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

  Caine had realized later that this factor was the very glue of the martial spirit. An army was drawn together by the notion that its members would rather die than admit their fear. This was why, just as he'd predicted to Copeland, no one had objected to joining this hazardous side-mission: it was the reason men volunteered for dangerous missions in the first place. If Caine had learned anything in his time as a soldier, it was that heroes were ordinary men who found themselves at the right place, at the right time. If you survived it was mostly down to luck.

  15

  The hanging in the Senussi village of Umm 'Aijil, had been halted by the sudden appearance of the village sheikh on a balcony overlooking the square. The old man, grasping a Mannlicher rifle, had demanded the release of all the prisoners. For platoon commander Oberleutnant Ernst von Karlsruhe, of No. 2 Company, the Brandenburg Special Duties Regiment, it was an exasperating delay in a job that should have taken no more than a couple of hours. If Karlsruhe had had his way, he would have rounded up the Arabs in the square and shot them down with his Schmeisser MG30, but his battalion commander's instructions had been specific: he was to make an example of this village. His plan was to burn most of the place down, leaving some of the corpses hanging from the walls of the mosque as a grisly reminder to any other Senussi who might be ready to harbour the enemy.

  This was the second delay von Karlsruhe had had to put up with. The first had occurred when a young woman had stabbed one of his men in the groin with a little knife. This had so inflamed the troops that they'd raped the girl savagely, and then raped a few others for good measure. Brandenburgers weren't known for ill discipline, but it had taken some time for him to restore order.

  The Oberleutnant had found the belligerence of these civilians unexpected. They fought back. Even now, when most of them were being confined by a cordon to the opposite side of the square, under the muzzle of the Schmeisser MG30 machine gun mounted on one of his trucks, he could hear them screeching and spitting at his men. Some were even attempting to attack the Germans with stones and bits of wood, and were being fought off with kicks and rifle butts.

  The Oberleutnant, a squat, knob-like officer with a predatory pike's face and a swaggering walk, was aware that his platoon's situation wasn't tactical. Too many of his troops were concentrated in one place, and he'd put out neither sentries nor forward pickets. This nagged at his sense of professionalism, but he told himself that there wasn't much to fear from the Allies. If the reports were true, Eighth Army was now scuttling back behind the Wire with its tail between its legs. The desert skies were so thick with Axis planes that an air raid was improbable.

  When the old man had first appeared on the balcony, Von Karlsruhe's reaction had been to guffaw at the Santa Claus figure with the wizened face and long white beard in his tattered Arab shirt, hooded cloak and tightly bound head-cloth. His laughter was quickly stifled, though, when the sheikh promptly shot off the face of a corporal standing right next to him. The round mashed the corporal's jaw and bulldozed into his brain, spattering the Oberleutnant with fragments of bone, grey matter and teeth. For a moment Von Karlsruhe stared incredulously at the corporal's twitching body. Then he drew out a handkerchief and began to wipe off the blood, remembering suddenly that the Mannlicher was a hunting rifle of celebrated accuracy, and that he was probably the next in its sights.

  Von Karlsruhe agreed to negotiate. While he was pretending to do so, raging inwardly at the waste of time, two hefty Brandenburgers sneaked up to the balcony and overpowered the old man. The weasel-faced Feldwebel in charge of the hanging detail came over and pointed out that the sheikh's daughter was among the prisoners. He suggested that before stringing the old man up, they should first gang-rape his daughter in front of him, then hang her. It would be a fitting revenge for the corporal he'd shot. The officer recoiled in disgust. ‘Are we animals?’ he raged. ‘There's been too much of that already. Hang her, yes, but keep it clean. Let's be done with it.’

  The girl accepted her fate with remarkable dignity. As the Feldwebel drew the hood over her head, her father, pinioned by the two Germans on the balcony above, tried to look away. One of the soldiers wrenched his head back, forcing him to watch. Another private was just looping the noose around her neck, under the Feldwebel's supervision, when a .303 ball-round hit him smack in the centre of the forehead. It had been fired at a distance of five hundred yards by champion sniper Corporal Harry Copeland.

