The Secret War

by Dennis Wheatley

  “All right,” he said. “I’m sorry—terribly sorry. Pray if it helps. I only wish I could.”

  As he spoke he came down the steps. He felt he could not possibly stay still waiting for death to creep up to him with the rising waters. Instead he splashed through them to make a more thorough examination of their prison.

  The darkness was a heavy handicap. His own matches had been taken when Zarrif’s men had searched his pockets and if Jeremiah Green had any on him they must have been soaked and rendered useless.

  For nearly half an hour he searched feverishly among the slimy stone pillars; hoping to find some contraption by which the water was drawn up from the cistern to the rooms above and which might be utilised as a way out. By the time he had satisfied himself there was nothing of the kind, and that it must be pulled up through the trap-door in a bucket to be filtered in the kitchen, the water had risen to his thighs.

  Jeremiah’s prayers now alternated with psalms. He chanted them in a deep, musical voice which quavered now and then as his faith was nearly overcome by terror.

  Lovelace wished fervently that he would stop. That endless monologue made it almost impossible to think; and think he must unless he was prepared to die.

  Suddenly it occurred to him that if he could locate the spot where the water was being pumped into the cellar they might be able to stop its rising by plugging the inlet with their clothes. With renewed hope he began another tour of the walls fumbling hastily about below the water line. At last he found the place but, instead of it being a small round hole, as he had hoped, it was a four-foot-long iron grating through which the flood was filtering at a steady pressure. The space was too big to stop up, even if they had been able to get up the grating, so he had to abandon the idea. When he returned to the steps the water was eddying round his waist.

  “I won’t drown,” he told himself fiercely. “I can’t. I’m not even middle-aged yet. I’ve got years of life to look forward to. I won’t choke my life out like a rat in a trap.” Yet, even as he fought to reassure himself, he knew that he would, unless he could think of some way to save himself.

  Jeremiah was babbling away quite incoherently. His muttering was the only sound perceptible in the chill, dank darkness, and as Lovelace listened involuntarily to his ravings he realised that the negro was making his supplication in Bambara or something like it: anyhow a dialect used on the west coast of Africa. Evidently he had deserted the Christian God for Voodoo incantations in the tongue handed down to him by his forebears of a few generations back when they had been shipped as naked slaves to the American plantations.

  Lovelace wiped the sweat out of his eyes and went up the steps once more. With his finger-tips he made a minute examination of the trap. It was evidently bolted on the upper side since it would not shift a fraction to the utmost pressure of his shoulder. The hinges too were on the upper side, although, even if they had been on the lower, he had no means of unscrewing them. The trap consisted of three solid planks and between them he could just make out faint ribbons of light by applying his eye to the cracks.

  Cursing the negro into silence he held his ear to the wider of the two apertures and listened intently. The murmur of muffled voices came faintly from above. By their tone, more than any actual words which he could catch, he judged them to be those of the Egyptian servants rather than Zarrif’s gunmen.

  After a little he abandoned the attempt to hear what was happening in the room above and sat, his head buried in his hands, crouched on the top step of the ladder, his brain whirling wildly.

  He tried to think sanely but he couldn’t. The unceasing pulsation of the electric pump and the knowledge that with every throb it gave the water below him was creeping upward seemed to blunt his wits and shatter every attempt at concentration.

  An hour had passed, or perhaps an hour and a quarter, since they had been flung into the cellar, when he raised himself and again listened at the crack in the planks above. He could hear no voices this time but, between the beats of the pump, a steady droning sound. After a moment it began to fade but before it ceased entirely he had recognised it as the distant roar of an aeroplane engine.

  It must be Zarrif’s plane; no other was likely to be in the neighbourhood. That meant he had left the villa then. The blood began to pulse through Lovelace’s veins at greater speed. A fierce new hope suddenly animated him to fresh action. If Zarrif had gone, his gunmen would have gone with him. Only the servants would remain and perhaps they would prove merciful or bribable. He began to shout loudly for help and beat his fists upon the trap once more.

