Pharaoh (Jack Howard 7)

by Gibbins, David

  Jones looked at him shrewdly. ‘You’ve been away sometimes for weeks on end, and that’s just carrying out reconnaissance upriver. If General Wolseley wants you to go into the desert for him, then you’ll probably be away for a long time. We won’t be seeing you back here at this spot, sir, that’s my guess.’

  Mayne pulled the Martini-Henry rifle out of the holster attached to his saddlebag, and picked up the cartridge box. ‘Then I’d better make the best use of my time while I’m here. My spotting scope and binoculars are in the saddlebag. Bring them to the parapet and we’ll see if we can’t spy out those dervishes of yours.’

  ‘You’re having something to eat and drink first, sir.’

  Mayne grunted, then dropped into the sangar and leaned his rifle against the parapet. Jones was right. He was not yet ready for hard-tack biscuit and tinned bully beef, but he took the proffered leather mussak water bottle gratefully, wetting his lips and then swilling the water around his mouth as he had learned to do from the Dongolese, taking small sips before slaking his thirst. He left the bottle half full and passed it back, taking his first proper look at Jones, who was wearing regulation khaki but sporting a colourful bandanna under his helmet, its knotted end hanging down his back like a pigtail. Mayne recognised the cloth pattern of the Hudson’s Bay Company; it must have been given to him by one of the Canadian voyageurs recruited by Wolseley to navigate the boats up the cataracts. Unlikely friendships had formed among the motley crew assembled for this task.

  Mayne waved away an open tin, but Jones succeeded in thrusting a rock-hard fragment of biscuit into his hand. ‘Was it as you expected, sir? The river, I mean?’

  Mayne slumped back against the parapet. ‘The next stretch of open water begins about seven miles ahead. I’ve mapped out a possible route through the cataract in between, but the river was too muddy to see any underwater obstructions even from my vantage point high above the bank. It’ll be down to the Mohawks to navigate the way forward.’

  ‘They’ve got an uncanny ability, sir. We’ve been watching them in the rapids below us here. Your friend Charrière, he’s the best.’

  ‘Rivers are in their blood, and the canoe is like a second skin to them,’ Mayne replied. ‘They can sense the slightest change in the current, allowing them to detect rocks underwater as if the river had been stripped away.’ He wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand, and took the water bottle again from Jones. ‘I’ve identified the best landing point for the flotilla when it reaches the foot of the next cataract at the end of the open water. It’s on the far bank, but the obvious route beyond that is a dead-end alley and they’d have to backtrack if they tried going up it, losing hours. They’ll need to cross the river and work their way up below the cliffs on this side. I’ll pass my sketches on to General Earle’s adjutant before I leave.’

  ‘Is the next cataract going to be as bad as this one, sir?’

  Mayne took another swig. ‘Worse, probably. And there are four more stretches of cataract before the clear passage to Khartoum. That’s more than two hundred miles ahead, and by the time open water is reached, the river level will have dropped so much that even the clear sections between the cataracts will be full of shoals and exposed rock. Time is most definitely not on our side. At best it’s going to be a close-run thing.’

  ‘And a few good marksmen on the cliffs could slow us down even more,’ the subaltern said.

  ‘I thought the dervishes couldn’t shoot worth damn,’ the Irish soldier said, leaning up on his elbows from where he had been lying, staring intently at Mayne.

  ‘Don’t count on it,’ Mayne replied. ‘The true jihaddiyah, the Ansar, have forsworn modern weapons, and despise firearms as the tool of the infidel. But the Mahdi’s been very astute. He knows that the traditional tribal warrior of the Sudan equates courage and manliness with the sword and the spear, and by extolling that tradition he’s been able to recruit more tribal men to his cause. But the Remington rifles they captured from the Egyptians have been put to good use too. The Mahdi has raised a cadre of sharpshooters to provide long-distance fire over the heads of the advancing Ansar. The few Egyptian soldiers who were allowed to survive capture have taught them how to clean and maintain the rifles, and how to shoot.’

  ‘Soldiers that we trained ourselves, turning what we taught ’em back against us,’ the soldier grumbled.

