The Doomed Oasis (36 page)

He got the camel to its feet and stood it close by the wall of the tower. Standing on its back, he was just able to reach the hole halfway up the tower's side. He scrambled in and from the dark interior produced a crude ladder made of palm-wood. We dragged the boy up and laid him on the dirt floor and David plugged and bound the wounds again, using his headcloth, which he tore in strips. “A bloody lousy piece of luck,” he said. “I'd planned to get you away before daylight. With Salim to guide you, you'd have been in Buraimi tomorrow, in Sharjah by the next day. I'd got it all planned. Now …” He shrugged. “We'll have to do some fresh thinking.”

It was daylight now. It came filtering into the interior of the tower through the entrance hole and through four narrow slits in the thick walls. They were firing-embrasures, and they reminded me of the turret room I'd occupied in Saraifa. But the view was vastly different. Two of them looked out east and west, each covering an arm of the walls. The other two, close together, faced south; they looked straight down on to Hadd itself.

“Well, that's all I can do for him.” David got to his feet. “You stay here. I must have a word with Hamid and bin Suleiman. And then we must deal with the camels.”

He left me sitting by one of the embrasures and I had time to think then. The excitement of action that had sustained me so far was gone now. The future stared me in the face and I began to be afraid of it. However impregnable the fort's position, there were still only four of us, and right there below me was that Arab town teeming with life and utterly hostile. I could see men clustered thick in the open square and some of them were armed. It could only be a matter of time.

They had already started work on the well inside the walls. Men were being lowered into it and every now and then a bundle of stones and rubble was handed up. The sun was rising behind the mountains. The sky was crimson and all the desert flushed the colour of a rose. It looked very beautiful, so serene in the clear morning air, and the mountains standing like cutouts painted purple.

It was just after the sun had lipped the mountaintops that David climbed back into the tower. “They've started work on that well in the square, haven't they?”

I nodded. The little square was teeming like an anthill.

“What are they—townspeople or the Emir's bodyguard?” He had his rifle with him and he came straight over to where I was squatting on the floor beside the embrasure.

“Both,” I said. The men working on the well were mostly stripped to the waist. But, standing about, watching them, were a number of armed men, their bodies strapped about with cartridges, bands of brass that glinted in the sun; their rifles, untrammelled with silver, had the dull gleam of modern weapons.

He pushed past me, kneeling in the embrasure, steadying himself with his elbows on the sill as he brought the rifle to his shoulder and fired. The sound of the shot was very loud in that dim, confined place. “That's one of them that won't go murdering old men and boys again.” He was trembling slightly as he sat back on his heels.

The crowd in the square was scattering. A little knot gathered in one corner, and then that, too, melted away and the square was suddenly empty. “An occasional shot like that and they'll learn to leave it alone. In a day or two they'll begin to understand what it's like to have the sources of water cut off, the wells dry.” He got up and set his gun against the wall. “Not that they'll die of thirst. They're better off than the people we saw in Saraifa.” He went back down the ladder and left me staring at the empty rectangle of the sun-drenched square, littered with the balks of timber they'd brought in to shore up the inner walls of the well. Behind me the wounded boy moaned restlessly, muttering words I couldn't understand, and when I went to him, I found his dark eyes wide open and staring, his skin dry and parched. I gave him some water, and then David called to me.

He and Hamid had started unloading the camels. Bin Suleiman kept watch from the eastern wall. We worked fast, but the sun was high above the mountains before we'd humped all the stores and the last of the waterskins up into the tower. “What about the camels?” I asked as we lifted the saddles from their backs. It was already blisteringly hot, the bare rock acting as a firebrick and throwing back the sun's heat. There was no vestige of vegetation inside the fort for them to feed on.

“I'll keep one for you. The other three will have to be slaughtered.”

They were fine beasts in the prime of life and in beautiful condition. But when I started to remonstrate, he cut me short. “What did you imagine we were going to do with them? We've no other meat.” He stared at me angrily. “Even the Bedou, who love camels a damn sight more than I do, don't hesitate to kill them when they're short of food. And we're going to be short of everything before we're through.”

