The Burning Sky (16 page)

Ras
Kassa waved at the pile of crates. ‘Mr Jardine, they are yours to do with as you wish.’

Appreciating the courtesy, there was only one reply. ‘Not so,
Ras
. My task may be to get them to Addis Ababa
but even here they are the property of your emperor, and since you represent him …’

The smile was as slow as the nod. ‘Then I think your suggestion a good one.’

‘Then select ten of your men – we do not have time to work with them all.’

‘Ah, the jealousies that will cause.’

Jardine grinned: that would happen with any group of young warriors. ‘We’ll do ten a day, tell them.’

‘You know, Vince,’ Jardine said, as he leant over what should be a box of rifles with a jemmy in his hand, ‘I have just had a notion it might have been us who were diddled. These boxes might be full of nothing but stones.’

‘Not to worry, guv, everyone keeps telling me this here fight we’re heading for is between David and Goliath, so that might be no bad thing.’

‘Did you bring a catapult?’

‘I knew I’d forgotten something.’

The act of opening a box got everyone’s attention and a crowd had gathered by the time Jardine had wrenched it open to reveal the top layer of Karabiner 98s, heavily greased on the metal parts, the whole layered by oiled paper, with another tier underneath. The first task was to get them cleaned, prior to opening a box of M88 ammunition.

Jardine set up a rough target on a tree trunk and personally tested each weapon, filling the oasis with the sound of single gunshots, adjusting the sights as he went. He then handed the rifles over to the selected warriors and
had them aim and fire in dumb show before allowing them one bullet each, with he and Vince supervising the way they held and aimed them to contain the recoil: broken shoulders were not a good idea.

He knew that
Ras
Kassa was dying to get his hands on one of them, but his dignity and quite possibly his rank forbade him to ask. Jardine was teasing him, for amongst the cases was a much better weapon for a man who ranked as a high aristocrat; if no one else could read the case markings he could, and the second box he opened contained, according to the lettering, M35 sub-machine guns.

These were weapons he had heard of but never seen, the very latest kit issued to the German army, but a gun is a gun – this one the successor to several previous versions – and once you have learnt how to take apart and reassemble one, you pretty much know how to do them all.

Equally well-greased on the metal parts, the first one he prepared and assembled himself, a task that he had not undertaken since Palestine days. Vince did not have to be asked: he just got on with opening a box of 9 mm bullets and slotting them into a magazine. Jardine set it to single shot to adjust the sights, then fired off a burst that removed several branches of a palm tree. Happy it was working properly, he reloaded it with a second magazine and presented it to a beaming
Ras
Kassa.

‘A weapon that befits your rank, sir.’

‘Does that come under the heading of sweet talk?’ Corrie Littleton asked, in a voice sugary but false, as the
ras
went to test his weapon.

‘Always be nice to the natives, something you Americans never quite got hold of.’

‘Like you Limeys did?’ Alverson demanded. ‘Remind me to a have a word with Mahatma Ghandi.’

‘Spare us the pieties, buster,’ Corrie Littleton said, ‘when do I get a weapon?’

‘Can you use one?’

‘Try me.’

Jardine nodded and fetched a rifle, checked the bolt to make sure the chamber was clear and handed it over. He knew immediately that this was a woman who had handled guns: she made sure the muzzle was pointed safely up in the air, then worked the bolt before asking, ‘Do I get a stripper clip?’ There was a moment then when Jardine had to make sense of that; not long, for he realised she meant a speed loader.

‘Maybe, when we find out if we have any and where they are; right now stick to a single shot.’

Corrie Littleton, having loaded the weapon, stepped up and took aim, screwing the stock into the crook of her shoulder, with a slight twist on her left leading hand, the twin acts that seated the weapon properly and allowed her to cope with the recoil. All around the men had stopped and were watching her, feet planted for balance, leaning very slightly forward. Squinting along the barrel her pull on the trigger was controlled and she put her shot about six inches from the middle of the target.

‘Damn, I’m out of practice.’

‘That should stop anyone creeping into your tent, honey,’ Alverson said.

‘Who would want to?’ Jardine replied, which got him a good sight of her tongue. ‘I have to get some more weapons ready, but it’s time to load up.’

