“What’s the crisis?” Homer said.
“Scouts coming up say your pal Bey-ag-Akhamouk is on the way. Evidently, with a big harka of Teda from the Sudan.”
“Great.” Homer crowed. “Now we’ll get going.”
“Ha!” Dave said. “From what we hear, a good many are camel mounted. How are we going to feed them? Already some of the Songhai Kenny brought up from the south have drifted away, unhappy about supplies.”
“Bey’s a top man,” Homer told him. “The best. He’ll have some ideas on our tactics. Meanwhile, we can turn over most of his men to one of the new recruits and head them down to take Fort Lamy. With Fort Lamy and Lake Chad in our hands we’ll control a chunk of Africa so big everybody else will start wondering why they shouldn’t jump on the bandwagon while the going is good.”
Dave said, “Well, that brings up something else, Homer. These new recruits. In the past couple of days, forty or fifty men who used to be connected with African programs sponsored by everybody from the Reunited Nations to this gobbldygook outfit Cliff and Isobel once worked for, the AFAA, have come over to El Hassan. The number will probably double by tomorrow, and triple the next day.”
“Fine,” Homer said. “What’s wrong with that? These are the people that will really count in the long run.”
“Nothing’s wrong with it, within reason. But we’re going to have to start becoming selective, Homer. We’ve got to watch what jobs we let these people have, how much responsibility we give them.”
Homer Crawford was frowning at him. “How do you mean?”
“See here,” the wiry South African said plaintively, “when El Hassan started off there were only a half-dozen or so who had the dream, as you call it. O.K. You could trust any one of them. Bey, Kenny, Elmer, Cliff, this Jake Armstrong that you’ve sent to New York, Rex Donaldson, then Jimmy and Jack Peters and myself. We all came in when the going was rough, if not impossible. But now things are different. It looks as though El Hassan might actually win.”
“So?” Homer didn’t get it.
“So from now on, you’re going to have an infiltration of cloak-and-dagger lads from every outfit with an interest in North Africa. Potential traitors, potential assassins, subversives and what not.”
Homer was scowling at him. “Confound it, what do you suggest? That these Johnny-Come-Latelies be second-class citizens?”
“Not exactly that, but this isn’t funny. We’ve got to screen them. The trouble with this movement is that it’s a one-man deal, and has to be. The average African is either a barbarian or an actual savage, one ethnic degree lower. He wants a hero symbol to follow. O.K., you’re it. But remember both Moctezuma and Atahualpa. Their socio-economic systems pyramided up to them. The Spanish conquistadores, being old hands at sophisticated European-type intrigue, quickly sized up the situation. They kidnaped the hero symbol, the big cheese, and later killed him. And the Inca and the Aztec cultures collapsed.”
Homer was scowling at him unhappily.
Dave summed it up. “All we need is one fuzzy-minded commie from the Soviet Complex, or one super-dooper democrat who thinks that El Hassan stands in the way of freedom, whatever that is, and bingo a couple of bullets in your tummy and the El Hassan movement folds its tents like the Arabs and takes a powder, as the old expression goes.”
“You have your point,” Homer Crawford admitted. “Follow through, Dave. Figure out some screening program.”
Cliff came in. “Hey, Homer. Guess what old Jake has done.”
“Jake Armstrong?”
“He’s swung the Africa for Africans Association in New York over to us. They’ve raised a million bucks. What’ll we do with it? How can he get anything to us?”
“We’ll have him plow it back into publicity and further fund-raising campaigns,” Homer said. “That’s the way it’s done. You raise some money for some cause and then spend it all on a bigger campaign to raise still more money, and what you get from that one you plow into a still bigger campaign.”
Cliff said, “Don’t you ever get anything out of it?”
Dave and Homer both laughed.
Cliff said, “I’ve got some still better news.”
“Good news we can use,” Homer said.
The big Californian looked at him in pretended awe. “A poet, no less,” he said.
“Shut up,” Homer said. “What’s the news?”
The fact of the matter was, he was becoming increasingly impatient of the continual banter expected of him by Cliff and even the others. As original members of the team, they expected an intimacy that he was finding it increasingly difficult to deliver. Among other things, he wished that Cliff, in particular, would mind his attitude when such followers as Guémama were present. The El Hassan posture could be maintained only in never-to-be-compromised dignity.
Bey had once compared him to Alexander, to Homer’s amusement at the time. But now he was beginning to sympathize with the position the Macedonian leader had found himself in, betwixt the King-God conscious Persians, and the rough-and-ready Companions who formed his bodyguard and crack cavalry units. A King-God simply didn’t banter with his subordinates, not even his blood-kin.
Cliff scowled at him now, at the sharpness of Homer’s words, but he made his report.
“Our old pal, Sven Zetterberg. He’s gone out on a limb. Because of the great danger of this so-far localized fight spreading into world-wide conflict—says old Sven —the Reunited Nations will not tolerate the combat going into the air. He says that if either El Hassan or the Arab Legion resort to use of aircraft, the Reunited Nations will send in its air fleet.”
“Wow,” Homer said. “All the aircraft we’ve got are a few slow-moving heliocopters that Kenny brought up with him.”
Dave Moroka snapped his fingers in a gesture of elation. “That means Zetterberg is throwing his weight to our side.”
Homer was on his feet. “Send for Kenny and Guémama and send a heliocopter down to pick up Bey and rush him here. He shouldn’t be more than a day’s march away. I wonder what Elmer is up to. No word at all from him. At any rate, we want an immediate council of war. With Arab Legion air cover eliminated, we can move in.”
Cliff said sourly, “It’s still largely rifles against armored cars, tanks, mobile artillery and even flame throwers.”
All the old hands were present. They stood about a map table, Homer and Bey-ag-Akhamouk at one end, the rest clustered about. Isobel sat in a chair to the rear, stenographer’s pad on her knees.
Bey was clipping out suggestions.
“We have them now. Already our better trained men are heading up for Temassinine to the north and Fort Charlet to the east. We’ll lose men but we’ll knock out every water hole between here and Libya. We’ll cut every road, blow what few bridges there are.”
Jack Peters said worriedly, “But the important thing is Tamanrasset. What good …”
“We’re cutting their supply line,” Bey told him. “Can’t you see? Colonel Ibrahim and his motorized column will be isolated in Tamanrasset. They won’t be able to get supplies through without an air lift and Sven Zetterberg’s ultimatum kills that possibility. They’re blocked off.”
Jimmy Peters was as confused as his brother. “So what? to use the Americanism. They have both food and water in abundance. They can hold out indefinitely. Meanwhile, our forces are undisciplined irregulars. We gain a thousand recruits a day. They come galloping in on camelback or in beat-up old vehicles, firing their hunting rifles into the air. But we also lose a thousand a day. They get bored, or hungry, and decide to go back to their flocks, or their jobs on the new Sahara projects. At any rate, they drift off again. It looks to me that, if Colonel Ibrahim can hold out another week or so, our forces might melt away—all except the couple of hundred or so European and American-educated followers. And, cut down to that number, they’ll eliminate us in no time flat.”