincided with it. When the bearing was set, they mounted silently and sped off into the sweltering heat of the afternoon.

  It took two hours to reach the falaise, and checking his watch, Caine realized that they'd shot the RV time by more than an hour and a half. That shouldn't have mattered – he was sure that the LRDG would give them at least until sunset. The cliff towered sheer above them: the edges of the gorge were warped and hammered by erosion into disquieting shapes: Caine saw maimed death's heads and slit-eyed demons embedded in the rock.

  As the wagons passed through the shatterstone jaws of the gorge and began to grind up the gently rising wadi bed, Caine's spirits sank even lower. The recognition signal – a blue Very flare – failed to show. The LRDG knew their business, he told himself. If t
hey were here, they'd have set up an OP and would have spotted the convoy hours ago. True, it no longer consisted of the seven vehicles that had set out from Jaghbub a week earlier, but since the Daimler had been flying the Union Jack for the past ninety minutes, there would have been no mistaking it. If they hadn't been seen by now, Caine thought, it meant that there was no one waiting for them at all.

  They rounded a sharp bend in the wadi bed and saw the escarpment rising in front of them. It took only another twenty minutes to reach its foot. The plateau lay two hundred feet above, with no way up but a direct ascent of the slope. Though the scarp was scarred and rough, Caine saw to his relief that it was considerably less steep than Shallal's gradient of one in three. It took only a quarter of an hour for the wagons to reach the top, but by then Caine knew for certain that no one was waiting to greet them. From the summit, a breathless panorama panned out east towards the Egyptian frontier – an enchanted land of apricot sand, shimmering quartz and silicon, black volcanic plugs, rubblestone tors, ironstone plains, whaleback ridges. He eyeball-walked the emptiness in vain for any necklace of mobile black dots that might have been the LRDG

  Leaguering the wagons in a fold in the ground beyond the lip of the scarp, Caine dispatched men in all directions to search for signs of friendly patrols. He sat down and double-checked the coordinates until he was absolutely sure that this was the right place. Then, he and Copeland crawled to the lip of the ridge and surveyed the wadi bed below them.

  The wash was about five hundred yards across at its widest point, with sheer cliffs rising straight out of the sandy bed on both sides. The cliffs were ruptured by cracks and crevices where water had cut its way through over countless millennia, and topped by angular peaks the colour of burnished bronze. The wadi bed, scattered with nests of broken boulders and dense little copses of tamarix trees, rose gently towards the base of the slope they were now on, which cut across it at right angles, abruptly truncating it. To the left and right of this ridge, water had sculpted steep paths down the rocks, like vast stone stairways. For a moment Caine wondered if the enemy might outflank them by climbing up these ‘stairs’, but a few moments' reflection told him that they were too steep and too exposed to make them an easy option.