  ‘Can’t say as I blame them,’ Jones said. ‘The Egyptian soldiers we massacred back at Tel-el-Kebir when we first arrived in Egypt only wanted freedom from Turkish rule, and we put the survivors in chains and sent them down here to the seventh circle of hell to get slaughtered. Joining with the dervishes isn’t just about saving their own skins; it’s about carrying on their fight against the Ottomans. I’m not saying as we should sympathise with the Mahdi, heaven forefend, sir, but I’ve seen the Ottoman officials on the way down here and the way they lord it over the Egyptians, and I can see their point.’

  ‘The Ottomans are our allies, Corporal Jones,’ the subaltern said. ‘Watch what you say.’

  ‘Begging your pardon, sir, I’m only saying what Tommy Atkins thinks, that is when he’s allowed to think, when he’s not digging holes and hauling on ropes and dodging crocodiles.’

  ‘Well, from what Major Mayne says about the work ahead, we’re going to need a lot more of that. And we can’t have you thinking, Jones.’

  ‘No, sir. Most definitely not, sir.’

  Mayne grinned tiredly. ‘It’s not the Egyptians we have to worry about, it’s the Mahdists. And they don’t yet use firearms as we do in massed volleys, or employ handguns at close quarters.’

  ‘Colonel Burnaby put them to rights on that score,’ Jones said. ‘He showed them what a pistol in the right hands can do.’

  Mayne slumped back, suddenly dead tired. At close quarters, a gun was only as good as the speed with which you could reload the chamber, and he knew that any battle with the dervishes would see these soldiers quickly reduced to bayonets and rifle butts and bare hands. He thought again of Burnaby, a man whose legend was matched by his physical stature and deeds. As a subaltern he had wreaked havoc in the officers’ messes of Aldershot and London, pushing the boundaries of boisterous play and earning the dislike of senior officers who had dogged his career ever since. He was an officer in the Household Cavalry, the Blues, a regiment that had seen no foreign service for decades but afforded its officers five months’ leave a year, and therefore scope for an energetic man with connections to appear on the spot wherever action was hotting up. This Burnaby did with flamboyant regularity, finding himself some tenuous attached position that allowed him to exercise his freewheeling nature while seeking out the thick of the action. After recovering from his wounds at El Teb, he had become one of the hotchpotch of officers attached to the river column, just as Mayne was now; and then he had found himself a position on Lord Wolseley’s staff, edging ever closer to where they all knew the next flashpoint would be, somewhere in the desert on the way to Khartoum. Burnaby had his admirers, Wolseley among them, Queen Victoria another, and he was the darling of the press, the epitome of the military hero in the popular imagination. But above all he was loved by the men. Tommy Atkins expected his officer to lead from the front, and if he did so with the bravura and dash of a Burnaby, he would follow him anywhere.

  Burnaby had another role, too, one that had brought him into contact with Mayne on missions known only to a select few in the War Office intelligence department. They had last met in the field four years earlier, during the final months of the Afghan War, in a desolate frontier outpost in Baluchistan. Forays to Khiva in Russian Asia and to the eastern frontier of Asia Minor during the Russo-Turkish war of 1877 had made Burnaby an expert on the Russian military, a specialisation that suddenly had huge cachet as Russia and Britain veered towards a proxy war in Afghanistan. When Mayne questioned him for the intelligence department in Baluchistan, he found him
sharp and perceptive, inclined to cut to the point, qualities that were paramount for an intelligence observer in the field.

  And Burnaby had been in the Sudan before, using another of his long leaves ten years earlier to report for The Times on Gordon’s first period as governor general in Khartoum. Mayne wished he could quiz him now on Khartoum and his time with Gordon, but in so doing he might be entering dangerous waters, leaving himself open to questions on his own role that even a fellow intelligence officer was to be denied. Mayne only ever worked in isolation, answering to one superior alone in the War Office; he never knew whether there were other operatives who were party to his missions, though he suspected it – those sent to take over if he failed; others perhaps tasked to execute the same directive as his own if his mission were to be compromised, to prevent him revealing the truth of a role that would shock the army and the nation if it were ever to come out.

