Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  For the moment Baltis, who was a genuine desperado, had Chullunder Ghose to deal with; and he was as full of exasperation as a boiling kettle, having Bertolini on his hands and being anxious to get away before Bertolini could learn what a trap he was in. The chauffeur was a thoroughly reliable old-timer of McGowan’s, stupid enough to take no interest in anything but food and wages, clever enough to seem more stupid than he was in order to avoid mistakes; so there was no anxiety on his score. But there was an awful risk that some more of Dorje’s men might appear at any moment and give the game away. Bertolini was perhaps not exactly suspicious, but he was puzzled and as I drew near the car I heard the babu say to him:

  “As to that, we will see what messages we get when we sit quietly in your place.”

  The moment I opened the car door and began to help Baltis in, the babu turned on me and damned me like a criminal to help bolster Bertolini’s growing doubt of him.

  “You keep this important agent waiting while you philander in the darkness! Just because you heard me say I will investigate him you forget that he is the head man here until or unless removed by direct order from headquarters! I will report you to the Lord Dorje himself as one who grows slack at critical moment!”

  Then he nudged me by way of apology, as if that were necessary, and turned his tongue loose on Baltis, who was much less likely to endure his impudence, her sense of humor having had a hard siege.

  “Damn you!” he exploded. “You women! You keep everybody waiting, always! If the King of the World succeeds in spite of women he will work a miracle! I have told him that not once but many times! If he fails, it will be because of a woman — I have told him that, too!”

  She perfectly understood that he was merely talking for Bertolini’s benefit; and the importance of keeping the blind man deceived until we had uncovered his secrets, must have been equally clear to her. It is not likely, either, that she had forgotten Bertolini’s comments on her own shortcomings and she probably understood she was in danger from him. But she could not resist her natural impulse to annoy the babu and, if possible, to make his blood run cold with foreboding.

  “Yes,” she retorted. “Dorje’s fate is in a woman’s keeping ever since he announced himself! Yours, too!”

  “What is that — announced himself?” Bertolini demanded. But then the car moved off and I was left standing, wondering what new dilemma was in store for our ingenious babu. I wished I had kept Baltis with us. She could have ridden the donkey. If she had happened to get killed, we could have spared her, it seemed to me. I had already forgotten I felt sorry for her.

  CHAPTER 20. “It’s only being caught off-stage that actually hurts.”

  Like most successful men of action, McGowan had a genius or choosing his assistants. If a less efficient and alert man than Lieutenant Allison had been in command of that motor-truck with its searchlight and squad of infantry, that night would probably have been our last on earth. However, I must explain what had happened.

  After listening to learn what line Chullunder Ghose would take with Bertolini, and having assured himself that copper-belly and his gang were not being troublesome, Grim left the ante-chamber and hurried for a conference with McGowan at the pyramid entrance. There he yielded to McGowan’s protest that it was unsafe to neglect those visitors who had fled when Honey Foxman was shot in the back. They agreed to signal for the motor-truck, and to do that McGowan had had to make a circuit of the pyramid, which takes time.

  He did not dare to signal from the entrance, because of the risk of being seen by Dorje’s men, and there was the added difficulty that he did not know exactly where the truck was in hiding. So, as I say, he made a circuit — and then climbed the pyramid — no mean feat in total darkness. From the summit he had only dared to make three or four quick flashes, but he had been answered instantly, and by the time he had got to the foot of the pyramid Lieutenant Allison and the truck were almost within hailing distance. However, he did not dare to hail them; Dorje’s men might be lurking anywhere in the shadows.

  He took the lesser risk of walking out to meet the truck, getting in its way and hoping rather than expecting not to be shot by some keen-eyed riflemen. Luckily, Allison spotted him. So McGowan got into the truck, and from that moment there began to be action that would have satisfied even old-time movie patrons.

