Sandstorm

by Asher, Michael

  Fahal banged his strapped arm against his knee. ‘How can we fight so many?’ he said.

  Churchill curled a big hand around the dressing on his wound. ‘There is a way,’ he said. ‘There’s only one road into this place, right? We’ll hold the pass with the Bren gun and all the Garands we’ve got. I’ve got Mills grenades and even plastic explosive in the Jeep, so we can make claymores. All right, so it’s not fighting the honourable way, I know, but it will even the odds a bit. The women will have to fight alongside the men.’

  Fahal brightened. ‘It might work,’ he said. ‘But we will need you to show us how to do it.’

  Churchill beamed as happily as he could. ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ he said. ‘The question is, who’s going for Taha?’

  He looked around him with an expression of assumed blankness. ‘We can spare two men.’

  ‘I will go,’ Belhaan said. ‘I know a way through the Umm al-Khof — not the way you came through, but another one even the Nemadi don’t know. It is quicker and will allow us to head off the iron chariots. But I cannot fight all those Christians alone. I need a warrior with me.’

  Churchill nodded. ‘The problem is,’ he said, looking intently at Sterling, ‘that there are no warriors here who can drive a Jeep.’

  Sterling lifted his head suddenly and stared back at Churchill. He gazed at Belhaan, then at Rauda, then at his grandsons, and at the other Reguibat who were watching him expectantly. Any one of them, he guessed, would be willing to give his or her life for Taha, just as Taha had been willing to give his life for Sterling. Since childhood he had resisted taking up arms — he had even gone to prison over it, lost the respect of friends and colleagues. But that was different. What was it Churchill had told him? ‘Mass war’s one thing, but when it comes to your own kids it another. In the end, a man has to look after his own.’

  Sterling picked Churchill’s Garand from the sand next to him. He stood up, feeling a dam burst within him, years of repressed anger flushing away. There was no uncertainty now. He was sure that he was doing the right thing. He looked at Belhaan and cocked the rifle as if he’d been doing it all his life.

  ‘Let’s go for our son,’ he said.

  *

  Hobart’s convoy emerged from the quicksand at sunrise, when the desert night was splitting along the seams, spilling out starbursts of molten orange light. They had made good progress, despite following Taha at a crawl. At first, Hobart had been impatient with his grandson’s pace, but the youth had explained that the route was a series of bottlenecks, wide in places, narrow in others, and could not be rushed. He could not navigate properly sitting high in the cab, and one wrong turn might mean losing a lorry. As they passed the Jeep half sunk in the sands, Hobart remembered how the surface had closed over the bodies of his dead comrades eight years earlier, and shuddered. After that he had argued no longer.

  In one sense Hobart was glad that Taha was out of the cab: this way the youth couldn’t know that he had lost contact with his men in the Guelb. The best-laid plan ... he thought. He wondered what had happened — whether the boys had simply got impatient and left, or whether the wireless was out of service. Whatever the case, if Taha realized Hobart had no communications, his hold over the youth would cease.

  He wondered if Amir’s men had arrived back at the Guelb to slaughter the men and take the women and children for themselves. He hoped they would enjoy it while they could. The original .30 ammunition Von Neumann had given the Delim had been good, but ninety-nine per cent of the rounds he’d brought with him on the lorries was dud. As soon as the original supply ran out, the Delim might as well use the rifles as clubs for all the good they’d be. That had been one reason he’d wanted to use the Umm al-Khof as an escape route. Unless the Delim had someone who knew the way through it — and Churchill had reported they hadn’t — they would never be able to catch up with him now.

  Churchill would have silenced Sterling hours ago, he reckoned. In fact, Churchill had proved a damn good operator all the way. Back in Casablanca in ’45 he’d found him a bit overzealous: a mouthy type who’d got in by the back door because of his languages, and seemed more intent on doing his job than was strictly necessary. Not really officer class. They’d heaved him out when the war was over; the chap had thought he’d got his foot in the door and resented it. He was a foreigner anyway — nobody with any breeding would have fallen for that ‘minor branch of the family’ routine. On this mission, though, Hobart had been more impressed. It was a pity he couldn’t afford to share the gold with him. There was already Skorzeny to pay, and you couldn’t mess around with Skorzeny. Churchill would just have to get lost on the way home.

