Ritzen spoke to him, and Ming replied, whereupon the minister turned back to Algy with an expression on his face that prepared him for serious tidings.
"The prisoners are to be moved from the prison at Tunhwang," translated Ritzen.
"To where?" asked Algy tersely.
"At first to Ansi. That's a long way away from the Red Highway. From there they will probably go on to Siberia. Ming got the news from the baker who serves the prison."
"When are they going ?" asked Algy.
"To-night. That is to say, they will start soon after midnight, which is the usual time for starting a journey in this part of the world. By doing that the first stage is reached soon after dawn. A stage is the distance from one water-hole to the next." For a minute nobody spoke. Then Algy said, wearily: "We just needed that to round of a really jolly afternoon."
CHAPTER VI GINGER WINS AN ARGUMENT
IT was some minutes before anyone spoke again. Consternation or dejection was written on every face round the little oil lamp that had been lighted. It seemed to be taken for granted that nothing could be done, that any hope of saving the prisoners could now be abandoned.
As for Ginger, he wished fervently that Biggles was there. He would at least have attempted something. He had a saying, there's always a way if you can find it. Even in this desperate emergency he would not have rested until he had found a way, Ginger was sure. He had another axiom.
The stickiest operation sometimes turns out to be the easiest. Well, this one looked sticky enough in all conscience.
From the drawn faces of the people around him it was plain that they had taken the depressing news to heart. That was only to be expected. They had known the missing men for years. Sometimes they had travelled together far out into the unknown, sharing the perils as they worked in the same good cause.
At last Ginger looked up at Ritzen. “How far are we from Tunhwang?”
"The best part of twenty miles, as near as I could judge."
"And Ansi is over a hundred miles farther on?”
“That"s right. Once our friends get there, they will never be seen again.
Others we know have travelled that same dreadful route. Why do you ask?"
"I was just thinking," answered Ginger vaguely.
"I was probably thinking on the same lines," said Algy.
“You mean, you think we ought to do something?”
"Yes."
“The trouble is there isn't much time. If we decided on anything it would have to be done to-night.
Ritzen stepped in. "My dear young man, you can dismiss the matter from your mind," he said, almost severely. "The thing is hopeless."
"I still have to be convinced that it is utterly hopeless," returned Ginger quietly. "And I shall take a bit of convincing," he added. "If my chief was here, he'd tell you that nothing is ever hopeless."
Ritzen stared at him. "Surely you're not thinking of going to Tunhwang!"
"I am. "
"But that's ridiculous," protested Miss Summers, and even Father Dubron looked at Ginger sadly, as if doubting his sanity.
Said Ritzen. "You don't know the way. You can't speak the language. You couldn't walk— "
"I wasn't thinking of walking," interposed Ginger, a trifle impatiently.
"How else could you get there?"
"By riding a horse."
"What horse?”
"There are several down below."
"The Kirghiz horses?"
"There are eight horses. I don't care who they belong to."
"The Kirghiz said their horses were worn out."
"I know they did, but I don't believe it. They didn't strike me as looking particularly tired. That was simply an excuse to stay here."
"They wouldn't need an excuse for that."
"I doubt if even you know what was in their minds."
Ritzen shook his head sadly.
"Suppose someone tries to be a bit encouraging for a change," suggested Ginger, almost plaintively. "I shall not deliberately commit suicide, you may be sure. So far I'm just turning over the possibilities, that"s all."
Ritzen shook his head again. "You don't know the way, and you have no idea of what this desert country is like."
"I've an idea," countered Ginger. "Ming must know the way. No doubt Feng does too. One might act as guide."
"And having got there what would you do?"
"I haven't thought as far as that yet," admitted Ginger. "Would you mind asking Ming if he knows how the prisoners will travel and what is likely to be the size of their escort?"
Ritzen put the question, and turning back to Ginger gave the answer. "He says he has no definite information, but it is almost certain they will go in one of the covered carts used in this region. There is, in fact, no other form of wheeled transport here, for the simple reason there is no proper road. These awful rutted tracks would break the springs of any ordinary vehicle. The escort will probably consist of anything up to half a dozen soldiers walking beside the cart. Four is the usual number when there are only a few prisoners. Actually, even that is only for the look of the thing, for there is no likelihood of an attempt to escape. The prisoners, having no food and nowhere to go, would be recaptured at once—unless they wandered out into the desert and starved to death."
Ginger looked at Algy. "That doesn't sound too bad to me."
"The escort will consist of soldiers, and they will of course be armed,"
Ritzen pointed out.
"So shall we," averred Ginger. Then he had his brainwave. "What about the Kirghiz!"
"What about them?"
"We might employ them."
"Employ them! Those desperate men!"
