The Doomed Oasis

by Innes, Hammond;

  “How long before they get here?” I asked.

  “If they keep going without being stopped in the dunes they’ll arrive sometime after midnight, I imagine.” He started to go back to the wireless truck, but then he stopped. “It might interest you to know that Signor Ruffini was appointed Reuter’s correspondent with the full knowledge of the Political Resident yesterday afternoon. But for that very odd appointment, I imagine your report would have been passed to Bahrain. In which case I’ve no doubt it would now be rotting in some pigeonhole in the Residency instead of making the world’s headlines.”

  The official attitude was obvious. By agreeing to Reuter’s request—perhaps even instigating it—they could justify their refusal to grant visas to correspondents by saying that the press already had coverage from an accredited agency correspondent, and that the very man from whom the story had originated. No doubt they took the view that, as a foreigner, Ruffini would be more amenable to control than a British correspondent and therefore unlikely to cause them further embarrassment. It was a little ironical that in their hurry to appoint him they had given me almost direct and immediate access to the whole of the British press.

  “I am to tell you,” Berry added with a thin smile, “that no further messages for Ruffini will be accepted through military channels. A matter of bolting the door after the horse has gone.”

  “What about that raiding party headed for Whitaker’s camp?” I said. I hadn’t mentioned it in my report to Ruffini the previous night. “Somebody ought to be told.”

  “Already done,” he said. “It won’t be passed on to Ruffini, but the PRPG will be notified and so will Sir Philip Gorde. He’s in Sharjah now.”

  So that was that, and nothing to do now but wait. The day passed slowly. No sound from the direction of Jebel al-Akhbar. Not a single shot all day. The hill seemed suddenly dead. The heat was very bad. The wireless operator was on constant watch on the headquarters wave band. We switched only once to the BBC news. A Foreign Office spokesman had stated that, whilst there was no official news, there was reason to believe that press reports were substantially correct and that a young Englishman had instigated some sort of guerrilla activity against the Emir of Hadd. The whole matter was under urgent review. There were rumours of reinforcements standing by in readiness to be flown to Bahrain, and two destroyers had left Aden, steaming north along the Arabian coast. Cairo Radio had stepped up its propaganda offensive.

  Late in the afternoon I was wakened from a stifling sleep in the shadow of the W/T truck with the news that the Hadd raiding force was returning. “And there’s been no sound from the fort at all.” Berry passed me the glasses as I stood with slitted eyes gazing at a dust cloud right in the path of the sun. “Thirty-three of them now,” he said. The dust made it difficult, but as they passed to the south of us and I could see them more clearly, I confirmed his count. “They must have been travelling all night and moving very fast.” The figures flickered indistinctly in the heat. “The Emir will have picked up the Arab news,” he added. “He’ll know he hasn’t much time. Had Whitaker a radio, do you know?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Then he probably doesn’t know what’s happening at home—that the Government’s being forced to take action. Oh, well,” he added. “If he goes up to the fort and his son’s still alive, Colonel Whitaker will learn from him what we were able to tell him yesterday. It might make some difference.”

  I thought of that scene: father and son facing each other in the shambles of that fort. Watching the Emir’s force move past us, men and camels all lifted bodily off the ground by a mirage and turned into strange, distorted shapes by the heat rising from the sea of sand, I felt once again the cruelty of this desert world. It was so hard, so empty, so casual of human life—a crucible to transmute the flesh to skin and bone, the mind to something as distorted as those shapes dancing in a mirage. I had a premonition of disaster then; but not, I think, of tragedy—certainly not a tragedy quite so grim.

  I watched them until they disappeared beyond the shoulder of Jebel al-Akhbar, and shortly afterwards the sun set. One more night. But there was still no news, no certainty of action. “Better turn in and get some sleep,” Berry suggested. “I haven’t even got an ETA from the Colonel yet.”

  “Will we move in the morning, do you think? David can’t last out much longer.” And in the morning he might be faced with his father’s desperate situation. “For God’s sake! It’s got to be tomorrow.”

