by John Harris
‘Lack? Pentecost! Get your people back here! Repeat: Get your people back here! Double-quick!’ There was a pause then Pentecost’s voice rapped out again, hard and peremptory. ‘Don’t argue! Do as you’re told!’
He swung round on Fox. ‘Sergeant, wait until you see them, then get that car back inside the gates! Fauzan, close the side gate and get your men up on the walls! See that every man’s in position to cover those people outside! I want a look-out on the tower and every man armed! Get the lorries inside the gate!’ He turned to Beebe and the urgency vanished as he spoke in his usual mannered politeness. ‘Mr Beebe, I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed.’
‘For God’s sake!’ Beebe roared, his temper exploding abruptly. ‘Just because that old fool in Khaswe doesn’t know whether he’s on his ass or his elbow, I’m not staying here!’
‘You’re very welcome to leave any time you wish, Mr Beebe,’ Pentecost said icily. ‘Though I don’t recommend it until tempers have been allowed to cool a little. You might not make it to Hahdhdhah. Now, if you’ll excuse me —’
He turned away and Beebe heard him issuing orders to the Iraqi foreman. A moment later Beebe was back inside the walls of the fortress.
As he jumped down, livid with rage, the other lorries of Pentecost’s group were swinging through the gate, raising a cloud of dust, and Beebe, his face twisted with dislike for everything Khaliti, saw them roar towards him one after the other and their drivers jump from the cabins and run to the walls. Fox was the last to appear, driving the little scout car himself with the Toweida driver clinging to the rear.
‘They’re on their way, sir,’ he shouted.
‘For sweet Jesus’ sake!’ Following Pentecost to the ramparts, Beebe stood gesturing, almost speechless with rage ‘—for sweet goddam Jesus’ sake, you’re not going to start a battle, are you?’
Pentecost, who seemed to be in half a dozen places at once, helping to set up a machine gun, driving the Toweidas and Dharwas on to the ramparts, directing the lorries away from the entrance, stopped for a moment.
‘I’m not starting a battle, Mr Beebe,’ he said stonily. ‘But I’m afraid I’m going to be involved in one. You, too. So it behoves you to get your head down.’
For a second, Beebe stood staring at him in fury, then he glanced out through an embrasure. Out on the plain, he could see green banners and a few small mounted figures emerging from the hills. Then a shot echoed softly on the distant air and he dodged hurriedly back against the wall.
‘For Christ’s sake–!’ Beebe stared about him, startled, bewildered and angry.
He’d done it wrong! For once he’d left it too late!
5
For a moment, he remained like that, his back against the wall, then, in a single movement, he swung round to the embrasure near his shoulder and stared across the plain, his mind shocked, hardly able to believe that what he was witnessing was really happening.
Minto’s men were hurrying back to the fortress now as fast as they could move, surrounding the lorry that held the big transmitter with which they contacted Khaswe, and Beebe could see Minto standing on the running board, directing them to move faster. Then, as he watched, he saw the mounted figures he’d noticed emerging from the lulls begin to thunder towards the open gate of the fortress.
‘Zaid Fausan!’ Pentecost’s voice came shrilly. ‘Are you ready?’
‘Ready, Abassi!’ Fauzan shouted back.
Fox looked up from the scout car where he was still sitting with the headphones on. ‘Sir! Dhafran again! More instructions from the coast. “Hahdhdhah garrison to remain in control. Evacuation instructions cancelled. No shooting unless attacked.”’
Pentecost gave a shrill bark of laughter. He was standing on the rampart over the gate staring towards Hahdhdhah village, his eyes squinting against the sun. Fox joined him, quickly checking the machine gun the Dharwas had set up.
Beebe pushed between them, still savagely angry. ‘See here,’ he shouted, ‘you can have all the goddam battles you want, but I’m an American citizen and I’m not involved in your baby war!’
Pentecost half-turned, still icily polite. ‘Not just now, Mr Beebe,’ he pleaded. ‘I’m rather busy at the moment.’
‘I’m leaving here,’ Beebe snarled.
‘How?’ Pentecost still managed to be polite, in spite of the confusion and the noise, and Beebe could have murdered him for his calmness when he felt harassed and afraid himself. ‘How do you propose to do it?’
