Three

 

 

1

 

Though Pentecost wasn’t aware of it, down in the shabby tortuous city of Khaswe, the commanding British officer, Major-General Alan Cozzens – known to his troops as ‘Teeth and Trousers’ – had also heard of the strange friendship that had grown up along the northern frontier.

The decaying atmosphere of Khaswe, with the Nationalists waiting to rush in when the British left and the Sultan living under the sword of Damocles, was enough to give Cozzens nightmares at times. The latest information in his possession was that, despite all the reassuring noises from Whitehall, Tafas was going to repudiate the agreement he’d made and demand that they stay. Tafas was noted for his slipperiness and the impermanence of his decisions. He was forgetful, changeable, stubborn, brave, and so secretive it was said his Ministers had to spy on him to find out what he intended. And with the Arab Nationalists flaying him for the presence of the British and ready to throw bombs like confetti if he went back on his word, good news was more than welcome. Especially about Aziz.

Aziz el Beidawi’s Zihounis were the notorious Black Men that Lawrence had so distrusted fifty-odd years before and, in their time, they had indulged in sensuality and the grossest kind of murder, treachery and sudden death. Yet, despite their cold-blooded cruelty, Cozzens had also heard that they were strangely poetic in their language, liked music and were given to wearing flowers in their hair, and enjoyed stories of fairies and djinns. But they were also vain, vengeful and venal, and their history was a monotonous record of perfidy, naked treachery and wholesale betrayals, and men of importance in Khusar were still said to sleep during the day and stay awake at night holding a loaded gun. Their whole life was one of warfare and gloom. Every tribe had its enemies, every family its blood-feud, every man his assassin. Hejri and Khaliti didn’t mix and never could. They had loathed each other through all their history and there was a story of how, when one of each had been murdered in the Fajir Pass, even their blood had refused to mingle as they had lain together on the stony ground.

In all this hatred, Cozzens found the news from Hahdhdhah deeply satisfying because he was also aware of the restrictions placed on the frontier garrisons in an attempt to keep the atmosphere up there sweet. People like Pentecost were conducting their affairs with one hand tied behind their backs and the Hejris were far from being out of practice. They had never lost interest in murder, rape and looting, and with Abd el Aziz el Beidawi sitting in the hills Cozzens realised he would be quite wrong to imagine they’d lost their old hostility. The last man who’d had to face Aziz had come back broken in spirit and health, but there was a calm self-confidence in Pentecost’s reports – almost a smugness, dammit! – that made Cozzens decide that the boy had a kind of genius. He had somehow made contact with the grim old warrior when a dozen political agents before him had failed, and they were now not only on speaking terms, they were actually even exchanging gifts.

As he thought about Pentecost, Cozzens thought also about his wife. Charlotte Pentecost was the daughter of an old comrade from the last war and he guessed she wasn’t enjoying herself alone, with her husband two hundred and fifty miles away to the north, sitting on a bomb. She was a pretty young woman with a lively mind and a tremendous zest for living, as attractive as her mother had once been and, judging by two children in three years, just as eager. Cozzens’ eyes grew distant with nostalgia, then he coughed hurriedly and rubbed his hand across his face.

‘Hm! Hah! Yes!’

‘Charlotte Pentecost,’ he said aloud, trying to keep his mind on the present when it persisted on straying to the past. He knew she kept herself to herself and never placed herself in a position where any of the brash young officers in the city, encouraged by the heat and Pentecost’s absence, might try to take advantage of her loneliness. Yet Cozzens knew she wasn’t happy either, because Khaswe was no place for a young woman with two young sons, and he made a note on his pad that it might be a good idea to have her to the next party they held so that she could meet a few other wives of her own age – in an atmosphere of safety away from the dangers of the old town where she had a flat.

Charlotte Pentecost, he wrote in his diary in his cramped square hand. Dinner? Drinks?

He wondered if she’d accept. His wife was known to the Command – most unfairly, because they thought quite wrongly that she ran it – as ‘Machine Gun Maggie’, and he knew that the wives of many of his officers failed completely to see beyond her hearty facade to the kindness beneath and ducked her receptions.

As he put down the pen, he noticed at the top of the sheet another entry – Bishop of Harwick – and he sighed.

