(2013) Collateral Damage (31 page)

A month ago he would not have been so sure. Baghdad had
fallen at last to the English general Maude, and although he had never been
there the Moudir felt its loss badly. After Mecca and Jerusalem it was the
third great city of the Empire, and thanks to that unspeakable traitor Hussein,
who had been appointed Sheriff of Mecca by the Sultan himself, they had lost
the Holy City the summer before.

Now things were looking up. Twice they had thrown the
English back at Gaza even though the enemy had given the land its first taste
of poison gas and sent those landships they called tanks crawling at them like
some monstrous bug from your worst nightmare. Nor were many of their best
troops in Palestine, though Jemal Pasha was doing his best to get Arab conscripts
replaced by proper Turkish soldiers. At the moment most of the iron regiments
were fighting the Russians in the Caucasus – fighting the Germans’ battles for
them, if the truth be known.

The Moudir felt uneasy about the Germans. In fact, he would
have been hard pressed to find any of his compatriots who had much liking for
them. Respect, yes. For Christians they were brave enough, and there was no
doubt that they were clever. Their equipment was probably the best in the
world, unless you believed these stories that every American soldier had a
machine-gun as well as a horsehair mattress and a gramophone.

But they were Christians and their allies –
which
made the Sultan’s declaration that this was a Jihad, a
holy war against the infidel English and the French, rather confusing. Here,
after all, was the world’s most powerful Muslim nation, led by a sultan who was
also the Caliph, the spiritual leader of all Muslims, not only allied to
Christians but at war with other Muslims, such as some of the Indian mercenaries
the English employed – and even the traitor Hussein’s goat-fucking Bedu, the
so-called Hejaz army, the very people of the Prophet, blessed be His name. The
Moudir sometimes found himself wondering what Allah, the Merciful and
Compassionate, made of it all.

When it was all over they would probably have to deal with
the Bedu in the same way they dealt with the white kaffirs. There was no room
in the Empire for kaffir riff-raff. They were there on tolerance, especially
those wretched Christian priests in Jerusalem always squabbling over which bit
of stone the Blessed Jesus had been born or died on. A Muslim family even had
to keep the keys of the Holy Sepulchre – otherwise the Christians would have
long since pulled the place to pieces with their feuds. He tried to imagine
what it would be like if Christians guarded the holy places in Mecca, and found
such blasphemy unimaginable.
Better that the traitor Hussein
should have temporary control than the English army.
Which
was only further proof, if any were needed, of the rightness of the true
religion.
Here were all these Christian nations with their new learning
and free thinking and Jewish gold and none of them, not even the Germans, would
dare to take the keys of the Holy Sepulchre from a Muslim.

No, there should be none of this equal rights nonsense for
Christians and Jews and madmen like those Bahai devil-worshippers from Persia
who had their so-called temple up on Mount Carmel. It might be different if you
could rely on their loyalty, but you could not. When they got out of hand they
had to be dealt with firmly – the way, by all accounts, they had dealt with the
Armenians.

Thinking these stern, dutiful thoughts, the Moudir went to
the small room above the cells that he liked to call his office and picked up a
riding-crop that was
lying
across the desk next to a
field telephone handset. He was still uncertain which prisoner was sobbing.
Perhaps he would give them both something to cry about, have them singing
through the soles of their feet. He called for a couple of Kurdish jailers and
went down to the cells. As he approached the prisoners could hear the slap of
his sandals on the stairs.

*

His Majesty’s Ship Monegam, the monitor the Moudir had
watched steaming north, was now a mile or so off the coast and almost
stationary. They were opposite the little fishing port of Athlit, just south of
Haifa.

Once the engines had been set to slow the swell caught the
ship’s shallow draught, and it began to rock gently from side to side as well
as up and down. The sailors were hardly aware of it, but on the bridge Major
Ponting found it harder to ignore the first queasy prelude to his seasickness.

‘
It’s
all clear,’ said the captain
of the vessel. A lieutenant-commander, he stood alongside Ponting and peered
through binoculars at a shoreline that was darkening fast with dusk. ‘They’re
coming out.’

‘Where’s the signal?’ asked the major.

‘You see the tower on the end of the promontory?’

Ponting nodded. He would have had to be blind not to see it.
It was more like a miniature castle than a tower. There were several of these
Crusader fortifications dotted up and down the coast. In some of them the Turks
had placed permanent garrisons. Others were simply visited by passing patrols,
who
might stay a night or two. The tower of Athlit was one
of these.

‘Go to about ten o’clock behind it and you’ll see a small
wooden house. Looks like it might be a farm house. It’s got wooden stairs
leading to a balcony that stretches along the entire length of its first floor.
If you look closely at that balcony you’ll see a white sheet has been draped
over it.’

Ponting reluctantly raised his own field glasses and tried
to focus. Aboard ship he rated trying to use binoculars as one better than
attempting to read fine print while eating a bacon sandwich. The bridge refused
to keep still. One moment he was thrust against the squat roundness of the
Crusader tower and the next he was peering into the white top of a breaker. He
felt his stomach rise to his throat and swallowed hard. He was tempted to take
the naval officer’s word for it, or even pretend that he had seen the signal;
but he kept searching, although his insides had begun to churn.