Such a thing was easier said than done, camels being awkward beasts, much given to biting even the men they knew well. They were not in the least willing to cooperate as their double panniers were lashed onto their backs, before being tied together in lines of ten, which would be fronted by a lead male and rider.

Moving between them, wary of being kicked or bitten, which many of them tried to do, Cal Jardine carried two flat pieces of wood, taken from the one now broken-up wooden crate. Beside each loaded camel he stopped, then cracked the two pieces of wood close to their ears. If they jumped away, he walked on; for those that seemed indifferent, he had a word with the drover who would lead them.

‘What are you up to, guv?’

‘I wondered if we might rustle up a couple of zamburaks, Vince.’

‘As long as you don’t want me to work one of them! I don’t want to mount a camel, never mind one with a machine gun on its hump.’

‘We probably won’t have time. For now we have to get moving, so get your head and mouth covered.’

The need for that was obvious once they emerged from the shade of the oasis trees: a great cloud of dust kicked up by the camels’ hooves. That was picked up and blown about by a wind that came off the now-invisible Indian Ocean.
Ras
Kassa, sitting on a donkey, his feet near to touching the ground, led the two Americans, likewise
mounted, to the front of the line where they were able to stay ahead of the beasts of burden, while their warrior escort lined up on both sides.

Wrapped in the kind of desert gear they had not worn since Iraq, a turban round both head and mouth and square kitbags on their backs, Jardine and Vince walked ahead of the whole caravan, M36s slung over their shoulders and their eyes scanning the landscape for possible threats. The sun beat down, which meant frequent trips to the female camel bearing the water skins, though care was taken: this was not the worst they would face, and the habit of conservation of liquid was a good one to employ.

The men leading the camel strings seemed to be asleep, gently rocking on the backs of their animals, and it was only if you got close you could hear them singing softly to themselves, dirges that probably went back to ancient times. Jardine was thinking that his fellow Britons would see this, a camel caravan, as romantic; he knew better – it was stinking because they stank, and even with a covered mouth he was spitting dust and cursing the annoying cloud of flies around his head. He also ruminated on another hazard, the sheer danger of the landscape itself, this being a place where a scratch from a thorn bush could give you fatal blood poisoning, as could the bite from any number of insects.

‘You used to the outdoors?’ he asked Corrie Littleton, as she left off a conversation she was having with Vince and came trotting alongside him – he asked her not to get in front and obscure his view.

‘Some, but not desert. Where I come from it’s woods, big cats and bears.’

‘And snakes?’ That got a nod. ‘Well, the desert is full of them too, and they are just as hard to spot. You are going to want to relieve yourself and that is not something you will do in full view.’

‘You’re damn right.’

‘Then be careful if you seek cover. That’s where the biters are, scorpions, too, and if there is shade, those reptiles I mentioned.’

‘Seems to me you should be telling Tyler, he’s the city feller.’

‘Don’t worry, I will, when, as we Brits say, he wants to go about his occasions.’

‘If you mean he needs to shit, say so, I’m no shrinking violet and when I relieve myself, I piss.’

‘More a cactus plant, I think, and a very prickly one.’

‘How did you get involved in this, Jardine?’

‘If you insist on using that name, I’d rather you called me Cal.’

‘OK, but does calling you Cal get an answer?’

‘What difference does it make?’

‘I’m curious. What makes a guy like you take risks, and for what?’

‘It’s not the pay.’

‘Vince says you’re a bit of an adventurer, which is kind of quaint, but he won’t say much more, except when he was in the military you were his officer.’

‘Just one of them, and he was a good soldier, Vince; bit prone to the drink, but no one better to have alongside you when trouble blew up.’

‘He said the same sort of thing about you, in fact he
insisted you were the best company commander he’s ever known.’

‘I’m glad he’s sticking to the script.’

‘So why not stay in the army?’

‘If you’d ever been in the British army you would know the answer to that, and I don’t suppose your own is much different. Military service in peacetime is a sort of purgatory. There’s never enough of the right equipment, your superiors are generally idiots, your peers are not much better, life is guaranteed to be boring and promotion is so slow you can die before you ever get to the level of making a difference.’

‘Don’t know much about it. No one in my family has been a soldier since the Civil War.’

‘So where did you learn to shoot?’

