E. Hoffmann Price's War and Western Action Page 21

  There was some discussion as to the nearest ant-hill. The common tribesmen kept a respectful distance, waiting for their chieftains to decide the details. Tsang Wu stood there, beaming, and said to Riley, “Plenty clazy, think I make mistakes. So I tell Andug how make sure. Catchee plenty guns, catchee plenty gold, go back to China.”

  Riley shrugged as best he could, with the strong hands that held him, and spat some “Five Brothers” smack between the Chino’s eyes. Everyone laughed, and two men lunged for Tsang Wu when he drew a knife. Andug said, “Teniente, spit on me too if it is not too far. No one will cut you down.”

  Riley answered, “Tsang is a pig. But you are a soldier. I am a soldier. So you will do me one favor before we go to the ant-hill.”

  “You wish me to tell Major Crann you died like a man?”

  “He’ll know that. Now this is what I want. Your man there has a fine bugle. It is our custom to blow certain music when a man dies.”

  “I will have him make the music,” Andug promised. “Ever since I cut down the soldier who owned that bugle, I have been proud of it. It belonged to the man who followed an officer all over the battlefield. A brave man, who made music when everyone else used bayonets against us.”

  Riley shook his head. “I heard your musician, he does not do well. Let me blow my own music, and then let us go. And make a circle. Do not crowd me. Take my sundang if you are afraid.”

  This was a real show. There had been nothing like this within the memory of the oldest datu. The attendant handed Riley the bugle, and the circle widened. In their interest, they forgot Crazy Tom, who had shouldered a place for himself.

  Riley wondered if his lips could produce a sound, and he wondered what Crazy Tom would do; but whatever happened, they would speak of this at campfires as long as a mosquito buzzed in Mindanao. He raised the bugle, closed his eyes, saw himself, ten years previous, mounting guard; himself and others, smartly stepping down the company street, playing marches between first call and assembly.

  He sounded these, with only a pause between.

  Riley opened his eyes, and played “Retreat.” He saw Crazy Tom’s dull eyes brighten in the setting sun. Then, “To the Color.” The sunshiner raised his hand as he had done that evening on the trail to Bacolod.

  The datus and dignitaries stood there, impressed. They liked the music, and the man’s gallant gesture appealed to their sense of the dramatic. No one was impatient. Not even when Riley played, “To Horse!”

  Crazy Tom cocked his head. “What’s that call, Lieutenant? Which hosses?”

  Then it came: “Charge!”

  The madman got it. He yelled hoarsely, and bounded across the circle. He whipped out his barong as he leaped, and the blade hissed. The horse holder dropped, head and left shoulder hanging by a shred. Crazy Tom was in the saddle, and the stallion snorted.

  Riley, playing for this break, had a split second advantage over the Moros. He slugged Sahipa’s groom, drew the fellow’s kris, and mounted up as half a dozen blades slashed at Crazy Tom.

  Wild cuts raked the fierce little stallions, though that was hardly necessary to make them bolt. In the scramble, none of the men on foot had a fair chance. An explosion could hardly have given them less time to draw or cut or parry, much less move together instead of into each other’s way.

  A second, two seconds of bobbing turbans, hissing krisses, howling men, upturned faces—and Riley was through, with Crazy Tom at his side. Then a flintlock roared; a muzzle-loader charged with rivets, nuts, bits of scrap iron. Slugs spatted through the foliage, smacked the bamboo. Pieces cut Riley, and he saw Crazy Tom lurch forward in that outlandish saddle. The sunshiner bawled, “I got that Chino—teniente!”

  “Shut up and ride!”

  Riley pulled into the lead, and he did not notice the thorns and slashing blades of cogon and bamboo. He was not sure just where or in how many places he bled, but there was no time to look.

  Ordinarily, Moros dislike night problems. This would be an exception.

  Finally, however, the sounds of pursuit could no longer be heard, though the drums were thumping, high up in the hills. The air became thicker, more steamy; the vegetation more dense, and progress slower. And when he pulled up to give his mount a breathing spell, Riley said, “How’d you make it, Tom?”

  The sunshiner muttered something. He toppled when Riley caught him.

  Kris and barong had raked Crazy Tom but that charge of scrap iron was what had done the damage. Riley staunched the wounds, tore up a shirt for bandages, and tied the sunshiner to the sultan’s horse, which by now had been whipped down to a bit less fire and cussedness. Then he turned his own mount loose, and led Sahipa’s stallion. He was too weary, too weak to manage one horse and lead another on that difficult trail. Riding was harder than walking.

