The Old Trade of Killing

by John Harris

  I didn’t understand what he meant at first and he held up the rotor arm from the distributor. ‘They can’t pinch ’em if they won’t go,’ he said. ‘Surely you remember? Regulations against surprise. We used to bury ’em in the sand near the offside front wheel.’

  Night came with its usual unexpectedness. One minute the whole length of the Depression was in view, with its caves and buttresses sharp against the shadows, then it was blurred and everything had a distant violet vanished look, and in a few minutes it was dark.

  The camp was silent – so silent you could almost hear the desert breathing. There was none of the scratched barbaric music from the Arabs now, none of the clink and tinkle of implements and the splash of water or the grunt of camels, or a wailing voice raised in song.

  I was standing outside the mess hut staring into the darkness with a cigarette in my mouth when Phil appeared alongside me and slipped her hand into mine.

  ‘Thinking?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘All sorts of things. One of them that up there somewhere Ghad Ahmed’s got a man, perhaps a couple of men, staring down here, doing what I’m doing, thinking, watching the lights and listening to the sounds, waiting.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I wish I knew. Perhaps till we’ve decided we’ve got to move.’

  ‘Do you think they’ll try to make us move?’

  ‘I’m damn sure they will. They’ve got Nimmo’s map, remember? And apart from wiping out the lot of us, the only way they can get that money, which legally doesn’t belong to them now anyway but to the British Government, is to get rid of us from here.’ I paused and went on slowly:

  ‘Did anyone ever come this way?’ I asked. ‘I mean, did anyone ever come through the Depression except you and Ghad Ahmed’s people – anyone we might expect to be able to help us?’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘When we first arrived we got a rice merchant or two on the way to Qahait and one or two Arabs with dates or offers to fetch water. But I think Ghad Ahmed must have discouraged them. They never came a second time.’ She paused and seemed to shiver. ‘What do you think their next move will be?’

  ‘It depends,’ I said. ‘It all depends on Houston and Selinski.’

  We’d half expected the jeep to return by the next afternoon, but by the evening there was no sign of it and I began to grow worried. Morena saw me staring along the Depression and stood with me for a moment watching for the little cloud of dust, which would herald its approach.

  He squinted into the lowering sun that changed the light to orange and then to rose pink, his square body relaxed, the sheen of sweat on his face.

  ‘If they don’t make it,’ he said slowly, ‘we’re really up the creek, aren’t we? Without a paddle.’

  I stared round at the cliffs, aware of the silence, and the desolation of gravel and scattered rocks. The heavy air was cooling a little as we watched the sun go down, blood red, beyond the edge of the Depression, and the purple shadows flooded out immediately from the cliffs. The silence became more oppressive as we stood there watching the night come, a tremendous silence that was heavy with foreboding. Ghad Ahmed was there, I knew, waiting for us to make a move and knowing we couldn’t make it without being seen.

  A sudden spurt of desperate optimism moved me to hope that Houston and Selinski would succeed. The route was rarely used and off the beaten track, but they had everything they needed – food, water, petrol, a good vehicle and a good weapon. Surely, I kept telling myself, even Houston, in spite of his twisted humour and inherent laziness, would remember enough of his desert skill to get the jeep through. The opposition couldn’t be all that strong and they’d be rank amateurs in spite of their knowledge of the desert. All sorts of questions were revolving in my mind. How much did Leach and Nimmo really know? How much were they to be trusted? What was Ghad Ahmed up to? Where was he now? It was for all the world like 1942 all over again.

  It had been like this when we’d waited in the hollows looking towards the west, trying to out-guess the Germans, all senses alert for the Panzers, all eyes watching the sky for the Messerschmitts and the Junkers 87s; probably with the burnt-out wrecks of vehicles around and somebody you’d known crouched against the wheel of his lorry in a soggy muck of blood and sweat; and your nerves on edge because you’d got too much to think about and not enough eyes to watch the whole of the limitless desert around you all at the same time.

  By the next morning I was uneasy enough to be really worried, and decided I’d better go and look for Selinski and Houston. We still had our Land Rover.

