The Doomed Oasis (40 page)

But the press reaction seemed to have made no impression on the official attitude. The only indication of increased interest was that radio contact with TOS HQ was every hour now on the hour. Colonel George, we learned, was back in Sharjah. Ruffini was still there. Berry's company was in a position ten miles west of Buraimi and about a hundred miles to the north of us. The day dragged on. The sun rose until the sky was a burnished bowl, a throbbing ache to the eyes, and the desert sand beneath our feet as hot as the lid of a stove. Several times we heard the distant sound of shots, but though we took it in turns to keep watch through the glasses, we saw no movement.

We dozed between watches, ate snacks out of tins, and waited. Water was rationed and we became thirsty. Boredom set in. We listened to the BBC, but David was no longer in the news. Time was running out for him, and my presence here seemed to serve no purpose. Those occasional, intermittent shots didn't tell me whether he was alive or dead; they only indicated that the fort was still held. Repeatedly I tried to persuade Berry to move forward and recce under cover of darkness. But he was absolutely adamant. “I cross that border with British military vehicles and God knows where it would end.”

By the end of the day we were beginning to get on each other's nerves. The truth was that nothing would have pleased Berry more than to be allowed to call up his company and go in and settle the whole business. In his quiet Scots way he was so tensed-up over the situation that the battle would have been a welcome relief. Instead of which he was tied down within sight of the Emir's stronghold in the company of a man who was becoming more and more irritable at the delay.

It wasn't that I didn't understand his difficulty. If he acted on his own initiative he might plunge the whole of Arabia into war, involve his own country, and certainly ruin his career. It was a diplomatic tightrope that I couldn't possibly expect him to walk. But understanding his difficulty didn't help me to bear the inaction. To have to sit there, doing nothing, whilst six miles away that boy was dying by inches … The heat and frustration, they nearly drove me mad.

I suppose it was the strain of the past fortnight. Berry gave me salt tablets, a large whisky, and sent me to bed at dusk. At midnight he woke me to say we'd be moving at first light. “The Colonel's finally got Bahrain to agree to my making an attempt to get him out alive. I'm to try and arrange an audience with the Emir in the morning.”

“And suppose he refuses to see you?” I asked.

“He won't. What's more, he'll accept my offer to mediate.”

“You seem very confident.”

“I am. I'm offering him a way out that'll save his face. If we do what the men of his bodyguard have failed to do and get young Whitaker out of the fort, then the Emir at least gets credit for being cunning. That's something to set against the laughter of the Bedou round their desert campfires. I take it you'd like to come with me?”

“Of course.”

He hesitated. “I think I'd better make it clear that I could be wrong about the Emir. He hasn't a particularly savoury reputation, and if he did decide to turn nasty …” He gave a little shrug. “So long as you understand the position.”

Six hours later we were on the move, motoring across the flat, stony plain with the Jebel al-Akhbar growing bigger every minute until it towered above us, a grey sugar-loaf mass against the rising sun. A Union Jack fluttered from the Land Rover's bonnet. There were just the two of us and Berry's driver, Ismail, a tall, dark-skinned man, very neat in his khaki uniform and coloured TOS headcloth. No sound reached us above the noise of the engine. I could see no sign of movement on the hill above us.

We rounded the shoulder of Jebel al-Akhbar by a dusty track, and there suddenly was Hadd, yellow now in the sunshine, with the Emir's green flag hanging limp above the palace and the town silent and strangely empty, with the tower I had known so well perched above it on the lip of the limestone cliffs. We passed a camp of the Emir's men. Smoke spiralled blue from their cooking-fires in the still morning air, and they watched us curiously, wild, lank-haired men, their bodies strapped around with cartridges, their rifles slung across their shoulders. Several were wounded, the blood caked black on their bandages.

The well outside the town was as we had left it that night, the wall destroyed by the explosion and nothing done to repair it. We entered Hadd by the main gate. The streets were empty, the little square deserted. Balks of palm timber still lay where they had been thrown down in panic beside the damaged well. “Looks as though the population has moved out into the date-gardens,” Berry said. “Three men, and they've stopped the life of this whole town dead. It's incredible.”

