The Case of the Golden Greeks
Page 29
Unless she had been sent as an emissary by a foreign power …
… the Turkish letter. The snippets of Turkish conversation Moustafa had heard during his captivity. Could the Turks have sent her, thinking her very outlandishness would act as a cover?
No, it couldn’t be!
But it made sense. She knew Arabic, and she seemed to get along well with the natives. Plus, she had a remarkable ability to appear when least expected.
And he had told her everything.
But wait, she had fought at the cottage. The Senussi might have assumed she had departed. Could she have been shamming when firing out the window? He had been too out of his own head to really notice whether she had been actually aiming at anything. And she wouldn’t have dared turn her gun on them. She might have gotten one of them, but not the other. Perhaps life was too dear to gamble it.
Or had she even fought at all? Perhaps she had hidden in a dark corner as the gunfire went all around her, much as Faisal had done. He had been too far gone to be sure. She had certainly pretended that she had fought afterwards, and Faisal had intimated that she had, but the boy had been ducking bullets so much he couldn’t be counted on to know what happened. And Moustafa had not said anything.
Could it all be a lie?
A twisting nausea gripped his stomach.
Please don’t be true, he thought. Please don’t be yet another enemy.
Augustus felt at a loss. He left Jocelyn’s quarters, passing by the guardhouse and the storage room where they kept the goods confiscated from Bedouin smugglers. He went to the perimeter, where the last glimmerings of the sunset shone in his eyes. A couple of men were hunkered down behind an emplacement of sandbags, sharing a smoke and waiting for the battle to come.
The wind blew in his face, coming off the great Western Desert all the way from Libya. The wind always came from the west here. He studied the low rock outcropping to his front right behind which hid the entrance to the aqueduct, and tried to imagine the line it made as it ran along the edge of the camp before heading for the temple of Alexander.
Augustus felt a slow, familiar sensation creeping up on him. His troubled thoughts began to drop away, replaced by nothing.
At least no conscious thought. Beneath the surface something was building, like a volcano at the bottom of the sea.
He knew this sensation, knew it was important, and let it take its time.
“Sir,” one of the soldiers said. “Best to get out of sight. The Senussi might decide to make an early start of it.”
Augustus barely heard him, and did not move at the squaddie’s good advice. Something was falling into place. The aqueduct. The line it made across the western perimeter. Upwind.
It was upwind, along nearly the entire length of the base.
Upwind. The prevailing wind came from the west, blowing over the subterranean aqueduct and into the faces of him and the soldiers.
Why did he feel that was significant? The aqueduct was underground. The wind did not touch it.
But it blew over the entrance, and it blew over the access holes Faisal had told him connected the aqueducts to the surface every twenty paces or so.
The wind blowing over the access holes. Claud Williams joking, “just last month we intercepted a shipment of several barrels of hydrochloric acid.”
Hydrochloric acid. Wind. The access holes.
Mustard gas!
“He had the air of a student learning from two respected teachers.”
They’re making mustard gas.
Ainsley Fielding was an expert in botany and chemistry. The Amazonian native an expert in poisons. They taught the man who killed Dr. Harrell how to make mustard gas. Hydrochloric acid mixed with sulfur. Sulfur is easy enough to find in the desert, and the Senussi were smuggling in the acid from Cyrenaica.
They needed to silence him. When Harrell guessed at its true nature he came to Cairo, under the guise of giving a lecture, but really to make an appointment to see Sir Thomas. He was going to tell all, and got killed for it.
Mustard gas.
Augustus staggered back. One of the soldiers called out to him, but he didn’t hear.
He was already going away.
Augustus remembered the first time he saw mustard gas. The Germans had used it on several sectors already, and news of it had spread like wildfire through the British army. It was a terrible death, those who had witnessed it said. Your eyes burned and blood came out your nostrils and mouth. It ripped apart your lungs with every breath, leaving you hacking up great gobs of blood and flesh. But you couldn’t bring it up quickly enough, they said, and you ended up drowning in your own blood. And even if you didn’t, even if you only got a whiff, it tore apart the surface of your eyes, leaving you blind.
The regiment was issued gas masks, but men in the know said they were poorly made, and one in ten would leak. One in ten would let in the gas to tear your eyes and fill your lungs with blood.
Augustus and everyone in his regiment lived in mortal fear of a gas attack. You could keep your head down and reduce your chances of catching a bullet. You could dive for a dugout and be reasonably safe from artillery shells. There was nothing you could do if the gas came. It crept into every foxhole, filled every dugout.
And then it came.
Augustus was in his dugout early one morning filling out a report on the previous night’s observations. He had noticed some unusual activity along the line. At first he had taken it for a wire laying party. Each side spent much time in No Man’s Land replacing barbed wire the other side had cut. They had sent up a few flares, but the Germans had gone to ground and the snipers only got one or two of them. Augustus hadn’t given it too much thought, until the day dawned cold and overcast, and looking out over the lip of the trench he could clearly see that none of the German wire had been replaced, and none of their own had been cut.