  I made up my mind to take Nimmo with me, chiefly because he was young and he’d already proved he could shoot. With his youth and sharp eyesight, and my own remembered knowledge, surely what had happened to Selinski and Houston – if something had happened to them – wouldn’t happen to us. This way, Morena would be left to keep an eye on Leach, and more and more I trusted Morena as less and less I trusted Leach.

  ‘Watch where he goes,’ I said. ‘There’s only him you’ve got to watch, so if he slips off, slip off after him.’

  ‘You think he knows where it is?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know. But that Arab with the broken neck – I don’t think Houston’s the man to do that, and Nimmo probably doesn’t know how.’

  Morena nodded. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’ll watch him.’

  ‘It’ll leave you two vehicles,’ I pointed out. ‘You sleep in one and get Crabourne to sleep in the other. Without the rotor arms that ought to stop anybody pinching ’em.’

  It appeared that in addition to the rifle we’d seen in the mess hut, Crabourne had a shot-gun and a couple of revolvers which he’d brought along as a safety measure, but he didn’t like the idea of loading them.

  ‘I didn’t come here for a fight,’ he said. ‘I came here for a peaceful scientific purpose.’

  I ignored him and gave one of the revolvers to Phil and made her promise to keep it with her all the time.

  ‘You never know,’ I said as I fastened the belt round her waist.

  She hadn’t wanted me to go and, long after everyone was asleep, she’d been pleading with me from the circle of my arms not to leave her. But there was no alternative, and in the end, her eyes full of tears, she’d nodded and accepted it.

  She managed a shaky laugh now as I hitched the belt into position, my hands resting on her hips for a moment as I looked down at her.

  ‘I’d like you around when I come back,’ I said.

  She tried to hold her head up. ‘Captain Doyle,’ she said. ‘At first I began to wonder if you were human.’ Her eyes rested on mine, frank with a shared secret. ‘I guess you are, though, after all.’

  ‘I’ll let you know even more about that,’ I told her, ‘when I come back.’

  Her smile faded rapidly. ‘See that you do come back,’ she said earnestly. ‘Please!’

  We loaded the Land Rover with water and supplies, in the same way that we’d loaded Houston’s jeep. I did the driving, with the second revolver strapped round my waist, while Nimmo sat beside me holding the rifle.

  ‘No bloody nonsense this time,’ I told him. ‘If you see anyone, be ready to shoot first. If anything’s happened to Houston and Selinski it’s because they didn’t.’

  We climbed out of the Depression, following the track that ran like tramlines up the rocky road, the sound of the labouring engine rattling back in echoes off the cliff. I half expected some of Ghad Ahmed’s men to be waiting at the top of the hill for us, but there was nothing but the limitless yellow desert, unoccupied and unrestricted in its ominous waste spaces that were marked only by small patches of rock near the lip of the Depression and clumps of camel-thorn up ahead.

  ‘We’re all right,’ Nimmo said. ‘Nobody about.’

  ‘Don’t kid yourself,’ I told him, faintly uneasy at the very emptiness of the plain. ‘This desert isn’t as flat as it looks, and it only needs a ten-foot dip to hide a je
ep.’

  It was a pleasure to get out of the Depression, nevertheless. Up here the air was cooler because we weren’t surrounded by those heat-reflecting walls and it was possible to throw off the feeling of claustrophobia that they brought.

  The whitish-yellow hue of the flinty earth threw back the glare with a blinding brilliance as we churned through the strips of wind-blown sand that had drifted across the track, then, after a while, the flatness changed to awkward hummocks, with spiky grass and scrub tufting the sandy ridges, and I grew more wary as the track rose and fell.

  ‘Gives you the creeps,’ Nimmo commented in an awed voice. ‘There’s such a bloody lot of it, and it’s so bloody still!’

  ‘Don’t worry about the desert,’ I said, still worried and puzzled by the absence of opposition. ‘That won’t hurt us. We’ve got food and water and petrol. Watch the ridges. You might see a man’s head.’