Oh, God, he thought, that bloody man! With his dog collar and holier-than-thou face, the Bishop of Harwick was one of the younger men in the top echelons of the Church and well known to Cozzens for being far more concerned with racialism, aid to backward nations and world starvation then he ever was with the spiritual needs of his own flock. Until he and his friends had started preaching ‘Love our black brothers’, it had never occurred to the blunt and forthright Cozzens to do anything else. The same applied to backward nations, world starvation and bad housing. Cozzens had been prepared to accept them all, even to offer his mite towards their alleviation, but the Bishop of Harwick had finally begun to convince him that everyone was right but the British.

And the Bishop had now arrived in Khalit on what he liked to call a fact-finding tour, together with Forester Hobbins, who was Britain’s arch-protester, member of the Nancy Left, intellectual and leader – from the back – of every assault on the American Embassy that ever took place. With them had come all the hordes of newspapermen who hung on their words, eager to make capital out of well-chosen criticism, among them Alec Gloag, the one television commentator Cozzens actively detested. His clipped Glaswegian voice sent shudders up and down Cozzens’ spine as he tore to shreds the reputations of men who, not having the advantage of television’s speedy growth, had taken a lifetime to make them. There were others too – Lewis, Garbitt, Hatchard and Diplock – already in Khalit and sending home snippets of news that gave Cozzens sleepless nights as he saw in them provocation for the Nationalists who were just waiting in the back streets of the Khesse district for something to go wrong.

Staring at the Bishop of Harwick’s name, Cozzens wished he could send him across the Toweida Plain to Hahdhdhah on an ass carrying a palm branch, which was all he seemed to think was needed to ensure peace. It might have worked for Jesus Christ, the General decided bitterly, but it certainly wouldn’t work for Harwick.

And finally, Westminster’s representative, a senior Minister of the Crown who was on his way to reassure the Sultan of the British Government’s honourable intentions with regard to the treaty but to beg him not to have second thoughts about it because such treaties had long since become embarrassing.

Cozzens had heard that the British Government would much have preferred a more enlightened rule whether they were there as peacekeepers or not, and only the fact that the Sultan’s son in Rome refused to return home had prevented a palace revolution.

He glanced at the dates again and grinned maliciously as he decided he might kill several birds with one stone. Rasaul Pasha, the Sultan’s Minister for the Interior, had been after him for some time to find out British intentions if Tafas proved difficult. Perhaps he could introduce him to the Government’s representative and let them fight it out between them. It might even, he thought spitefully, be enlightening to listen to the ill-humour that would result. Perhaps he could even get Charlotte Pentecost in on it. She was a good talker and pretty enough to take any Minister’s mind off his job.

Rasaul, he wrote after Charlotte Pentecost’s name. Westminster chap. Maybe even the bloody Bishop, too, he thought sourly. And that gadget, Hobbins! At least it would keep them quiet for a while and might encourage Tafas to make up his mind and sign.

 

 

2

 

Though Cozzens didn’t know it, Sultan Tafas el Taif at that moment had just about finally decided not to sign. In the exotic old palace on the headland, furnished with hi-fi and televisions bought with the revenues from American-owned businesses, he and his Minister for the Interior, Rasaul Pasha, were angrily discussing the situation.

The Sultan was an old man who enjoyed the out-of-date comedies of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, dreamed dreams of settling all his problems with the discovery of oil, and handled the affairs of his country like a mediaeval monarch. Rasaul was well aware of the British dilemma. With no one to put in place of Tafas they were stuck with the elderly, old-fashioned man who held back the development of his country, only because he was considered one stage better than the fist-clenching young men from the Khesse district or a junta of ambitious colonels.

‘I didn’t expect to give up the Toweida Plain,’ he was saying. ‘This Sultanate was carved out by my great-grandfather after the troubles between the British and the Italians in the last century. For my father’s work in the First World War the treaty that was made in 1860 was renewed for another eighty years, and because I placed our airfields at the disposal of the British in 1940, they agreed to stretch it for another forty and poured money into the country. Now the Americans are bringing trade. Why should I give it up to the half-wits who get their training in Cairo?’

Rasaul sighed. He knew Tafas well enough to realise that this was all nothing more than the preliminaries to another of his colossal changes of mind.

