High Requiem: A Johnny Fedora Espionage Spy Thriller Assignment Book 6

by Desmond Cory

  “That’s fine,” said Johnny. “Maybe they’ll pay your passage-money somewhere else.”

  “I don’t say that’s the idea. But it’s certainly a possibility.”

  And O’Brien relapsed again into a somewhat sulky silence. The brittle rasp of his voice was replaced by the groaning of the chassis and the perpetual machine-gun rattle of dry sand against the mudguards; sounds that underlay the complaint of the engine, that accompanied them incessantly as the van traversed the long, jolting miles towards the dawn.

  While the stars were fading, they reached the end of the long valley they had been following; its termination was not marked by any sudden rise or fall of the land, but by a low, steady encroachment of the flanking hills upon the path. The going became firmer but rougher; the track, undulating. Great worn slabs of rock lay to either side, like sleeping lions, half-visible in the gradually strengthening light; the tired headlamps picked up other boulders that lay in the track, some small, some large as a man’s head, and the van undertook a somnolent weaving motion in order to avoid them.

  “This,” said O’Brien, “is where we’d turn east, if we wanted to go to Benghazi.”

  Johnny peered out of the vacant window-frame. The surrounding country seemed just the same to him; as it had been for the last hour and a half. “But we’re going straight on.”

  “Straight on. That’s right. To Tripoli.” O’Brien scratched his neck. “Make me a cigarette, will you?”

  Johnny fumbled in his pocket and obediently began to roll one.

  “What the hell’s happened to the dawn? That’s what I’d like to know.”

  “Well, what has happened to it?”

  “It’s all of twenty minutes late. Should be almost light by now.”

  Johnny paused for a moment to glance at his wristwatch. “We’re farther north, of course, than we were.”

  “Not all that much. Not enough to make any difference. We’re headed more west now, anyway. It’s funny.”

  “Funny things are always happening round here.”

  “By God, that’s true enough. One part of the world I’m really none too keen to fly across, if you want to know the truth. Ever read Antoine de Saint-Exupéry?”

  “No,” said Johnny. “I don’t know. Who wrote it?”

  “It’s a him. He wrote it. Books about flying in the desert. Gives you a dam’ good idea of what you’re up against, one way or another … That’s why I can’t see what that sod Michael’s doing in Tripoli.”

  These sporadic early-morning conversations were always apt to be inconsequential. Johnny nodded sagely, accepting the train of thought without fully comprehending it. “He’s a flier, too, then, I suppose.”

  “Flier? Dam’ good flier. Wing-Commander, Raf. Absolute wet sheet on the ground, but a dam’ fine flier. Was in my squadron, as a matter of fact.”

  “If he’s in the Raf, I suppose he has to go where he’s posted.”

  “Michael?” O’Brien snorted. “Not likely. One of the boys with pull. Family connections. Distinguished future and all that. Wind up a bloody Air-Marshal. That my cigarette? Thanks.”

  He breathed heavily, as though the concoction of so many consecutive sentences had left him panting. “Lucky he’s where he is, anyway. One of the few blokes I can absolutely rely on for help.”

  “He must be a close pal of yours.”

  “A close pal of mine? That’s right.”

  O’Brien smiled thoughtfully and took a hand from the wheel to light his cigarette.

  He held the lighter steady for a moment afterwards, regarding the flame; which burnt clearly, strongly, and then was puffed into extinction. Simultaneously, the van shuddered as though in fear, a long shudder that set Johnny’s teeth rattling, and a sheet of sand rose up to strike the windscreen with a frightening, ripping wail. “My God,” said O’Brien, lowering his head as the grains tore savagely at his face.

  The wind was gone almost instantly, and the van, steadying itself, ploughed determinedly onwards. O’Brien, head still down, was scrutinising the dashboard alertly, his hands poised to receive any tell-tale tremors from the scarred machinery.

  “Now that was quite a gust.”

  O’Brien grunted; continued to concentrate on the instruments. Some fifteen seconds passed before he relaxed … “Yes, it was. I think we’re in for trouble, old boy.”

  “What trouble? Some sort of a storm?”