  Strangely, in spite of my unease, I felt suddenly sure of myself. Twenty years before I’d grown wise in the normal skills of killing. I’d learned to navigate by the stars and study terrain, to judge distances and use my eyes, and I found I could reach back to that experience and I hadn’t forgotten.

  Nimmo, however, was nervous and kept glancing round him quickly, as though his eye had caught something that had alerted him and made him start, and he was fingering the rifle uneasily.

  ‘Keep that bloody gun out of my face,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve got the safety catch on.’

  ‘It might be a good idea to have the safety catch off,’ I pointed out. ‘If anything comes it might come quickly.’

  He glanced at me and I thought he might snap back at me, but he didn’t.

  ‘OK,’ he said, willingly enough as though for the first time he was aware of his own inexperience and was weighing it up against his youth.

  ‘Divide the horizon into quarters,’ I went on, trying to sound more friendly. ‘Cover each one methodically. You can’t look in two directions at once so don’t try. Make sure you cover what you’re looking at when you do look at it, though. That’s all. You’re the one with the good eyes, not me. If they happen to pop up when you’re looking the other way it’s just our rotten luck. You take the two rear quarters. I’ll take the two forrard ones.’

  He gave me another odd look, then he nodded. ‘It’s your show now, soldier,’ he said, and for the first time there was no hint of a jeer in his voice. If anything, there was a faint sign of respect, as though he’d decided at last that for once I knew more about it than he did.

  Curiously, I was glad to have him with me. I think he’d found it trying occasionally with the rest of us twenty years older than he was, and there’d been many times when I’d not felt very sure of him. Now I was. Behind all his youth there was a great deal of his father in him, and there’d never been anything wrong with Nimmo, senior, when it came to a tight corner.

  He settled down after that and didn’t fidget so much, as though he drew a certain amount of reassurance from me. Actually, I was as nervous as a cat on hot bricks, but Morena had taught me twenty years before that once you started to show your nervousness everybody else got nervous, too.

  We bypassed Biq Qalam and I grew more uneasy at the absence of any signs of life. We stopped for something to eat at midday when the only shadow the Land Rover threw was directly below us, remaining in our seats so that our view of the horizon wouldn’t be impeded, and ate the bully beef out of the tin. After a swig at the water and a cigarette we relieved ourselves, one on each side of the vehicle so that we didn’t have to take our eyes off the horizon. A lot of people had probably thought during the war that I was over-cautious because whenever I’d stopped I’d always made a habit of assuming that the Germans were just over the next rise also having a brew-up. But I’d never been jumped, so perhaps there was something to it, and I applied the same rules now.

  ‘Keep your eyes peeled,’ I said. ‘If Ghad Ahmed’s around he’ll be watching the route to Qalam. You always watch the oases because sooner or later the other side has to come for water.’

  He nodded and grinned at me, the first time I’d had an honest-to-God grin from him for a long time, and I began to feel much better.

  We’d parked in the shelter of a low sandhill and as we set off again, breasting the rises and small scarps, we began to flounder through soft sand-strips and stretches of shaly rock that spread across the track. Once or twice we disturbed flights of small brown thrush-like birds that swept up ahead of us in great arcs out of the scrub, to be lost against the dun colour of the desert. Once it was a small fleet gazelle, bounding lightly out of a bush and heading for the skyline, and Nimmo’s rifle came up at once.

  I slammed it down immediately. ‘Leave it,’ I said sharply, trying to look in every direction at once in case it had been someone else than us who had disturbed the antelope, my uneasiness fed by the emptiness of the land around us.

  ‘Fresh meat, for God’s sake!’ he pointed out eagerly.

  ‘Listen,’ I told him. ‘Listen to the silence! You can hear a rifle a hell of a long way when it’s as quiet as this. You can hear a car door slam miles away. And Ghad Ahmed’s probably listening, even if he isn’t watching. If he hears your rifle we’ll probably be the fresh meat.’

  He nodded. ‘OK, Captain,’ he said.

