Harkaway's Sixth Column (14 page)

‘Machine guns or anything larger than a rifle need not be feared,’ General Forsci insisted. “The convoy will move at speed and will not stop en route, and the only area where we need worry is between Jijiga and Bidiyu. Bidiyu to the coast can be handled easily by General Barracca. Everything else is well covered.’

While General Forsci was making the final decisions for his convoy, Harkaway had had a good session with a map he’d found in the Lancia they’d captured, and they moved out at dusk and crossed the Jijiga-Bidiyu road to the flatter land beyond, then, swinging in a large arc, they appeared south-east of the road beyond Bidiyu.

‘Remember,’ Harkaway said. ‘We move fast. We don’t waste time. We collect all the arms we can and bolt south, into the flat country. Then, with a bit of luck they’ll think we came from the direction of Odweina or even over the border. We head for Madoba and take cover among the trees there in case they send aircraft out looking for us. As soon as we can, we head back north-west, cross the road and head for Gumra.’

‘Not Eil Dif?’

‘No. Harari country this time. They’re bound to look for us at Eil Dif so we’ll give it a rest for a while. Yussuf can let us know when they’ve gone.’

They spent the night not far from Hargeisa south of the Strada del Duce on the edge of the desert, silent and un-moving during the heat of the day among the few gum trees and acacias that grew round the waterhole at Duduba. The water was bitter and the heavy smell of the camels and their trodden dung filled their nostrils. Around them was nothing but sand and rock for miles. The wells were being used by a few nomads with their goats and sheep and the camels carrying the frames and mats of their homes. As they stood in a silent half-circle with their wives and children, the Habr Odessi and Harari men eyed them contemptuously, warriors watched by farmers.

A tent was set up for the Europeans among the scrub. Insects clogged the lamp after dark and the stew they cooked was full of tiny corpses and detached pieces of wing.

‘You can’t tell ‘em from the bits of onion,’ Grobelaar observed.

The wind that had filled the day with blown sand filled the night with moaning, coating the tea in their mugs with grit. The long shadows of hyenas prowled from bush to bush, with massive shoulders and jaws, their pale-furred throats giving out an eerie groan as their wide nostrils caught the scent of meat. Gooch rose to pelt them with stones.

‘They’ve gone,’ Danny said.

‘Probably joined the Eyeties,’ Grobelaar suggested.

The following morning before daylight they moved quietly up to the road, Harkaway moving ahead in the Lancia to choose a point roughly between Bidiyu and Hargeisa, where there was a gap in the hills. Leaving the lorry and the Lancia hidden, they moved through the gap to the tarmacadamed surface of the road and waited there, surrounded by armed Somalis, some with rifles, some carrying the Brens and the Vickers, one or two gingerly carrying land mines.

As they stood in the silence with only the wind sighing through the gap, there was no sign of Italians and Harkaway looked at Abdillahi, their first recruit.

‘Can we do it, Abdillahi?’ he asked.

Abdillahi gestured with a thin black hand.
‘In sh’Allah, effendi.
If God wills it.’

Harkaway drew a deep breath then gestured to the men carrying the land mines. Digging them into the road in a zigzag pattern so they couldn’t be avoided, he scattered sand and gritty earth to hide where he had worked.

With a team of Habr Odessi, Tully set up one of the Brens to cover the road at the point where the halted vehicles would stop. Gooch, with four of the Harari, had placed one of the Vickers further down the road. The rest of the tribesmen, in two groups, were hidden among the rocks at the south side of the road under the command of Harkaway and Grobelaar. They had no idea how long they might have to wait and as they sat in the sun the young men softly started singing a song called ‘Mohammed Salih’, which Yussuf said was the war song of the Mad Mullah, a hangover from twenty years before. Chief Abduruman had fought with the Mullah and his young men had picked up the song from him.

They seemed to be there for hours before one of the Somalis, posted high on the slopes, waved his rifle and began to slither down the rocky scree to the road. The song stopped abruptly at a sign from Harkaway and the silence that followed seemed immense. A hot wind was blowing from the Haud, the desert area to the east, bringing with it gritty clouds of dust and lifting little whorls like sand-devils from the scree slopes. Harkaway could just see Tully and Gooch and he signed to them to get their heads down. Turning, he saw a dozen pairs of fierce black eyes on him, a dozen sombre expressions. Then one of the young men whispered something to his neighbour and immediately the whole lot of them were grinning in anticipation.

