A Soul of Steel (3 page)

“Well?” After having his competence challenged, Cobra counterattacked with a vengeance. “What good is it to know the foul deed in advance if you do not know the doer? If you are right, and I happen to think you are, we will engage the Afghans within a day or two. Do you mean to say that all your slinking around on soft cat feet has only turned up a rumor?” Tiger’s mustache bristled like brutal whiskers. “I hesitate to name the man on a matter of such dishonor. But it is... Maclaine.”

“Maclaine of the Royal Horse Artillery? We need all the artillery we have against the Amir.” Cobra stirred, concealing his spyglass. “I had best be making for the plain. This is dire news.”

“Wait!” Tiger pulled the burnoose hood over his head, putting his betraying blue eyes into deep shadow. “Let an old game hunter sniff out the trail before you start back. That vulture is still circling. It may spy only carrion, but—”

Cobra nodded. No scout superior to Tiger inhabited all of India. The older man scrabbled sideways across the rocks scorpion-swift, the rifle in his hand cocked like a stinger, until he was out of sight.

Tiger’s bag lay on the rocks. Cobra hesitated, as if fearing a sting, but then rapidly unbuckled the straps and studied the contents—quinine pills, a compass and water flask like his own, ammunition, a mustache comb—more likely catch an Afghan with a pocket watch than with one of these! Cobra frowned. He knew not for what he searched, only that he did not trust the bearer.

And then he felt a welt within the leather. His sun-stained fingers probed, working a secret flap loose. A folded document lay in his hand, written on heavy soft paper, so it should not crackle. Odd words. Afghan words. And Russian. Some sort of drawing, a cryptogram.

It took Cobra a moment’s work to stuff the paper into his own kit, to replace Tiger’s bag in the searing sun as if it had never been touched. He was not as green as Tiger thought.

Something in the man’s manner today had fanned Cobra’s usual dislike into embers of outright suspicion. A British force and the fate of India were at stake. If he were wrong, he would take the consequences. And right or wrong, he would have Tiger to answer to.

He never heard the espionage agent return, but a swelling shadow swooped down suddenly, like a vulture, and squatted near him.

“All clear,” said Tiger, smiling... smiling like a well-fed big Bengal cat.

KHUSHK-I-NAKHUD,
Evening, July 26, 1880

On occasion the orchards surrounding Kandahar scented the night air with perfumes that infiltrated even the city’s narrow, filthy streets. Here, however, in the British camp midway across the waste that lay between Kandahar and the river Helmond, the only certain fragrance wafted from the plentiful droppings of the beasts of burden needed to transport the baggage and equipment of twenty-five hundred fighting men.

Cobra, now in uniform, slipped unnoticed among the soldiers in the pungent darkness. Horses neighed in answer to ill-tempered bagpipelike brays from the camels. All beasts, native or not, led a brutal life in these parts, and often a short one.

By the muted lantern light of an army soon to go head-to-head with the forces of Ayub Khan, Cobra dodged the shoulder-high wooden wheels of E Battery, B Brigade of the Royal Horse Artillery. The commander of two of these big guns was Lieutenant Hector Maclaine.

Cobra found his man propped against one of the stone enclosures that bracketed the camp, staring into the impenetrable night. Stars sparkled like bright brass buttons above, but no enemy campfires mirrored these hot points of light below. The two men could have been alone in a coal mine with fool’s gold salting the ceiling, save for the faint rustles of restless men and animals.

“Stan!” Maclaine greeted the newcomer in surprise. “I doubted you would return before we broke camp.”

“Had to report,” Cobra said shortly.

“So are we dragging pack and packhorse to greet Ayub Khan tonight, as rumor has it?”

“Perhaps. I merely report to St. John. He carries the news to Slade and the brigadier. Then news becomes rumor.”

“Insane that a frontline scout never reports directly. Damn clumsy system.”

“Perhaps.” Cobra was silent for several moments, as if, used to hurried clandestine meetings, he had forgotten how to converse in other than staccato fashion. “I have uneasy news, Maclaine, and from the look of it, the command will not listen.”

“Command lives to order others to listen, not to heed its own scouts’ words.” The smile in Lieutenant Maclaine’s voice was evident even in the dark.

“That is what I fear!” Cobra burst out. “They will not listen, not about Ayub Khan’s superior artillery, not about Tiger... not about anything.”

“What’s wrong, old man? Too much time spent in solitary on the boiling sands?”

“Burrows is getting spoiled spy-work, and I know it. I’m going out again to scout Maiwand. The previous report sounds too perfect: a long ravine for an attack base and no flaws in the terrain.”

“That does not sound like the Afghanistan that has scrubbed our boots raw,” Maclaine agreed.

“Just what I thought. I have scoured the ground like a dust devil, and found a secondary ravine to the east no one has reported. If we see action at Maiwand tomorrow, the RHA will be  in the vanguard. Keep your eyes and ears open, full-bore,” Cobra cautioned him. “You have nothing... troubling you?”

“Nothing save dust and heat, a gulletful of quinine pills and a noseful of horse manure. Have I ever struck you as a nerve- ridden man?”

“No, you have not,” Cobra answered soberly. “That is what troubles me. Someone who has no notion that I know you has accused you of having a guilty conscience.”

“I?” Maclaine leaped up. “Who is this liar? I'll call him out in mid-battle, though six dozen Ghazi fanatics charge us.”

“This is serious spy-work,” Cobra said. “Leave it to me. But for God’s sake, Mac, keep a sharp eye about yourself from now on.”

“Can you say no more?”

