The Doomed Oasis (41 page)

The screams thinned to silence. The body on the ground arched, a series of violent jerks; something sounded in the throat and after that it lay still. I glanced at Berry. He hadn't moved. Nor had David. The click of metal on stone drew my eye to the top of the tower. The glint of a rifle, a thin wisp of smoke. Everything was still again; it was difficult to believe that in that instant a man had died.

“You see! That's all the treacherous bastard's safe-conduct is worth.” David gave a dry little laugh. “You'd better get out of here whilst you still can.”

Berry hesitated, and then he nodded. He reached into his pocket and produced some field dressings and a small first-aid kit. “Had an idea these might be required.” He handed them over and then drew himself up and gave David a formal parade-ground salute. “Good luck!” he said, and turned quickly.

David looked at the first-aid tin and the dressings, his eyes quite blank, his face suddenly fallen-in, the flesh tight on the bones of the skull. I could only guess what he was thinking. A few more days and if he hadn't been killed by a bullet, he'd be dead of thirst. He looked up. “This is goodbye, sir.” He held out his hand. “Tell my father, will you, that I hope it's a bloody good well … but if he lets the Emir get his hands on one penny of the royalties I'll haunt him to the grave and beyond.”

His skin was dry, the bones of the hand like an old man's bones. I stared at him, not knowing what to say, for I was sure I wouldn't see him again. He was so damned young to die—and like this, in cold blood with his eyes open, trading life for the sake of a gesture. And yet, like Berry, I didn't try and argue with him. “Goodbye,” I said, and turned quickly before my eyes betrayed me.

At the gateway I paused and looked back. He hadn't moved. He was still standing there, quite alone and swaying slightly, all his muscles slack with weariness. We stared at each other for a second and then I went out through the gateway, and I knew if the Emir attacked again that night, it would be the end. “What a waste!” I said to Berry, stumbling almost blindly down the track.

He looked at me. “I don't agree.” His voice was hard and there was a ring to it, as though I'd struck a chord deep down. “If there weren't men like David Whitaker …” He shrugged. “It's a big question, isn't it? Why we're born; what we do with our lives.” And he added after a pause: “I'd like to think, given his circumstances, that I'd behave the same way.” He had loosened his pistol holster and his eyes searched the rocks as we hurried back down the track. But we saw nobody and the only sound was the heat throbbing at our temples. The Land Rover was still there with Ismail standing beside it. Treachery had gone back to its lair, and high up over the fort the black speck of some carrion bird planed on the still air.

Berry had seen it, too, and as we drove off he said: “I give him four days. In four days I reckon he'll be dead of thirst.”

“He's weak,” I said. “They've only got to make a determined attack now.”

But Berry shook his head. “So long as there's one man left in that tower capable of firing a rifle or tossing a grenade they'll never take it, and Sheikh Abdullah knows it now. Only artillery or mortars could blast them out. I couldn't understand, even from your description, how three men could hold a fort against a hundred tribesmen, but now that I've seen the place …” He was staring back at it over his shoulder. “I am only surprised that a civilian should have appreciated the military possibilities of it.”

“He was a gang leader in Cardiff docks before he came out to join his father in Saraifa,” I said.

He laughed. “Well, I suppose that's as good a training as any.” And after that we drove in silence.

When we got back to the wireless truck, Berry found a message ordering him to return to Sharjah immediately. “But why?” I said. “You're not on Hadd territory.”

“They've got cold feet over the situation, by the sound of it. My company's been ordered back, too.” He stood staring towards Jebel al-Akhbar and there was an obstinate look on his face. “I've given orders that we move at dawn and I've notified HQ that I'm held here the night with a damaged spring on the wireless truck. Twelve hours isn't much, but you never know. The situation could alter.”

By this simple stratagem we were still there on the border when the slanting sun showed a cloud of dust moving across the desert from the direction of Hadd. Through the glasses we counted thirty-two camels, and the riders were all armed. Berry ordered his corporal to issue additional ammunition and personally sited both the Bren guns on a low ridge. But the raiding force kept to Hadd territory, heading due west towards the sands. “Their objective must be Whitaker's camp,” Berry said. “There's nothing else out there.” But he made no move to follow them. “Colonel Whitaker will have to look after himself.”

