Sandstorm Read online

  Sandstorm

  Michael Asher

  Copyright © Michael Asher 2003

  The right of Michael Asher to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2003 by HarperCollins.

  This edition published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  Acknowledgements

  Extract from Shoot to Kill by Michael Asher

  Quid non mortalia pectora cogis,

  Auri sacra fames!

  VIRGIL, The Aeneid, 111.56

  ‘A spot of piracy on the high desert ...’

  RALPH BAGNOLD, founder of the Long Range Desert Group

  Storm and adventure, heat and cold,

  ... And Buccaneers and buried Gold,

  And all the old romance, retold,

  Exactly in the ancient way ...

  ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, Treasure Island

  1

  In the whole vast immensity of the sky, the crows were the only things moving. There were two of them, and they circled, rich black dots on translucent blue. The sky had a heaviness to it, Billy Sterling thought. It was almost as if he was lying on the bed of the ocean, with the brilliant, heavy blueness above him and the soft dunes beneath. Its bigness was terrifying but in a sort of holy way — the way you felt sometimes when you entered a cathedral. As if you had to tread quietly and speak in whispers because there were big powers at work here that were dreadful and unfathomable, and you didn’t want to draw attention to yourself or wake them up.

  It was not exactly that the desert was empty — there were ridges and saw-tooth peaks all around him, layered and polished to a vermilion lacquer, and even straggled, stunted trees in little copses that looked almost like family groups of grotesque statuettes. It was more that there was nothing human — no roads, no tracks, no sign of machinery or habitation. The boy was glad that the crows were here. He understood the attraction they felt to him, the attraction of life to life.

  Billy had no idea how long he had lain on the sand. It might have been forever, except that it had been dark when he’d hit the ground and it was now light. Everything seemed tangled up in his head, and he wondered if he had imagined falling out of the sky on a parachute. He reached up and felt the lift webs sprouting from his shoulders like angel wings. His body was firmly strapped in a parachute-harness and, at the end of the webs and cords, about five metres away, a jellyfish-like canopy was fluttering, half inflated. He sat up suddenly, realizing that he had been drifting away down a river of dreams. He looked at his watch — the one that his parents had given him for his thirteenth birthday — but it was gone. Then he remembered: it had been ripped off when he’d lumbered into the bulkhead, just after Corrigan had punched him.

  He reached up again and felt his swollen jaw, remembering the shock of the blow. Apart from that, there were only vague, disjointed images — of Corrigan and Craven, with faces screwed up in alarm. The humming aircraft, with the wind roaring beyond the gaping door. The sight of Craven going out on the static line, the slow realization that the plane was going to crash. He remembered how he had screamed and struggled frantically as Corrigan had shoved him through the door — the heady rush of the slipstream; plummeting like a deadweight; the sharp tug as his fall was arrested by the developing canopy; drifting helplessly like a dandelion seed. Then hitting the ground with a crump, and the night silence absorbed by a deeper silence within.

  The crows, thwarted by Billy’s sudden return to the vertical, flapped away, cawing indignantly. He watched them go with a feeling of desperation. Then, remembering the parachute, he clutched at the release-catch, trying to recall the procedure he’d been taught. He turned to the right and pressed. The catch sprang open. He was free.

  The little finger of his left hand began to throb. It ended in a slightly swollen stump at the joint — the result of an accident when he was eight years old. It always became itchy and painful when he was under stress. He had never understood whether the pain was real or imaginary. There was nothing imaginary about this situation, though. He was stranded alone in the middle of the desert.

  His heart started drumming like a tom-tom, his breath coming in rasps, his muscles trembling. He was assailed for a moment with wild panic, and felt the urge to run. But he did not know where to go, so he stayed where he was, took a deep breath and glanced around him, letting his senses expand cautiously out into the vastness.

