‘Seems to me you should be telling Tyler, he’s the city feller.’
‘Don’t worry, I will, when, as we Brits say, he wants to go about his occasions.’
‘If you mean he needs to shit, say so, I’m no shrinking violet and when I relieve myself, I piss.’
‘More a cactus plant, I think, and a very prickly one.’
‘How did you get involved in this, Jardine?’
‘If you insist on using that name, I’d rather you called me Cal.’
‘OK, but does calling you Cal get an answer?’
‘What difference does it make?’
‘I’m curious. What makes a guy like you take risks, and for what?’
‘It’s not the pay.’
‘Vince says you’re a bit of an adventurer, which is kind of quaint, but he won’t say much more, except when he was in the military you were his officer.’
‘Just one of them, and he was a good soldier, Vince; bit prone to the drink, but no one better to have alongside you when trouble blew up.’
‘He said the same sort of thing about you, in fact he insisted you were the best company commander he’s ever known.’
‘I’m glad he’s sticking to the script.’
‘So why not stay in the army?’
‘If you’d ever been in the British army you would know the answer to that, and I don’t suppose your own is much different. Military service in peacetime is a sort of purgatory. There’s never enough of the right equipment, your superiors are generally idiots, your peers are not much better, life is guaranteed to be boring and promotion is so slow you can die before you ever get to the level of making a difference.’
‘Don’t know much about it. No one in my family has been a soldier since the Civil War.’
‘So where did you learn to shoot?’
‘Pa loved hunting and he used to take me out with him. If you go out into the forests of America, being able to shoot is a must. Ever met a grizzly bear?’
‘I met you.’
‘Very funny! Trouble with grizzly bears in the woods is you can’t see them, and if they are hungry and have cubs to feed, you are lunch, so you keep a sharp eye out for droppings and keep your weapon loaded and the safety off, ’cause there’s no time if they come at you.’
Looking at Jardine she saw his eyes were narrowed, his binoculars were up and he was looking ahead with concentration; he had not been listening to her.
‘What’s up?’
‘Nothing, most likely, but you see those hills up ahead? A couple of what looked like horsemen just appeared out of one of the folds, then disappeared again very quickly before I could get my field glasses on them. It was the mounts I saw, really.’
‘Danger?’
‘Might be. I’d have been happier if they had decided to just come on and say hello.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Jardine was searching ahead and up, sweeping his field glasses around to see if he could catch another sight of those two men. The hills seemed to fold in on each other, red earth, rocks, gnarled bushes and stunted trees blunting the outline, the larger ones rising, he guessed, to something well over a thousand feet, those lower down creating the defile which they would have to make their way through.
‘Fire a shot in the air.’
‘Why?’
‘Makes an interesting noise?’
‘And tells them we have spotted them.’
She did as he asked, the sound of the shot reverberating off the hills where he had seen the riders.
‘That’s a warning, because I don’t think we can avoid going through that track up ahead, which is where I would be if I wanted to rob a part of this caravan.’ He called over to Vince. ‘Did you see them?’
‘Just a flash and so did the old gent.’
Jardine moved to talk to Ras Kassa who was now sitting on his donkey with his machine pistol cradled in his lap. Having stopped the caravan, he too was peering at the hills ahead.
‘What I saw troubles me, Mr Jardine.’ There was no fear in the statement; in fact there was some doubt if it was an emotion to which he would be subject. ‘There are two tribes in this region, Afars and Issas, both nomadic animal herders and salt traders who would ride a donkey at best. It is unusual they made no attempt to make talk with us, which is also not common.’
‘Are the tribes to be trusted?’ Jardine asked.
‘The climate is harsh, the soil not good and the poor have their needs.’
It took no great genius to see that anyone trying to eke a living out of such a landscape would have to struggle to survive. Loaded camels were a tempting target and the problem was obvious. All you had to do was look at a string of camels nearly a mile in length and wonder, even with the amount of warriors available, how it was going to be defended from opportunistic raiders trying to cut out a couple. That was true now, out in the open; how much more was it the case on a winding valley track, where losing sight of parts of the caravan was a certainty?
Jardine suggested that when this route had been in full use, knowing the local tribes could turn to theft, the slavers, rather than travel with any more mouths to feed and carry more water than necessary, might have paid tribute to pass through freely.
‘That is very possible.’
The guarded response made Jardine wonder just how open the older man was being about a trade that had gone on for thousands of years and was not ended yet: he seemed to know this route well enough. Ethiopian emperors paid lip service to the notion of stopping the slave trade but they had not succeeded, and it was interesting to speculate how much they gained from it themselves. Such a lucrative trade could buy influence at the highest level, and even if imperial edicts forbade it, the local satraps in such a large, wild and inhospitable land could pretty much ignore them.
‘Could we do that- pay to be left alone?’
‘That, Mr Jardine, would require someone to make a demand, and those fellows showed no sign of even wishing to approach us.’
‘So how do you assess what has just happened?’
‘Not good. We have to get through those hills ahead of us.’
‘You’re sure there is no other way?’
‘Not one that absolutely avoids the risk of these weapons being discovered.’
Their destination for the day was another oasis on the far side of those hills, a very necessary source of water, which meant anyone observing them, if they knew the country, would have a precise knowledge of where such a large caravan was headed. This was not a part of the world in which you could just deviate; the route existed precisely because of the availability of each aquifer-fed waterhole. There were no rivers and to turn aside was to risk everything.
What lay before them was a natural obstacle through which those plying the route must pass, which made it the perfect place for an ambuscade, and the presence of unknown riders was bound to cause alarm. They might be entirely innocent, they might just be a couple of tribesmen more afraid than brave, but they could also represent a larger group for whom they had been scouting; it was best to assume the worst.
‘How far to the oasis from here?’
‘Four miles, perhaps six.’
That imprecise number underlined something Mason had said in his study: many parts of this land had never been properly mapped and he had none of this route. Sense dictated that the hills be reconnoitred before they passed through, yet that would take time. While no expert on camels, Jardine knew that, loaded as they were, it would not be a lack of water so much as a need for respite that would affect them. Resting here for an hour might mean they had to continue to travel into the hours of darkness, but better that than they lose some of them to exhaustion.
‘So what’s the decision?’ asked Tyler Alverson, who had been listening to the exchange.
‘Mr Jardine, I think you should take some of my men up the hillsides to see what they can find.’
‘I agree, but how will they understand me?’
‘Use your hands, Mr Jardine, they are Shewan warriors and they will obey you, while I will concentrate on the caravan and rest the camels until you return.’