by John Harris
He nodded, apparently satisfied, and jerked his head towards Leach who’d gone to sleep in a small hollow, his big body crouched against a rock, as though he’d clutched at his limbs to bring warmth to them. He had no blanket and no one had bothered to offer him one, and he’d made no attempt to get away because now there was nowhere to go.
‘What about him?’ he asked.
‘He’s coming with us.’
‘Can you trust the bastard?’
‘We’ve got to. We might be glad of him.’
In the daylight the camp looked like a battlefield, with the burnt-out ruins of the huts with their collapsed roofs and the lorry that had gone up on the night the map had disappeared and the radios had been wrecked. There were scattered blankets everywhere with scraps of canvas and broken camp-beds and torn fly-sheets, and camp-chairs lying about in the harsh grey light of morning, among the charred poles from the huts, and the scattered cinders and burnt fragments of thatch. Even the main compass was smashed. It all seemed so familiar I wanted to cry. It only wanted a few more wrecks, with gun barrels askew and bright red blood on the armour plating. At the very thought of it my stomach knotted with nausea.
We ate breakfast silently and nobody bothered to see that Leach got any. Phil woke in a pallor of lingering terror as we finished, sitting up abruptly with a cry and feeling about her as though she were seeking me. As I went to her, Morena followed me and silently handed her a chipped mug of tea and a bacon sandwich and she took them just as silently, Nimmo watching her with an expressionless face, withdrawn and absorbed in his own thoughts.
The hollow of the Depression was blurred by the mist that swirled and rolled on some hidden draught round a spur of rock where Crabourne had pitched his tents to obtain shade as early as possible. The top of it was out of the mist and picking up the sunshine.
I stared at it for a while, wondering, as I’d been wondering half the night, what was the best way of getting out of the Depression. Behind me the long dusty bowl stretched beyond the rock fall near the pear-shaped cave, blue-grey in the mist and hidden still from the sun.
When we’d finished eating I put some of the soggy bacon on a biscuit and took it with a mug of coffee over to Leach who was sitting up now, rubbing his injured knee and staring towards us.
‘Thanks,’ he said quietly.
‘I’m not doing it for love of you,’ I pointed out. ‘When you’ve finished it get hold of a tin of bully beef and a water bottle and get up there on that spur of rock and keep your eyes peeled for Ghad Ahmed. They’ve got two jeeps and there may be a camel or two. And let ’em see you occasionally. I want ’em to know we’re watching.’
He picked at the raw spot on his nose and eyed me, but he said nothing, and later I saw him climbing the spur, limping heavily, his face puffy where Nimmo had hit him with the rifle.
By this time we’d got one of the flattened tents standing again among the scattered packing cases and bedding and all the equipment Crabourne had brought for painting – paper, crumpled like broken bodies, and the sheets of cellophane and splintered ladders. We placed the chest inside it and as soon as Leach’s back was turned I got Morena to one side because I felt he was the only one I could trust now.
‘Wop,’ I said quietly. ‘Get one of the tin trunks into the tent when no one’s looking and get that chest open. Transfer everything inside it to the trunk, then fill it up with sand and rock and tie it up again.’
He grinned. ‘In case friend Tiny decides to bolt with it?’
I nodded. ‘We’ll put it in the Land Rover. Then if he does make a run for it he’ll not get much. I’ve thought this one out and the lorry’s best for us. It’ll carry more and it’s probably newer.’
I left him to it, under the guise of sorting out spares, while Nimmo and I scouted round the camp to see what we could find. The man I’d killed was still lying where I’d brought him down, flat on his back, staring blindly at the brassy sun. Behind a rock there was another one whom Morena had shot, huddled against the stone as though doing his penances towards Mecca, his face on the sand, his knees up under him, kneeling in the way we seemed to find so many bodies during the war, ugly and ungainly and with none of the dignity so often associated with death. His brown hand clutched a rifle of ancient Italian vintage that was doubtless a relic of the war, like the tommy guns, and there was an ugly stain in the sand underneath him.
