Code of Combat

by Michael Asher

  Caine watched them spread out into a staggered line abreast: there couldn’t have been more than two dozen of them, but there seemed to be hundreds. The Spandau on the Kubelwagen clattered like a mangle: rounds blasted dirt, crackled on stones along the edge of the ditch. ‘Here they come,’ Caine hissed. ‘Wait for it.’

  The Jerries rushed across the road in bunches, yipped and roared, weapons going tack-tack-tack, counterpointing the the nasal clank of the M42.

  Caine’s last grenade was in his hand: he gripped the cool, segmented metal, hooked out the pin, squeezed the handle, watched the hurtling Krauts: slugs charred air, lashed dust, went wheeeuuuwww off the parapet. He felt as if a catapult were being tightened in his head, cranked by a handle whose turns grew tighter and tighter until the tension was almost unbearable. Krauts were so near he could see the details of their kit – an open pouch, an unbuttoned pocket, a wobbling ammo-box. An ice-ball melted in his chest: the catapult in his head went snap. ‘Grenades!’ he yelled.

  He pitched the Mills bomb, traileyed flexing arms, fingers snapping open, saw bombs fly, heard detonators pop: for a moment the scene hung suspended – Jerries frozen in the act of charging, grenades dangling in the air, defying gravity. Caine forced himself to watch the bombs fall, dipped his head. BabooommMMM, bawwroommppp, BAA-ROWWMMFFF, beeeeyowwwwmmm. A chain of echoes swooped and back-eddied: the ground tipped, grit spattered, dust-haze soughed: the air shrilled with birdhouse racket, howls of shock, agonized shrieks.

  Caine popped up, saw Kraut bodies littered across the road like dead ninepins, glimpsed a Jerry dry-swimming on bloody stumps, another gouging at a shrapnel wound in the face, a third trying to claw himself up on a red mess of a knee with jagged bone-ends protruding. He saw Jerries blundering aimlessly, saw raw black faces, eyebrows gone, skin hanging in curled-up shreds, saw other Krauts stagger to their feet, shaken but unscathed: some crouched in the road, some started shooting. Muzzles sparked, belched smoke: slugs droned, welted earth in front of the ditch, shivered stones, spouted rock chips and red earth.

  A spent case clipped Caine’s ear: he flinched, became suddenly aware of the din around him, heard his comrades triphammer fire. He saw Krauts skid, stumble, go down, saw a straw-haired soldier raise a spudmasher: he pulled iron, triggered a burst, felt his rounds spoing the Jerry’s gut, straddle flesh, trawl viscera, crush bone. The Jerry fell like a plumb weight, dropped the grenade: his nearest comrade grabbed it, tried to throw it away, was stopped short by a numbing whaaackck, a quatrefoil starflash of shimmering white light that ripped his arm from its socket, demolished his head and chest in a shower of tissue and viscous spatters of gore.

  Caine ticker-tacked drumfire through wefts of oily blackness, steamdrilled rounds at a squat, bacon-faced Kraut who came reaming at him through the haze with bayonet fixed: Caine saw the rounds strike high in the Jerry’s chest, saw him vault up in the air with arms spread, saw blood-gouts flush. A grenade dropped short of the ditch to his left, crumped apart with a piledriver slam, a forked-lightning flash, a halo of ruddy glare: he heard Furetto’s coarse shriek, saw him jerk backwards, collapse into the ditch. He saw Ettore duck, saw a Jerry roar out of the smoke at him, saw the boy’s Schmeisser jump, saw a splodge of fire-opal kick at the Jerry’s throat, saw him falter, saw blood rain down in hosepipe spurts.

  Caine traileyed Emilia on his left, saw her struggle with a jammed weapon, saw blades dance in her eyes, saw her teeth grind, saw her tongue lick at the dried blood on her lips. He turned to help: heard a round tweet, felt a tug on his bicep, felt warmth ooze down his arm, saw his sleeve drenched in blood. He swore, sucked air, felt hot wind slam, heard Emilia squeak, saw her knocked back by a richochet that skimmed her neck, whinged off into space. He saw her drop the Schmeisser, saw her slide down with glazed eyes.

  His blood went cold: a glacier spread up his legs and arms. The pain from his wound started up abruptly – a steel band clinching his flesh. A Kraut reeled over him – a bandy-legged trooper with ditchwater eyes and a mouth like a tunnel: the Jerry’s SMG tacker-tacked, shots leapt and spun: Caine stonked him with a duck-and-drake tap that gouged out an eye, mashed his nose to shreds.

