Pharaoh (Jack Howard 7) (19 page)

Wolseley beckoned Mayne over. ‘You know why you are here?’

‘I await your instructions, sir.’

‘Then listen closely. What I am about to tell you will not only determine Gordon’s future, but will shape the future of the Sudan and Egypt and our prestige in the eyes of the world. What I am going to ask you to do must remain top secret. There will be no medals, no public accolade. Only those of us around this table will ever know. Are you willing to serve your Queen and country?’

Mayne caught Wilson’s eye, then gave Wolseley a steely look. ‘It’s what I’m here for. Tell me what I have to do.’

14

W
olseley picked up a tattered piece of paper from the table and showed it to Mayne. ‘This is Gordon’s last communiqué. It reached me through Kitchener’s network of spies, carried by fast camel through the desert. It’s dated the twenty-ninth of December, two days ago. He says: “Khartoum all right, and can hold out for years.”’

Kitchener opened the notebook he had been holding. ‘General Gordon has been sending his journals down by steamer to Metemma for safe keeping, and I have read the most recent entries. This is one for the fourteenth of December. “If the expeditionary force does not come in ten days, the town may fall; and I have done my best for the honour of our country.”’

Burnaby tapped his cigarette ash on to the floor. ‘Lord Randolph Churchill has suggested to me that we collect together a group of big-game hunters with African experience and send them to rescue Gordon,’ he said. ‘A posse, as I believe they would call it in America.’

‘With you at their head, doubtless,’ said Buller, giving Burnaby a jocular look.

‘The thought had occurred to me,’ Burnaby said with a smile, leaning back and exhaling another cloud of smoke.

‘Out of the question,’ Wolseley said forcibly. ‘This not the Wild West, and Her Majesty’s army does not appoint deputies to do its dirty work.’ Kitchener shut the notebook, and Wolseley stared at Mayne. ‘You see our dilemma. Gordon was in a perilous situation in November, and yet two days ago he can last out for years. Clearly the latter cannot be the case. We must question his state of mind.’

‘Can you not
order
Gordon to leave?’ Earle said. ‘You outrank him.’

‘Officially he works for the Khedive of Egypt, as governor general of the Egyptian province of Sudan. If I bring the Queen’s Regulations to bear, he will resign his commission in the British army and be out of our orbit completely. He has tried to resign before, and only the intervention of Gladstone kept him on our books. It is the only thread of control we have with him and we cannot jeopardise it.’

‘The man only ever treated orders as a basis for discussion,’ Earle said. ‘They even say he consults the prophet Isaiah before giving his approval.’

‘Orders as a basis for discussion? That sounds familiar.’ Wolseley raised an eyebrow at Kitchener. ‘Except that some of us operate without the need to consult any prophet other than ourselves.’

‘Is there any hope of negotiation with the Mahdi?’ Earle persisted.

Kitchener snorted. ‘As self-appointed ruler of the entire Muslim world, he answers only to Allah.’

‘Only to God?’ Buller mutterered. ‘That sounds like Gordon.’

‘General Gordon answers to
himself
,’ Kitchener snapped.

‘That also sounds like someone else, Major Kitchener.’

Kitchener’s look hardened, but he kept his counsel. ‘General Gordon’s intentions are tied to his sense of responsibility towards the people of Khartoum. In China he was there to defend the mercantile interests of the West, and in Khartoum he is here to defend the livelihood of the Sudanese.’

‘By all accounts it is a pestilential place, a veritable Gomorrah,’ Earle said forcibly. ‘Why Gordon should choose to make it his cause is beyond me. They say that half the population are slaves, the other half slave-dealers.’

‘A trade that Gordon has allowed to continue, to the consternation of the prime minister
and
the Queen,’ Buller added.

‘He allowed it to continue because it is in the best interests of the Sudanese people,’ Kitchener retorted. ‘General Gordon abhors the corruption of the Ottoman viziers who control the Sudan, and the venality of the Arab and Egyptian merchants. By banning the slave trade he would have lost sympathy with both the Ottomans and the Sudanese. By allowing it to continue he has established his reputation among them and increased his chance of quashing the trade when the time is right. His actions are sorely misunderstood, even by his erstwhile friends. His decision was made with noble intentions.’ Kitchener opened a marked page in the notebook and read from it. ‘“November the ninth. I declare positively, and once and for all, that I will not leave the Sudan until everyone who wants to go down is given the chance to do so.”’ He paused. ‘The next line is written by General Gordon in capital letters. He states that if any emissary comes up ordering him down, “I will not obey it, but will stay here, and fall with the town, and run all risks.”’ Kitchener shut the journal and put it down. ‘He reiterates his intention to stay many times, with great vehemence.’