Ginger smiled. "We can be pretty tough ourselves at times."
"I can assure you that nobody has ever succeeded in employing Kirghiz outlaws."
"That's probably because they were expected to work for nothing."
"And what were you thinking of offering them ? "
"The two things which, according to you, they like most.' Fighting and money."
"But we have no money." "It's available, should we need it. The British Government has never jibbed at paying for service, and as all the world knows it has never failed to pay its debts. If we got safely home, I'd undertake to fly back here and drop a bag of money—whatever we promised."
Everyone now began to take an interest and a faint atmosphere of hope became perceptible.
Algy looked at Ginger. "You know, I think you've got something there."
"What do you use for money in this part of the world?" Ginger put the question to Ritzen.
"There are several currencies, both coin and paper money," was the reply.
"But the money that is accepted by everyone is in the form of lumps of silver called taels. A tael is worth a bit under two shillings."
Algy did some mental arithmetic. "Could we say that a thousand taels would be roughly about a hundred pounds?
"Roughly, yes."
"Would that interest the Kirghiz do you think?"
Ritzen smiled bleakly. "I doubt if they've ever seen so much money. Such a sum would be a fortune here, where men work all the hours of daylight for around a penny a day."
"All right. Then let's get weaving," suggested Ginger. "How about you having a word with the bandits and finding out how the idea of being millionaires appeals to them?"
Miss Treves spoke. "Are you thinking of attacking the cart?"
"Put it this way," answered Ginger. "I'm trying to think of some way of saving innocent people from a miserable death. In my view, any means justifies that end."
"C'est vrai," declared the French member of the party, apparently a realist like most of his countrymen. "I dislike bloodshed," said Miss Summers.
"So do I—particularly when it's likely to be my own," returned Ginger.
"I hold that it's unpardonable."
"It's also unpardonable of these godless communists to carry off our friends for no other reason than sheer hate,
" declared Ginger warmly.
"Let's waste no more time arguing about that, please."
"I'll go and speak to the Kirghiz," said Ritzen, getting up and going into the darkness.
"If they won't come themselves, ask them if we can have the spare horses," requested Algy. "Tell them they must make up their minds quickly or it'll be too late."
For all the arguments he had put forward Ginger knew in his heart that this was the craziest scheme which they had ever committed themselves.
The whole project had been a wild one from the outset, but it was now, he felt, fast approaching the fantastic. But as he had said in an aside to Algy, he wouldn't have slept had they done nothing. Gnawing at his conscience would have been the thought of the wretched people in the cart getting ever farther away from any hope of deliverance. With or without the co-operation of the bandits he did not hold any high hopes of success. But anything was better than sitting doing nothing at all.
Ritzen came back. "They will go," he announced briefly.
"Capital!" cried Algy.
"The thousand taels did the trick."
"Cheap at the price."
"They have a doubt. It is that the prisoners, fearing them more than their captors, will not leave the cart. For good faith they want one of us to go with them."
"I had every intention of going," declared Ginger.
"No, I'll go," stated Algy.
"Not likely," answered Ginger. "You've plenty on your plate here. It was my scheme. I'm the one to go. That's settled."
Ritzen joined in again. "They want us to keep their wounded comrade in the caves and look after him until they get back. They're afraid that the Tiger may come back with more soldiers. If they found a Kirghiz here they would at once put him to death without mercy."
"That's fair enough," agreed Algy. "As a matter of fact I was thinking that myself."
"I said that if any of us got home we would see that a bag of money was dropped in the sand where the stones have been cleared," said Ritzen.
"There was a question about the horses," he continued. "There are four white prisoners and the Abbot, making five in all. There are four Kirghiz. They have five horses plus the three captured from the troops, making eight. That means only three horses available for the five prisoners."
"I doubt if the Abbot would ride," said Miss Summers. "He's very old."
"We'd manage him somehow," declared Ginger. "How many horses will there be drawing the cart?"
"Usually two."
"We'll borrow those if necessary," said Ginger, brushing the difficulty aside in his impatience.
"You will all come back here if the plan succeeds? queried Ritzen.
"Of course, to be ready for the plane when it comes. But time is precious. If our wild and woolly allies are ready, let's get off."
That ended all argument.
The only preparations Ginger made were to put a couple of biscuits in his pocket with a flask of water, and throw on a loose Chinese robe which Feng produced from somewhere. This, it was thought, would serve both as camouflage and as an extra garment in the cold night air.
And just how cold it could be Ginger was soon to learn.
CHAPTER VII A LAND OF FEAR
IN twenty minutes the rescue party was on its way, winding through a seemingly endless succession of valleys and defiles so that it was only by checking on the stars that Ginger could keep any sense of direction.
