Code of Combat

by Michael Asher

  Bwommmfffff. The report came from behind Caine’s left ear: he traileyed the countess, saw her crouched over rifle-sights, saw the puff of smoke around the muzzle of the weapon she’d just fired: he saw the bald-headed SS-man stiffen, saw the baffled look on his face, saw his eyes cross inwards as if trying to focus on the hole the .22 round had just punched in his forehead. For a moment it seemed that he would continue charging up the steps: then his legs jellied out on him. He pitched over face-forward, dropped his SMG, started to roll down the steps in spatters of blood. Other SS-men ran to replace him: Caine got a glimpse of tense faces, bared teeth, weapons pointed in his direction. He shoved Stengel into full view. ‘Come on. Who’s going to shoot the boss?’

  Nobody fired: for a split second there was pin-drop silence.

  ‘Schiessen Sie ihn, dann wird er mit uns tauschen.’

  It rolled out of Stengel’s throat like a death-rattle. Caine didn’t know what it meant, but he heard the contempt in it. He kept a grip on his captive with one hand, slid out two of the stick-grenades he’d salvaged, pulled the draw-strings. He kneed Stengel hard in the back, sent him sprawling downstairs, lobbed the two grenades as hard and as far as he could. ‘Three – four – five,’ he counted.

  Babboooommmmffffff.

  In the confined space, the twin-detonations seemed to come from deep down in the world’s guts: Caine and Emilia were already pelting across the landing, past the dressing-room she’d used the previous day, to a door at the far end of the corridor. It was unlocked. They scrambled into the room, closed the door: Emilia lit her torch. Caine made out a king-sized bed with a brocaded cover, drapery hangings, a vast, square armoire with carved doors. Emilia moved to the armoire, opened it, balanced the rifle under her arm.

  She turned: Caine saw half-moon eyes, saw the faint gleam of her teeth, saw a dark hand brush away darker strands of hair. ‘I hope you don’t have a problem with confined spaces,’ she said.

  She shone her torch into the cupboard, stepped in, pulled Caine after her, closed the door. Inside, it was as big as a small bedroom, empty except for a length of cloth covering the back wall. For a second Caine felt the compelling force of her presence, took in her pneumatic figure, the provocative curl of her lips, the mown-grass smell of her hair, the faint muskiness of her body. He watched her whip down the back-cloth, clocked behind it the circular mouth of a shaft no wider than a sewer pipe. ‘This is where the villa abuts the walls of the old monastery,’ she told him. ‘The original walls are honeycombed with shafts like this – I guess they were bolt-holes in times of trouble. Don’t start thinking you’ve gone deaf in there. The stone work is ten feet thick.’

  ‘In there?’ Caine repeated. He’d never thought of himself as claustrophobic: with his water-buffalo shoulders and deep chest, though, he wondered if he could possibly get through it.

  ‘It’s the only way,’ she told him. ‘Just follow me.’

  ‘You’ve been in there before?’

  ‘Not for ages. I was smaller then.’ She nodded at the hunting rifle. ‘I’ll have to leave it here.’ She laid the weapon on the floor. ‘Come on,’ she said.

  She wriggled into the opening: in an instant the darkness had swallowed her up. Caine paused, considered how to manage his weapons: the knife and the grenade in his waistband were all right – he moved them round to his back. He studied the Schmeisser for a second, then removed the magazine, folded the stock, stuffed the two parts inside his shirt. Finally, he took off his waistcoat with its heavy baggage of .22 ammunition, laid it next to Emilia’s rifle.

  ‘What are you waiting for?’ came her voice, slightly muffled, from the shaft.

  He wormed into the tunnel after her.

  He’d expected it to run straight: instead it twisted and turned: in places it dropped so steeply that Caine had to stop himself from sliding into Emilia, using his hands and knees as brakes. Mostly, he had enough room to raise himself on his elbows, but often he had only an inch or two of clearance, obliging him to pull himself along, with his chin almost scraping the floor. Walls ten feet thick: it was like crawling across the seabed with the immense weight of water pressing down on him. The countess moved fast, squirming her legs, flashing her torch occasionally: in the flickers of light, Caine could see only the kicking soles of her feet: he struggled to keep up with them. The dismembered SMG was heavy: its hard metal stuck into his flesh under the shirt. He realized how hot it was: sweat dripped off his forehead, his hands were damp, a clammy layer enveloped his body.

