E. Hoffmann Price's War and Western Action Page 11

  “Before I blow my top, please tell me what’s coming next?”

  “Oh. Well, it’s awfully simple. I threw a wingding to get you moving, and then I decided to do a few things myself. I met Colonel Sir Pratap Singh Bahadur and told him I could help. I knew you couldn’t find Steve, but it’d be easy for me.”

  “Too easy! He’s getting cleaned up. The truck caught afire. All right, marvelous gal, you found us, and with only four guards, and in territory that British armies found too tough to tackle.”

  She leaned forward to say, confidentially, “That position in Kabul, as head nurse. That’s what did it. Sir Pratap naturally couldn’t come into Swat, but he did arrange with the Wali for me to come over. The Wali’s the sweetest old thing!”

  “You met the Wali?”

  “Well, of course! Or I’d not last ten minutes. He’s so modern. Remember, you told me about his hospital. Anyway, he wouldn’t be outdone by Afghans and their Women’s Hospital in Kabul, and he decided he’d go them one better. Since he couldn’t build another hospital, and it’d be indecent, having women in the one he built for men, he commissioned me to be the traveling female doctor, tending to the hill women all over.”

  Slade nodded. “They’d rather die than be examined by a male M. D. Uh-huh, it is simple. So you heard about a man in a jeep, and—”

  “What do you think? The news of you spread. Poor Shir Dil would’ve been flogged to death, Akbar Khan’s so awfully sensitive. So I doctored his women, and talked Akbar out of his rage. You’re supposed to be dead, of course.”

  “Chances are still good,” he observed sourly. “So Shir Dil brought you here?”

  “Naturally.” She smiled up at him like a little girl. “So here I am, to help smuggle the loot back. Nobody’d dare stop me, I’m under the Wali’s protection.”

  Slade groaned. “Oh, God! Coming to Peshawar was bad, but this is the kiss of death.”

  “Why, Dave? Don’t look at me as if I were a leper! I’ve sacrificed and risked—”

  “That’s the very trouble!” he shouted. “You’re crabbing the act! Get out before I throw you out! Go doctor Akbar’s wives and lady friends, and leave me alone!”

  “Dave—” She sat up straight, and her voice was cold. “I suspected you of itching to drag Steve back a prisoner, to make yourself a name, and now I know it! Well—well—to hell with you! I’m sticking here to see you do nothing of the sort. You may be an officer, but you’re no—”

  “Nobody in my department,” he interrupted wearily, “can be a gentleman. The services we perform are too special. They call us officers purely as a formality. We’re all sneaking connivers. Believe it or not, I’ve connived for him, not against him.”

  She looked as if she half believed. “Then why must I leave?”

  “Did you, or did you not, see that hunk of shapely female meat wrap herself all around him? She knew somehow before anyone else that you weren’t a native woman, but someone important to him.”

  Diane laughed. “Oh, good Lord, you’re pre-war! Now if she were a woman of our own kind, then I should be worried silly. She’s lovely, that Yasmini.”

  “Oh. Yasmini. You know all about her?”

  “How long does anything stay secret in mysterious Peshawar? My amah at the hotel told all, and loved it. So I simply had to come here and—well—”

  “Go down that tunnel and try to pry them apart!” Slade growled. “Try it, and good luck! He never will come back, now!”

  CHAPTER X

  The women were not screaming or taking each other to pieces; but after some thinking on it, Slade concluded that this was all for the worst. Echoes warped the voices he did hear, and the rumble of the tunnels tricked his cars. None of which made any difference, since nothing which Diane and Kellam said would affect the issue. But at last came something which reached into the space where the truck was parked.

  Kellam screamed, “Quit rubbing it in, or I’ll set out afoot! He likes you, he’s crazy about you, he wants you, he can have you, now shut up!”

  She came to Slade, and sobbed without restraint. “Do something!” she cried, “you fool, do something! Let’s leave! Now!”

  “Can’t. Not until dark.”

  “But he’ll go away on foot. He’s out of his head!”

  “So were you, when you butted in.”