‘Pa loved hunting and he used to take me out with him. If you go out into the forests of America, being able to shoot is a must. Ever met a grizzly bear?’

‘I met you.’

‘Very funny! Trouble with grizzly bears in the woods is you can’t see them, and if they are hungry and have cubs to feed, you are lunch, so you keep a sharp eye out for droppings and keep your weapon loaded and the safety off, ’cause there’s no time if they come at you.’

Looking at Jardine she saw his eyes were narrowed, his binoculars were up and he was looking ahead with concentration; he had not been listening to her.

‘What’s up?’

‘Nothing, most likely, but you see those hills up ahead? A couple of what looked like horsemen just appeared out
of one of the folds, then disappeared again very quickly before I could get my field glasses on them. It was the mounts I saw, really.’

‘Danger?’

‘Might be. I’d have been happier if they had decided to just come on and say hello.’

J
ardine was searching ahead and up, sweeping his field glasses around to see if he could catch another sight of those two men. The hills seemed to fold in on each other, red earth, rocks, gnarled bushes and stunted trees blunting the outline, the larger ones rising, he guessed, to something well over a thousand feet, those lower down creating the defile which they would have to make their way through.

‘Fire a shot in the air.’

‘Why?’

‘Makes an interesting noise?’

‘And tells them we have spotted them.’

She did as he asked, the sound of the shot reverberating off the hills where he had seen the riders.

‘That’s a warning, because I don’t think we can avoid going through that track up ahead, which is where I would be if I wanted to rob a part of this caravan.’ He called over to Vince. ‘Did you see them?’

‘Just a flash and so did the old gent.’

Jardine moved to talk to
Ras
Kassa who was now sitting on his donkey with his machine pistol cradled in his lap. Having stopped the caravan, he too was peering at the hills ahead.

‘What I saw troubles me, Mr Jardine.’ There was no fear in the statement; in fact there was some doubt if it was an emotion to which he would be subject. ‘There are two tribes in this region, Afars and Issas, both nomadic animal herders and salt traders who would ride a donkey at best. It is unusual they made no attempt to make talk with us, which is also not common.’

‘Are the tribes to be trusted?’ Jardine asked.

‘The climate is harsh, the soil not good and the poor have their needs.’

It took no great genius to see that anyone trying to eke a living out of such a landscape would have to struggle to survive. Loaded camels were a tempting target and the problem was obvious. All you had to do was look at a string of camels nearly a mile in length and wonder, even with the amount of warriors available, how it was going to be defended from opportunistic raiders trying to cut out a couple. That was true now, out in the open; how much more was it the case on a winding valley track, where losing sight of parts of the caravan was a certainty?

Jardine suggested that when this route had been in full use, knowing the local tribes could turn to theft, the slavers, rather than travel with any more mouths to feed and carry more water than necessary, might have paid tribute to pass through freely.

‘That is very possible.’

The guarded response made Jardine wonder just how open the older man was being about a trade that had gone on for thousands of years and was not ended yet: he seemed to know this route well enough. Ethiopian emperors paid lip service to the notion of stopping the slave trade but they had not succeeded, and it was interesting to speculate how much they gained from it themselves. Such a lucrative trade could buy influence at the highest level, and even if imperial edicts forbade it, the local satraps in such a large, wild and inhospitable land could pretty much ignore them.

‘Could we do that– pay to be left alone?’

‘That, Mr Jardine, would require someone to make a demand, and those fellows showed no sign of even wishing to approach us.’

‘So how do you assess what has just happened?’

‘Not good. We have to get through those hills ahead of us.’

‘You’re sure there is no other way?’

‘Not one that absolutely avoids the risk of these weapons being discovered.’

Their destination for the day was another oasis on the far side of those hills, a very necessary source of water, which meant anyone observing them, if they knew the country, would have a precise knowledge of where such a large caravan was headed. This was not a part of the world in which you could just deviate; the route existed precisely because of the availability of each aquifer-fed waterhole. There were no rivers and to turn aside was to risk everything.

What lay before them was a natural obstacle through which those plying the route must pass, which made it the perfect place for an ambuscade, and the presence of unknown riders was bound to cause alarm. They might be entirely innocent, they might just be a couple of tribesmen more afraid than brave, but they could also represent a larger group for whom they had been scouting; it was best to assume the worst.