‘At that date he was incensed by the murder of his friend Colonel Stewart, who he had sent down from Khartoum to supposed safety in the steamer
Abbas
a few days before,’ Wolseley said. ‘Now perhaps he will be less agitated and see more reason.’

‘Or see no reason at all,’ Buller said. ‘He has been under fire since the end of October, when the Mahdi arrived with his army outside Khartoum. Kitchener tells me that his garrison lives on tree gum and tobacco dregs and bread made from the pith of palm trees. As for the civilians, they must have eaten the last of the rats weeks ago. The dead will be strewn in the streets, and one shudders to think what the living eat now. There are those who say that Gordon has rigged the palace to explode if it is taken; ever the engineer. They say that he sleeps by day and stays up at night, sitting framed by his window in the palace deliberately backlit by candles, as if he’s asking for a bullet
.
I ask you: are these the acts of a man who can any longer see reason?’

Kitchener snorted. ‘General Gordon is an officer of the Royal Engineers. He will have calculated the distance across the Nile to the nearest sharpshooters, and know perfectly well that their Remingtons would stand little chance of hitting him at that range. And he will also have calculated the uplifting effect on his Egyptian and Sudanese garrison of seeing him night after night seemingly impervious to gunfire. If it makes him seem a god in their eyes, then it can only be to the good in his present situation.’

‘It’s not their perception of his godlike status that matters to me; it’s whether he has that perception himself,’ Buller rumbled. ‘Gods don’t need to be rescued by mere mortals like us.’

Wolseley tapped his pencil on the table. ‘Twenty years ago I watched him deliberately expose himself above the parapets at Sebastopol in the Crimea. He was drawing the fire of Russian sharpshooters so that the smoke would reveal their positions. He’s not the only one among us who seems to relish a dice with death.’ He glanced at Burnaby, who flicked the ash of his cigarette and looked impassively on. ‘In February, Gordon arrived in Khartoum alone, like a penitent holy man. He presented himself to the people of Sudan as their saviour, and also as one who was at their mercy should they choose to disbelieve him. He depends for survival on his own heroic self-image. That is how you garner loyalty among these people.’

‘Heroic, or foolish,’ Buller muttered.

‘He has the heroic qualities of authenticity and honour,’ Kitchener replied. ‘He will not be swerved from what he thinks is right, and he will not let down those who have given their loyalty to him. He will
not
leave Khartoum without his people,’ he reiterated.

‘The fate of that place and its people is beyond our control,’ Wolseley replied.

‘Then so, it seems, is the fate of General Gordon,’ said Kitchener.

Wolseley waved the piece of paper again. ‘But our latest intelligence suggests otherwise. This message was written only days ago, and is buoyant.’

‘We would be wrong to believe such assurances,’ Buller rumbled. ‘With Colonel Stewart gone, Gordon no longer has Europeans to advise him, only Egyptians and Sudanese who regard him not as a general but as a holy man, their own version of the Mahdi. He even wants a slave-trader to be his deputy, I tell you.’

‘Zubayr of the Ja’aliyyin,’ Kitchener said. ‘A venal man by the standards we suppose that we have, but the Sudanese tribesmen understand a slave-trader and respect him more than they do the Ottoman and Egyptian officials.’

‘It’s just as it was in China,’ Wolseley muttered. ‘He has always surrounded himself with mavericks and foreigners. His closest confidants have never been men of his own background we can trust, but others like himself who take him even further from our control. In China he locked himself away and brooded for two months before finally capturing Soochow and killing the rebel leaders. He may be in the same state now, and have a surprise in store for us yet.’

Buller grunted. ‘From what Kitchener tells us, he is now very far from the logic that we propose to apply to his rescue. He may even wish to dig himself deeper into that pestilential hole that looks as if it will become his tomb.’

‘He has done everything to increase his isolation,’ added Earle. ‘Even before the telegraph line was cut, he packed up his cipher book and sent it away with his belongings in the steamers. Why did he do that, deliberately cutting himself off from us?’

‘A fit of pique,’ Buller said. ‘Disgust that he was being made a sacrificial lamb.’

‘It would take someone with a saint’s powers to endure what he has gone through without cracking.’

‘It is a test he’s set himself. He’s dragging his own cross through the streets to Calvary. No wonder he was so interested in finding the location of Golgotha on his recent trip to Jerusalem. He was pacing out his march to apotheosis.’

