E. Hoffmann Price's War and Western Action

by E. Hoffmann Price

  But anger wouldn’t save Kellam, so he said, “Go back and put your cards on the table. I’m your witness.”

  “I’m A.W.O.L.”

  “I radioed and got you a thirty day leave. You’re out of bounds, but not A.W.O.L.”

  Kellam got up. Yasmini remained cross-legged on the Boukhara carpet whose shining nape had caged the soul of many embers. Slade arose. He was not as steady as he should have been. Swallowing his fury had poisoned him with a venom worse than that of weariness. When he went to the truck he saw there was no cargo.

  “Where is the stuff?”

  Kellam gestured. “Here and there, there’s no end to this nest of caved-in buildings.”

  Slade mounted to the cab. The key was in the ignition. He prodded the starter. The engine spun merrily, but would not fire. Kellam told him, “The spark plugs are gone.”

  “Sounded odd.” Slade got down and lifted the hood. “Who took them out?”

  Kellam reddened and lowered his eyes.

  “Where are they?” Slade demanded, “Tell me or I’ll knock your damned head off and—where are they?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’m afraid I have to believe you. Come outside. I give you my word that there’s no one who can understand a word of English.”

  “Go with him,” Yasmini said.

  Kellam went with Slade to the mouth of the passageway. There, seating himself in an angle sheltered from the wind, the deserter said, “I didn’t have guts enough to face Diane.”

  “So she thought, and nearly clawed my eyes out, and said it was my fault, the way I’d cracked down,” Slade told him. “Go back and face it out.”

  “When a man makes a mess that smells to Washington, and a girl comes all the way to Peshawar to save him,” Kellam explained, “he can’t face her.”

  “Quit beating around the bush! You’re so dizzy about that fancy shape you can’t break loose. You want to break away, but you can’t.”

  Kellam coughed, fidgeted, and stared at his toes. This was answer enough for Slade. “You heel,” he said, quietly, “I could have told Diane about Yasmini, I could have fixed it for someone else to tell her, a neater way of playing my own hand. All right, I have always liked Diane a lot.”

  “You have to bring me back alive, so she can be a hundred percent fed up with me, and you’ll have a clean chance at her!”

  “I’d like such a chance, but that wouldn’t get it for me. My job is to put you back on the beam. I want to do it man to man, not in military style.”

  “Meaning, you don’t want to put me under arrest. Because you know there’s hardly a chance of our getting back?”

  “It’s not quite that bad.”

  Kellam pondered for a long time. “On your word as an officer, is that stuff stolen property?”

  “Sir Pratap Singh Bahardur had an inventory. I read it. Too many items checked for there to be any chance of funny business. What’d she tell you when you hauled the things to her house?”

  Kellam eased up as though talking it out was a relief. Slade hunched forward to grasp at victory.

  “I was—am—fond of her. She wasn’t a public character—not in my time—we’d made plans—”

  Slade kept his teeth from gritting audibly.

  Kellam continued, “The story rang true. She could damn well have been in danger of robbery in times like these. I met you all the way in taking the stuff to her house. I knew I was giving her a slap in the face. Seeing Diane would clinch it. I didn’t know what to do, which way to turn—what could I tell Diane?”

  Slade, seeing the man’s face in the moonlight, threw off his contempt; he was merely sorry that this was the real thing. He could not deny that Yasmini had, in her way, planned on a new life with Kellam. A fatally foolish plan, but if they both meant it, then out of common humanity, he had to accept and understand. Slade had to swallow anything that he had to swallow if by doing so, he could redeem the poor devil.

  Kellam had given his men a bucking up that had snapped them to their feet with a jerk. Only a soldier and a good one could have towered above his own bad example and got response from such poorly disciplined G.I.s. Marching Kellam back a prisoner would be like the surgeon’s reporting that the patient had died after a successful operation.

  Slade said, “If I’d been in your fix, it’d had me biting ten-penny nails in half. Then what happened?”

  “Yasmini was afraid. She wasn’t pretending. She begged me to drive her to the frontier. She’d been prepared, she had everything but a truck and a front.”