‘I’ve got a Stars and stripes in my lorry,’ Beebe shouted. ‘I’ll wave it. That’ll stop the bastards shooting at me.’
‘It’s not something I’d take a chance on, Mr Beebe.’
Beebe glared then he turned and, in his fury, almost fell down the steps from the rampart to his lorry. A burst of firing from above made him jump and, through the still-open gates, he saw lorries appearing one after another from the village and roaring towards the fortress in a group, the dust in clouds about them. From the middle of them came a series of faint frantic squawks from Owdi’s bugle, then he saw the Hejri horsemen, joined now by the group which had emerged from the hills, trailing the lorries – almost like Red Indians, Beebe thought, shocked.
He had reached his own vehicle now and had climbed into the back. Sweating with rage and fear he rooted among his equipment with stumbling fingers for the flag he always carried in case of emergencies. He’d used it before now, tied to the aerial or fastened across the bonnet and it had always worked. Crowds had always parted and he’d been allowed to pass. He snatched it from under his valise at last and threw it from the lorry. The Iraqi driver picked it up.
As he began to unfold it, Beebe stared again through the gates of the fort. Lack’s lorries were now approaching Minto’s hurrying men and Minto halted and about-faced, and they heard the rattle of rifles, then, as the lorries caught them up, Minto’s group doubled for the fortress, the lorries close behind them as a barrier. Pentecost’s voice came as he started to count the vehicles.
‘One short,’ he said.
As Minto’s Toweidas broke away, a flurry of horsemen charged down on them and Beebe saw Pentecost nod to Fox. As the machine gun chattered, Beebe saw the dust jump among the galloping horsemen. A horse went down and one or two figures fell from their saddles but he couldn’t tell whether it was because they were hit or because they were sheltering behind their mounts, then the first of the Toweidas were hurrying through the gate, gasping and panting, several of them without their weapons.
As they flung themselves to the dusty earth of the square, Pentecost was among them like a small fury, kicking them to their feet so that they scrambled up in terror of him and began to hurry to the ramparts where Zaid Fauzan swung at them with his fists, hurling insults at them as they got into position. In spite of all the training Pentecost had given them, they hadn’t much idea of shooting, and they began to fire wildly, their bullets flying among the running men on the plain. But Lack’s lorries had now formed a defensive box round the rest of the Toweidas and Dharwa Scouts, and the whole group was beginning to move towards the fortress in disciplined fashion, keeping pace with each other while the horsemen circled them, making short nervous rushes, unwilling to come too close to the disciplined fire of the Dharwas or the ancient automatics Lack had got going.
As they came within range of the fortress the horsemen stopped and were drawn up, screaming insults, and as the firing subsided, Beebe became aware of the Iraqi still holding the flag and staring at him uncertainly. He realised he had been so absorbed in the manoeuvres on the plain, he had forgotten his own situation.
‘Get out there and wave it!’ he shouted, climbing into the driver’s seat of the lorry. ‘We’re going!’
‘Now?’
‘Sure! Before they close the goddam gates!’
The Iraqi didn’t seem very happy but he unfurled the flag on its staff and headed for the gate, waving it wildly in front of him.
6
The gesture was
seen by the Deleimi rifleman with the cold eyes of a hawk who was holed up in a huddle of rocks not a thousand yards away. Majid the Assassin had the courage of a fanatic. He was a Tayur reim and a Deleimi, accepting allegiance to no one but Thawab, and he was one of the few Deleimis who had worked himself near enough to the fort to be able to shoot effectively.
His indifference to death was well known, and if he were to be wounded he hoped he would show no weakness, because he had no fear of wounds or mutilation – or even of death. If he had been told to do so, he would have run on to Fox’s hot gun muzzle. Fanaticism was dying out in the northern tribes these days as young men grew more educated and owed their allegiances not so much to Allah and his prophet as to political or nationalistic creeds. But despite this, Majid was an old-fashioned man and had never quite outgrown the ingenuous belief that death in battle was the true way to enter Heaven. He was quite indifferent to his fate, hoping only that he would be spared long enough to take with him one of the white-skinned Roumis or a few of the whey-faced Toweidas, and the waving of the flag in the gateway caught his attention at once.