  Big Wallace loosed a tremor of fire at a blade-faced Jerry who’d already been hit in the leg and was firing from his knees: Wallace’s rounds tore open his stomach, sent him spinning on to his back, gurgling incoherently, drooling gore. The giant heard a Spandau go blatta-blatta-blatta-blat, peered through dust-roils, saw that the Kubelwagen was rolling out in support, her M42 blabbering. He heard a second Spandau kick in like a low echo, lob-lob-lob-lob-lob, saw a lazy curve of tracer float towards him, saw it luft tight in the air, shatter into red wires that lashed and burned. He heard a round hit the stock of Trubman’s rifle with an audible whop, niffed sulphur, saw the weapon knocked out of the Welshman’s hands. He saw Trubman scrabble for it, his hand dripping blood, saw agony written on his face, saw gore-smears on his glasses.

  The giant clocked the 3-tonner that was rolling steadily up behind the Kubelwagen, saw the Spandau mounted on her cab, saw another lorry and a black civilian car moving behind her, saw a second field-grey squad galloping down the Orsini road. ‘Bloody hell!’ he spat.

  Huns rushed him, weapons going tick-tack-tick: he plastered a long burst at them, felt his working parts prong. He ducked behind the parapet, released his mag, checked it: it was empty. Rounds bleated: a Jerry reared over him. Wallace hurled the useless SMG at his legs: the Jerry jumped, hashed rounds that divebombed Wallace’s ears like demented wasps. He grabbed the nearest stone in his huge fist, turned to look down the muzzle of an SMG. That’s it then, a small voice told him.

  The Jerry was swept off his feet by a blast of fire that seemed to come from nowhere: Wallace gaped, saw the Kraut sprawl over the edge of the ditch on top of Trubman, heard an ear-crushing surge of noise, realized that an immense volume of fire was falling on the road: machine-gun volleys bent air, tracer-rounds skimmed and dipped, squealed off gravel, shrieked off stones, beamed into the oncoming Jerries. Wallace saw Huns scatter, fall back, saw a Jerry hit by a round that plunged into his backside, drilled through his pelvis, blew out his groin in a hash of mangled flesh and grey cloth, saw another clutch at a face become mincemeat, saw a third go down with a gaping protrusion of bone and teeth where his jaw had been. He saw the gunner on the Kubelwagen traverse the Spandau to his left, saw a spread of tracer drop on the car like a swarm of bright bees, saw both gunner and driver thrash, saw crimson gules welt from field-grey chests, saw rounds chunk bodywork, chomp steel, saw the car leap inches off the ground, heard the keeeeraaaakkkk, saw the vehicle dissolve in a swell of lava and smoke, belch spirals of metal slivers, maimed iron, molten flesh. Wallace saw retreating Jerry troops bowled over by the blast, lifted off their feet, dashed to the ground: he saw a Kraut hit by a spindling chunk of steel that knocked his head off, drew cables of gore from his gaping neck.

  The Huns were running for it, breaking ranks, diving for cover. Wallace heard the grind and whirr of motors, dekkoed right, saw a wedge of three vehicles poling down the main road in tactical formation: one up, two back, gears grating, mounted guns racking rat-tat-tat, rat-tat-tat-tat-tat. His eyes widened: the vehicles were Willy’s Bantam jeeps and the tone of the guns was as familiar to him as his own voice: twin-Vickers ‘K’s.

  For a moment he thought he must be dreaming: SAS jeeps. SAS weapons. Here? He cast a glance at Caine, saw him tending Emilia, who was crouching next to him with her hands around her neck, blood welling through her fingers: he saw Ettore on all fours in the ditch-bed, with Furetto, who was bleeding from the head and throat and looked badly hurt. Wallace shifted the dead Jerry off Trubman, yanked his mate clear, saw the graze on his wrist, dribbling blood. His pupils were dilated behind his gore-daubed lenses, his skin taut. ‘You all right, mate?’

  ‘Dandy,’ Trubman grimaced. ‘What’s going on?’

  The volume of fire reached a crescendo: rounds squibbed and clittered.

  Wallace’s ro
ugh-cut chunk of a forehead furrowed. ‘The bleedin’ cavalry, innit.’

  A jeep skidded to a halt in front of the ditch, machine guns smoking: Caine clocked three men in British Army battledress, features hidden under face-veils. He saw the front-seat gunner swivel the twin Vickers almost ninety degrees, tackhammer tracer across the bonnet, heard the thunka-thunka-thunk, heard spent cases plink, whiffed cordite. Before the soldier had eased the trigger, another Vickers, pintle-mounted in the back, took up the refrain: ammo-pans rattled, twin muzzles gnashed spears of crimson flame, wofts of blue smoke. The rear-gunner leaned into his shooting, adjusted the double barrels minutely: Caine clocked SAS wings on his left sleeve. For a split second he was mesmerized – the white parachute, the black-and-white feathers of a sacred ibis. The procession of sacred ibises in my dream. Why didn’t I see the connection? He recalled the severed head immersed in the fish-tank. Whoever kills a sacred ibis shall die. A warm flush touched his cheeks: he’d never before felt so grateful to see that badge.