I thought of the lone figure we'd left standing with the clutter of that drilling-rig behind him. This was what he had feared, the emissary returning in force. Whitaker would go with them this time. He'd have no alternative. I wondered what would happen when he met the Emir. Would he agree to go up to the fort? And if he did, how would David react?

But that was all in the future. I watched the dust cloud until it disappeared below the rim of the horizon, and then I fetched my briefcase and settled down to write a report. It was finished by the time the sun had set and darkness was closing in. I gave it to Berry and he agreed to have his wireless operator transmit it to Sharjah at the next contact with HQ. The report was a long one, for it covered David's situation, our visit to the fort, and the treacherous attempt on his life, and I addressed it to Ruffini. We were both civilians and I thought there was just a chance that it might be passed across to him before any one in authority stopped it.

“If he's still there,” Berry said. The thing was sent now, and we were sitting in the truck waiting for the BBC news. More questions in the House, and the Opposition had attacked the Government for refusing to grant newspaper correspondents visas for any Arabian territory except Bahrain. They were accused of trying to hush up an ugly situation.

And then, in the morning, when we picked up the BBC newspaper roundup, I was staggered to find that virtually the whole national press had carried a story obviously based on the report I had sent to Ruffini. Somehow he had got it through uncensored, and the result was a fantastic perversion of the facts, so colourful, so written up as to be almost unrecognizable as the sad spectacle we had witnessed; and yet it was all there, the heroic quality of David's stand magnified a thousand-fold to give jaded townspeople the best breakfast-table reading for weeks. And the story had spread from the front pages right through to the editorial columns, an angry, outraged demand for Government action.

And when the last editorial flag had been waved by the BBC announcer and the last exhortation to the Government to act immediately had been read, Berry and I looked at each other in astonishment. I think we were both of us quite dazed by the violence of the reaction at home. It was only twelve hours since Berry's wireless operator had laboriously tapped out in Morse my long report, and in that short time David's situation had been put before the highest tribunal in the land—the British Public. Moreover, something had obviously roused the press to anger—the secretive attitude of Whitehall, presumably. As one paper put it:
Up to a late hour last night, despite a barrage of phone calls, nobody in authority appeared to be in a position to confirm or positively deny the story. The only comment was: “We regard the source as highly unreliable.” This is either stupendous arrogance, or stupendous ignorance. We suspect both, and we demand that the Foreign Secretary take immediate action. The country is deeply disturbed
.

On the strength of that Berry cancelled his orders to move, and within half an hour his action was confirmed. Colonel George, acting on a hunch that political decisions would now have to be reversed—and entirely on his own initiative, I gathered later—had already turned Berry's company round and ordered it to drive with all possible speed to the Hadd border. “I'm to wait here until they arrive,” Berry said. “By then the Colonel hopes to be here himself to take command.”

“How long before they get here?” I asked.

“If they keep going without being stopped in the dunes they'll arrive sometime after midnight, I imagine.” He started to go back to the wireless truck, but then he stopped. “It might interest you to know that Signor Ruffini was appointed Reuter's correspondent with the full knowledge of the Political Resident yesterday afternoon. But for that very odd appointment, I imagine your report would have been passed to Bahrain. In which case I've no doubt it would now be rotting in some pigeonhole in the Residency instead of making the world's headlines.”

The official attitude was obvious. By agreeing to Reuter's request—perhaps even instigating it—they could justify their refusal to grant visas to correspondents by saying that the press already had coverage from an accredited agency correspondent, and that the very man from whom the story had originated. No doubt they took the view that, as a foreigner, Ruffini would be more amenable to control than a British correspondent and therefore unlikely to cause them further embarrassment. It was a little ironical that in their hurry to appoint him they had given me almost direct and immediate access to the whole of the British press.

