Three Kings

John Schettler Three Kings

Part I

Fire With Fire

“Be stirring as the time; be fire with fire;

Threaten thethreatener and outface the brow

Of bragging horror.”

William Shakespeare: King John

Chapter 1

Sergeant Hobson stood there in the darkness as the light from his Ronson wavered. He had been following the Barbary ape, feeling his way in the dark and expecting to catch it just round the next bend in the labyrinth of Saint Michael’s Cave beneath the Rock. This tunnel led south, down the last of the rocky spine of Gibraltar until it ended somewhere beneath Windmill Hill. It went on for just another few hundred yards, and he could hear the chatter of the Macaque up ahead, but it was very dark. Then he came up short, surprised to reach an impasse in a great boulder that blocked his way.

He knew this rock, as it marked the end of the passage but his Macaque was nowhere to be seen. He held up his lighter, scanning the strange twisted shapes of the rocks. He remembered the old legend that said there was a hidden tunnel that went all the way under the straits to Spanish Morocco, though he knew that was folly. Then he keened up his senses, looking about when he heard the echo of his quarry resounding, hollow and very distant.

“Now where have you gotten to?” he said, hearing only the echo of his own voice. There was no sign of the beast.

The Barbary ape was gone, but Hobson wasn’t about to let the creature off that easily. “If you’ve gone off that way, why it means there may be another passage down here the engineers have yet to find. It that is so…” He thought about it, wondering what he should do. Then his mind settled on the only course he could take. I’d best find someone who can do something about it, he thought. I’d best get to a Lieutenant, or better yet, a Colonel. We need to get Artisan Engineers down here to see where that bloody ape has gone.

What good would that do, he thought? Suppose there is another passage down there, or a whole bloody network of caves and caverns. Might they go all the way to Spanish Morocco as the legend has it? And what if they did? There’s bloody Germans there by now as well. No way out for us any way you look at it… but then an idea came to him, and he raised an eyebrow. He had been one of the very few men on the Rock let in an a little secret, a special cave that had been dug high up on the Rock in a hidden chamber. It was called the “Stay Behind Cave,” and he knew about it because he was in the detail that moved the rock out when the engineers finished the work. Six men had volunteered to enter the chamber, where a year’s worth of supplies, along with a 10,000 gallon cistern of water, had been stored to sustain their lives after they were sealed inside in the event the Rock was ever taken by hostile forces. Two were physicians. Others worked for British intelligence.

Cleverly positioned high up with two small observation slits, the team could observe both the Bay of Algeciras and the Straits of Gibraltar. They had rigged up a stationary bicycle that could be pedaled to generate electricity for a radio set, and the mission was to observe and report on enemy activity. It was to be called “Operation Tracer,” the last trace of British occupation of the Rock, and Sergeant Hobson had little doubt that the men were already there, sealed away for their long voluntary entombment.

What if we could hide some of the lads down here, he thought? How many? There was no way to know until he got hold of the engineers and convinced someone to have a look. But there was one thing he did know. That Barbary ape was gone, without the slightest trace, and he knew enough about those wily creatures to realize they would not go anywhere unless there was a good chance of surviving. No. The little bugger knows something more about this place than we do, he realized.

And I’m bloody well going to find out where he’s gone.

The loss of Gibraltar had been a severe blow to British morale. Even though Liddell was still holding out in St Michael’s cave, there was already fighting for the upper galleries as the Germans sought to gain entry. It would be a long terrible siege. The German mountain troops would have to blast their way in, moving from one narrow passage to the next, around stony corners that led to chambers where the British could set off mines, booby traps, or simply lay in wait with a couple good Vickers machine gun teams. It would be a long and costly assault to pry the last of the British troops from their haunts, and the Germans were in a quandary as to how to proceed. Word from Berlin was adamant-get the job done-so the Oberleutnants and other senior officers gathered to discuss their options.