  “That’s my diagnosis.”

  “Then what to do? Keep on?”

  “Nothing else for it.”

  Johnny turned again to thrust his head through the window-frame. The hot wind of their passage lifted his hair, but did nothing to cool his face; it was like a breath from the inside of an oven, torrid and greedy. All around lay the rocks under their thin covering of sand, obscure yet as though translucent in the half-light suffusing the sky. No stars now; and no dawn.

  “Hell,” said Johnny. “I believe that’s the sun, over there.”

  “Where?”

  “There. Beyond the slope.”

  O’Brien creased the skin at the sides of his eyes, peering painfully through the blotched windscreen. Ahead and to the left, above the steep slope cascading down towards them, was a faint purplish patch in the dark sky, like a bruise on the surface of a plum. “You’re dam’ right,” said O’Brien. “That’s the sun. No doubt about it.”

  “It looks weird,”

  “Unearthly. Never seen anything like it. Still, that settles it; there’s a haboob on the way. Ever been in one before?”

  “Yes, once.”

  “Where was that?”

  “Central Africa. East of nowhere.”

  “No bloody joke, are they?”

  Johnny made no reply.

  “When the wind drops, that’s the time to watch out. You know - there’s that sudden dead calm you get … What’s the wind doing now?”

  “Hard to tell,” said Johnny.

  He thrust his head once more out of the window; and the desert exploded in his face.

  The blast numbed him, deprived him of breath, seemed to crush in his ribs; and there came, tingling on the tail of the blast, the clap of a powerful detonation. He clutched giddily hold of the door of the van, vaguely aware that it was tipping and sliding away from him, aware that he was falling out into nothingness. Grains of sand travelling at a tremendous velocity scourged his cheeks, his forehead, the palms of his outstretched hands; then he was rolling over and over in the choking, biting dust, conscious now of a sharp, stinging pain that crawled along his forearm. He glimpsed the van, the underside of the van, tipping itself away from him, slowly overturning, vanishing from sight into a cloud of swirling sand. He lay still; gradually, the dust settled. Johnny got up to his knees.

  The van lay on its side, its front wheel still spinning monotonously in the air - a final, hopeless refusal to admit defeat. The desert breeze, deceptively gentle now, brought with it the smell of burning rubber. Part of the van’s corpse twitched, detached itself; O’Brien wriggled out through the narrow opening, peering suspiciously about him.

  “Johnny? Where the hell have you got to?”

  “Here,” said Johnny faintly.

  O’Brien turned his head; then came limping over the road towards him. His shirt hung about him in tatters; blood made dark streaks on his left cheek, his neck, his arms, and trickled steadily from a deep cut in his left shoulder: “So there you are. Are you all right?”

  “More or less. Something’s happened to my arm.”

  “Let’s see.” O’Brien stooped down, his mouth drawn back in a grimace, half of pain, half of apprehension. “Yes, you’ve broken it.”

  “I fell out,” Johnny explained.

  “Well, I know that. I saw you doing it. What in the name of Jesus was it, anyway?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t see anything.” Johnny rose, rather clumsily, to his feet. “Something seemed to go off, right in my face. That was all.”

  “Did you hear any kind of a bang?”

/>   “Yes, I think I did.”

  “So did I. If the idea weren’t so silly, I should have said it must have been a bomb. But - it didn’t seem to make that sort of a bang, somehow.”

  Johnny detached his gaze from his uncomfortably dangling wrist and looked about him. The desert swirled towards the horizon; nothing but the desert. Except that on the slopes of that steep incline, behind and slightly above them …

  “Look,” said Johnny, pointing with his good hand. O’Brien stared. “Yes,” he said. “That’s where it hit all right. It’s sunk a good-sized pit.”

  “Must have been a bomb, then.”

  “Come on. Let’s take a look at it.”

  They went back together over the sand-strewn rocks - Johnny swaying slightly as he walked, O’Brien still limping pathetically. The van remained with its nose thrust into the unfeeling earth; its wheel had at last stopped spinning; it was dead and done for, and looked it. The heat rose in great slow waves from the sand.