  Emilia’s torch flicked on: Caine got a glimpse of her feet and buttocks, grey stonework beyond. The shaft appeared to stop abruptly: he soon realized that it went into a ninety-degree twist, and he was grateful for it. It meant that the Jerries wouldn’t be able to shoot down the shaft: even if they lobbed in a grenade, the blast would be deflected by the sudden turn.

  On the other hand, he was finding it harder and harder to breathe: the air was as thick as soup: often he had to stop to ease his straining lungs. As they stumbled on and on in the darkness, he found himself getting anxious that the shaft might be blocked: the countess hadn’t been down here for years – there could have been any number of cave-ins since then. The horror of trying to crawl backwards around those twists and up those slopes didn’t bear thinking about.

  The shaft was getting narrower, he was sure of it. In places now he could raise his head only slightly: the stonework was crushing his limbs, confining his elbows: each thrust forward required an excruciating effort. His hands were hot and swollen, chafed by the rough stone floor: his ironmongery was cutting into his chest. He felt his energy draining, felt himself slowing down. He tried to bring his arms forward for the next thrust, found he couldn’t move. He realized with a start that he could no longer sense Emilia in front of him, that she hadn’t lit the torch for a while.

  He resisted the impulse to call out, gritted his teeth, tried to pull himself forward, found that he was wedged in the shaft: struggle as he might, he couldn’t extend his arms. He gulped at the air: his whole body was soaked in sweat. It was pitch dark: the shaft here couldn’t be more than a foot high, he thought – impossible for someone his size to get through. I’m stuck. I’m never going to get out.

  Caine’s nerve almost failed him. He’d brought off hazardous ops behind enemy lines, survived a crash in the Nile, escaped from a hundred-foot well: nothing had scared him like this. Even in that well he’d been able to see the sky. Buried alive, he thought. This is what it must be like to wake up in a coffin and realize you’re six feet under. No one to help you. No one to hear you scream. He was trembling: his heart was pumping so fast he thought he was going to faint – or die. He was a hair’s breadth from panic, from shrieking madly, from clawing at the stones until his fingers were stumps. He remembered stories of premature burials: how corpses had been found whose arms and legs had been fractured in their frantic attempts to escape their grave. He shuddered, closed his eyes, felt blackness steal over him. Is this it? Am I going to die here like a rat in a drain? The blackness was in his head: he was drifting.

  ‘Hi, you there? You all right?’

  Emilia’s voice came to him from far away: it felt like a lifeline.

  ‘I’m stuck,’ he panted. ‘Can’t bloody move. Shaft’s not more than a foot high.’

  ‘That’s just an illusion. If I got my big butt through, you can.’

  An illusion. Caine choked back a comment. It might be true: in a situation like this your imagination could play tricks on you.

  An image drifted into his mind, of his old friend Fred Wallace, the six-foot-seven giant, built like a Bren carrier: Fred would really have been in trouble here, he thought. Not only was he twice Caine’s size, he was utterly terrified of enclosed spaces. At least I’m better off than he would have been.

  The thought somehow raised his spirits. He scooped a breath, closed his eyes, lifted himself on his forearms, tried to force himself on. It’s no narrower here – that’s just an illusion. For an instant
it seemed that the stones were snatching at him, holding him back: then the feeling faded, as if the shaft had decided to widen itself to allow him through. He willed his muscles to tense and release, tense and release, crab-walked through the shaft until the fear was forgotten, until he could feel only the pain of burning lungs, straining sinews, hands flayed raw from the stone floor. He kept going, working hands, knees, feet, pumping on and on through the darkness until he ran into the soles of Emelia’s shoes.

  ‘You OK?’ she said.

  ‘Yeah . . . just . . . lost my bearings there for a sec.’

  They crawled on. Caine was convinced now that the shaft was getting wider: suddenly he sensed Emilia sliding away from him: he felt the floor tilt, slithered down a steep incline of polished stone, buffered himself with his knees and swollen hands. He bumped into Emilia’s soft rump, heard a stiff intake of breath, realized that they had emerged from the shaft into a wider tunnel.