  Riley had lost all track of time when he heard a sentry challenge, “Halt! Who’s there?”

  He couldn’t be near Bacolod, not even with a downhill pull; but that was a Scout’s challenge, and he answered, “Armed party!”

  This was not what the sentry had expected. He yelled for the sergeant of the guard, and then Riley recognized Vicente Piomonte.

  Someone said, “Es el Teniente!” As he got the order to advance, he heard Major Crann cursing.

  Riley shouted, “Turn out the guard! Deceased comrade!”

  That, he felt, precisely described Crazy Tom, one time trooper in the regular cavalry. He explained this to the major, before he told of the guns that were to land at Tanjong Merah.

  Major Crann finally said, “You damned fool, of course I’d turn out in force when I got enough barrio gossip to know that you’d gone into the hills. But now I’ll have to draw up some new charges, Lieutenant.”

  “New ones, sir?”

  Crann grunted. “New ones. Plain A.W.O.L. 61st Article of War. Probably cost you five files and half a month’s pay. If you give yourself half a chance, you may amount to something yet. Anybody who could make Crazy Tom have a lucid interval is fit to command men in battle.”

  Riley said, after a moment, “It’s my fault he died, but maybe I did him a favor. Look here, sir—could we give him a military funeral?”

  “Huh! I guess you’ll want to blow taps, eh, Lieutenant? Well, I’ll see if we can arrange it, but it’ll be the first one on record with four widows involved.”

  CAIRO TANK TROUBLE

  Originally appeared in Thrilling Adventures, May 1943.

  CHAPTER I

  A Fight in an Alley

  Mike Rayne, civilian specialist, was beginning to wonder if it wouldn’t be a real break to get out in the desert after Rommel. He was tired of sweating here under the floodlights. He was weary of trying to invent ways of mating up parts from three different models of tanks. The result had to be one mongrel tank that could roll, and dish it out, and take it for a while.

  Here the greasy concrete floor quivered from the impact hammers which straightened plates, ripped and warped by those roaring 88s. Hissing torches welded cuts, and built up tractor treads. Here, just as much as the desert gap between the Qattara Depression and el Alamein, was the front.

  And Rayne, who had left the factory in Detroit to go to Egypt to supervise tank repair, had been doing it the hard way. His crew had to recondition damaged parts, while Rayne robbed what he could from hopeless wrecks. There was nothing else to do. For the Iron King, loaded with spare replacements, had been torpedoed in the Red Sea.

  A stooped, thin man with silver eagles on his shirt stalked through the shop. He halted, cocked his head.

  “Rayne! You working yet?” he bellowed. “When the simmering blazes do you sleep? How many hours do you think a man can stand in this furnace?”

  Rayne’s swarthy face twisted. He gestured at the line-up.

  “All right, Colonel. Take over for me, will you?”

  Colonel Mitchell made a gesture, pa
lms up.

  “Enough’s enough. Don’t you work your crews overtime?”

  “Won’t do. If they get groggy things might happen.”

  The Colonel snorted with disgust.

  “I know why. They can’t use a micrometer, they can’t pour a bearing, they can’t balance a crankshaft. Especially the ones which ought to go to the scrap-heap instead of back into service. That’s so, isn’t it?”

  “Sure. Simple enough.”

  “All right,” the colonel went on, “and if you don’t ease up, you’ll drop dead. Get out of this place, right now.”

  Mike Rayne was tired, more tired than he had ever been in his life before. Lines of weariness had cut into his young face, injected his eyes with blood and furrowed his brow. But he wouldn’t quit. His square jaw set itself. He felt inclined to argue.

  “Aw, nuts!” he said. “Don’t you realize Rommel’s advancing?”

  Even as he spoke the shop had a tendency to spin. He put his hand to his wet brow and managed to control the dizziness. Colonel Mitchell caught the gesture. His manner grew triumphant.

  “Ah, ha, you see that?” cried the Colonel. “What did I say? You need time off. I’ll wager you haven’t even seen your grandmother; I’m putting you out.”

  To emphasize his remarks, Mitchell caught Rayne by the shoulder, whirled him about and hustled him toward the far-off entrance. Mitchell’s hand was far more powerful than it looked. Effortlessly he managed the weary man.

