The Seventh Scroll (83 page)

"Yes, of course," Tessay replied guilelessly. "I told Royan that I had given her message to Moussad at the Egyptian Embassy. Didn't she tell you?" Nicholas winced as though he had taken a low punch, but he smiled and kept his tone casual. "It must have slipped her mind. Not important, anyway. But thanks nevertheless, Tessay."

PM-Om At that moment Mek came striding out of the darkness and spoke in a harsh whisper. "This sounds like a camel market. Nogo will hear us from five miles away." Quickly 3. he took command and started to organize the shore party Once the last of the ammunition crates were unloaded, they dragged the boats into the canefields and unscrewed the valves that deflated the pontoons. Then they piled cane trash over them. Still working in the dark they distributed the cargo of ammunition crates amongst Mck's men. Sapper took a case under each arm. Nicholas slung the radio over one shoulder and his emergency pack over the other, and balanced on his head the case that contained Pharaoh's golden deathmask and the Taita ushabti. Mek sent his scouts forward to sweep the route out to the airstrip and make certain that they did not run into an ambush. Then he took the point and the rest of them strung out in Indian file along the rough, overgrown track behind him. Before they had covered a mile the clouds suddenly opened overhead, and the crescent moon and the stars showed through and gave them enough light to make out the chimneystack of the ruined mill against the night sky.

But even with this moonlight their progress was slow and broken ses, by long pau for the stretcher-bearers carrying the wounded had difficulty keeping up. By the time they reached the airstrip it was after three in the morning and the moon had set. They stacked the ammunition cases in the same grove of acacia trees at the end of the runway where they had cached the pallets of dam-building equipment and the yellow tractor on the inward journey.

Although they were all exhausted by this time, Mek set out his pickets around the camp. The two women tended the wounded, working by the light of a small screened fire as they used up the last of Mek's medical supplies.

Sapper used the one electric torch whose batteries still held a charge, and he gave Nicholas a discreet screened light while he set up the radio and strung the aerial.

Nicholas's relief was intense when he opened the fibreglass case and found that, despite its dunking in the Nile, the rubber gasket that seated the lid had kept the radio dry.

When he switched on the power, the pilot light lit up. He tuned in to the shortwave frequency and picked up the early morning commercial transmission of Radio Nairobi.

Yvonne Chaka Chaka was singing; he liked her voice and her style. But he quickly switched off the set so as to conserve the battery, and settled back against the hole of the acacia tree to try and get a little rest before daylight broke. However, sleep eluded him - his sense of betrayal and anger were too strong.

uma Nogo watched the sun push its great fiery head out of the surface of the Nile ahead of them. They were flying only feet above the water to keep under the Sudanese military radar trans missions. He knew there was a radar station at Khartoum that might be able to pick them up, even at this range.

Relations with the Sudanese were strained, and he could expect a quick and savage response if they discovered that he had violated their border. Nogo was a confused and worried man. Since the d6bdcle in the gorge of the Dandera river everything had run strongly against him. He had lost all his allies. Until they were gone he had not realized how heavily he had come to rely on both Helm and von Schiller. Now he was on his own and he had already made many mistakes.

But despite all this he was determined to pursue the fugitives, and to run them down no matter how far he had to intrude into Sudanese territory. Over the past weeks it had gradually dawned'upon Nogo, mostly by eavesdropping on the conversations of von Schiller and the jr Egyptian, that Harper and Mek Nimmur were in possession of treasure of immense value. His imagination could barely asp the enormity of it, but he had heard others speak of gr tens of millions of dollars. Even a million dollars was a sum so vast that his mind had difficulty assimilating it, but he I i had a vague inkling as to what it might mean in earthly terms, of the possessions and women and luxuries it could buy.