  Diane cried wordlessly, and turned on him. Slade caught her arms; he held her fast, shook her. “Pull yourself together. We’re both ready to blow our tops. We’ve got to keep our feet on the ground.”

  He released her, and went into a vault lighted by slanting rays which reached through rifts in masonry and earth. Kellam got up, still clutching a bowl.

  Wild-eyed and gulping, he stared. Then, as if belatedly recognizing Slade, Kellam snarled, “Try and take me back! Pull a gun on me! Your damn bungling, bringing her into this!”

  Slade spat from tasting the fumes in the air. “Panj,” he said quietly, “and here’s where you get all five! I’ll make a Christian of you if I have to knock you apart.”

  Kellam reached for the waist-band of his pants and brought out an automatic; a small bore weapon, not a service .45. It spurted flame. Slade felt the bit of powder flecks on his cheek. Blinded, he closed in, because the shock had not stopped the motion which had started before the shot. He connected, and with his left, he knocked aside the pistol.

  Red flashes and green streaks danced before his eyes as he grappled with the crazed man. Yasmini’s pistol and hashish promised to make good Kellam’s threats.

  Slade stumbled. He went down, clawing for a fresh hold before Kellam could boot him apart. A heavy weight flattened him, knocked him breathless. Shir Dil was saying, “Cold caulked him, maybe not too much.”

  The Pathan still held a chunk of rock in his fist.

  “How’s the sun?”

  “Low.”

  Slade sighed. “Give me a hand. He’ll have to go back, tied and gagged. Where’s that Kashmiri?”

  “I find her.”

  “She’s not in sight? Ok, give a hand, she’s not going with us. Her ‘relatives’ will take care of her.”

  They carried Kellam to the truck, and bundled him in.

  The four Sikhs stood by, unmoved, and without curiosity. Their job was to guard Diane. Nothing else interested them.

  “Get in,” Slade ordered.

  “Where’s that woman?” Diane asked.

  “Who cares? She was smart, hiding out. She could have shot me with that gun, but that’d turned him against her, so she tried accidentally roasting me alive.”

  “That’s how the truck got scorched? But the loot?”

  “Fire’d hurt nothing but rugs and the pearls.”

  Four plugs from the jeep’s engine, and two spares from the tool kit, put the truck in service. As he backed toward the angle and into the tunnel leading to the shelf, Slade was content with Yasmini’s absence.

  “Could use her as a witness, or Exhibit A, though she’d do more harm than good—hell on the sea-beach!”

  Diane, facing the tailgate, called to him, “Stop! Those rocks’ll brain us!”

  Fragments were peeling from the earth overhead. What made Slade jam the brakes was a chunk of column which smashed to the shelf, blocking the exit. The slope kept it from rolling away. Stains on the fluted marble showed that it had lain lengthwise, somewhere up on the mound. After it came a heavy slab, sliding endwise, and falling in a shower of small boulders.

  “Take it easy, it’s not an earthquake!” Then, to Shir Dil and the Sikhs, “Get busy, buck the rubbish out of the way.”

  Shir Dil, who led the rush, jerked back with a yelp. A bundle of burning brush, fiercely ablaze, rained sparks as it fell. The wind drove the sparks into the tunnel. Then Slade saw the riders coming down the opposite slope. A moment later, dust kicked up near the shoulder of the shelf; the muzzle b
last of rifles which spattered the entrance with bullets.

  There was no clearing the road block as long as snipers covered it with fire. Slade got the truck out of danger.

  A few more rocks clattered down. A woman cursed him in English, and challenged him to go out and meet her relatives. Yasmini and Halima, seeing allies from afar, had wasted no time.

  “Find the holes before dark,” Slade told the men. “So they can’t sneak in a surprise party.”

  As dusk fell, the besiegers crept closer, following channels which rain had carved across the plateau. Shir Dil and the Sikhs blazed away, keeping the enemy under cover. The raiders would not risk a rush for the well-defended tunnel mouth; the besieged could not move, under fires and on flat ground, the marble cylinder which Yasmini and her maid had so levered to roll down the slope of the mound.

  Shortly before dark, Yasmini’s allies built small fires in the rain channels, so that the glow lighted the tunnel mouth.

