Mayne waved away an open tin, but Jones succeeded in thrusting a rock-hard fragment of biscuit into his hand. ‘Was it as you expected, sir? The river, I mean?’
Mayne slumped back against the parapet. ‘The next stretch of open water begins about seven miles ahead. I’ve mapped out a possible route through the cataract in between, but the river was too muddy to see any underwater obstructions even from my vantage point high above the bank. It’ll be down to the Mohawks to navigate the way forward.’
‘They’ve got an uncanny ability, sir. We’ve been watching them in the rapids below us here. Your friend Charrière, he’s the best.’
‘Rivers are in their blood, and the canoe is like a second skin to them,’ Mayne replied. ‘They can sense the slightest change in the current, allowing them to detect rocks underwater as if the river had been stripped away.’ He wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand, and took the water bottle again from Jones. ‘I’ve identified the best landing point for the flotilla when it reaches the foot of the next cataract at the end of the open water. It’s on the far bank, but the obvious route beyond that is a dead-end alley and they’d have to backtrack if they tried going up it, losing hours. They’ll need to cross the river and work their way up below the cliffs on this side. I’ll pass my sketches on to General Earle’s adjutant before I leave.’
‘Is the next cataract going to be as bad as this one, sir?’
Mayne took another swig. ‘Worse, probably. And there are four more stretches of cataract before the clear passage to Khartoum. That’s more than two hundred miles ahead, and by the time open water is reached, the river level will have dropped so much that even the clear sections between the cataracts will be full of shoals and exposed rock. Time is most definitely not on our side. At best it’s going to be a close-run thing.’
‘And a few good marksmen on the cliffs could slow us down even more,’ the subaltern said.
‘I thought the dervishes couldn’t shoot worth damn,’ the Irish soldier said, leaning up on his elbows from where he had been lying, staring intently at Mayne.
‘Don’t count on it,’ Mayne replied. ‘The true jihaddiyah, the Ansar, have forsworn modern weapons, and despise firearms as the tool of the infidel. But the Mahdi’s been very astute. He knows that the traditional tribal warrior of the Sudan equates courage and manliness with the sword and the spear, and by extolling that tradition he’s been able to recruit more tribal men to his cause. But the Remington rifles they captured from the Egyptians have been put to good use too. The Mahdi has raised a cadre of sharpshooters to provide long-distance fire over the heads of the advancing Ansar. The few Egyptian soldiers who were allowed to survive capture have taught them how to clean and maintain the rifles, and how to shoot.’
‘Soldiers that we trained ourselves, turning what we taught ’em back against us,’ the soldier grumbled.
‘Can’t say as I blame them,’ Jones said. ‘The Egyptian soldiers we massacred back at Tel-el-Kebir when we first arrived in Egypt only wanted freedom from Turkish rule, and we put the survivors in chains and sent them down here to the seventh circle of hell to get slaughtered. Joining with the dervishes isn’t just about saving their own skins; it’s about carrying on their fight against the Ottomans. I’m not saying as we should sympathise with the Mahdi, heaven forefend, sir, but I’ve seen the Ottoman officials on the way down here and the way they lord it over the Egyptians, and I can see their point.’
‘The Ottomans are our allies, Corporal Jones,’ the subaltern said. ‘Watch what you say.’
‘Begging your pardon, sir, I’m only saying what Tommy Atkins thinks, that is when he’s allowed to think, when he’s not digging holes and hauling on ropes and dodging crocodiles.’
‘Well, from what Major Mayne says about the work ahead, we’re going to need a lot more of that. And we can’t have you thinking, Jones.’
‘No, sir. Most definitely not, sir.’
Mayne grinned tiredly. ‘It’s not the Egyptians we have to worry about, it’s the Mahdists. And they don’t yet use firearms as we do in massed volleys, or employ handguns at close quarters.’
‘Colonel Burnaby put them to rights on that score,’ Jones said. ‘He showed them what a pistol in the right hands can do.’
Mayne slumped back, suddenly dead tired. At close quarters, a gun was only as good as the speed with which you could reload the chamber, and he knew that any battle with the dervishes would see these soldiers quickly reduced to bayonets and rifle butts and bare hands. He thought again of Burnaby, a man whose legend was matched by his physical stature and deeds. As a subaltern he had wreaked havoc in the officers’ messes of Aldershot and London, pushing the boundaries of boisterous play and earning the dislike of senior officers who had dogged his career ever since. He was an officer in the Household Cavalry, the Blues, a regiment that had seen no foreign service for decades but afforded its officers five months’ leave a year, and therefore scope for an energetic man with connections to appear on the spot wherever action was hotting up. This Burnaby did with flamboyant regularity, finding himself some tenuous attached position that allowed him to exercise his freewheeling nature while seeking out the thick of the action. After recovering from his wounds at El Teb, he had become one of the hotchpotch of officers attached to the river column, just as Mayne was now; and then he had found himself a position on Lord Wolseley’s staff, edging ever closer to where they all knew the next flashpoint would be, somewhere in the desert on the way to Khartoum. Burnaby had his admirers, Wolseley among them, Queen Victoria another, and he was the darling of the press, the epitome of the military hero in the popular imagination. But above all he was loved by the men. Tommy Atkins expected his officer to lead from the front, and if he did so with the bravura and dash of a Burnaby, he would follow him anywhere.
Burnaby had another role, too, one that had brought him into contact with Mayne on missions known only to a select few in the War Office intelligence department. They had last met in the field four years earlier, during the final months of the Afghan War, in a desolate frontier outpost in Baluchistan. Forays to Khiva in Russian Asia and to the eastern frontier of Asia Minor during the Russo-Turkish war of 1877 had made Burnaby an expert on the Russian military, a specialisation that suddenly had huge cachet as Russia and Britain veered towards a proxy war in Afghanistan. When Mayne questioned him for the intelligence department in Baluchistan, he found him sharp and perceptive, inclined to cut to the point, qualities that were paramount for an intelligence observer in the field.
And Burnaby had been in the Sudan before, using another of his long leaves ten years earlier to report for The Times on Gordon’s first period as governor general in Khartoum. Mayne wished he could quiz him now on Khartoum and his time with Gordon, but in so doing he might be entering dangerous waters, leaving himself open to questions on his own role that even a fellow intelligence officer was to be denied. Mayne only ever worked in isolation, answering to one superior alone in the War Office; he never knew whether there were other operatives who were party to his missions, though he suspected it – those sent to take over if he failed; others perhaps tasked to execute the same directive as his own if his mission were to be compromised, to prevent him revealing the truth of a role that would shock the army and the nation if it were ever to come out.
He ran yet again over his own cover story, thinking of everything he had said and done since he had last taken stock, finding no new chinks in his armour. Corporal Jones had suspected that his missions into the desert might be preparation for something bigger, but he had no reason for thinking that it might be anything more than a deeper penetration of the desert ahead of the camel corps that was now assembling at Korti. Among his fellow officers, Mayne was unremarkable, a thirty-eight-year-old whose name had gone steadily up the gradation list until reaching major earlier that year, with none of the brevet promotions and temporary commands that singled out the rising stars. As a Royal Engineer, he was one of a corps of almost a thousand officers posted around the world who had trained and served together, and who often returned to their headquarters at Chatham for refresher courses and periods of study; as a survey officer specialising in forward reconnaissance, he was known more widely still, among the officers of infantry and cavalry and artillery he had served alongside in the field. The utter secrecy of his role was best served by his familiarity, as a skilled officer with a reputation for toughness and resilience who would go behind enemy lines and return without making a show of it.