Equally slowly it had dawned upon him that, now that Von Schiller and Helm were gone, this treasure could be his alone; there was no longer any other person to stand in his way, other than the fleeing shufta led by Mek Nimmur and the Englishman. And he had overwhelming force on his side and the helicopter at his command.

if only he could pin the fugitives down, Nogo was certain he could wipe them out. There must be no survivors, no one to carry tales to Addis. After Mek and the Englishman and all their followers were dead it would be a simple matter to spirit his booty out of the country in the helicopter. There was a man in Nairobi and another in Khartoum whom he had dealt with before; they had bought contraband ivory and hashish from him. They would know how to market the booty to best advantage, although they were both devious men. He had already decided that he would not trust it all to one person but would spread the risk, so that even if one of them betrayed and cheated him His mind raced off on another tack, and he savoured the thought of great riches and what they could buy for him. He would have fine clothes and motor cars, land and cattle and women - white women and black and brown, all the women he could use, a new one for every day of his life. He broke off his greedy daydreams. First he had to find where the runaways had vanished to.

He had not realized that Harper and Mek Nimmur had inflatable boats hidden somewhere near the monastery.

Hansith had not informed him of that fact. He and Helm had expected them to try to escape on foot, and all the plans to head them off before they could reach the Sudanese border had been based on that

assumption. On Helm's orders, he had even set up a reserve fuel dump near the border where they expected Mek Nimmur to cross, from which they could refuel the helicopter. Without those supplies of fuel he would long ago have been forced to give up the chase.

Nogo had placed his men to cover the trails leading along the river bank towards the west, and he had not even considered guarding the river itself. It was quite by chance that one of his patrols had been in a position to spot the flotilla of yellow boats as they came racing downstream. However, there had not been enough warning to enable them to set up an effective ambush, and they had been able to fire on the boats only briefly before they escaped. They had not inflicted serious damage on any of the boats - at least, not enough to stop them getting through.

Immediately the company commander had radioed his report of this contact with Mek Nimmur, Nogo had started ferrying men downstream to the Sudanese border to cut off the flotilla. Unfortunately, the Jet Ranger could carry no more than six fully armed men at a time, and transporting them had been a time-consuming business. He had only succeeded in bringing sixty of his men into position before night had fallen. During the night he fretted that the flotilla was slipping past him, and with the dawn they were in the air again. Fortunately the cloud had broken up during the night. There was still some high cumulus overhead, but they were now able to fly low along the river and search for any sign of Mek Nimmur's flotilla.

They had first flown back along the river on the Ethiopian side of the border, as far as the point where Mek Nimmur and Harper had been fired upon. They had picked up no sign of the boats, so Nogo had forced the pilot to turn back, cross the border and search the Sudanese stretch the Nile. But Nogo had only been able to persuade his pilot to penetrate sixty nautical miles along the Nile into the Sudan before the man had rebelled. Despite the Tokarev pistol that Nogo held to his head, he had banked the jet Ranger into a 180-degree turn and headed back low along the river. By now Nogo knew he had been defeated and ourwitd. He brooded unhappily in the front seat of the helicopter ter beside the pilot, trying to fathom out what had happened to his quarry. He saw the tall smokestack of the abandoned sugar-mill at Roseires poking up into the early morning sky, and he glowered at it angrily. They had passed the mill only a short while before on their way downstream.

"Turn in towards the north bank," he ordered the pilot, and the man hesitated and glanced at him before he obeyed..

They passed directly over the building, flying lower than the chimney. The factory was roofless and the windows were empty rectangles in the broken walls. The boilers and machinery had been removed twenty years previously, and Nogo could look into the empty shell. The pilot hovered the aircraft while Nogo peered down, but there was no place where anyone could hide, and Nogo shook his head.

"Nothing! We have lost them. Head back upstream." The pilot lifted the machine's nose and turned away towards the river, obeying the order with alacrity. As the aircraft banked steeply, Nogo was looking down directly into the overgrown canefields verging the river when a flash of bright yellow caught his eye.

"Waid' he shouted into his mike. "There is something 9 there. Go back!'

The helicopter hovered over the field, and Nogo gestured urgently downwards. "Down! Put us down."

As soon as the skids touched the earth, the stick of six heavily armed troopers dived out of the rear cabin and raced out to take up defensive positions. Nogo clambered out of the front door and ran into the overgrown bed of tall cane. One look was all he needed. The yellow boats had been deflated and folded and hastily covered. The earth around them had been churned up by booted feet.

