by John Harris
Suddenly it seemed wiser to get back to the Depression. Somehow that was where instinct told me we should be, and we kept going back on our tracks until dark, on beyond Biq Qalam, then I stopped the Land Rover a few miles short of the Depression and left the lights on for a while in case anybody was watching.
‘Let ’em see where we are,’ I said.
After ten minutes I started the jeep up and very quietly, keeping the engine as silent as possible, I moved on for another half-mile or so without the lights, then I turned off the track and stopped.
‘This’ll do,’ I said. ‘We’ll go down at first light tomorrow.’
We ate bully beef again and drank tepid water, listening to the hot engine ticking and creaking, then we drew lots for watches. I won and decided to take the first one.
‘Get some sleep,’ I said to Nimmo. ‘You might need it later.’
‘You think the bastards’ll come?’ he asked uneasily.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t like it. They’ve got two jeeps now to our one. And weapons. Houston’s as well as their own. We know that. And I can’t understand why they haven’t been near us. There’s something going on I don’t like.’
‘How can you tell?’
‘I don’t know. Sixth sense, if you like. I can smell trouble. It’s a long time since I last smelled it, but I don’t think I’ve lost the knack.’
He smiled nervously. ‘The old desert lore,’ he said. ‘Sand in my shoes.’ But he wasn’t jeering and might even have been grateful.
I took the rifle and walked slowly to the top of the neighbouring ridge and flung myself down in the soft sand, listening, straining for the slightest sound that might come out of the coarsely grassed undulations ahead, looking for an improbable geometric shape that was at variance with the soft curves of the desert. There was a chill in the air, and a drifting scent from the dew-wet earth that was faintly aromatic in my nostrils.
I was tired but far too unsettled to sleep, and I lay in the sand, not smoking in case anyone was watching for the glow, and as I stared northwards the feeling of having been there before was so strong I half expected to see the pale fingers of searchlights probing the heavens, and the rose-red glow of shell-flashes.
After a three-hour stretch I woke Nimmo. He came to consciousness at once and sat up.
‘OK,’ he said.
‘Keep your eyes skinned for the shape of anything that doesn’t seem to fit – squares and oblongs that might mean a jeep, or a knob that might mean a man’s head. Get down low, then you can see them against the sky.’
‘Right.’
I heard him shuffle off through the sand, and rolled myself in my blanket alongside the Land Rover. I seemed to wake almost immediately and found him standing over me.
‘You’ll probably think I’m a bloody fool,’ he said apologetically, and I noticed at once the sudden absence of cockiness and the new admission of inexperience. ‘I thought I heard shooting.’
I threw off the blanket, rolled it up and tossed it in the Land Rover.
‘It sounded like a machine gun,’ he said. ‘I’ve never heard one except on television, but that’s what it sounded like.’
‘You’re not such a bloody fool as you think,’ I said. ‘That’s probably what it was. It was a tommy gun that killed Selinski.’
‘You sure?’
‘I’ve seen men killed by tommy-gun bursts at close range before now. I expect the bastards have had them ever since the war.’
We drove the rest of the way as though the hounds of hell were after us. The track was hard and flat except for a patch of ridges now and again that threatened to shake us to pieces, but I hardly seemed to notice them. Suddenly I was very worried. It just hadn’t been natural for Ghad Ahmed to leave us as much alone as he had and I’d started to wonder if he’d just let us get out of the Depression to slip down into it behind us.
The Land Rover rattled and bumped over the rough track with all the equipment in the back bouncing like a lot of mad things. Once we lost the shovel and had to reverse to pick it up, and I found my jaw was hanging open like a panting runner’s, and I was crouching over the wheel as you do when you’re coming back from the sea and the traffic’s getting thicker and the sun’s gone.
‘Think there’s something up?’ Nimmo shouted above the clattering behind us and the roar of the engine.
I nodded. ‘They’ve killed two men and there’s nothing to stop ’em doing the lot of us. The desert’s big enough to hide it.’
We saw the flames as soon as we reached the top of the Depression and we knew at once that they’d set fire to the huts.