“I am to tell you,” Berry added with a thin smile, “that no further messages for Ruffini will be accepted through military channels. A matter of bolting the door after the horse has gone.”

“What about that raiding party headed for Whitaker's camp?” I said. I hadn't mentioned it in my report to Ruffini the previous night. “Somebody ought to be told.”

“Already done,” he said. “It won't be passed on to Ruffini, but the PRPG will be notified and so will Sir Philip Gorde. He's in Sharjah now.”

So that was that, and nothing to do now but wait. The day passed slowly. No sound from the direction of Jebel al-Akhbar. Not a single shot all day. The hill seemed suddenly dead. The heat was very bad. The wireless operator was on constant watch on the headquarters wave band. We switched only once to the BBC news. A Foreign Office spokesman had stated that, whilst there was no official news, there was reason to believe that press reports were substantially correct and that a young Englishman had instigated some sort of guerrilla activity against the Emir of Hadd. The whole matter was under urgent review. There were rumours of reinforcements standing by in readiness to be flown to Bahrain, and two destroyers had left Aden, steaming north along the Arabian coast. Cairo Radio had stepped up its propaganda offensive.

Late in the afternoon I was wakened from a stifling sleep in the shadow of the W/T truck with the news that the Hadd raiding force was returning. “And there's been no sound from the fort at all.” Berry passed me the glasses as I stood with slitted eyes gazing at a dust cloud right in the path of the sun. “Thirty-three of them now,” he said. The dust made it difficult, but as they passed to the south of us and I could see them more clearly, I confirmed his count. “They must have been travelling all night and moving very fast.” The figures flickered indistinctly in the heat. “The Emir will have picked up the Arab news,” he added. “He'll know he hasn't much time. Had Whitaker a radio, do you know?”

“I don't think so.”

“Then he probably doesn't know what's happening at home—that the Government's being forced to take action. Oh, well,” he added. “If he goes up to the fort and his son's still alive, Colonel Whitaker will learn from him what we were able to tell him yesterday. It might make some difference.”

I thought of that scene: father and son facing each other in the shambles of that fort. Watching the Emir's force move past us, men and camels all lifted bodily off the ground by a mirage and turned into strange, distorted shapes by the heat rising from the sea of sand, I felt once again the cruelty of this desert world. It was so hard, so empty, so casual of human life—a crucible to transmute the flesh to skin and bone, the mind to something as distorted as those shapes dancing in a mirage. I had a premonition of disaster then; but not, I think, of tragedy—certainly not a tragedy quite so grim.

I watched them until they disappeared beyond the shoulder of Jebel al-Akhbar, and shortly afterwards the sun set. One more night. But there was still no news, no certainty of action. “Better turn in and get some sleep,” Berry suggested. “I haven't even got an ETA from the Colonel yet.”

“Will we move in the morning, do you think? David can't last out much longer.” And in the morning he might be faced with his father's desperate situation. “For God's sake! It's got to be tomorrow.”

“You'd better pray, then,” he snapped back irritably. “For only God and the Foreign Office know what action will be taken and when.” And he added angrily: “I don't even know whether the Colonel's order to my company has been officially confirmed.”

I took his advice then and went to my camp bed. But sleep was out of the question. The night was hot and very still, the stars bright. Time dragged and I dozed, to be jerked awake by the distant sound of engines. It was 0155 hours and Berry's company was motoring in, dark shapes moving in convoy across the desert without lights. An officer reported all present and correct, but warned that the only orders he'd received were to wait for the Colonel and not to cross the border.

Orders whispered in the night, the dark trucks spewing men out onto the sand; the area of our camp was suddenly full of movement, an ant heap settling to sleep, and a voice at my elbow said: “'Ullo, Mister Grant. Is Ruffini.” His pudgy hand gripped my arm, patted my shoulder; words tumbled out of him. They had rushed him up to this company to get him out of the way. He'd been made fabulous offers by several newspapers. “I am lucky, eh—lucky to be a journalist and out 'ere at this minute?” But I think he was a little scared. He was certainly lonely. His knowledge of the Arabs was based on Mussolini's short-lived empire.