by Leo Kessler
Jeeves nodded. It was certainly not the type issued to the RAF as well as the British Army – the flat, square bottle, enclosed in what looked like khaki serge and holding the usual quart of water. This one was smaller, fatter and held perhaps half that quantity of water, and instead of the plug top of the British model, this had a screw, nozzle-type top. The colour was different too, not khaki, but field grey. "So, what do you make of it, McLeod?" he asked after a moment.
The Scot didn't answer immediately. Instead he asked a question of his own. "Strange, isn't it, sir. But here we have a member of the Indian Army appearing, apparently out of the blue, clad in British Army issue equipment, save for a German water bottle. Now, that's pretty strange, wouldn't you think, sir?"
Jeeves was angry for a moment. He didn't like people playing guessing games with him, even experts like McLeod. "Come off it, McLeod. Don't play games with me. What are you bloody well trying to say?"
"This, sir. How did this bloke get here? I checked, while we got rid of the towel-heads, with the port authorities at Basra. There are no Indian units there. So, how did he and his mates – there were obviously others – get here?"
"Dropped in from the bloody sky, naturally," Jeeves said ironically.
"Exactly, sir."
"What?"
"You said it, sir."
"Said what?" Jeeves demanded.
"Dropped in from the sky." The Scot's pale-blue eyes displayed unusual warmth for such a serious, dour man. Hastily, before his senior officer exploded, McLeod pulled back the dead man's shirt so that the air commodore could view the skinny, delicate, brown torso below. "Look at that, sir," he urged.
"Look at what?"
"Those red puckered lines around the shoulders, and the slight bruise just above the dead man's belly button. Do you see them?"
"Yes, I do. But what do they signify, for God's sake? And please, McLeod, don't give me any more ruddy puzzles, I'm running out of patience. And this bloody heat isn't helping any."
"Marks from a chute – a parachute, sir. Not so long ago, this dead bloke here came out of an aircraft attached to a piece of knickers silk. Those are the marks the harness left on him."
Jeeves was surprised, very surprised, but he concealed it. It never did to show one's feelings to lower-ranking officers; they lost confidence in one's leadership qualities if one did. All the same, he was constrained to ask the Scot, "Why? Why have he and his comrades been dropped by parachute here in neutral Iraq, and, for God's sake, who dropped them?"
McLeod had his answer ready. "The Huns, sir. The Indian is perfectly kitted out, save for the water bottle, which is German, and if you'll look at his boots." He pulled up the dead man's left foot and showed his superior the typical British Army ammunition boot underneath the neatly tied khaki puttees. "Just look at the studs. They're arranged in the regulation thirteen, but they're different."
Puzzled and surprised as he was, Jeeves had no time for further riddles. "All right, McLeod, how are they different and what do they signify?"
"British Army studs are round, these are triangular."
"So?"
"They're German Army issue, sir." He didn't wait for Jeeves to react. "This man already possessed most of his Indian Army gear, but not a water bottle. It's not the sort of thing you'd need in a POW camp. A bloke would probably sling it away immediately after he was captured – "
"You mean, this Indian wallah was once a German POW?" Jeeves interrupted the Scot harshly.
"I do. One of the thousands of Indians taken prisoner in the Western Desert, sir, once the Huns moved in and took over from the Japs there. Naturally, those POWs would be subjected to German pressure to make them join in the German cause. The Hun tried the same trick in World War One. Nowadays there are better reasons for them to want to help the Huns to remove our cruel – " his craggy dour face cracked into a wintry smile at the word – "domination of their country. Gandhi and all the rest of those Indian Congress wallahs. My guess, sir, is that his nibs here was one of those Indians who succumbed to German pressure." He let the dead man's foot go and his boot slammed hollowly against the burning metal deck of the wrecked armoured car.
For a moment or two there was silence while Jeeves stared down at the dead man in bewilderment, his mind paralysed and unable to work out what this discovery meant. Finally he said, somewhat weakly, "Well, what do you think, McLeod? You're the old hand."
