‘Any chance of getting out of the sun, Ras?’ asked Alverson, covered in a layer of dust stuck to those places where he had sweated heavily in his bush clothing.
A series of rapid commands followed, detaching some of the white-shrouded warriors, all with spears, none of those with the new rifles, while still others were unloading part of a tent to erect an awning. Jardine and Vince divested themselves of their kitbags and led away their scouting party as the awning was being erected and the caravan condensed into a defensible mass, with Ras Kassa putting the riflemen out to the fore.
‘Two horsemen, boss, an’ all this?’ said Vince.
‘From what I know of this part of the world, which I admit is not a lot, people are pretty outgoing, yet they saw us and didn’t come to parley to ask our purpose. A caravan headed towards the interior, clearly with loaded camels, has to be unusual, so if you are not curious, what are you?’
‘They might have been going somewhere.’
‘They might, Vince, but we can’t risk it.’
Eyes flicking, weapon at the ready, he led the way towards the first part of the defile, not much of one, as the hills on either side were not high. The trail, which up until now had been wide, like the course of a dry river bed — odd, given there were no rivers in this part of the Somaliland — narrowed to the width of two or three men, and every sound was magnified, mostly the scraping of European boots on the hard earth, because the Shewan were barefoot.
Two high mounds cut off sight of the hillsides at the entrance. Jardine stopped behind them and signalled with five fingers and pointed left, which sent the correct number of silent warriors upwards on that side, while he led the rest in the opposite direction, to where he had seen those riders, fanning them out, pleased that no orders were required for them to do what was needed: to look at the ground for signs of human or equine traffic. They had not gone far when the first shot ricocheted off the rocks.
If these Shewan were brave and intelligent enough to obey sign language, they were also foolhardy. It took shouts accompanied by furious arm waving to get them to take cover, instead of brandishing their spears and uttering threats. The last man to get down, on the opposite side of the ravine, too slow by far, spun away as another shot, from what was a fusillade, took him in the shoulder. Another nearly bought one by trying to go to his aid, the folly of that underlined when a third grabbed his arm and hauled him down; the wounded man would have to wait.
‘That’s a lot of firepower, guv,’ said Vince from behind his rock.
‘It is,’ Jardine replied, looking around for a way of getting a bit higher so he could see what it was they faced. ‘Did you get a chance to count?’
‘No, it was volley fire.’
‘One round, then stopped, Vince, what does that tell us?’
‘Trained men.’
‘We need those riflemen up here, they’re no good where they are.’
‘Right,’ Vince replied, slithering backwards.
Jardine had to signal hard again for his spearmen to keep their heads down and stay put on both sides of the ravine, but he also had to keep in place those facing them: against spears they could just walk forward and kill. He raised himself just enough to fire off half a magazine, the sound of that, and the way the bullets hit rock, echoing around the folds of those hills, surprised that no return fire came his way.
In a contact with an enemy, and this was very much that, you filter a mass of little things through your mind without any conscious application, like Vince had discerned as quickly as Jardine that a single, coordinated volley meant men who have been trained to obey commands: tribesmen, wherever they came from, were not normally so disciplined. Nor, up against spearmen, had they abandoned their cover to come forward and remove the approaching threat.
It had been the men he had sent up the left-hand hills who had spooked them, because they had been approaching a point where their chosen position would have become visible, and they had not melted away to avoid discovery but stayed to fight for possession of the ground. So they had positions they were content to hold, the conclusion obvious: this was an attempt to block the passage through the hills, not bandits trying to steal the camels and what they carried, and he was bound to wonder who would embark on that.
‘Bloody hell,’ Jardine said to himself, as that led to the only possible deduction. ‘Italians.’
Those thoughts had to be checked against other possibilities. Renegade Ethiopians? Highly unlikely to be that, or Ras Kassa would have mentioned it. The French? He had no real idea if he was right now in British territory or part of French Somaliland, but if it was the latter and they wanted to stop the passage of weaponry, they would not have taken up a blocking position, kept out of sight, and opened fire. They would have come out into the open and, no doubt, they would have been told, by some sneering Foreign Legion officer, they could not pass through to the next oasis and must turn back.
In the few seconds these thoughts were being filtered, it was also apparent that only in catching a fleeting sight of those two mounted men had the caravan been saved from getting into real trouble. Had they come on, unaware that they faced any threat at all, and been caught in those defiles, there would have been a massacre. But if they were Italian troops, what they were doing made a certain kind of sense, though there was no logic in them being here at all unless …
‘Someone, somewhere, has done the dirty on us.’
Filtering names through his mind, only one made sense! Jamal Cabdille Xasan. Mason was a certain no and so was his wife, while people like Peydon and Grace, even if they had been aware, would not have told the Eyeties. But that ugly old sod might have, and he would have done it for money, which the Italians would spread around willingly for information. As he had already surmised, in arranging for a contraband cargo to be offloaded, and being paid handsomely, it did not take too deductive a brain to figure out what it might be and where in the end it was headed.
Yet the Italians could have just informed the British Governor General with a telegram and he would have ordered Mason to stop any arms coming ashore, an instruction the district officer could not have dared to disobey. Another way to interdict the unloading would have been to send an Italian gunboat down the coast and force the landing of the cargo to cease. What lay in front of him, if he had figured it out correctly, made no sense at all!
Jardine ducked automatically at another volley of rifle fire, thanking God there was no sign of a machine gun, a weapon that could take out the whole of Ras Kassa’s warrior escort in a single sweep. The shots cracking overhead and not striking rocks told him they were aimed at the Ethiopian riflemen now coming up from defending the caravan, with the ras leading — not Vince — two of his warriors carrying a box of rifle ammunition. He got his men into cover as soon as they made the rocks at the head of the defile, only coming on himself, ducking through various bits of cover with ease, to get to Jardine, his first act to hand over a couple of spare, filled magazines.
‘Your man is looking for a mortar as well as a crate of hand grenades.’
‘Clever Vince,’ Jardine replied, then explained his thinking to the ras. ‘Right now, all they have to do is hold their position and we are obliged to attack as the only means of shifting them.’
‘So they must be pushed aside.’
‘Tell your spearmen to retire and to keep their bloody heads down.’
Ras Kassa smiled. ‘“Bloody” is a word I have not heard for some time, Mr Jardine.’
‘I think you will have occasion to hear it more than once today, because this is not going to be easy.’