The Men Behind

by Michael Pearce

“Where the Pasha goes?”

  “Yes. There is a path up from the rift.”

  “Have you been with him?”

  “Yes. We waited outside while the Pasha prayed.”

  The ground now was covered with boulders and the horses picked their way with difficulty. There had been a heavy fall from the cliff above.

  “How far are you going, effendi?” asked the servant. “If you don’t turn soon you won’t be at the river before it gets dark.”

  Owen was wondering that too.

  They came to the edge of a fall of scree. The horses hesitated and then plunged across it, their feet sliding and slipping on the loose stones.

  The servants stopped.

  “We will go back now, effendi,” they said.

  “Very well. Only lend me your headdress,” Owen said to one of them. “It will be evening soon and you will not need it.”

  “All I have is yours,” the man responded automatically and swept his headdress off. Owen sensed, however, a slight discomfort. No Arab felt at ease if he was bareheaded for long.

  “And in exchange, take mine,” he said.

  The man beamed, took Owen’s hat, and rode off rejoicing.

  “Bring it to me tomorrow!” Owen called after him.

  On the other side of the scree the ground sloped away sharply down into an enormous hollow. It was like riding down the slope of a dune.

  One of the trackers muttered something. All three suddenly seemed to have found something ahead which interested them.

  On the other side of the hollow was another set of tracks. It came over the sand and joined the trail they were following at right angles. The tracks blended together.

  “Friends?” asked Owen.

  The leading tracker shook his head.

  “It is the same people,” he said. “Only the track is fresher.”

  “What is it that you are saying?”

  “It is the same party, but a later day.”

  “How much later?”

  “Earlier today.”

  “In that case,” said Owen, “let us ride on.”

  They were coming now to the end of the jebel. The trail still kept close to the bottom of the cliff following the line of rock. As the steep line of cliff fell back the tracks bent around with it until they were going first due east around the end of the jebel and then north behind it.

  Still they kept close to the rock. Little ridges ran out on this side like the buttresses of a cathedral, requiring them to make continual detours and blocking the view ahead.

  It was for this reason that they came upon the men quite suddenly.

  They had climbed to the top of a spur and were just about to plunge down the other side when the trackers stopped. At first Owen could see nothing. And then on the far slopes he saw a group of tiny figures: four men and six camels. Two of the men were Bedawins. The other two were Roper and Plumley.

  ***

  Owen swore. To have come so far, to have gone to such lengths, and then to find—this!

  He cursed Ali Osman for luring him down here with his tales of being followed, he cursed himself for his credulousness in believing them. Most of all he cursed himself. What was he doing riding around the countryside like a lunatic when he ought to be in Cairo where Christ knows what was probably happening?

  The trackers looked at him admiringly.

  “That was a mighty curse,” said one. “It does a man’s heart good to hear it.”

  Resignedly Owen gave the sign to ride over to Roper and Plumley.

  They were just about to ride over the brow of the spur when there was the sharp crack of a rifle. It was followed at once by several others.

  The figures on the far slope seemed to freeze for a moment and then plunged desperately towards some rocks to one side of them.

  The rifles cracked again and there was the distinctive ping of a bullet hitting rock. There was no echo, but here where the air was clear the sound came with peculiar sharpness.

  So far as Owen could see, the figures reached the rocks without mishap, leaped from their mounts and took up position behind cover.

  A moment later they began to fire in return.

  From where he was Owen could see their assailants clearly. A handful of men in galabeahs lay sprawled among the rocks at the bottom of the slope blazing away.

  “Brigands,” said Owen.

  “Gypsies,” said one of the trackers contemptuously. He raised his rifle to his shoulder.

  Owen stopped him. “Let’s get closer,” he said.

  The two parties were so far apart that there was little chance of them doing much damage to each other, and Owen’s party was further off still. The Bedawin—and certainly his own trackers—were good shots, but their besetting sin was to blaze away at absolutely maximum range where a kill would certainly be spectacular but was highly unlikely.

  Besides, Owen was supposed to be keeping the peace.

  They rode quickly down the spur, keeping out of sight. At the bottom there was a dried wadi which ran roughly in the right direction. At the end of that there were some rocks.

  They left their horses in the wadi and ran crouching through the rocks. The trackers, recruited from unruly desert tribes, were in their element.

  Owen was not. Once again he had been caught without a gun when he particularly needed it.

  From time to time he heard occasional splatters of fire. Neither party had left its cover. The assailants seemed reluctant to press their attack.

  That would probably be so if they were indeed gypsies. Like anyone else in the desert, they would take a chance if one came along, and a small party with baggage camels was an opportunity not to be missed. However, it was unlikely that they would have gone out positively looking for trouble.

  Owen thought that if he could get close enough he could get them to surrender en masse. What he would do with them he wasn’t quite sure but it was better if you could do that, for then you could bring home to them that there was somebody ostensibly keeping law and order in the land. Otherwise, if you just scared them, they would run away and consider the attack quite a success.

