“Search me,” Bey said, looking around. “Possibly it’s because it’s the first time they’ve ever done something that would profit themselves. I don’t see the tents. Where are Homer and the rest?”
A Tuareg warrior was passing. Bey called out to him in Tanaheq, asking the whereabouts of El Hassan and his viziers. The other answered and Bey looked back at Kenny. “They’re inside the fort.” he said.
They pulled through the main gate, which was in the process of being repaired, and headed for the parade ground. Once Foreign Legionaires, Chasseurs d’Afrique, Spahis, and Tirailleurs d’Afrique had paraded here. Now it was as warm with Tuaghi, Teda, Ouled Tidrarin, Sudanese, Songhoi and even occasional Rifs from the far north, not to speak of representatives of various tribes that neither Kenny nor Bey recognized. All were armed, and armed with modern weapons of Soviet Complex design. On the face of it, El Hassan had taken little time to confiscate the captured modern equipment of the Arab Union and distribute it among his followers.
Bey asked questions again and they drove over to the former administration building of the fort and parked the hover jeep. There were quite a few other vehicles in the vicinity, ranging from additional jeeps, to heavy trucks and even several medium tanks. El Hassan had supplied his forces adequately with his military loot. Well, they both decided, inwardly, they’d need it.
They found Homer, Isobel and Cliff Jackson in the former officer’s mess, all three looking as though they hadn’t slept for as long as they could remember.
Homer Crawford and Cliff Jackson were dressed in military khakis, obviously liberated from the foe. Isobel wore a man’s shirt of the same material and had evidently taken two pair of khaki shorts, ripped them up and reconstructed them into a culotte, a divided skirt. On her figure, it looked fine. She was a pretty wisp of a girl, somewhere in her mid-twenties and seemingly couldn’t have been more out of place than in this Saharan background.
The three were seated at a long, heavy table, strewn with papers and dispatches and a battered typewriter which sat before Isobel. They looked up at the entrance of Bey and Kenny.
Homer ran a black hand back over his short wiry hair, in a gesture of weariness, and said, “I thought you two were pursuing that bastard Ibrahim.” But he looked relieved to see them, as did the other two.
“Consider him pursued, man,” Kenny said, slumping down onto a bench, and putting his Tommy-Noiseless on the table before him.
Bey said, “Guémamaa is escorting the survivors back.”
“Guémamaa!” Cliff Jackson blurted. “With those fanatic camelmen of his? If any of the prisoners get back here, they’ll be lucky.” The big Californian former UCLA athlete was the least sophisticated of the El Hassan crew and had a tendency to gush.
Bey sighed and said, “I told them that El Hassan had sent word that he wanted to put the prisoners to the question and find out everything he could about what the Arab Union was up to. They can’t wait to get back to watch the torture going on.”
“Oh, great,” Homer growled. “Now I’ll have to talk them out of that little pleasure. How many prisoners are there?”
“Possibly two hundred, including the wounded,” Kenny said.
Isobel winced. “No more than that?”
Bey looked over at her. “When they started from here, quite a few were wounded. There was insufficient room in their vehicles—those that they still had—for wounded, other than officers. They were carrying too much equipment. The others had to keep up as best they could. There was insufficient water, and in this part of the world, the sun we shall always have with us. We hung on their flanks and knocked off the stragglers, and sniped at the main column. Short of the Khyber Pass, this is possibly the best area in the world for guerrilla fighting. From time to time, they’d flip their lids and send the armored cars—they had two of them—or their jeeps to flush us out. The only casualties we took were probably tribesmen who laughed themselves to death. Finally, they gave those tactics up and put the armored cars to each flank and the jeeps to the front and rear to cover those on foot. Damn little good it did them. We continued to pick them off, one by one, or to overrun stragglers, two or three or so at a time.”
Bey took a deep breath. “It was pretty bad. The tribesmen had the time of their lives. It got a little sickening to Kenny and me.”
Homer said, understanding in his voice, “What finally happened, Bey?”
“Their officers seemingly went completely around the bend. They took to one of the larger wadis, probably figuring that they could make better time. We ambushed them. At first they wouldn’t surrender, probably figuring on being butchered. When Guémama and his boys came up, slavering at the mouth, they panicked completely and it was all over.”
Homer Crawford said, “How did Guémamaa work out?”
“Fine. He controls his men like a top sergeant.”
Kenny said, “What in the hell are you three doing in Western dress? What’re the Tuaghi going to say when they see you without a teguelmoust? With your faces, ah, obscenely revealed?”
Both Bey and Kenny still wore the complete Tuaghi attire, as had all of them, even Isobel, up until the present.
Homer shook his head and said, “This camp now represents a score of different tribes, some of which I’ve never even heard of. Some of them are blood-foes of the Tuaghi, or have been until the advent of El Hassan’s unifying movement. We can’t afford to present ourselves as favoring one element. From now on, all of El Hassan’s immediate staff will wear desert khakis and so will all of our armed forces, Tuaghi and otherwise. If any potential trooper doesn’t like the idea, he won’t be accepted into our service. We’ve got to break down these age-old traditions. Some of them are crazy. Wearing black wool burnouses, for instance, in this climate. Or Moroccan babouche slippers. They have no back to them. You walk by kind of shuffling forward. If you try to walk backward, the slippers fall off your feet. Or can you imagine trying to run at any speed in them? Or take the haik as worn in Morocco and Algeria. It so covers the woman’s head that she can’t hear well and only one eye is exposed. Can you imagine walking through modern traffic in a city in this outfit? They get hit like ten pins.”
Homer Crawford was bitterly definite. “No, the traditional clothes of the North African have to go!”
“Where’d you get your outfits?” Kenny said, unimpressed by this harangue.
“We liberated them from the Arab Union soldiers,” Cliff told him. “Except for those kaffiyeh headdresses of theirs, they wear the same clothes the British did when they were fighting Rommel or, for that matter, the same as the Israelis wear.”
“Well, you’re not going to outfit all of our armed forces with what you swiped from Colonel Ibrahim’s men.”
Homer laughed. “We’ve placed a sizeable order in Dakar by radio, along with other immediate necessities.”
He picked up a small brass bell from before him and rang it. A tribesman, garbed self-consciously in desert khakis, the same as those of Homer and Cliff, entered and came to attention, rather sloppily, but at least he made the attempt.
Homer said, “Locate my viziers, James ben Peters and Doctor Smythe and the juju man, Dolo Anah, and request their presence.”
The guard left.
Both Bey and Kenny were ogling Homer. “What in the hell do you mean, you ordered them from Dakar?” Kenny demanded. “With what ? We haven’t enough money between us to play a slot machine.”
Homer laughed and said, “Ask our Vizier of the Treasury,” and looked over at Cliff Jackson.