  Another jeep yawed in so close behind the other that they almost bumped: Caine saw a driver and two gunners, a man lying in a stretcher strapped across the back. The front-gunner of this jeep wore SAS wings on his chest in 1st Regiment manner. The man let go the machine-gun, peered through his face-veil at Caine. ‘What’re you waiting for? Christmas?’

  The voice – and the phrase – were strangely familiar: Caine, already out of the ditch, was helping Emilia up: he stopped in his tracks.

  ‘Do I know you?’

  The gunner chuckled, pushed back his face-veil. Caine found himself gawking at a lean face, a kedge-shaped nose, eyes like glittering blue crystals, bogbrush blond hair. Harry Copeland let his mouth twitch at the corners. ‘Doctor Livingstone, I presume?’

  Chapter Forty-Two

  The junction looked like a slaughter-house hit by a firestorm: 3-tonners blazing in the road, smouldering frames of two Kubelwagens and a civilian car: dead, wounded, maimed SS soldiers littering the road and verges, blood everywhere. A miasma of stinking smoke and butcher-shop smells hung over the scene. The only wireless had been in Kaltenbraun’s car: it had gone up with the vehicle. Grolsch had sent off a messenger to Jesi in one of the motorcycle combinations that had somehow survived the attack. He had requested a spotter-plane, given instructions that all posts and checkpoints be alerted, and expected a relief column within the hour. He supervised the medical orderlies, told them to move the wounded into the trees, left them to do their work. He lurched back to the Horch staff-car, found Stengel examining the vehicle carefully, whistling the ‘Radetzky March’ under his breath. ‘Six bullet-holes,’ the Reichsgeschäftsführer said.

  Grolsch couldn’t help chortling: it had been his idea to park the Horch out of sight in the bush: that it had been hit by a few stray rounds was the least of their worries. He was holding a gore-soaked pad against his cheek, grazed when he’d run out to help the wounded lorry-crews. His face was the colour of pasta: he’d lost his sling in the firefight, and the wound he’d taken a few days earlier had reopened, stained his tunic dark purple at the shoulder. He felt light-headed and heavy-legged but was grateful he’d escaped with only a scratch. He muttered a prayer of thanks to God before he even realized he was doing it. I shouldn’t have killed that priest, he thought. Shouldn’t have ordered the execution of those SAS-men either, or those partisans at Orsini. I know I was following orders, but that doesn’t make it right.

  He opened the door on the passenger side, slumped sideways in the seat with his legs out. Stengel got into the driver’s place, hunched over the wheel, pounded it with the side of his fist. ‘Jene verdammte Fallschirmspringer wieder,’ he cursed. ‘How did they get so deep behind our lines?’

  Grolsch pouted, stuck a cigarette in his mouth, tried to summon the strength to light it. ‘Not by parachute, I think.’

  ‘Three jeeps, did you see that?’

  ‘Certainly, Reichsgeschüftsführer.’

  Grolsch lit the cigarette with a lighter, drew in a lung-scorching drag of smoke. He was still in shock: the tables had turned so fast. He tried to replay the sequence of events: the enemy had evidently taken over the checkpoint, had overpowered the Sipo-SD guards, dumped them in the trees. It was an audacious move, he had to admit – one he hadn’t anticipated. They’d stopped the Kubelwagen carrying Ettore Falcone, shot Kaltenbraun and the driver, captured the others. At that point Grolsch himself had heard shooting, spotted the activity at the barrier: he’d ordered his troops to debus, instructed the mortar crew to open fire. They’d blitzed the barrier, hit the Kubelwagen, put the enemy to flight – the Falcone boy and five others in civilian dress, including a woman.

  ‘It was the countess,’ Stengel grunted, as if reading his thoughts. ‘Caine, too, dressed as a civilian.’ His lip curled. That bitch hit me with a bottle. Caine would have killed me with those grenades.

  ‘My absconders were there,’ Grolsch said. ‘Fishface and the Giant. They were wearing civilian clothes also, but you couldn’t mistake that big gorilla.’

  ‘Scheisse!’ Stengel rapped the steering wheel again.

