The Burning Sky

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Jardine 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.

‘Ras Kassa, how comfortable are you about firing off that gun?’

‘I pray to God for the chance.’

‘Half the magazine, rapid fire, no more, you to the left, me to the right, your riflemen to move to join us as soon as we open up.’ The ras was just about to comply when Jardine stopped him. ‘If they are Italians up ahead, they might be askaris, and if they are, will they understand what you shout to your men?’

‘Only if they know Shewan, Captain Jardine, and since there are fifty different tongues in my homeland alone I cannot think a Somali will know what I am saying.’

‘Tell them what they are to do, but not to move until we begin firing.’

Again came that high-pitched calling, with Jardine waiting to see if it provoked a response. Lacking that, after a decent wait, he nodded and got to one knee, firing as soon he had sight of the positions he hoped the enemy occupied, the ras beside him doing likewise, though to Jardine, exposing himself too much.

‘Down,’ he shouted, as this time the riflemen up ahead did respond, firing at will, which at least allowed him to sneak a look and fix their positions using the muzzle flashes and smoke. One side of the ravine elevated enough to give them cover firing down, making it hard for anyone below to return shot in an effective way. Numbers he tried to guess by individual discharges but it could only be an estimate.

Choice? Stay put and wait for Vince to bring up a mortar, which he would have had to unpack and prepare. He would also have to find the panniers with the ammunition, which could take ages given his lack of German. Option two, seek to winkle out the men who tried to ambush them with no clear idea of their numbers, leading warriors who were certain to be less well trained in the use of weapons than those they were facing.

The sun on his back was baking and enervating, but that also applied to his opponents, who would think, if he failed to come forward, they had the upper hand. Unconscious thoughts came to him again.

Whoever is in command up there has no idea of what weapons we are carrying; in fact, if he wanted to take the time, Jardine could unpack two machine guns and spray the whole hillside at will, mixing it with multiple mortar fire, deadly in rocky terrain. So whoever he was, good sense said that as soon as the first mortar shell landed amongst them he should get out quick unless he had the means to respond in kind.

‘More orders, Ras: keeping as much cover as they can, get your chaps to move forward as far as I do. I want to see if he has any more firepower than rifles, and if he has, we need to withdraw.’

‘Can we not just charge them?’

‘You could lose half your men, maybe all of them.’

‘Men get killed in war,’ Ras Kassa replied callously.

‘Not when I can help it,’ Jardine snapped, pointing to the hill opposite. ‘There’s a wounded man over there too; we have to get him out to where he can be looked at.’

‘My friend,’ the Ethiopian leader said gravely, ‘he will wait, because he will know he has to, and die if he must without complaint. God will care for him as he cares for us all.’

Jardine declined to respond to that. ‘Twenty-feet advance, no more. Make sure they know that and get them to pick their cover fast. If they go on, they are at risk from hand grenades as well as bullets.’

He had no idea if the ras passed on that message in its entirety and there was nothing he could do about his ignorance. What he did know was that if the bugger in front of him had a mortar, this was the time to use it. Wait till your enemy is in the open and coming from a known position. Range it to drop in front of that point and it will be right in amongst them, causing carnage.

The tactics of whoever was in command up ahead were not great: he had fired off his rifles at too extended a range. He should have let those searching come on until he was sighted, so they were closer, better targets, more likely to be either killed or wounded with much further to go to get back to safety, a retreat compounded by the need to care for their casualties.

Would they take those now? Would these Ethiopian warriors do what was required? It was galling not to be able to effectively communicate exactly what he wanted, and Jardine promised that one of his first tasks after this would be to learn some basic universal words that everyone could understand — even with fifty languages, there had to be some commonality or nothing would ever get done.

There was no shout: that would only alert the opposition a second in advance. The signal for everyone was his actions, and he stood to set off a short burst, not really aimed, given half his attention was on looking for his next bit of cover. When he moved, he had to worry about keeping his footing on loose, rock-filled earth. Twenty feet does not sound like much, but when you are running uphill exposed to gunfire it turns into an eternity.

There was no thought of potential pain as he threw himself behind a second boulder just as bullets pinged off the crest. Ras Kassa was beside him a second later, plucking at his red cloak where a bullet had torn it, which made Jardine wonder why the old sod was still wearing something so easy to see.

‘I guess from the fire we have received we are facing about platoon strength — under thirty effectives. I suspect our enemy has nothing other than what he has employed, which would have been sufficient if he had caught us unawares, and I think he has no idea of what we can counter with. He set himself the task of closing the path to the next oasis and making it so bloody to get through we would withdraw. When that failed he fell back on the hope of denying us the trail. I think if we press him he will retire.’

‘Then let us do that.’

‘Wait for the mortar, Ras.’