by John Harris
I saw Leach’s eyes move towards Houston’s and I knew I was right. Morena stared.
‘Well, by God!’ he said.
‘They found it here,’ I went on. ‘They found it when they found the jeep and the bodies and they thought then it would be nice to keep it. But they knew they couldn’t get away with it, with the rest of us waiting up there for them. So they hid it. For all I know they were probably the bastards who shot the Paymaster.’
‘He was dead,’ Houston said quickly, his face suddenly scared. ‘They were all dead!’
‘OK, they were dead. And that left only four people who knew about it, didn’t it? You, Leach, Nimmo and Ward. And Ward made your shares bigger because he was unfortunate enough to get himself killed at Alamein. Perhaps he was lucky. He never knew his friends were bastards.’
‘Christ!’ Morena breathed.
‘It does come as a bit of a shock, doesn’t it?’ I said. ‘Especially when you remember they were just waiting for us to turn our backs to pick it up and nip off without us. I suppose it had even entered each one of their rotten little minds to dig it up on their own and leave the lot of us in the lurch.’
‘Look’ – Nimmo drew a deep breath – ‘there’s no harm done. The dough hasn’t been touched. It hasn’t even been found yet. We just know it’s here.’
Houston nodded. ‘It’s here,’ he said quickly. ‘Somewhere in front of the cave.’
‘Unfortunately, though, you’ve lost the map,’ I pointed out, ‘and the bearings were too complicated to remember.’
‘He should have made a note of the bloody things!’ Houston nodded at Nimmo, whose eyes glowed viciously.
‘Perhaps I should have let you have ’em,’ he growled. ‘So you could have done the job on your own, like Leach.’
‘It is a pretty big area to dig up without knowing exactly, isn’t it?’ I said, almost enjoying their fury.
‘We can do it,’ Nimmo said.
‘From memory?’
‘We can work together. Nothing’s different. There’s nobody else knows about it but us.’
He was trying to bargain, I could see. ‘Just us,’ I said. ‘Each one of us wondering when he’s going to get a knife in the back. Just us – and Ghad Ahmed.’
Nimmo’s face fell.
‘Christ, man,’ I said disgustedly, ‘you might have told Morena and me. It might become rough. Ghad Ahmed’s hard enough to push things to the extreme if he has to. He believes that dough’s his. He’s been looking for it ever since his father died. I’ll bet that’s the only reason he’s here with Crabourne. His Qalam shepherd saw the Paymaster being buried and it didn’t take Ghad Ahmed long to guess the chest they’d been expecting had also been buried.’
They didn’t say anything and I went on bitterly, speaking chiefly to Morena: ‘I bet the late lamented and beloved Jimmy Nimmo, senior, would have been back long since if he could,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t the distance that stopped him. It was because this place was a forbidden military area or because he couldn’t raise the fare or was in trouble with the police. That and the uproar. When he hid that chest he didn’t expect the questions and the court martial and the Provost people searching for so long. He didn’t realise, of course, that there was enough money in that chest to start another war. We were trying to buy a lot of help with it, and it was worth burying and coming back for, even after twenty years. But, unfortunately, there were too many people watching for them coming. That’s why he never dared to make a move. Because, if anyone had the nerve, he had!’
We walked slowly back to the camp, with Leach limping in the middle, as though we were all suddenly afraid he’d run out on us, all of us knowing things could never be the same again. They didn’t even look now like the men I’d known during the war. Then, nobody could ever do without anybody else and out of that knowledge had sprung the comradeship that had overridden all undercurrents of bad feeling; but now, where once the issue had been a straightforward and uncomplicated one of duty and nothing else, we were hag-ridden by ambition and greed.
Nobody spoke on the way back, but you could literally feel the distrust moving from one to the other of us. There was a lot of noise from the Arab compound and the camels seemed to be restless. The breeze had started again from nowhere, stirring the sand into small gritty whirlpools, and I decided it must be that which was unsettling them. I saw a camel move across the dying glow of a fire and decided it must be a stray, then I saw a man run after it and there was silence again.
