Sterling glanced around him. ‘Get in the Jeep, Eric,’ he said. Churchill clambered back in and Sterling got in on the other side. ‘Drive,’ Sterling said.
Churchill had the ‘officially nonplussed’ look on his face that Sterling knew well and no longer trusted. ‘Where to?’ Churchill said. ‘What’s all this about? I thought they were going to let Taha out with a slap on the wrists and we were all going to drive home together. Have a bit of a safari.’
‘That’s what I wanted you to think,’ Sterling said. ‘But I don’t believe you really swallowed it, Eric. Anyway, you’ve been devious with me, and now it’s my turn. We aren’t going to drive back through Morocco. We’re taking Taha back to the desert. His people have been kidnapped by raiders, and we’re going to help him rescue them. After we’ve broken him out of jail, that is.’
Churchill’s face dropped theatrically. ‘You’re off your rocker!’ he said.
‘No, I’m not,’ Sterling said. ‘This is the first sane thing I’ve done for years. I had the chance to make Billy happy when he was a kid, but I fluffed it every step of the way. I’m not going to do that again. Not even if it means breaking laws. Not even if it means getting myself killed.’
Churchill stopped the Jeep on the quayside, where the lamplight from the buildings threw long blocks of light on the rippling sea. He turned to Sterling, and suddenly his manner changed. The wary, calculating Churchill that Sterling had glimpsed the day after their arrival was looking at him in the dim light, out of the same face.
‘That’s fighting talk, George,’ he said. ‘Sure you can take the consequences?’
‘I’m determined to get Taha’s people back. He has a wife and children, Eric. My grandsons.’
‘Jesus. He never breathed a word about that.’
‘I know. Now, the question is, are you with me? Or do I have to do it on my own?’
Churchill laughed, and this time it was a genuine laugh, not one of his hail-fellow-well-met ingratiating chuckles. ‘If we break Taha out of jail,’ he said, ‘what’s to stop the Spanish air force sending an aircraft out after us?’
‘Nothing,’ Sterling said, ‘except that this afternoon I had a word with the chief mechanic at the airfield and made a very substantial contribution to his family’s welfare. He predicted that all local planes would be grounded for three days.’
Churchill’s surprised look was patently authentic this time. ‘Good God!’ he exclaimed. ‘You’ve certainly got it all worked out.’
‘I had a good teacher,’ Sterling said. ‘So. Are you in or out?’
Churchill took a deep breath. ‘All right, George,’ he said. ‘I may as well see it through to the end.’
*
The local lock-up stood on the quayside, a primitive building of white adobe, without even a fence or a guard. Sterling supposed that they didn’t have many jailbreaks here, or many prisoners, for that matter. The place was a good hundred yards from the next house, so Churchill simply drove up and parked the Jeep outside.
‘Now what is our strategy going to be?’ he asked Sterling.
Sterling scratched his head. ‘I reckon we’ll just go up and knock on the door.’
Shamsu was surprised and annoyed when the Englishman appeared at the door asking to see Taha. Who did he think he was? He, Shamsu, was in charge here. ‘Where is your permission?’ he demanded insolently, holding the door open a crack. ‘Visitors are not allowed at night.’
Suddenly the door was pushed open violently with a force that sent Shamsu tottering. When he looked up, there was a man he hadn’t seen before, a bear-like afrangi with a ferocious face, pointing a pistol at him. ‘This is our permission,’ the afrangi croaked. ‘Unlock the cell of the prisoner Taha. Unlock his shackles, or you will be meeting your maker sooner than you counted on.’
The bear-like man looked serious and quite capable of carrying out the threat. Shamsu began to tremble. ‘B-but I don’t have the keys of his shackles,’ he stammered.
‘No?’ the man said. He eased his big frame into the office and the smaller one shut the door. ‘Then I don’t need you, do I?’
He clicked the safety catch with a giant thumb. Shamsu’s eyes started out of his head. ‘No!’ he whimpered. ‘I have the keys! Don’t shoot!’
He led the big man to the cell and unlocked it. Taha recognized Churchill and stood up, backing away warily, holding up his shackled hands as his only weapon. ‘What do you want?’ he demanded.
‘Don’t worry, son,’ Churchill said. ‘I’m on your side. I always have been.’