‘Because, sir,’ he said patiently, ‘if you don’t allow the British to go, you will find these same hotheads who got their training in Cairo will apply it to rise as a body and force them to go.’

‘The British Army?’

‘Sir, the British Army is not the vast organisation it once was. They have commitments elsewhere – too many sometimes and some too close to home. They don’t want to stay. They can’t stay.’

‘They have to stay if I refuse to sign!’

The Sultan stared angrily through the window, hearing the faint wail of a muezzin from one of the minarets silhouetted against the pearly sky. ‘La illa Lah Mohammed rassoul Allah – There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.’ The tamarisk plumes in the garden below him drooped in the still air and the geraniums made a flare of colour against the white walls. The dusty rose bushes were half in bloom and from the mouth of a stone lion water trickled musically into a stone basin. The garden had an air of faded opulence that went with the rusted metal furniture and the bleached and shabby awnings and the lawns covered with weeds and fallen dates. Beyond, the murmur of the streets and the babble of the bazaars, the water-sellers’ bells and the endless ‘Allah, Allah’ of the beggars were hushed to a soft monotone.

‘If the frontier forts are closed down,’ he said slowly, stubbornly, ‘the frontier will move south of the hills, and once it starts it will never stop until the Sultanate is thrust into the sea.’

‘The British would never guard the frontiers, sir,’ Rasaul pointed out.

‘The treaty says they must.’

‘The treaty terms say clearly, sir, that the British will back up the Sultanate and such borders as are agreed with our neighbours. They will never support disputed or artificial ones, and the Khusar Hills were decided arbitrarily in the last century by your grandfather’s administrators against the advice of the British and despite the protests of the northern tribes. The British will stand by that clause.’

‘The small print on the back of the contract,’ Tafas sneered.

‘The terms of reference of the treaty extend to the Dharwas, sir, and no further. The British refused to alter them in 1940.’

‘They are opting out of their promise.’ The Sultan’s voice was sulky.

‘Sir’ – Rasaul’s voice rose angrily – ‘you and your Ministers agreed to them going.’

‘Things have changed since then.’

‘I can’t imagine them permitting you to back out now, sir.’

Tafas gave a sly smile. ‘There are ways of making them,’ he said. ‘They believe in sticking to treaties even when they don’t like them. And I need the northern frontier. I need Hahdhdhah. I need those young men up there who put backbone into my troops.’

 

 

3

 

Standing at the window of his office, Pentecost could see the hills reflecting the yellow glow of the late sunshine, and he shivered a little as he felt the evening chill. Hahdhdhah was high enough in the foothills of the Urbidas to be cold in the evenings and through the night. Sometimes, in winter, even, there was snow, and when snow lay on top of the Rass range just beyond the Urbidas the little fortress could be freezing, and the Toweidas stumped around the place with their heads down between their shoulders, wearing every scrap of clothing they possessed, their faces as long as fiddles. Thank God, he thought, they’d be out of Hahdhdhah – and probably out of Khalit – by the time the next winter came.

From Beebe’s quarters he could hear the sound of a radio. Beebe was still with them, still working across the plain, guarded always by a scout car and a lorry, exploding his little canisters, reading his instruments and checking and rechecking his columns of figures. From time to time, a report was sent down to Dhafran for the coast, but as far as they could tell they were all negative and discouraging.

A Toweida near the tamarisk which at noon gave the only scrap of shade to the courtyard that existed started singing to a one-stringed guitar which made a noise like a tortured cat. Pentecost frowned at its barbarity, then he breathed deeply, catching the snuff-dry air in his nostrils, wondering how his wife would have regarded him walking out alone towards a line of tribesmen armed to the teeth. He had described the affair in a letter to her, then thought better of it and torn it up and written again without making any mention of it. Living in the uncertain atmosphere of Khaswe was enough. Already, he knew, his older son was going to infant school in a bus with windows grilled against grenades, and there’d been more than one shooting in Victoria Street, the main shopping centre. It seemed months now since he had shared his wife’s bed, and a long time since she had told him frankly that it was time they did something about increasing their family.

He stared again through the window, noticing how the shadows of the few scattered trees near the fortress striped the dusty yellow earth. The trees were unexpected in the bare Toweida Plain and he found himself wondering why they had never been cut down. In all the past assaults on the place they must have been a perfect haven for snipers. Probably some earlier commander, considerate of creature comforts, had planted them there to break the monotony of the view or to give himself a little shade where he could enjoy a picnic during the more peaceable periods.