  The crows were black commas in the distance now. The huge dimensions of the wasteland played havoc with his perception of scale. The sun was just up, a lopsided beachball bowled along seams of dust, and he could feel the gathering prelude of the day’s heat. Billy knew that his best bet was to find the Rose of Cimarron. He didn’t recall having heard the Dakota pile in, but the way she’d been juddering and yawing before he’d been shoved through the door, he was sure she couldn’t have got far.

  He scanned into the sun. In the mid-ground, weirdly shaped nodules of rock poked out of the soft down of the dunes — rocks with toadstool heads and slender stems, looking like petrified trees. Billy remembered having studied these things in a geography lesson at Scowcroft with old Jobbins. They were called yardangs — the stems had been eroded near ground level by the abrasion of sand over eons, while the heads had remained intact. What struck Billy as odd about the rocks, though, was not their shapes. It was the fact that, at the base of one of them, stood a vertical splash of orange that seemed curiously vulgar against the desert’s subtle colour-scheme. Craven had been wearing a flying-suit of just such a shade of orange.

  Catching his breath, not daring to believe it, he shaded his eyes with his hand and peered intensely at the bright-coloured patch. It was human shape, certainly — the upright torso of a human body, and Billy could almost make out Craven’s long fingers waving feebly and his overlong hair flopping from side to side as he nodded his head. Billy’s heart began to thrust with excitement. For a moment he wondered if he had imagined it, and he peered again. No. There was movement, of that he was certain. He could clearly see Craven’s hands oscillating up and down and the head shaking to and fro. But then why wasn’t he shouting, trying to attract Billy’s attention? The answer was obvious, Billy thought: Craven had been injured in the parachute jump and couldn’t move freely or speak.

  In his relief at seeing another person, Billy forgot the pilot’s cowardly behaviour. Almost sobbing with joy, he rushed towards the yardangs, waving and gesticulating madly. ‘Major!’ he screamed. ‘Keith, I’m coming!’

  He was sinking calf-deep into the soft sand of the dunes, but he struggled on until he was gasping for air. The yardangs were further away than they had seemed, and by the time he had come within fifty feet of them, he had run out of steam. As he edged closer, Billy saw that Craven’s head was lolling on his chest, as if he were only half conscious; occasionally it raised itself a few inches, as if with tremendous effort. Billy got a glimpse of almost closed eyes and a slack jaw hanging open and slavering froth. The position of Craven’s arms, raised at shoulder height in a ‘don’t shoot’ position, seemed unnatural. Billy slowed to a cautious walk and approached the pilot with bated breath. ‘Keith?’ he said. ‘All right, Keith?’

  The only answer was a subtle tremor of the hands and the ghost of a nod, and as Billy stepped nearer he suddenly understood Craven’s predicament. He was still strapped in his parachute-harness, and the canopy had snagged on the head of one of the yardangs, suspending him u
pright, with his feet trailing on the sand. The lift webs, pulled taut by the weight of his body, had not been visible from far off. Craven’s hands were caught in the tangle of webs and cord, and the breeze in the snagged chute was playing his body like a marionette.

  On the sand, by Craven’s flying-boots, Billy saw the worn leather map-case the pilot had always carried with him — something so precious that it was never allowed out of his grasp. Billy gulped, realizing suddenly that a map might be just the thing he needed right now. Holding his breath, he lurched forward and grabbed the map-case, then backed away from the suspended body. ‘Keith!’ he recited again, but his voice was a whisper now, lacking conviction. It occurred to him suddenly that Craven must have slammed into a yardang, snapping his back like a twig. Craven was dead.

  For a second he stood rooted to the spot, not knowing what to do. A sob issued from somewhere far away and it was only with a shock that he realized it had pressed itself from his own throat. Emotions crowded in on him, control and panic battling for supremacy in his adolescent psyche. Nothing in his life had prepared him for this. It was the quickness of death that astonished him. Only yesterday this husk had been a living, functioning person. He took a step backwards as a new shockwave absorbed him. Suddenly his control gave way, and the child in him panicked. Adrenaline pulsed through his veins and he staggered further away, finally turning his back on Craven’s crucified body and pelting off helter-skelter into the desert, oblivious to everything but the horror behind him.