He had been pulled out of writing his report by the loud, persistent clonking of a metal bar on an empty shell casing. The alert.
“Gas! Gas!” someone shouted.
“Everyone get your masks on!” he ordered as he stormed out of the dugout, putting on his own.
The men didn’t need to be told. Every one of them had grabbed their mask at the first utterance of the feared word.
Augustus rushed to the nearest periscope and looked at the eyepiece.
Then he understood the previous night’s activity.
From shell holes all along the line, great plumes of dirty yellow gas billowed out.
The prevailing wind in Flanders was from the east in the mornings, and the gas blew toward them, each cloud spreading out to merge with the others into a wall of toxins.
Augustus would never forget that sight, and never forget how he saw with his own eyes that the rumor that one gas mask in ten didn’t work was true. Dimly through the dirty eyepieces of his mask, and the yellowish haze that settled on the trench, he saw men go down, writhing in the mud, trying to take a breath of air but every inhalation quickening their doom.
And now it was happening again, long after the war was over.
He staggered over sand that was quickly turning to mud. He blinked, trying to see the palm trees that were shrouded by shattered poplars. He needed to focus. He needed to stay here, in Egypt, and not go back to Flanders.
It didn’t help to have a man in a British army uniform standing in front of him talking.
What was he saying?
“Are you all right, sir?”
“Gas,” Augustus managed to force out. “They’ve made mustard gas and they’re going to force it out the access holes of the aqueduct.”
“What’s that, sir?”
Augustus shook his head to clear it, forcing his eyes to focus on what was in front of him instead of what he should have put behind him.
“I need to see Major Belgrave,” he said. “It’s not enough to guard the entrance. We need men in the tunnel.”
And I need to get to get down there and save Moustafa and the boys
.
He strode for Major Belgrave’s quarters, his vision finally cleared. Now he knew the Senussi’s strategy. The surface attack would only be to pen them in, so that the gas could blow over them and choke them all to death. Augustus felt sure there wasn’t a single gas mask on base. In the Western Desert campaigns, there had been no need. Neither the Senussi nor the Ottomans had used gas.
Which is why they were surprising the British with it now.
He had to warn the major and get a strong force down in the aqueduct before the attack happened. Twenty men and a machine gun should do it. The aqueduct was narrow, and they could hold off any number of Senussi. If the Bedouin and their Turkish advisors tried to use the gas within the confines of the tunnel, they’d die too.
A small, strong force in the tunnel, and the battle against the Senussi would be half won.
The sound of an approaching engine made Augustus turn. Through the barbed wire, Augustus could see Captain Williams’ familiar stripped-down Model T Ford speeding along the track toward the base, just visible in the fading light.
Just as Williams came to the straightaway that formed the final stretch of track leading to the base, a volley of rifle fire raked the motorcar. Williams swerved and hit a palm tree, coming to a dead halt.
Another volley followed the first, and then suddenly from all four sides, hidden Bedouin poured fire at the base.
The attack was on, and there was no way to get a troop of men to the aqueduct now.
They were trapped.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Moustafa’s first thought when the Senussi came charging down the tunnel was that his boss was going to fire him for putting that idiot woman in danger. Soon he had more important things to worry about.
Like the poison dart that shot an inch over his head.
And the several spears that followed it.
The Senussi, from what he could see of them in the wavering light of the electric torches, carried guns too, mostly rifles strapped across their backs, but they did not use them. Obviously they didn’t want to make too much noise and alert the soldiers on the surface.
Moustafa had no such compunction. He leveled his rifle and took out a man in front who was about the throw a spear.
Racking the bolt, he shot the next man who raised a spear at him. In the confusion he couldn’t see the man with the blowgun. He feared one of those poison darts far more than a dozen spears.
“Get back to the tomb!” Moustafa shouted. “We need the cover.”
The boys took his advice. That fallen woman did not.
Moustafa blinked to see she had his pistol in his hand, which she proceeded to empty down the narrow tunnel to great effect.
The Senussi fell back, a trail of groaning men lying half submerged behind them. Moustafa fired a third shot to cover their own retreat. The tomb was fifty yards behind them. He could just see the lights of the boys’ electric torches disappear as they hopped into the hole in the tunnel wall.
Moustafa and Mrs. Montjoy sprinted for the relative safety of the tomb. For once Moustafa was grateful she was wearing trousers. The water would have pulled on her skirts and slowed her down.
They were almost to the hole when the Senussi got reorganized. A bullet panged off the tunnel wall inches from Moustafa’s head. Another splashed in the water just behind Mrs. Montjoy. Now that Moustafa had made so much noise, they felt free to use their guns.
“Get in! I’ll hold them off,” he ordered, turning and going to one knee.
To his surprise, the woman actually obeyed him. Most likely because she was out of bullets.
Moustafa fired, but in the glare of the electric torches shining his way he could not see if he hit anyone. A bullet struck the water close to him, splashing his face. Moustafa fired another shot, then leaped for the hole, struggling to get through as quickly as possible.
Mrs. Montjoy grabbed him under the shoulders and hauled him in like an oversized fish.