McLeod didn't answer immediately. It was as if he, too, needed a conscious act of willpower before he could express an opinion. "Well, sir, let's say this man and his companions might be a sort of recce. They'd fit in here well enough – their colour, religion – and they're seemingly part of the British Imperial military presence."
"But a recce for what?" Jeeves objected.
"For the Huns."
"But the nearest Huns are in the Middle East and in Greece. There's surely thousands of miles between them and us here, McLeod."
The Scot had an answer to that question ready. "I think that this recce is not meant for a full-scale assault force, sir. Perhaps the Germans will send in just enough troops – probably by air – to stiffen up Raschid Ali – "
"That greasy traitor!" Jeeves interjected scornfully. "If anybody needs his backbone stiffening, it's that bastard up there in Baghdad, if you'll excuse my French."
"I will, sir. But if Raschid Ali does get German support, the Iraqi generals will go over to him. Then it won't take much convincing – or baksheesh – " he made the Arab gesture of counting banknotes with his thumb and forefinger – "to make the generals take part in open warfare against us. They know just how weak our forces are here in Iraq." The Scot shrugged his skinny shoulders. "Then we will be up a certain creek without a paddle. Cut off as we are here, it could be another Kut."
Involuntarily Jeeves shuddered. He'd been a schoolboy at the time of the Kut massacre and what followed when the Turkish military forced the British garrison to surrender at Kut in the then Mesopotamia, but the terrible events of that time were still etched on his memory. Even today, nearly thirty years after Kut, when he was a battle-hardened commander who had seen plenty of unpleasant incidents in his time, he couldn't bring himself to remember what the Turks and their Iraqi allies had done to the thousand-odd British soldiers who had surrendered to them. The thought gave him the impetus to make a quick decision. "All right, McLeod, I'll buy it. You are probably right. The Hun's up to his usual nasty tricks here in Iraq, and the whole business is probably linked with that greasy bastard in the capital, Raschid Ali. He'd sell his own mother for a couple of quid if it would help him to gain power. So this is what I'd like you to do, McLeod."
"Sir?"
"How many armoured cars can you spare from your routine desert patrols?"
"Two, as long as I have nine runners to protect the base in case..." He didn't finish his sentence, but Jeeves knew what the Scot meant – in case the bloody balloon went up.
"All right, take a troop of two, McLeod. I'll give you forty-eight hours. Find these other Indians and bring in prisoners. It's vitally urgent we find out more about what's going on. Understood?"
"Understood, sir. I'll get right on to it as soon as I get this vehicle towed away."
"Don't bother about it. I'll see to the towing away myself personally. At the double now." He flashed the older squadron leader a fleeting smile. "And the best of luck."
McLeod, as serious as he always was, didn't return the smile. Instead he said, "I'm off, sir." He paused momentarily before adding, "And watch your back, sir. You know what the Iraqis are like." And with that he was gone, leaving Jeeves to stare at the bare yellow horizon beyond the great sprawling camp, a growing feeling of apprehension and doubt slowly beginning to seep through his body.
CHAPTER 3
McLeod cursed. The engine of the second armoured car was overheating already. They had been out on patrol searching for the mysterious Indians for not more than an hour and already, as usual, he was having trouble with the antiquated vehicle
s.
It was typical, McLeod told himself, as the crew of the second armoured car poured more water into its radiator. The British Government, in their infinite wisdom, had tried to run Iraq on a pittance. They'd used the RAF, flying obsolete planes as well, and cheap Assyrian levies, to control a big country, plagued by warring tribes and, since 1930, governed by treacherous, supposedly pro-British politicians in Baghdad, who could be bought and bribed at the drop of a hat.
Just before he had set out, minus one armoured car which refused to start for some reason, a gloomy Jeeves had confided in him that all he had to defend the great sprawling Habbaniyah Base were some 1,000 Assyrians and about the same number of RAF personnel, who were flying and servicing eighty planes, all of them of pre-war vintage. In addition, there were some 8,000 civilians, some of them British, who Jeeves said he could arm if he could find enough weapons for them.