Thrusting the thought from his mind, he sat down at the desk and lit a cigarette. He was a young man of precise and regular habits and he allowed himself only five a day. Enjoying the first puffs, he considered the situation.

Despite the quietness, he knew it would still be wise to take every care with the evacuation.

He paused, thinking of Aziz. The great curved scimitar hanging on the wall opposite him was a reminder of their friendship. Beneath it now there were a ceremonial dagger and a muzzle-loading musket, its stock inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl, its powder horn decorated with filigree gold and silver. Aziz’s gifts had been mostly warlike, though lately – as though sensing that they were entering a new period of peace – he had produced brassware and a carpet. His own gifts in return had all been peaceable because you didn’t give teeth to a wolf and because the weapons he held weren’t his to give. But his lighter had gone – at a later meeting Aziz had complained it had not worked – and so had the silver photograph frame which had once held a picture of his wife. It was probably now in a tent in Addowara or in the hills, holding the photograph of Aziz and Pentecost that Minto, who had also taken a photographic course, had taken of them.

The whole business was becoming rather expensive, in fact, because while Aziz could doubtless take what he wanted from whoever he wanted – merely by issuing a threat or using his strong right arm – it cost Pentecost a lot of money and he didn’t have much. Though the first Pentecost, by fighting on the right side at Hastings, had set the family up for generations, a later one had decided for the wrong side at Marston Moor and beggared them and he had had to buy Minto’s Japanese tape-recorder and Lack’s transistor – even the New English Bible Fox’s mother had given her son on his departure overseas, which he’d explained to Aziz as the Englishman’s Koran. It hadn’t been easy to persuade them to part with things they preferred to keep and only the feeling that they were contributing to their future safety had encouraged them to let them go.

Aziz, he felt, would give no trouble under the circumstances but he hoped that when Tafas finally got round to putting pen to paper the officials in Khaswe would not expect them to get out at such speed so that they would not only lose their dignity but probably also their pants.

Lack appeared in the doorway. ‘Beebe sent this,’ he said. ‘It’s not calculated to bring roses to your checks.’

Pentecost took the sheet of paper he offered. Ever since he had arrived, Beebe had been keeping a bulletin on the BBC news he picked up on the big receiver in his lorry with which he contacted his office in Khaswe. He taped it then typed it out and hung it in the little mess they shared, deriving a certain amount of wry humour from presenting them with a running commentary on their own end.

Pentecost glanced down at what he’d written.

 

Despite the British Government’s wishes, the Sultan of Khalit is now insisting that the treaty cannot be repudiated. Conditions have changed, he claims, and while a provisional date has been fixed for the British withdrawal, he now says that under the terms of the treaty he still has the right to insist on a British presence in Khalit.

 

Pentecost looked up. ‘Makes a change to be asked to stay,’ he observed mildly.

Lack shrugged. ‘They’d never let him off the hook,’ he said. ‘Not now. A joint statement was issued.’

‘Funnier things happen these days,’ Pentecost said. ‘Diplomacy takes some funny turns.’ He pushed the sheet of paper aside and sat for a moment deep in thought. ‘What’s your opinion of the Toweidas?’ he asked unexpectedly.

Lack smiled. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘they were never up-and-at-’em boys but, apart from a tendency to lose their heads when they’re excited, they’re in fine shape.’

‘That’s gratifying at least.’ Pentecost sat back and, without any further explanation, tossed a file across the desk. ‘Stores,’ he said. ‘I think we’ll have to itemise a bit further those we’re leaving. That pentolite for blasting, for instance – separate it from the rest of the explosives. It looks prettier and quartermasters like things pretty. Those two old inch-and-a-half Martinis. Shove ’em down. The politicians like to appear generous. Timber, biscuits, grain, kerosene’ – he leaned across the desk, his eyes travelling down the list – ‘sheets, plastic.’ His finger jabbed. ‘They’re different strengths, aren’t they? And sheets, iron, corrugated. They’re different sizes.’

Lack laughed. ‘When we’ve gone,’ he said, ‘the whole bloody Hejri nation’ll have corrugated iron loos with plastic windows.’