I stood and stared at him. Without camels, he'd have no means of retreat. He'd be trapped here.…

“Do you reckon you could get through to Buraimi on your own?”

I hesitated. But I knew now there was no alternative for me—only death here on this pitiless hilltop. “I could try.”

“Good. We'll keep the one you've been riding, then, and get you away tonight as soon as it's dark.”

Immediately after we'd breakfasted, bin Suleiman butchered the three camels, slitting their throats and letting the blood drain into a tin bowl. The carcasses were then disembowelled, and the meat cut into strips and hung to dry in the sun. Flies buzzed and the place smelt of blood, and yet it didn't seem unnatural. Sand and rock and the blazing sky, that boy lying in the dim interior of the tower, his breath gurgling in his throat and blood seeping on to the floor, and below us an Arab town ruled by a man consumed by a murderous greed. Death didn't seem so hateful when life itself was so cruel.

Action followed hard upon my thoughts. Hamid, from his lookout post on the very top of the tower, called down to us: men were circling the hill to the north. From the walls we watched them climb by the camel track. They were well spaced out, their guns ready in their hands. Others were coming up by the zigzag path direct from Hadd. Lying prone on the blistering stones, we waited, holding our fire. The stillness seemed to break their nerve, for they began shooting at a range of almost three hundred yards.

The attack, when it came, was a senseless, ill-directed affair, men clawing their way up the last steep rock ascent to the walls without any supporting fire. We caught them in the open, unprotected, and the attack petered out almost before it had begun. They went back down the sides of the hill, taking their wounded with them and not leaving even a single sniper to harass us from the shelter of the rocks.

“It won't be as easy as that next time they come.” David's eyes had a cold, dead look, untouched by the light of battle that I'd glimpsed for a moment on bin Suleiman's broad animal face.

We had used, I suppose, no more than two or three dozen rounds, but it was sufficient to make David anxious about his ammunition. Whilst the two Wahiba kept watch, David and I lowered the ladder through a hole in the mud floor of the tower and climbed down into the black rubble-filled pit below. It was slow work, searching in the dark, for we'd nothing but our hands to dig with and after so long David wasn't at all certain where he had buried the boxes. We must have been down there at least an hour, and all the time we were scrabbling at the rubble with our hands, Ali lay delirious on the floor above. Twice Hamid's rifle cracked as he carried out David's orders and kept the wells in Hadd clear of people. Those sounds and the darkness and the feeling that at any moment we might be overwhelmed through lack of ammunition gave a sense of desperate urgency to our work.

Finally we found the boxes and hauled them through the hole to the floor above—more than a thousand rounds of ammunition and two dozen grenades. We'd barely got the boxes open when Hamid reported a Land Rover leaving the palace. We watched it from the embrasures, blaring its horn as it snaked through Hadd's crooked alleys and out through the main gates of the town. It headed south towards Saraifa, and David let it go, not firing a shot. “The sooner Sheikh Abdullah is informed of the situation here,” he said, “the sooner his raiding force will leave Saraifa in peace.” His eyes were shining now, for this was what he'd intended. That little puff of dust trailing across the desert was the visual proof of the success of his plan.

“But what happens,” I said, “when Sheikh Abdullah attacks us here with all his forces?”

He smiled, a flash of white teeth in the dark, lean face. “We're not short of ammunition now.”

“But we're short of men. There are only four of us. How many do you think Sheikh Abdullah musters?” I thought it was time he faced up to the situation.

“It's not numbers that count,” he answered tersely. “Not up here. Whoever built this fort designed it to be held by a handful of men.” And he added: “We're bloody good shots, you see. Hamid and bin Suleiman, they're like all the Bedou—they've had guns in their hands since they were kids. And me, I learned to shoot out hunting with Khalid.” He was almost grinning then. “I tell you, man, I can hit a gazelle running with a rifle bullet—and a gazelle's a bloody sight smaller than a man. Anyway,” he added, “no call for you to worry. With any luck we'll get you away under cover of darkness tonight.”

“And what about you?” I asked. “You've no camels now.”

“No.” He stared at me, a strange, sad look in his eyes. And then he gave a little shrug. “There comes a moment in every man's life, I suppose, when his destiny catches up with him.”