“Do you have any more cartridges for the pistol?” she asked.
Moustafa reached into his pocket and poured a handful on the floor as the gods and goddess looked on. Faisal had pulled Ahmed further in and away from the hole. The Little Infidel had been in enough gunfights to know how to take cover.
Moustafa reloaded and glanced out the hole. The Senussi had advanced a few yards. He gave them another shot and ducked back out of sight before they had time to reply.
“Now what?” Faisal asked, peeking from around a painted column.
Good question. They were stuck here. The tunnel ran straight for several hundred more yards before they could get to the surface. There was no way they could make it. Although they were safe for the moment, they were trapped.
He could hear the Senussi advancing, the splashing of their countless feet echoing down the tunnel, loud even to Moustafa’s ringing ears. This fight had obviously upset their timing, and they wanted to get rid of Moustafa and his companions as quickly as possible.
Mrs. Montjoy pushed past him to fire out of the hole but flinched back as a rain of bullets chased her.
“We seem to be in a spot of difficulty,” she said.
Moustafa thought for a moment, then gestured for the boys to come closer.
“They’ll be on us any second,” he told them. He stood, his head almost brushing the ceiling of the tomb, and drew his sword, a sword not used since the days of the Mahdi. “Just as they come up to the hole I will jump out and fight them hand to hand with this. That will keep them occupied while you run away. Get out as fast as you can. I will not be able to hold them for long.”
Mrs. Montjoy stood. “But—”
“Do as I say, woman! Take care of the children.”
The footsteps grew near. Slowed. The shouts fell to whispers. Moustafa faced the hole, repeating the shahada to himself, the Muslim declaration of faith. There was no way he could live through this, but if he timed his attack well, he at least could save the boys, and perhaps his example would make that low woman reform her life.
There is no god but God. Muhammad is the messenger of God, he said in his mind, over and over again. May God forgive him for not saying it out loud. God could hear his thoughts, and he did not want the Senussi to hear his words. Then they would know where he was.
The Senussi tried to move silently, but they were too many. Every step, every shift of weight, rippled the water.
How to know when they were close enough for him to strike down, but far enough away for him to get out of the hole without getting struck down himself?
Mrs. Montjoy solved that problem for him. Without exposing her head, she hooked her arm around the edge of the hole and fired blindly down the tunnel.
Moustafa leapt legs first through the hole. By some miracle, he didn’t smack his head against the sides of the breach and he managed to land on his feet.
Right in front of a disorganized mob of Senussi.
A man barely three feet in front of him struggled to hold up another man who had fallen into his arms, his chest streaming with blood. Moustafa let out a bellow, raised his sword high, and brought it down on him, the blade cleaving deep into his shoulder.
The man shrieked in pain and horror and fell, taking his friend with him.
Wrenching the sword free, Moustafa swung again, hitting the next man just as he raised his rifle.
Shots rang out, and two more Senussi fell. He hoped Mrs. Montjoy would stop firing now and take the boys out of here. The tunnel was swarming with Bedouin warriors. He could not hold them long.
But he could hold them for a while.
He felt the blood pulse in his veins, and finally knew the thrill his uncle had felt at facing guns with only a sword.
His uncle’s words came back to him, told to him during one of his many war stories when Moustafa was a boy back in his village so many years ago.
Once you close with the enemy, keep pressing them. Don’t give them a chance to use their guns. As long as you do that, you will have the advantage.
The Senussi gave ground. A few of the braver ones tried to face him with their spears or scimitars, but they had less reach and far less strength. Moustafa kept pressing them, not giving them time or room to bring their rifles to bear.
They began to move back more quickly, the riflemen trying to duck and weave around the spearmen in order to get a good shot. He didn’t let them.
Then all at once the last man with a scimitar fell, Moustafa cut down the rifleman behind him, and the entire crowd moved back. He roared, barreling into them, cutting down three more in rapid succession. And then there were no more Senussi within reach.
They were retreating! Moustafa let out a bellow that echoed off the tunnel walls. The Bedouin were famous fighters, but they had never faced a Nubian!
He laughed and taunted them, waving the bloody sword over his head.
Then sense returned. He was acting like a madman. Good God, he was acting like Mr. Wall!
The Senussi wouldn’t remain broken for long. He had to get out of here while he could. God had granted him a chance to escape and see his family again, and it would be impious to waste it.
He sprinted down the tunnel. Somewhere in the confusion he had forgotten his rifle. He wondered if one of the others had grabbed it. They had disappeared up ahead. Had they made it out?
There was little light in the tunnel, just the far flickering of the Senussi torches. That suited him fine. That meant they were in light and he was running into darkness. They wouldn’t be able to see him.
But they didn’t need to see him. All they had to do was keep firing down the narrow, straight aqueduct and they were bound to hit him sooner or later.
Moustafa stumbled as his shoulder hit the wall. He slowed, moving through almost pitch darkness. Why couldn’t he see the electric torches his companions had carried? Had they made it out of the tunnel already, or had some trouble befallen them?