  *

  In his blind rush to get away, he was almost upon the Rose of Cimarron before he saw her. Panting heavily, he pulled himself up, his mouth falling open. The Dakota lay resplendent in the sunlight, a noble silver artefact from another age and time. She had not piled in, but made a miraculous landing. True, she was nose-deep in sand and her landing gear was gone, but the fuselage and wings had remained remarkably intact. Billy greeted the new apparition with a surge of hope, and for a moment the boy had comic-book visions of piloting the Dakota out of there. Then adult reality intervened. He knew that he would never have been able to fly her, even if her landing gear had been intact.

  Still, there had been a wireless on board, and maybe it was still working. Maybe he could talk to somebody on it, get himself rescued. He thrust his head through the open cargo door. The cabin looked undisturbed, the strops of the parachutes’ static lines still attached to the overhead brackets where they had been clipped. He crawled into the cabin, gagging in the stink of aviation fuel, but feeling momentarily safe from the immensity of the great void out there. Tools, water-bottles, packets of cigarettes, chewing gum and chocolate bars were strewn across the deck around the long-range fuel tank that extended almost the whole length of the cabin.

  Billy pushed through into the cockpit and squirmed into the pilot’s chair. A vacuum flask still stood in its bracket under the instrument panel, and a padded flying helmet still hung from the back of the seat where it had been tied. The panel seemed lifeless, and for what seemed an age he tinkered with it, clicking and unclicking switches, desperately trying to recall how the wireless worked. In the end he gave up, and for a long while he sat holding himself tightly, rocking backwards and forwards in the seat, feeling numb, wishing even that the two crows would return to remind him that he was not alone on the planet’s face.

  *

  Billy shivered and sat up. How long he’d been in the cockpit he didn’t know. He did not think he had slept, yet his mind had been filled with images of Craven’s dead body. He tried to steer his thoughts away from the horror he had seen, but always it returned. He was brought out of it only by the gnawing rasp of thirst in his throat. It was very hot now. He clambered back into the main cabin and groped under the baggage net for the steel jerry can Craven had left there. The can was only about half full of water and Billy knew that wouldn’t last long. He picked up chocolate bars and biscuits from the deck, and collected them in a pile. He poured water from the jerry can into an enamel mug, wolfed down melted chocolate, and gulped water. For the first time he wondered what had happened to Corrigan. Had he met the same fate as Craven, or was he still wandering around out there?

  He sat down in the doorway for a moment, and looked at the map-case he had taken from near Craven’s inert body. He had always wondered what it contained — the major had seemed so protective of it always. Maybe it was just a keepsake that reminded him of his wartime exploits. Billy’s grandfather had told him proudly that Craven had won the DFC and bar flying reconnaissance missions for the army in light aircraft called Wacos. He was one of only a handful of army officers to receive the DFC, and probably the only one with a bar. Grandfather had called Craven, ‘the bravest of the brave’, but that didn’t seem to tally with his abandoning Billy in the Dakota when it was about to crash last night. Impulsively, Billy opened the map-case. He had been expecting to find a detailed air chart — something that would give him an idea, even a vague one, of where he might be. Instead, the case held nothing but a sketch-map; neatly drawn, but a sketch-map nevertheless. Written across the top in bold capitals was the word ‘SONNENBLUME’. The map seemed to be drawn to scale. There were hand-drawn graphics of sand-dunes and rocks, and a pair of crossed swords marked Sonnenblume again, this time in smaller letters. A dotted line, starting from the crossed swords, led to an area where a maze of rocky outcrops and contour lines were drawn. There was a series of small crosses marked Graves, and nearby a larger cross marked Gorge. There was an arrow here, and next to it a tiny box, in which was written:

  1) Grave One 570 yards 340° north by northwest. Rum Flask

  2) 172 yards NW Wilkinson’s Arrow

  3) 110 yards Fanny

  Billy shook his head. It looked like something from a child’s game of pirates — he hadn’t a clue what it meant, and it gave no inkling as to where he was. He closed the case and looped it over his neck — it had been important to Craven and it might come in handy later.

