The Doomed Oasis (35 page)

Dusk fell and merged imperceptibly into night. The stars lit our way, and in no time at all, it seemed, there was the Jebel al-Akhbar, a black hat of a hill bulked-against the night sky. We rode slowly in a tight little bunch. The time was a little after ten. “We'll water our camels at the well on the outskirts, fill our water bags.…” David's voice was taut.

“And if there's a guard?” I whispered.

“We're travellers from Buraimi on our way to the coast. Bin Suleiman will explain. He's known here.”

“And after we've filled our water bags?”

“Ssh!” The camels had stopped at a signal from Hamid. We sat still as death, listening. There were rock outcrops ahead and the dim shapes of buildings. A solitary light showed high up on the slope of the hill, which now towered above us, a dark mass against the stars. Somewhere a goat bleated. There was no other sound.

A whispered word from David and we moved forward again. The wellhead appeared, a simple wooden structure topping a crumbling wall of mud and stone. We dismounted and the leathern bucket was dropped into the depths. The wooden roller creaked as it was drawn up. One by one the camels were watered; one by one, the skin bags filled. And all the time the wood creaked and we stood with our guns ready. But nobody came. The solitary light vanished from the slope of the hill, leaving the whole town dark as though it were a deserted ruin. Salim and Ali left with the camels and David went to work with cartridges of explosive and detonators. And when he'd mined the well, we went forward on foot, running the thin line of the wire out behind us.

The second well was close under the walls and there were camels couched near it. We could hear them stirring uneasily, could even see some of them, dark shapes against the lighter stone. A man coughed and sat up, dislodging a stone. The sound of it was magnified by the silence. And then I saw his figure coming towards us. Hamid and bin Suleiman moved to intercept. They talked together in whispers whilst David went on working and I helped him, glancing every now and then over my shoulder, expecting every moment to hear the man cry out and raise the alarm.

But nothing happened. The camels quietened down, the man went back to his interrupted sleep, and David was left to complete his work in peace. He worked fast and with absolute sureness, but it all took time. It was past midnight before he had finished, and a paler light above the mountains warned that the moon was rising.

As we trailed our wire towards a gap in the crumbling walls, two shots sounded far out in the desert behind us. We checked, standing there motionless and sweating. But there were no more shots. “Somebody out hunting gazelle,” David whispered. “They do it at night by the lights of their Land Rovers.” And we went on through the gap, which led to a narrow alley. There were no doors to the buildings on either side, only window openings high up. The alley led into the market place. More camels, some goats and figures asleep against the walls of the houses. The well was on the far side. There was a baby camel there, and a small boy lay curled up beside it. The camel, its coat fluffy as a kitten's, rose on straddling, spindly legs and gazed at us in amazed silence. The boy stirred, but didn't wake. A dog began to bark.

I caught hold of David's arm. “You've done enough, surely,” I whispered.

“Scared?” He grinned in the darkness and shrugged me off. “We can't climb to the fort till the moon's up.” And he squatted down in the dust and went to work. The boy suddenly sat up, staring at us, round-eyed. I thought: My God! If he kills that child … But David said something and the boy got slowly to his feet and came hesitantly forward, gazing in fascination. David gave him the wire to hold. A man moved in the shadows by an archway. The boy's father. As he came forward, other figures stirred. A little knot of men gathered round us. But the boy sitting there in the dust beside David, helping him, made it all seem innocent. They stood and watched for a while, talking with Hamid and bin Suleiman, and then they drifted back to their sleep.

The moon rose. The mud walls of the houses on the far side of the open place stood suddenly white, and moment by moment the dark shadow-line retreated until it touched the base of the buildings and began to creep across the ground towards us. At last David tied his mine to the well rope and lowered it. We left then, and the boy came with us, trailing the baby camel behind him. Other figures followed us, curious but not hostile. “They don't belong to Hadd,” David whispered. “They're Bedou in from the desert to sell camels. Otherwise we'd never have got out of there alive.”

