by W E Johns
“I’ve an idea,” countered Ginger. “Ming must know the way. No doubt Feng does too. One might act as guide.”
“And having got there what would you do?”
“I haven’t thought as far as that yet,” admitted Ginger. “Would you mind asking Ming if he knows how the prisoners will travel and what is likely to be the size of their escort?”
Ritzen put the question, and turning back to Ginger gave the answer. “He says he has no definite information, but it is almost certain they will go in one of the covered carts used in this region. There is, in fact, no other form of wheeled transport here, for the simple reason there is no proper road. These awful rutted tracks would break the springs of any ordinary vehicle. The escort will probably consist of anything up to half a dozen soldiers walking beside the cart. Four is the usual number when there are only a few prisoners. Actually, even that is only for the look of the thing, for there is no likelihood of an attempt to escape. The prisoners, having no food and nowhere to go, would be recaptured at once—unless they wandered out into the desert and starved to death.”
Ginger looked at Algy. “That doesn’t sound too bad to me.”
“The escort will consist of soldiers, and they will of course be armed,” Ritzen pointed out.
“So shall we,” averred Ginger. Then he had his brainwave. “What about the Kirghiz!”
“What about them?”
“We might employ them.”
“Employ them! Those desperate men!”
Ginger smiled. “We can be pretty tough ourselves at times.”
“I can assure you that nobody has ever succeeded in employing Kirghiz outlaws.”
“That’s probably because they were expected to work for nothing.”
“And what were you thinking of offering them?”
“The two things which, according to you, they like most. Fighting and money.”
“But we have no money.”
“It’s available, should we need it. The British Government has never jibbed at paying for service, and as all the world knows it has never failed to pay its debts. If we got safely home, I’d undertake to fly back here and drop a bag of money—whatever we promised.”
Everyone now began to take an interest and a faint atmosphere of hope became perceptible.
Algy looked at Ginger. “You know, I think you’ve got something there.”
“What do you use for money in this part of the world?” Ginger put the question to Ritzen.
“There are several currencies, both coin and paper money,” was the reply. “But the money that is accepted by everyone is in the form of lumps of silver called taels. A tael is worth a bit under two shillings.”
Algy did some mental arithmetic. “Could we say that a thousand taels would be roughly about a hundred pounds?”
“Roughly, yes.”
“Would that interest the Kirghiz do you think?”
Ritzen smiled bleakly. “I doubt if they’ve ever seen so much money. Such a sum would be a fortune here, where men work all the hours of daylight for around a penny a day.”
“All right. Then let’s get weaving,” suggested Ginger. “How about you having a word with the bandits and finding out how the idea of being millionaires appeals to them?”
Miss Treves spoke. “Are you thinking of attacking the cart?”
“Put it this way,” answered Ginger. “I’m trying to think of some way of saving innocent people from a miserable death. In my view, any means justifies that end.”
“C’est vrai,” declared the French member of the party, apparently a realist like most of his countrymen.
“I dislike bloodshed,” said Miss Summers.
“So do I—particularly when it’s likely to be my own,” returned Ginger.
“I hold that it’s unpardonable.”
“It’s also unpardonable of these godless communists to carry off our friends for no other reason than sheer hate,” declared Ginger warmly. “Let’s waste no more time arguing about that, please.”
“I’ll go and speak to the Kirghiz,” said Ritzen, getting up and going into the darkness.
“If they won’t come themselves, ask them if we can have the spare horses,” requested Algy. “Tell them they must make up their minds quickly or it’ll be too late.”
For all the arguments he had put forward Ginger knew in his heart that this was the craziest scheme which they had ever committed themselves. The whole project had been a wild one from the outset, but it was now, he felt, fast approaching the fantastic. But as he had said in an aside to Algy, he wouldn’t have slept had they done nothing. Gnawing at his conscience would have been the thought of the wretched people in the cart getting ever farther away from any hope of deliverance. With or without the co-operation of the bandits he did not hold any high hopes of success. But anything was better than sitting doing nothing at all.
Ritzen came back. “They will go,” he announced briefly.
“Capital!” cried Algy.
“The thousand taels did the trick.”
“Cheap at the price.”
“They have a doubt. It is that the prisoners, fearing them more than their captors, will not leave the cart. For good faith they want one of us to go with them.”
“I had every intention of going,” declared Ginger.
“No, I’ll go,” stated Algy.
“Not likely,” answered Ginger. “You’ve plenty on your plate here. It was my scheme. I’m the one to go. That’s settled.”
Ritzen joined in again. “They want us to keep their wounded comrade in the caves and look after him until they get back. They’re afraid that the Tiger may come back with more soldiers. If they found a Kirghiz here they would at once put him to death without mercy.”
“That’s fair enough,” agreed Algy. “As a matter of fact I was thinking that myself.”
“I said that if any of us got home we would see that a bag of money was dropped in the sand where the stones have been cleared,” said Ritzen. “There was a question about the horses,” he continued. “There are four white prisoners and the Abbot, making five in all. There are four Kirghiz. They have five horses plus the three captured from the troops, making eight. That means only three horses available for the five prisoners.”
