The Secret War (23 page)

“I'm sorry—Ben Ibrim's fooled us. Make north—towards French Somaliland—try and get clear. If you see a good stretch, land, and we'll run for it.”

At the first staccato rattle Valerie had glanced over her shoulder and realised the meaning of it.

“We're done!” she gasped. “Their plane's faster than mine—and it's higher. We can't shoot back—they'll do us in for certain.” But as she spoke she flung the joystick over and they curved into a sickening dive to the right of the railway.

Zarrif's plane followed. Lovelace could picture him in his forward cabin, cold and impassive, submitting with bleak resignation to this momentary interruption of his work while his gunmen carried out his orders.

A few hundred feet above the desert Valerie flattened out and zoomed up again; heading north as Lovelace had told her.

The enemy, realising that the manœuvre was a trick, banked steeply and came roaring after them. The
shadows of the two planes, black and clear-cut like two huge birds, raced at two hundred miles an hour across the desert.

Valerie was climbing again which caused her to lose pace. The bigger machine swooped suddenly, diving at them with both its forward guns blazing. Valerie flicked her plane over so that it almost turned turtle; righted it again and shot skywards. The two planes seemed to miss each other only by inches but she had escaped the hail of bullets and now had the greater altitude.

Christopher lurched to his feet, his pistol drawn, his black eyes staring, waiting for a chance to open fire upon their overwhelmingly more powerful enemy.

Lovelace pulled his arm. “That's no good,” he yelled, “you couldn't hit them in a month of Sundays. Save your bullets—we'll need them if we can only land.”

Both planes were climbing again now; straining for height: Valerie, that she might get clear for a breakneck dive to attempt a landing on a patch of even ground she could see ahead, and Zarrif's pilot so that he might swoop at her again. For three breathless moments there was silence.

Suddenly the attack opened once more. The chatter of the machine-guns was louder now. A spate of bullets tore through the fuselage of the smaller plane. Valerie swerved; then dropped like a stone. Christopher was flung off his feet. Lovelace gasped as his heart seemed to rise up into his throat. Yet even in that moment, as they flashed out of the bullet-spattered area, he realised what a superb pilot they had in the white-faced girl beside him.

Before they knew what was happening she had righted the plane again and was heading north once more. They had dropped a thousand feet but the desert was still over two thousand feet below them.

Zarrif's plane was after them, heavier but as fast, two streams of bullets zipping from its forward guns. A control wire snapped with a loud ping as a shot cut through it, a dozen more made a line of punctures in the metal-work of the cabin only a few inches behind Christopher's shoulders.

Valerie threw back her head. She was not looking at Christopher but at Lovelace. Her glance held no fear but distress and apology. She had done her best to get clear but it was impossible.

His grimace was meant to be a smile of thanks, admiration, understanding. He nodded once, pulled the rip cord of the emergency exit in the roof of the cabin, and shouted: “Land! Anywhere! It's our only chance.”

Next second she had thrown the plane into a spin. Gyrating madly they plunged down, down, down, while the spinning earth rushed up to meet them.

Lovelace held his breath; waiting for the terrific impact which he knew must come before oblivion. Suddenly they came out of the spin and seemed to flash along the surface of the ground at breakneck speed, almost scraping it. There was a frightful jolt; they bounded into the air again with the ground still racing away beneath them until a wing-tip caught upon a giant boulder. The plane swerved violently. With the scream of tearing fabric and twisted metal it turned right round, lurched sideways, and came to a standstill.

For a moment they were too dazed to move. Christopher recovered first and began to scramble out through the roof of the cabin. “Come on!” he called, stretching down a hand to grab Valerie's arm. “Come on! They're still shooting at us.”

Lovelace thrust her up and followed her through the aperture. They saw Zarrif's plane, far above them now, circling in the wide blue sky. Its guns still flashed and a hail of bullets was tearing the left wing of Valerie's machine to pieces.

As they jumped to the ground the fierce heat of the stones struck up to their feet through the soles of their shoes but they did not heed it as they dashed for cover.
Instinctively they headed for a natural arch formed by two big rocks, about a hundred yards away, and flung themselves down beneath it.