  I am not quite sure that McGowan had not lost patience with Grim’s peculiar tactics, although he never dropped a hint of it, that I heard. At any rate, with or without Grim’s concurrence, he had decided on a clean-up; and one of the most marvelous things I have ever seen was the instantaneous, mechanically perfect response of the cordon of troops from the moment the truck went into action. Someone — I have no idea who — not only had trusted McGowan implicitly, but had imposed exact cooperation in a plan that must have been decided on, in almost no time at all, at a conference during the day’s confusion.

  As the truck approached the south side of the pyramid McGowan ordered the searchlight turned on. It flooded all the lower courses of the masonry with a white glare in which hardly a snake could have hidden. It was answered instantly by a revolver shot from one of Honey Foxman’s gang lurking somewhere in a gap in the broken masonry; he probably aimed at the lens in the hope of smashing it, but he hit the driver of the truck, whose crew cut loose with a machine-gun while Allison himself took the wheel and two men picked up the wounded man. Then the truck came on again, spurting rifle and machine-gun fire and wiping out the shadows with its roving eye. One moment there was a broad path of light in front of it; the next it was sweeping the pyramid; and there must have been twenty-five or thirty men in hiding, every one of whom aimed at the light and tried to smash it with revolver fire. Each shot from the pyramid courses was instantly answered by a belt or half a belt from the machine-gun, and in the glare from the light I saw several men come tumbling headlong.

  Two thoughts worried me. One was, whether the car containing Chullunder Ghose and Bertolini was already far enough away to permit the babu to invent a plausible enough explanation of the firing, which the blind man’s sharp ears could not fail to detect. The other was that the searchlight could inevitably sweep in my direction in a moment. There was nothing to distinguish me as friend or enemy — no cover where I was at the moment — nothing for it but to walk straight forward, wondering what the next world looks like, if there is one. And sure enough, about fifty bullets clipped the macadam road on either side of me before McGowan spotted who I was and yelled to me to come and attend to the wounded driver.

  Unless you have steady light and instruments, there is not an awful lot that you can do for a man with a revolver bullet in his shoulder, especially in a crowded motor-truck that is bumping over sand and broken masonry. However, I stopped the bleeding. By that time there was no more shooting from the pyramid; they were turning the searchlight in every direction and potting at fugitives. I had time to observe what the cordon of troops was doing.

  Searchlights — I would never have believed there were so many in all Egypt. They were advancing ahead of the troops in a wide arc with one end extended toward the pyramid and the other, away to the south of us, curving around toward the Nile. They did not, of course, at one time make a perfectly unbroken zone of light in front of them, but there was not an inch of ground that those searchlights did not sweep, and it was impossible to see beyond them except for moments when two lights diverged and one could glimpse between. One could only imagine the supporting troops, converging like ribs of a fan. I wondered what would happen if that tremendous quantity of active electric current should disturb the as yet uncovered cache of Dorje’s thunderbolts. What would happen, for instance, to the ammunition in the men’s belts? I did not know they had none.

  Meanwhile, there was another of our men hit and McGowan himself was half- stunned by being pitched off the back of the truck when we struck a lump of limestone masonry that lay covered with blown sand; so I had my hands full, although McGowan recovered rapidly and very soon took cha
rge again. They maneuvered until they had the searchlight turned full on the pyramid entrance — that is to say, at a considerable upward angle, and to do it they had to back away about a hundred and fifty yards, so as to avoid impenetrable shadow on the few flat feet where there is standing room.

  The maneuver made the truck an almost perfect target. A mere handful of Dorje’s men, instead of following the others across the sand and being shot down, had climbed to the higher courses and now kept up a determined, long- range fire with their revolvers in the hope of putting the searchlight out of action; they could have escaped then pretty easily toward the Nile, where they would at least have had a slim chance, although there was undoubtedly a whole flotilla of boats on the watch. They were clever; they never fired twice from the same spot, and it is not easy to aim upward; they had acres of irregularly broken masonry in which to hide, and they only needed one lucky hit to smash the searchlight or put the power-plant out of business.