“I doubt if the Abbot would ride,” said Miss Summers. “He’s very old.”
“We’d manage him somehow,” declared Ginger. “How many horses will there be drawing the cart?”
“Usually two.”
“We’ll borrow those if necessary,” said Ginger, brushing the difficulty aside in his impatience.
“You will all come back here if the plan succeeds?” queried Ritzen.
“Of course, to be ready for the plane when it comes. But time is precious. If our wild and woolly allies are ready, let’s get off.”
That ended all argument.
The only preparations Ginger made were to put a couple of biscuits in his pocket with a flask of water, and throw on a loose Chinese robe which Feng produced from somewhere. This, it was thought, would serve both as camouflage and as an extra garment in the cold night air.
And just how cold it could be Ginger was soon to learn.
CHAPTER VII
A LAND OF FEAR
IN twenty minutes the rescue party was on its way, winding through a seemingly endless succession of valleys and defiles so that it was only by checking on the stars that Ginger could keep any sense of direction.
At first the pace was a brisk walk, but as soon as the moon rose the Kirghiz broke into a gentle canter which, as they seemed to have no difficulty in keeping it up, Ginger took to be their normal speed. The horses were small and rough, but wiry-looking beasts.
How the bandits found their way through the maze of dead-looking hills that all looked alike was to Ginger a mystery, even though he took into account the fact that they had been born to such country and knew no other. There was no track, or a semblance of one, but they appeared never to be in doubt. He could only supp
ose that the serrated skylines served as signposts. They travelled in silence. Not once did they speak. Even the horses, three of which were being led, seemed to know, perhaps from training, that silence in the silent desert is the golden rule, and in some miraculous way they seldom kicked a stone.
In such bizarre conditions it is not surprising that Ginger lost all sense of reality. He found it hard to believe that this was really happening. It was all too preposterous. As a schoolboy he had read the usual stories about brigands. He knew the old rhyme about the brigands sitting round their camp fire. Now, here he was, riding with a band of them across the middle of Asia. They were the real thing too.
They had already demonstrated that plainly enough. No, it couldn’t be happening. Presently he would wake up.
Then he smiled foolishly to himself at the absurd thought of what Biggles would think if he could see him. He lost all count of time. In some strange way such man-made sections of it as hours and minutes seemed no longer to have meaning. Here, the sun, the moon and the stars, the dawn, the dusk and the seasons, were the only measurements that mattered.
Still the Kirghiz pressed on without a spoken word, without a pause, with hardly a glance to left or right, clearly with no more doubts about their way than if they had been on a broad highroad. To Ginger, each inky gorge, each brooding valley, each gap through the everlasting dunes, was exactly like the last. Ritzen had been right in one respect. Alone in such nightmare country he would have become hopelessly lost. No wonder Feng had called it the Black Gobi. No wonder, according to him, it was peopled by demons and monsters who lured foolish travellers to their doom.
After what seemed an eternity it was the numbing cold that dispelled the illusion of a dream. There was no doubt whatever about the cold. Without the sun to warm it the thin air was perishing.
The Kirghiz now began to advance more cautiously. Before showing themselves on a skyline one would dismount, creep forward and survey the ground ahead. Ginger supposed that either they were nearing a caravan trail or approaching their destination. During one such halt he saw lying on the ground beside him an enormous pair of curved horns, and recognised them as coming from the head of the great desert sheep called Ovis poli. From the way the bones had been scattered it looked as if some beast had pulled the animal down and devoured it. Instinctively his eyes wandered to the bare, wrinkled hills around him.
It was a dismal, terrifying country, he mused. What it was like in the winter, when storms and ice and snow swept down from the north, was something best left to the imagination. He hoped he would not be there to see it.
The party moved on even more slowly. At long last it stopped. The Kirghiz dismounted. Ginger did the same, but not before he had gazed across a plain that now stretched away before them. He discerned a slender grey ribbon winding across it; the track, he supposed.
The halt had been made at a point where it fringed the hills. So this, he surmised, was the one trail that linked Tunhwang with Ansi. Never had he seen a path so sinister. There was something almost evil about the way it crept secretly out of the gloom to glide like a serpent across the plain and fade again in the dim, mysterious distances.
The Kirghiz continued to go about their business like men who knew exactly what they were doing, having done the same thing many times before—as no doubt they had. One man took all the horses and led them back into the valley from which they had emerged.
The others, after a signal to Ginger, went forward a little nearer to the track, where they vanished from sight like phantoms in a slight fold in the ground. Ginger found a similar place for himself, not without qualms, knowing what was going to happen. It did not appear to be a particularly good place for an ambuscade, but apparently the bandits thought it was.
It had this advantage. It did not look suitable for the part it was to play, and, for that very reason the escort would suspect nothing. They settled down to wait.
This, to Ginger, was the most nerve-testing phase of the enterprise. The landscape, in all its stark sterility, was bathed in hard moonlight. The stars hung like beacons in the vast expanse of sky, the constellations following their everlasting course across the heavens. All was still. Ginger had known silences, but none like this. The hush was that of a world from which all life had departed There was something so terrible about it that he was afraid the nervous pounding of his heart would be heard. The cold was intense. He was glad of his robe.