Again I was conscious of his strange choice of words, the sense of fatalism. “If you don't get out … if you stay here until Sheikh Abdullah's men have surrounded you …” What could I say to make him see sense? “You'll die here,” I told him bluntly.

“Probably.”

We stood there, staring at each other, and I knew there was nothing I could say that would make him change his mind. He didn't care. He was filled with a burning sense of mission. It showed in his eyes, and I was reminded of the word Sue had used to describe his mood—the word “dedicated.” All the misdirected energy that had involved him in gang warfare in Cardiff docks—now it had found an outlet, a purpose, something he believed in. Death meant nothing.

“What about Hamid and bin Suleiman?” I asked. “Will they fight with you to the end?”

“Yes,” he said. “They've a blood feud on their hands and they want to kill.”

There was nothing more to be said, then. “If I reach. Buraimi and get through to the coast, I'll inform the authorities of the situation at once.”

“Of course.” He said it with a bitter little smile, so that I was afraid he'd read my thoughts and knew I was thinking that help would arrive too late. But then he said: “It's no good talking to the authorities, you know. They won't do anything. Much better give the story to the newspapers. I wouldn't like to die without anybody knowing what I'd tried to do.” Again that bitter little smile, and then he turned away. “Better get some sleep now. You've a long journey and you'll need to be fresh for it.”

But sleep wasn't easy. The only place where there was any shade was the tower, and there Ali's agony of mind and body was a thin thread of sound piercing each moment of unconsciousness, so that I dreamed I was listening to David's death throes, at times to my own. He died as the sun sank—a brief rattle in the throat and silence. And at that same moment David scrambled in by the entrance hole to announce that there were vehicles coming from the direction of Saraifa.

“I think Ali is dead,” I said.

He bent over the boy and then nodded. “I should have put him out of his misery,” he said. “Without a doctor, he hadn't a hope, poor kid.”

From the embrasures we watched a trail of dust moving in from the desert … three open Land Rovers packed with men, a machine gun mounted in the back of each vehicle. David called down to Hamid, who was cooking rice over a fire, and he grabbed his gun and climbed the outer wall to lie prone beside bin Suleiman. David motioned me to the other embrasure. “Don't fire till I do. And, remember, every man you hit is one less for us to deal with later.” He had dropped to his knees, his rifle ready in the slit of the embrasure.

The three Land Rovers reached the main gates and there they halted, stopped by the crowd of people who swarmed round them, all pointing and gesticulating towards us. An Arab askari in the leading Land Rover swung his machine gun, and a long burst ripped the sunset stillness. Bullets splattered against the base of the tower. The guns of the other two Land Rovers followed suit—a sound like ripping calico. Several rifles were let off.

It was a demonstration designed to restore morale. My hand trembled as I set the sights of my rifle to 500. And then David fired and I was conscious of nothing but my finger on the trigger and the third Land Rover fastened like a toy to the V of my sights. The smell of cordite singed my nostrils. Fire blossomed like a yellow flower against the dun of desert sand. Men scattered. Some fell. And in a moment there was nothing to shoot at.

One Land Rover in flames, the other two deserted; some bodies lying in the dust. Tracer bullets exploded like fireworks from the back of the burning vehicle, and almost immediately a second Land Rover caught fire as the petrol tank went up.

“I'm afraid they won't give us an opportunity like that again.” David sat back on his haunches and cleared his gun. “It will be night attacks from now on.”

Hadd was deserted now. Not a soul to be seen anywhere, the alleyways and the square empty. The Emir's green flag hung limp above the palace; nothing stirred. Hamid went back to his cooking. The sun set and the excitement of action ebbed away, leaving a sense of nervous exhaustion. “You'd better leave as soon as it's dark,” David said. Dusk had fallen and we were feeding in relays. He began to brief me on the route to follow, and as I listened to his instructions, the lonely desolate miles of desert stretched out ahead. The embers of the fire were warm. The dark shapes of the surrounding walls gave a sense of security. I was loath to go, and yet I knew the security of those walls false, the embers probably the last fire for which they would have fuel.