Dennis Wheatley - The Secret War

For another twenty minutes he talked and laughed with Ben Ibrim, but Valerie suddenly noticed that he had begun to scratch his left ear.

She closed her eyes and swayed from side to side a little, putting her right hand up to her throat.

Christopher asked if she were ill, and the two acted a little pantomime together, in which she pretended that she would be quite all right in a moment, while he expressed grave concern.

Ben Ibrim asked Lovelace in what way she was suffering and placed his household at her disposal. Lovelace replied that it was mainly fatigue and the great heat of Jibuti, to which she was not accustomed. If they left at once she would not be in bed much before midnight, and she had had a long and tiring day. He begged therefore, that His Excellency would excuse them and allow her to wait upon his wives the following day.

The Arab stood up and they rose with him as he clapped his hands to summon his servants. 'Women and horses are delicate creatures,' he remarked to Lovelace, 'but Allah has provided both for the joy of man, and timely care of them enables the two species to give us the maximum of pleasure. It is sad that you should have so soon to go. I still have some lovely stories I would have liked to tell you, but tomorrow is yet a day.'

A few moments later, after bowing their thanks to Ben Ibrim for his hospitality, they were escorted to the outer court.

When they reached the street, Lovelace chuckled. `I've got what we wanted,' he told his friends. `Zirrif was here but he left this morning by plane for Addis.'

He would not have been quite so pleased with himself had he known that the moment they were out of the house Abu Ben Ibrim had picked up a telephone which was concealed behind his pile of rugs, and was even then giving an account of their visit, over it, to Paxito Zirrif, who was actually still in Jibuti,

16

The hawk and the sparrow

Next morning, to the surprise and distress of the sergeant's aunt, they were up long before dawn. At four o'clock, in the comparative cool which still lasted with darkness, they drove out to the aerodrome.

Valerie made a particularly careful examination of her engine, as she knew that it might prove extremely awkward if they had to make a forced landing before completing their seven hundred mile journey, but by five o'clock they were in the air and heading for Addis Ababa.

They did not notice a great four engined machine that was run out of a hangar and left the Jibuti airfield ten minutes after them. If they had it would have appeared only as a tiny speck in the distance to their rear.

The rising sun seemed to come up all at once out of the ocean behind them. It shattered the brief twilight and painted the hills beyond Jibuti in unbelievably fantastic colours. The white salt mountains, which they had seen in the distance the day before, turned orange, gold, and rose, like a magnificent sunset spread out below. Then the colours faded and hard, brilliant, clear, every feature of the land lay naked in the glare, exposed to another day of blistering sun.

Valerie followed the railway line, a tiny, string like track across the surface of the wild, in which French trains were visible upon it. The express to Addis Ababa still ran only twice a week, although there was a war on, yet freight and fares at scandalously high rates were now bringing fine profits to the railway company. The bi weekly train due out that day which might, or might not, carry Baron Foldvar up into the interior was not scheduled to leave Jibuti until some hours later.

Plantations of cotton and coffee, interspersed with great areas of dense jungle which made the country appear green and fertile, fringed the railway on either side for several miles. At a quarter to six they were over the frontier and above Douelne, the first Abyssinian town, if the little cluster of buildings below them could be dignified by that name.

By seven they were over a place where the railway took a great curve to the south and then swung round. to the north again, almost forming a horseshoe bend. The land in the Bight was a greenish yellow, pockmarked surface looking as though it was pitted with innumerable small craters and, towards its centre, speckled with little dabs of white.

From the map they saw that the place half a mile below them was Diredawa, the most important city on the line between Jibuti and Addis, where it was necessary to leave the train for the great southern metropolis of Harar which lay some twenty five miles to the southeast.

Valerie circled once, bringing her plane down to a thousand feet so that they could get a better view of the town. The few whitish dabs were brick built, tin roofed buildings; the countless pock marks tuculs round, thatched native huts. Patches of blue gum trees were now apparent, tilled fields and, in the middle of the town, some larger buildings; churches and Rases' palaces perhaps. The town had no plan as far as could be seen; no main streets or squares. It just straggled outwards from the denser cluster of hutments grouped round the bigger buildings.

As they flew on again the fertile plain on their left, to the south of the railway, dropped away towards Harar and the fruitful province of Ogaden, while to the north lay a brown, barren land which soon overlapped the line and filled the horizon on both sides as far as they could see.

It was a nightmare country of almost unbelievable desolation. In the far distance range upon range of fiercely jagged mountains pierced the sky. Out of the trackless deserts below rose steep, flat topped kopjes like those seen in the waterless South African Karoo. No single sign of life appeared upon the inhospitable, boulder strewn, volcanic soil. The country might have been created by Satan in a fit of diabolical hate against mankind.

The sun was now making a furnace of the earth and already objects on it were becoming indistinct from the shimmering heat haze that quivered over the sandy wastes. Instinctively, almost, Valerie mounted to a higher altitude.

It was half an hour after passing over Diredawa that Lovelace caught sight of the following plane. At first he hardly took conscious notice of it but it was gaining on them and, as the distance between the planes decreased, something about the lines of the other machine struck him as familiar. Suddenly he realised that it was Zarrif’s.

The knowledge worried him as he dismissed at once the idea of coincidence. Abu Ben Ibrim had admitted that Zirrif had been in Jibuti two days before but said that he had left on the previous morning. Ben Ibrim had lied then. But why? Because something had been said which had given away the fact that they were not really Zarrif’s friends. Zirrif must still have been in Jibuti the previous night then and, having got rid of them by sending them on to Addis, Ben Ibrim had warned him about them. But why was Zirrif following them now? Lovelace felt a sudden chill of apprehension and he told Christopher that it was Zarrif’s plane behind them.

Christopher shrugged. 'What's it matter? As long as Zirrif is on his way to Addis Ababa it's immaterial which of us arrives there first.'

Lovelace said no more. No useful purpose could have been served by doing so now and he endeavoured to conceal his anxiety. Having travelled in Zarrif’s plane he knew that for each trip it was converted from a luxury air liner into a fighter carrying four machineguns. He had a ghastly feeling that those machine guns might be manned at the moment and that Zirrif was following Valerie's plane intent upon its destruction.

They were half way across the long, desolate stretch between Diredawa and Mojjo when Lovelace's fears were confirmed all too fully. The machine guns in their rear suddenly began to stutter.

A cold perspiration broke out on his forehead. They were unharmed; they could not fight. Zirrif meant to shoot them down and finish them once and for all, out there in the desert, where there would be no troublesome witnesses. He gripped Valerie by the shoulder.