  “Papers, you mean, to flash at Malakand?”

  “Right. And I had a spare uniform at her house. She hid under the load. That battle-axe of a Halima, we made her up as a man, she has nearly enough mustache. She faked being drunk, out cold, to explain my being at the wheel. It all went so fast I hadn’t time to think of how I’d get back.”

  Silence, until Slade prompted, “You didn’t plan not to come back?”

  “Didn’t plan. Period.”

  “I’ve been that way about a woman, only I was lucky. Then what?”

  “She knew of this place. I didn’t know that a truck couldn’t get through to Afghanistan. She told me then that she’d prepared for everything. That a letter to relatives in Kashmir would—had already—started them on the way to here. With pack animals to carry the goods. We’d not dare try to buy horses around here, or we’d be looted in five minutes.”

  “I see how you got into, deeper and deeper,” Slade admitted. “You balked and threatened to leave her, unless she left the loot hidden here and came back with you?”

  “Something like that. I’d done my share. I told her she could go back to India, and wait safely, far away from Peshawar, till I got out.”

  “And with Diane in the picture, Yasmini knows better than to risk that?”

  Kellam groaned, and buried his face in his hands.

  Slade caught him by the shoulder. “On your feet, soldier! We’re finding those spark plugs. We’ll shoot our way past Akbar Khan’s place if we have to. I’ll drive, and you hose them if they try to make us pull up.”

  Kellam looked less harassed, less confused. He said, “You’re about ready to fold, what in God’s name’ve you been doing to get here? You need some chow, we have coffee, and brandy, and—”

  Slade shook the hand from his arm. “No go. I’m risking nothing from any commissary Yasmini is running. I’ll hit the sack in a corner I pick for myself where she can’t knife me. And you could do with some rest. Then find the plugs.”

  After watching Kellam fade into the gloom, Slade told himself, “That jeep’s got enough plugs to get us out, and to hell with Yasmini’s foxiness.”

  CHAPTER IX

  When Slade came back with the spark plugs of the jeep, he showed them to Yasmini and said, “You were right when you told me that if I tried to make you find the plugs, Kellam’d turn against me. You’re right saying I’d not be tough enough to force a woman to talk. You’re right in everything—except this.”

  Yasmini looked worried. Slade turned to Kellam. “You won’t lift a hand to stop me.”

  When he would not answer, Yasmini and her woman went down a cross passage whose right-angled reach from the main entrance extended far through the rubbish and ruin. Daylight came in, though faintly. Kellam did not follow them. “Get the stuff,” he finally said, pointing. “I can’t stop you.”

  “Do you want to?”

  “Anyway I turn, I’m wrong.”

  “Sit tight, I’ll get busy.”

  Enough light came in through overhead crevices for Slade to catch the glint and gleam of jewel and silk and metal. Shir Dil’s absence worried him until he stopped to reason it out: the old man must have been convinced by the wrathful khan’s account of how a handful of pistol slugs had settled the fugitive chauffeur. And Shir Dil was among
his own people.

  After loading the loot, Slade told Kellam, “Checking out by daylight can’t be done. Akbar Khan would see our dust and build a road-block we couldn’t break through. So it’s a night march.”

  He checked the spare gas cans, and found more than enough to make the Malakand summit.

  “Give me your gun and the knives,” Slade went on. “We need all the shut-eye we can get before dark. I don’t trust Yasmini—what the devil’ve you been drinking?”

  Kellam was definitely owl-eyed. He reddened, but wouldn’t answer. Slade caught the smell, and exclaimed, “Post, by God! Isn’t honest liquor bad enough?”

  “What’s wrong with post?”

  Slade eyed him, and shrugged. “I believe you don’t actually know what that girl has been feeding you—well it explains a lot.”

  “What’s in it beside brandy and flavoring? She called it panj, anyway.”

  “Panj, my eye! Panj, in case you’ve been too busy to study Urdu, means five: brandy plus rose water plus citron juice plus sugar plus arrack—one-two-three-four-five, panj, hence the English ‘punch’.”

