Sandstorm Read online

  Craven’s body was no longer there. Not a sign or a trace of it. For a fraction of a second Billy wondered if he’d imagined it. For another long moment he thought he must have come to the wrong place. No, he had not imagined it, and this was the right place — the shape of the yardangs here was very distinctive. As he sidled nearer, he saw that the sand was scuffed and broken by the same barefoot tracks. The tracks were there, but Craven had gone, the parachute canopy had gone, everything had gone. Billy staggered backwards; then, for the second time, he turned and fled from the same spot.

  Rose of Cimarron glittered in the light of the rising sun. She drew his eye magnetically, seeming two or three times her true size. Billy shambled nearer, knowing that the Dakota could not really protect him, but taking comfort from her presence anyway.

  He was about to enter, through the open cargo door, when a long shadow fell across his own. Billy put up his arm instinctively to protect himself and saw that the shadow belonged to a dark rider from the deepest reaches of nightmare. He froze, catching his breath, staggered by the sight. It was a man looking like an Old Testament prophet, mounted on a white camel. The man was dressed in a fluttering black head-cloth and blue robes that billowed behind him over the camel’s flank. With one hand he held in check the beast’s gnashing, snapping, snake-like head, and in the other hand he held a slim stick. An old rifle was slung over his shoulder. He looked as if he’d stepped out of some fantastic dimension, like a wizard from a fairytale book. His hands and feet were as thin as a skeleton’s, his face etched like desert rock, with only a straggly wisp of beard at the end of a long chin. Smears of dye had rubbed off on his skin, giving the face a patina of raw blueness. The old man’s eyes were alive with animal curiosity, wisps of grey hair hanging down from beneath the head-cloth. His teeth were bared under a hawk-like beak of a nose, and Billy could not tell whether he was smiling. He said something, and the words sounded harsh and guttural, as if they had come from deep inside.

  Billy was so overwhelmed with the vision that in the moment he might have taken to his heels, he instead stared back at the old man’s face, mesmerized. And in that moment the Blue Man slipped out of the saddle with ease, and reached for him.

  2

  ‘I go back now,’ Sliman said in tortured English. He applied the Jeep’s brakes jerkily and put the gear in neutral. Squinting through the dust-jacketed windscreen, George Bridger Sterling could make out the shape of the kasbah standing on the very edge of the rocky hammada, the desert surface swept clear of sand and dust by the wind. Above it towered orange and yellow dunes. The kasbah looked like a Gothic castle that had melted in the heat. It was at least a mile away.

  He glared at the driver harshly. ‘We’re paying you to take us to the kasbah,’ he said. ‘We aren’t there yet.’

  Sliman took a flat packet of cigarettes from the pocket of his djellaba, teased one out with his thumb and forefinger and lit it with a match. He was a thin man with bulging eyes and bulbous lips, a combination that gave him a curiously baleful expression. ‘Maybe I get stuck in sand,’ he said. ‘Or maybe that crazy son-of-a-bitch Sheikh Mafoudh take a shot at me. You get out here.’

  Suddenly the driver froze with the cigarette in his mouth. His knuckles went white on the steering wheel. Sterling turned to see that Eric Churchill, in the back seat, was holding the muzzle of his Smith & Wesson .38 flush with the Arab’s head. ‘I don’t think so,’ Churchill growled. ‘It’s not that I’m sorry to find this is the end of the road. Three days of bone shaking across the Atlas is enough. But a deal is a deal. The agreement was that you delivered us to the door.’

  Churchill looked intimidating, Sterling had to admit. He was six-foot-three, a powerful, slightly round-shouldered man, who for a moment resembled his namesake, Winston, as he demonstrated the grim-set, turned-down mouth and knitted eyebrows of the ‘we will fight on the beaches’ speech that Eric knew off by heart. But the resemblance went only so far. At thirty-seven, Eric was a little under half Winnie’s age, and the dark eyes and slightly hooked nose held a hint of foreignness that would have been quite out of place on the elder statesman.

  Sliman burst into a bout of coughing and dropped the cigarette on his lap, where it burned a hole in the cloth of his djellaba. Sterling retrieved it, and threw it out of the window, while Sliman beat at his burning djellaba and spluttered. ‘This Sheikh Mafoudh, he possessed by yenun,’ he gabbled. ‘Crazy, you unnerstan’? He don’t like visitors. He even shoot at people. Maybe he shoot you — me too.’