Just as we reached the camp, sullen and angry with each other, we heard the roar of an engine from the Vehicle Park and we all stopped dead and tried to stare through the darkness. For a moment we seemed to be frozen, then, as a chorus of yells started up in the distance, Morena shouldered us aside and set off running.
‘The bastards are pinching the trucks!’ he yelled.
Four
In the semi-darkness it was hard to see just what was going on, but as we pounded towards the vehicle park I saw what appeared to be a whirlpool of figures milling around in a cloud of moon-laden dust.
Sharp-edged by one of the camp-fires, I saw a tent go down and realised it was ours, but, as we swung towards it, a jeep moved off; its engine screaming in the hands of an inexperienced driver, knocking down a stake as it went. It began to increase speed, jolting and rolling as it lurched over the flattened boundary fence, trailing a strand of wire and a broken stake behind it, and we swung round and ran to head off the shadowy bulk.
We were far too late and turned again towards the Vehicle Park. As we reached it a figure rose in front of me. I lashed out instinctively and it vanished from sight, sending a pile of empty petrol cans clattering. I jumped over the sprawling figure, hearing the yell as I trod on it, then I was grabbing at the shirt of one of Crabourne’s Arab drivers who was just climbing into the lorry. I felt the material rip as I heaved him back and I caught a quick glimpse of the startled look on his face. He landed flat on his back, yelling, then he picked himself up and started to run.
Nimmo was scuffling with someone near the Land Rover and I could hear shouts all round me. The night seemed to be full of running figures, and the bulky shapes of camels barging against tents, then suddenly it was silent again and empty, and we were counting noses to see if anyone had been hurt.
Our vehicles didn’t appear to have been touched and I was just congratulating myself on our luck when I saw Phil approaching, followed by Crabourne and Selinski. She came towards us in little frightened runs ahead of them, as though she found more assurance among our party than her own, and it dawned on me they were seeking help. Her hair was over her face and she seemed to have been crying, and it was then for the first time that I realised that the silence around us came from the fact that the Arab camp was empty.
The camels had gone and the fires were dying and the tents were down. The running figures we’d seen had scattered like leaves before a wind and there wasn’t a single moving shape in the darkness now apart from our own.
We were all left with a lost feeling, a blind sense of uncertainty and frustration that emptied us of anger so that only a futile hopelessness remained.
We checked the rest of the vehicles and gathered near Crabourne’s mess hut, where Phil handed out mugs of coffee. Nobody had much to say, but we were all aware of waves of dislike and suspicion that moved about between us.
In only one thing did we seem to be united, and that was the need to protect ourselves. This, at least, was a common cause.
Without speaking, almost without thinking, the group split up. Crabourne went to his hut, his head bent and looking somehow older in the pale light of the lamp. Phil stared after him, and then at me, her face worried, then she too moved away to her own hut.
For a moment the rest of us stood in silence, then Morena seemed to jerk us to life.
‘There’ll be a lot to do in the morning,’ he said sharply. ‘It’ll be a good idea to get some sleep.’
We worked for a while on the collapsed t
ent, but in the end we left it and just salvaged our blankets and lay down on the rocky ground. Nimmo had agreed to stand watch for the rest of the night and we selected places near the vehicles, but we were all of us hungry and tired, and the night seemed cooler than normal.
I lay a little apart from the others, out of the moonlight in the shadow of the huts, my eyes prickling with the need for sleep, yet unable to stop my mind churning over all the things I felt we had to do. There seemed to be so many precautions we suddenly ought to take.
After a while I heard the scuff of a shoe in the sand near me and the chink of a stone. I lifted my head and sat up abruptly, thinking immediately that Ghad Ahmed was back, but as I did so Phil came towards me out of the shadows in a nervous rush and threw herself down alongside me on the cooling sand.
‘Let me stay here,’ she begged. ‘Please let me stay here!’