  “You’d better pray, then,” he snapped back irritably. “For only God and the Foreign Office know what action will be taken and when.” And he added angrily: “I don’t even know whether the Colonel’s order to my company has been officially confirmed.”

  I took his advice then and went to my camp bed. But sleep was out of the question. The night was hot and very still, the stars bright. Time dragged and I dozed, to be jerked awake by the distant sound of engines. It was 0155 hours and Berry’s company was motoring in, dark shapes moving in convoy across the desert without lights. An officer reported all present and correct, but warned that the only orders he’d received were to wait for the Colonel and not to cross the border.

  Orders whispered in the night, the dark trucks spewing men out onto the sand; the area of our camp was suddenly full of movement, an ant heap settling to sleep, and a voice at my elbow said: “’Ullo, Mister Grant. Is Ruffini.” His pudgy hand gripped my arm, patted my shoulder; words tumbled out of him. They had rushed him up to this company to get him out of the way. He’d been made fabulous offers by several newspapers. “I am lucky, eh—lucky to be a journalist and out ’ere at this minute?” But I think he was a little scared. He was certainly lonely. His knowledge of the Arabs was based on Mussolini’s short-lived empire.

  A bare two hours’ sleep and then the dawn breaking … Another day, and the ant heap stirred and came to life, little groups of men forming and re-forming, an ever-changing pattern against the blistering yellow of sand and gravel. And standing there on the rim of the desert to the southeast, the Jebel al-Akhbar—black at first against the rising sun, but soon dun-coloured and bare. No sound, no movement to be seen through the glasses. And the desert all around us—that was empty and silent, too.

  And then that solitary shot. We were sitting under a canvas awning, rigged from the side of the headquarters truck, and drinking tea. We all heard it, a sharp, faint sound from the direction of Jebel al-Akhbar. But when we looked through the glasses there was nothing to see, and there was no further sound; just that one isolated shot. The time was 10.34.

  We had no reason to regard it as any different from the other shots we had heard, though afterwards we realized the sound had been slighter. We settled down again and finished our tea, an island of men camped in a void, waiting whilst the sun climbed the brassy sky and the oven lid of the day’s heat clamped down on us, stifling all talk.

  Only Ruffini was active, trotting sweating from one to the other of us, tirelessly questioning, endlessly scribbling, staring through creased-up eyes at the Jebel al-Akhbar, and then finally badgering Berry until he had given orders for his copy to be transmitted over the radio to Sharjah.

  And then, just before midday, the dead stillness of the desert was torn apart by the buzz-saw sound of a helicopter. It came sidling in from the north, a strange aerial insect painted for desert war, and in the instant of its settling the whole camp was suddenly changed to a single organism full of purpose. With Ruffini I stood apart on the edge of this ordered turmoil and watched the man responsible for it, surrounded by his officers, standing with legs straddled, head thrown back—a man conscious of the dramatic quality of the moment.

  Ruffini noticed it, too. “Il Colonello—’e is going to war.”

  But my attention had shifted from Colonel George. Coming towards me from the helicopter was the squat, battered figure of Philip Gorde. “Grant.” He was leaning heavily on his stick as he faced me. “Where’s Charles Whitaker? What’s happened to him?” And
when I told him what we feared, he said: “Christ Almighty, man, couldn’t you do something?” But then he shrugged. “No, of course not. Bloody politicians!” he growled. “Always too late making up their minds. Hope we’re in time, that’s all.” He was staring at me out of his bloodshot eyes. “I gather he’d moved his rig up to the border. He’d started to drill, had he?”

  “Yes.”

  “I wish I’d known that earlier.” He looked tired, his face liverish. “Not that I could have done anything to help him,” he added heavily. “It’s a hell of a situation. And that boy of his a bloody little hero. Doesn’t he realize what he’s doing to his father—or doesn’t he care? God!” He was jabbing at the ground with his stick. “Well, we’ll just have to hope we get there in time,” he said again, and he stumped off to talk to Colonel George.

  The cluster of officers was breaking up now; voices shouting orders, men running, the whir of starter motors, the roar of engines, a Land Rover disappearing in a cloud of dust.