“What did they think we were doing?”

“I said we were testing the wells before installing pumping equipment. They know all about pumps. They've seen them in Buraimi and also in Saraifa.” By the second well we picked up the line of our wire, clipped on another coil, and trailed it to the limit up the hill just outside the walls. There David fastened it to the terminals of the plunger, and then he handed it to the boy and told him what to do. “He'll tell the story of this moment till the end of his days.” He patted the boy on the shoulder, smiling almost cheerfully as he turned and left him.

We climbed quickly, came out from the shadow of the wall on to the moonlit slope of the hill, and on a rock well above the rooftops of the highest houses we halted. The boy was squatting there beside the detonator, his face turned towards us. David raised his hand above his head and then let it fall. The boy turned away and his shoulders hunched as he thrust down on the plunger.

The silence ceased abruptly, the stillness of the night rent by three deep, rumbling explosions that were instantly muffled and snuffed out by the collapse of the earth walls of the wells. The sound nevertheless went on, travelling back through the mountains, reverberating from face after face and gradually fading.

The boy still hadn't moved when all sound had ceased. The baby camel stood beside him. It was as though the shattering effect of the explosion had turned them both to stone. Then suddenly he was jerked to life. For an instant his face was turned towards us, white and startled in the moonlight, and then he fled screaming down the hillside, the camel breaking away in ungainly puppet strides.

6.

Fort Jebel al-Akhbar

We turned then and followed a zigzag track that climbed by crumbling outcrops, and below us the town came to life—the sound of voices, the glimmer of lights. A shot stabbed the night, but it wasn't directed at anything in particular and we were close under the fort before the pursuit got under way. We could see them clear on the moonlit slope below us, zigzagging up the path by which we had come. There were about a dozen of them, climbing in single file and moving fast with the agility of mountain goats.

The fort tower hung on the lip of the cliff above us, a white stone keep crumbling to decay, and where the track doubled back through a narrow defile in the rocks David posted Hamid to guard our rear. “I hope to God we find Salim there,” he panted. The path had steepened, so that we climbed with our hands as well as our feet, rocks slipping away from under us. And then we reached the walls and the track led through a narrow opening.

We were inside the outer defences then, an open space of half an acre or more that occupied all the top of the hill. The walls had originally been about twenty feet high, with a firing-step round the inside, but they were now in a bad state of repair and there were few places where they were higher than ten feet. They were horseshoe-shaped, the two ends finishing abruptly at the cliff edge, the tower between them. There was no sign of the camels.

“Damn the old fool! He should have been here by now.” David's sudden uneasiness made me wonder whether perhaps Salim had taken the opportunity to desert us. But when I suggested this, he shook his head. “Why do you think I sent Ali with him? That boy knew what those camels meant to us. No, something has happened to them.”

A shot ripped the silence apart. Hamid had opened fire on our pursuers, and the sound of it echoed back from the naked rock faces that surrounded us. A scatter of shots sounded from lower down the slope and a bullet hit the wall close by us with a soft thud.

“Wait for me here. I'm going to see what's happened.” David ran quickly across the open courtyard of the fort and out through the main gate on the north side, and when he was gone I climbed to the broken top of the wall and threw myself down beside bin Suleiman. From this vantage point we commanded the final approach to the fort.

Perched high on the edge of the sheer cliff face, I could see right down into the town of Hadd. The market square, where we'd mined the third well, was clearly visible, a white rectangle with people moving about or standing in little groups. It was not more than a thousand feet away, an easy rifle shot. And the wells outside the walls—I could see them, too. I began to understand then why David had been so sure those damaged wells would stay out of action.

Immediately below was the defile. I could see Hamid stretched out on top of one of the rock shoulders. His rifle gleamed as he raised it to his shoulder. A stab of flame, the crack of the shot, and then silence again. On the slope beyond there was now no sign of pursuit. The men who had started to follow us were pinned down amongst the rocks. It was an incredible position, impossible to take from that side so long as it was defended by men who knew how to shoot.