But as we looked up, it wasn't quite so incredible. That tower hung right over the town. All the way to the gates of the palace we could see it perched there above us. The narrowness of the streets was no protection; it looked right down into them.

Berry's appreciation of the Emir's situation proved correct. After keeping us waiting for over an hour, he received us in a small room off one of the palace rooftops. There were armchairs in the Western style and a table on which stood an expensive German camera and some models of tanks and armoured cars. The walls were hung with finely silvered guns and pictures of the Emir driving through Hadd in a glossy American car.

The man himself was small and wiry, with a face that somehow managed to combine craftiness with great dignity; it was a long, rather cruel face, its length emphasized by the big nose and the little pointed beard glistening black with oil. His eyes were heavily made up with
kohl
. Sheikh Abdullah was there, and several other notables, including the Emir's secretary, and though I couldn't follow what was said, I was conscious of the atmosphere, which was distinctly hostile.

The audience lasted a long time, with the Emir insisting at first that Berry storm the fort with his own troops, take David prisoner, and have him shot. When he refused, the Emir launched into a harangue that was so violent that the spittle actually flew from his lips.

“I thought for a moment,” Berry said afterwards, “that we were for it.” Threatening us, however, didn't solve the Emir's problem, which was that he was being made to look a fool before his own people and all the desert world. After a long argument he finally agreed that if we were able to persuade the defenders to evacuate the fort they would be allowed to go unmolested.

We waited whilst Sheikh Abdullah gave one of his men orders to climb the slopes of Jebel al-Akhbar under a white flag and announce a cease-fire. Berry had guessed that there were snipers posted among the rocks below the fort walls, and he was taking no chances. “The extraordinary thing is,” he said as we hurried out of the palace, “that they're convinced there are at least a dozen men up there in the fort.”

We drove back through the silent town, out past the deserted wells and the askari encampment, and took the dusty track that led round the shoulder of the hill. We left the Land Rover at the foot of the camel track on the north side and started up on foot. The sun was high now and the heat throbbed back from the bare, scorched rock, beating up through the soles of our shoes. For a time the fort was lost behind ridges, but as we climbed higher the walls gradually came into view. There was no sign of Sheikh Abdullah's snipers, no movement on the hilltop. The air was very still, the silence and the heat appalling. It was just over five days since I had come down this very track in the dark. Five days—just over one hundred and thirty hours, to be exact, and under constant attack … It didn't seem possible that David or any of them could still be alive. And yet Hadd was deserted and the Emir had agreed to Berry's terms. We climbed fast, hoping for the best—fearing the worst. They must be out of water by now, wounded probably, perhaps only one of them left alive.

The timbers of the main gate sagged open, splintered by the rocks that lay at the foot of the two crumbling bastions. As we climbed the last steep rise, the tower appeared, framed in the gateway, pale yellow in the sun, with the shadowed opening halfway up yawning like a mouth agape. No sign of life. No sound. I called out: “David! It's George Grant!” The rocks echoed back his name and nothing stirred. “David!”

And then, unbelievably, he answered—a hollow, croaking sound from the interior of the tower.

“I have Captain Berry of the Trucial Oman Scouts with me.” My throat was parched, my voice hoarse. “The Emir offers you a safe-conduct.” Even as I said it I wondered, the stillness and the heat beating at my nerves. Concealed amongst the rocks below us were men with rifles. How did we know they wouldn't open fire on us? The hairs at the back of my neck crawled; treachery seemed to hang in the hot air, and even as David told us to come in through the open gateway I knew we shouldn't have trusted the Emir. The open expanse of the fort's interior was a shambles. There were the remains of fires, the tattered remnants of camels' carcasses—those things I remembered. But now there were bodies of Arabs, too, lying where they had fallen, unburied and rotting, buzzing with flies. I counted nine of them; the place smelt of death, was littered with the debris of attacks beaten back. And the sun—the cauterizing, sterilizing sun—blazed down.