  Something had torn a great gouge in the slope of the crest, had struck and had buried itself, splintering away the solid rock to a depth of about three feet. Johnny and O’Brien stood on the edge of the shallow pit, silently wondering. Whatever it was that had landed with such devastating force, it had left no trace at all of itself; other than a faint metallic gleam that might, perhaps, have been caused by the fracturing of the rock or by its fusion at gigantic heat.

  “Well, I’m damned,” said O’Brien. “A … meteorite, do you suppose?

  “I don’t know,” said Johnny.

  “I’ve heard of such things. Must have been the hell of a big one, though, to … Well, either it’s something like that or else something quite crazy is going on in the meteorological department.”

  Johnny said nothing. The broken bone was now and at last really beginning to hurt him; his eyes were misted over with the pain of it. He gripped his arm above the elbow-joint, gripped as hard as he could; hoping somehow to crush out the slow circles of agony welling outwards from the fracture. But that did not help much. He began to wonder if he might not be concussed, as well.

  O’Brien’s voice came to him from a long distance away.

  “Looks as if the old van’s bought it, in any case. We’ve got the hell of a walk in front of us.”

  Johnny nodded, and opened his eyes. The crater in the rock yawed wickedly to and fro before his feet.

  “We’d better go back, anyway, and take a look at that arm of yours.”

  They turned and began to retreat; moving even more slowly than before, slipping from time to time on the downward-sloping sand. Neither of them noticed how still the air had become.

  2

  The calm had lasted for almost half an hour. Johnny and O’Brien lay in the lee of the overturned van, waiting for the storm. They had constructed a rough shelter, utilising the roof and a part of the half-detached door, and they had buttressed it with shovelled and hard-stamped sand; but it offered them only the flimsiest protection against any kind of a gale, and they did not feel particularly cheerful about it. However, there was nothing else to do. They lay close together on the dry, scorching sand, smoking pensively and exchanging remarks from time to time.

  The sky had lightened somewhat; just sufficiently to show the true darkness of the clouds that were building up in the east. The sun was no longer visible, not even as a blur, and only the slowly intensifying heat showed that indeed it had risen. Johnny was able once again to show some interest in his surroundings; the pain from his arm had abated with satisfying speed, and the actual damage seemed to be nothing more serious than a simple fracture of the ulna. O’Brien had treated it with surprising dexterity, strapping it to an improvised splint in a near-professional manner; and it now seemed that his own badly twisted foot was likely to be more of an obstacle on the long march that lay before them.

  Still, that lay in the future. First of all, there was a storm to be weathered - at least, all the signs pointed that way. And for the moment there was nothing else to be done …

  Johnny had repeated that phrase several times to himself in the last ten minutes - while he lay on his back, nursing his arm, and listened to O’Brien’s bursts of conversation.

  “I felt rather like this when I lost the old Beechcraft.”

  The smoke spiralled upwards from O’Brien’s cigarette-end, forming fantastic twirls whenever he gesticulated. “Always said, of course, that in Africa you need an engine on either side of you. Reliable engines, at that. But even the Beechcraft let me down in the end. Well, it was the surprise, y’know, as much as anything else that got me.”

  “Still,” said Johnny, “you put her down all right.”

  “Well, I got out without a scratch. And that’s the main thing, I suppose. But the plane was properly pranged. I’d been losing height, y’see, expecting to make Entebbe; so I didn’t have time to pick much of a landing-place. No, so far as the poor old Bee was concerned, I wrapped her up good and proper.”

  “Tough luck,” said Johnny.

  “Yes, it was a bad break. Left me with the devil of a walk back, too. Luckily, I had myself pretty well orientated when I ditched.” O’Brien drew on his cigarette thoughtfully. “In a way, I’m better off now than I was then. We’re on a road of sorts, after all; there’s always a chance somebody’ll come along and give us a lift.”

  “But you didn’t have a haboob brewing up then.”

  “That’s true,” said O’Brien. “I didn’t.”