  ‘And if you don’t go,’ Churchill growled, ‘then I shall certainly shoot you.’

  Cursing to himself, Sliman nosed the Jeep in the direction of the kasbah.

  As they got nearer, it looked less impressive. It was more than half ruined, its outer walls caved in, the roof mostly gone. Behind the rambling building, tamarisk trees grew in the skirts of the dunes, some of them ancient, huge, and grotesquely twisted. Above the tamarisk groves rose the razor-edged creases of the sands, dividing light from dark, climaxing in drifting soft peaks in rose and orange ochre, buff and flame. The highest peak stood at least 500 feet above the hammada.

  It was mid-morning, but already the sky was a radiant blue screen. A shimmer of heat rose across the eastern horizon; somewhere over there, Sterling knew, Morocco ended and French Algeria began. The Spanish sector lay almost 400 miles south by west.

  Sand drifts had piled up against the kasbah’s mud walls, which were the texture of dried beef, and a door stood open, gaping like a missing front tooth. As they drew near, a barefooted Arab in a ragged brown robe and head-cloth stepped into the doorway. He had a face as rough as buck-skin, with eyes the colour of slate. He wore a cartridge belt round his waist with a hooked dagger in it, and in his hands he held an old rifle. It was pointed at them.

  Sliman began to tremble. He brought the car to a halt and stuck his head out of the window. ‘Don’t shoot!’ he cried in Arabic. ‘These are the foreign visitors who arranged to meet Sheikh Mafoudh.’

  ‘Mirhabban bikum,’ the Arab said. ‘Welcome.’ His eyes did not lose their slaty coolness, and the rifle stayed pointing at the Jeep. Sterling and Churchill got out and unloaded their canvas kitbags, and Churchill slapped dirhams into the driver’s hand. Sliman counted them fastidiously. ‘Hey!’ he said at last. ‘No tip?’

  ‘On your bike,’ Churchill said.

  The Moroccan narrowed his bug eyes, knowing he’d been put down but trying to grasp what bikes had to do with it. ‘You fuck,’ he spat.

  ‘As do you,’ Churchill said.

  The man gave them a last look of hatred, a fearful glance at the Arab with the rifle, and sped off towards the horizon, leaving them alone with the Arab.

  Once the Moroccan had gone, the Arab seemed to relax. He shook hands with them both, and led them through the doorway into a yard that was dilapidated and open to the elements. It was carpeted with sand and goat-turds, and a white Hand of Fatima was painted on the wall as protection against the evil eye. Above them there were the remains of a roof of palm-beams, palm-stalks and fibres, much of which had collapsed onto the floor. The walls had mostly fallen in under the pressure of creeping sand; Sterling glimpsed through the spaces the sun glittering on the polished quartz and limestone nodules of the hammada — acres of stone stretching eternally across the void.

  Six men were sitting around a hearth in the middle of the shaded bit of the yard. Some were wearing ragged head-cloths, the colour of the desert sands; all wore patched Arab shirts with cartridge belts and daggers. Their rifles were leaning against the wall nearby. Most had the chiselled features of Arabs, but a couple were distinctly African. To Sterling they looked like wild men — as primitive as the natives of New Guinea he’d seen in National Geographic — and yet their manners were gracious. All stood up to welcome the Englishmen, and one, an old man with a white beard and a smoothly shaven head, grinned at Churchill, showing a single yellow tooth, like a claw, that wobbled as he spoke. ‘Captain!’ he yelled, slapping Chu
rchill’s big hand with his own and flinging his emaciated arms round him. ‘Captain! Is it really you? They say you are back but I don’t believe it. I say, I don’t believe till I see the captain hisself! And, God be praised, here you are!’ He launched into a stream of Arabic, which Churchill seemed to comprehend, alternately wringing his hand and thumping his broad shoulder.

  Churchill introduced him to Sterling and the old man shook his hand violently. ‘Sheikh Mafoudh worked with me as a guide in the war,’ Churchill said. ‘One of my Baker Street Irregulars. This is his little gang. They’re outcasts: ex-slaves, fugitives, Znaga — mostly not true desert people — but they know the desert well enough to get us into the Spanish Sahara.’

