Hammond Innes - The Doomed Oasis

Sharjah Fort was like any desert fort, only now it was an airlines transit hotel. Two rusty iron cannon lay in the sand on either side of the arched entrance and all the interior was an open rectangular space with rooms built against the walls. Otto took me to the lounge and bought me a beer. The room was large, the walls enlivened with maps and coloured posters; the tiled floor gritty with blown sand. ‘How long are you going to stay here?’ he asked me. And when I said I was waiting for Gorde he looked surprised. ‘Well, you’re going to have a darn long wait,’ he said.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Didn’t they tell you? He sent a radio message through yesterday to say he’d changed his plans. He’s being flown back to Bahrain tomorrow.’

So that was it… that was why Erkhard had changed his mind. A free ride in a Company plane and I’d be in Sharjah by the time Gorde got back to Bahrain. ‘Thank God you told me in time,’ I said.

‘In time? Oh, you mean you want to ride back with me.’ He shook his head. ‘Sorry, fellow. I got a full load from Ras al-Khaima. And not to Bahrain either — to one of the off-shore islands.’ And he added, ‘It’s too bad. They should have told you.’

I sat, staring at my beer, momentarily at a loss. ‘Is there any way I can get to Abu Dhabi from here?’

‘Today?’ He shook his head. ‘Anyway, you haven’t a visa, have you?’

That was no good then. ‘When’s the next flight back to Bahrain, do you know?’

‘Civil? Oh, there’ll be one through in a day or two. The manager will have the flight schedules.’

I asked him then who would be flying Gorde back to Bahrain, but he didn’t know. ‘Might be Bill Adams, might be me.’ He took a long pull at his beer. ‘Probably me, I guess. He likes to have me fly him. Reminds him of the old days when he was boss out here and we flew everywhere together.’ And he began telling me about an old Walrus they’d flown in the early days just before the war. ‘One of those push-prop amphibians. Boy! We had fun with that old kite. And Gorde didn’t give a damn; he’d let me slam it down any old place.’

‘Could you give him a message?’ I asked, for I was quite certain now that the note I’d left with Erkhard’s secretary would never be delivered.

‘Sure, what is it?’

I hesitated. ‘Perhaps I’d better write it.’

‘Okay. You write it. Then whoever picks him up tomorrow can give it to him.’ His freckled face crinkled in a grin. ‘You might’ve been waiting here for weeks. Not that there aren’t worse places than Sharjah to be marooned in. This time of year the bathing is wizard. Know what I think? I think that in a few years’ time this coast will be one of the world’s great winter playgrounds.’ I finished my note whilst he was extolling the tourist attractions of the Persian Gulf, and then he began talking about the strange places he had landed in. ‘Have you ever been to Saraifa Oasis?’ I asked him.

‘Saraifa? Sure I have. We had a concession there once.’

I asked him how far it was to Saraifa and he said something over two hundred miles. A long way across the desert, but less than two hours’ flying by plane. ‘Has it got an airfield?’

‘Sure. You don’t think I walked, do you? But that was four years ago,’ he added. ‘I’m told the sand has moved in since then. Funny thing.’ He glanced at me quickly. ‘You’re out here on account of young Whitaker; his lawyer — that right?’

I nodded.

‘Well, that last time I flew Gorde in to Saraifa, it was the day David Whitaker arrived there. It was about the last thing Gorde did before he handed over to Erkhard and went home on sick leave. We flew in to Saraifa to break it to the Sheikh Makhmud that the Company wasn’t going to renew the concession. They were arguing about it all evening with that one-eyed devil, Haj Whitaker, sitting there like an Arab and swearing by the Koran that he’d get even with Erkhard. Has anybody mentioned the Whitaker Theory to you?’

I nodded.

‘Oh well, you’ll know what it meant to the old Bedouin then. Saraifa was his baby. He’d negotiated the concession and if it hadn’t been for Erkhard they might have been drilling there now. But Erkhard was the new broom and if Whitaker could have got at him that night I swear he’d have killed him with his bare hands. It was as elemental as that.

Now, of course,’ he added, ‘it’s a different story. Erkhard’s under pressure and Haj Whitaker-’ His navigator called him from the doorway. ‘Okay, Eddie. Be right with you.’ He swallowed the rest of his beer and got to his feet.

‘You were saying you were there in Saraifa when David Whitaker arrived?’ I said.

‘Oh, yes. Well … I was just there, that’s all. He was dressed in Bedouin clothes; he was very young and he looked scared stiff. Couldn’t blame the poor kid. He’d never been in Arabia before, never met his father before, and that black-hearted bastard just stared at him as though he wished the floor would open up and swallow him. He even introduced the boy to us as David Thomas. It seemed like he didn’t want to acknowledge him as his own son, which wasn’t very clever of him, for the boy had the same cast of features — the nose, the jaw, the heavy eyebrows. Well, I must go now.’ He held out his hand for the envelope. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll see Gorde gets it. And I’ll come and rescue you sometime during the week if you haven’t flown out by Gulf Airways.’ A wave of the hand and he was gone, out through the screen door. I was alone then with the posters and the lazy circling flies and the old magazines.

It was siesta time and after the departure of the plane the Fort went back to sleep. I was allotted a room and after I’d had a shower, I went up on to the terrace that ran like a broad firing step round the inside of the walls and sat there in a pair of shorts and sun-glasses staring at the shimmering line of the mountains. Down there to the south, where the high volcanic peaks disappeared below the sand horizon, lay Saraifa. Two hundred odd miles, Otto had said. I remembered Griffiths’s description of conditions in summer — hot enough to burn the tyres off a truck and the soles off your boots. The heat came up at me with a furnace fierceness and the flat expanse of the airfield lay in mirage-pools of water.

But if I’d been manoeuvred clear of Gorde, and Whitaker was inaccessible, there was at least one person available to me here. And as the sun sank and the breeze came up, damp off the sea, I dressed and made enquiries about getting to Dubai. A lieutenant of the Trucial Oman Scouts, who was in the lounge having a drink, offered to take me in after the evening meal.

It was just over twelve miles to Dubai, out past the sheikh’s palace with its string of fairy lights and the hum of its generator, and along a winding road beaten out of the sabkhat. The road was as black and hard as macadam and all to the right of us were salt flats running out into the sea — a thin, baked crust, treacherously overlaying a slough of mud that was as lifeless as the surface of the moon. To the left the desert sand was humped like the waves of a petrified sea, and far in the distance the mountains of the Jebel, purple and remote, stood sharp-etched on the earth’s rim.

As we drove through this empty world I asked the lieutenant whether his outfit was expecting trouble in the interior. He laughed. ‘We’re always ready for trouble. That’s what we’re for.’ And when I mentioned the rumours circulating in the bazaars of Bahrain, he said, ‘Oh, you don’t want to worry about them. Bahrain’s always buzzing with rumours.’ He had a soldier’s contempt for civilians and I think he thought I was scared.

The hospital was a mile or two outside Dubai, a solitary building sprawled over a sand hill. The last glow of the sun had gone, the sky fading to darkness, and the building stood black against the sand. Night was falling fast. ‘Give Doc Logan my salaams and tell him I’ll come over tomorrow and help him drink his Scotch,’ my lieutenant said and roared off in his Land-Rover towards the distant wind-towers of Dubai.