  The soldier dropped without a sound. The Feldwebel turned with bulging eyes to see three enemy vehicles roiling down the street in fumes and dust, engines churning, machine guns stabbing out long spears of blood-red flame. Two twin Vickers ‘K’s thunked and drummed at a thousand rounds a minute, tick-ticking tracer and ball, weaving patterns across the road, skewering parked lorries, carving up the troops guarding the prisoners. The Germans reeled in shock, crashing, rolling, jiggering like puppets, flapping at gunshot wounds. Some dropped their weapons, others leap-frogged for the shelter of doorways and walls. The Senussi prisoners wormed through them and hared off down the street. The Schmeisser MG30 crew on the cab had just swivelled the gun to scythe them down when a 20mm shell shrieked and split open among them, shredding the gun to shards, whacking the crew apart in a searing flash of red, orange and black. The lorry guffed into crackling flame.

  The AFVs creased to a halt. Helmeted, stubble-bearded commandos in bleached khaki shorts hopped off and scattered, fixing bayonets, whaling Mills grenades, hammering rounds as they ran. Bren-gun crews made cover, lay prone, snapped out bipods, cocked working-parts, spritzed double-taps. A dozen or more Germans went down in the first wave of fire.

  Still on the armoured cars, Wallace and Jackson, their faces powder-black from the rounds they'd already fired, pivoted twin Vickers, frenetically pulling iron. They slingshotted tracer, boosted bullets at moving targets. Flash Murray, in the Daimler's turret, welted another two-pound incendiary at the enemy trucks. The shell scraped air, stonked a cab, detonated: glass flew, steel slivers shivered, the fuel tank mushroomed up in a bubble of molten gas.

  Copeland, in cover behind the Dingo's rump, clocked the two enemy on the balcony trying to heave the old man over the rail. He zeroed-in his sights, got the first of them in his cross-hairs. He held his breath, eased the trigger. He saw a scarlet blister swell just above the soldier's ear and watched him collapse, spewing blood. He sighted in on the other Jerry, cracked a second .303 slug through his chest, saw a smile frozen on his face as he piled over the rail and dropped into the street. Murray's two-pounder kettle-drummed, whomphing flame. A third shell scorched air. Another truck whiplashed fire and gas.

  A knot of commandos was advancing through smoke and dust, Tommy-guns blipping, Lee-Enfields cracking. Caine found himself looking down the barrel of Von Karlsruhe's Walther P38, and felt a round whirr past. He fired his Tommy-gun, sowing the officer's broad chest with blood and lead. Von Karlsruhe felt his body go numb, felt the earth come up to meet him, saw his world go black.

  A round slugged Caine's helmet, ramming him clean off his feet. A German goliath loomed over him with bayonet fixed. In slow motion, Caine saw the Corsican, Cavazzi, take the Jerry in a bearhug, one hand behind his shoulder, jerking him on to the razor-honed fanny in the other. Caine saw the knife bite hilt-deep into khaki drill, saw the point emerge from the Jerry's back, saw the two of them – the huge German and the tiny Corsican – locked in eternal embrace.

  A Jerry tried to brain Cavazzi from behind with a rifle butt, but the Corsican dodged, taking the whack on his helmet and shoulder. He let go his fanny, wriggling free to find Private ‘Bubbles’ O'Brian, ex-Royal Ulster Rifles, dragging his assailant off him by the belt. O'Brian swung the German round, and Caine, back on his feet, punched a .45 calibre round through his head, point blank. Another Jerry came from nowhere, hitting O'Brian like a tornado, slashing his throat with a bayonet. Caine saw the wound gape like a red mouth and felt his comrade's blood drenching his shirt. He shot the German through the chest, clocked the b
ullet blast out of his back in a sluice of burned flesh.

  Some of the enemy had taken cover behind a low wall around the mosque and were knocking loop-holes in the brick, laying down fire with Gewehr 41 semi-automatic rifles and Schmeisser sub-machine pistols. Caine, riding an adrenalin wave, saw the weasel-faced Feldwebel dragging a Senussi girl away with a bulging arm crushing her throat, and recognized her as the girl under the gibbet. He was going after them when he heard the punka-punka-punka of a Schmeisser MG30. He wheeled around, saw ‘channel-thrower’ Martin Rigby, ex-DCLI, gunny-sack over with a pattern of machine-gun wounds stitched at two-inch intervals along his thigh. Blood squirted from one of them in yard-long squidges. Caine whirled round with an ‘o’ of surprise on his mouth, just as Todd Sweeney, to his left, screamed, ‘Armoured car.’

