She turned slowly within the circle of his arms and lifted her face to his as he stooped, meeting his body with a forward thrust of her hips.
The taste of his mouth and the musky male smell of his body hastened her own arousal.
It took all her determination to tear her lips loose from his, and to draw away from his embrace. She crossed quickly to where her blankets lay and picked them up with hands that shook.
She spread them again between the dark supine forms of Jake and Gregorius, and only when she rolled herself into their coarse folds and lay upon her back trying to control her ragged breathing was she aware that Jake Barton was awake.
His eyes were closed and his breathing was deep and even, but she knew with complete certainty that he was awake.
eneral Emilio De Bono stood at the window of his office and looked across the squalid roofs of the town of Asmara towards the great brooding massif of the Ethiopian highlands. It looked like the backbone of a dragon, he thought, and suppressed a shudder.
The General was seventy years of age, so he recalled vividly the last Italian army that had ventured into that mountain fastness. The name Adowa was a dark blot on the history of Italian arms, and after forty years, that terrible bloody defeat of a modern European army was still unavenged.
Now destiny had chosen him as the avenger and Emilio De Bono was not certain that the role suited him. It would be much more to his liking if wars could be fought without anybody getting hurt. The General would go to great lengths to avoid inflicting pain or even discomfort. Orders that might be distasteful. to the recipient were avoided. Operations that might place anybody in jeopardy were frowned upon severely by the commanding General and his officers had learned not to suggest such extravagances.
The General was at heart a diplomat and a politician not a warrior. He liked to see smiling faces, so he smiled a great deal himself. He resembled a sprightly, wizened little goat, with the pointed white beard that gave him the nickname of "Little Beard'. And he addressed his officers as "Caro', and his men as "Bambino'. He just wanted to be loved. So he smiled and smiled.
However, the General was not smiling now. This morning he had received from Rome another one of those importunate coded telegrams signed Benito Mussolini. The wording had been even more peremptory than usual. "The King of Italy wishes, and I, Benito Mussolini, Minister of the armed forces, order that-" Suddenly he struck himself a blow on his medal-bedecked chest which startled Captain Crespi, his aide-decamp.
"They do not understand," cried De Bono bitterly. "It is all very beautiful to sit in Rome and urge haste. To cry "Strike!" But they do not see the picture as we do, who stand here looking across the Mareb River at the swarming multitudes of the enemy." The Captain came to the General's side and he also stared out of the window. The building that housed the expeditionary army headquarters in Asmara was double storied and the General's office on the top floor commanded a sweeping view to the foot of the mountains. The Captain observed wryly that the swarming multitudes were not readily apparent. The land was a vast emptiness slumbering in the brilliant sunlight. Air reconnaissance in depth had descried no concentrations of Ethiopian troops, and reliable intelligence reported that the Emperor Baile Selassie had ordered that none of his rudimentary military units approach the border as close as fifty kilometres, to avoid giving the Italians an excuse to march.
"They do not understand that I must consolidate my position here in Eritrea. That I must have a firm base and supply train," cried De Bono pitifully. For over a year he had been consolidating his position and assembling his supplies.
The crude little harbour of Massawa, which once had lazily served the needs of an occasional tramp steamer or one of the little Japanese salt-traders, had been reconstructed completely. Magnificent stone piers ran out into the sea, great wharves bustled with steam cranes, and busy locomotives shuttled the incredible array of warlike stores that poured ashore by the thousands of tons a day for month after month. The Suez Canal remained open to the transports of the Italian adventure, and a constant stream of them poured southwards, unaffected by the embargo that the League of Nations had declared on the importation of military materials into Eastern Africa.
Up to the present time, over three million tons of stores had been landed, and this did not include the five thousand vehicles of war troop transports, armoured cars, tanks and aircraft that had come ashore. To distribute this vast assembly of vehicles and stores, a road system had been constructed fanning into the interior, a system so magnificent as to recall that of the Caesars of ancient Rome.
General De Bono smote his chest again, startling his aide. "They urge me to untimely endeavour. They do not seem to realize that my "force is insufficient." The force which the General lamented was the greatest and most powerful army ever assembled on the African continent. He commanded three hundred and sixty thousand men, armed with the most sophisticated tools of destruction the world had yet devised from the Caproni CA.133 three-engined monoplane which could carry two tons of high explosive and poison gas a range of nine hundred miles, to the most modern armoured cars and heavily armoured CV.3 tanks with their 50 men. guns, and supporting units of heavy artillery.
This great assembly was encamped about Asmara and upon the cliffs overlooking the Mareb River. It was made up of distinct elements, the green-clad regular army formations with their wide-brimmed tropical helmets, the black shirt r Fascist militia with their high boots and cross-straps, their deaths head and thunderbolt badges and their glittering daggers, the regular colonial units of black Somalis and Eritreans in their tall tasselled red fezes and baggy shirts, their gaily coloured regimental sashes and put teed legs above bare feet.
Lastly, the irregular volunteers or ban da who were a. group of desert bandits and cut-throat cattle thieves attracted by the possibility of war in the way that the taint of blood gathers sharks.
De Bono knew but did not ponder the fact that nearly seventy years previously, the British General Napier had marched on Magdala with less than fifty thousand men, meeting and defeating the entire Ethiopian army on the way, storming the mountain fortress and releasing the British prisoners held there, before retiring in good order.
Such heroics were outside the realms of the General's imagination.
"Caro."
"The General placed an arm about the gold, braided shoulders of his aide. "We must compose a reply to the Duce. He must be made to realize my difficulties." He patted the shoulder affectionately and his face lightened once more into its habitual expression as he began composing.
"My dear and respected leader, please be assured of my loyalty to you and to the glorious fatherland of Italy." The Captain hastened to take up a message pad and scribble industriously. "Be assured also that I never cease to toil by night and by day towards--" It took almost two hours of creative effort before the General was satisfied with his flowery and rambling refusal to carry out his orders.
"Now," he ceased his pacing and smiled tenderly at the Captain, "although we are not yet ready for an advance in force, it will serve to placate Il Duce if we initiate the opening phases of the southern offensive."
The General's plans for the invasion, when it was finally put in hand, had been laid with as ponderous regard to detail as his earlier preparations. Historical necessity dictated that the main attack should be centred on Adowa.
Already a marble monument, brought from Italy and engraved with the words "The dead of Adowa avenged with the date left open, lay amongst the huge mountains of his stores.
ndary flanking attack However, the plan called for a secc, farther south through one of the very few gateways to the central highlands, This was the Sardi Gorge. A narrow opening that was riven up from the desert floor, splitting like an axe-stroke the precipitous mountain ranges, and forming a pass through which an army might reach the plateau that reared seven thousand feet above the desert.