‘Gordon’s isolation began before he left England,’ Wolseley said. ‘His furtive departure from Waterloo station in February, with the commander-in-chief packing his bag for him and Lord Baring handing him money, like parents sending off a miscreant son to exile in the colonies. The die was cast the moment that train pulled out of the station. And then the brief for his role at Khartoum which every-one knew he would discard in favour of his own mission, to save the people. I cannot help but see Mr Gladstone behind this.’

‘Gladstone does not want a martyr,’ Buller said.

‘It might serve him for Gordon to make a fool of himself.’

‘There is a fine line between a fool and a martyr.’

‘That’s Gladstone’s gamble, and perhaps Gordon’s too.’

‘This rescue mission has been hampered from the start by Whitehall,’ Buller said, slapping the table. ‘Who, I wonder, could be behind that? And there is another possibility. Gordon could go down in flames with his city, or he could survive and be captured. That would be the worst of all outcomes for Gladstone. The image of Gordon standing alongside the Mahdi in chains must keep him awake at night.’

‘Or
not
in chains,’ Wolseley said. ‘
That
would be his worst nightmare.’

‘Then we must do everything we can to prevent it.’

‘That is why we are here, gentlemen. On with the planning.’

Mayne felt the sweat prickling on his face. He glanced at Wilson, who appeared to be concentrating on the map. The conversation had veered dangerously close to their own secret purpose in being in the Sudan, and he was beginning to feel on edge.

Buller banged his hand on the table again. ‘The longer he strings it out, the more intractable he becomes. If he has gone seeking personal redemption like the children of Israel, then I fear he may have become lost in the wilderness.’

‘This is a military and logistical matter, not one requiring us to delve into the mind of a latter-day prophet,’ Wolseley said sharply.

‘In that you are, in my opinion, entirely wrong,’ Kitchener said quietly.

Wolseley glared at him, and then put a finger on the map. ‘We are here to discuss a rescue mission. We are at Korti on the Nile. From here, the column under General Stewart will advance across the Bayuda desert, rejoining the Nile where it loops around some hundred miles to the south of us. Meanwhile the column under Earle will continue to make their way up the river through the cataracts.’ He swept one hand across the desert and the other over the eastward loop of the Nile, bringing them together on the river at a point about halfway between Korti and Khartoum. ‘The two columns will meet here at Metemma. Stewart’s column will arrive first, and an advance force will be sent forward to Khartoum in Gordon’s three river steamers that should be waiting for us. When Earle’s river column arrives, the rest of the force will embark on the whaleboats and follow. If the advance contingent in the steamers is successful in retrieving Gordon, then the rest of the force will turn around and withdraw to Korti and the Egyptian border. If we do have to go forward into Khartoum and raise the siege, then so be it. But our intention, gentlemen, is not to save Khartoum or the Sudan. It is to rescue General Gordon.’

‘The Mahdi’s army will not stand idle,’ Kitchener said. ‘There will be battle in the desert, mark my words. Days spent dithering and planning now will advance our cause to hopelessness. Time is of the essence.’

Wolseley tapped his pencil irritably, then leaned forward. ‘After discussion with Colonel Wilson, I have decided to send a man forward to Khartoum in advance of the steamers. His job will be to persuade Gordon of the utmost gravity of his situation, and the imperative for him to leave with our forces when they arrive. Colonel Wilson himself will then accompany the flotilla of steamers up to Khartoum to escort Gordon out. Gordon must be made to understand that the steamers will have room for him alone, and not for the entire damned population of Khartoum as well. If he wishes to save his own skin, he must abandon them. The man I have selected for the job is you, Major Mayne. If Gordon chooses to stay, then his fate is no longer in your hands. Do you understand?’

Mayne remained stock still. ‘Yes, sir.’

Wolseley put down his pencil and arched his hands together. ‘Time has run short for us, gentlemen. Colonel Wilson has received intelligence that Russian forces have advanced over the Oxus river near Panjdeh in Afghanistan. It’s the most dangerous escalation since the end of the war in Afghanistan four years ago. If it comes to renewed war now, we will be siding with the Afghans against the Russians. Mr Gladstone has ordered an emergency session of Parliament and the army in India has begun to mobilise. And this won’t just be a British war to curb Russian imperialism on the borders with India. The French will become involved, as they did in the Crimea. The web of alliances across Europe will draw in other nations, some of them itching for an excuse to get at each other’s throats. The greatest fear is that Germany could enter as a belligerent against us and even against the Russians too, and that she could emerge supreme if we overextend ourselves in the east. Gentlemen, for the first time since the war against Napoleon, we could find ourselves leading armies across the English Channel to Flanders and Picardy and Normandy.’