  Caine blinked in disbelief. He saw the German AFV wheeling through the whorls of smoke and dust, clocked the goggle-eyes of the driver through the open hatch. He registered starbursts of fire from the mounted Schmeisser MG30, the razor-slash grin of the gunner behind it. He felt its fire shave air. He fell flat, his mind ransacking itself for clues as to how they could have missed the AFV, knowing this was the critical point in the scrap, knowing the surviving Jerries would now be poised for a counter-attack.

  The drumfire from the twin Vickers on the Dingo and the White faltered at the same time, and Caine thought Wallace and Jackson had both been knobbled by MG30 fire. Jackson was lying sprawled over his Vickers with a gunshot wound in the chest, but Wallace was wrestling with a jam. The giant unloaded and cleared his guns, smacking drums back in with huge hands, while Taffy Trubman stuck his double-chinned face out of the hatch to see what was up. Truman's fishy eyes fixed on a German at a window pointing a 7.92mm Gewehr 41 semi-automatic rifle at Wallace. The signaller poked his SMLE tentatively over the hatch and squeezed off a .303 round. The rifle smacked, and the Jerry at the window vanished. Wallace's mouth dropped open. He said nothing. He went on clearing the stoppage.

  On the White, Copeland perched over the still-conscious Jackson. He slapped a shell-dressing on his wound and barked at him to hold it in place. Cope scanned the scene through shifting smoke. He took in commandos hitting the deck, the enemy AFV rolling towards them, the Germans behind the mosque wall prepping a reprise. He heard the thud of the Schmeisser MG30, saw its muzzle sunbursting. He shouldered his rifle, gauged the range, lined up his sights, centred the MG30 gunner in the cross-hairs. He held his breath, greased the trigger, heard the Lee-Enfield crack, saw the gunner slump. At almost the same moment the Daimler rolled forward, her turret grating as it rotated. There was an ear-splitting wallop as a tongue of fire and gas licked out. Cope saw the enemy AFV going up like a rocket, coming apart in steel slivers and black smoke. He moved Jackson out of the way and braced the twin Vickers. On the Dingo, Wallace cleared the stoppage, reloaded, boosted fire.

  Caine felt the crump as the German AFV went up and saw the gunner's body spiral in smoke. He heard the resumed thump-thump of fire from the Vickers and took in the commandos skirmishing forward out of doorways, pumping Thompsons, firing Brens from the hip. Electric patterns of tracer bee-lined in, and Caine saw the enemy behind the mosque wall caught in crossfire, puppet-dancing, dropping weapons, squelching blood. Two commandos lobbed grenades that volcanoed up in V-shaped detonations of brickdust and mangled body parts. The Daimler loomed in closer, punching off an HE shell that dashed the wall into a million little pieces.

  As Caine picked himself up, he heard the girl shriek. He spotted the Feldwebel lurking at an open doorway, holding a Mauser pistol to her head. Caine ran towards him, shooting deliberately wide with his Thompson to suppress the Hun's fire without hitting the girl. He felt his breech-block clump on an empty chamber. The Feldwebel fired, the slug nicking Caine's knuckles. He saw the girl's features contorted. Furious, he went into a crouch and scrabbled for a spare magazine with his wounded hand. He brought it out slick with his own blood but couldn't fix it in place. Another round whizzed off his tin lid. He dropped his Thompson, drew his Colt .45. The girl shrieked again and flopped down in a dead faint, giving Caine a clear shot. He squeezed iron, shot the Feldwebel smack through the temple.

  Small-arms fire was fizzling out. The Vickers had gone silent. Murray was rotating the Daimler's turret left and right with nothing to shoot at. The village was still blazing, but the wind had changed, and in the square the smoke had begun to clear. Todd Sweeney realized that there hadn't been any return fire from behind what was left of the wall for the past two minutes. He crept up and lobbed in another No. 36 grenade. The grenade cracked off. The commandos waited. Lance Corporal Moshe Naiman, the Jewish-Palestinian interpreter, called out in German, ordering anyone left to come out with his hands up. There were no takers. ‘I don't think there's anyone alive behind there,’ Naiman said.

  ‘They fought bloody hard,’ Sweeney said. ‘Who the heck were those blokes anyway?’

