‘He fed them on Carnation milk. Happy as a sandboy.’
‘When he got to the leaguer, Paddy said he had to take ’em back. No one could remember where the cave was, so he had to turn ’em loose in the Jebel. Reckoned wolves and hyenas would get ’em. Poor old Fred. Came back in tears.’
Copeland sniffed suddenly, looked away, saw the tea was boiling. He took the mess tin off the fire, laid it on the ground to cool. ‘How’re you doing?’ he asked.
‘You mean, apart from deserting my chums, and losing almost my entire patrol?’
‘No, I meant how bad is your wound?’
‘I expect I’ll live. Hurts like hell, though. How about yours?’
‘Arm’s stiff as a plank. Could do with some antiseptic dope.’
‘Get it out, then.’
Cope spread his scarf on the ground, took a brown envelope from his haversack, shook pills out on to the scarf.
‘This is the last of it. Two sulphonomide and two Bennies apiece.’
‘Save the Bennies. We might be glad of them later.’
Copeland nodded, put the Bennies away, handed Caine his share of the sulphonomide. He fished out the ship’s biscuits, gave Caine two, took the remaining two himself. He picked up the mess tin, blew on it, passed it to Caine.
‘Nah, after you, mate.’
‘No, you need it, Tom.’
Caine took the mess tin. He swallowed the sulphonomide, took a swig of tea, dipped a biscuit in it, took a bite. ‘Damn me, that’s good,’ he said.
He drank half of the tea, passed it back. Cope finished eating and drinking in silence.
He wiped his mouth with his good arm. ‘That’s it then,’ he said. ‘Rations finished.’
He threw away the dregs, scoured the mess tin with sand. ‘So. What do you want to do?’
Caine hesitated, brought Jizzard’s map out of the patch-pocket of his trousers. ‘I’m going after Fiske. I know where he’s heading.’
Copeland took the map, examined it by the light of his torch. ‘That RV’s ten miles away. We’re knackered. We’ll never make it in this state.’
‘I’m going,’ said Caine wearily. ‘I’m going after that bastard even if I peg out doing it. You don’t have to come, Harry. I’m not ordering you to.’
‘Christ, Tom. As if the drama at the bridge wasn’t enough. You’re the most obstinate bugger I’ve ever had the misfortune to serve with.’
Caine felt tears bud in the corner of his eyes. ‘I probably am,’ he said, ‘but I owe it to the lads, Harry. I’m not letting that bloody traitor get away.’
Copeland slotted the mess tin into his equipment. He took another shufti at the map. ‘Bir Souffra,’ he said. ‘That’s where Fiske’s going. Why there? Ah, did you see this, skipper? There’s a temporary landing ground, LG120. He must be getting picked up by plane.’
‘I’d put money on Caversham or Maskelyne. Those sods are up to the hilt in this. They set us up, Harry. We both knew it from the start, but we still walked into it.’
Caine took back the map, folded it carefully: instead of returning it to the patch-pocket, he inserted it into the space concealed in the lining of his overalls.
Copeland watched him with alert eyes. ‘How did they persuade you, then?’
Caine twitched, pulled at his chin. ‘It was Nolan. They had photos of her alive, taken months after the crash. They promised to help me find her if I accepted the job.’
‘Now you know she’s with the deserters, why risk it? It’d be better to make for our own lines.’
‘Who knows where our lines are? By the time we’ve found them, it’ll be too late.’
‘You reckon the black box is that important?’
Caine tugged at his chin again. ‘You know when we were at the derelict? I didn’t tell anyone, but I had a sort of … well … it was like a dream, except I was awake. I saw Maurice Pickney.’
Copeland raised an eyebrow. ‘Pickney’s dead, Tom.’
‘Yes, ’course he is, but there he was, talking to me just like I’m talking to you. He told me not to take the black box, said there’d be a disaster if we opened it.’
Copeland cracked his knuckles. ‘You still took it. You even tried to open it.’
‘I don’t believe in ghosts, Harry. I wasn’t going to leave it behind just because of some hallucination.’
‘Perhaps that’s what it was – a hallucination. You were exposed to Olzon-13, weren’t you? Remember the craziness that stuff caused among the Senussi? It could be the lingering after-effects.’