  “Ah, there you are, Grant.” The Colonel, neat and dapper, cool almost in the torrid heat, came towards me. “The boy’s still alive, I gather.”

  “There was a shot fired.…”

  “So Berry tells me. We’ll just have to hope for the best. I’m sending a small force up to take over the fort. The rest of the outfit will move direct on Hadd. Berry’s gone ahead to make contact with the Emir. You and Ruffini can ride in the headquarters truck.”

  The column was lining up now, and ten minutes later we were on the move. “If ’e is still alive, it is a great story, eh?” Ruffini said. “You think ’e is still alive?”

  “How the hell do I know?” But Berry had given him four days. I was pinning my hopes to that.

  “Well, it don’t matter—alive or dead, ’e is a hero. And this is the biggest story I am ever writing.”

  That was all Ruffini saw in it—a newspaper story, nothing more. And Gorde hating David because I hadn’t had time to explain his motives. I felt suddenly sad, depressed by the thought that David’s action would be misunderstood. How could you explain to men like Gorde what Khalid’s death had meant to him, how he’d felt when he’d seen the people of Saraifa forced to leave the oasis?

  Half an hour later the column halted. We were close under the Jebel al-Akhbar. Time passed and nothing happened. The wait seemed endless. And then suddenly the Colonel’s Land Rover came roaring down the column. He had Gorde in the seat beside him. “Jump in,” he called to me. “Ruffini, too. The Emir has agreed to meet me at the first well.” He was in a mood of boyish elation, a reaction from nervous tension. The column was moving again now and several vehicles had swung away and were headed for the camel track on the north side of Jebel al-Akhbar.

  We reached the head of the column just as it breasted the shoulder of the Jebel. There once more was Hadd, jammed against the limestone cliffs, with the Emir’s palace flying the limp green flag and the fort stark against the sky above it. “Hell!” Colonel George signalled his driver to stop, and Berry’s Land Rover drew up alongside. The column ground to a halt behind us. “I don’t like it,” the Colonel said. “Too quiet.”

  Between us and the crumbling walls of Hadd there wasn’t a living soul: no sign of Sheikh Abdullah’s askari, no vestige of the camp we’d seen two days before. Even up by the date-gardens nothing moved. All the Wadi Hadd al-Akhbar, as far as the eye could strain through the glare and the mirages, was empty of human life.

  “The blighter’s up to something. What do you think, Berry?”

  “I think we’d better be prepared for trouble, sir. I told you I didn’t like the speed with which he saw me, the crafty look in his eye.”

  The Colonel nodded. “Go ahead, then.”

  The orders were signalled and the column fanned out across the level gravel plain, whilst we drove straight to the first well. Behind us the Bedouin Scouts leapt from their trucks and spread out over the sand—mortars and machine guns, ammunition. And not a shot fired at us. We sat in the Land Rover, roasting by the shattered parapet of the well, and the tension mounted with the uncanny silence. Nothing stirred anywhere.

  A full hour the Emir kept us waiting there in the blazing sun. He judged it nicely. A little longer and Colonel George’s patience would have been exhausted. And then at last life stirred in the mud-dun town, a scattering of figures moving towards us across the flat, shelved expanse of gravel that lay between the well and the walls: old men and children—not an armed man amongst them. “He’s going to play the injured innocent,” Gorde whispered in my ear.

  The old men and the children had closed around us. Some had empty drinking bowls, others goats’ skins; they whined and begged for water as they had been told to do.

  “My heart bleeds.” Gorde snorted with contempt. “Ah, here he comes.”

  Through the arched entrance to the town came a figure riding a white camel, riding absolutely alone—not a single retainer. “He’s clever,” the Colonel muttered. “There isn’t a desert ruler who wouldn’t have regarded this as an occasion to parade his full power. And to ride a camel when he’s got an almost brand-new Cadillac …” His eyes were fixed with a puzzled frown on the solitary figure, on the slow, stately gait of that lone camel. He turned abruptly to Gorde. “What’s he got up his sleeve? Something. That Cadillac was a present from Saudi. He’d surely want to flaunt that in our faces.”