As Jeeves confided to McLeod, looking to left and right to check whether he was being overheard (for there were spies everywhere in the camp), "If the balloon does go up here, McLeod, and the Iraqi Army gets into the act, we'll be hopelessly outnumbered. That is, unless we get reinforcements from home or from India, which looks doubtful in view of the Eighth Army's situation in the Middle East." He sighed and sucked at the stem of his unlit pipe (for some reason the air commodore had decided to stop smoking his beloved briar when everyone else seemed to be smoking more due to the rising tension in the desert country). "Nil desperandum, what, McLeod. Smile through your tears and all that bullshit, eh?"
McLeod had responded with a careful smile of his own. Jeeves was doing his best. Unfortunately, old Mespot hand that he was, he knew better than the air commodore how bad the situation was in Iraq. He knew from Intelligence that they had been picking up Morse signals ever since the end of March. They appeared to come from outside Iraq and, according to the Intelligence wallahs, they were strong enough to be coming from neighbouring Syria.
Syria was under the control of the Vichy French government, which was actively co-operating with the Nazis on the French mainland. As far as Intelligence was concerned, that meant the Germans were partially running the show in Syria, for the coded messages should have been easily cracked. British Intelligence had long been able to read French Army codes. So, Intelligence had concluded that the Morse signals were using the German code which hadn't been deciphered so far.
McLeod watched his sweating half-naked men finish off filling up the radiator with precious water, wondering if he was going to have enough for the patrol. If he didn't, he and his men would have to sacrifice some of their own water, and they were limited to a quart a day for all purposes – drinking, washing and remaining clean-shaven in the best traditions of the Royal Air Force. It was bloody, very bloody, but it had always been that way in this godforsaken country. Sometimes he wondered why he had stayed here so long. In reality, he knew. Iraq, in some awful bloody way, was home to him. He had long forgotten what Scotland was like. As he gave the signal for his two crews to mount up, he told himself, "Jock, old pal, they're gonna bury you in this bloody arsehole of the universe." Five minutes later, the two lone armoured cars were on their way again, tiny dots in that vast yellow sea of sand.
McLeod, the veteran, worked his vehicle on the grid system, covering a square of some twenty miles between the base and the main road to Baghdad. Even as he selected the route for the search, he told himself it would be highly unlikely that these mysterious Indians would be heading – at least, openly – for the Iraqi capital. As he had anticipated, he found nothing save a convoy of skinny-ribbed camels heading for God knew where, whose handlers had seen nothing. Thereafter he checked a couple of the more well-known watering holes. But although there was evidence that they had been used recently, there were no tracks or footprints of nailed Indian Army boots to indicate the Indians had been there. That evening, as he and his men squatted next to the cars, drinking strong 'Sarnt-Major's tea' and eating hard tack biscuits spread with corned beef that had poured out of the big tins in almost liquid form, McLeod decided on another tack.
Idly listening to the soft talk of the men, mainly concerned with 'subject number one', i.e. sex, McLeod tried to work out what would be the Indians' aim here in Iraq. If they were there to do some job for, say, the French in Syria, and that job was somehow connected with a possible revolt by the Baghdad Iraqis, he reasoned, then the Indians might well be doing a recce of the base area itself. But what would they be looking for?
"So I got her in the back of the barn," Chalky White, the big driver of number one car was saying in this thick Barnsley accent, "and I said, "No, come on, lass, have them drawers off' n yer right now. You've had yer port and lemon and yer fish-and-tatie supper. Yer can't expect me to pay that kind of money on yer without a bit o' slap and tickle in return."
McLeod gave a little smile. Soldiers never changed, he told himself. They were talking the same kind of stuff about their 'bints, booze and baccy' when he had first come out here a green young officer of the Royal Flying Corps in what seemed now another age. Thank God they never did change. Who back home would accept this kind of life, with all its hardships, if they weren't a regular?