  16

  Caine holstered his .45 and helped the girl to her feet. The old man with the Father Christmas beard he'd seen on the balcony came running up and took her from him. He said something in Arabic, pointing at Caine's hand, still dripping blood. Caine had almost forgotten the wound. He nodded, then slid a field dressing from his top pocket, knelt down and tried to apply it. This was difficult with a single shaky hand, and a moment later the girl took the dressing from him. Her hands were gentle and astonishingly steady for someone who'd just dodged death more than once. She was, Caine couldn't help thinking, a European's dream of an oriental woman – the long jet-black hair, the smooth café-au-lait skin, the highbridged nose with its hint of pride, the large round eyes, the full figure. He turned away from her, crushing these thoughts from his mind.

  The old man kicked the Feldwebel's body with a sandalled foot, then, apparently satisfied that he was really dead, picked up his fallen Mauser .38 calibre and stuffed it into his belt. He retrieved Caine's Thompson and laid it reverently at his feet – an action that looked remarkably like a tribute. ‘I am Sheikh Adud,’ he said in fractured English. ‘Sheikh of this village. This is my daughter, Layla.’ The girl nodded slightly, showing tiny crow's feet around her eyes. ‘Thank God you came,’ the sheikh went on. ‘You saved us… my daughter… thank God.’ He broke off, evidently overwhelmed by emotion, and Caine looked away, embarrassed. When the field dressing was in place, he thanked Layla, picked up the Thompson with his good hand, and stood. To the south, the houses were burning ever more fiercely: Caine could feel the heat on his face. ‘You have to evacuate the village,’ he said. Adud shook his head blankly. Caine shrugged and pointed to the mosque, where his men were gathering. ‘Come over there,’ he said.

  The square was a snapshot of hell on earth, redolent with the smells of blood, cordite, charred flesh and scorched engine oil. It was littered with enemy dead, lying like beached dolphins in dark patches of their own blood, their faces ghostly blue. There were, Caine noticed, some unspeakable wounds. The Jerry armoured car was still crackling and hissing from the 20mm incendiary: over to his right, he saw the skeletons of the three German trucks melting down in smoke and flame. His own vehicles were manoeuvring into defensive positions by the mosque, and Caine was pleased to see that the Bren-groups had formed a perimeter.

  There were figures trawling among the enemy dead – Senussi women in rainbow-coloured dresses. He wondered if they were looting the corpses, but a flash of steel told him otherwise. He raced over and caught hold of a tall woman with plaited hair and face tattoos who had just slit the throat of a German soldier, already badly wounded in the belly. The Jerry's jugular spurted gore. Caine grabbed the woman's wrist, tried to wrestle the dagger away from her. She resisted, cursing him roundly, her eyes wild – it was like fighting a hank of twisting cable, Caine thought. More women closed around him, screeching and yelling. He saw interpreter Moshe Naiman dashing over and let go of the woman abruptly, as if she were something poisonous. ‘What's this about?’ Caine asked the interpreter.

  Naiman, a l
ightly built, energetic, olive-skinned youth of about nineteen with a hooked nose and alert eyes, talked with the woman for a moment. ‘This soldier was one of those who raped her,’ he told Caine.

  ‘Tell her we don't murder wounded men,’ Caine said.

  When Naiman translated this, the women shrieked back at him like a flock of disturbed crows. ‘They say these men dishonoured them,’ Naiman said. ‘They claim the right of revenge – unless we're taking them with us, in which case the wounded are under our protection.’

  He watched Caine with a puzzled half-grin on his face. Both he and Caine knew that they couldn't take the wounded Germans, but killing them was a war crime that might one day come back to haunt them. ‘Just tell them to stop,’ Caine said, turning away. ‘Anyone found killing a wounded man will be shot.’ He knew at once that it was a punishment he'd never be prepared to carry out.

  Caine found Todd Sweeney coming towards him, gesturing impatiently at the burning AFV. ‘Where the heck did it spring from?’ he demanded. ‘You said there weren't any armoured cars.’

  Caine detected the barely suppressed anger in his voice and felt his face glow, knowing that Sweeney was right. The success of the action had depended on the enemy not being able to regroup, and the appearance of the AFV might easily have cost them the battle. There was no one to blame but himself. He realized that in his impulsive rush to play white knight there'd been a lot of factors he'd overlooked: what to do with enemy wounded, what to do with his own wounded, what to do if his unit lost so many men the Runefish mission was no longer viable. ‘They must have been hiding it,’ he answered lamely. ‘There was no sign of it on the recce.’ Another thought struck him. ‘Did you see any wireless aerials?’