  Gorde didn’t say anything, and we sat and waited. The crowd fell back, the clamouring ceased. The Emir rode his camel through them, and, sitting there in the Land Rover, I realized suddenly why he hadn’t used his Cadillac. With set face and without any gesture of greeting, he rode his beast right up to us, and when he finally halted it, the supercilious head was right over us, the rubbery lips white with foam, dripping saliva on the Colonel’s beret. The Emir himself towered above us, godlike against the burning sky.

  It was extraordinarily effective. The man was simply dressed in spotless robes and looked much bigger, the features more impressive, the curve of the nose more marked.

  He waited in silence for Colonel George to greet him. Instead the Colonel barked an order and his driver backed the Land Rover, turning it so that the bonnet faced the Emir. But it was no good. Patiently, without expression, the camel moved, resumed the same dominating position.

  And then the Emir began to speak. It was an address that lasted almost a quarter of an hour. The manner of delivery was cold and restrained, but underlying the restraint was the hate that filled the man. It was there in the thin, vibrant tone of his voice, in the black gaze of his eyes, in every gesture—a bitter fury of hatred. And that bloody camel, slavering over my head, seemed the very embodiment of his master’s mood.

  Gorde whispered the gist of the Emir’s speech to me. It followed a familiar pattern. It ignored entirely the unprovoked attack on Saraifa, the cruel intention behind the blocking of the falajes, the murderous slaughter of men driven to desperate action to save life and home. Instead, it dwelt at length on Hadd’s territorial claims. These the Emir based on a particular period in Hadd’s history, a period that went back more than five hundred years. He conveniently brushed aside all that had happened in the area since that time. He attacked the oil companies for sucking Arabia’s lifeblood. The spittle flew from his mouth as he called them “Nasrani thieves, jackals of the West, imperialist bloodsuckers.” He ignored the fact that without the companies the oil would have remained beneath the sands, that the wealth of Arabia depended on them, that the very arms he’d been given had been bought with the royalties they paid. And in attacking the oil companies, he also attacked Britain and America. Imperialist murderers! he called us.

  “He’s coming to the point now,” Gorde muttered. The camel belched, a deep, rumbling sound that blew a fleck of froth from its lips into my lap. The Emir leaned forward, the dark, cruel face bending down towards us. Murderers! he screamed. I thought he was going to spit in our faces.

  “Start the engine,” Colonel George ordered the driver. “I’m not standing
for any more of this.” He said something to the Emir. The man smiled. That smile—it was curiously excited. I call you murderers because you come here armed to protect a murderer. He gestured with his hands, pointing towards the fort. And when Colonel George tried to explain David’s motives, the rough justice of his action in depriving Hadd of water, the Emir silenced him. You do not think it is murder when an Arab man is killed. What do you say if he is the murderer of a white man—one of yourselves?

  He turned, raising his body in the saddle, shouting and signalling with his hand. A closed Land Rover emerged from Hadd. The crowd, which had drawn in a tight circle round us, scattered before it, and as it roared past us a figure in Arab clothes was thrust out of the back of it, a limp rag of a figure, battered and covered in blood.

  It hit the sand beside us, rolled over once, and then lay sprawled face upwards in an undignified heap; and as the cloud of dust settled, I saw what it was that lay there: the dead body of Colonel Whitaker.

  He had been shot in the face, and his head was badly battered, his arms broken. His clothes were black with blood. Flies settled in a swarm, and I felt suddenly sick.

  You know this man? the Emir demanded. And when Colonel George nodded, the Emir explained that Haj Whitaker had that morning agreed to go up to the fort and reason with his son. What had happened up there he did not say. He merely gestured to the body. This man’s son has murdered my people. You say it is not murder. Look now at that which lies before you and tell me—is that murder?

  Colonel George sat there, his eyes hard, his face set. He had no answer. “His own father!” His voice was shocked, and he made no attempt to challenge the Emir’s version of what had happened.

  “You can’t be sure,” I said.