We rattled down the track at full speed, taking a wild chance in the dark, bouncing and swaying over the rocks and slewing wildly every time the front wheels bounced out of the wheel-carved track. Several times I thought we were going over and at the bottom we almost capsized the Land Rover as it hit the soft sand. It swung sideways and came to a stop with the engine cutting out on us, and we were almost thrown out of our seats. Working the gear lever frantically, I got it back on to the track and went bounding across the Depression with the lights switched off again.
As the flames drew nearer, we heard shots and saw black figures moving about in silhouette and once the shape of a moving jeep. It was Ghad Ahmed, all right.
I saw a man running and there was something vaguely familiar about the dark shape of the weapon he had under his arm, and I drove the Land Rover close up to him, working the revolver out of its holster as I did so. Then, as he suddenly became aware of the sound of the vehicle and it dawned on him it wasn’t one of his own, he stopped dead and swung round.
I stopped the Land Rover so abruptly Nimmo almost fell out. I flipped the light switch so that the man in front was framed in the glare and shot him smack in the chest as he lifted the tommy gun. We were so close it seemed to lift him off the ground and slam him down flat on his back in a puff of dust.
‘Get that gun,’ I said, and Nimmo jumped from the Land Rover and was reaching for it almost before the man had stopped twitching.
‘That was bloody quick,’ he said breathlessly as he returned. There was a burst of firing in our direction and I switched the lights off at once and changed position quickly.
‘The bastards have seen us,’ I said.
As we drove into the camp I caught a glimpse of jeeps racing off and for a moment, knowing they were on the run and that now was the time to hit hard, I was torn with the itch to go after them. The chase in the darkness and the bullets made it all too familiar and I was reacting instinctively. But even as I swung the vehicle round I realised that Nimmo didn’t know how to use the tommy gun and that a rifle was about as much use in the dark as a pea-shooter in a fog, and I stopped again. As I swung the Land Rover round and drove into the camp, the shouting seemed to die away and the drone of the jeeps’ engines faded in the darkness into silence.
Six
The camp was a wreck. Several of the tents had gone up in flames with the palm-frond roofs of the huts and half our supplies and petrol, and there were scattered objects like blankets and fly-sheets and cooking pots lying around in the dust.
A figure with a rifle appeared out of the shadows with a soot-blackened face and white eyes and I saw it was Morena. He managed a twisted grin.
‘Thanks,’ he said shortly. ‘You were just in time. I got one but there weren’t enough of us to go round and Crabourne was about as useless as a wet hen with a gun.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘He was over there somewhere when I last saw him.’ He jerked a hand.
‘And Phil?’
‘I saw her a minute ago. She’s all right.’
‘What about Leach?’
‘He was here. Getting in everybody’s way. He’s too bloody fat.’
‘OK, never mind him now,’ I said. ‘Let’s find the others.’
He scrambled into the back of the Land Rover, and as we drove into the middle of the camp I saw Phil coming towards us
, silhouetted by the flames, the heavy revolver hanging from her hand as though it weighed a ton.
‘Did you shoot anybody?’ Nimmo asked cheerfully still a little excited by all that had happened.
She shook her head numbly, her expression full of shock and horror, and as she stopped in front of us I saw there were dried tears on her face among the marks of soot and dust. I jumped out of the Land Rover and ran towards her and she flung herself into my arms.
‘Sloan’s been shot,’ she sobbed. ‘I think he’s badly hurt.’
I heard Morena swear softly and I turned to Nimmo as we started after her.
‘Bring the Land Rover,’ I said. ‘We might need the lights.’
We found Crabourne lying on his side near one of the huts, hugging the earth in that grasping intimate way the dead always have. There was blood across his face and in his hair.
‘Is he bad?’ Phil asked as we turned him over.
‘He’s dead,’ I said.
‘Oh God!’ Her face crumpled and she dropped the revolver and put her hands to her mouth, her eyes shut.
