The moon rose. The mud walls of the houses on the far side of the open place stood suddenly white, and moment by moment the dark shadow-line retreated until it touched the base of the buildings and began to creep across the ground towards us. At last David tied his mine to the well rope and lowered it down. We left then, and the boy came with us, trailing the baby camel behind him. Other figures followed us, curious but not hostile. They don’t belong to Hadd,’ David whispered. They’re Bedou in from the desert to sell camels. Otherwise we’d never have got out of there alive.’
‘What did they think we were doing?’
‘I said we were testing the wells before installing pumping equipment. They know all about pumps. They’ve seen them in Buraimi and also in Saraifa.’ By the second well we picked up the line of our wire, clipped on another coil and trailed it to the limit up the hill just outside the walls. There David fastened it to the terminals of the plunger, and then he handed it to the boy and told him what to do. ‘He’ll tell the story of this moment till the end of his days.’ He patted the boy on the shoulder, smiling almost cheerfully as he turned and left him.
We climbed quickly, came out from the shadow of the wall on to the moonlit slope of the hill and on a rock, well above the rooftops of the highest houses, we halted. The boy was squatting there beside the detonator, his face turned towards us. David raised his hand above his head and then let it fall. The boy turned away and his shoulders hunched as he thrust down on the plunger.
The silence ceased abruptly, the stillness of the night rent by three deep, rumbling explosions that were instantly muffled and snuffed out by the collapse of the earth walls of the wells. The sound nevertheless went on, travelling back through the mountains, reverberating from face after face and gradually fading.
The boy still hadn’t moved when all sound had ceased. The baby camel stood beside him. It was as though the shattering effect of the explosion had turned them both to stone. Then suddenly he was jerked to life. For an instant his face was turned towards us, white and startled in the moonlight, and then he fled screaming down the hillside, the camel breaking away in ungainly puppet strides.
6. Fort Jebel al-Akhbar
We turned then and followed a zig-zag track that climbed by crumbling outcrops, and below us the town came to life, the sound of voices, the glimmer of lights. A shot stabbed the night, but it wasn’t directed at anything in particular and we were close under the fort before the pursuit got under way. We could see them clear on the moonlight slope below us, zig-zagging up the path by which we had come. There were about a dozen of them, climbing in single file and moving fast with the agility of mountain goats.
The fort tower hung on the lip of the cliff above us, a white stone keep crumbling to decay, and where the track doubled back through a narrow defile in the rocks, David posted Hamid to guard our rear. ‘I hope to God we find Salim there,’ he panted. The path had steepened so that we climbed with our hands as well as our feet, rocks slipping away from under us. And then we reached the walls and the track led through a narrow opening.
We were inside the outer defences then, an open space of half an acre or more that occupied all the top of the hill. The walls had originally been about twenty feet high with a firing step round the inside, but they were now in a bad state of repair and there were few places where they were higher than ten feet. They were horse-shoe shaped, the two ends finishing abruptly at the cliff edge, the tower between them. There was no sign of the camels.
‘Damn the old fool! He should have been here by now.’ David’s sudden uneasiness made me wonder whether perhaps Salim had taken the opportunity to desert us. But when I suggested this, he shook his head. ‘Why do you think I sent Ali with him? That boy knew what those camels meant to us. No, something has happened to them.’
A shot ripped the silence apart. Hamid had opened fire on our pursuers and the sound of it echoed back from the naked rock faces that surrounded us. A scatter of shots sounded from lower down the slope and a bullet hit the wall close by us with a soft thud.
‘Wait for me here. I’m going to see what’s happened.’ David ran quickly across the open courtyard of the fort and out through the main gate on the north side, and when he was gone, I climbed to the broken top of the wall and threw myself down beside bin Suleiman. From this vantage point we commanded the final approach to the fort.
Perched high on the edge of the sheer cliff face, I could see right down into the town of Hadd. The market square, where we’d mined the third well, was clearly visible, a white rectangle with people moving about or standing in little groups. It was not more than a thousand feet away, an easy rifle shot. And the wells outside the walls; I could see them, too. I began to understand then why David had been so sure these damaged wells would stay out of action.