For a few moments bullets continued to clatter on the stones about them; then there fell a sudden silence broken only by the drone of the plane above. It grew fainter and Lovelace peered out. The enemy were apparently content with having shot them down; for the plane had turned and was heading away towards Addis Ababa.

He wondered that Zarrif should be satisfied to leave them still alive when, by expending a little more time and ammunition, he could have descended to a closer range and massacred them in spite of their scant cover. Yet they must be thirty, if not fifty, miles now from the railway line and a hundred from a village that contained a white man. They would die of thirst and starvation in that blistering desert before they could cover half such a distance. All the same it was strange that Zarrif should have left them even so slender a chance of life.

Suddenly he saw something move behind a boulder. Through the shimmering heat haze a savage, brown face, surmounted by fuzzy, black hair, was peering at him.

Valerie gave a cry and gripped Christopher's arm. She was looking in a different direction and had seen another. The whole region seemed to come to life and there were scores of dark, shiny faces glaring at them.

Lovelace understood then why Zarrif had left them. He had seen the tribesmen from above. This was Danakil country where whites were first terribly mutilated and then murdered. He had gone on to Addis Ababa, quite satisfied that there was not the slightest chance of their ever troubling him again.

There was only one thing for it, Lovelace knew. He had got to shoot Valerie first and himself afterwards.

Lovelace stared out into the heat haze. The blistering sun was already scorching his back and shoulders through his thin tunic. The yellow-brown rocks danced and shimmered. Above them, no more than twenty yards away, peered the brutal faces of the savage Danakils. It was no nightmare, but reality. This was Abyssinia, and an end to their mad venture before they had been two hours over the frontier of the country. A swarm of the fuzzy-haired warriors were already looting the wrecked plane.

“Speak to them!” Valerie's voice came low-pitched and urgent at his side. “Speak to them and tell them we're not Italians.”

He shook his head helplessly. Even if he could have said in the dialect of the tribe: “We are neutrals on our way to Addis Ababa to stop war—not to make it,” he doubted if it would have made the least difference.

These barbarous Danakils were killers of unprotected travellers in normal times, as even then the Emperor's writ was so much waste paper more than fifty miles from his capital. He had to collect his taxes by a series of armed forays each year, and the townships of his so-called Ethiopian Empire, which was six times the size of Abyssinia proper, were only kept in subjection by garrisons of Amhara soldiery. Lovelace knew the complicated system of guides and presents by which any visitor to the interior of the country had to be passed on from one local chieftain to another if he was to escape attack. Now it had filtered through to tribesmen that their country was at war they would risk attacking even
armed convoys under the impression that rewards would be forthcoming for every white they slaughtered. He could speak Arabic, Urdú, “pidgin” French and “pidgin” English, and had a smattering of various other non-European languages, but Danakil, or even Amharic, was utterly beyond him.

“I'm sorry,” he muttered. “I can't, and, anyhow, these people don't know one European nation from another—only that it's no longer necessary even to make excuses when they murder white men.”

Christopher's thoughts were racing wildly. He was much younger than Lovelace, and this was the first time in his life that he had ever found himself outside the protection of organised law and order. At the first sight of the natives he wondered why they did not use their long, old-fashioned guns or cast their tufted spears. Then he realised that the encircling ring of warriors had crawled nearer and meant to capture them alive. His next thought was the appalling one that Lovelace had had only a few seconds before. He must shoot Valerie first and himself immediately afterwards.

Lovelace had already drawn his pistol. He knew far better than Christopher the terrible mutilations and tortures that all three of them would suffer if they allowed themselves to be captured. He gazed round him, hoping desperately to find one friendly face in the ring of evil masks; a chief to whom they might offer ransom, or a semi-cultured type; but they were all stupid, brutal, bestial; their black hair wild and shaggy, their eyes fierce with the lust for blood.

He raised his automatic. Sweat was pouring off his face in rivulets. With an almost superhuman effort of will he jerked the gun up behind Valerie's shoulder until it was pointing at the base of her skull behind the left ear. She would know nothing about it; feel nothing but a smashing blow and then be beyond all physical joy or pain for ever.