 

 

4

 

As Pentecost left the office, the Dharwa on guard outside slammed to attention and he returned the salute precisely because his polite mind told him a mere casual acknowledgement was not enough. He was a believer in God, the Queen, the realm of England, and good manners.

Crossing to his quarters, he took a shower, then, dressing in fresh clothes devoid of dust and the stains of sweat, he lit a cigarette, picked up a folding chair and a book of verse and marched in his precise narrow stride to the ramparts. Five minutes later, Talaal, the officers’ mess steward, appeared with a bottle of beer and followed him.

If they had done nothing else, the Khaliti engineers had managed to build the fortress over a well, and just inside, on a shelf where it was cool, Talaal always kept two or three bottles of beer for Pentecost. From time to time Lack tried to persuade him that there should be one for George Gould Lack, but nothing – neither persuasion nor outright bribery – had ever persuaded the Toweida to grant him the same privilege, and bitterly he watched as Pentecost climbed the steps and put down his chair. Lack thought he was a little mad, the way he performed the same ceremony at the same time every day, carrying his little seat up to the ramparts to watch the sun go down. Pentecost was opening his chair now and Lack looked round as he settled himself, to see Talaal just emerging from the mess with a tray, moving with as much decorum as if he were head waiter at the Savoy. Lack would have given his right arm for the same treatment, but without fail he got his beer warm and slapped in front of him with as little ceremony as if he were a new-joined lance-jack in the corporals’ mess.

The fact that he was observed by everyone in the fort and that Fox liked to set his watch by his movements completely escaped Pentecost. He was aware that he had the makings of an eccentric, but it didn’t worry him greatly. All Pentecosts were eccentrics. His great-grandfather had ridden into battle at the Alma eating raisins because he considered the army rations of the day bad for the health. His grandfather had worn a cotton kilt and sandals through the East African campaign in 1916 because he considered stockings and shorts the worst thing possible for prickly heat and jungle sores. And in the desert in 1942, his father had always been among the more outrageously dressed officers in an army noted for its outrageous dress. They’d always got away with it, whatever their rank – because there’d been Pentecosts in the Army List ever since there’d been an Army List.

As he took the beer from Talaal, he opened his book of verse and stared at the hills. One or two of the Toweidas were kicking a ball around on the square, then, deciding they were hungry, they disappeared abruptly, and the fort became silent. The sentry on the tower moved and Pentecost heard the clink of his equipment, but otherwise everything was still. For a moment, he caught the sound of high-pitched morse from where Beebe was toying in the back of his lorry, some brief harsh words in Arabic – probably from Cairo or Baghdad – then they were cut off sharply and the place was silent again, in a silence that held a great deal of menace.

Pentecost sipped his beer and stared around him between glances at his book of verse. The light was changing, and the shadows on the hills were changing rapidly from violet to purple. Over in the west, there was a faint pinky glow where the last of the sun still stained the sky.

Nalk Owdi was sounding off near the gate, and down near the MT park Sergeant Stone, talking to himself in a monotonous exasperated fury, was struggling to sort out the plug leads on a lorry which one of the Khaliti drivers had managed to connect in the wrong order. By the living quarters Sergeant Chestnut’s clipped Scottish voice lifted in a piercing shriek of disgust. ‘You – MacFadyen! Come here! No’ tomorrow – the noo!’

Only Chestnut could make a Scottish Highlander out of a Toweida called Mufaddhin but everyone knew that years in the sun had made Chestnut a little mad and the sound of his crazy screech belonged to the background – familiar, safe and secure.

‘Yon bastard’s no’ pullin’ his weight,’ he was saying bitterly to Stone. ‘He’ll nae do a bluidy thing I tell him. He can understand but he pretends not to.’

Stone’s laugh came up to Pentecost. ‘Go on, man! Even I can’t understand you.’

Pentecost smiled, then he became aware that the sound of frogs in a gully that led down to the river had stopped suddenly, as though something had moved down there and the alarm had been sounded. The silence seemed to envelop him, and, suddenly restless, he stood up, the glass still in his hand, and crossed to an embrasure.