  Churchill and Sterling shook hands with the whole crew, and were welcomed by the fire. Glasses of hot tea were poured from a decrepit miniature teapot and forced on them.

  Sterling stared at the glass — it seemed to have acquired half the substance of the desert in its travels. ‘Don’t think about it, just drink it,’ Churchill whispered. Sterling sipped it gingerly. It tasted like vinegar.

  ‘Tea no good?’ Sheikh Mafoudh demanded with mock indignation.

  Churchill chuckled. ‘You have to slurp it,’ he said. ‘Or they’ll be insulted.’

  He demonstrated by slurping his own tea noisily. Mafoudh and his ragged gang nodded with approval.

  When the tea-drinking ceremony was finished, Churchill asked Sterling to get out the map. He took it and showed it to Mafoudh, who promptly turned it upside down. ‘Afrangi map,’ the old man commented, his single tooth wobbling. ‘Arab map is better.’ He pointed a callused finger to his smooth pate. ‘Arab map up here.’

  Churchill handed the map back to Sterling. ‘We’re looking for an aircraft,’ he said. ‘An iron bird, like the ones you used to see taking off in Casablanca, Sheikh Mafoudh.’

  The old sheikh nodded vigorously.

  ‘It came down in the desert,’ Churchill went on. ‘In the Seguiet al-Hamra, seven years ago. Did you ever hear tell of such an aircraft?’

  The old man tilted his head to one side. ‘Many iron birds come down in desert,’ he said. ‘But the Seguiet al-Hamra ... that is Reguibat country — very dangerous. It is far.’

  ‘The man who made the map didn’t know the name of the place,’ Churchill said. ‘But it is an unusual place. On one side are high dunes, on another broken hills and empty desert. On another side there is quicksand. Do you know of a place like this?’

  The sheikh went quiet for a moment, then translated what Churchill had said to his crew. In a second everyone was talking at once. After a while, Mafoudh held up his hand for quiet and looked at Churchill. ‘You mean the Ghaydat al-Jahoucha,’ he said grimly. The others nodded and sucked in their breath. ‘I have been there once,’ he went on. ‘Many, many years ago, when I was young. It is dangerous. The dunes on the north side are called the Uruq ash-Shaytan and they stretch across the plain in an unbroken wall. I never heard of anyone crossing the Uruq with camels. The quicksand is called Umm al-Khof. It can be crossed by a single path, but that is known to none but the hunting people. The third way — across the Zrouft, the Plain of Thirst, is our only way in, but even that is hard, by God. Seven days without water for the camels. God only knows, if it is hot, camels die. Then we all die.’

  Churchill was watching him intently now. ‘Can you take us there?’ he asked.

  Mafoudh looked troubled. He scratched his white beard, and began to gabble to his men. Once again the yard was filled with excited voices. One of the men, a squat Arab with a curly mass of black hair and a twist of beard on his long chin, leapt up, ripped off his head-cloth and threw it down. One of the black men — an immensely powerful-looking man with tribal tattoos on his cheeks — began to bawl at him, gesturing angrily with his stick. Everyone was shouting.

  Sterling shot Churchill a look of concern. ‘Don’t worry,’ Churchill smiled. ‘You should see them when they’re worked up.’

  When the noise had quietened down again, the sheikh beamed at Churchill, waggling his one loose tooth with his tongue. ‘We can take you,’ he said. ‘But the way is hard even for us. Very hard for you.’ He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together and a crafty look came into his eyes. ‘It will cost many, many moneys,’ he said.

  *

  The tribesmen chattered on exuberantly while Churchill and Sheikh Mafoudh began to reminisce in Arabic about old times. Sterling’s Arabic was passable but not perfect, and soon he lost track of the conversation, drifting off into the inner world that had become his familiar resort ever since Margaret had died. Seven years, he thought, since Billy had disappeared in Morocco, and in all that time there hadn’t been a hint of what had happened to him. Not a trace of the missing aircraft had been found.

  Nothing until the day, only a few weeks back, when Sterling had suddenly received a call at his office in London from a man calling himself ‘Mr Black’. ‘Mr Black’ claimed that he had information about Billy, and had asked Sterling to meet him in a West End pub called the Marquis of Granby that evening. It was an offer Sterling couldn’t refuse.