  He ran yet again over his own cover story, thinking of everything he had said and done since he had last taken stock, finding no new chinks in his armour. Corporal Jones had suspected that his missions into the desert might be preparation for something bigger, but he had no reason for thinking that it might be anything more than a deeper penetration of the desert ahead of the camel corps that was now assembling at Korti. Among his fellow officers, Mayne was unremarkable, a thirty-eight-year-old whose name had gone steadily up the gradation list until reaching major earlier that year, with none of the brevet promotions and temporary commands that singled out the rising stars. As a Royal Engineer, he was one of a corps of almost a thousand officers posted around the world who had trained and served together, and who often returned to their headquarters at Chatham for refresher courses and periods of study; as a survey officer specialising in forward reconnaissance, he was known more widely still, among the officers of infantry and cavalry and artillery he had served alongside in the field. The utter secrecy of his role was best served by his familiarity, as a skilled officer with a reputation for toughness and resilience who would go behind enemy lines and return without making a show of it.

  His cover extended as far back as the beginning of his military career. As a subaltern in 1870, he had been plucked by Wolseley from the School of Military Engineering to join his expedition to Canada against Louis Riel. Back in Chatham, he had been visited by a Captain Wilson from the War Department, who had heard of his survival skills and his exceptional marksmanship, learnt as a boy from the Mohawks, and recruited him for a top-secret role. By the time he met Burnaby in Baluchistan, he had spent almost three years in Central Asia, living in disguise for long stretches in the mountains of the Hindu Kush while the Afghan War raged below, watching and waiting in case the British were routed as they had been forty years before. He had been with Wolseley for the invasion of Egypt in 1882, and with another river expedition in prospect, it was natural that Wolseley should call on him once more. Wilson was here too, acting as Wolseley’s intelligence chief. If Mayne were to be activated, there would be no word, no secret conference, just a handshake and a small folded code. Wilson’s presence was enough to put him on high alert; he knew that the call he had received to attend Wolseley would decide his role here one way or the other.

  He looked at the medal ribbons on the tunic of the soldier nearest to him, among them the Khedive’s Star for the invasion of Egypt in 1882. The Khedive was the Egyptian puppet of the Ottoman Turks, the sultanate in Constantinople that ruled an empire stretching from Cairo and Jerusalem to Damascus and Baghdad. The British were forever tottering towards war with the Ottomans, but for the time being they were allies, for as long as the Ottomans provided a buffer against the Russian threat. When the British had invaded Egypt in 1882, it had been to secure their interests in the Suez Canal, to ensure that their new gateway to India was kept open and free from the venality and financial mismanagement of the Ottoman regime in Cairo. Yet after defeating the dissident Egyptian army at Tel el-Kebir, they had propped up the old regime, reinstating the Khedive and ostensibly handing back the reins of power to the Ottomans; they had even supported the Khedive in his renewed attempts to control the Sudan, an exercise that had begun ten years before when the War Office in London had allowed Colonel Charles Gordon to be appointed governor general in Khartoum, supported by the motley collection of European and American adventurers that Gordon gathered around himself.

  The Sudan had been the last great bastion of the African slave trade, and Gordon’s appointment had met with approval among the moral crusaders of England, among them no less a person than Queen Victoria herself. If anyone could sort it out, it was Gordon, a man of near-suicidal courage who as a young officer had stood exposed on the parapets in the Crimea in order to attract Russian fire and pinpoint enemy positions, and whose Christian fervour seemed to match the growing evangelical mood of the country. Yet as Gordon himself realised soon after taking up his appointment, supporting Ottoman expansionism in the Sudan was a recipe for disaster, with ominous consequences. The slave trade may have been abhorrent to Victorian sensibility, but it was a mainstay of the Sudanese economy and so deeply embedded in tribal loyalties and hierarchies that to suppress it suddenly would require massive military intervention. To the horror of his admirers, Gordon had come out in favour of maintaining the trade in the short term. He had realised that the tribes of Sudan were a complex mosaic of alliances and visceral enmities; the one thing they shared in common was a hatred of Ottoman rule, a hatred that had spread among some to include all outsiders, providing a fertile breeding ground for fundamentalist Islam, and a new cry for jihad fanned by the emergence of a charismatic local Sufi known as the Mahdi, the chosen one.