Immediately below was the defile. I could see Hamid stretched out on top of one of the rock shoulders. His rifle gleamed as he raised it to his shoulder. A stab of flame, the crack of the shot, and then silence again. On the slope beyond there was now no sign of pursuit. The men who had started to follow us were pinned down amongst the rocks. It was an incredible position, impossible to take from that side so long as it was defended by men who knew how to shoot.
A bullet whined low over my head and I ducked automatically, poking my rifle forward and searching the steep slope beyond the defile. But there was nothing to fire at. The night was still and without movement.
We remained in that position for two solid hours whilst the stars moved sedately round the sky and all away to our right the desert stretched its white expanse. The sense of isolation, of a long wait for ultimate death, gradually took hold of me. It had a strange effect, a throw-back, I think, to the mood that had filled me as we lay pinned down like rats on the slopes of Monte Cassino … a mood compounded of fear and the desire to survive that expressed itself in the need to kill, so that when a figure moved on the slope below me, my whole being was concentrated in my trigger finger, and as he stumbled and fell my only feeling was one of elation, a deep, trembling satisfaction.
A little after three the first glimmer of dawn brought the mountains into sharp relief. A small wind whispered among the stones and it was quite chill. It was the time of night when the body is at the lowest ebb and I began to worry about David, and about our rear. By now men from the village below could surely have circled Jebel al-Akhbar to climb by the camel track to the main gate. I called to bin Suleiman and made a motion with my hand to indicate what I was going to do, and then I abandoned my position and started on a tour of the walls.
The result was encouraging. They were built on sheer rock slopes. Only on the north side was there any means of reaching the fort. There the camel track climbed steeply from the desert below to enter by the only gateway. Old palm tree timbers sagged from rusted iron hinges. This was the way attack must come if it were to succeed. Bastion towers flanked the gate on either side and from the top of one of them I could see down the whole length of the track. It was empty. So, too, were the slopes of the hill. There was no cover and nowhere could I see any sign of David or the camels.
I was turning away when my eye caught a movement on the white floor of the desert below; four shapes moving slowly, their shadows more sharply defined than the shapes themselves. They were camels moving towards the bottom of the track, and as they turned to start the climb, I made out the figure of a solitary rider on the leading camel.
I lay down then on the broken stone top of the bastion and pushed the safety catch of my rifle forward. Our camels had numbered six and with David there should have been three riders. They came on very slowly whilst the grey of dawn overlaid the moonlight and the whiteness faded out of the desert.
As the light improved and they came nearer, I saw the body of a man lying slumped over the saddle of the second camel. Skin bags bulging with water confirmed that the beasts were ours and soon after that I was able to recognize David. I met him as he rode in through the broken gateway. He didn’t say anything as
he dismounted, but his face looked grey. ‘What happened?’ I asked.
Those shots we heard … they rode straight into a party of the Emir’s men camped outside the town.’ He asked me then whether they’d tried to rush us yet.
‘No,’ I said. ‘They’re still pinned down less than a third of the way up the slope.’
‘Good. Give me a hand, will you.’ He led the second camel to the foot of the tower and got it couched. The body tied with cord across its back was Ali’s. ‘He’s badly hurt.’ We laid him gently on the ground. He moaned softly, barely conscious. He’d a ghastly wound in the chest. I’d seen the effect of a soft-nosed Bedouin bullet on the metal of a Land-Rover; now I was seeing its effect on human flesh and the sight appalled me. He’d a knife wound in the shoulder, too, and he’d lost a lot of blood; the dark, broad-lipped, girlish face had taken on a sickly pallor.