  Irritably he threw away his cigarette-end. It smouldered on the sand for perhaps a minute, a white speck gradually diminishing; at last it extinguished itself. A final greyish tendril twisted its way straight upwards through the air, and then there was nothing. Johnny looked up again towards the oyster-coloured horizon, his eyes taking a painful moment to focus themselves; the clouds were like a painted backcloth to the desert, dimly lit, and where they met the land was a pitch blackness. He said nothing of this to O’Brien, who would see it soon enough, anyway; but he moved himself uncomfortably into a fresh position.

  “How did you get into the charter-pilot business, anyway?”

  “That’s a long story,” said O’Brien. “It just so happened that back in ’fifty-one I went into business with a rich Arab, some kind of a sheikh from Kuwait. Things went wrong … as things sometimes do. At the end of it, poor old Ha’fiz had been nobbled by some political gang or other, and I found myself with a perfectly good Dakota on my hands, quite legitimately an’ all.” He smiled innocently and stretched himself; Johnny saw that his wounded shoulder could now raise his left arm little more than head-height. “So I went into the charter game on my own. Did quite well, too, until that little accident I was just telling you about.”

  “A pity you didn’t get any savings salted away.”

  “Well, I had, in a way. Trouble was, my savings were with me in the plane at the time, and a bit too damned heavy to carry. That, between you and me, was why I went east so ruddy fast; also why I didn’t feel much like picking up any insurance. All in all, it was a cruel blow, old man. A cruel blow.” O’Brien’s gaze became riveted on the horizon. His right hand pulled thoughtfully at the lobe of his ear.

  “I.G.B.?” asked Johnny.

  “No questions,” said O’Brien, “and no bloody lies. Seen the horizon lately?”

  “Yes. I saw it a minute ago.”

  “It’s spreading while you look at it. Yes … here she comes all right.”

  “Perhaps another two or three minutes.”

  “Perhaps. Gosh, I’d certainly like to be able to climb up over this little lot.”

  “Me, too,” said Johnny feelingly.

  They looked at each other. Then they flattened themselves, wrapped their shirts around their heads and waited patiently for the sand to strike. The van lay and waited, too.

  Then, when the storm came, it was really bad.

  It did not last much more than twenty minutes. But for a long time afterwards Fedora lay very still, his forehead pillowed on hi
s sound elbow, breathing with difficulty through a mouth that seemed choked with sand. His body felt battered, bruised, as though beaten all over with a heavy truncheon; while his head ached as though it were squeezed in some steadily-tightening press. Only vaguely, indeed, was he aware that the storm had passed; the torture of that long, losing battle with the strangling sands had so impressed itself upon his brain that the memory of it had become almost as terrible as the reality. All the same, a certain part of him knew that, in spite of the tumult that still raged and swirled behind his tightly jammed eyes, the desert outside was once again peaceful, the air - incredibly - at rest. And when the dust-cloud of the haboob had become a dark shadow on the horizon to the south, Johnny stirred and shook himself and painfully lifted his head.

  Then he coughed, rackingly, for perhaps half a minute. Then he rolled over on to his right hip and rubbed at his face with his sleeve. Later, much later it seemed, he was able to open his eyelids; the bright enemy up in the sky struck at his reddened eyes, struck as agonisingly as though the vanishing screen of clouds had no existence. Coming back to life was, for Johnny, a very unpleasant business.

  By his side, another shapeless object was gradually returning to normality. After ten minutes had passed in the increasing sunlight, Johnny and O’Brien were able to look once again at each other; more, Johnny was able to voice the thought that had for so long been uppermost in both their minds.

  “Water,” he said, briefly.

  O’Brien freed his tongue from the glutinous mess that had congealed around it. “Water,” he said. “Yes.”

  Johnny began to feel around beneath him for the water-bottle that he had previously stored directly under his chest. Some few seconds’ scrabbling in the sand revealed it. He passed it to O’Brien. O’Brien, the fortunate two-handed, took it, unscrewed the stopper, rinsed out his mouth and spat forcibly into the sand. This procedure he repeated three times before returning the bottle to Johnny.

  “Lord,” he said. And then, “That’s better, I think.” And then, “Was a dam’ sight worse than I thought.”