He pushed his Garand rifle forward slowly until the sights came into line. Through the V of the backsight he could see a small moving triangle of grey which was the Iraqi foreman’s shirt. Beebe’s lorry had moved forward and the Iraqi was standing in front of it near the gates.
The rifle followed him, the foresight moving up slowly, and pausing for a tiny instant of time as he steadied his breathing, Majid took the first pull of the trigger.
Occupied with his battle, Pentecost didn’t notice what was happening by the gates until he turned and saw Beebe’s lorry edging forward and the Iraqi foreman waving the flag in the gateway.
‘What in God’s name is that man doing out there, Mr Beebe?’ he shouted in his high-pitched voice.
‘He’s stopping your goddam battle!’ Beebe roared back in a fury. ‘So that I can get the hell out!’
‘Bring him back at once!’
Just at that moment, there was a lull in the firing and the single shot from the hills seemed to echo round the walls. The Iraqi had stopped dead and Beebe watched with horrified fascination as the flag appeared to drop in slow motion from his hands. The Iraqi leaned backward – so slowly he seemed to be hanging by an invisible thread – then his body buckled in the middle, and he sat down abruptly, and slowly, just as slowly, toppled over to lie sprawled on his back in the dust, a red splodge where the bridge of his nose had been.
While Beebe was still staring, the last of the panting infantry began to arrive in the fortress, stumbling past the body of the Iraqi without even looking at it. Lack’s scout car appeared, with Owdi on the back optimistically trying to blow the ‘Charge’, and the final single figure of a small limping Dharwa private, then the plain was empty of running figures except for the horsemen and a lonely figure staring bewildered and angry at the gate whom Pentecost recognised as Aziz, his bannerman holding his green flag just behind him.
‘Close the gates!’ Pentecost shouted and Beebe, still unable to believe his eyes, saw Sergeant Stone and several of the Dharwas slam the huge gates and lift the heavy cross-bar into position.
‘Shore it up, Sergeant,’ Pentecost called, and Stone waved and sent several of his men towards the timber store. They began to return a moment later with lengths of timber.
The horsemen were still screaming their hatred as the solitary figure of Aziz rode slowly towards the Urbida Hills, followed by his bannerman, and Pentecost’s heart went out to the old man, feeling a sense of guilt that didn’t really belong to him and wondering how in God’s name he could get a message to him to say it wasn’t his fault.
Lack was standing by the scout car as he joined him, still cursing, his face thunderous.
‘Who was that bloody fool waving a flag?’ he shouted. ‘What the hell was he trying to do?’
‘Never mind that now!’ Pentecost’s face was full of cold fury. ‘What delayed you?’
Lack drew a deep breath.
‘Those bloody Toweidas,’ he snarled. ‘Usual left-foot right-foot trouble. Ran like a lot of bloody rabbits. Int-Zaid Suleiman with ’em. It couldn’t have been worse. We were right in the middle of the narrowest street in the place with that bloody Owdi screeching in my ear to know what to blow. Int-Zaid Hussein would have gone, too, I reckon, if I hadn’t flung him in the lorry. Why in Christ’s name did they leave it to the last minute?’
‘Bombs in Dhafran. Damaged the radio room. Go on.’
‘We lost the lorry with the medical supplies. The bastards were standing about as coy as unmarried mothers and they let the bloody Hejri set it on fire. Not that you can do much to stop ’em with weapons that are about as much use as old box-tops.’
‘How many did you lose?’
‘I reckon about fifty altogether. Some coming back, some in the village. We couldn’t turn round till we got to the Square and all the kids were crying and the women shrieking they were going to be raped by the Hejris. We lost some of ’em and their men went after ’em. What went wrong?’
‘Nothing went wrong,’ Pentecost snapped. ‘We got a priority from Dhafran. They’ve changed their minds in Khaswe. We’ve got to hold Hahdhdhah.’