Caine repressed the desire to tell him that he’d also seen Pickney on the battlefield, or about the persistent visions of Nolan and Eisner he’d had in Cairo: Cope would start to think he really was round the twist.
‘Whatever it was, I can’t help thinking that there was a message in it, even if it came from somewhere inside, you know, like an intuition? That’s one of the reasons I’m making for Fiske’s RV, Harry. But I’m going it alone this time. I’m not dragging you into any more shit.’
Copeland shook his head, amazed at the sheer cussedness of it. Then he remembered how Caine had taken on the Sandhog mission, mainly because he, Copeland, had wanted to rescue Angela Brunetto. He felt a surge of grief when it struck him that Brunetto was no longer there. He spat into the sand. ‘Don’t talk daft, mate. If we get through it, though, I reckon you’ll owe me a couple of beers.’
They moved down the escarpment at dawn with the sun flaring up behind them in reefs of coral and carnation rose. They followed the road through screes and huddlestone outcroppings, looking down across a plain where quilts of caramel fanned out in ripples, where the new sun wove a tapestry of purple blisters and shimmering bright pools like polished glass. At the base of the slope, they came across the tyre-tracks of many vehicles, softskinned and armoured, all heading south–north towards the Tebaga Gap. They cast out in separate arcs looking for signs of a jeep going west towards Fiske’s RV.
‘Hey,’ Caine called. ‘Look at this.’
He showed Copeland the tramlines of a Willys Bantam, heavily laden, travelling west. The tracks were fresh.
‘How do you know it’s him?’ Copeland demanded. ‘Could be anyone.’
‘No.’ Caine crouched down, showed him damp patches in the sand between the tracks. ‘Water leak, Harry. Remember I fixed the condenser on that jeep. Looks like I didn’t do a very good job.’
‘That can’t be the only jeep in Tunisia with a leaky condenser.’
‘It’s Fiske all right. The tracks are slap on our bearing. Come on.’
He set off along the tracks fast, with Copeland tagging along after him.
Within two hours they were shattered. Yet they continued to dog the jeep tracks through windscoured atolls, dragging their feet across lodes of jetblack clinkers that lay in strange configurations like the parts of fossil beasts, through thorngroves where the sand had built up around driedout roots in pillowed ruffs. They tottered through fields of grass tussocks littered with the hard pellets of goat droppings, where flakes of sunwhitened bone lay on the surface, where fragments of goat-hide and twists of decayed rope were scattered round three-stone fireplaces that had once marked shepherds’ camps.
Caine kept his prismatic in his hand, made sure the jeep tracks were still on course: they seemed to be curving towards a far-off wall of razorback ridges, veiled at the base by dust flurries and quivering tentacles of haze.
They’d covered about seven miles when they saw smoke ahead, rising in loose coils from the scree. They carried on for another ten minutes: the jeep tracks warped away from the smoke, then back towards it. They halted: Caine dekkoed through his field-glasses. The smoke was coming from a coppice of big tamarix: the kind of place marked on the maps as a hattia. He made out dark figures there, Bedouin shacks, goats browsing in shadow.
‘Arabs,’ he said. ‘No sign of the jeep. You think maybe they’d give us food and water?’
‘How do we know we can trust them?
‘We
’re armed, mate. Let’s just do it.’
Before they got within a hundred paces of the camp, a dog began to bark. Copeland brought up his rifle.
‘Leave it, Harry. We don’t want to appear hostile.’
As they approached, a grey dog skeetered out at them, baying. It planted its feet firmly as if to make a stance, backed away when they didn’t stop. They found two Arabs standing by the fire. They looked like father and son – one older, one younger, both small men with sandfox faces and pointed beards, dressed in desert-stained long shirts and ragged headcloths. Neither of them was armed, but Caine saw an old bolt-action rifle hanging from the beam of a shack nearby.
There were three shacks, crudely pieced together from deadfall and dried grass, roofed with mats of woven goathair, standing in the umbrella shade of the huge tamarix. An earthenware waterjar stood outside one of the shacks: Caine noticed a leather well-bucket and a coiled rope hanging from another. He ran a parched tongue over split lips.
Caine didn’t speak Arabic, but he’d picked up a few words and phrases from Layla, the Senussi girl he’d known in Libya. He touched Copeland’s arm, stopped ten paces from the men. ‘Salaam alaykum,’ he said.