“Nothing until I learn more. God guard you all tonight.”

“And you, Stan,” Lieutenant Maclaine said. “I vouchsafe we will next meet on a battlefield—or in heaven.”

“Just so long as it is not in an undeserved hell,” Cobra answered, edging silently into the darkness.

After he had gone, Lieutenant Maclaine stamped a booted foot like a restless horse. Officers of the Royal Horse Artillery were used to chaos, danger, dust and gunpowder. Innuendo and behind-hand dealing, or sinking into the native culture, as Cobra did, was more foreign territory than Afghanistan.

“Odd fellow,” Maclaine muttered to the apparently empty and unheeding night.

Cobra was gone by then, eeling through the dark as if it were a silent, immobile sea. He slithered past a wooden wheel and the stolid forms of resting horses, through thinning tents, into the open waste.

Beyond the camp and beside a last solitary stone, Cobra stooped to disinter his native robes, his mind on a jumble of oddities, not the least of which was his friend Maclaine’s role in the coming events.

He never heard a sound. All at once the night’s opaque ebony curtain dropped upon his head with a tremendous thud. Warm red velvet oozed over his eyes, into his surprised mouth, as he felt his skull seem to split from side to side, a chasm opening into an utter darkness blacker than even the Afghan night.

Chapter Two

EAST MEETS WEST

The Battle of MAIWAND,
July 27, 1880

Heat haze
and dust perform a whirling dervish dance in the distance. Only a few thousand yards away, unseen masses of milling men and horses churn as the Ayub Khan’s forces move into battle positions.

The hour is early, only nine-fifteen in the morning. Between the two forces lies a flat, merciless Afghanistan plain, already seeming to quiver under the blast-furnace heat, as if viewed in a wavy mirror. A village or two hump carcass-fashion ahead. The only other shelter on the pitiless plain is the ravine previously scouted, fifteen to twenty-five feet deep and fifty to a hundred feet wide, running like a wound toward the northeast.

Brigadier General Burrows rides forward with the general of the cavalry, Nuttall.

“Blackwood!” he orders. “Take Fowell’s and Maclaine’s sections forward across the ravine under the escort of a troop of the Third Light Cavalry.”

He watches the sections grind forward into the dusty no-man’s-land between the British position at the ravine and the unseen—but not unreported— Afghan hordes arranged into a scimitarlike arc twenty-five hundred yards beyond.

Thus does battle fall upon the British like an afterthought. By ten-thirty A.M. Fowell’s two guns open fire from a position five hundred yards northwest of the ravine. Even as the two generals watch with some complacency, for generals expect their orders to be carried out, a sudden spurt, a geyser-burst of dust, erupts on Ayub’s front lines.

“What—?” begins Burrows, certain that the Afghan artillery has not yet been drawn into position.

“Must be... Maclaine!” Nuttall rises in his stirrups. “Damn fool, he’s galloping his guns directly to the front gate of the Afghan position. Why on earth—?”

“Disobeying orders,” Burrows roars. “That is why.”

The two generals keep a sudden silence, each calculating the advantages and disadvantages of having an artillery section a mile in advance of the regular troops. Soon a mounted messenger, with orders for Maclaine’s guns to pull back, is racing into the dust toward his position. Messages from Blackwood are sent as well, telling Fowell’s artillery section to move forward where it has a chance of hitting the enemy positions.

In time, by a process of seesawing, Maclaine’s position pulls back and Fowell’s pushes forward to two thousand yards in advance of the ravine. They form a united front, backed by a half-company of the Sappers and Miners and the infantry, with the Sixty-sixth Berkshires on the far left.

For half an hour only the British artillery pounds the parched Afghan earth. Then Ayub’s guns begin heaving, spitting heavy shells into the British lines from breech-loading Armstrongs.

“Ayub has more guns than a battleship,” Nuttall shouts into the dusty din as he watches the artillery sections and his cavalry take repeated poundings.

“So Cobra’s report said,” the brigadier grumbles. “Why are the Sixty-sixth Berkshires so sluggish about holding the line?”

A scout charges up at that moment with the reason: “A shallow ravine joins at right angles to this, sir! Along it the Afghan rifles are harrying our rear baggage section. The men and animals are in disarray, and the Sixty-sixth is forced to deform the line to defend themselves.”

“Another ravine? No spy or scout reported this! Then we are in danger of being surrounded, and Ayub has ten to fifteen thousand men to our nineteen hundred field soldiers!”

The brigadier grows suddenly quiet. Not until now has it occurred to him that the sun may not set on a British victory.

“Guns!” bawls another officer, riding up. “In the subsidiary ravine. Two artillery guns, pounding the Sixty-sixth.”

Dire news comes charging at Brigadier General Burrows after that: the left wing formed by the ambushed Sixty-sixth is steadily being cut down; E Battery, B Brigade of Royal Horse Artillery is ordered to fire one more round, but, ahead of the infantry, is almost surrounded. Maclaine at their forefront fails to retrieve his guns, leaving them to the enemy and retreating under shots fired at a range of only fifteen to twenty yards.

“We need those guns back,” Brigadier General Burrows barks.

“Let me order Nuttall to lead a cavalry charge at the captured guns,” Leach urges.

Moments later the general watches a saber of dust plough toward the Afghan-surrounded guns, but the charge quickly sputters and retreats.

Nuttall, his face gritty with sand, rides up.

“Charge again,” the general orders.

“Impossible, sir,” Nuttall replies.

The general eyes the dust storm that is the battlefield. “If another charge is impossible, then so is victory.”