Part Two
A Parallel from the Indian Wars
Six
1
As the sun disappeared in a blaze of salmon-coloured glory behind the hills, the fortress seemed to stink of dust and smoke and the fading scent of fear. Down in the courtyard, Fox had brought order into the chaos and the vehicles were standing now in neat rows, with an armed guard on them. Above him the Dharwa Scouts, the Civil Guards, and the sullen Toweida Levies peered out of the embrasures at the fading light, and behind them in the living quarters they could hear the wail of women.
Their losses, apart from forty-three missing Toweidas, had been small. Two men including Beebe’s Iraqi had been killed and five wounded, only one of them seriously, but the Toweidas had been shaken by the panic and by the loss of their comrades and by the fact that inside the fort there were still civilian clerks, storekeepers, drivers, and a few women and children, wailing over the loss of their men. They were left with eighty Dharwa Scouts – good soldiers if simple-minded, thick-headed and vain – forty-five tough Civil Guards, two hundred indifferent Toweida Levies, twenty-five civil servants, transport drivers and commissariat clerks, and twenty or thirty wives and a few children.
Studying the lists, Pentecost frowned. They were all his responsibility. Somehow he had to protect them or get them to safety. He had already ordered the rations to be reduced, and though there was plenty of ammunition he would have to make sure it wasn’t blazed away without cause. For the time being, too, he knew he had to watch the Toweidas, and had instructed Zaid Fauzan that each post was to contain at least two Dharwas or Civil Guards.
The Hejris had stayed outside the fortress all day, waving their green banners and shouting insults, but not venturing too close. Occasional little rushes were made, but against the bare walls and closed gate they were half-hearted and were soon stopped by a burst from one of the out-of-date machine guns.
Pentecost had watched them, moving from one side of the fortress to the other, his eyes bright and narrow, so that to Beebe, watching him with a sick feeling of guilt at the Iraqi’s death, he seemed to be actually enjoying himself.
During the night there was a series of explosions outside the walls which reduced the Toweida bazaar, brothel and mud huts to dusty rubble, and flurries of musketry between the fort and the infuriated Hejris who had been approaching to take them over as points from which to direct firing at the walls. A strong party of Toweidas and Dharwas under Int-Zaid Mohamed had already fortified the old stables and they had posted sentries, feeling that they had done all they could to make the place secure.
Curiously enough, by next day there was a surprising lightness of spirit in the atmosphere round the fortress – rather as though they’d all been expecting trouble and welcomed it now that it
had come with a feeling of ‘Oh, well, let’s get it over.’
Fox had buried the bodies and got the goats safely into a sheltered pen near the wood store by this time and there appeared to be plenty of fodder with all they had been able to cut during the hours of darkness from the area near the gates.
An elaborate plan for defence, flanking fire and barricades had been produced and one of the rooms had been cleared of stores, and quarters arranged for the women and children, with water butts for washing which could be refilled during the hours of darkness when the courtyard could not be overlooked from the hills. Toweida craftsmen had been put into the armoury to make grenades, and the Khaliti blacksmith set to work to put metal shields on the scout cars so they could be used if necessary as makeshift armoured vehicles.
Chestnut had produced a proclamation on the ancient duplicating machine and it had been posted round the fort to let them all know what had happened, and field telephones were strung from one strongpoint to another. The cellars were full of grain, working parties were organised and the civilians recruited – women for the hospital, the men as labourers – and all spirits, whether arrak or brandy, had been impounded.
Black-outs, parapets, patrols and pickets had been organised, and a watch set against fire or the defection of the Toweida Levies. Even spears from the ancient armoury had been placed near loopholes in case anyone got near enough to try to shoot through them.
Sanitary arrangements, a wireless watch and a hospital had been set up. Cigarettes were rationed, and the well had been sandbagged and was now guarded in case of Toweida treachery, and handmills were being constructed by Dharwa Scouts to grind corn. On Fox’s suggestion, a Union Jack had been made by Bugler Owdi but, in his enthusiasm, he had incorporated a crescent and crossed swords, and it had hung, bizarre and ridiculous, under the flag of the Sultan until Stone had pushed up another one, ‘Chelsea for the Cup’, and Pentecost had drawn a line and had them all brought down except the Khaliti flag.