  It had been a gloomy, wet night in February. In the pub, clusters of men in shabby raincoats were leaning morosely over a beer-soaked bar, or hobnobbing in alcoves under a haze of tobacco smoke like a camouflage net. Sterling ordered a pint of bitter. When the barman set the glass under the pump, he noticed that there was a clean-sheared stump where the man’s hand should have been. He watched the cripple with fascination as he heaved on the handle, holding the glass in place with his stump. The man noticed his gaze and nodded, unembarrassed, at his mutilated limb. ‘Dunkirk,’ he commented. ‘Christ! What a bleeding pig’s ear.’

  ‘Isn’t it always?’ Sterling said, half to himself.

  The barman’s eyes flickered momentarily on him, taking in the tousled, unkempt hair, the worn greatcoat, the shirt with its flyaway collar. ‘What about you?’ he growled. ‘Come out all right?’

  Sterling shrugged, not wanting to get drawn into the subject of what he had done in the war. Some of the worst mutilations, he thought, were on the inside. ‘I missed Dunkirk, thank God. I was here and there, you know.’

  He paid the sixpence hurriedly, but the barman’s eyes followed him as he sat down at a round table in front of a flickering coke fire.

  ‘Mr Sterling?’

  The voice was almost a whisper, and the accent was distinctly American. Sterling turned slightly to see a man in a brown overcoat and broad-brimmed hat looming over him. The man was thin and pale-looking, with wire-framed glasses that rimmed hollow eyes. He was not old, yet he looked tarnished — as threadbare as the coat he was wearing. He kept his hands in his pockets as if suffering from the cold, but a copy of the Daily Mail was folded under his arm. He glanced nervously around him. ‘You alone?’ he asked.

  Sterling half smiled. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Mr Black’ continued to gaze around uncertainly, and Sterling saw cold fear behind the spectacles. ‘You certain you didn’t bring anyone?’ he demanded.

  ‘Of course I am. What are you afraid of, anyway?’

  The man sat down circumspectly in the chair opposite, and stared at him. ‘Werewolves,’ he said. He did not smile.

  Sterling shivered inwardly. ‘I beg your pardon?’ he said.

  The man seemed to be examining his features minutely. ‘Even the walls have ears. Isn’t that what they used to say during the war? Careless talk costs lives? Loose lips sink ships?’

  ‘The war’s over,’ Sterling said.

  ‘Not for some, it’s not. For some it’s still on.’

  ‘Mr Black’ put the newspaper down on the table and tried to warm his hands in the fickle heat of the coke. His fingers were slender and the nails bitten down to the bone. His hands shook slightly as he held them up, Sterling noticed. ‘Cold tonight,’ he said in the same sandpapery voice. ‘At least the rain’s stopped.’

  He took a packet of Camel cigarettes from his pocket, stuck one in his mouth and lit it shaki
ly with a match. He blew smoke at the fire, then suddenly burst into a paroxysm of coughing. Sterling watched, fascinated, wondering what would come next.

  ‘Still,’ the man went on hoarsely, after the coughing had died down, ‘the rain’s better than one of them pea-soupers, ain’t it?’ He coughed again briefly. ‘You remember that one coupla months back? They reckon it laid upwards of ten thousand in their graves.’

  Sterling nodded. ‘Yes, but it was an exaggeration by the press. Most of the deaths were actually from asthma or an outbreak of Asian flu.’

  He moved his chair back an inch. He found the man’s appearance disagreeable. There was an unwashed smell about him, almost as if he had been sleeping rough.

  ‘Mr Black’ was staring into the fire, exhaling smoke. ‘Hell of a dump, anyway,’ he commented. He grinned at Sterling suddenly, and the feeble light of the coke flame glinted on broken teeth. ‘Drink’d be nice.’

  Sterling swallowed back a rejoinder to this solecism. ‘What’ll you have?’

  ‘Brandy. Make it a big one.’

  ‘Mr Black’ was still staring into the fire, smoking and coughing alternately, when Sterling returned with the brandy. He took it without thanks and drank half of it greedily in a gulp. ‘That’s the stuff,’ he said. ‘Dopes you up good.’

  ‘Mr Black,’ Sterling began, but the man held up a lean hand.

  ‘Name’s not Black,’ he said. ‘It’s Corrigan. Former Flight Sergeant US Air Force. Currently unemployed.’