Harkaway's Sixth Column (19 page)

As Harkaway made his plans, it was noticeable now that he didn’t bother to ask the others what they thought.

To their fury, the brightest of the Harari and Odessi men were told to hand over their rifles. Their protests welled up and filled the air.

Harkaway waved his hands and turned to Danny. ‘Tell them,’ he said, ‘that we have better weapons for them.’

As she did so, he turned and pulled the cover from one of the Vickers which he had set up facing a small hill.

‘Tell them they will be using
these
weapons,’ he said. ‘And that they will
see
their bullets killing their enemies.’

He bent over the Vickers and pressed the trigger, swinging the gun on its tripod as he did so. Tracer bullets lifted in brightly coloured arcs that provoked breathless gasps as they tore lumps from the hillside and ricocheted into the air.

‘Tell them,’ Harkaway went on, and he sounded like a salesman at a fair, ‘that they will learn to fire these other guns.’

‘You’re taking a chance,’ Gooch warned. ‘Giving machine guns to wogs.’

‘They’ve got to learn to use ‘em some time,’ Harkaway said in a flat voice. ‘We can’t leave it all to you. We’ve now got ten machine guns and you can’t fire the lot.’

‘What do we want ten machine guns for?’ Tully asked.

‘Because rifles won’t be big enough for what we’re going to do.’

As Harkaway turned away, Tully looked at Gooch. Harkaway had always been aloof, keeping himself separate from his companions in a way that suggested they weren’t fit companions for a man who’d been well educated.

‘What about stoppages?’ Gooch called out. ‘I can just see these ham-fisted bastards trying to clear a stoppage.’

‘They won’t have to,’ Harkaway said over his shoulder. ‘You’ll do that. All they’ll do is spray what they’re told to spray. We now have more ammunition than we know what to do with.’

‘That bugger’s getting too bloody big for his boots,’ Gooch complained to Tully as Harkaway moved out of earshot. ‘He’s beginning to behave like a sergeant-major or a brand new second-lieutenant. They’re both known for having too much lip.’

Nevertheless, what Harkaway wanted was done. With the aid of oaths and cuffs about the head, they managed to persuade the Somalis to fire in short sharp bursts and not to waste ammunition. They picked up the idea surprisingly quickly, though Harkaway allowed none of them to strip a gun.

‘That’ll come in good time,’ he said. ‘First, we need camels.’

‘What do we need camels for?’ Grobelaar demanded.

‘Never mind what we need ‘em for. Get ‘em. Together with donkeys, mules, horses, even women if they can carry loads.’

Harkaway was becoming obsessed with his idea of hammering the Italians and nobody seemed to have the courage to stand up to him. Camels, horses, mules and asses were mustered, paid for by the Maria Theresa dollars they had captured, and they milled round the wells near Eil Dif, bawling and stinking to high heaven, surrounded by the herds of sheep and goats which Harkaway said he wanted as food for his men. Hearing what was in the wind, he was joined by more young men, coming in large numbers now, Rer Alis and Mudus from the south, even a few Mijjerteins and Omar Mahmouds from Italian Somaliland. There were also a few Abyssinians, remnants of patriot bands broken up by skirmishes with the Italians, who even brought their own firearms, and deserters from the battalions of native levies from along the borderlands who were itching to get their own back on the men who had conscripted them into their army. They were an ill-trained, ill-armed, ill-equipped and ill-disciplined rabble whom Harkaway had persuaded to rally round him only by promoting tribal rivalry, inferring one lot were better than the next. As the numbers grew, feeding them became a problem, and Harkaway was well aware that they would have to make a move soon because the Bur Yi Hills had been almost scoured clean.

The others watched him as he worked, puzzled, conscious of his single-mindedness and wondering what was in his mind.

‘Your ideas seem to be growing a little,’ Danny commented dryly.

Harkaway ignored her. He was a natural leader and nobody questioned his authority, least of all the Somalis. By this time, they had forgotten loot in their delight in their new weapons and were eager for more action. He had even formed a private little group which he called the Imperial Guard, led by Abdillahi; they included the first men they’d taught to use a rifle or drive a lorry, and they would have followed him anywhere.

Meanwhile the little pack guns had been assembled. They were only small weapons but Gooch made them work and the Somalis leapt and danced as he aimed one of them at the old houses on the edge of the town. Mud bricks, timbers and stones flew and a wall collapsed with a roar and a welling cloud of dust.