  Molly would be pleased about Sterling, Hobart thought. She’d been in on the Sonnenblume business since they’d met in Algiers in 1945 — she’d even acted as his contact agent and telephonist. She’d never been able to stand the sight of George Sterling, whom she referred to as ‘the Wall-Flower’. Hobart agreed that his son-in-law was a lily-livered pansy: the fact that he’d won the GM in the Ambulance Corps was just a fluke. But, despite what Hobart had told him, he didn’t even despise George, not really. He was simply indifferent to him. Since Hobart’s own patriotism had been a mixture of bravado, chauvinism and lip service, privately he’d never been able to get too self-righteous about someone who just didn’t want to play the game. To him, George was a nothing, a non-event. And now a dead non-event.

  As for Billy/Taha, well, Hobart had always wanted a son and heir, and Taha had grown into quite a tough customer, as Churchill had put it. But his grandson had unfortunately become a wog, and there was little hope of retrieval. Even if Taha wanted to leave his adopted folk, which he showed no sign of, Hobart knew that Molly would never accept a half-wild youth as a stepson. No, it was regrettable, but the very fact that Billy no longer spoke English, and was almost unrecognizable, made him all the more disposable. He was another one who wouldn’t be making journey’s end.

  A hundred yards ahead, Taha had halted and was making a sign, opening both hands wide, his shadow elastic and surreal against the gold-tinted sands. Hobart took the sign to mean ‘all clear’, and heaved a long sigh of relief. He’d made it. He was home free.

  He told the driver to slow down, and waved his hand out of the window to draw the lorries into line abreast.

  Hobart yawned. This was as good a place as any to halt for a cup of tea and a bite, he thought. He wanted to press on fast from here for the rest of the day to make sure he put plenty of distance between himself and the Delim. Now he’d finally got the gold, he was going to make sure he hung on to it. This was also a good place to rid himself of Taha. He glanced down at his Tommy gun and wondered if he could do it. Margaret’s face seemed to get in the way. But then Margaret was long dead, and Billy had been dead to him for seven years. This fellow in the ragged blue shirt was not Billy, he told himself, but a wog, a savage, and that’s what he’d always remain. He’d even married and had sons now, for God’s sake — he, Arnold Hobart, had wogs for great-grandsons! Imagine what Molly would say to that!

  Hobart ordered the driver to stop, opened the door and dropped heavily into the sand. He adjusted his Tommy gun, and straightened up. As he did so, he saw to his great surprise that Taha was no longer alone — a gaunt figure in a dara’a and head-cloth seemed to have popped up out of the landscape, a second spider-leg shadow, dark against the rising sun. Taha seemed absorbed in conversation with the shadow, and from where Hobart stood the two figures looked like black chessmen facing each other, their features in perfect profile against the swelling light. The new figure didn’t appear to be armed or menacing, but Hobart was suspicious and irritated at this unexpected development. He cursed and limped towards his grandson angrily. ‘Now who the hell is this?’ he demanded.

  There was a split-second’s pause, and then Taha swung round on him, his face an oval of black against the sun. ‘It’s my dad,’ he said. ‘He’s come to get me.’

  At that moment the shadow threw
back his head-cloth and dara’a, and Hobart realized with a shock that he was looking at George Sterling, down the barrel of the .30 calibre M1 rifle that was clutched firmly in his hands.

  His first impulse was to laugh at the incongruous sight, his second to step back and release the safety on his Tommy gun. At that instant Sterling fired.

  His first shot went wide, but before Hobart could let rip with the sub-machine-gun, Sterling pulled the trigger again. This time the bullet tore off Hobart’s thumb, and he screamed in shock. He sank to his knees, blood pulsing out of the joint, spattering the cool sand. He watched incredulously as another slim figure popped up from the ground, from under a cloak the same colour as the desert surface, not a hundred paces away: a crabbed old beggar with a streak of white beard, holding a rifle in each hand. He held one of them out to Taha, who was already racing for it.

  Hobart snatched at the trigger of his weapon with his left hand. The burst was wildly off-target, but self-preservation made Sterling drop, and in that moment Hobart turned and ran as fast as his stiff leg would allow.