How long he lay there without sound or movement he did not know, for, fearful in case the luminous dial might be seen from a distance, he had put his watch in an inside pocket. There was no need to know the time. He became stiff and cramped, but still he dared not break the awful spell that seemed to hold the desert in its grip. Again the unreality of it all took him by the throat so that he was conscious of his heavy breathing after the long ride. The suspense became torture. The Kirghiz might have been stones for all the signs of life they showed.
At last the deathly hush was broken by a sound, a sound which, although trivial in itself, said much, and demonstrated more clearly than any words the need for absolute silence. A pebble had rattled against another. How far away this had occurred was not easy to judge. Ginger’s eyes focused in the direction whence it had come.
Presently from out of the darkness came something that moved, a shape that soon resolved itself into a covered cart with a man walking beside the two horses that pulled it. But it was not the one for which they were waiting, for it was coming from the wrong direction, travelling towards Tunhwang, not away from it. Soon came the creak of leather mingled with the soft thud of the carter’s padded cotton slippers. The clumsy vehicle came on, drew level.
With strange thoughts in his head Ginger watched it go past. It was like the passing of a wraith; the man, whip in hand, leaned forward, staring ahead, the weary horses dragging a monstrous conveyance through a land of Fear. The carter never saw them, or suspected their presence. To Ginger it was a phantom shape in another world. He had never seen the man before. He would never see him again. For this one instant in all eternity they had been close together, he reflected. Never again would they meet. It was a queer, solemn thought. In a vague sort of way he marvelled at the tangled chain of events that had resulted in the encounter.
Some time later he was brought back to earth by another sound, one that told him that the vigil was at an end, for this time it came from the right direction. He made it out, from its regularity, to be the creak of a wooden axle. Shortly afterwards the bulk of the cart disengaged itself from the gloom. But for one thing it might have been the same cart coming back. It had the same top-heavy roof of matting. The same sort of carter strode beside his horses. But for the creak it moved in the same uncanny silence. But now there were four more figures. They walked bunched together as if they, too, were under the spell of fear. Rifle barrels, carried at different angles, gleamed faintly in the moonlight.
Ginger waited, and as he waited and the cart drew nearer yard by yard, the suspense became so strained that he felt that if it were not soon broken he must cry out. When the end came, although he was prepared, so violent was it that his taut-strung nerves collapsed like snapping fiddle-strings.
With a throaty cry that was half-way between a yell and a snarl, the Kirghiz leaped from their lairs, like tigers.
Judging from what the sound did to him, Ginger could understand how the guards must have felt. The shock was too much. All dropped their rifles and ran, screaming, into the desert; as did the carter, without a glance behind to see what was happening.
Never was an ambush more successful. Actually, the Chinese guards hadn’t a chance, and they must have known it. The Kirghiz pursued them into the desert. Only one shot was fired. What happened out in the darkness Ginger did not know. Preferring not to know, he didn’t ask. He ran up to the back of the cart and cried: “Who’s in there?”
A deep voice rich with Scottish accent answered: “Angus McDougall for one. Who the blazes are you?”
Ginger igno
red the question. “If you want to go home jump out and make it snappy. I’m one of a party come to fetch you.”
He heard a voice say: “Now I know that miracles do happen.”
Then four figures came scrambling out of the cart to stand in the moonlight. I take it you’re all anxious to get home?” asked Ginger.
The replies, in the affirmative, came in voices dazed with incredulity.
“Are you all well enough to ride? “questioned Ginger. Again the answer was yes.
“Are ye by yourself, laddie?” asked the Scot, a big, broad-shouldered man.
“I have some Kirghiz with me,” Ginger told him.
“Kirghiz! Those thieving vagabonds!”
“That’s as may be, but at the moment some of them at least are on our side,” said Ginger. “I couldn’t have done this raid alone. They’ll be back in a minute. Where’s Abbot Ching-fu?”
“He’s not with us,” answered the Scot. “He was released from prison this afternoon on the understanding that he did not leave Tunhwang. There was nothing more he could do for us. The reason why they let him go was because he’s well known as a holy man, with many friends. The communist agents didn’t want to start an uprising by holding him. It doesn’t take long to start a revolution here, particularly when religion is involved.”
“As we were short of horses perhaps it’s as well,” said Ginger, who was relieved to be free of the responsibility of having the old Abbot with them. “I’ll tell you about myself when I get back,” he went on. “We’re still short of a horse so we’ll have to take one of these from the cart.”
The Kirghiz now returned from the desert and the position was explained to them by Dr. McDougall. They wasted no words. Silent and taciturn they soon had one of the horses from the shafts. They clicked their fingers and their own horses were brought forward. Everyone mounted and the party moved off, the Kirghiz leading.
The thing that amazed Ginger, as they retraced their steps through the lonely passes, was not so much the success of the operation as the simplicity with which it had all worked out. At the outset it had been a forlorn hope. In the event, nothing could have been easier, apart from the physical discomfort and fatigue.