  The trackers, entering into the spirit of it, took him through the rocks so quickly he could hardly keep up. The rocks brought them right up to the gypsies and they were upon them before the men could see them coming.

  The shooting from the top of the slope had died away. From their higher position Roper and Plumley had probably watched it all.

  The trackers slipped into position behind some rocks and trained their rifles across their tops. Owen got them to fire a volley over the heads of the gypsies.

  The firing stopped abruptly.

  Owen shouted to them to put down their guns. The volley, and then the English voice, would probably be enough to convince them that retribution was at hand.

  Nothing seemed to happen.

  Owen got one of the trackers—one only, because he did not want to give away the small size of his party—to fire another shot. This time the tracker deliberately put it just to one side of a man who might be the gypsies’ leader. There was a little puff of sand about a foot to the left of the man as he was lying.

  The man hastily scrambled up and put his hands in the air. One by one the others did the same.

  Owen walked out from the rocks with one of the trackers. The others gave him cover.

  “Stay where you are!” he said.

  The tracker went around collecting the guns.

  Owen told the men to sit down. They did so glumly. Now he was close he saw that they were indeed gypsies.

  Out of the corner of his eye Owen saw that the party on the hill was beginning to come down towards them.

  The tracker stacked all the guns in a pile and sat on them. As an afterthought he pulled three of the guns out, loaded them and leaned them caref
ully over his knee. Meanwhile the barrel of his own gun did not waver.

  “This is a Government party that you’ve attacked,” Owen said to the gypsies sternly.

  “I know,” said one of them sadly, “and now we are for it. You will take us to prison.”

  “We did not really mean to kill them,” said another gypsy.

  “When God had put such bounty in our way it seemed wrong to spurn it,” another explained.

  “You cannot go around attacking peaceful travelers.”

  “They were foreigners. We thought that didn’t count.”

  “It counts; as you will shortly find,” said Owen severely.

  Roper arrived in a shower of sand.

  “I take my hat off to you, Owen,” he said. “How the hell did you know this was going to happen?”

  “What are you doing here?” Owen asked ungraciously.

  “Doing a survey,” Roper replied. “With our little friend here.” He indicated Plumley.

  “I thought it was all right here?” said Plumley anxiously. “We said we’d be somewhere around here.”

  “It’s all right. On the whole.”

  Owen looked at the crestfallen gypsies.

  “Are you planning to go on with your survey?” he asked.

  “Might as well finish it,” said Roper.

  “We just don’t want these beauties interfering again.”

  “What are you going to do with them?” asked Roper. “Shoot them or kick them up the ass?”

  “I ought to take them in.”

  “We don’t usually bother,” said Plumley shyly.

  “Usually?”

  “Well, of course, this sort of thing happens now and again,” said Plumley apologetically. “Usually they shoot at us and we shoot at them and after a bit they go away again.”

  “It happens all the time when you’re surveying, does it?”

  “Not all the time. Occasionally.”

  “Not worth reporting?”

  “Well, hardly. Is it?”

  It wasn’t. By the time a police force had reached the spot the attackers would be hundreds of miles away.

  “I may take one of them back with me,” said Owen. “Just to show them.”

  “You won’t be able to do that tonight,” said Roper, looking at the sun.

  In fact, the trackers would have been able to find their way just as easily by night as by day. However, Owen thought he’d better spend the night where he was. That way he could keep an eye on the gypsies. In the morning he would let Roper and Plumley get off first and give them a start. Then he’d start the gypsies off in the opposite direction.

  The other thing he’d have to watch out for was theft during the night. The gypsies might not be great gunfighters but as simple thieves they were in a class of their own.

  Roper was evidently thinking the same thing. He beckoned to one of the gypsies and made him sit down on the ground. Then he tied his feet together. He then confronted the assembled gypsies.

  “If anything goes missing during the night,” he said, tapping his gun, “then his head goes missing too. Got it?”

  The gypsies understood the mime if not the English.

  Owen made his own arrangements. He instructed the gypsies to retire to the bottom of the hollow, where he ordered them to make camp. As soon as they did so, other gypsies, mostly women and children, began to emerge from the rocks.

  Owen was standing watching them when he suddenly felt a hand moving over his hip. He caught it and held it as he spun around. It belonged to a woman who had crept up behind him unnoticed.

  “You cheeky bitch!” said Owen. “Bloody robbing me while I was standing there!”

  “I wasn’t robbing you!” the woman protested. She explained where she had intended to put her hand.

  “Jesus!” said Roper. “There’s that woman again.”

  It was Soraya, the Ghawazi girl from the night club.

  “You get around,” said Owen.

  “I’m a gypsy.”

  “What the hell are you doing down here?”

  “We always come down here at this time of year. We go up the river to Assiut and then across the desert to Hurghada and then up the coast to Suez. Then sometimes we go straight to Alexandria, other times we go to Aleppo. I am a Halabi.”