  He bellowed to his driver to open up with the Browning, still mounted on the cab. The driver was already through the hatch and was grabbing for the machine gun, when a shot from Belhaan took him through the chest. The driver’s body snapped forward and drooped over the cab, his blood spilling, cleaning a path through the thick dust on the windscreen.

  The other drivers were already panicking, reversing out of harm’s way, gears grating, engines roaring. ‘No!’ Hobart bawled. ‘Don’t reverse!’

  It was too late. There was a shuddering crash as one of the lorries backed into another, then a scream of gears as one big Mercedes began to tilt into the quicksand. The driver — the long-haired Spaniard — leapt out of the cab with a Tommy gun in his hand, but Taha, now armed with the rifle Belhaan had passed to him, put a round blast through the skull. For a moment the Spaniard’s dark head was illuminated by a halo of pink mush, then his body buckled into the sand.

  Hobart saw him fall, but still circled towards the lorries for the protection of numbers they promised. Sterling moved more quickly and cut him off. Hobart’s game leg slowed him down, and he stopped, panting, blood still spurting from where his thumb should have been. His head reeled and he felt sick. He could not feel the pain in his thumb, but his leg was agony. He watched Sterling coming on; his small, tight figure had a determination about it that Hobart had never seen before, a sense of absolute purpose that was suddenly frightening.

  Hobart’s resolution deserted him, and he cast around for an escape route, the great head turning from side to side like a bayed lion. Fifty yards behind was a lone tree, leafless and spiky, and he hobbled towards it, his vision flitting in and out of focus, his mind spinning dizzily. He had gone only a few yards when Sterling shouted at him to stop.

  Hobart swore obscenely, and staggered on another fifteen paces, until he had run out of steam. ‘Stop!’ Sterling bawled again.

  Hobart’s strength had failed him. He turned the leonine head slowly to find that Sterling was standing ten paces away, with the Garand held at waist-height.

  ‘I should have killed you back there,’ Hobart growled. ‘At the tadout.’

  ‘Yes,’ Sterling agreed, raising the rifle to his shoulder. Hobart clutched at his mangled hand, and tried to stop himself falling.

  ‘All right, that was a lucky shot,’ he groaned. ‘But are you really going to shoot me dead? I doubt it.’ He spat violently into the sand.

  There was a rumble of shots, shouts, puffs of smoke, and the screech of brakes from the direction of the convoy. Hobart saw that two of the trucks had keeled over completely and were fast sinking into the quicksand. Those drivers and mercenaries who were not dead or wounded were being forced out of their cabs at gunpoint by Belhaan and Taha.

  ‘Whichever way you look at it,’ Sterling said, ‘it’s over.’

  Hobart spat again. ‘You and your idealistic bullshit,’ he said. ‘You could have been in on it with me. You can’t change the world, George. Money equals power equals honour.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ Sterling said. ‘Money doesn’t buy honour, Arnold. There’s a whole people out here whose society rests on honour without possessions. Taha is one of them.’

  ‘Pah!’ Hobart sneered. ‘Savages!’

  Sterling gave a hollow laugh. ‘Perhaps you should look at yourself and ask who are the real savages,’ he said. ‘Us or them?’

  ‘I haven’t got time for your bleeding-heart garbage, George. I never have had. Now, if you’re not going to shoot me, I suggest you let me go.’

  Sterling lowered the rifle. ‘I’m not going to shoot you, Arnold,’ he said.

  Hobart gave a triumphant leer. ‘Didn’t think so ...’

  ‘I don’t need to. You see, you’ve blundered into the Umm al-Khof. Look at your feet.’

  Hobart looked, and screamed. He had already sunk up to his heels without noticing. He whimpered and lurched forward, but the sudden movement took him even further into the sinking sand. He struggled, hurling the Tommy gun away in terror, and within a few seconds he was up to his knees. His head thrashed madly from side to side. ‘George!’ he bellowed. ‘Help me!’

  ‘I’m sorry, Arnold,’ Sterling said. ‘If I take a step further I’ll be in it too. I tried to stop you back there. That spiky tree you were running towards is a jurdul.’

  It was only then that Hobart remembered what he had once known — the quicksand started where the askaf stopped, and the only plant that grew inside it was the jurdul.