He gestured to Grobelaar further along the road, then turned to Danny who was squatting among the rocks with the Somalis.

‘Tell them,’ Harkaway said, ‘that they must not move until I tell them.’

The young men lifted their hands, pale palm outwards, to acknowledge what she said, and she looked anxiously at Harkaway.

‘Be careful, George,’ she said, and he flicked her an arrogant glance, sure of her, aware of her growing feelings for him but in no hurry to take advantage of it.

‘Now, if you feel like it,’ was all he said, ‘you can send up one of your prayers. And I hope to Christ He hears you.’

The convoy came into view from the direction of Bidiyu a quarter of an hour later, moving slowly because they had chosen a spot where the road wound round the side of the hill in a series of curves.

It was led by an armoured car. It wasn’t a proper armoured car because it had been home-made in Jijiga by attaching sheet steel to the sides, front and rear of a Lancia truck and mounting a machine gun - sufficient, General Forsci thought, to withstand anything the natives could throw at it. Unfortunately, it wasn’t constructed to withstand explosives and the land mines blew off the two front wheels, killed the lieutenant in command, together with his corporal, and wounded both the other two members of the crew before they even knew who was their enemy.

The vehicle behind, its driver somnolent and unalert in the heat, ran into the back of the wrecked armoured car, buckling its wing, and the whole convoy concertinaed to a stop. At the rear, the Italian sergeant in command of the machine gun put his head out to find out what had happened just as Gooch opened up with the Vickers. The first burst hit him in the chest, flinging him back into the lorry, and the next, ripping through the canvas cover, killed one of the askari loaders and wounded another. The third decided it was wiser to fling himself flat on the floor, where the maize from the punctured sacks dribbled slowly down on him. The crews of the other lorries jumped out and bolted away from the firing, only to run into a burst from Tully’s Bren. Three men fell, one of them dead.

It had been found in the past that, on the whole, the Italian officers were well-trained and courageous, but that when they were killed their forces quickly went to pieces. Now somebody waved a white towel and almost at once more appeared. Gooch gave them an extra burst with the Vickers to convince them and Tully peppered the armoured car with the Bren so that it should give no trouble, then, as an Italian corporal and two Italian privates appeared, their arms in the air, the Eritrean askaris threw down their rifles and lined themselves neatly alongside the road to await events.

Black figures in coloured loincloths began to appear from the rocks on either side of the road. This, Harkaway felt, was the crucial moment. If the Somalis did what their fathers had done under the Mad Mullah in the twenties, they would have a massacre on their hands.

Their new-found obedience almost slipped. One of the young Hararis, overcome with impatience and excitement, stood up, uttered a piercing yell and began to scramble over the rocks alongside Harkaway. Harkaway saw him just in time, stuck out a foot and tripped him up. As he clambered to his feet, indignantly reaching for his weapon, Harkaway swung a big fist and he went down like a log.

‘Tell them!’ he yelled at Danny. ‘Tell them again! If any of them disobeys, he’ll be shot.’

The Somalis studied each other with rolling eyes but the prostrate figure of the boy Harkaway had brought down was sufficient example. While keeping their rifles pointed at the new enemies they had found, they kept their eyes on Harkaway for information on how to act.

‘Tell ‘em not to move,’ Harkaway yelled and the information was passed on in a high-pitched soprano voice normally more used to uttering prayer than military commands that made the Italians look round quickly, wondering what they had come up against.

Moving along the line of prisoners, Harkaway checked that they were unarmed, then he gestured to Abdillahi to collect all the weapons he could find and put them in the rear lorry.

What they were doing required quick work and he moved along the trucks, checking their contents.

‘Maize,’ he announced. ‘And dates and coffee. The Boys’ll like that. And skins. They can use those. How many rifles?’

Gooch gestured. ‘Sixteen,’ he said. ‘With ammunition. Most of them single-shot that we took off the askaris, but there are several good Italian guns and a Biretta automatic.

There are also two machine guns, one off the armoured car. It’s a bit messy because somebody’s been bleeding all over it but it’ll clean up.’