We rolled them both into blankets and brought the Land Rover towards them, then we buried Crabourne under the cliffs alongside the Paymaster and his men and erected a crude cross over him, and put the Arabs in the soil a little to one side.
I saw Phil’s eyes on us, empty and vacant-looking, as we finished, and I noticed that she made no move to shrug off Nimmo’s hand as he placed it on her shoulder in a gesture of reassurance.
By this time we’d separated the undamaged equipment and placed it in a pile near the tent. Everything that had belonged to Crabourne we loaded into the van, packing the completed drawings with care under the supervision of Phil. Then, slowly and carefully, we loaded the lorry and the Land Rover, taking care that everything on the Land Rover could be done without if necessary. If Leach decided to bolt I wanted to make sure he’d take only what I wanted him to take. We made sure there was water and food and petrol, however, because I wanted each vehicle to carry its own supplies in case of emergency, and if the Land Rover was taken I wanted to be sure it would be taken quickly, without any interference with the supplies we had on the lorry. Then, finally, we placed the chest – now full of sand and rock – in a prominent position in the back of the Land Rover where it couldn’t be missed.
‘All set.’ Morena gave me a bleak smile as we finished.
‘Fair enough,’ I said quietly. ‘If he takes off now he can take off without worrying us. I don’t want him to take off and if I can stop him he won’t. But just in case he does he won’t be going with anything we shall need.’
When we’d finished we drove the vehicles behind the fall of broken rock near the pear-shaped cave and parked them so that only the hood of the lorry was visible, then we packed everything that remained and lit a couple of big fires, burning all the torn fly-sheets and tents to make as much smoke as possible, because I wanted Ghad Ahmed to see them. During the afternoon Morena made a check on the vehicles, revving the engines a lot so that Ghad Ahmed would hear them, and when he’d finished he rigged a light from one of the spare batteries ready for the evening.
Just before dusk we decided to have a decent meal, but we discovered we had nothing but a small primus stove to cook it on. One was twisted out of shape, crushed at some point during the night by the wheels of the vehicles prowling through the camp, and the others had simply disappeared, stolen, I supposed, by Ghad Ahmed’s men.
Morena shrugged and cut one of the empty petrol cans in half with a pair of cutters from the tool-kit, then, scooping sand into one of the halves, he poured petrol over it and threw a lighted match on to it. It went up with a ‘whoosh’, then died quickly into low flickering flames in the growing shadows, and he silently filled the other half of the can with water and bully beef and tinned vegetables and placed it on top.
‘Haven’t lost the knack,’ he grinned.
While we ate, we spread a blanket on the ground and opened the maps on it. ‘We’ll skirt the well at Biq Qalam and the oasis,’ I said, ‘because if Ghad Ahmed expects us to head anywhere it’ll be there. There’s a road runs up to Breba and if we go due north from the top of the camel track we can try to turn towards it. We’ll soon recognise it because there’s a bridge there – Roman, I believe – that crosses the ditch they cut near the well. There’s a police post there and if we can reach it we’ll be safe.’
‘It’s a hell of a way,’ Morena pointed out.
I managed a quick smile. ‘It always was a hell of a way,’ I said. ‘But if they miss us at Biq Qalam and the oasis they’re bound to watch the direct route and we’d best not be on it. Besides,’ I added, ‘we’ve done this tr
ip before – almost exactly – up to Tobruk during the war.’
When we’d eaten we made tea, the old sweet sergeant-major’s tea, and drank it standing, cradling the mugs in the palms of our hands, all of us silent and busy with our own thoughts. Just before dark Morena went up to relieve Leach, as though for the night and I saw him climbing boldly along the skyline so that he was in full view. A little later Leach came down the same way, to eat what was left of the stew we’d cooked. He was subdued, but his eyes were alert and cunning as he prowled round the lorry and the Land Rover, missing nothing. I didn’t interrupt him because I knew he’d got one eye on the chest and was making sure of the stores that went with it.
As the night shut down, Morena appeared in the camp and stuck one thumb up.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Let’s get going.’
Leach was slow to respond and Nimmo aimed a kick at him. ‘Get cracking, you bastard,’ he growled. ‘You heard what the man said.’