  “They’re going to starve us out,” Diane said, as she heated canned rations. “We can’t hold long, and there’s no water.”

  “They can’t light up the whole shelf,” Slade countered, “nor watch all of the draw where I heard water trickling. We’ll have enough to drink. We—”

  Deep within the ruin, a shot echoed and re-echoed. Slade, pistol in hand, raced toward his best guess at the origin of the report. From one of the danger spots came a Sikh, who pointed, shouting, “Over that way, sahib! Not here!”

  The exchange had ended when he came to a gap in an inner wall. The Sikh who crouched with a rifle explained, “I am watching there, I hear noise by this place. I come, and they go back, shooting.”

  “We’ll block this. Go get a crowbar and shovel.”

  Presently, Slade and the guard had loosened sufficient debris from the overhead to plug the narrow approach. “Back to your post, Ram Singh,” he told the bearded man. “And look out for more tricks.”

  When Slade rejoined Diane, he sat in the shelter of debris which was some yards short of the fire light in front.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, “there’s a way out. Out, and with the truck. Provided that Akbar Khan doesn’t come to investigate.”

  “They’d not dare touch me, or us!”

  “We’d not dare try to keep them from touching that loot. Or what do you think?”

  She didn’t answer. Finally, after he had touched light to a cigarette, she asked, “What’s that you’re fingering?”

  “Oh. That?” He had scarcely been aware of his nervous fumbling. “It’s a hand of Fat’ma. Moslem luck symbol. Brought luck to the chap who used to wear it.”

  “How was it lucky for him, since you took it?”

  “He was lucky I kicked him instead of killing him. This was at Yasmini’s house in Peshawar, when three cutthroats broke in to settle her, or—”

  He stopped short. Diane, reaching for the blue enameled hand, looked at him, and demanded, impatiently, “Oh, go and say it!”

  “Or to loot her house,” he concluded. “What’d you think?”

  “That you were about to say, settle her or Steve. Rather late, trying to spare my feelings, isn’t it?”

  “You asked for what you got!”

  “Why shouldn’t I have believed that coming to Peshawar would keep him from going morbid and neglecting his duty? Why shouldn’t I?” she pleaded, hoping for a shred of justification. “Why shouldn’t I?”

  “Because a soldier does what he is supposed to do, whether it’s fun or not! And regardless of whether the girlfriend comes to coddle and weep over him! It’s you idiot women who started all this G.I. hysteria, I-wanna-go-home stuff, in Manila, in the ETO, all over, writing wailing letters. Wenches in platoon formation, mobbing Eisenhower in Washington, telling him he’d better bring their men back home, or else! Me, I think I’d go for Yasmini, she has guts anyway.”

  “Why, you—you—” Diane couldn’t find a word. “Take your lucky token!”

  She got up. She stopped short. They both listened to the sound in the darkness, a choking, gurgling sound, separate from the roar and rumble of Suastos. Diane gasped, “Oh—what’s that?”

  By then, Slade understood. “Kellam, weeping into his bowl of brandy and hashish. See if you can wile him into snapping out of it, or I will tie him up!”

  The watch fires in front had died, for the moon had come up. However, the smack of a rifle answered Slade’s first attempt at budging the obstacle.

  He was ready. He had been ready. The sniper, seeing a man crawl up with a length of wood, exposed himself recklessly. Slade’s pistol blazed. The marksman jerked up like a jack in a box, spun, and doubled, his gun clattering into the channel.

  A shot smacked behind Slade. Shir Dil cursed, then said, “Is no Kashmiri, that guy. Is Pathan mountain man, the size, and the turban.”

  “Yasmini’s got all sorts of relatives!”

  The following morning, Kellam came to Slade. “Nothing to say for myself. But I’ll take any orders you give.”

  “Stand watch in front, while I make my rounds.” He caught Kellam’s eye. “Forget what happened last night. I don’t remember a thing, Steve. Take your post.”