There was also a box of light percussion grenades of Japanese manufacture. They looked like toys but nobody was anxious to try them. Harkaway took one and tossed it in his hand. ‘We’ll have these, too,’ he said. ‘See they’re not forgotten.’

‘What about the lorries?’

‘We take ‘em.’

Gooch grinned. ‘All of ‘em?’

‘As many as we can drive. Tell the prisoners to strip. We want their uniforms. We promised the Boys loot. So, okay, they get loot. Gold braid. Pretty hats. They did all right.’

He was still poking about in the lorry as the scared Italians stripped off their clothes.

‘What do we do with ‘em?’ Gooch said.

Harkaway was in the back of the lorry that had run into the armoured car. ‘Let ‘em go,’ he said. ‘Without boots, it’ll take ‘em a while to get to Hargeisa. That’ll give us plenty of time. Hello -’ he stopped dead ‘- what’s this?’

He was stooping over a metal box with a lock through the hasp. Using the spike of his jack-knife, he broke it easily enough and as he opened the lid, his face split in a smile.

‘By God, Goochy,’ he said. ‘Money!’

‘Whose money?’ Gooch’s head was over the tailboard immediately, his expression eager.

‘It
was
theirs,’ Harkaway said. ‘Now it’s ours.’ He picked up one of the coins and studied it. ‘Maria Theresa dollars.’

‘Any good to us?’

‘You bet your sweet life they are. They use ‘em to pay Africans and Chinese who can’t be bothered with pound notes. Useful to bribe tribes to come over on to your side. The Boys’ll consider themselves well rewarded if we give them a sack of maize apiece and one of these.’

One by one, Grobelaar and Danny were swinging lorries off the road to the scrub-covered surface of the flatter land. Eventually they had five vehicles lined up alongside their own on the stony soil facing south.

Harkaway had chosen them carefully and the petrol lorry was among them. They had thrown into them everything they possibly could from the vehicles they were having to leave behind.

‘Hurry,’ Harkaway kept saying. ‘For God’s sake, hurry! We want to be out of sight before they start looking.’

Quickly, Grobelaar backed the other vehicles close together, then he punctured the petrol tanks with a spike so that the petrol flooded into the road beneath them. Shoving the prisoners out of range, Harkaway pulled the pin of the Japanese grenade he had pocketed and tossed it into the pool of petrol. It exploded with a crack that shattered the senses and immediately there was a roar and a blast of air that sent him sprawling.

Danny ran to him but he pushed her aside, grinning at the burning vehicles.

‘What a lovely sight,’ he said.

The news reached Hargeisa and Bidiyu at roughly the same time, soon after midday. When Di Sanctis appeared, Guidotti and Piccio were studying the map of North Africa and comparing it with the latest news they had received. In the Western Desert, a long line of prisoners was heading eastwards. Bardia was captured now and Tobruk was likely to fall at any time.

Piccio’s concern was chiefly with the broken pride of the Italian armies. Guidotti’s was more realistically concerned with what it meant to him. There were reports that British forces were building up in the Sudan close to the Eritrean border near Kassala and he knew what that meant. The British were intending to take full advantage of the Italian preoccupation with North Africa to win back some of their losses and, as he well knew, defeat in the desert meant they could expect no help from Rome.

‘What is it, Di Sanctis,’ Guidotti asked. ‘More trouble along the Strada del Duce?’

‘Yes, Excellency. General Forsci’s convoy’s been ambushed.’

Guidotti jerked upright, the Western Desert forgotten.

His question had been light-hearted because, despite the blowing up of the Wirir Gorge and the bomb that had destroyed the Duce’s victory column, he hadn’t really been expecting trouble. He forced himself not to lose his calm, clenching his fists and straightening his back as he held on to his emotions.

‘Forsci’s convoy,’ he said, ‘has already safely passed through the danger area. All the trucks arrived here. I saw them myself.’

‘Yes, Excellency, they followed the usual routine and left five of them here, to rejoin the convoy on its way back in two days’ time. The rest were going on to Hargeisa and Berbera. They were ambushed on the other side of Bidiyu, halfway to Hargeisa. Five men were killed and the rest disarmed.’

Guidotti fought against the desire to raise his voice. ‘The rest?’ he asked stiffly. ‘How many are the rest, Di Sanctis?’

‘Twenty-seven, Excellency. The news has just come in. We’ve lost the lot.’