Before we could get to them they were circling round each other in the dust, Nimmo, his eyes glowing, chopping viciously at Leach’s puffy face as though he were enjoying hurting him, and Leach slogging wildly back at him, missing him all the time, his brows drawn down in a stolid expression of hate.
We dragged them apart and pushed them away.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ I said to Nimmo, ‘grow up. We’ve got better things to do than fight.’
‘He asked for it,’ he said with a savage grin. ‘I was glad to give it him.’
Leach said nothing, but he didn’t hesitate any longer to help, and, working now as fast as possible, we moved the van and the Land Rover up the Depression and removed the canvas cover from the lorry, and then the tubular frame that supported it. Then, as Morena drove the lorry away, we erected the frame and the canvas cover on piles of stone where the lorry had stood, with Nimmo showing off a little in front of Phil, who was watching both him and Leach with a scared expression on her face. When we’d finished, with as much of the cover showing as had been visible before, we connected the light that Morena had rigged up and stirred the fires until there were two good blazes and enough light to illuminate the top of the cover. With luck, it might fool Ghad Ahmed into thinking the vehicles were still there for a while after sun-up the next day.
‘Let’s have your radio,’ I said to Nimmo, and we set it on a rock and turned up the volume control as far as it would go.
During all this time Morena had been revving the Land Rover as though he were still testing the engine. I wanted Ghad Ahmed to get used to the sound of engines and the blurt of the radio. I wanted him to imagine we were still there, preparing to move up the road towards Qalam the next day. I wanted him to be still waiting there while we were climbing up the camel track towards Qatu. Out of the Depression, I’d feel better because I’d have the whole width of the desert to manoeuvre in and once there we’d at least give him a run for his money.
When we set off it was well after dark but before the moon had got up. We left the fires blazing and the battery light burning and the radio blatting out pop music from Algiers, and slipped away slowly up the rocky track along the Depression, without lights and with the engines as quiet as we could keep them. I had Leach driving the Land Rover with Nimmo alongside him with a revolver. The lorry was in front and the van behind so that he couldn’t bolt.
‘Keep an eye on him,’ I’d told Nimmo, and he’d given me a quick savage grin in the firelight that reminded me of his father.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘If he tries anything I’ll take the greatest possible pleasure in shooting the bastard.’
Phil was quiet in the lorry alongside me. She was making a great effort to be brave, though I knew she was feeling pretty low in spirits. She’d made no further reference to Crabourne or Selinski and I knew she was trying hard to put them out of her mind.
Just before dark I’d seen her standing in the entrance to one of the caves, staring round at the paintings with a lost look on her face, and I knew that, although she’d been no archaeologist, she’d somehow become attached to those pictures in the way that you can always become attached to a job you’re doing.
‘It seems such a pity,’ she’d said softly, staring round her at the ancient glowing colours. ‘God only knows what damage they might suffer now we’ve disturbed them.’
‘They’ve stood up to thousands of years,’ I pointed out.
‘They had a layer of dust over them then that protected them, and the paint isn’t new now. Objects as old as these are as frail as gossamer.’
She sighed and managed a quick smile. ‘It’s here somewhere,’ she said. ‘That treasure that you came to find. In spite of not being the one you got. I’ve thought about it often. Somewhere there’s got to be something. This land’s been covered by everybody from the Phoenicians to the Byzantines, and by the caravans of slaves that came up from the Congo. In spite of what Sloan said, there’s a door here somewhere, all covered with soil and rock, a gold door maybe; and behind it a chamber, full of skeletons of men and women who were ritually murdered thousands of years ago. And beyond them the treasure, all gleaming gold, weapons and hunting implements for the men, and domestic things and sex fetishes for the women. All of it waiting to be found and all of it with a curse on it for the finder. It’s here and now it’ll just go on gathering dust in the darkness, in some vast chamber with the skeletons of the guards and all the scrolls to say why it’s there.’
She seemed to choke over the words and as she turned away, she brushed against me. For a second she stared up at me, then she flung herself into my arms, her forehead against my chest, struggling to control the dry retching sobs that tore at her.
