Desmond Bagley - Flyaway / Windfall

We drove on for about three miles and then came across a ruined building. Byrne drew to a halt. ‘This is it. We wait here.’

I got out and stretched, then looked across at the building. There was something strange about it which I couldn’t pin down at first, and then I got the impression that it wasn’t as much ruined as intended to be that way. It had started life as a ruin.

Byrne nodded towards the tremendous rock which towered three thousand feet above us. ‘Ilamen,’ he said. ‘The finger of God.’ I started to walk to the building, and he said sharply, ‘Don’t go in there.’

‘Why not? What is it?’

‘The Tuareg don’t go much for building,’ he said. ‘And they’re Moslem – in theory, anyway. That’s a mosque, more elaborate than most because this is a holy place. Most desert mosques are usually just an outline of stones on the ground.’

‘Is it all right if I look at it from the outside?’

‘Sure.’ He turned away.

The walls of the mosque were of stones piled crazily and haphazardly one upon the other. I suppose the highest bit of wall wasn’t more than three feet high. At one end was a higher structure, the only roofed bit, not much bigger than a telephone box, though not as high. The roof was supported by stone pillars. I suppose that would be a sort of pulpit for the imam.

When I returned to the truck Byrne had lit a small fire and was heating water in a miniature kettle. He looked up. ‘Like tea?’

‘Mint tea?’

‘No other kind here.’ I nodded, and he said, ‘Those stone pillars back there weren’t hand-worked; they’re natural basalt, but there’s none of that around here for twenty miles. Someone brought them.’

‘A bit like Stonehenge,’ I commented, and sat down.

Byrne grunted. ‘Heard of that – never seen it. Never been in England. Bigger, though, isn’t it?’

‘Much bigger.’

He brought flat cakes of bread from the truck and we ate. The bread was dry and not very flavoursome but a little camel cheese made it eatable. It had sand mixed in the flour which was gritty to the teeth. Byrne poured a small cup of mint tea and gave it to me. ‘What are you?’ he asked. ‘Some sort of private eye?’ It was the first time he had shown any curiosity about me.

I laughed at the outdated expression. ‘No.’ I told him what I did back in England.

He looked towards the mosque and Ilamen beyond. ‘Not much call for that stuff around here,’ he remarked. ‘How did you get into it?’

‘It was the only thing I know how to do,’ I said. ‘It was what I was trained for. I was in the Army in Intelligence, but when I was promoted from half-colonel to colonel I saw the red light and quit.’

He twitched his shaggy eyebrows at me. ‘Promotion in your army is bad ?’ he enquired lazily.

‘That kind is. Normally, if you’re going to stay in the line of command – field officer – you’re promoted from lieutenant-colonel to brigadier; battalion CO to brigade CO. If you only go up one step it’s a warning that you’re being shunted sideways into a specialist job.’ I sighed. ‘I suppose it was my own fault. It was my pride to be a damned good intelligence officer, and they wanted to keep me that way. Anyway, I resigned my commission and started the firm I’ve been running for the last seven years.’

‘Chicken colonel,’ mused Byrne. ‘I never made more than sergeant myself. Long time ago, though.’

‘During the war,’ I said.

‘Yeah. Remember I told you I walked away from a crash?’

‘Yes.’

‘I liked what I saw during that walk – never felt so much alive. The other guys wouldn’t come. Two of them couldn’t; too badly injured – and the others stayed to look after them. So I walked out myself.’

‘What happened to them?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘I gave the position of the plane and they sent a captured Fiesler Storch to have a look. Those things could land in fifty yards. It was no good; they were all dead.’

‘No water?’

He shook his head. ‘Goddamn Arabs. They wanted loot and they didn’t care how they got it.’

‘And you came back here after the war?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘I let the war go on without me. During the time I was walking through the desert I got to thinking. I’d never seen such space, such openness. And the desert is clean. You know, you can go without washing for quite a time here and you’re still clean – you don’t stink. I liked the place. Couldn’t say as much for the people, though.’ He poured some more mint tea. ‘The Chaamba Arabs around El Golea aren’t too bad, but those bastards in the Maghreb would skin a quarter and stretch the skin into a dollar.’

‘What’s the Maghreb?’

‘The coastal strip in between the Mediterranean and the Atlas.’ He paused. ‘Anyway, early in ’43 I got a letter to say my Pop was dead. He was the only family I had, so I had no urge to go back to the States. And General Eisenhower and General Patton and more of the top brass were proposing to go to Italy. I didn’t fancy that, so when the army went north I came south looking for more favourable folks than Arabs. I found ’em, and I’m still here.’

I smiled. ‘You deserted?’

‘It’s been known as that,’ he admitted. ‘But, hell; ain’t that what a desert’s for?’

I laughed at the unexpected pun. ‘What did you do before you joined the army?’

‘Fisherman,’ he said. ‘Me and my Pop sailed a boat out o’ Bar Harbor. That’s in Maine. Never did like fishing much.’

Fisherman! That was a hell of a change of pace. I suppose it worked on the same principle that the best recruiting ground for the US Navy is Kansas. I said, ‘You’re a long way from the sea now.’

‘Yeah, but I can take you to a place in the Ténéré near Bilma – that’s down in Niger and over a thousand miles from the nearest ocean – where you can pick up sea-shells from the ground in hundreds. Some of them are real pretty. The sea’s been here and gone away. Maybe it’ll come back some day.’

‘Ever been back to the States?’

‘No; I’ve been here thirty-five years and like to die here,’ he said peacefully.

Mokhtar was away a long time, nearly five hours, and when he came back he had the gutted carcass of a gazelle slung across his shoulders. Byrne helped him butcher it, talking the while.

Presently he came over to me and squinted into the sun. ‘Getting late,’ he said. ‘I reckon we’ll stay here the night. Billson is either between here and Assekrem or he ain’t. If he is, we’ll find him tomorrow. If he ain’t, a few hours won’t make no difference.’

‘All right.’

‘And we’ve got fresh meat. Mokhtar tells me he stalked that gazelle for twenty kilometres and downed it in one shot.’

‘You mean he walked twenty kilometres!’

‘More. He had to come back. But he circled a bit, so say under thirty. That’s nothing for a Targui. Anyway, Mokhtar’s one of the old school; he learned to shoot with a muzzle-loader. With one of those you have to kill with one shot because the gazelle spooks and gets clear away before you can reload. But he likes a breech-action repeater better.’

And so we stayed under the shadow of Ilamen that night. I lay in the open, wrapped in a djellaba provided by Byrne, and looked up at those fantastic stars. A sickle moon arose but did little to dim the splendour of those faraway lights.

I thought of Byrne. Hesther Raulier had compared him with Billson, calling him, ‘another crazy man’. But the madness of Byrne was quite different from the neurotic obsession of Billson; his was the madness that had struck many white men – not many Americans, mostly Europeans – Doughty, Burton, Lawrence, Thesiger – the lure of the desert. There was a peacefulness and a sanity about Byrne’s manner which was very comforting.