At first the pace was a brisk walk, but as soon as the moon rose the Kirghiz broke into a gentle canter which, as they seemed to have no difficulty in keeping it up, Ginger took to be their normal speed. The horses were small and rough, but wiry-looking beasts.
How the bandits found their way through the maze of dead-looking hills that all looked alike was to Ginger a mystery, even though he took into account the fact that they had been born to such country and knew no other. There was no track, or a semblance of one, but they appeared never to be in doubt. He could only suppose that the serrated skylines served as signposts. They travelled in silence. Not once did they speak. Even the horses, three of which were being led, seemed to know, perhaps from training, that silence in the silent desert is the golden rule, and in some miraculous way they seldom kicked a stone.
In such bizarre conditions it is not surprising that Ginger lost all sense of reality. He found it hard to believe that this was really happening. It was all too preposterous. As a schoolboy he had read the usual stories about brigands. He knew the old rhyme about the brigands sitting round their camp fire. Now, here he was, riding with a band of them across the middle of Asia. They were the real thing too.
They had already demonstrated that plainly enough. No, it couldn't be happening. Presently he would wake up.
Then he smiled foolishly to himself at the absurd thought of what Biggles would think if he could see him. He lost all count of time. In some strange way such man-made sections of it as hours and minutes seemed no longer to have meaning. Here, the sun, the moon and the stars, the dawn, the dusk and the seasons, were the only measurements that mattered.
Still the Kirghiz pressed on without a spoken word, without a pause, with hardly a glance to left or right, clearly with no more doubts about their way than if they had been on a broad highroad. To Ginger, each inky gorge, each brooding valley, each gap through the everlasting dunes, was exactly like the last. Ritzen had been right in one respect. Alone in such nightmare country he would have become hopelessly lost. No wonder Feng had called it the Black Gobi. No wonder, according to him, it was peopled by demons and monsters who lured :foolish travellers to their doom.
After what seemed an eternity it was the numbing cold that dispelled the illusion of a dream. There was no doubt whatever about the cold. Without the sun to warm it the thin air was perishing. The Kirghiz now began to advance more cautiously.
Before showing themselves on a skyline one would dismount, creep forward and survey the ground ahead. Ginger supposed that either they were nearing a caravan trail or approaching their destination. During one such halt he saw lying on the ground beside him an enormous pair of curved horns, and recognised them as coming from the head of the great desert sheep called Ovis poli. From the way the bones had been scattered it looked as if some beast had pulled the animal down and devoured it.
Instinctively his eyes wandered to the bare, wrinkled hills around him.
It was a dismal, terrifying country, he mused. What it was like in the winter, when storms and ice and snow swept down from the north, was something best left to the imagination. He hoped he would not be there to see it.
The party moved on even more slowly. At long last it stopped. The Kirghiz dismounted. Ginger did the same, but not before he had gazed across a plain that now stretched away before them. He discerned a slender grey ribbon winding across it; the track, he supposed.
The halt had been made at a point where it fringed the hills. So this, he surmised, was the one trail that linked Tunhwang with Ansi. Never had he seen a path so sinister. There was something almost evil about the way it crept secretly out of the gloom to glide like a serpent across the plain and fade again in the dim, mysterious distances.
The Kirghiz continued to go about their business like men who knew exactly what they were doing, having done the same thing many times before—as no doubt they had. One man took all the horses and led them back into the valley from which they had emerged.
The others, after a signal to Ginger, went forward a little nearer to the track, where they vanished from sight like phantoms in a slight fold in the ground. Ginger found a similar place for himself, not without qualms, knowing, what was going to happen. It did not appear to be a particularly good place for an ambuscade, but apparently, the bandits thought it was.
It had this advantage It did not look suitable for the part it was to play, and, for that very reason the escort would suspect nothing They settled down to wait.
This, to Ginger, was the most nerve-testing phase of the enterprise.
The
landscape, in all its stark sterility, was bathed in hard moonlight.
The stars hung like beacons in the vast expanse of sky, the constellations following their everlasting course across the heavens. All was still. Ginger had known silences, but none like this. The hush was that of a world from which all life had departed There was something so terrible about it that he was afraid the nervous pounding of his heart would be heard.
The cold was intense. He was glad of his robe.
How long he lay there without sound or movement he did not know, for, fearful in case the luminous dial might be seen from a distance, he had put his watch in an inside pocket. There was no need to know the time. He became stiff and cramped, but still he dared not break the awful spell that seemed to hold the desert in its grip. Again the unreality of it all took him by the throat so that he was conscious of his heavy breathing after the long ride. The suspense became torture. The Kirghiz might have been stones for all the signs of life they showed.
46 Biggles in the Gobi Page 6