There was a burst of chattering from a group of Toweidas under the solitary tamarisk then everything was quiet again. His eyes narrowed, he stared at the hills and, somehow, he was troubled in a way he couldn’t explain. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a light go on in one of the windows overlooking the courtyard and he felt almost as if he wanted to say, ‘No, not just now.’

He’d heard rumours, some of them brought to him by Fox who picked them up from God alone knew where, some of them by Zaid Fauzan who’d spent his whole leathery life on the frontier and knew the place like the back of his hand. They’d heard that Thawab abu Tegeiga was due to arrive in the hills to the north, with his Hawassi and Dayi and Tayur reims, and that the trouble-makers down in Khaswe had been suborning the Jezowi, the Khadari, the Muleimat and the Shukri, who were supposed to guard the Dharwa passes for the Sultan. If the agitators from Khaswe stirred up trouble there, it might be difficult getting through to Dhafran when the time came.

Pentecost glanced at the hills again. An army could hide itself in the folds up there, and he found himself looking for small things that might show where they were – a layer of floating dust over one of the ridges, a flock of birds disturbed from their roosting. Nothing moved and he told himself he was being unnecessarily edgy. There was no need to be afraid – not while he and Aziz were on their present good terms. Briefly, he saw a flicker of light, which burned and died almost as suddenly as it had come. Then another, and away over on his left another. Aziz was still there with his Hejris. If Pentecost was taking no chances, neither was Aziz. The mere fact that contact had been made didn’t break down the distrust of centuries, and both he and Aziz still sought proof that the other was honest. He wanted to be certain that when they walked out of Hahdhdhah, Aziz would permit them to go in peace. And Aziz would never be certain they were leaving till the last man had left.

Pentecost forced himself to sit down again, a priggish young man troubled by his own thoughts. He knew that Hejris were moving about in the market place in Hahdhdhah village, had probably even been to the gates of the fort with the Toweida traders. Never in a hundred years had anyone ever been able to stop that. All Toweidas were Hejris, even if all Hejris weren’t Toweidas, and it was impossible to tell the difference unless they wore their traditional headbands and girdles and the beads that decorated the fronts of their robes.

His eye roved over the land in front of the fort, resting on a clump of rocks fifty yards away, the mud-hut that had been a Toweida brothel, the little bazaar and stables, the patch of trees and long grass where the stream ran down to the river, all places he might have to fortify or clear if things went wrong…

He stopped dead as he saw himself once more nervously thinking of strong points and defences. For God’s sake, he told himself, it won’t come to that!

Then he noticed that the sound from Beebe’s receiver had changed suddenly, and heard a heavy voice blare out, iron-sounding with too much volume, only to die abruptly so that he could just still hear the voice without being able to catch the words.

As he listened it stopped abruptly, as though a switch had been thrown, and he saw Beebe jump down from his lorry and cross to the radio room. A moment later the voice started again, on Chestnut’s receiver, and he wondered what was going on.

 

 

5

 

The sardonic expression on Beebe’s face increased as the astonishment grew on Lack’s. He was almost enjoying himself as he watched his expression change.

‘You’d better get Billy,’ he said. ‘He’ll want to hear this.’

Lack was staring open-mouthed at the big receiver that Chestnut had tuned in, on Beebe’s encouragement, to London, his face slack, his eyes as round as marbles. On the table near his hand was an empty glass. Minto had a sickly grin on his face and looked like an overgrown schoolboy. Beebe watched them, amused. His heavy beard left him blue-jowled within a couple of hours of shaving, and his eyes, under his black eyebrows, were merry and restless as fleas. Chestnut’s thin Scots face looked frigid with rage.

Beebe’s big shoulders hunched. ‘Go on,’ he persisted. ‘Fetch Papa.’

Minto, who was almost too young to be certain of anything, knew that the insulting tone of Beebe’s remarks was really only a joke, but he had never quite been able to accept that his laughter was not unfriendly.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Of course.’

He turned on his heel and left the room. Crossing the square, he could see Pentecost leaning against the embrasure near the tower, a lonely figure against the darkening sky. He ran up the steps and stopped alongside him.

‘I think you ought to come,’ he suggested. ‘Special announcement coming up on the BBC.’

Beebe was bent with Chestnut over the set when Pentecost arrived, and he looked up as he entered.

Lack’s face still wore its stunned look. ‘They’ve ratted on us,’ he said at once.