She moulded herself to me as I took her in my arms, small and cold and trembling like a frightened child.
‘It seemed like the inside of a tomb in the hut,’ she said with a shudder. ‘I just couldn’t take any more of it. I had to be where there was someone alive.’
She seemed terrified and I could feel her shaking against me. ‘I woke up,’ she said. ‘I was scared. Please let me stay here.’
‘Take it easy,’ I whispered. ‘You’re all right now. Nobody’s sending you away.’
‘It was the thought of the camp just emptying like that. Everybody just disappearing in the darkness. I woke up and couldn’t hear anything and I suddenly felt I was alone in the whole of the desert. Please don’t send me away!’
I put my hand on hers and was surprised at the strength of her fingers as she grasped it. She put her cheek down on it in a spontaneous gesture of affection and tenderness, then she lifted it to her breast and left it there. For a moment I stroked her hair, murmuring to her, then as I took her chin, she turned her face quickly towards me. I kissed her gently, but she put her arm round my neck and pulled me towards her, urgently, with all her strength, her young body firm against me, her mouth on mine, her hand under my torn shirt against my skin, suddenly murmuring wild endearments as she returned my embraces. In the desperate flow of emotion it seemed as though we were carried away on a flood, drowning and blinded, while she made little abandoned sounds by my ear and ran her fingers feverishly against my flesh.
Then the madness passed and we drew apart, both of us a little dazed and startled, and there was a starry look in her eyes. Her face seemed blind and bewildered and I was filled with pity and tenderness and a sad lost longing to be as young as she was.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said quickly in a shaky voice. ‘That wasn’t why I came. Truly it wasn’t. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’
‘Christ,’ I said, more roughly than I intended, ‘don’t start apologising.’
My hand found hers again and our fingers grasped harshly, entwining fiercely, and she kissed me as though she were starved of love, dishevelled and heedless, her hair tumbled, her skin silken, her eyes ecstatic.
After a while her kisses grew softer and tender and I knew the reaction and shock had passed because when she spoke her whisper was steadier, though still full of bewilderment.
‘This is a damn funny time to go in for tomcatting,’ she said. She was silent for a while, motionless in my arms as I stroked her hair.
‘Shall we have to leave?’ she asked. ‘Shall we have to go home – now that they’re all gone?’
‘It depends a bit on Crabourne,’ I said. ‘It depends a bit on how much nerve he’s got. It depends on how much nerve we’ve all got.’
‘If we do leave, can I ride with you? Just to be near.’ I kissed her again in assent and her tones became possessive and needy.
‘I just have to,’ she said. ‘I just have to. Don’t make me go with anyone else. Not now.’
‘Not with anybody else,’ I said, and she squeezed my hand. She was still trying to squeeze it, still trying to make certain that I didn’t take it away, when she fell asleep.
Five
The cooking hearths were cold and on a stick a scrap of rag hung forlornly in the brilliant sunshine which seemed to highlight the scene with a garish glare. There was nothing else, just a few fragments of broken water pitcher and a discarded Arab slipper. Where the Arab compound had been there was now only a lot of stirred sand, a few heaps of camel-dung and one or two scattered piles of charcoal.
And what was worse there was now silence, utter silence, the deep daytime silence of the empty desert that filled us all with a sense of misgiving. Before, even during the period of distrust and suspicion, there had always been the grunt of camels, the low chatter of the women by the tents and the subdued murmur of the workmen and their shuffling feet, and Ghad Ahmed’s imperious commands. Now there was nothing under the high sun, only the hollow sound of our own voices that were thinner in the stillness as they bounced back at us from the deserted caves in a deep velvety brilliant silence that muffled every sound, swallowing it, it seemed, in its greater immensity, so that we found ourselves, as we erected the flattened tents, whispering, even in the daylight, in awe of it.
There was nothing we could do now except pool our resources, throwing in our lot together and messing as one unit, taking it in turns to do the cooking. It was quite clear that Selinski’s trouble at Qahait had been connected with our own disaster and the one thing that stood out above all else was that Ghad Ahmed was trying to force us to withdraw from the Depression.