‘How far to the oasis from here?’

‘Four miles, perhaps six.’

That imprecise number underlined something Mason had said in his study: many parts of this land had never been properly mapped and he had none of this route. Sense dictated that the hills be reconnoitred before they passed through, yet that would take time. While no expert on camels, Jardine knew that, loaded as they were, it would not be a lack of water so much as a need for respite that would affect them. Resting here for an hour might mean they had to continue to travel into the hours of darkness, but better that than they lose some of them to exhaustion.

‘So what’s the decision?’ asked Tyler Alverson, who had been listening to the exchange.

‘Mr Jardine, I think you should take some of my men up the hillsides to see what they can find.’

‘I agree, but how will they understand me?’

‘Use your hands, Mr Jardine, they are Shewan warriors and they will obey you, while I will concentrate on the caravan and rest the camels until you return.’

‘Any chance of getting out of the sun,
Ras
?’ asked Alverson, covered in a layer of dust stuck to those places
where he had sweated heavily in his bush clothing.

A series of rapid commands followed, detaching some of the white-shrouded warriors, all with spears, none of those with the new rifles, while still others were unloading part of a tent to erect an awning. Jardine and Vince divested themselves of their kitbags and led away their scouting party as the awning was being erected and the caravan condensed into a defensible mass, with
Ras
Kassa putting the riflemen out to the fore.

‘Two horsemen, boss, an’ all this?’ said Vince.

‘From what I know of this part of the world, which I admit is not a lot, people are pretty outgoing, yet they saw us and didn’t come to parley to ask our purpose. A caravan headed towards the interior, clearly with loaded camels, has to be unusual, so if you are not curious, what are you?’

‘They might have been going somewhere.’

‘They might, Vince, but we can’t risk it.’

Eyes flicking, weapon at the ready, he led the way towards the first part of the defile, not much of one, as the hills on either side were not high. The trail, which up until now had been wide, like the course of a dry river bed – odd, given there were no rivers in this part of the Somaliland – narrowed to the width of two or three men, and every sound was magnified, mostly the scraping of European boots on the hard earth, because the Shewan were barefoot.

Two high mounds cut off sight of the hillsides at the entrance. Jardine stopped behind them and signalled with five fingers and pointed left, which sent the correct number
of silent warriors upwards on that side, while he led the rest in the opposite direction, to where he had seen those riders, fanning them out, pleased that no orders were required for them to do what was needed: to look at the ground for signs of human or equine traffic. They had not gone far when the first shot ricocheted off the rocks.

If these Shewan were brave and intelligent enough to obey sign language, they were also foolhardy. It took shouts accompanied by furious arm waving to get them to take cover, instead of brandishing their spears and uttering threats. The last man to get down, on the opposite side of the ravine, too slow by far, spun away as another shot, from what was a fusillade, took him in the shoulder. Another nearly bought one by trying to go to his aid, the folly of that underlined when a third grabbed his arm and hauled him down; the wounded man would have to wait.

‘That’s a lot of firepower, guv,’ said Vince from behind his rock.

‘It is,’ Jardine replied, looking around for a way of getting a bit higher so he could see what it was they faced. ‘Did you get a chance to count?’

‘No, it was volley fire.’

‘One round, then stopped, Vince, what does that tell us?’

‘Trained men.’

‘We need those riflemen up here, they’re no good where they are.’

‘Right,’ Vince replied, slithering backwards.

Jardine had to signal hard again for his spearmen to keep their heads down and stay put on both sides of the
ravine, but he also had to keep in place those facing them: against spears they could just walk forward and kill. He raised himself just enough to fire off half a magazine, the sound of that, and the way the bullets hit rock, echoing around the folds of those hills, surprised that no return fire came his way.

In a contact with an enemy, and this was very much that, you filter a mass of little things through your mind without any conscious application, like Vince had discerned as quickly as Jardine that a single, coordinated volley meant men who have been trained to obey commands: tribesmen, wherever they came from, were not normally so disciplined. Nor, up against spearmen, had they abandoned their cover to come forward and remove the approaching threat.