At that instant she turned. She could not see the
pistol, but his raised arm and half-crazed expression told her of his intention. Instinctively, blind terror gripped her. Her mouth fell open, her grey eyes started from her head, and she ducked with such suddenness that she stumbled and fell forward on her knees.

Hardly a moment had elapsed since their first sight of the Danakils. As though her fall had been a signal, the native warriors gave a yell of triumph and, leaping from their cover, came dashing pell-mell across the twenty yards of open ground.

In a second Valerie grasped the full horror of her situation. To fall alive into the hands of these murderous savages meant twenty deaths instead of one. Far better that Lovelace should blow her brains out. She wrenched herself round on her knees and threw her head back.

“All right!” she gasped. “Go on—shoot me!”

Lovelace had let his pistol-hand drop to his side. Now he raised it again until the weapon pointed at her breast. For split seconds, each of which seemed like an eternity, he strove to force himself to press the trigger.

He could have managed it before, when she was not looking; but now that she was staring up at him, her eyes riveted on his, waiting for the bullet to sear through her body, he could not.

Christopher had turned and was shouting something. His black eyes shone feverishly in a face drained of blood. His
Millers
' lethal gas pistol, too, was now aimed at Valerie, but her fall had lost them precious seconds, and before either of the men had time to nerve himself for his terrible act the Danakils were upon them.

At the last moment, Christopher, swerving from his purpose, swung round and discharged his weapon at one of the warriors. Lovelace kept his pistol levelled at Valerie and pulled the trigger, but a huge native leap, upon her as the automatic flashed and took the bullet in his thigh.

After that all chance to kill each other or themselves was gone. They were borne down by a solid mass of black, stinking humanity. It was all over within one minute of the warriors having left their cover. Battered, bruised, breathless, the two white men and the girl were lugged to their feet, alive but captives, to find themselves staring half-dazed into a host of hostile, brutish faces.

Without further delay they were pushed and pulled over the hot stones, past their wrecked plane and on through the wilderness.

It seemed to stretch interminably behind them and on either side, with neither tree, nor shrub, nor waterhole to break the endless monotony of sun-scorched rock, but before them rose a great range of cliffs; the first step to the highlands of the interior. Black, precipitous, apparently unscalable, they towered up in the near distance, cutting sharply across the skyline.

The prisoners were being taken towards the west, and the morning sun beat down with relentless force upon their backs. Valerie had lost her hat, and only her chestnut hair, now hanging about her head in damp, tangled rats' tails, protected her from sunstroke. As she was hurried along, tripping and stubbing her toes on the hot, uneven ground in the firm grip of two perspiring natives, she thought of that; then realised how little sunstroke mattered. In a few hours she would be raving mad from the atrocities these animals in human form would practice upon her.

Lovelace and Christopher were both thinking of the same thing, and each was cursing himself for his cowardly hesitation at the moment when he might have shot her. They trudged on blindly, hastened by jabs from spear-points and blows from the muzzles of ancient blunderbusses.

Before they had covered five hundred yards of their terrible journey all of them had lapsed into semi-consciousness from heat, nightmare imagination, and
brutal beating. The naked rocks underfoot had given way to tough, dry, desert grass and through this they were half-dragged, half-carried, until they arrived within a hundred yards of the cliff face. There, they sensed rather than saw that they had arrived outside a village.

A swarm of screaming women and a host of naked children came out to meet them, dancing and grimacing with delirious glee, while the warriors broke into a shrill, unmelodious song of triumph at their capture.

The village was no more than a collection of daub-and-wattle huts clustered together at the foot of the cliff. It was so primitive that it had not even an open space at its centre. By the nearest hut an old, old man, with a fringe of white hair round his polished skull and a wizened, monkey-like face, stood leaning on a staff. As the gibbering mob dragged their prisoners before him he regarded them with small, cruel, rheumy eyes for a moment, then muttered a few words in his own dialect. Without further parley they were jostled another twenty yards and flung head foremost into an empty hut.