He made Shamsu unlock the shackles. Taha’s wrists were bloody and the skin chafed through. ‘Now,’ Churchill said to the fat man, ‘you put them on.’
Shamsu began to whimper and plead, but Churchill poked him with the revolver. ‘Put them on,’ he said. ‘Or I’ll put a bullet right through that fat gut of yours.’
Shamsu clapped the irons on his own fat wrists, crying like a baby. Churchill locked them, then drew a long piece of cotton material out of the pocket of his smock and tied it firmly round the jailer’s face. ‘That ought to shut you up,’ he commented. He nodded at Taha who was standing back, rubbing his arms. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘your dad’s out there. Let’s go.’
Sterling was tempted to hug Taha again when he appeared, but restrained himself. Churchill closed the cell door, locked it, and pocketed the keys. ‘They’ll have a hard time finding these where I’m going to drop them,’ he grinned.
Outside, the night was cool and quiet, pervaded by the soothing rhythm of the sea. There were pinpoints of light from the other buildings along the quay, but there was no one about. Churchill jumped into the Jeep and Sterling pressed Taha into the passenger seat, taking up his position with the petrol and water in the back. Churchill gunned the engine. ‘I’m sorry,’ Sterling told Taha. ‘This time it’s the iron chariot or nothing.’
Churchill changed to second and the engine burst into life, burning rubber along the metalled road, heading north. ‘I hope you know your way back to your camp,’ he said.
‘No,’ Taha said. ‘But my brother does. He’s hiding in the Wadi of Lizards, just north of the town.’
10
Taha and Fahal were so delighted to see each other that they remained locked in each other’s arms for several minutes. Taha broke the embrace only to examine his brother’s injured arm, which was still strapped up but on the mend, thanks to Taha’s splint and Belhaan’s ministrations. ‘I can just about hold my camel’s head-rope,’ Fahal explained. ‘But I can’t fire a rifle.’
He showed Taha the heavy pistol that their father had given him, and Taha made a grunt of approval when he saw it was a Colt .45 revolver. ‘If you hit someone with that, they don’t get up,’ he commented.
It took him a long time, though, to persuade Fahal to leave his camel and join them in the Jeep, and the delay made Churchill nervous. He knew the police probably wouldn’t find Shamsu till morning, but he wanted to put in some miles between them and Layoune across the open desert to be on the safe side. ‘What’s his problem?’ he growled at the brothers out of the open door. ‘Let’s get a move on.’
‘Fahal’s afraid,’ Taha said. ‘He’s never been in an iron chariot before.’
‘Get him in, for God’s sake!’
Reluctantly, Fahal loosed his camel from its hobble and drove it off with a smack on the rump. He hated parting with the animal: he had reared it himself and it was like a child to him. He hoped it would reach his camp eventually — camels’ homing instincts were very strong, but these days you never knew if someone would steal it or butcher it for meat, despite the Reguibat brand.
Churchill moved Taha into the back and put Fahal in the passenger seat, since he was to be their guide. He drove off fast, but soon Fahal made him stop. ‘The chariot moves too fast,’ he said. ‘We are past the marks I am looking for before I know it. I am used to the pace of a camel.’
Churchill scratched his thick jowls. ‘What about the stars?’ he asked.
�
��I know them,’ Fahal said. ‘But you must drive slowly.’
Though they did not get as far as Churchill had hoped, they had made a good hundred miles across the gravel plains by the time they stopped in an area of grass-covered sandbanks, acacias and tangled tamarisks. No aircraft had come after them yet, but Churchill parked under the flat-topped spread of a white-spined acacia just in case. The first thing he did on cutting the engine was to hurl the lock-up keys as far into the desert as he could. ‘I hope they’ve got spares!’ he said.
Churchill and Sterling shifted jerry cans of water and cartons of provisions from the back of the Jeep, while the brothers lit a fire quickly and efficiently. The big man gave the nomads a bag of flour and some dried meat, and opened tins of beans and sausages, slopping the contents into a mess-tin. ‘You keep your Arab bread,’ he told them wryly. ‘I had enough of it in the Zrouft to last me forever.’
