His cover extended as far back as the beginning of his military career. As a subaltern in 1870, he had been plucked by Wolseley from the School of Military Engineering to join his expedition to Canada against Louis Riel. Back in Chatham, he had been visited by a Captain Wilson from the War Department, who had heard of his survival skills and his exceptional marksmanship, learnt as a boy from the Mohawks, and recruited him for a top-secret role. By the time he met Burnaby in Baluchistan, he had spent almost three years in Central Asia, living in disguise for long stretches in the mountains of the Hindu Kush while the Afghan War raged below, watching and waiting in case the British were routed as they had been forty years before. He had been with Wolseley for the invasion of Egypt in 1882, and with another river expedition in prospect, it was natural that Wolseley should call on him once more. Wilson was here too, acting as Wolseley’s intelligence chief. If Mayne were to be activated, there would be no word, no secret conference, just a handshake and a small folded code. Wilson’s presence was enough to put him on high alert; he knew that the call he had received to attend Wolseley would decide his role here one way or the other.
He looked at the medal ribbons on the tunic of the soldier nearest to him, among them the Khedive’s Star for the invasion of Egypt in 1882. The Khedive was the Egyptian puppet of the Ottoman Turks, the sultanate in Constantinople that ruled an empire stretching from Cairo and Jerusalem to Damascus and Baghdad. The British were forever tottering towards war with the Ottomans, but for the time being they were allies, for as long as the Ottomans provided a buffer against the Russian threat. When the British had invaded Egypt in 1882, it had been to secure their interests in the Suez Canal, to ensure that their new gateway to India was kept open and free from the venality and financial mismanagement of the Ottoman regime in Cairo. Yet after defeating the dissident Egyptian army at Tel el-Kebir, they had propped up the old regime, reinstating the Khedive and ostensibly handing back the reins of power to the Ottomans; they had even supported the Khedive in his renewed attempts to control the Sudan, an exercise that had begun ten years before when the War Office in London had allowed Colonel Charles Gordon to be appointed governor general in Khartoum, supported by the motley collection of European and American adventurers that Gordon gathered around himself.
The Sudan had been the last great bastion of the African slave trade, and Gordon’s appointment had met with approval among the moral crusaders of England, among them no less a person than Queen Victoria herself. If anyone could sort it out, it was Gordon, a man of near-suicidal courage who as a young officer had stood exposed on the parapets in the Crimea in order to attract Russian fire and pinpoint enemy positions, and whose Christian fervour seemed to match the growing evangelical mood of the country. Yet as Gordon himself realised soon after taking up his appointment, supporting Ottoman expansionism in the Sudan was a recipe for disaster, with ominous consequences. The slave trade may have been abhorrent to Victorian sensibility, but it was a mainstay of the Sudanese economy and so deeply embedded in tribal loyalties and hierarchies that to suppress it suddenly would require massive military intervention. To the horror of his admirers, Gordon had come out in favour of maintaining the trade in the short term. He had realised that the tribes of Sudan were a complex mosaic of alliances and visceral enmities; the one thing they shared in common was a hatred of Ottoman rule, a hatred that had spread among some to include all outsiders, providing a fertile breeding ground for fundamentalist Islam, and a new cry for jihad fanned by the emergence of a charismatic local Sufi known as the Mahdi, the chosen one.
Yet it was Gordon, not the Mahdi, who was now the nub of the problem, and the reason why Mayne was here. The British imperial system that had so often succeeded by giving free rein to talented individualists was also prey to their whims, to their occasional instabilities and bouts of insanity. Much depended on the shared culture of moral decency and gentlemanly behaviour, of unswerving loyalty to Queen and country that allowed the Colonial Office to send out men to administer vast tracts on their own, confident that their discretion and judgement would accord with the wishes of Her Majesty’s government. The men who occupied these positions of power with restraint were the genius of the British system, but where restraint fell away, they could be its greatest weakness. With the expansion of the empire, a secret office had been established in Whitehall under the remit of military intelligence to develop a safety net, a series of checks and balances. Much of the work involved intelligence-gathering, character assessment, advice to government on whom to appoint and where, but there was also a contingency for what to do if things went wrong.
For six months now, all eyes had been on Gordon in Khartoum, and everything hung in the balance. The British government had supported the Egyptian Khedive’s regime in the Sudan, but Prime Minister Gladstone’s new Liberal government had no intention of dispatching a military force of the size that would be required to defeat the Mahdi. There was, however, a need to evacuate Europeans and Egyptian officials and their families from Khartoum, and Gordon was the man for the job. He had seemed to agree to this brief, but then something had gone wrong. He had become increasingly cut off in Khartoum, holed up in the Governor’s palace. The messages that came out were terse, infrequent, increasingly erratic. Whitehall began to fear the worst. Gordon’s highly individual form of Christianity allowed him to empathise with Islam in a way that some found disturbing, to the extent of wondering whether he himself might go over to the Mahdi as some Europeans captured by the dervishes had done. The prospect was a nightmare for Gladstone’s government, and would be a catastrophe for Britain’s reputation abroad. If rescue were impossible, better that Gordon die a martyr.
Mayne took a swig of water, and shut his eyes. He thought of the men below the cliff struggling up the river, the nearly impossible nature of the task; not for the first time he wondered whether there were other forces at play here, whether this excruciating exercise was deliberate, a very public attempt to rescue Gordon that was surely doomed to failure. At the moment, the likely success of the expedition and the nature of his own involvement hung in the balance, but he knew that with the clock ticking and Khartoum starving, something would have to give way very soon.
He himself was as deeply implicated in empire as any of them. His father had been an Irish indigo planter in Behar, in the shadow of the Himalayas. As a small child Mayne had thought nothing of the thousands of men and women they employed like slaves in the crushing mills, and the opiate splendour of their villa and the gardens where he had played. It was the only world he had known, and it seemed the natural order of things. When he was eight, at boarding school in England, his parents and brother and sister had been hacked to death by mutineers of the Bengal Army in Cawnpore, their bodies thrown down with those still living into a well. His beloved ayah had survived long enough to tell the story of their brutal torture and deaths to the British soldiers who had arrived too late to rescue any of them, but who had exacted a terrible vengeance. Mayne thought of Burnaby’s four-barrelled howdah pistol and the slaughter at El Teb. Any lingering sense of chivalry and sport in war was long gone now, expunged by the Zulu slaughter at Isandlwana and Rorke’s Drift, by the bloodbaths of Colonel Hicks’ last stand and the Red Sea battles, which could only be a foretaste of what was to come.