Pentecost’s voice was suddenly surprisingly sharp and commanding. ‘Who’ve ratted on us?’

Lack gestured. ‘The Government.’

Pentecost frowned. ‘Would you mind telling me what’s happened?’ he said.

Lack seemed to shake his head, as though trying to force some sense into it. ‘The Government’s agreed with Tafas,’ he said. He seemed bewildered, as though someone had cheated him over something he failed to understand. ‘Or, in effect, they have, anyway.’

Pentecost’s eyes glinted. ‘I’ve still not been made aware of what’s happened,’ he pointed out frostily, and Beebe could see he was growing angry. ‘Surely, you learned to make a report more clearly than that.’

Lack seemed to pull himself together at the rebuke. ‘Questions at UNO.’ He gestured heavy-handedly. ‘The whole pack of ’em on our necks. They had to admit Tafas’ right to invoke the treaty if an emergency still exists. While at the same time saying what a rotten lot we are to be here, anyway.’

‘And?’

‘Well, can’t you see what’s coming? He doesn’t have to sign now if he doesn’t want to!’ Lack’s face became thunderous. ‘It’s sheer bloody cowardice,’ he burst out. ‘The old bastard won’t face up to the fact that times are different.’

Minto was staring at him, puzzled. He was obviously not very clear on politics. ‘What difference does it make?’ he asked ‘We’ve had our instructions to leave.’

Lack’s rage exploded from him at last. ‘Don’t be a bloody fool, Freddy,’ he said. ‘Now that they’ve admitted Tafas’ rights, it’s kicked the underpinnings from the Government’s arguments. Tafas can demand that we stay. And if we do, we’ll be staying in Dhafran, too – and in Hahdhdhah!’

 

 

6

 

‘Her Majesty’s Government’ – the well-known voice sounded weary ‘—has been accused of failing to meet its responsibilities. It is not a matter of British prestige but of contractual commitments.’

‘It’s enough to poison the atmosphere of Eden,’ Lack growled. Pentecost gave him a quick look that Beebe caught, as though he found Lack’s comments pointless and irritating. As Lack became silent again, the heavy voice came through once more.

‘The Government has given a great deal of consideration to the Sultan’s claims,’ it droned on, ‘and we shall not be accused of going back on our promises. We cannot deny our commitments and we have been reminded that we have treaties…’

‘Oh, my God,’ Lack said.

‘…and in Khalit foreign agents are using the British military presence to destroy an established régime.’ There was a long pause and Pentecost found he was holding his breath. ‘If called upon, we cannot let our old friends down. We have been looking into the matter in the light of the Sultan’s claim and a responsible Minister will be sent out at once to see what can be done.’

There was a long silence and Beebe saw Pentecost draw a quick breath. Despite the cautious words of diplomacy, they had it at last. They were staying.

‘Talks are continuing with Khaliti Ministers’ – the speaker was winding up now and, though there was more to come, they were no longer interested – ‘and a senior British Minister will be flying out immediately to meet the men on the spot to see how the British presence in Khalit can be made acceptable to the Khaliti people until the present situation changes…’

They heard him out, not speaking, their faces grave, then, as Chestnut switched off, Lack lit a cigarette, flinging the match away furiously.

‘That,’ Pentecost said in a flat, calm voice, ‘appears to be that.’

Beebe had never been a soldier but he felt he had sufficient experience of roughing it to know what men were made of. He had carried his trade to Alaska and the wilds of Canada, to the Amazon and India and Indo-China, all the corners of the world where American trade and American know-how had found its way, and he suddenly felt desperately sorry for these three young men.

‘What’ll you do?’ he asked. ‘If you stay, I mean.’

Pentecost lifted his head and as his eyes met the American’s he gave him a small private smile that seemed to be full of quiet personal jest. ‘Do, Mr Beebe?’ he said. ‘We shall exercise our calling. We shall fight to the death.’

As he left, Beebe stared after him, suspecting sarcasm. No one said anything and he turned to Lack, wondering if he’d heard correctly. ‘He doesn’t mean that, does he?’

Lack stared at the door and then at Beebe so that the American realised that Pentecost was as much an enigma to the others as he was to him.

‘God knows,’ Lack said. ‘Probably.’