Taha and Fahal moved away and made a second fire in a sandy patch. Taha mixed flour and water in a bowl and began to knead the dough rhythmically, while Fahal made tea. As they worked, sitting shoulder to shoulder, relaxing, happy to be in each other’s company, Fahal described how he had been herding his camels a day’s journey from Lehauf, and had returned one morning to find that the camp had gone. ‘Vanished,’ he said. ‘Tents, water-skins, everything. Then I heard whimpering, and I found Auwra lying by his two hunting dogs — what was left of them. You remember how he loved those animals? Their heads had been cut clean off by the Delim. Auwra was barely alive.’
The Delim had fallen on the camp by night, a thing unheard-of in nomad tradition. They were many — more than before — perhaps forty or fifty, and all with the new rifles. The clan had been taken by surprise. Old Saqr Tayaar had grabbed a club and knocked five or six of them down before they felled him. Auwra himself had set his dogs on the raiders. They hadn’t expected this, and at first the dogs had scared them, but then they had taken courage from their numbers and killed them. Auwra had resisted, and they had shot him through the chest. The strangest thing of all, though, was that instead of just stealing the camels and goats, they had disarmed the men and forced everyone to strike camp. Taking prisoner an entire clan was something new.
‘Our father believed the Delim had sold themselves to the devil,’ Fahal said. ‘But by God, it’s a human devil. Whoever gave the Delim those rifles is behind this.’
Taha paused in his kneading and considered it. ‘Between us, with God’s help, we killed or wounded eight Delim on the Ghayda,’ he said. ‘Then there are the two or three we shot the time you were hit. That’s a lot for a raiding party to lose. It would have been perfectly understandable if the Delim had wanted to take revenge. But capturing a whole clan like this is very strange. You’re right, Brother, it’s as if they were being instructed by someone else — someone ignorant of our ways.’
Fahal yanked the kettle off the fire with his good hand. ‘Auwra said they asked after your family,’ he said. ‘That is, Father, Rauda and your boys.’
Taha leapt to his feet. ‘God’s curse on the Delim!’ he bawled. ‘I swear I shan’t rest until I have killed them all!’
Churchill and Sterling, surprised by the outburst, were staring at him in alarm. Fahal banged on his leg. ‘Calm down, Brother,’ he said gently. ‘I found Rauda’s tracks among the rest, and those of the boys, and Father’s. They showed no sign of having been harmed.’
Taha squatted down again, picked up the bowl and the dough and began kneading furiously.
After a few more minutes he took out a clean cotton cloth and tipped the dough out on it, then began to shape it into a flat, oval loaf. With his good hand, Fahal added twigs to the fire to make it hotter for baking.
He rocked back into a cross-legged position, and told Taha how he had left his milch camels with some Znaga. ‘I was returning to Lehauf to pick up the tracks of our people again,’ he said, ‘when I met a hunter of the Nemadi who had your camel with him, and a stolen Delim camel. His name was Bes. He sat with me for a while, and told me about the lemha, about what had happened on the Ghayda, about the two afrang, and about how the big one had taken your spirit, and tied him up. He was furious about that. He said that an iron bird had come to take you away, but that he heard the big Christian mention Layoune. He was sure you’d been taken there. The news gave me hope, though, because I knew that I couldn’t do much alone, especially with my arm as it is. I decided to go to Layoune and find you. After all, doesn’t the old proverb say: “two can do together what is impossible for one”?’
Taha nodded, breaking the burning twigs down to embers with a heavy stick.
‘So Auwra died peacefully?’ he asked.
‘He’d lost too much blood,’ Fahal said. ‘He became quiet, and by sunset he was dead.’
‘God have mercy upon him. We shall take his price.’
‘By God, we will. But will these Christians help?’
‘I think so. The shorter one — he is my father. I mean my afrangi father, the one I had before I became one of us.’
‘God works in strange ways.’
‘Amen. He is a good man, but he does not understand anything. The other man, the big one, is a friend of his. My father does not carry arms, but the big man is a fighter whom my father hired to help him. I do not trust him, but I think he will help us for his own reasons, or for money.’
‘Bes said he knocked you out with some kind of medicine.’
‘That is so. I cannot understand him. He is a shape-shifter who wears different masks.’
Fahal sucked in breath. ‘That is the worst kind of man,’ he said.