  Grolsch smoked grimly. It was during the assault on the ditch that things had gone awry: the verdammte Fallschirmspringer had come out of nowhere, rolled in on a hurricane of fire. He’d been thunderstruck by the power of those little cars – that combination of quick-firing machine guns and powerful engines was ingenious and effective. Not only had they mowed down half his men, they’d also demolished the Kubelwagen and the lorries: while two jeeps had stopped to pick up the others, another had gone after the 3-tonners, skirted the wreck of the first Kubelwagen, steamed in behind a firewall. Grolsch shivered: the attack had been short, sharp and devastating: it was a wonder that any of them was still alive. He’d fired off a clip from his pistol, but the Tommies had manoeuvred the jeeps so fast he doubted he’d hit anything.

  ‘Those men are good,’ he croaked.

  ‘They are dangerous,’ Stengel corrected him. ‘The Führer was right to declare no quarter for them. In any case, it’s the Codex that concerns me.’

  Grolsch held his cigarette with one hand, patted his bloody cheek with the other. Half of his Sipo-SD platoon were dead or wounded: he’d seen the body of one of his corporals, SS-Rottenführer Böttcher, from Cologne, whose head had been knocked clean off his shoulders by a lump of flying shrapnel. Of the Waffen-SS men Stengel had brought with him, only a handful remained. Yet all the Reichsgeschäftsführer could think about was his blasted Codex and the bullet-holes in his car. Was a damn’ book worth all this carnage, no matter how badly Himmler wanted it? He was filled with a surge of loathing for Stengel: his whistling, his muttering, his furtive backward glances. He wasn’t a soldier but a bureaucratic toady, a martinet to whom subordinates were expendable. Grolsch retched: he felt decidedly sick, hoped he wouldn’t vomit.

  He took another lungful of smoke, coughed. ‘Do you think they plan to take the Codex?’ he asked in a croupy voice.

  Stengel’s cod-eyes bulged. ‘Why else would Caine have snatched the countess? Butterfield and his men were sent for the manuscript, I’m sure of that. Now Caine has taken over the task.’

  Or maybe he has it already, he thought. Maybe they retrieved it from its hiding place in the villa on their way out. But why put so much effort into snatching Ettore Falcone? He’s the countess’s brother, of course. Could it have been her condition for revealing the whereabouts of the Codex?

  His fingers gripped the steering-wheel. What if it was the boy, not the countess, who knew where the Codex was? That could explain why the bitch had held out, why she’d insisted that she didn’t know. He glanced in the rear-view mirror, saw a knot of dark shadows hovering behind the car: rodent-faced men in prison-grey with big, glittery eyes leering at him through the rear window. He recoiled: a cold flush seeped up his back. One hundred and five Jew-Bolshevik commissars. He caught his breath, glanced over his shoulder, saw nothing there.

  Grolsch clocked the movement. ‘What is it, Reichs
geschäftsführer?’

  Stengel shuddered. He had a sudden vision of the countess’s naked body tied to the bed with strands of her own underwear, of himself crouched over her, raping her with a wine-bottle. ‘Behold the ravishing beast,’ he whispered.

  Grolsch turned away in disgust, dropped his cigarette-butt, drew his legs into the car.

  Stengel had almost forgotten him: he was thinking again about the countess, about what she’d whispered under interrogation. What is sought lies in a room with no doors or windows. I am the door. Another holds the key. He’d already worked out that what is sought was the Codex. The part about a room with no doors or windows didn’t add up, but whatever it was, opening it evidently involved two people. I am the door. Another holds the key. Suddenly, Stengel saw it. The secret of the Codex concerned both the countess and her brother: the door and the key. Maybe there was a kind of code of which each of them knew a part and which made sense only when put together? How this was possible, he didn’t know, but he was certain he was on the right track.

  ‘They’ll be heading for the partisans,’ Grolsch commented.

  Stengel remembered his presence. ‘What?’

  ‘The partisan camp. That’s where they’ll be heading.’

  ‘But where is the partisan camp?’

  Grolsch shut the car door with a bang. ‘I have an informer among the Giappisti. It’s only a matter of time before we find out.’

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Le Marche, Italy

  11 October 1943

  It was late afternoon when they halted in the forest. Since Furetto was badly wounded, Ettore and Emilia had acted as guides, directed them along a tortuous network of cart-tracks and bridle-paths, kept them clear of checkpoints and Kraut patrols. They ran the wagons into a grove of ancient trees with trunks like silos and top-heavy boughs that drooped earthwards to a forest floor carpeted with leaves like rusted metal scabs. They leaguered the jeeps under an incline braided with broomstraw, rising among densely packed conifers in verdant herringbone patterns. No sooner had they debussed than a Fieseler Storch aircraft droned over: Caine peeked up through the canopy, clocked her progress across the tiny patches of blueness that showed through the leaves: she was hunting them, he thought: a few minutes later and they’d have been clocked.