Morena looked sharply at me, as though he’d noticed for the first time that we’d come back alone. ‘What about Houston?’ he asked. ‘Didn’t you find ’em?’
‘We found ’em,’ I said. ‘Houston’s dead too. They were both dead.’
Morena’s arm moved slowly as he began to polish the butt of the rifle with the heel of his hand, in an instinctive movement as though he were removing the dust. Then he looked up, his face expressionless.
‘The bastards mean business, don’t they?’ he said softly.
There was little we could do but salvage what was left of our belongings. We still had the lorry and the Land Rover and Crabourne’s heavy van, but our circumstances had changed considerably. The huts were burned out with most of their contents and the tents were down and torn. Food was suddenly short and for the first time we knew we could not replenish our water when it was gone.
We covered Crabourne’s body with a scrap of tarpaulin for burial at daybreak and wandered disconsolately about the wreckage, trying to save what was saveable and it was only when we’d been working for some time, listlessly kicking aside the charred planks and remains of tents, that we noticed that Leach had not reappeared.
For a moment we were all silent, then I jerked my head.
‘Come on, Nimmo,’ I said. ‘Let’s go. We haven’t finished yet. Wop, stay here. We shan’t be far away.’
We left Morena staring after us, the rifle trailing from his hand to the ground and Phil by his side, and walked quickly through the camp. I still had the revolver strapped round my waist and Nimmo had picked up the rifle again.
The smoke from the burning huts was still rising across the sky, making the moon dust-dim, so that it shed a weird glow that was more brown than silver, but there was enough light to see the cliffs and the blurred shape of rocks.
We found Leach outside the pear-shaped cave, and he’d been digging again, thirty yards from where we’d been tearing up the ground two days before. There was a solitary hole and turned earth and he’d obviously known where to look because the hand compass from the lorry lay on the ground beside him and there was no indication that he’d been searching.
‘OK, Tiny,’ I said. ‘You can come out now.’
He’d been driving down with the spade into the stony ground and he hadn’t heard us approach, and his head shot up and he came bolt upright, his jaw dropped, his eyes big and round.
‘You bloody rotten liar,’ Nimmo said, in a low vicious voice, the rifle pointed at Leach’s chest. ‘You knew where it was all the time!’
Leach stood in the hole as we approached, then his hand reached out slowly for the spade.
‘Leave it, Tiny,’ I told him. ‘One more dead man won’t make much difference now.’
He climbed slowly out of the hole, limping and throwing his weight away from the knee he’d injured in the fight with Nimmo, and stood with his hands at his sides, a big, awkward, unhealthy-looking man with tousled hair and a surly face, his nose peeled and raw where the sun had taken off the skin, his eyes fixed on the muzzle of Nimmo’s rifle.
I stuffed the revolver back in its holster and began to dig in the hole. It didn’t take me long to unearth what Leach was looking for and in the light of the torch I recognised it immediately as the chest I’d seen in the back of the Paymaster’s jeep twenty years before.
‘How the hell did he know where it was?’ Nimmo asked.
‘Because he’d got the map,’ I said.
His jaw dropped. ‘He stole it?’
‘Not from you. Ghad Ahmed’s man did that. He just saw him leaving and killed him for it. I expect if you search him you’ll find it.’
As Nimmo approached, Leach backed away, his mouth working, and Nimmo swung at him viciously with the rifle barrel. Leach went down, the blood coming from his nose, and as he lay on the sand, half-stunned, Nimmo fished the papers from his shirt pocket.
Although I expected it, I was full of shocked disappointment. The comradeship I’d thought could last a lifetime had existed only because of the conditions that had made it. When those conditions had gone we’d gone back to the old original dog-eat-dog, and this bloated, ugly man with the bright peeled nose and puffy knee wasn’t the Leach I remembered, any more than I was the naive, unsuspicious boy he remembered.
Nimmo was watching me, his eyes on the chest.
‘What are you going to do with it?’ he asked.
‘Take it back,’ I said. ‘Where it belongs.’
‘Nobody’ll thank you for it,’ he said quietly. ‘It’s a drop in the ocean to a government. I expect they wrote it off years ago.’