  Soon he heard voices overhead. Those of the Egyptian servants undoubtedly. If he could hear them they must be able to hear him. He redoubled the strength of his cries before pausing to listen. To his unutterable dismay he distinctly heard them laughing. Of course! They were Zarrif’s men, highly paid, keepers of his secrets for fear of their lives, and utterly dependable. They would have had their orders to wait until the cistern was full, remove the drowned bodies, carry them down to the river and throw them in under cover of night. Very probably they had been privy to other such slayings and regarded their part in this only as a matter of routine.

  Lovelace sank down again and rocked from side to side; a prey now to fearful imaginings about the coming moments of his death and compelled at last to acknowledge the utter hopelessness of his situation.

  Jeremiah had crept close up beside him and now burst into renewed supplications: “Oh Lawd, who did deliver Daniel from de lions’ den! Who did lead Moses by de hand when he were in de Wilderness—hearken to ma prayer.”

  Almost instinctively Lovelace found himself praying too. “Please God let me get out. Help me. Help me think of something. Or—if I’ve got to die—give me the strength to die courageously.”

  He tried to pull himself together and stretched down his leg to test the height of the water with the toe of his shoe. It had risen a lot since he was standing in it and he judged its depth now to be about five feet.

  There was nothing to be done. Nothing but wait in the grim darkness and fight to keep control of his nerves up to the last horrible moment.

  Dully he wondered where Christopher and Valerie were. It must be eight o’clock or later. They were probably dining quietly at their hotel in Alexandria. Perhaps they were even speculating when they would hear from him, but they would not be worried. He had told them that it might prove difficult for him to keep in touch with them while he was with Zarrif but that he would get a message through somehow. The arrangement was that they should remain in Alexandria for another three days unless they received instructions from him to the contrary. They would go to bed confidently expecting to hear from him to-morrow or the day after; but by the time they were asleep to-night he would be dead.

  Jeremiah had fallen silent at last and, as Lovelace realised it, he remembered what a missionary had once told him of the African negro’s fundamental attitude towards God. “It seems strange,” he had said, “that they should worship sticks and stones since they all believe in the Great Creator; but this is what they tell you, ‘God made the world and all that is in it including the spirits of the forests and rivers. We pray to them because when God had finished his work he went away and left us. How could anyone expect the Great God, who has other worlds to make and the Sun and the Stars and the Moon to care for, to remain here, just to listen to the prayers of insignificant people like ourselves?’”

  At the time Lovelace had felt how well that had explained the patient humility of the negro races and that many white people might be better for considering their little personal woes less important in the sight of Almighty God.

  Now, he understood Jeremiah’s silence. The negro’s thin veneer of Christianity had fallen from him and he had even abandoned as useless the deeper rooted Bambara incantations to the old familiar spirits of his tribe. He had reverted to that philosophic belief basic in his people and crouched there silent, like a trapped animal, waiting for the end.

&nb
sp; Lovelace envied him his new-found calm. His own more agile brain was still racked with regrets over the things that he must lose by death. Valerie came again and again into his mind. She was Christopher’s of course, had been apparently from childhood up: still, that did not matter now and the image of her gave him more satisfaction than that of any human being he had ever dwelt upon. He wished desperately that she had not made such a mystery of their first meeting. He was more certain than ever that he had met her somewhere years ago and he would have liked to have known where before he went out.

  The water crept over their feet and up to their ankles as they perched huddled together on the upper steps of the ladder with their heads pressed against the trapdoor. A rat scuttled past below them yet they hardly noticed it. Both were sunk in a heavy torpor; only the steady rhythmic beat of the engine now penetrated to their dulled senses.

  Suddenly the crack of a pistol sounded in the house above. It was followed by another and another, dull but distinct, then came a muffled cry of pain.

  They both roused instantly. Lovelace began to batter upon the trap door again and to yell for help with all the strength of his lungs.