By midnight, following her directions, we reached the camel trail at the end of the wadi, with the rising moon shedding a wisp of remote cold light over it that was hardly stronger than the stars. We stopped at the bottom, shocked by the narrowness of the track and by the number of camel bones that lay about, startlingly white in the pale glow from the sky.
‘Christ,’ Nimmo said. ‘It’s not very wide!’
Morena stared upwards, his expression calm and unmoved. ‘We can’t go back,’ he pointed out. ‘Not now.’
‘Suppose we stick?’
‘We’ve got two chances. Either we do or we don’t. Either way, we’re no worse off.’
Simply because we had no alternative we began to crawl upwards, the engine noises beating back softly from the walls of the Depression. At first it wasn’t too difficult, though we were soon slowed down by a series of potholes, but after three hours’ climbing, it began to grow more tricky. First it was a fall of rock that blocked the path, so that we had to turn out of the vehicles and throw the stones over the edge, and later it was a drift of wind-blown sand that obscured the track for what seemed thirty yards. It was a heartbreaking job, scooping at its dusty surface and moving the vehicles forward inch by laborious inch, searching the track all the time for stones to jam under the wheels as they bogged down.
We worked until our finger ends were sore with lifting stones and our shoulders were stiff with shovelling sand, but we made steady progress, though I was constantly looking nervously up the slope, waiting for the burst of firing that would tell me that Ghad Ahmed had discovered what we were doing and was waiting for us just above. But nothing happened and, as the moon sank lower, we got nearer and nearer to the surface of the desert.
Then, just when we seemed to be winning, we ran into the landslip. It had cut away half the road and it was impossible to get past it.
‘We can’t go back,’ Morena said again. ‘We’ve got to dig into the cliff face.’
Fortunately, there was more earth than stone and we only had to hack it away, but it was still hard work and I was getting worried now, because I could see a lightening in the sky and I wanted to get up to the floor of the desert and away from the edge of the Depression before daylight. By then the wireless battery would have faded and the fires would have died and it wouldn’t take Ghad Ahm
ed long to realise he’d been fooled.
In sheer desperation we decided to take a chance and move ahead, although the wheels of the lorry crumbled the edge of the track.
‘It’d be a tit of a wreck if it went,’ Morena said grimly, as he edged it forward.
We got the lorry and the Land Rover safely across the gap, but it was obvious immediately that Crabourne’s big laboratory van was too weighty and top heavy.
‘It’s not wide enough,’ Morena said, squaring the vehicle up and standing back to see how much room we had. ‘We ought to make it wider.’
I indicated the sky. ‘We haven’t time,’ I said, my voice sharp with nervousness. ‘We’ve barely enough as it is. We’ll have to abandon the bloody thing!’
In the end we decided at least to make an attempt, and Morena agreed to drive. We all knew it was a risk, but it was a risk we had to take.
Carefully, we barred the route to the Land Rover with the lorry so that Leach couldn’t slip away and make a dash for it, then, for safety, we lifted the flat wooden cases of tracings from the van and placed them alongside. I could hear Leach muttering about them to himself and I knew he was still weighing up his chances.
As we laid them down, Morena climbed into the cab of the van, his face set, and with the engine grinding in low gear he edged the heavy vehicle forward, while I shone the torch along the edge of the drop for any signs of danger.
‘Easy!’ I called. ‘Easy! And for God’s sake be ready to jump if I shout. We don’t want to lose you.’
There had been many times when I had blessed Morena’s imperturbability. For a man who had Latin blood in him he was always remarkably difficult to rattle, and I never blessed him more for it than now. The heavy wheels crunched forward in the sandy soil and I could see the broken edge still crumbling away under their weight, then, when he was almost across, I saw the outside front wheel beginning to dip.
‘Go!’ I screamed. ‘Full revs!’
He wrenched at the steering and as the engine shrieked we all flung ourselves against the back of the van, spitting out the sand that the wheels threw into our faces, while it canted more and more sharply to one side.