‘Now show
them
how to do it,’ Harkaway said.

Danny watched him, a worried look on her face. There was a commanding manner about him now that she’d never noticed before and she saw that the others didn’t argue but leapt to do as he bid them. She could only put it down to some inborn quality he possessed, because there was nothing else to make them, beyond a hidden drive that kept him going. It was an inner source of energy that was enough to carry them all along, but in his brooding yellow eyes there was a look that troubled her. She voiced her fears to Grobelaar.

‘What’s he up to, Kom-Kom?’ she asked.

Grobelaar gave her his shadowy smile and touched her hand. ‘Better ask him, man,’ he said.

Harkaway made no attempt to conceal what was in his mind. ‘With the British coming down from the Sudan into Abyssinia and Eritrea,’ he said, ‘and Kom-Kom’s South African friends moving up from Kenya, the Italians are bound to draw in their horns. They’re bound to retreat on their centre, and their centre isn’t British Somaliland and certainly not Berbera, Hargeisa or Bidiyu. They’ll pull back because they haven’t a cat in hell’s chance of staying where they are. That road from Berbera to Jijiga’s going to be busy. That’s where the Sixth Column will be.’

He was talking less like a junior NCO and more like a general now. Danny eyed him curiously.

‘What’s it all for?’ she asked.

‘To kill Italians, of course.’

‘There’s no need to kill them, man,’ Grobelaar said. ‘They’re going, anyway.’

‘They’ll go faster if we encourage them.’

Danny studied him, an anxious expression on her face. ‘What are you hoping to get out of this, George?’ she asked.

He had been deep in thought and he started and turned to look at her. ‘Nothing,’ he said.

‘Nobody takes the sort of risks you’re taking, just for the pleasure of saying you chased off Italians who were going anyway.’

‘It’s our job to chase them.’ His face was grim. ‘I’m going to stop up the Strada del Duce. Before they know it, it’ll be the Strada degli Inglesi.
Our
road. Just watch me, my white-breasted Bronwen. We have the advantage all the way now. I’m going to stop ‘em on the Bidiyu side of the Wirir Gorge.’

‘Why there?’

‘Because at that point the road’s a good ten feet above the surrounding scrubland. They won’t pull off it to pass anything that’s blocking it, because if they did, they’d never get back on. It’s narrow, see, so they can’t even turn round. I’m going to split their column so that those in the rear will be concerned only with reaching the front and getting to safety. The rest will be ours. We’ll get the lorries off the road into the scrub and disappear.’

‘You said you couldn’t get off the road there.’

Harkaway’s smile was pitying. ‘I said they
wouldn’t
because they couldn’t get back on, which is different. All we have to do is lower them with ropes. There’ll be enough of us.’ He gestured at Grobelaar standing nearby. ‘Kom-Kom’s done this sort of thing before, I’m sure.’

She stared at him, her eyes on his face. ‘You can’t do it,’ she said. ‘You won’t have time. Bidiyu’s too close. They’d be bound to radio and Guidotti’ll send help.’

‘He’ll arrive too late,’ Harkaway smiled. ‘Because I’ve a few tricks up my sleeve to stop him. There’s a gully passes under the road eight miles back for a start, to stop the water coming off the hills when it rains washing the road away. I know it’s there because the Engineers laid it in 1939, and I was one of them. At the moment, it’s stuffed up with mud and sand and various other kinds of refuse. A touch of explosive there will blow a hole twenty feet wide.
That
should stop Twinkletoes coming from Bidiyu. It’ll also stop anybody who manages to get his vehicle turned - assuming that he could or would want to - from returning to Bidiyu.’

‘How are you going to get there?’ Danny asked. ‘You can’t move all these men, all these vehicles across the desert. The Italians would spot you at once. And you can’t go along the road. They have posts every few kilometres, connected by radio to Bidiyu.’

‘I’m not going across the desert. And I’m not going by the road. I’m going over the hills. We did it before.’

‘On foot,’ Grobelaar pointed out. ‘You’ll never get this lot over. There aren’t any roads. There was talk in the Public Works Department before the war of building one but, because there was no path to work from, they decided not to bother.’

‘Shows how little you civil service chaps know,’ Harkaway said with tired patience. ‘Yussuf says he’s taken his sheep and goats along it.’

‘Lorries aren’t sheep and goats!’

Harkaway seemed weary of the arguing. ‘They thought Stonewall Jackson couldn’t get his troops over the hills in the Shenandoah Valley campaign. But he did.’