  “Yes, I remember. I also remember what you were doing in the night club.”

  “You could come to me tonight,” said Soraya.

  “Bloody take up the offer, man!” urged Roper. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “I’ve got other things on my mind. Like seeing they don’t cut your throat.”

  “I’ll be all right,” said Roper, and wandered away.

  “Would you like me to cut his throat?” asked Soraya.

  “Christ, no.”

  He found he was still holding her arm and released it. Soraya seemed disappointed.

  “You go back there,” said Owen firmly, pointing towards the gypsy encampment.

  Soraya went off sulkily.

  As soon as it began to grow dark Owen went to the gypsy camp and drew a line in the sand with his foot. He then summoned one of the trackers and presented him to the gypsies.

  “This is Hosein,” he said. “He is a famous tracker. He can see in the dark. If anyone crosses that line between now and dawn he will shoot them.”

  Hosein agreed with enthusiasm.

  The gypsies looked at the other camp, the space and the tracker appraisingly. Owen was under no illusion that their calculations were necessarily the same as his.

  He went back to the other camp and joined Plumley and Roper for supper.

  Plumley, not one of the Bedawin, was the cook and he prepared a meal with all the expertise of one used to camping and used to the desert.

  “I quite like it out here,” he said. “Of course, I wouldn’t want to do it all the time, there are things in Cairo I’d miss. But it’s nice to get away from the office occasionally.”

  “Do you usually travel on your own?”

  “I have a couple of men with me when I’m surveying. You need one to hold the theodolite and it’s best to have another holding the camels.”

  Roper went to sleep soon after the meal.

  “He’s not used to it now,” Plumley apologized. “He gets tired if there’s a lot of riding.”

  Owen and Plumley remained sitting by the fire.

  “Presumably you didn’t come down to Hamada just to save us?” said Plumley quietly.

  “No.”

  Owen told him about the bomb. Plumley listened attentively.

  “That’s interesting,” he said. “That’s very interesting.”

  “It doesn’t seem to be getting us anywhere. I can’t even find the place where it happened.”

  “I might be able to help there,” said Plumley.

  “Really?”

  “Yes. I think I may have seen the place. I was surveying over that side, oh, about a year ago and I came across the bones. They were already bones by then. You know, hawks and ants. And I couldn’t work it out. That close to the village they would normally have been properly buried. And then I could see it had been an explosion.”

  Plumley looked at Owen again almost apologetically.

  “I’m used to that sort of thing, you see. Explosions. Anyway, I couldn’t make it out. How could there be an explosion like that there? The man would have had to have been carrying gelignite or something. And then I looked around and I saw the piping and I reckoned it had to be a bomb, a homemade bomb. But a bomb, there?” Plumley bobbed his head diffidently. “Anyway, it stuck in my mind.”

  “A year ago. Do you think you could still show me the spot?”

  “Oh yes. I noted it down. I was surveying, you see. Anyway, I think I could remember. Would you like us to come back with
you tomorrow?”

  “Very much. Normally I wouldn’t want you to disrupt the surveying, but just now—”

  “It won’t disrupt it very much. We were going to go over to that side of the river afterwards. We’ll just circle around.”

  As Owen stretched out on the sand a little bit later, his hand on his saddlebag, he thought he might call back the curses he had heaped on Ali Osman; some of them.

  The mighty tracker, Hosein, who could see in the dark, could not see well enough. Owen had not been asleep long when he awoke to find a hand crawling over his body. He grabbed it and twisted over to pinion his attacker. There was a surprised grunt and then a soft voice complained: “You are always hurting me.”

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Well…”

  ***

  Plumley led them right to the spot. It was not in the strip they had been searching but to one side of it. There was a track leading back to the village.

  “Why on earth didn’t they tell us about this one?” demanded Owen.

  “It goes out of the village at a bit of a tangent,” said Plumley. “If they wanted to get to the desert they wouldn’t go this way.”

  “Then why did they go this way when they heard the explosion?”

  Plumley, high on his camel, looked back over the sugar cane.

  “They were following the sound, presumably.”

  And the Mamur had just forgotten, thought Owen bitterly. Or perhaps he hadn’t.

  When they emerged from the sugar cane, Plumley paused for an instant to consult his mapwork and then set out unhesitatingly across the desert.

  The trackers saw it first: a white ribcage, rounded like a wicker basket, collapsed back into the sand. As they drew nearer, they saw other bones lying. And then as they drew nearer still there was the black sheen of metal and a short length of piping, twisted and gnarled and now choked up with sand.

  “It’s exactly the same, you see,” said Plumley, dismounting. “Of course, I wasn’t to know that at the time. But this kind of bomb has become pretty standard over the last few years. In Cairo, I mean. I’ve been called out before.”

  The bones were scattered over quite a wide area.

  Plumley took out a sketchpad.

  “I’ll draw it for you if you like,” he offered. “It’s always a help to the lab.”