David stood for a moment, staring down at him. ‘Poor kid,’ he murmured. ‘I found him lying in a pool of blood by the ashes of their camp fire. I suppose they thought he was dead. Salim’s body was close beside him. They’d slit his throat.’ His voice shook. The murdering, dung-eating bastards! Why did they have to do it? There were at least twenty of them there, twenty of them against an old man and a boy.’ Apparently he’d found the camp deserted, our four camels wandering loose. They must have been disturbed by the sound of the explosions,’ he said. ‘Otherwise they wouldn’t have left the camels. They only took one. It was the other that led me to their camp; it was I
wandering around on three legs, bellowing with pain. I had to finish it off.’ He gave a quick, angry shrug as though wanting to dismiss the whole thing from his mind. ‘Well, let’s get him up into the tower. He can’t lie here.’
He got the camel to its feet and stood it close by the wall of the tower. Standing on its back he was just able to reach the hole halfway up the tower’s side. He scrambled in and from the dark interior produced a crude ladder made of palm wood. We dragged the boy up and laid him on the dirt floor and David plugged and bound the wounds again, using his headcloth which he tore in strips. ‘A bloody lousy piece of luck,’ he said. ‘I’d planned to get you away before daylight. With Salim to guide you, you’d have been in Buraimi tomorrow, in Sharjah by the next day. I’d got it all planned. Now … ‘ He shrugged. ‘We’ll have to do some fresh thinking.’
It was daylight now. It came filtering into the interior of the tower through the entrance hole and through four narrow slits in the thick walls. They were firing embrasures and they reminded me of the turret room I’d occupied in Saraifa. But the view was vastly different. Two of them looked out east and west, each covering an arm of the walls. The other two, close together, faced south; they looked straight down on to Hadd itself.
‘Well, that’s all I can do for him.’ David got to his feet. ‘You stay here. I must have a word with Hamid and bin Suleiman. And then we must deal with the camels.’
He left me sitting by one of the embrasures and I had time to think then. The excitement of the action that had sustained me so far was gone now. The future stared me in the face and I began to be afraid of it. However impregnable the fort’s position, there were still only four of us, and right there below me was that Arab town teeming with life and utterly hostile. I could see men clustered thick in the open square and some of them were armed. It could only be a matter of time.
They had already started work on the well inside the walls. Men were being lowered into it and every now and then a bundle of stones and rubble was handed up. The sun was rising behind the mountains. The sky was crimson and all the desert flushed the colour of a rose. It looked very beautiful, so serene in the clear morning air, and the mountains standing like cut-outs painted purple.
It was just after the sun had lipped the mountain tops that David climbed back into the tower. They’ve started work on that well in the square, haven’t they?’
I nodded. The little square was teeming like an ant-hill.
‘What are they - townspeople or the Emir’s bodyguard?’ He had his rifle with him and he came straight over to where I was squatting on the floor beside the embrasure.
‘Both,’ I said. The men working on the well were mostly stripped to the waist. But standing about, watching them, were a number of armed men, their bodies strapped about with cartridges, a band of brass that glinted in the sun; their rifles, untrammelled with silver, had the dull gleam of modern weapons.
He pushed past me, kneeling in the embrasure, steadying himself with his elbows on the sill as he brought the rifle to his shoulder and fired. The sound of the shot was very loud in that dim, confined place. ‘That’s one of them that won’t go murdering old men and boys again.’ He was trembling slightly as he sat back on his heels.
The crowd in the square was scattering. A little knot gathered in one corner, and then that, too, melted away and the square was suddenly empty. ‘An occasional shot like that and they’ll learn to leave it alone. In a day or two they’ll begin to understand what it’s like to have the sources of water cut off, the wells dry.’ He got up and set his gun against the wall. ‘Not that they’ll die of thirst. They’re better off than the people we saw in Saraifa.’ He went back down the ladder and left me staring at the empty rectangle of the sun-drenched square, littered with the baulks of timber they’d brought in to shore up the inner walls of the well. Behind me the wounded boy moaned restlessly, muttering words I couldn’t understand, and when I went to him, I found his dark eyes wide open and staring, his skin dry and parched. I gave him some water and then David called to me.