‘Wa alaykum as-salaam.’
There was a moment’s silence: the Arabs stepped towards them, shook hands over and over again. Caine knew this was the Arab way: the desert people used the greeting ritual to size newcomers up. The grey dog sniffed at their feet, sidled off and sat down in the shade.
‘Almani?’ one of the Arabs asked. ‘Italiani?’
‘No. No.’ Caine shook his head rapidly. ‘British. Inglizi.’
The men smiled, showed white teeth.
Caine made a gesture towards his mouth with closed fingers.
‘Eat. Drink.’ He patted his stomach. ‘We’re hungry.’
The older man nodded: his face was cracked into clefts and crevices: one of his eyes was a slit through which only a speck of white showed. He beckoned to them, drew them into the shade of the trees, called out something. A moment later a young girl trotted out of one of the shacks, carrying a roll of woven matting. She was barefoot and wore a dress of brilliant primary colours: her face was nutbrown and almond shaped, with eyes like shiny black coals. Her hands were doll’s hands, and she had a wealth of braided black hair. She must have been thirteen or fourteen: a perfect younger version of his Senussi friend.
The girl spread out the mat under the trees. The old man pointed at it. ‘Itfaddalu,’ he said.
They dumped their haversacks, removed their webbing, sat down on the rug. They kept their weapons close. The old Arab sat crosslegged in the sand opposite, watched them with his good eye: the girl brought leather cushions, placed them behind their backs. The younger man fetched water in a wooden bowl encrusted with rinds of porridge and dried milk: he passed it to Caine with both hands.
‘Take it easy,’ Copeland told him. ‘Don’t drink too much at once.’
Caine swallowed water: it was clean and deliciously cool: he passed the bowl to Cope. The girl boiled tea squatting at the fire, poured it into an enamel teapot, brought it over on a battered tray with small glasses, placed the tray before the old man. He spoke to her again, and a minute later she came back with a woolly black sack. The Arab rummaged in it, brought out a box containing chunks of sugar. He popped sugar into the teapot, fished out a bent spoon covered in green mould. He spat on the spoon, rubbed it with sand, stirred the tea. He poured it into two of the glasses, handed them to Caine and Copeland in turn. Caine sipped tea: it was hot, strong, stiff with sugar. ‘By golly, that’s wonderful,’ he said.
The girl came back again with a tray of dates, set it down before them. ‘Okulu,’ the old man said, indicating his mouth with clenched fingers.
The dates were hard and dry, but sweet. They set to work on them ravenously. The old man refilled their glasses, then refilled them again.
Caine finished the tea, declined another glass, sat back against the cushion. ‘I could get used to this,’ he said. A wave of drowsiness washed through him. He closed his eyes.
‘Don’t go to sleep, Tom,’ Copeland warned him.
Caine opened his eyes, stared up at the thick boughs of the tamarix above, wondered how long the tree had been here: hundreds of years, probably. Life was incredible, he thought. Life. Betty Nolan is alive. I’ve got to get through this. Got to see her again. First I’ve got to deal with Fiske.
He sat up, faced the old Arab. ‘Has a man in a jeep been here?’ he asked. He braced an imaginary steering-wheel, made a farting sound through pursed lips. He pointed at his smock.
‘English soldier? Dressed like this?’
The Arab blinked his good eye, looked mystified. He shouted to the younger man, who jogged over: they had what sounded like a heated discussion for a few minutes. Finally, the older one turned to Caine: he pointed to the space beyond the camp. ‘Hinaak,’ he said. ‘Ma jaa hinna.’ He patted the ground, shook his head emphatically.
‘I think he means the jeep passed by,’ Copeland said.
Caine pulled at his smock. ‘A man dressed like this?’
Both Arabs nodded. ‘Aywa. Aywa.’
Caine pointed at his watch. ‘What time was it?’
Again the men looked puzzled. ‘They don’t use watches,’ Cope said. ‘They don’t know the time.’
Caine pointed at the sun, made a rising-falling gesture with his hand. The young man seemed to grasp his meaning. ‘Amis,’ he said. He directed both hands towards the western horizon. ‘Amis fil-asur.’
‘Evening time,’ Copeland said. ‘Before sunset, maybe.’