  Allison solved it. He suddenly switched the searchlight off, as if it had been smashed, and the din the engine made before they throttled it helped out the illusion. Even above that din we heard one man shout to the others from higher up. I caught the word homar (donkey). I told Allison where Bertolini’s beast was standing tied to a lump of broken granite; it was a fine white Muscat mare as capable of speed as any animal of that size can be; to the imagination of a desperate fugitive, particularly if he happened to be wounded, it probably seemed like lightning on four feet.

  I had signed the donkey’s death warrant, but she never knew what hit her and she had company into the next world, if that was consolation. Pausing, directing the searchlight, counting seconds, calculating how long it would take those men to scramble down the courses, Allison suddenly switched the light on. He gave no order. The machine-gun stuttered. Five men and the donkey went away from this world with the suddenness of shadows caught by sunlight — only that these left their shadows in a graceless heap behind them. I heard a sergeant:

  “Lad, y’re learning! You may buy beer on the strength o’ that. I’ll drink wi’ you!”

  Then Jeff — gigantic — he bulks like a barge in darkness — standing in the entrance, shouting down to us to prevent a hail from the machine-gun. The searchlight, swerving upward, caught him and reduced his size as if he had been re-focussed.

  “We’ve prisoners as soon as you can spare some men!”’Allison went in, and six men after him. McGowan stayed in charge of the truck; he spared me one man and I went to see if there were any wounded among the machine-gun’s victims. I found three, of whom one was almost dead. The second one we came on — he was lying on the second — lowest course of masonry — struck upward at me with a wave-edged dagger and had to be held down by the rifleman while I improvised a tourniquet to prevent him from bleeding to death. The third man fired his last shot as we drew near; it clipped about a third of an inch of skin and hair from the side of my head but did no other damage. He had a smashed leg — it was almost shot off — but he tried to hide himself among the shadows, and when we did what we could for him he bit the soldier through the hand.

  We had to return and get help, and even so the utmost we could do was to carry those three wounded men and lay them on the sand where they could be found by an ambulance crew later on. We had water for them, from the riflemen’s bottles, and there was a first-aid outfit on the truck that provided temporary bandages; beyond that and a few cigarettes they had to take their chances, which were nothing to feel cock-a-hoop about. We had no time to search them or the dead for clues about Dorje just then. Grim came, looking like a serious casualty himself because of the cut on his forehead; but he took one look at the semicircular cordon of advancing searchlights and then spoke to McGowan:

  “Signal, if you don’t mind.”

  “O.K. Signal,” said McGowan.

  Up went the searchlight skyward and described a circle three times, then descended and was switched off. That was twice repeated. There was sudden darkness. Almost exactly together the advancing searchlights were switched off, one only, away to the rear, continuing to send a long pencil of light toward the sky. It was possible then to see the troops behind the searchlights; companies and squadrons had closed in on one another until they looked like one sickle-shaped brush-stroke painted rather deeper than the midnight gloom around them. They were grimly mysterious — ominous — almost impossibly silent.

  “Shall we go?” said Grim.

  McGowan left two men in charge of prisoners and wounded. Jeff climbed into the truck and demanded antiseptic for the bites in his arm, so my attention was again occupied, but I did not miss much. We jolted forward slowly without running lights, skirting the second and third pyramids and narrowly avoiding open tombs that were hard to distinguish from shadows. Grim whispered to me:

  “This looks like catching a mouse with a herd of elephants, but wait and see. If Dorje’s cache is where we think, they might have got through to Cairo with enough dingbats to destroy the city. They’re desperate. I should say we’ve one chance in a million.”

  I asked the obvious question: “Why not wait for daylight?”