‘Can’t you see it?’ The lieutenant-commander sounded
impatient. They had a lot to do, and every second they spent at that speed made
them a better target for a U-boat.

Ponting ignored him. A flash of white in the lens vanished
when the vessel rolled again and he found himself looking at what appeared to
be a stone wall on a terraced slope. He took another deep breath, put his legs
slightly further apart, and jammed his knees against the bulkhead of the open
bridge. He found the tower again and went to ten, no, eleven o’clock. He
managed to steady the glasses on it this time. Behind the sheet were the three
windows of the wood house’s upper storey, and beyond its sloping roof a bunch
of tall conifers.

Ponting let his field glasses hang on the short strap around
his neck and took another large gulp of air. He felt the nausea rise from his
innards. It was going to happen.

‘Can you get any closer?’ he asked. ‘It will save time.’

‘A bit – but we have to be careful of mines. They’re
difficult to spot in this light.’

Ponting grunted. He had become quite well acquainted with
the Royal Navy during the last six months, and was not all that impressed. They
were always being careful about something. He sometimes had the feeling Nelson
wouldn’t recognise the service.

Nevertheless, HMS Monegam turned towards the shore and a
couple of sailors went on her bow with a plumb line to test the depth. Gun
crews turned their pieces towards the medieval stonework on the promontory
while teenage boy sailors took eight-inch shells off the hoists that came up
from the magazine.

Now that Ponting no longer had to look through the
binoculars he felt a little better. He extracted one of the Egyptian cigarettes
he had become fond of lately. Suddenly the cigarette got to him and he stumbled
down to the bowl in his cabin with his hand over his mouth, hating the sailors
he bumped into for not being sharp enough about giving him gangway.

By the time he was back on the bridge the ship was steadier
and they were closer to the shore. Although it was almost dark by now he could
distinctly make out feathery-leaved tamarisks on the beach, and beyond them a
few scraggy-looking palms.

‘Boat to starboard,’ called a lookout.

Ponting, determined to redeem himself, spotted it before the
lieutenant-commander. It was an Arab fishing boat with a high bow and a small
triangular sail, a design basically unchanged since the Phoenicians. The
sailcloth appeared to be brown or blue, he could not tell which in the dying
light. He guessed that they had chosen it so that they would be less visible to
a casual watcher from the shore although he was willing to bet there were nets and
lines on board in case they were challenged.

The little boat tacked towards them, taking advantage of
every scrap of wind. ‘He knows his business,’ murmured the
lieutenant-commander.
‘And a good thing too.
We don’t
want to be hanging about.’

It was the naval officer’s first involvement with cloak and
dagger stuff. From what he could see it was all
cloak
and no dagger. This particular job involved Ponting collecting and sending
messages via the courier who then returned to shore. He assumed it was difficult
to equip these spies with the kind of wireless telegraphy equipment that would
be easy to operate and, in any case, wireless messages were almost invariably
intercepted by the enemy. As long as weather conditions didn’t make the
rendezvous difficult, the whole operation wasn’t supposed to take more than ten
minutes. Even so, it was very hard on the nerves. The captain was sure he would
rather be in a pitched battle between cruiser squadrons than endure all this
creeping about an enemy coast with the army breathing down your neck and making
it plain that they thought you an absolute pansy if you weren’t over-keen about
risking your ship.

He was pleased that Ponting had been sick, because it should
make him as anxious to get away as he was. The trouble with the army, he mused,
was that officers like the good major had no idea what it was like to be in
charge of thousands of pounds of equipment. All they knew was what it was like
to be in charge of thousands of men and, if the way they spent them was anything
to go by, they didn’t come all that expensive. It seemed one could lose an
awful lot of soldiers before anybody wondered if you might be being a bit
extravagant. As far as the Admiralty were concerned, big or small, it wasn't at
all like that with one of His Majesty's ships.

The fishing boat was almost alongside now. There were three
occupants. Two of them appeared to be Syrian fishermen for they wore the keffiyeh
chequered headdresses they favoured. The third, who was seated in the stern
alongside the man on the tiller, wore a straw hat held in place with a scarf
that was tied under the chin. It occurred to the lieutenant-commander that it
was the kind of thing that back home a woman might wear
 
for a motoring trip on a summer’s day.

The Monegam’s engines were already on slow. Now he ordered
the port screw to be set in reverse. This made the monitor revolve slowly in
the water, able to spring away at the first whiff of danger from the enemy
coast.

A Jacob’s ladder was put over the side and a couple of sailors
with boat-hooks pulled the fishing boat towards them. The captain looked over
his bridge to see how things were coming along just as the figure in the stern
of the boat stood up. My God, it was a woman!
A young,
European-looking woman, quite pretty too if you like them a bit on the plump
side.
She was wearing a light blue, high-collared dress which ended just
above her ankles. A sailor seized her firmly by the arm and, as she stepped off
the Jacob’s ladder, the blue dress
rose
high enough to
reveal that she was not wearing any stockings.
 

The lieutenant-commander turned to say something to Ponting
but he was no longer there. He looked down again and saw that the major was
down by the rail and welcoming her aboard with all the proprietary airs of some
jumped-up mill owner receiving guests aboard his gin palace during Cowes Week.

‘Good evening,’ the captain heard him say. ‘I do hope we
weren’t late.
Any news of Daniel?’

He spoke to her in French.