He and Hamid had started unloading the camels. Bin Suleiman kept watch from the eastern wall. We worked fast, but the sun was high above the mountains before we’d humped all the stores and the last of the water skins up into the tower. ‘What about the camels?’ I asked as we lifted the saddles from their backs. It was already blisteringly hot, the bare rock acting as a fire-brick and throwing back the sun’s heat. There was no vestige of vegetation inside the fort for them to feed on.
‘I’ll keep one for you. The other three will have to be slaughtered.’
They were fine beasts in the prime of life and in beautiful condition. But when I started to remonstrate, he cut me short. ‘What did you imagine we were going to do with them? We’ve no other meat.’ He stared at me angrily. ‘Even the Bedou, who love camels a damn’ sight more than I do, don’t hesitate to kill them when they’re short of food. And we’re going to be short of everything before we’re through.’
I stood and stared at him. Without camels, he’d have no means of retreat. He’d be trapped here …
‘Do you reckon you could get through to Buraimi on your own?’
I hesitated. But I knew now there was no alternative for me - only death here on this pitiless hilltop. ‘I could try.’
‘Good. We’ll keep the one you’ve been riding then and get you away tonight as soon as it’s dark.’
Immediately after we’d breakfasted, bin Suleiman butchered the three camels, slitting their throats and letting the blood drain into a tin bowl. The carcases were then disembowelled and the meat cut into strips and hung to dry in the sun. Flies buzzed and the place smelt of blood, and yet it didn’t seem unnatural. Sand and rock and the blazing sky, that boy lying in the dim interior of the tower, his breath gurgling in his throat and blood seeping on to the floor, and below us an Arab town ruled by a man consumed by a murderous greed. Death didn’t seem so hateful when life itself was so cruel.
Action followed hard upon my thoughts. Hamid, from his lookout post on the very top of the tower, called down to us; men were circling the hill to the north. From the walls we watched them climb by the camel track. They were well spaced out, their guns ready in their hands. Others were coming up by the zig-zag path direct from Hadd. Lying prone on the blistering stones, we waited, holding our fire. The stillness seemed to break their nerve, for they began shooting at a range of almost three hundred yards.
The attack when it came was a
senseless, ill-directed affair, men clawing their way up the last steep rock ascent to the walls without any supporting fire. We caught them in the open, unprotected, and the attack petered out almost before it had begun. They went back down the sides of the hill, taking their wounded with them and not leaving even a single sniper to harass us from the shelter of the rocks. ‘It won’t be as easy as that next time they come.’ David’s eyes had a cold, dead look, untouched by the light of battle that I’d glimpsed for a moment on bin Suleiman’s broad animal face.
We had used, I suppose, no more than two or three dozen rounds, but it was sufficient to make David anxious about his ammunition. Whilst the two Wahiba kept watch, David and I lowered the ladder through a hole in the mud floor of the tower and climbed down into the black rubble-filled pit below. It was slow work, searching in the dark, for we’d nothing but our hands to dig with and after so long David wasn’t at all certain where he had buried the boxes. We must have been down there at least an hour, and all the time we were scrabbling at the rubble with our hands, AH lay delirious on the floor above. Twice Hamid’s rifle cracked as he carried out David’s orders and kept the wells in Hadd clear of people. Those sounds and the darkness and the feeling that at any moment we might be overwhelmed through lack of ammunition gave a sense of desperate urgency to our work.
Finally we found the boxes and hauled them through the hole to the floor above - more than a thousand rounds of ammunition and two dozen grenades. We’d barely got the boxes open when Hamid reported a Land-Rover leaving the palace. We watched it from the embrasures, blaring its horn as it snaked through Hadd’s crooked alleys and out through the main gates of the town. It headed south toward Saraifa and David let it go, not firing a shot. ‘The sooner Sheikh Abdullah is informed of the situation here,’ he said, ‘the sooner his raiding force will leave Saraifa in peace.’ His eyes were shining now, for this was what he’d intended. That little puff of dust trailing across the desert was the visual proof of the success of his plan.
The Doomed Oasis Page 27