‘How do
you
know about Stonewall Jackson and the Shenandoah Valley campaign?’ Danny asked.

‘It’s prized above rubies at Sandhurst.’

She was staring at him narrow-eyed now. ‘How do you know about Sandhurst? Were
you
at Sandhurst.’

He ignored the question. ‘Good type, Jackson. Very religious. You and he would have got on well. He smote them hip and thigh until they didn’t know where he was coming from next. That’s what I’m going to do.’

‘You’ll never do it.’

‘Just watch me.’

Her eyes on his face, she tried to read his mind. ‘And what are the camels and the horses and the mules for?’

He grinned at her, a wolfish grin that was frightening. ‘To pull the lorries if necessary, my little Jesus waif. That’s what for.’

As the days went by, Harkaway grew more morose, like a torpid yellow-eyed eagle, relaxed in broody silence. Yet he never seemed still. He had now started showing the Somalis how to fire a mortar. He wasn’t concerned with their accuracy, only that they knew how to feed the bombs into the steel tube and keep out of the way. The accuracy could be provided by himself, by Tully or Gooch, even at a pinch by Grobelaar who had worked with the army long enough to understand them. When he started teaching them to throw the little Japanese grenades, even Tully objected.

‘They’ll kill their bloody selves,’ he protested. ‘Probably me, too.’

‘No, they won’t,’ Harkaway insisted. ‘Not the way I plan it. Just teach ‘em that when you pull the pin it blows up and they have to get rid of it. It won’t matter about timing.’

Tully looked at Gooch.

‘I dunno what them Italians are expecting,’ he said. ‘But I bet it ain’t what they’re going to get.’

By this time, convoys of troops were moving back along the road from Berbera and they noticed they were beginning to increase in size. The radio informed them that the South Africans had not stayed long in Mogadiscio but, swinging north, had reached Villagio del Duca degli Abruzzi eighty miles inland and were now heading for Bulu Burti, while another column, splitting off at Jelib, was pushing on to Lugh Ferrandi.

It was time to get on the march and the huge, straggling caravan shuffled, gathered its muscles and heaved into movement.

Sitting on a rock at the side of the road by the Lancia, Harkaway watched them go, the camels lurching along under their loads behind the lorries, the stink of their dung heavy in the air.

‘They’re overloaded, man,’ Grobelaar protested. ‘You’ve got around two hundred and fifty pounds on them.’

‘Camels can carry two hundred and fifty pounds,’ Harkaway said.

‘Under ideal conditions. They won’t be ideal the way you’re going. They need barley to keep their strength up. They’ll die.’

‘Let ‘em,’ Harkaway said. ‘So long as we get there.’

He turned to Commandante di Peri, who was sitting alongside him, his hands clasped between his knees, a picture of dejection.

‘We have to take you with us,
Commandante,
’ he explained. ‘You realize that? It’s for your own safety. There’s no one we can leave to guard you. And I wouldn’t advise you to bolt. You wouldn’t want the Abyssinians coming to fetch you back.’

Di Peri lifted his head. ‘As a prisoner of war under the Geneva conventions - ‘

‘Don’t bother me with that,
Commandante!’
Harkaway barked. ‘We’re not fighting the war here under Geneva conventions. In any case, the Geneva conventions state that you should share the conditions of the people who capture you. That’s what you’re going to do.’

The dusty straggling column began to turn into the hills - lorries, horses, mules, asses and camels, and a long string of lean black men in tobes and turbans carrying rifles. They were unaccustomed to order and had been bored by parades, drilling and instruction, but now, under the harsh glare of the sun, they were facing the real thing and their eyes were hard and excited.

Taking the opportunity to water before they started to climb, men jostled for the greenish bitter stagnant liquid already fouled by the mass of animals. Nobody objected. They were all of them more thirsty than fastidious. As they went higher, they seemed to draw nearer the sun and the fierce white light grew more clinical and sterile. But as the sun disappeared and night came, the winds which had been warm at lower levels suddenly seemed cold and blew through thin robes.

Sitting alone, Grobelaar started to play his mouth organ. In addition to his responsibility for the vehicles, he seemed to have been saddled with the role of camel-master for the simple reason that, with his years in Somaliland, he was the only one apart from the Somali herdsmen who knew much about them. It was a role he disliked because it involved moving up and down the column, first with the lorries, then with the failing animals, yelling them on with Afrikaans cries of
‘Voetsek’
and
‘Trek ons!’