A bullet whined low over my head and I ducked automatically, poking my rifle forward and searching the steep slope beyond the defile. But there was nothing to fire at. The night was still and without movement.

We remained in that position for two solid hours whilst the stars moved sedately round the sky and all away to our right the desert stretched its white expanse. The sense of isolation, of a long wait for ultimate death, gradually took hold of me. It had a strange effect, a throwback, I think, to the mood that had filled me as we lay pinned down like rats on the slopes of Monte Cassino … a mood compounded of fear and the desire to survive that expressed itself in the need to kill, so that when a figure moved on the slope below me, my whole being was concentrated in my trigger finger, and as he stumbled and fell my only feeling was one of elation, a deep, trembling satisfaction.

A little after three the first glimmer of dawn brought the mountains into sharp relief. A small wind whispered among the stones and it was quite chill. It was the time of night when the body is at the lowest ebb, and I began to worry about David, and about our rear. By now men from the village below could surely have circled Jebel al-Akhbar to climb by the camel track to the main gate. I called to bin Suleiman and made a motion with my hand to indicate what I was going to do, and then I abandoned my position and started on a tour of the walls.

The result was encouraging. They were built on sheer rock slopes. Only on the north side was there any means of reaching the fort. There the camel track climbed steeply from the desert below to enter by the only gateway. Old palm-tree timbers sagged from rusted iron hinges. This was the way attack must come if it were to succeed. Bastion towers flanked the gate on either side, and from the top of one of them I could see down the whole length of the track. It was empty. So, too, were the slopes of the hill. There was no cover, and nowhere could I see any sign of David or the camels.

I was turning away when my eye caught a movement on the white floor of the desert below: four shapes moving slowly, their shadows more sharply defined than the shapes themselves. They were camels moving towards the bottom of the track, and as they turned to start the climb, I made out the figure of a solitary rider on the leading camel.

I lay down then on the broken stone top of the bastion and pushed the safety catch of my rifle forward. Our camels had numbered six, and with David there should have been three riders. They came on very slowly whilst the grey of dawn overlaid the moonlight and the whiteness faded out of the desert.

As the light improved and they came nearer, I saw the body of a man lying slumped over the saddle of the second camel. Skin bags bulging with water confirmed that the beasts were ours, and soon after that I was able to recognize David. I met him as he rode in through the broken gateway. He didn't say anything as he dismounted, but his face looked grey. “What happened?” I asked.

“Those shots we heard … They rode straight into a party of the Emir's men camped outside the town.” He asked me then whether they'd tried to rush us yet.

“No,” I said. “They're still pinned down less than a third of the way up the slope.”

“Good. Give me a hand, will you?” He led the second camel to the foot of the tower and got it couched. The body tied with cord across its back was Ali's. “He's badly hurt.” We laid him gently on the ground. He moaned softly, barely conscious. He'd a ghastly wound in the chest. I'd seen the effect of a soft-nosed Bedouin bullet on the metal of a Land Rover; now I was seeing its effect on human flesh, and the sight appalled me. He'd a knife wound in the shoulder, too, and he'd lost a lot of blood; the dark, broad-lipped, girlish face had taken on a sickly pallor.

David stood for a moment, staring down at him. “Poor kid,” he murmured. “I found him lying in a pool of blood by the ashes of their campfire. I suppose they thought he was dead. Salim's body was close beside him. They'd slit his throat.” His voice shook. “The murdering, dung-eating bastards! Why did they have to do it? There were at least twenty of them there, twenty of them against an old man and a boy.” Apparently he'd found the camp deserted, our four camels wandering loose. “They must have been disturbed by the sound of the explosions,” he said. “Otherwise, they wouldn't have left the camels. They only took one. It was the other that led me to their camp; it was wandering around on three legs, bellowing with pain. I had to finish it off.” He gave a quick, angry shrug as though wanting to dismiss the whole thing from his mind. “Well, let's get him up into the tower. He can't lie here.”