  ‘George!’ Hobart blubbered. ‘George, please, there must be something—’

  ‘There isn’t,’ Sterling said. ‘Even if I went and got a rope, by the time I got back it would be too late.’

  ‘Please, George! For Margaret’s sake!’

  Hobart saw a chilling grimness in Sterling’s face.

  ‘I loved Margaret,’ Sterling said quietly. ‘Your greed took her away from me. You robbed her of her son, and me of seven precious years of his life. You broke the golden rule, Arnold — something I learned out here. In the end, a man has to look after his own.’

  ‘No! No! It’s not like that. Craven—’

  ‘Sorry, Arnold,’ Sterling whispered.

  He turned, and as he walked slowly towards the lorries, the cries and imprecations grew fainter. By the time he got there, all trace of Hobart had gone.

  *

  Tifiski was over and the hot winds of summer were stirring along the margins of the red land. The caravan was making its way towards the pastures of the inner desert —the Jauf — where Belhaan’s people had summered since the Time Before Time. On the top of the escarpment, Sterling and Churchill halted the Jeep for a last glimpse of the People of the Clouds.

  The camel-herd passed below them, a never-ending parade of animals, stalking on in trails of fine dust. Sterling had not realized how many camels Belhaan’s clan owned. Behind the herd came the women and small children mounted on litters — tiny huts on camel-back. Woven hangings of many colours swayed beneath the animals’ bellies, and their proud heads bristled with ostrich-feather plumes. After them came the strings of house-camels, laden like Christmas trees with tents and tent-poles, bloated water-bags, earthenware pots and wooden milking-vessels, iron-bound chests, faded leather saddlebags filled with everything the tribe owned. The goat flocks followed in the wake, five hundred paces behind, and scrambling to keep up. It was, Sterling had to admit, a magnificent sight.

  Ten warriors formed a protective screen around the procession, trotting backwards and forwards along its flanks, their robes and head-cloths startlingly blue and black against the camels’ pastel hues. Even from where he stood, Sterling could recognize the upright figure of Belhaan.

  A week earlier, the old man had led the ritual purification ceremony to purge the Guelb of the transgressions that had occurred there, and the following day they had taken possession of the camels stolen from their Znaga by the Ulad Delim. Though Churchill had prepared
the defence of the Guelb carefully, the expected attack had never come. In the south, the massed Reguibat clans had routed the Delim, and had then ridden fast under the guidance of young Minshaaf to deal with Amir’s raiding party in the north.

  They had intercepted the Delim on the plain outside the Guelb at first light, just as Sterling and Belhaan were halting Hobart’s convoy. The Delim had been taken by surprise and, because their camels had been overburdened with rifles and ammunition, had been unable to escape. Amir and his men had stood their ground stalwartly for a few volleys, after which their rifles started to misfire, and they had begun throwing them away in disgust. The Reguibat had killed and wounded many, and lifted most of their camels, chasing the rest of the raiders to the borders of their own territory. Amir ould Hamel was not among the dead, and no one knew what had happened to him. It was clear, though, that he would never be trusted by any desert nomad again for as long as he lived.

  Belhaan, Taha and Sterling had disarmed those of Hobart’s mercenaries who’d remained alive, and sent them back to Morocco in an unloaded truck. As for the gold, Sterling had urged Taha to keep it. ‘Remember what the Spanish official told you in Layoune?’ he’d said. ‘The land is being given to the mining companies. With the gold you could buy it back from them.’

  The council had debated it long and hard, but in the end they had decided not to keep the treasure. It had come out of evil and could only bring evil, they said. And, as Belhaan had put it, ‘If we offer the Christians gold for the land, we will be admitting that it belongs to them in the first place, when of course it belongs to no one but God.’

  The following day they had thrown the gold, bundle by bundle, into the Umm al-Khof.

  As Sterling watched now, one of the riders detached himself from the mobile patrol and halted below him. The Blue Man was completely enveloped in his dara’a and head-cloth, but Sterling knew from the way he held his body that it was Taha. Parting with his son and grandsons had been a great sadness for Sterling, but it was made all the more poignant by his knowledge that time was running out for the Blue Men. For a million years man had made little mark upon this landscape, save a few rock pictures, but soon the corruption of the city would be reaching out into the sands. It was not only the last of the Sterlings, but an entire way of life that was passing away before his eyes.