I shrugged, and he went on persuasively, still obviously not abandoning the idea of keeping it: ‘Money’s like everything else. Comparative. If you’ve only got a hundred, a thousand’s a lot. The government won’t miss it, and it’d do us a power of good.’
‘We’ll take it back, all the same,’ I insisted.
His brows came down. ‘For Christ’s sake, why?’ he snapped.
‘Because I was once accused of pinching it.’
He stared at me, but he didn’t argue any longer and the two of them carried the chest back to the camp, while I walked alongside the limping, snuffling Leach with the revolver in my hand. He seemed quite subdued, his head hanging, a look of surly bitterness on his face, though if he’d tried to make a break for it I don’t know what I’d have done. I’d probably have hesitated too long and he’d probably have got away.
Phil came towards us as we reached the camp, close on Morena’s heels, as though she were afraid to be left alone. She seemed to have recovered a little now, but Morena’s face was twisted with contempt and disgust as he stared at Leach.
‘I never thought I’d live to see one of our lot nip off when there was trouble,’ he said quietly. ‘Probably thanks to you a man’s dead back there.’
We stood for a moment, surrounded by the wreckage of the camp, the smell of the smoke in our nostrils.
‘We’ll get some sleep now,’ I suggested. ‘And take a look at what’s in the chest in the morning. For tonight I’ll keep it beside me. You’d better make sure the vehicles are properly immobilised, Wop, and remember our sweet friend Tiny might have a spare rotor arm hidden away somewhere. As for the rest of it, the problem now seems to be to get out of here and to the coast. I’ll lay a year’s wages Ghad Ahmed knows we’ve got the money and will try to stop us.’
Morena lifted the rifle and slipped it under his arm. ‘And I’ll lay you a year’s wages,’ he said flatly, ‘that he’ll be smart enough to keep between us and the coast. He’ll probably have men sitting up there now, some at each end of the Depression waiting for us to go either to Qalam or Qahait. And by the look of ’em they’ve got plenty of guns.’
‘We’ll think of something.’
Phil gestured with her hand. She looked shocked still, but seemed to be coming out of it a little. ‘There’s a ca
mel track,’ she said. ‘Over there. There’s a wadi and the track leads up it towards Qatu. Or it did. There’s no village there any more, though, and it’s never used now.’
I glanced at Morena and then back at Phil. ‘Can you get a vehicle up?’ I asked.
She shrugged. ‘There are rock falls. We didn’t go all the way.’
‘Does Ghad Ahmed know about it?’
‘I expect so, but he might think we don’t. He hadn’t arrived when we found it. We were looking for more of the paintings, but as there weren’t any, we never went there again.’
‘Could you lead us to it?’
She nodded, and as I patted her shoulder I felt her give a small shudder under my hand.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘We’ll try it. We’ve got to try it.’
The dawn came in a silver glow and as I woke I moved gently away from Phil so as not to disturb her. Nimmo was already awake and standing alone a little distance away, tall and slender in the mist, his head down, thinking.
As I stood up, he nodded to me and offered me a cigarette. The first puff of smoke in the cool air was like heaven and Nimmo gave me a twisted smile that hid his anxious look.
‘When are we leaving?’ he asked.
‘Tonight.’
He gestured with his cigarette towards the lip of the Depression.
‘That lot,’ he said shortly. ‘They’ll see us, won’t they? They’ll see us as we go up.’
I shrugged. ‘We’ll go up without lights.’
He protested again. ‘They’ll see us leaving. And even if they don’t, they’ll know we’ve gone once they see the lorries have disappeared.’
‘They’ll not see the lorries have disappeared.’
He stared. ‘What do you mean?’
‘We’ll make ’em think they’re still here,’ I said. ‘Camouflage. They’re not going to come near us – not after last night. It wasn’t as easy as they expected, so they’ll sit and hope to starve us out. And from where they’re sitting they can’t see as much as they’d like, not even with glasses. Tomorrow we’ll still appear to be here.’