The wood had burned to glowing embers now. Taha raked them aside with a stick and scooped a shallow hole in the sand. He placed the raw dough carefully in the hole, then drew a thin layer of sand over it, followed by the hot embers.
While the bread was baking, Fahal brought Taha his spare dara’a and head-cloth. Taha put them on gratefully, and threw his European clothes into the fire. Churchill had already offered to treat his chafed and bloody wrists with antiseptic powder, but Taha preferred the fish-oil ointment his brother kept.
As Taha swept back the burned-out embers and flipped the hot, hard-baked loaf out of the sand, Churchill and Sterling joined them, eating beans and sausages out of mess-tins. Taha borrowed Fahal’s dagger and scraped the excess sand and soot from the loaf. Sterling had always marvelled at the accident of chemistry that somehow prevented the sand and dust from mixing with the wet dough. Finally, Taha slapped the loaf with his hand, set it back on the clean cloth, and began to carve it up with the dagger. The delicious smell of freshly baked bread touched their nostrils. Taha offered pieces to Churchill and Sterling, who declined. Then he and his brother began to eat ravenously, a quarter of a loaf in one hand and a glass of tea in the other. ‘By God!’ Taha commented through a mouthful. ‘This is good. The first proper food I’ve had for more than a week!’
After they had finished, Churchill hefted a long canvas bag over to their fire and opened it. Taha’s jaw fell slack with amazement as the big afrangi took out two brand-new Garand M1 rifles, a Bren gun, and a bunch of Mills Grenades. He handed an M1 to each of them. ‘Presents,’ he growled. ‘I thought since we’re taking on that Delim mob, we may as well even the odds a bit.’
The brothers took the weapons and examined them with reverence.
‘These are really for us?’ Fahal asked.
‘All yours,’ Churchill said, setting his chiselled chin. ‘Of course they’re from George here, really. He paid for them, only he didn’t know about it.’
Sterling was looking on in bemusement. ‘When did you get these, Eric?’ he demanded.
Churchill shrugged. ‘Someone was selling them on the black market in Layoune yesterday and I couldn’t pass up the chance. Got plenty of ammo too.’
Sterling cocked his head to one side. ‘But yesterday we didn’t know anything about this,’ he said suspiciously.
Churchill smiled to himself and ran his big hands over th
e Bren in the moonlight, fiddling with sights and settings. ‘I thought they might come in handy,’ he said. ‘I never really thought you’d take Taha to England. I had a feeling we’d end up taking him back to the desert.’
Sterling shook his head. ‘You never cease to amaze me, Eric,’ he said.
‘No?’ Churchill said seriously. ‘Thing is, George, I’m always one jump ahead of you. Learned that in the spy-catching business.’
He lifted the Bren as if it was a toy, snapping its bipod down. ‘Best light machine gun ever made,’ he said. ‘Fires five hundred and twenty rounds a minute, effective range six hundred yards.’ He cocked and released the mechanism, clicked on a curved magazine, stood the weapon on its bipod and surveyed it proudly, as if it were a baby he’d just set on its feet. ‘That’s for me,’ he said. ‘Used to be a marksman with it.’
Fahal was still staring at his new weapon. ‘By God!’ he said. ‘That’s the best present anyone ever gave me. I just wish I had two sound hands so that I could fire it.’
‘All in good time,’ Churchill said.
Taha had thrown away an M1 he’d taken from the Delim guard on the Ghaydat al-Jahoucha for lack of ammunition, but he remembered how good it had felt to fire, and the feeling of power when the new cartridge was thrust into the chamber without any effort on the firer’s part. His eyes lit up as he realized the rifle was really his, and he began to tinker with it, opening and closing the breech.
‘But why did you get two Garands?’ Sterling asked. ‘You didn’t even know Fahal would be joining us.’
Churchill blinked at him. ‘The second one was originally for you, of course, but you can take the Remington hunting rifle instead. That’ll be better for you. It’s a sniper job — five shots, bolt action, small calibre.’
Sterling grinned sheepishly. ‘You’re joking,’ he said. ‘Anyway, I wouldn’t even know which end to point at the enemy.’
The big man shrugged and rubbed grease off his hands. ‘Never too late to learn,’ he said. ‘Maybe you’ll change your mind.’
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