Phil welcomed the suggestion of integration, bustling around at once to make sure it became fact, but always sticking as close as she could to me. From time to time her eyes met mine. At first she wasn’t able to meet my gaze, but then she began to stare back defiantly, with a little secret half-smile, as though proud of what had gone between us. Nimmo seemed to suspect what had happened and his face was thoughtful, and Houston, his grubby little brain always full of unpleasantness, also seemed to know and there was a bitter twist to his mouth as he went about his work, his eyes always greedily on Phil, as though the dark recesses of his mind derived some satisfaction from the fact that what he had predicted had come true.
Crabourne, of course, was almost in tears and mute with fury, but it was obvious we couldn’t carry on as separate units, and he had to accept what we had all decided. His face was like thunder with disapproval, as though he felt he was losing control of his expedition, and in the end it was decided that Selinski should take Crabourne’s remaining jeep and report the incident to the police post at Qalam, at the same time trying to raise more workmen there. It wasn’t too far and it didn’t seem an impossible task, and we drew lots to decide who should go with him. Houston lost and I saw his face fall at once.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said shortly. ‘We’ll make bloody sure you aren’t left out if anything’s found.’
We loaded the jeep with water and tins of bully and biscuits and armed them with a rifle just for safety, and watched them set off across the Depression away from the blinding light of the sun. At Qalam, with luck, they’d find help enough for us to finish the jobs we’d come to do.
When they’d vanished from sight we turned back towards the camp, which had drawn closer together now, as though for protection, the tents alongside each other and a vehicle beside each one. Nobody spoke much to Leach and he limped around with a surly look on his heavy features.
Lunch consisted of melted bully beef and biscuits, because we’d spent the morning reorganising ourselves and hadn’t made any roster for cooking, and it was a scratch affair eaten in the mess hut that Ghad Ahmed’s men had built for Crabourne.
Crabourne was in a bitter mood and clearly held us responsible for all that had happened.
‘All right,’ he said, the resentment bursting out of him at last. ‘So they were after this damned money that was lost! And that’s why they were helping us – so they could do a little private searching while they were at it. But it didn’t matter, did it? It didn’t matter why they were here. I’m not
interested in the money. We were getting on with what we came for. Slower than we expected, but we were making progress. Now we’ve nothing left. We’ll have to get our air force to help us from Wheelus Field or somewhere like that.’
‘How do we contact them,’ I asked, ‘without radio?’
He looked at me bitterly. ‘We could have gone on for ever until you people came,’ he said.
‘For God’s sake, Sloan,’ Phil said angrily, ‘they weren’t to know we’d be here when they arrived. It’s not their fault.’
We tried to carry on during the day, with Crabourne and Phil wrestling half-heartedly with the drawings with occasional assistance with ladders, while the rest of us scratched around in front of the pear-shaped cave. It was a hopeless task from the start without the map and we just had to dig where Leach’s memory of the place and Nimmo’s memory of the bearings told us to dig. I, for one, never expected much because Leach’s memory was clearly faulty or deliberately blank and the bearings weren’t clear enough in Nimmo’s mind to be much help.
Eventually, I suppose, we’d have stumbled on the chest, but it would have been a long hard grind, and all the time I hadn’t the slightest doubt that somewhere Ghad Ahmed had his eyes on us from the lip of the Depression, with his group of Qalami camped round the camels and the stolen jeep. By the end of the afternoon our muscles ached, and our hands were blistered, and our backs were hot with the sear of the sun. It was years since I’d done work of that kind and I was filthy with sweat-caked dust.
Morena had gone back into the camp ahead of us to prepare stew from bully beef, noodles and dried tomato and rice, and when we returned he was tinkering with the engine of the lorry.
‘Trouble?’ I asked.
He gave me a slow smile. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘I’m just taking the bung out of the lifeboats.’