  Putting the map to the back of his mind, he inched his way round the cabin, collecting anything he thought might be of use to him: spare water canteens with dribbles of liquid in them, an axe, a spanner, a rope, a torch, a cardboard carton containing tinned food. When he had gathered his trophies together, he piled them into the cockpit, where he felt safest. Then, reasoning to himself that a rescue mission was certain to come, he sat down again to wait. He waited, dozing fitfully, but outside the cockpit nothing moved but the shadows and the sun. No help came.

  *

  The night fell with frightening suddenness, and with it came an unexpected drop in temperature that had the boy shivering in his cotton shirt. He dozed again, woken every few minutes, it seemed, by the cold. His only comfort was to nibble on the biscuits, but they left him thirsty and he dared not drink too much of the water. A moon came up — a first-quarter moon like a long curved dagger, so close you could almost touch it, and through the aircraft’s windscreen he could see familiar patterns of stars he could not name. The vastness of space only made his sense of impotence more acute.

  He slept again, dozing deeply this time. In his dreams a wizened creature — a wolf with a shadowed face — heaved itself up from the sands beneath the plane and clutched his arm with skeletal fingers, twisting it hard until it broke with an audible snap. Billy’s eyes flew open.

  He sat bolt upright, all his senses alert, wondering if the noise had come from within his dream or without. He strained for sound in the darkness, holding his breath, and listened with his ear cocked to one side. From the outside came the faintest scuffle. He listened again, thinking it might be the wind, but the desert night was as still as the grave, and the faint sound came once more. Billy felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle, and fought to hold down his breathing. There was something moving outside the aircraft — something that he could sense but could not see. The idea grew upon him that it was a human being out there, and suddenly the irrational notion that it might be Craven vaulted into his mind. Maybe the major wasn’t really de
ad. No, that was crazy. But the events of the previous day and the silence of the night had already blurred the edges of reality. What if he had got it wrong? What if Craven had only been unconscious after all? Billy cursed himself. How could Craven possibly be alive? He had seen him cold and dead as a stone. If there was somebody out there, it had to be Corrigan, not Craven. He considered calling Corrigan’s name, but checked himself. He listened again. There was no sound from outside, and again he asked himself if he had dreamed it. The mind could play funny tricks out here.

  When at last the night ended and long shadows began to sprout from the trees and under the plane, Billy crawled out, shivering. He watched the sun come into being beyond the vermilion ridges in the distance, a fragile eddy of light at first, flaring in intensity as it strengthened its grip on the day. A gauze of heat shimmered along the jagged skyline, forming and breaking like bubbles of gas.

  For a while Billy stood there, sensing the sacred character of the moment, feeling the night’s claustrophobia melt into an awe for the hugeness of the world and the smallness of his place in it. It was a shift of absolutes —in the night your world became reduced to the little you could sense around you; in the day you were a mote under the endless sky.

  Billy paced around, slapping his arms across his chest as if to beat the cold away. Suddenly he stopped. There, not twenty feet from the Rose of Cimarron, the fresh tracks of naked human feet were cut neatly into the sand.

  Billy’s first instinct was to rush back to the Rose of Cimarron in terror, but he was weary of running, knowing that in this great void there could be no hiding-place. Trembling, he began to follow the tracks. It seemed to him that they were more slender and smaller than Craven’s would have been, but he could not be sure. The most disquieting thing, though, was that the footprints actually led in the direction of the yardangs, where he had left Craven’s body. It was surprisingly far: Billy realized that he must have been completely unconscious of the distance during his mad flight away from the corpse the previous day. As he approached the place his disquiet increased. He had no desire to see Craven’s body again, but the sense of unease seemed to come from something else. He could not see the parachute canopy flapping on the rocks. He paused behind the cluster of yardangs, breathing heavily, then made his way around them — and stood petrified.