  The air stank of dust and decay. Emilia flashed her torch around: Caine saw that the new shaft had a vaulted roof: it was easily tall enough to stand upright in. The walls were of smooth, red stone – it looked as if it had been carved through bedrock. In the instant before Emilia switched off the torch, he noticed that the walls were lined with shallow alcoves, like shelves: bleached bones glinted from them – human bones: skeletal fingers, ribcages, skulls, unarticulated, yawning jaws.

  In the darkness he wondered if he’d really seen it. ‘What the hell is this?’ he demanded.

  ‘The catacombs,’ Emilia said. ‘They used to bury the monks here.’

  She flicked on the torch again: Caine saw piles of bones: bones of all shapes and sizes poking out of the alcoves, scattered on the tunnel floor: armbones, leg-bones, ribs, foot tarsals, white plates of clavicle. In one place six or seven crumbling skulls had been crushed together in a crude pyramid. After the awful descent of the shaft, Caine thought, it was as if they’d plunged into hell.

  ‘We follow the catacombs a little way,’ Emilia said, ‘then drop down to another level.’

  ‘All right. Let’s take a breather here.’

  They slid down against the wall: their thighs brushed in the darkness. Despite his unnerved state, Caine felt an electric tingle at her touch, sensed the magnetic warmth of her body, the wild musk of her scent. He felt an almost overwhelming desire to put his arms round her. Instead, he fumbled for cigarettes, then thought better of it: his mouth was like pasteboard. He drew the pieces of the Schmeisser from under his shirt, clicked the magazine into place. He reached inside the shirt, rubbed the sore patches where the SMG had dug into him.

  ‘Thank God we don’t have to go back up there,’ Emilia sighed.

  Caine suppressed a shudder. ‘How far down are we?’

  ‘On the level of the cellars. These catacombs go on for ever: you can get lost in them.’

  She cut the torch: for a moment they sat silently in the pitch-darkness. ‘That man I shot,’ Emilia said. ‘His name was Stolbe. He tried to . . . well, you know. He was a pig, like Stengel. I hope Stengel’s dead. I hope you killed –’

  ‘Sshh. You hear that?’

  In the stillness, Caine’s ears had picked up voices. He paused, listened, came up into a squat, shuffled forward, felt his feet crunch on brittle bones. He listened again. Kraut voices. Coming down this tunnel.

  He gripped the Schmeisser across his knees, squinted along the tunnel, saw dim twinkles of light, heard footfalls: they were still some way off. But not that far.

  Emilia was on her feet. ‘They’ve found the way in,’ she hissed. ‘But how did they guess we were here?’

  ‘Can’t have. Just doing a thorough search. That means there’ll only be a couple of them . . .’

  He fingered the stick-grenade in his belt, considered laying an ambush: a spud-masher and a burst of nine milly would do the trick. He tugged the grenade out of his belt. ‘Once I chuck this, we’ve got five seconds,’ he said. ‘You move: I’ll cover you.’

  They listened again: heard footfalls coming nearer. Emilia grabbed his hand. ‘Forget it,’ she whispered. ‘Run.’

  It was almost impossible to run in the darkness: instead they jogged at a slow trot. Emilia let the torch-beam wink at intervals: they wove around a series of tight zig-zags, came into a straight stretch where more alcoves pitted the walls, where bones crunched under their feet. At the end of that the tunnel turned sharply left: Caine followed Emilia into the turn, felt her stop abruptly.

  ‘Is this it?’ she said. ‘I think it’s here.’

  She flashed her torch at the wall. Caine saw, among the bone-littered alcoves, a large framed tablet bearing a faded fresco and a Latin inscription. The fresco showed what looked like the severed head of a woman, with a thick array of stray locks floating around her. The eyes were full of horror, her mouth open in a terrifying grimace. For an instant Caine was reminded of the severed head he’d seen in his dream – a woman’s head floating in a fishbowl. Then he realized that this woman’s hair wasn’t hair at all but a mass of writhing snakes.