The tracks led away inland. The men who had made them had been heavily laden, for they had trodden deeply into the soft, sandy earth. Nogo ran back to the helicopter and thrust his head in through the open cabin door. "Is there an airstrip near here?" he shouted at the pilot, who shook his head.

"There is nothing shown on the chart,, "There must have been one. The sugar'mill would have had a strip."

"If there was one, it must have been decommissioned years ago.

"We will find it,'Nogo declared. "Mek Nimmur's tracks will lead us to it." He sobered immediately. "But I will have to bring up more men. judging by his spoor, Mek Nimmur has at least fifty of his shufta with him." He left his men at the sugar-mill and flew back to the border with an empty rear cabin to pick up the first load of reinforcements.

'ñDig Dolly! Come in, Big Dolly. This is Pharaoh.

Do you read?" Nicholas put out his first call an MD hour before sunrise.

"If I know the way jannie's mind works, and I should, he would plan to make his approach flight in darkness and arrive here as soon as there is enough light to pick up the strip and land."

7L 111.7-7 -7

"If the Fat Man comes," Mek Nimmur qualified.

"He will come," said Nicholas confidently. "Jannie has never let me down yet." He thumbed the microphone and called again: "Big Dolly! Come in, Big Dolly."

The static hummed softly, and Nicholas retuned the set carefully. He called again every fifteen minutes as they huddled around the set in the dark under the acacia trees.

Suddenly Royan started to her feet and exclaimed excitedly, "There he is. I can hear Big Dolly's engines.

Listen!'

Nicholas and Mek ran out into the open, and turned their faces upwards, looking into the north.

Nicholas exclaimed sud

"That's not the Hercules, denly. "That's another machine." He turned and faced southwards, towards the river. "Anyway, it's coming from the wrong direction."

"You are right," Mek agreed. "That's a single engine, and it's not a fixed wing. You can hear the rotors."

"The Pegasus helicopter!" Nicholas exclaimed bitterly.

"They are on to us again."

As they listened, the sound of the rotors faded.

Nicholas looked relieved. "They missed us. They can't have IR spotted the Avons."

They trooped back under the cover of the acacias, and Nicholas called again on the radio, but there was no reply from Jannie.

Twenty minutes later they heard the sound of the jet Ranger returning, and they monitored it anxiously.

"Gone again," said Nicholas after a while, but then twenty minutes later they heard it yet again.

"Nogo is up to something out there,'Mek said uneasily.

"What do you think it is?" Nicholas was infected by his mood. When Mek worried, there was usually a damned good reason to worry.

"I don't know," Mek admitted. "Perhaps Nogo has spotted the Avbns and is bringing up more men before he comes after us." He went out into the open and listened intently, then came back to where Nicholas crouched over the radio.

"Keep calling," he said. "I am going out to the perimeter to make certain my men are ready to hold Nogo off if he comes., The helicopter moved up and down the Nile at'short intervals during the next three hours, but the lack of any further developments lulled them, and Nicholas barely looked up from the radio each time they heard the distant beat of the rotors. Suddenly the radio crackled, and Nicholas started violently at the shock.

"Pharaoh! This is Big Dolly. Do you read?"

Nicholas's voice bubbled over with relief as he replied, "This is Pharaoh. Speak sweet words to me, Big Dolly."

"ETA your position one hour thirty minutes." jannie's accent was unmistakable.

"You will be very welcome!" Nicholas promised him fervently. He hung up the microphone and beamed at the two women, "Jannie is on his way, and he will-'

He broke off and his smile shrivelled to an expression of dismay. From the direction of the river came the unmistakable rattle of AK-47 rapid fire, followed a few seconds later by the crump of an exploding grenade.

"Oh, dammit to hell!" he groaned. "I thought it was too good to last. Nogo has arrived."

He picked up the mike again and spoke into it expressionlessly. "Big Dolly!

The uglies have arrived on the scene. It's going to have to be a hot extraction."

"Hang on to your crown, Pharaoh!" jannie's voice floated back. "I am on my way."