"So yer knows what she sez to me, muckers?" Chalky was saying. "I got more than fish and taties from that flight sergeant last week. He gave me a proper sitdown knife-and-fork supper an' a gin and tonic. Now, he was a real gent. Knew how to treat a lady. He even took my drawers off for me... "
McLeod forgot Chalky White's sexual memoirs and concentrated once again on the problem at hand. If these mysterious Indians were doing a recce for either the Iraqis or some other power and they were paying special attention to the Habbaniyah Base, they'd obviously look for suitable spots for artillery, or places where the infantry could mass in dead ground safe from British fire or aerial attack. It seemed to him, therefore, that the best place for an assault to be initiated would be in the low foothills east of the camp, between it and the main road to Baghdad. Those hills would be additionally well located close to the motor road, for bringing up further enemy troops if necessary. The more he thought about it, the better McLeod liked the idea. But there was one catch. The cars' radio sets, again damnably old, were pretty useless at the best of times. In the foothills, however, they would be worse than useless. Their transmissions wouldn't carry more than a mile or so. If he ran into trouble out there, there'd be no chance of contacting base. They'd be on their own and he could guess what would happen to them then. They wouldn't be coming back – or, if they did, it would be in a wooden box...
At dawn, McLeod had his little force on the move again. He and his crews savoured the dawn coolness, hardly noticing the roughness of the terrain, the potholes and ruts of the track, which made the springs of the ancient armoured cars squeak alarmingly. Standing upright in the turret of the lead car, muffled up in his sheepskin coat and wearing motoring goggles, for it was damnably cold and the bitter wind threw razor-sharp sand particles at his red-raw face, McLeod surveyed the way ahead for any sign of life. But there was none. They might well have been the last men left alive on earth.
The hours passed leadenly. Now, in the blue haze of the distance, with the sun already high in the sky, McLeod could see his objective – the brown smudge of the foothills. Carefully he scanned it with his binoculars. He was searching for any sign of life – a hut or spiral of smoke which might indicate a cooking fire. But there was none. The foothills appeared deserted and void of human life, save for the skeletons of camels and other livestock, dead these many years.
All the same, McLeod felt in his lean guts that he was on the right track. He had to be, he told himself, for his fuel and water were running out. Tomorrow he'd have to return to base, unless he wanted to walk back, and that could lead to his own bones joining the other white-bleached bones that littered the desert floor.
It was dark when they reached the foothills, and the men were exhausted, parched and red-eyed with the strain of driving for so many hours. Although he didn't like to
stop now, McLeod knew he had to; the men needed a rest. Indeed, the men were too hungry to open their tins of sausage and Canadian bacon wrapped in greaseproof paper and cook them. So McLeod, the good commander, sprang a surprise on them. He produced the six big cans of Syrian peaches which he had bribed the cooks into giving them and handed them over to Chalky White to distribute among the suddenly delighted crews.
For a while, McLeod slept heavily, as did the others snoring heartily, save for the sentry, who was trying to keep warm in McLeod's sheepskin coat. But about three, just after the sentries had changed, he woke with a start. For a moment or two, he wondered what had wakened him. Propping his head up under his blanket, he stared at the night sky, bright with the silver light of a myriad cold stars, listening to the 'singing of the sand', as the old Iraq hands called it. At night the grains of sand contracted in the bitter cold, then they rubbed together, for some reason, giving off a strange haunting sound.
But after a few moments of listening, he realised it wasn't the 'singing of the sand' which had wakened him. It was another sound altogether.
This one was higher, shriller, more urgent than the gentle, almost magical music of the shifting night sands. This was a mechanical, busy sound. Immediately McLeod was fully awake. He wasted no time. He shrugged off his blankets, feeling no cold now in the urgency of the movement.
Tugging out his revolver, he hurried in a crouch to where the sentry, Chalky White, stood motionless, head cocked to one side as if he were listening too. "Do you hear it, Leading Aircraftsman?"
White nodded and answered in a voice that was subdued, for him, "Ay, I did that, sir."
"Morse?"
"Sounds like it to yours truly, sir."
McLeod frowned, puzzled, but before he could ask the question he was about to pose, White did it for him. "Who the hell can be sending Morse at this time o' night in the middle of the bleeding desert, sir?"