  He heard shouting, another fusillade of shots, trampling feet, a scream as somebody was hit; but he never ceased his frantic cries for help and violent pounding on the wooden trap.

  Next moment it was drawn up. Gasping for breath he staggered out and turned to pull up the half-fainting Jeremiah.

  After the darkness of the cellar he was temporarily blinded by the light but, in a moment, he saw that Valerie was helping him with the black and that Christopher stood behind her, his pale face tense, his black eyes gleaming as he clutched a smoking automatic in each of his hands, covering their escape.

  CHAPTER XIII

  THE ENEMY STRIKES BACK

  “Now! I really must know what’s been happening,” Lovelace declared as he took his first sip at a welcome glass of hot grog.

  Half an hour had sped by during which questions were hardly possible. Every moment had been occupied by their flight from Zarrif’s villa, the race back to Alexandria in a hired car with a strange driver and Lovelace getting out of his wet clothes at Valerie’s orders to roll up in warm blankets on the sofa of a dingy hotel sitting-room.

  She smiled and patted the cushions into a more comfortable position behind his shoulders. “I really ought to wait until Christopher comes back; then we could both hear how you got caught.”

  “Never mind about that. I’ll tell you later. What’s happened to Christopher though? Where’s he gone rushing off to at this time of night?”

  “To try and find Otto Klinger.”

  “What, the member of the Millers who lives here?”

  “Yes. Zarrif has gone and you say you have no idea where he is making for so Christopher thought Klinger might possibly be able to help us to get on his track again. He didn’t like to leave it till the morning.”

  “It must be getting on that way already.”

  Valerie laughed. “My dear, you’ve lost count of time. It’s only a little after nine o’clock. As soon as you’re feeling fitter I’m going to order a belated dinner to be sent up to us.”

  “Good Lord!” he passed a hand quickly over his eyes. “And I thought it must be well past midnight. Every moment I spent in that hellish cistern seemed an eternity. But how the devil did you find out what had happened to me?”

  “We didn’t, and you wouldn’t be here now if one of the enemy hadn’t had a shot at murdering Christopher this afternoon.”

  Lovelace raised his eyebrows and whistled. “Phew, they’ve got on to the fact that he’s here then?”

  “Not here—I hope.” She glanced at the carefully curtained windows. “This isn’t the Gordon Pasha Hotel, where we agreed to stay, you know. We quit that in double-quick time, after the attempt had failed, and picked on this as another unpretentious little place where we might hope for a few hours’ grace before they ran us to earth again. It was our forced change of address which made us decide to go out to Zarrif’s villa on the chance of being able to let you know about it.”

  “You knew I was out there then? Saw us landing, I suppose.”

  “Yes. I lost Zarrif’s plane in the cloud banks over the eastern end of Crete, but I held on my course as it looked as if he was heading for Alex, and I managed to pick him up again just as we sighted land. There was no mistaking that great, four-engined machine of his. That night Christopher and I went out to have a snoop round the villa. We knew you must be somewhere inside it unless they had dropped you overboard and that was hardly likely.”

  Lovelace frowned. “I’m afraid I’m awfully dense but I still don’t see how you knew they’d caught me and chucked me into that filthy cellar.”

  “We didn’t,” she shook her sleek chestnut head, “but once we’d left the Gordon Pasha we realised you wouldn’t know where on earth we’d got to, and we felt it would be far too risky to go back there and inquire for letters, so we went out to the villa in the hope of getting a message through to you about our change of address.”

  “And then?”

  “Well, we left the car with the chauffeur about half a mile down the road, walked up to within a couple of hundred yards of the house, and installed ourselves behind a sand-dune. The heat was simply grilling there but we stuck it and watched the place all through the afternoon, hoping you’d appear at one of the windows or come out for a stroll in the garden, because we thought it absolutely vital to let you know we’d had to leave the Gordon Pasha. We’d printed the name of this hotel in large, black letters on a big sheet of white cardboard that we meant to hold up for you to see if only you showed yourself and we could attract your attention while no one else was about. We saw Jeremiah Green drive up with one of Zarrif’s men but there wasn’t a sign of you.”