It had been the men he had sent up the left-hand hills who had spooked them, because they had been approaching a point where their chosen position would have become visible, and they had not melted away to avoid discovery but stayed to fight for possession of the ground. So they had positions they were content to hold, the conclusion obvious: this was an attempt to block the passage through the hills, not bandits trying to steal the camels and what they carried, and he was bound to wonder who would embark on that.

‘Bloody hell,’ Jardine said to himself, as that led to the only possible deduction. ‘Italians.’

Those thoughts had to be checked against other possibilities. Renegade Ethiopians? Highly unlikely to be that, or
Ras
Kassa would have mentioned it. The French? He had no real idea if he was right now in British territory
or part of French Somaliland, but if it was the latter and they wanted to stop the passage of weaponry, they would not have taken up a blocking position, kept out of sight, and opened fire. They would have come out into the open and, no doubt, they would have been told, by some sneering Foreign Legion officer, they could not pass through to the next oasis and must turn back.

In the few seconds these thoughts were being filtered, it was also apparent that only in catching a fleeting sight of those two mounted men had the caravan been saved from getting into real trouble. Had they come on, unaware that they faced any threat at all, and been caught in those defiles, there would have been a massacre. But if they were Italian troops, what they were doing made a certain kind of sense, though there was no logic in them being here at all unless …

‘Someone, somewhere, has done the dirty on us.’

Filtering names through his mind, only one made sense! Jamal Cabdille Xasan. Mason was a certain no and so was his wife, while people like Peydon and Grace, even if they had been aware, would not have told the Eyeties. But that ugly old sod might have, and he would have done it for money, which the Italians would spread around willingly for information. As he had already surmised, in arranging for a contraband cargo to be offloaded, and being paid handsomely, it did not take too deductive a brain to figure out what it might be and where in the end it was headed.

Yet the Italians could have just informed the British Governor General with a telegram and he would have ordered Mason to stop any arms coming ashore, an
instruction the district officer could not have dared to disobey. Another way to interdict the unloading would have been to send an Italian gunboat down the coast and force the landing of the cargo to cease. What lay in front of him, if he had figured it out correctly, made no sense at all!

Jardine ducked automatically at another volley of rifle fire, thanking God there was no sign of a machine gun, a weapon that could take out the whole of
Ras
Kassa’s warrior escort in a single sweep. The shots cracking overhead and not striking rocks told him they were aimed at the Ethiopian riflemen now coming up from defending the caravan, with the
ras
leading – not Vince – two of his warriors carrying a box of rifle ammunition. He got his men into cover as soon as they made the rocks at the head of the defile, only coming on himself, ducking through various bits of cover with ease, to get to Jardine, his first act to hand over a couple of spare, filled magazines.

‘Your man is looking for a mortar as well as a crate of hand grenades.’

‘Clever Vince,’ Jardine replied, then explained his thinking to the
ras
. ‘Right now, all they have to do is hold their position and we are obliged to attack as the only means of shifting them.’

‘So they must be pushed aside.’

‘Tell your spearmen to retire and to keep their bloody heads down.’

Ras
Kassa smiled. ‘“Bloody” is a word I have not heard for some time, Mr Jardine.’

‘I think you will have occasion to hear it more than once today, because this is not going to be easy.’

‘What was your rank in the army?’

‘Captain, why?’

‘Then I shall, from now on, call you by that title. Mister seems not appropriate in the situation we are in.’

Cupping his hands he called out, in a high-pitched voice at odds with his normal even bass, a series of commands that had his spearmen retiring, crawling backwards on their bellies to keep from getting shot at, though not one bullet came their way.

‘Some of them must have presented a target,’ Jardine said, ‘yet no shots, so I don’t think our johnny up ahead is too well blessed with ammo. Either that, or he wants to save it for killing us.’

Crawling a few feet, till he could find a gap through which to fire, Jardine set his weapon to single shot and slowly, deliberately, sent bullets into the hills above his head, aiming for a thick bush or a prominent rock, quickly changing the magazine to a fresh one. Still no response, which underlined their discipline, which was not good news; worse, he had not seen any true indication of their precise position and he needed to bring forward those riflemen cowering behind them. Right now they were in no danger: due to elevation, the enemy did not have fire control at the point at which the trail opened up to the flatlands.