Caine remembered that the word amis meant yesterday. ‘Yesterday afternoon,’ he concluded. ‘He’s not more than half a day ahead of us.’
‘We’d better get cracking.’
‘We can’t. Not yet.’ Caine nodded in the direction of the shacks: the girl was walking carefully towards them carrying what looked like an enamel washing bowl, two feet wide.
‘I think lunch is served,’ Caine said. ‘It’d be churlish to leave without sampling the fare.’
Copeland grinned.
The girl set the bowl down in the sand by the mat: the old man crouched on one knee, summoned them with a bony hand. The food was a savoury stew of meat, gravy, lumps of fat: the old man called the younger Arab, dug out an oval loaf from his sack, divided it into four thick hunks. He handed one to each of them.
‘Okulu,’ he ordered. ‘Bismillahi.’
Caine paused for a moment, watched how the Arabs broke off pieces of bread, dipped them in the stew with their right hands, groped with their fingers for fat and meat.
‘Hand job, then,’ Copeland commented.
‘Come on. Dig in.’
Afterwards, the girl came round with a metal jug and poured water over their hands. They sat back. ‘Makes the world look a different place,’ Caine declared.
‘We have to move on, though, skipper. I reckon LG120’s only another two miles.’
For once, though, he didn’t sound convinced: he was lolling against his cushion, eyelids heavy.
Caine winked at him. ‘Let’s give it a minute or two to digest.’
He lay back against the cushion. His side wound was still sending occasional hotwires through him, his face felt razorscraped, his arm was throbbing. He was completely shagged out, yet the meal had given him a sudden glow of well-being. It was peaceful lying here in the shade with these simple folk, with a full stomach, listening to the languid hum of flies, the soothing sound of goats snaffling in the trees. It seemed as far away from el-Fayya bridge as heaven from hell.
He closed his eyes. In a moment he was asleep.
Someone was shaking him: it must have been Copeland, but he couldn’t be sure. It was very dark. He wondered how long he’d been there. ‘Come on, Tom,’ a voice growled.
He followed the shadowy figure through the tamarix. On the other side of the copse, the inkblack night was split by strings of blue lightning: for a split second it il
luminated the derelict STENDEC aircraft, looming out of the sand like the fractured carcase of an enormous pterodactyl. What the hell is she doing here? Her black wings heaved: her fuselage groaned like punctured bellows: he saw cat’s eyes wink at him, heard the tremor of thunder. The derelict was huge, much bigger than he remembered: entering her fuselage was like crawling through a gangrenous wound into a whale’s belly. The cabin was a vaulted ribcage hung with diseased organs, festooned with green fungus, seeping fluid like coagulating pus. The windpipe extrusions had come alive, glowed with slimy phosphorescence, squirmed and thrashed like spilled viscera. Skullheads gaped at him out of dark recesses. He heard the grating of voices, grinding laughter, muffled screams. Oily-skinned snakes coiled away from him, turned into impossibly long human fingers, like spider’s legs. In places he had to push through cobwebs as limp and cloying as wet silk. He was about to ask his guide where they were going when the figure turned on him. It wasn’t Harry Copeland: it was Maurice Pickney. He was standing by the black box: the word STENDEC was burning on top in letters of blue fire.
Pickney’s eyes were smouldering diamonds in a corpse’s face: his mouth was a vacant, toothless buttonhole. ‘You were warned not to take the black box.’
A rill of fear fingered Caine’s spine. ‘What’s in it?’ he stammered.
Suddenly, Pickney was standing right next to him, whispering in his ear:
‘He left bleached bones in the desert,
Wrestled with centaur and satyr,
Defied the demon hosts,
Put out the Holy Fire.’
Caine recoiled. ‘What? What does that mean?’
‘Don’t touch the black box. Don’t go near it.’
41
A dog barked. Caine awoke, found that he was still lying on the mat under the tamarix tree. It was late afternoon, and Copeland was gone. He heard shouts, sat up with a start, saw that two German lorries and a light car had halted two hundred paces out of the hattia: more than a dozen men in fieldgrey uniforms and Kaiser tinlids were moving in on the Arab camp. The grey dog hurtled towards them yapping: a Jerry with a long face and a lopsided camel’s jaw shot it in the belly. The dog whimpered, lay still in the sand.
Death or Glory III Page 26