  ‘Medusa,’ Emilia said. ‘Come on, help me with this.’

  She hooked the nails of her right hand under the frame of the tablet: Caine saw it move outwards. He ran to help her, got his fingertips behind the frame, pulled, felt it slip open. The tablet was a door, he realized – a stone door that couldn’t be spotted from the outside, yet which had been so finely tooled and balanced that it opened as if it had been oiled.

  Emilia shone the torch on the entrance to a shaft not much wider than the one they’d come down. Caine’s jaw tightened.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘This is only the entrance. The rest is fine.’

  Caine wasn’t listening: he’d picked up footsteps and muffled voices again: the Jerries were coming down the straight stretch just before the sharp-left turn. Damn Fritz. He hasn’t given up.

  ‘They’re still here,’ he said.

  He rested the Schmeisser across the crook of his elbow, reached for the stick-grenade, felt Emilia’s hand close on his wrist. ‘They don’t know we’re here,’ she whispered.

  ‘How can you be sure of that?’

  ‘Intuition. Come on.’

  This time she made him enter the shaft feet first, so that he could close the concealed door by the stone knob on its rear-side. Caine pulled it to gently, lay still, listened. Despite the door, he could still hear the voices, the crunch of boots on the tunnel floor. The voices grew louder: he guessed they’d passed the turn: they were almost there. The footfalls stopped. Caine knew the Krauts were standing outside, probably looking at the Medusa fresco. His heart clumped: his breath sounded like bellows. The Jerries were debating something: Caine didn’t know what it was and didn’t care: he just wished they would go away.

  The talk stopped: the men didn’t move. Caine felt helpless: he’d had to break up the Schmeisser again to get into the shaft: if they opened the door, all he’d be able to do was spit at them. Suddenly, though, he heard footsteps again, moving cautiously away from him. He waited – it seemed for ever – until they had faded, let out a long breath. ‘They’ve gone,’ he said.

  Emilia was right: the tunnel here was short. It ended only about four yards further on, in a vertical shaft, with an iron ladder running down its side. Caine fought his way backwards on to the ladder: Emilia helped him to place his feet on the rungs. They scrambled down in the darkness, dropped the last few feet on to the floor of another passage.

  ‘This is the lowest level,’ Emilia panted. ‘It twists and turns a bit, but it’ll take us to the forest door.’

  By the light of the torch the tunnel looked more like a mineshaft – the walls had been shored up by galleries of pit-props: the roof was of stout timber. It was humid down here: the smell of earth and mould was overpowering: in places, tree-roots penetrated between the props: several times Caine almost tripped over giant coils that snaked across the tunnel from one side to the other. The way dipped and zig-zagged, then began to rise. The smells of dirt and h
umus became even stronger: Caine felt as if he were passing through the belly of Mother Earth. Emilia turned left abruptly, continued for another twenty yards, halted, shone her torch on a door of thick wooden beams strengthened with metal bands, studded with iron. The door was squat, with a lock the size of an ammunition box and sets of double iron bolts top and bottom.

  Caine focused on the lock. ‘The key,’ he said. ‘What about the key?’

  Emilia cast around with her torch, found an alcove set in the wall: a large, ornate key hung there on a nail. She took the key, handed it to Caine. It fitted the lock perfectly: Caine turned it, heard the tumblers fall: Emilia worked on the lower bolts: Caine dealt with those on top.

  Emilia was about to open the door when Caine stopped her.

  ‘You never know,’ he said.

  He gripped the Schmeisser in both hands, took up a firing pose.

  ‘Go on.’

  Emilia opened the door warily, keeping out of Caine’s line of fire. The wood creaked, swung wide to admit lush moonlight, a torrent of woodland scents, cool night air. The door stood in a short, cave-like tunnel whose entrance was half shrouded by foliage. Emilia scanned it with her torch: Caine moved up beside her. Suddenly a dark figure appeared at the mouth of the cave, moved steadily towards them. Emilia flinched: Caine’s fingers tensed on the SMG. The figure stopped a couple of yards away: Caine got the impression of a body engulfed in an ankle-length cloak. ‘Finalmente, siete arrivate,’ an old woman’s voice croaked.