  Yet it was Gordon, not the Mahdi, who was now the nub of the problem, and the reason why Mayne was here. The British imperial system that had so often succeeded by giving free rein to talented individualists was also prey to their whims, to their occasional instabilities and bouts of insanity. Much depended on the shared culture of moral decency and gentlemanly behaviour, of unswerving loyalty to Queen and country that allowed the Colonial Office to send out men to administer vast tracts on their own, confident that their discretion and judgement would accord with the wishes of Her Majesty’s government. The men who occupied these positions of power with restraint were the genius of the British system, but where restraint fell away, they could be its greatest weakness. With the expansion of the empire, a secret office had been established in Whitehall under the remit of military intelligence to develop a safety net, a series of checks and balances. Much of the work involved intelligence-gathering, character assessment, advice to government on whom to appoint and where, but there was also a contingency for what to do if things went wrong.

  For six months now, all eyes had been on Gordon in Khartoum, and everything hung in the balance. The British government had supported the Egyptian Khedive’s regime in the Sudan, but Prime Minister Gladstone’s new Liberal government had no intention of dispatching a military force of the size that would be required to defeat the Mahdi. There was, however, a need to evacuate Europeans and Egyptian officials and their families from Khartoum, and Gordon was the man for the job. He had seemed to agree to this brief, but then something had gone wrong. He had become increasingly cut off in Khartoum, holed up in the Governor’s palace. The messages that came out were terse, infrequent, increasingly erratic. Whitehall began to fear the worst. Gordon’s highly individual form of Christianity allowed him to empathise with Islam in a way that some found disturbing, to the extent of wondering whether he himself might go over to the Mahdi as some Europeans captured by the dervishes had done. The prospect was a nightmare for Gladstone’s government, and would be a catastrophe for Britain’s reputation abroad. If rescue were impossible, better that Gordon die a martyr.

  Mayne took a swig of water, and shut his eyes. He thought of the men below the cliff struggling up the river, the nearly impossible nature of the task; not for the first time he wondered whether there were other forces at
play here, whether this excruciating exercise was deliberate, a very public attempt to rescue Gordon that was surely doomed to failure. At the moment, the likely success of the expedition and the nature of his own involvement hung in the balance, but he knew that with the clock ticking and Khartoum starving, something would have to give way very soon.

  He himself was as deeply implicated in empire as any of them. His father had been an Irish indigo planter in Behar, in the shadow of the Himalayas. As a small child Mayne had thought nothing of the thousands of men and women they employed like slaves in the crushing mills, and the opiate splendour of their villa and the gardens where he had played. It was the only world he had known, and it seemed the natural order of things. When he was eight, at boarding school in England, his parents and brother and sister had been hacked to death by mutineers of the Bengal Army in Cawnpore, their bodies thrown down with those still living into a well. His beloved ayah had survived long enough to tell the story of their brutal torture and deaths to the British soldiers who had arrived too late to rescue any of them, but who had exacted a terrible vengeance. Mayne thought of Burnaby’s four-barrelled howdah pistol and the slaughter at El Teb. Any lingering sense of chivalry and sport in war was long gone now, expunged by the Zulu slaughter at Isandlwana and Rorke’s Drift, by the bloodbaths of Colonel Hicks’ last stand and the Red Sea battles, which could only be a foretaste of what was to come.

  He opened his eyes and raised himself up so he could see over the parapet to the ridge opposite. He was looking for a telltale flash of light off a blade or a gun barrel, but he knew that the reconnaissance scouts of the Ansar were too good for that; they had blackened the barrels and receivers of their Remingtons, and with the sun behind them on that ridge they would give off no reflection. He squatted on his knees, keeping his head below the parapet, feeling better after his rest. The soldier tending the fire below the billycan took his pipe out of his mouth and spoke. ‘General Wolseley came to talk to us last week. He claimed that no amount of dervishes could withstand the smallest of our columns.’