  Lovelace nodded. “I was in a ground floor sitting-room at the back of the house all the afternoon; more or less confined there although not actually a prisoner. But go on; what happened then?”

  “We had almost decided to chuck it up and come out again to-morrow morning when Zarrif’s pilots appeared and ran his plane out of its hangar. Twilight had fallen by then but the place was lit up by the hangar arc lights and as it looked as if something interesting was going to happen we stayed on. Zarrif appeared with Cassalis and the whole bodyguard about three-quarters of an hour later. They all went aboard the plane and she sailed away to the south-westward. As you weren’t with them it was obvious you had either remained behind on purpose or that something had gone wrong.”

  “So you came in to see?”

  “That’s it. We waited a good bit longer to see if you’d come out and take the road to Alexandria but as you didn’t we made up our minds to go in and get you.”

  “Jove! That was plucky of you.”

  Valerie’s grey eyes danced. “Christopher did all the heavy stuff; but I must say I enjoyed it.”

  “Did the servants put up much of a fight?”

  She shook her head. “One took a pot at us but Christopher shot him in the thigh. He chivvied the others along the hall, firing over their heads, till we got into the kitchen. We could hear you shouting by that time, fit to wake the dead, and the blacks were tumbling over each other out of the window.”

  “What a bit of luck for me you came in when you did.” Lovelace sighed. “But tell me about the attempt to murder Christopher this afternoon.”

  “It was quite well planned,” she said slowly. “You know there are lots of these students’ riots going on in Egypt. They don’t seem to care a bit for you British.”

  He nodded. “That’s Ben Jelhoull, unless I’m much mistaken. He’s behind all this anti-British trouble.”

  “Who?” She raised her straight eyebrows in a puzzled frown.

  “Ben Jelhoull,” he repeated. “Haven’t you ever heard of him? He is known as the Hitler of Algeria, and runs a sort of Nazi movement there for the blacks—or Arabs, I suppose one should call them—anyhow, the Mohammedans; and he�
��s become a real thorn in the side of the French.”

  “What’s that to do with Egypt?”

  “A lot. Ben Jelhoull’s followers are known as the Young Turbans. The movement has spread until it’s so powerful to-day that it controls the coloured population of the whole of North Africa from Morocco to the Red Sea. It’s no longer anti-French, but anti-white; and if there’s a general blow-up the Young Turbans will prove a very big factor to reckon with. They’ll start a Jehad, a Holy War, and that won’t be much fun to have on our hands if we’re up against Italy, Germany and Japan at the same time.”

  “It’s more vital than ever, then, for us to stop Zarrif getting that concession which may set fire to the powder magazine.” Valerie’s eyes were very earnest.

  “Yes, but tell me what happened to Christopher.”

  “Well, one of these riots occurred outside the Gordon Pasha this morning. It wasn’t anything serious, but the police had to fire a few rounds over the heads of the crowd before they would disperse. Our sitting-room was on the second floor, so Christopher and I watched the trouble from our window. Some of the mob were hurling brickbats, and a few, who had revolvers, were firing wild, but there didn’t seem the least danger of our being hit at that height, because they were aiming at the police in the street.”

  Valerie paused for a moment. “What made me look up I don’t know, but I did, just when the riot was in full swing, and at a second floor window on the opposite side of the street I saw a man aiming a rifle dead at Christopher. I just had time to pull him down as the man fired. The bullet whizzed over our heads and smashed the mirror of an old bureau. Of course, if Christopher had been killed it would have been put down to a stray shot from the street.”

  “That’s about it.” Lovelace nodded. “Jove! what a narrow squeak. I wouldn’t mind betting that riot was engineered specially to cover the attempt. The devils. I suppose they’ve been on the look-out for him in every likely town since he left Long Island. I wonder how they managed to get on to him when he was staying under an assumed name at a little place like the Gordon Pasha, though.”