  “Interesting,” Kellam said caustically, “but what of it?”

  Slade eyed his own hand, and the fingers thereof. “Five equals panj, which you’ll get and in English, brother, if you drink any more of that stuff she’s mixed. It’s doped with opium or hashish, and with you out cold, where’d I be?”

  “Opium? Hashish? I’m no hophead!”

  “Of course you’re not, or you’d’ve realized from the way it works what’s in such a mess. You can take it a long time and not be an addict. The case in your favor gets better right along—I mean it, you did a swell job of it while the shooting lasted in Africa. That was something you understood. India fooled you, that’s all.”

  Sincerity touched Kellam. Slade chuckled good humoredly, relaxed his fist, and said, “See that all knives and the like are present and accounted for. Or I’ll have to peel her to the buff to make sure nothing’s hidden. Or, tie her up so tight it’ll be painful. Even then, these dancing girls are so nearly double jointed you can’t hold ’em without a blacksmith to make a job of it.”

  Kellam went to find Yasmini and Halima. When he came back with a dagger and a chopper, which he turned over, along with his service automatic, he said, “This is it, there’s nothing more.”

  “Official statement.”

  Kellam, despite post, drew himself to attention, and saluted. “Official, sir.” Slade, forgetting how grotesque he was in vermin infested Pathan rags and sheepskin jacket, snapped to attention to return the salute. “Very good, Captain! Then, smiling, “Damn good, Steve. And sleep well.”

  Slade burrowed into Boukharan embroideries, silken carpets from Samarkand, and Tekke carpets of wool more luxurious than any silk. The truck’s hood was wired down. He had fastened the tarpaulin, and latched the cab.

  “If that beautiful girl lets air out of the tires, I’ll make her pump ’em up,” he resolved, and yielded to the sleep he had to have, lest he wreck the truck on the dangerous trail.

  Somewhere, in the debris littered passages of buried Suastos, Yasmini was awake and hating him. This knowledge kept him from total surrender to fatigue, so that though Slade rested, his consciousness was nearer the surface than it would otherwise have been. And then, he had won Kellam back to returning. In his half sleep, Slade pondered on how to stay behind the scenes, to help Kellam without taking from him the credit of having made restitution of his own accord and effort.

  “…losing that jeep’ll be tough to explain away…less said about post, the better…tried to do girlfriend a favor, and kicked the roof off when he learned the score…so came back…my end’s easy…leaving details from a report isn’t a false official statement…the guy has bucked up his outfit…”

  Thus Kellam’s redemption, rather than his own danger, kept Slade from entire rest. What awakened him was gasoline fumes.

  “Siphoning—”

  Just that much; the words pertaining to Yasmini had no time to shape. Flame spewed, red and smoky. Slade scarcely heard the gusty sound, and the crackle of tarpaulin. He was lurching for the front, snatching the extinguisher, and twisting the door handle.

  Yasmini, backed well away from the flaming fuel tank, screamed when she saw him. Her eyes were impossibly wide. She was frozen in a dancer’s pose. Slade gave her the first jet of the extinguisher. It caught her squarely in the face. Pain made her collapse, choking and clawing her eyes.

  After wasting a few strokes on the gas tank, he flung the extinguisher aside, knifed the tarpaulin, and grabbed a woolen rug. This he flung over the tank. Being full, there was no space in it for an explosive mixture to form. He smothered the fire, then whipped out the blazing trails of fuel which had boiled over to the ground.

  The extinguisher settled the smoldering tarpaulin.

  When he had finished, Yasmini was gone. Kellam came on the run, blinking and confused. Slade said, “She did it. Don’t worry, a bit of carbon that won’t blind your honey or even mark her, but by the living God, I’ll kill her if she makes one more false move. Tell her, make her believe it, or I’ll change my mind and finish her right now!”

  Kellam believed, and he obeyed.

  Slade sleeve-mopped his sooty face. “Lucky that hellion didn’t know enough about gas tanks to do it right,” he muttered. “Better hold her nose and fill her with post till it leaks out her ears…

  He went to the front, and cursed the sun, and the long hours before he could get on his way.