  The sun was sinking and the brassy gold of the day was turning to yellow, so that the whole colour of the desert changed from a white glare to the bronze-yellow of late afternoon. You could see the folds of the land now as the lowering sun began to throw shadows, and the track began to look sharper as the ridges picked up the sun and the hollows were thrown into clear relief.

  ‘Be there soon,’ Nimmo commented.

  ‘Hold it!’

  I stopped the Land Rover so abruptly he was thrown forward, and he turned and looked quickly at me.

  ‘There,’ I said, nodding my head.

  He stared in the direction I indicated his eyes narrowed.

  ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘Your eyes aren’t so bad as all that.’

  I accelerated to where I had spotted the flattened shape lying like a punctured haybag in a hollow alongside the track, and we stopped in a drifting puff of dust.

  It was Selinski. He was lying flat on his face, and I could see a brown-red mess of bloodied dust beneath him.

  Nimmo jumped down after me as I climbed slowly from the Land Rover and I swung round on him sharply.

  ‘Get back,’ I told him. ‘And keep your bloody eyes skinned and the engine running.’

  Selinski didn’t seem to be anyone I knew. The hours he’d been lying there in the hot sunshine had changed him out of all recognition. Nimmo’s face was dry and vacant-looking. He hadn’t shaved and his gingery hair was covered with a coating of dust, and for a moment I thought I was looking at his father.

  ‘Gun?’ he asked.

  ‘Something better than a rifle,’ I said. ‘You can see the poor bastard’s ribs.’

  His face suddenly looked drained and sick, then he swallowed quickly and licked his lips.

  ‘Stay here,’ I told him. ‘If you see anything, fire a shot.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  I indicated a lengthening shadow about thirty yards off. It was the only one within reach.

  ‘If I know Houston,’ I said, ‘he probably ran for that.’

  Sure enough, Houston was there, lying on his back with his arms and legs wide apart. The sun had played havoc with him and I felt quite sick, because his throat was cut. It looked as though they’d probably wounded him and then murdered him. There were flies about and I wondered briefly where the hell they always came from.

  Surprisingly enough, nothing else had touched him, though I could see the prints of half a dozen small animals that had probably come up to him in the night and sniffed at him. There was dust on his staring eyeballs and no sign of the rifle.

  As I walked slowly back towards Nimmo, I saw at once that he’d changed. His face seemed thinner and more tired
and the roundness of youth had given place to the alert tense look of a soldier I’d seen so many times before.

  ‘He’s up there,’ I said. ‘I’ll bury him.’

  I unclipped the shovel and walked back towards the hollow while Nimmo sat in the Land Rover with his rifle across his knees.

  It was difficult burying Houston because he’d stiffened, and I had to dig a wide shallow grave. I was panting when I’d finished and I was glad to shovel the last of the earth across the accusing expression he wore.

  I straightened up at last and looked round for a few stones to put on top of him, but there was nothing worth collecting, so I found the biggest I could and placed it where his head lay. Then I stood for a moment, looking down at the disturbed sand. It seemed to call for something out of a prayer book but instead I just picked up the shovel and started to walk back.

  As I went down the slope, my boots scuffing the sand, I kicked a scrap of cloth and I saw it was Houston’s Arab head-dress. He’d always been proud of it, so I picked it up and stood looking at it for a moment, then I walked back and put it under the stone.

  Nimmo was still sitting in the back of the Land Rover when I returned.

  ‘OK,’ I said, indicating Selinski. ‘You can bury this one.’

  He gave me a sharp look, as though I were unnecessarily callous, then, while I wiped the perspiration off my face with my shirt, he handed over the rifle for the shovel and climbed down while I sat in the back of the Land Rover in his place.

  We knew we couldn’t get back to the camp in the Depression before dark, but it seemed to me that if we tried to get to Qalam we’d probably run smack into Ghad Ahmed just as Houston and Selinski had done. I was nervous and worried, and the silence was beginning to play tricks with my imagination.

  From the signs it looked as though Houston and Selinski had been surprised and, knowing him, I guessed that the wretched Houston had failed to keep a good lookout. Then, when the shooting had started, he’d run. I was surprised he’d got as far as the hollow.