‘What was your rank in the army?’
‘Captain, why?’
‘Then I shall, from now on, call you by that title. Mister seems not appropriate in the situation we are in.’
Cupping his hands he called out, in a high-pitched voice at odds with his normal even bass, a series of commands that had his spearmen retiring, crawling backwards on their bellies to keep from getting shot at, though not one bullet came their way.
‘Some of them must have presented a target,’ Jardine said, ‘yet no shots, so I don’t think our johnny up ahead is too well blessed with ammo. Either that, or he wants to save it for killing us.’
Crawling a few feet, till he could find a gap through which to fire, Jardine set his weapon to single shot and slowly, deliberately, sent bullets into the hills above his head, aiming for a thick bush or a prominent rock, quickly changing the magazine to a fresh one. Still no response, which underlined their discipline, which was not good news; worse, he had not seen any true indication of their precise position and he needed to bring forward those riflemen cowering behind them. Right now they were in no danger: due to elevation, the enemy did not have fire control at the point at which the trail opened up to the flatlands.
‘Ras Kassa, how comfortable are you about firing off that gun?’
‘I pray to God for the chance.’
‘Half the magazine, rapid fire, no more, you to the left, me to the right, your riflemen to move to join us as soon as we open up.’ The ras was just about to comply when Jardine stopped him. ‘If they are Italians up ahead, they might be askaris, and if they are, will they understand what you shout to your men?’
‘Only if they know Shewan, Captain Jardine, and since there are fifty different tongues in my homeland alone I cannot think a Somali will know what I am saying.’
‘Tell them what they are to do, but not to move until we begin firing.’
Again came that high-pitched calling, with Jardine waiting to see if it provoked a response. Lacking that, after a decent wait, he nodded and got to one knee, firing as soon he had sight of the positions he hoped the enemy occupied, the ras beside him doing likewise, though to Jardine, exposing himself too much.
‘Down,’ he shouted, as this time the riflemen up ahead did respond, firing at will, which at least allowed him to sneak a look and fix their positions using the muzzle flashes and smoke. One side of the ravine elevated enough to give them cover firing down, making it hard for anyone below to return shot in an effective way. Numbers he tried to guess by individual discharges but it could only be an estimate.
Choice? Stay put and wait for Vince to bring up a mortar, which he would have had to unpack and prepare. He would also have to find the panniers with the ammunition, which could take ages given his lack of German. Option two, seek to winkle out the men who tried to ambush them with no clear idea of their numbers, leading warriors who were certain to be less well trained in the use of weapons than those they were facing.
The sun on his back was baking and enervating, but that also applied to his opponents, who would think, if he failed to come forward, they had the upper hand. Unconscious thoughts came to him again.
Whoever is in command up there has no idea of what weapons we are carrying; in fact, if he wanted to take the time, Jardine could unpack two machine guns and spray the whole hillside at will, mixing it with multiple mortar fire, deadly in rocky terrain. So whoever he was, good sense said that as soon as the first mortar shell landed amongst them he should get out quick unless he had the means to respond in kind.
‘More orders, Ras: keeping as much cover as they can, get your chaps to move forward as far as I do. I want to see if he has any more firepower than rifles, and if he has, we need to withdraw.’
‘Can we not just charge them?’
‘You could lose half your men, maybe all of them.’
‘Men get killed in war,’ Ras Kassa replied callously.
‘Not when I can help it,’ Jardine snapped, pointing to the hill opposite. ‘There’s a wounded man over there too; we have to get him out to where he can be looked at.’
‘My friend,’ the Ethiopian leader said gravely, ‘he will wait, because he will know he has to, and die if he must without complaint. God will care for him as he cares for us all.’
Jardine declined to respond to that. ‘Twenty-feet advance, no more. Make sure they know that and get them to pick their cover fast. If they go on, they are at risk from hand grenades as well as bullets.’
He had no idea if the ras passed on that message in its entirety and there was nothing he could do about his ignorance. What he did know was that if the bugger in front of him had a mortar, this was the time to use it. Wait till your enemy is in the open and coming from a known position. Range it to drop in front of that point and it will be right in amongst them, causing carnage.
The tactics of whoever was in command up ahead were not great: he had fired off his rifles at too extended a range. He should have let those searching come on until he was sighted, so they were closer, better targets, more likely to be either killed or wounded with much further to go to get back to safety, a retreat compounded by the need to care for their casualties.
Would they take those now? Would these Ethiopian warriors do what was required? It was galling not to be able to effectively communicate exactly what he wanted, and Jardine promised that one of his first tasks after this would be to learn some basic universal words that everyone could understand — even with fifty languages, there had to be some commonality or nothing would ever get done.
There was no shout: that would only alert the opposition a second in advance. The signal for everyone was his actions, and he stood to set off a short burst, not really aimed, given half his attention was on looking for his next bit of cover. When he moved, he had to worry about keeping his footing on loose, rock-filled earth. Twenty feet does not sound like much, but when you are running uphill exposed to gunfire it turns into an eternity.
There was no thought of potential pain as he threw himself behind a second boulder just as bullets pinged off the crest. Ras Kassa was beside him a second later, plucking at his red cloak where a bullet had torn it, which made Jardine wonder why the old sod was still wearing something so easy to see.
‘I guess from the fire we have received we are facing about platoon strength — under thirty effectives. I suspect our enemy has nothing other than what he has employed, which would have been sufficient if he had caught us unawares, and I think he has no idea of what we can counter with. He set himself the task of closing the path to the next oasis and making it so bloody to get through we would withdraw. When that failed he fell back on the hope of denying us the trail. I think if we press him he will retire.’
‘Then let us do that.’
‘Wait for the mortar, Ras.’
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
In good cover, at no seeming risk and with time to think, Jardine was not impressed with the opposition, or at least not with whoever was in command. First he had allowed his presence to become known; second, he had taken no action following on from the single gunshot fired by Corrie Littleton, which surely indicated an awareness of the threat. He had adopted the fixed tactic of the ambush so that his relative strength would count for more.
Yet if the need was to block the trail, he would have been better to have sealed off the point of entry where, with rifles effective at long range and over a field of fire with no cover, provided he had water — and he had an oasis, albeit a distant one, at his back — he could have sat there for ever while inviting the warriors from the caravan to attack him over open ground.