Something moved in the black mouth of the tower and the rickety ladder was thrust out of it. It fell the last few feet to the ground and David appeared, climbing stiffly and very slowly down it. At the bottom he paused as though to gather his strength together, and then he turned and faced us, standing very stiffly erect, a bloodstained strip of cloth round his right forearm and blood showing in a black patch below his left shoulder.

Berry took a tentative step forward. “We've just seen the Emir. If you leave with us now, he's agreed to allow you to cross the border into Trucial territory unmolested.”

“And you believed him?” David started to move towards us, but then he stopped. He was swaying slightly, too weak to walk.

“He's ordered a cease-fire.”

He nodded slowly. “That's true. I heard the order given. A man came up by the path from Hadd a little while back. He carried a white flag. But then he disappeared; went to earth amongst the rocks.” His voice was thin and very weak. “I don't trust the bastards,” he added, coming towards us very slowly.

Close to, he looked ghastly. His eyes had gone quite yellow, the skin of his face yellow, too, and all the flesh fined away so that the cheeks were sunken, the bones staring. His body seemed smaller, dried up and shrivelled. He looked about half his normal size, completely desiccated. The death's-head face, the yellow, burning eyes, the croaking voice … I thought he couldn't last much longer, and I pleaded with him to take this chance. But he was like a man in a trance. “Have the authorities decided to act? Will they support Saraifa?” And when we told him no, all he said was: “They will. They will. If I hold out long enough, they'll be forced to act.” The eyes fastened on me. “Why didn't you go to Sharjah? Why come here? This isn't what I wanted.” His voice sounded desperately tired, utterly dispirited. “Didn't you understand? I wanted the world to know. If people at home don't know what I'm trying to do …”

“The people at home do know,” I said, and I told him about Ruffini and how the story had been taken up by the national press and a question asked in the House.

His eyes lit up, his whole bearing suddenly changed. “Wonderful!” he breathed. “Wonderful!” He was standing erect now, his head up, his voice much stronger. “Time,” he said. “Time and a little luck. That's all I need now.”

“Time is against you,” Berry said. “This is your last chance to get out of here alive.”

“Is it?” The dry, cracked lips produced a twisted smile. “Do you really believe the Emir would let us get out of here alive—particularly when they see how few we are? He'd lose too much face. Anyway, I'm not going. I'll stay here till I die unless the Emir agrees to my terms or the authorities make some move to safeguard Saraifa.”

“Surely to God you've done enough,” I said, and I gave him the rumour we'd heard about the two
falajes
running again at Saraifa and the people returning to the oasis. Berry, more practical, said: “How much water have you got left?”

“Not much. But it's cooler inside the tower. We're drinking very little.”

“And your two men?” Berry asked. “Are they alive?”

“Yes, they're still alive. Hamid's very weak—a bullet through the shoulder and a splinter of rock from a ricochet in the back. Bin Suleiman's leg is smashed. But they'll both last as long as the water.”

“So you won't leave with us?”

“No.”

Berry nodded, accepting his decision as final. He seemed to understand David's attitude and he didn't attempt to reason with him. Instead, he unstrapped his web belt, slipping his water bottle from it. “It's not much,” he said, holding it out. “But one day could make the difference. I'll report your decision by radio to HQ as soon as I get back to my wireless truck.”

David took the water bottle, and though there couldn't possibly be any moisture left in that emaciated, dried-up hull of a body, his eyes glistened for a moment. “Thanks,” he whispered. “I'll remember.” His thin hands were gripped tight round the bottle. “One more day,” he breathed. “You'll have that—I promise.” He wasn't looking at Berry or at me. He was looking upwards, to the burning vault of the sky … a pact with God. And on this barren, burnt-rock hilltop where the air was heavy with the stink of rotting bodies, it would be an Old Testament God. “One more day,” he whispered again in that croaking voice, and at that moment a rifle cracked.

The thud of the bullet, the scream of pain, the clatter of a gun barrel on rock—it was all on the instant, and I turned to see the body of an Arab writhing on the eastern wall. It reached the edge, paused, and then fell, and as it pitched, screaming, on its face, a second shot rang out.