  “Too many people got the wind up,” he answered. “The politicals want Cairo cooled off, if it should leak out that there’s a cache of these thunderbolt things in the desert. We’re lucky there’s a red-hot general commanding; he doesn’t believe a word about the cache, so Mac says, but he’s giving us full rope to prove our theory or eat crow. He’s all right. But he’ll try to make us eat crow at the show-down. Why not? Who wouldn’t? So I think there’ll be fireworks.”

  “Then we start for Chak-sam?”

  “Not unless we’re right on this hunt. If there’s no cache where we’re looking for it, they’ll remind me I’m a United States American, to whom a visa to visit India cannot be granted just at this time for fear of the danger to my health and morals. However, they play fair. They don’t like us outsiders on the team. But if we pull this off they’ll give us carte blanche — almost.”

  We had passed the third pyramid and swung on south by east on bumpy ground. McGowan ordered one flash from the searchlight then, to show our whereabouts, and it was answered by a zig-zag movement of the beam of light behind the troops. We began to go slower. Suddenly we stopped. Allison switched on the running lights. McGowan’s motorcycle Cockney leaped out of a shadow and came running toward us, exposing himself to the light for fear he might be shot unless recognized. He was out of breath and unable to talk in a low voice; his speech came in gasps, so we all heard what he said, although McGowan jumped to the ground to talk with him”:

  “Sir, you’re close up! There’s nigh on fifty of ’em, scared desperate, all ‘iding in and around that tomb. Them that couldn’t crowd in dug a funk-’ole for ‘emselves in the sand what come out o’ the tomb. They’ve killed Mahdi Aububah with the butt-end of a rifle, maybe thinking it was ‘im who brought the troops down on ’em. They’ve got lots o’ firearms, but l couldn’t get near enough to tell what kind.”

  “Did you overhear anything?”

  “Yes, sir, but not much. One man said in Arabic that they’d better die there than be hanged like dogs on a Christian gallows.”

  “How far away are they?”

  “‘Alf a mile. Maybe a bit less. Maybe a bit more. I dunno. I’ve ‘oofed it.”

  “Where’s your motorcycle?”

  “Busted. Pitched ‘ead-first into a open tomb and cut my ‘ead; it’s all bloody.”

  So I had one more job of bandaging, but I heard what followed. McGowan, Allison, Grim and Jeff went into conference, as the business bosses say at tea-time. They agreed to signal to the general. Up went a beam from the searchlight and McGowan, with Grim agreeing word by word, dictated to Allison, who wrote the message down and then dictated to the sergeant-signaler, who jerked a little gadget and made Morse code flashes on the sky.

  “Cache believed discovered. Reported held by more than fifty riflemen. Distance about half mile. May we wait for daylight?”


  It was nearly five minutes before the answer came dash-dotted by the searchlight at the army’s rear:

  “Send demand for unconditional surrender, failing which within sixty minutes action will ensue without further warning.”

  “Orders are orders,” said McGowan. “He can’t say afterwards he wasn’t told. He doesn’t believe in the thunderbolts.”

  “He never will,” Grim answered. “Some men can’t believe what isn’t in the books. However, he’s a good sport. We can’t grumble. Who goes?”

  “You do,” said McGowan. “You’re likeliest to be able to talk them into unconditional surrender.”

  “I would like a witness,” said Grim.

  “Yes, of course. All right; Allison, you go with him.”

  “And the guide would save time. Is he fit for duty?”

  “Me, sir? That ain’t duty, it’s a pleasure! My ‘ead’s as good as gospel— ‘tain’t broke — only shook up!”

  “And a bodyguard,” said Grim.

  “Make haste then — pick your own.”

  “Care if I take my own crowd?”

  “‘Course not.”

  So there were four of us, including Jeff and me, who followed that excellent Cockney through the darkness with nothing but his sense of direction to guide us. He was as keen as a terrier hunting rats. He was one of those men whose passion it is to pull out chestnuts from the fire for other people, well contented if only his beneficiaries make the utmost use of what he finds. A priceless man, impossible to bribe or frighten.