  When Slade saw the white-bearded mountaineer coming up over the shoulder of the shelf, he forgot Yasmini, and grabbed his carbine. He would have dropped the man, but for his aversion to shooting without challenge.

  At the first move, the newcomer flung himself forward to roll for scanty cover. “Don’t shoot!” he yelled.

  “Shir Dil—you blockhead—get on your hind legs, or l will blow you loose from your eye teeth! What’s the idea barging in like this? Where the devil—who’s that following you?”

  While Pathans are usually loyal to their salt, Slade had seen too many men slip. He yelled for Kellam, “Grab the gun from my belt and stand by!”

  Two bearded Sikhs with carbines loomed up. They were big, brown, stolid, and wearing turbans which made their faces even heavier; unimaginative men, thick-witted men who, once in motion, keep moving. The yelling and Shir Dil’s dive for cover had not changed the sway of their broad shoulders. They came on, and two like them followed, guns at the ready. That Kellam had joined Slade, and stood by with a .45 automatic was nothing to them. Each firm step raised puffs of dust. Unless someone commanded, “Halt!” they’d probably march right through the bowels of buried Suastos; if anyone began shooting, they’d answer with marching fire, and keep going until they dropped or else won the decision.

  There shouldn’t be any Sikhs in the Wali’s territory, least of all in khaki uniform. “This is it,” Kellam said, in a level voice. “The commissioner sends troops, now that we’re both off base and Uncle Sam doesn’t count.”

  Slade blocked Kellam with his elbow. “Hold it! That’s my man getting on his pins. That’s what smells! Shir Dil, what’s this?”

  The old Pathan was up, and smiling. “Friends, O Friend of Allah!”

  Then Slade saw the veiled woman who rode a cream-colored donkey. Only one eye was visible. Her dusty brown cape made her shapeless as a beehive. Pack animals followed.

  Slade groaned. “More women.”

  Yasmini had recovered from her woes. The splash of carbon tetrachloride hadn’t hit squarely. She came out, splendid and shapely, with a figured shawl over her sleek hair. She had dyed her palms red, and stained her toenails; a billow of attar surged ahead, sweetening the air.

  Kellam tried to thrust her back into the shallows, but she clung to him. Slade barely noted this, being busy squinting through the glare, a
nd wondering what would come next. When it came, he was not prepared.

  The woman on the donkey lowered her veil.

  “I knew I’d find you!” she cried.

  Slade took a step forward, and choked. “You bungling blockhead! You—”

  Her face changed. She had seen Kellam and Yasmini; Kellam’s embarrassment had told more than the dancing girl’s close-pressed body could have revealed. “Stand fast, you fool,” Slade growled, turning his head in time to see Kellam hustling Yasmini back into the tunnel. “Stand fast, you’re making it worse.”

  Yasmini, laughing and breathless, let herself be herded out of sight. The more she insisted she wanted to meet the memsahib, the more Kellam felt that he had to conceal her.

  Slade then went to meet Diane Crawford, who was followed by two native women, whose leathery faces insured their safety in any company. They helped Diane dismount.

  “Get in, you and your army, before someone sees you from miles off, these blasted mountaineers have telescope eyes, X-ray eyes. What the blazes is this?”

  Diane smiled impishly, as though she had not noticed Kellam trying to untangle himself from a Kashmiri girl whose every pose was enticing art. “You’d never guess, but I made it! Oh, it was so simple, so easy!”

  Slade, following her into the ruins, wondered if perhaps he had been drinking post in his sleep. But the Sikhs were no illusion, and neither was Shir Dil’s bouquet of sheep, tobacco, asafetida, garlic, and horses.

  “It was this way, sir,” the old Pathan began. “Akbar Khan is a pig-loving son of many fathers! When he came back, he had me beaten till there weren’t no more sticks left. He—”

  “Skip it! Diane, what’s it all about?”

  “Oh, a truck!” she exclaimed seating herself on the running-board. “How marvelous!”