  Later Slade wormed his way up into the tangle of earth and roots, of beams and tiles and shattered cornices, trying to find a place through which he could gouge a loophole from whose height he’d command a view of the besiegers. Several such loopholes, with a rifleman firing from each, could scatter the enemy in panic; but for some hours, he succeeded in little more than starting slides, or running afoul of masonry which blocked him. The cracks through which light filtered from the outside proved deceptive, one after another.

  And then Diane added to his problem. “We’ve got to get out,” she told him. “I won’t stand for any more of this.”

  “More of what?”

  “Your man, Shir Dil, was shot when he went out to get us some water.”

  “That’s no news. Just a crease, he laughed it off. You mean he’s crying at long last?”

  “No, but I am. I made him let me bandage the wound. I won’t drink water bought at such risk.”

  “Then drink some of Kellam’s brandy.” This didn’t help; she took a new tack. “Your job,” Diane declared, “is to bring Steve back. If he drinks himself crazy with any more of that horrible mess, it’ll be your fault.”

  Slade drew a deep breath. “Listen,” he answered, with all the patience he could muster, “Steve’s doing all right. He’s on guard. He’s off the stuff. Anyway, it’s about gone.”

  “All the more reason to get him out of here.”

  “You’re being helpful.”

  “Is that treasure worth the lives it’ll cost if those bandits rush us?”

  “They’re rushing slowly, aren’t they?”

  She beckoned to the leading one of the four Sikhs, who had come from their ground level lookout posts. Slade turned on the man, demanding, “Ram Singh, what the devil are you doing here? Who relieved you from duty?”

  “Sahib,” the big fellow answered, respectfully but stubbornly, “our duty is guard the lady. This is danger to her. Taking your order, is not duty. We go with her and the women.”

  The one following, a gray beard called Hari Singh, took up the argument: “Sahib, if she is hurt, we pay. Is this good?”

  Slade could neither deny their claim, or call it mutiny. He said to Diane, “You can get out if you convince those devils outside that the rest of us can’t hold the fort long enough for you to send help.”

  “What help could I send?”

  “None, and they know it. Toss-up whether they grab the loot from me, or Akbar Khan finally wakes up and comes to grab it. If you must leave, get ready, you, your women, and your guards. Who’ll talk to the gang?”

  “Zohra, the little one, she’s smart.”

  “Go ahead, then.”

&
nbsp; Through a crevice near the entrance, Slade watched Diane and her sharp-faced assistant walk out into the open. When they halted, Zohra called. One of the besiegers, cautiously remaining under cover, answered. In a few minutes, Diane was back. She said, “They’ll let us leave, provided I’ll let Yasmini search me and Zohra and Jauhara.”

  “And his men’ll frisk your four?”

  “Yes.”

  “Go to it, then.”

  He turned and walked away. When he had gone half a dozen strides, Diane called, “Dave!” and overtook him. Then, “you mean you’d actually stay here, you and Shir Dil, facing all those men; there are over a dozen.”

  “You forgot Steve. He’s staying.”

  “He could leave.”

  “He could not. I’d put him under arrest.”

  Without a word, she turned away. Slade went over to where Shir Dil had watched the entire exchange.

  “They’re used to your sneaking out to draw water,” he said to the old man. “They’re used to not hitting you. That gives me an idea. It’d better be good, or they’ll nail us, and soon.”

  “You look worried too quick.”

  “With the dickering she just finished,” Slade went on, “they know we’re weakening. They’ll soon have guts enough to rush us. They don’t mind losing some men, it makes the prize money all the better for those that come up on top. But I can’t figure that way. So, it’s up to you and me. We’ll both play water boy, and one will stay to give them a surprise.”

  Shir Dil’s wicked eyes gleamed as he caught the possibilities of making a sortie against besiegers who expected early surrender. “You tell me plenty more, what?”

  But a call from the front made Slade answer, “Wait till I see what’s cooking now! You go and have a look at Captain Kellam.”

  CHAPTER XI

  Yasmini was approaching the entrance.

  She came to tell Slade, “They say they’ll divide the loot, and everyone go his way, not fighting.”

  “I won’t bargain with a woman.”

  “They expect you to say that. Very well, you go out to talk to them, with a flag of truce.”

  “Don’t be stupid! I’m the trouble maker.”