  “You follow instructions,” he told Rayne. “Get yourself a bit of shut-eye, see your grandmother, or go out and get drunk. Do something.” At the door he halted the young mechanic. “Trust your crew,” he said. “You trained ’em. Now give ’em their heads. They depend too much on you. If it weren’t for that you could go to the front. But you’re too valuable to lose. So you must take care of yourself, boy. Understand?”

  Rayne sighed. The old chap with the silver eagles was right, no doubt about it.

  “You win, Colonel. I’m going.”

  Not until he left the shower, did Rayne realize the colonel’s order. He put on his clean whites, which accentuated the swarthiness of his face, the keenness of his deep-set eyes and the darkness of his brows. He still did not feel any too steady on his feet. His head was giddy from long sustained tension.

  Maybe he ought to see his grandmother, out in the Salahiya Quarter, as the colonel had suggested; The old lady was past eighty. However, going to bat for Cairo had been a mania with Rayne since he had come back to Egypt. Though born in Denver, he had spent his boyhood in Cairo, with his grandmother.

  On the Detroit payrolls, he was listed as Mike Rayne, and not Mikhail Matar. An American, he once told his parents, ought to have an all-American name, so he had translated it. Though “Rain” he figured, had a bit more class if you spelled it “Rayne.”

  The paving billowed a little under his feet. He knew that he could drink arrak by the bottle and not feel the blistering stuff. He understood now why the survivors of a torpedoed transport, after several weeks in an open boat, had that blank look, why they could not say much.

  Rayne was exhausted. Exhaustion parts the thin veil which separates a man’s everyday knowledge from the hidden knowledge which comes to him in hunches. To Rayne, the lights and the voices, the café laughter and the whine of “rebeks” and the crying of flutes carried a shocking message. Most of the town felt Rommel did not want to bomb Cairo.

  Rayne knew Rommel wanted to blast the British and American armored forces. Rommel wanted to shoot the R.A.F. and the U. S. Air Force from the sky. But he wanted to keep Cairo intact for the Nazis. Rommel could plan this way because at least half of Egypt hated the British, and believed that Hitler would bring a bright new day to the Nile.

  Rayne could have gone to the Continental Roof, where Hekmet did the Egyptian version of a strip tease. Also there were the cafés on the Ezbekiyah, crowded with officers. Instead, Rayne, drifted toward the Muski Quarter, the town he knew from boyhood days;

  He had lived in the States too long not to notice the smells. But for all his crinkled nostrils, it was like meeting an old friend, a friend who was making a deadly mistake. A woman’s voice, and the plucked strings of an oudh tugged at his heart. Such things brushed back some fifteen years. Mike Rayne became Mikhail Matar again, an American thinking in Arabic.

  Robed figures flitted about shadowy alleys like the unburied dead. “Effendis” strutted in European clothes, and tarbooshes rakishly cocked. At times, he heard English and American voices. These began to sound foreign. He stepped into a loqanda where much arrak and only a little coffee was sold. No one gave him a second look; he belonged. But when two men in civilian clothes entered, Kassim’s customers eyed them. Kassim, sharp-eyed and greasy, went into his tourist bait routine.

  “Nix, we want a drink,” growled the two men.

  They were seamen. Rayne knew that. They needed the anise flavored brandy to turn the Red Sea jitters out of their rugged frames. U-boats did slip past Aden. Submarines still plied On Mozambique and Madagascar.

  “Talk about horseshoes,” the red-Haired sailor said, after a snort to welcome the “arrak” home. “That Iron King. Torpedoed, she’s abandoned. Gosh knows what happened to her crew, but she settles on a reef and hanged if he’s not towed in.”

  “Says who?”

  “I talked to a guy at Suez, that’s who. Cargo all okay.”

  Rayne almost choked on his “arrak.” The Iron King, leaving New York some six weeks ahead of him, had been loaded with spare parts. And these men had sighted her, limping homeward after emergency repairs at the southern end of the Suez Canal. Then why had not her cargo reached the shops?

  The seamen’s speech, already thick, was becoming more so. Rayne left his bench in the corner and sat down with them.

  “What ship you on?”

  Where they had been dishing out news for all to hear, they now froze up, “Who wants to know?”

  The other put in his bit. “Beat it, mug,” he said. “Shove off before we wrap a table around your head.”

  That a customer, so much at home in Kassim’s, spoke English with an American accent, aroused their suspicions. This was no place for Rayne to explain himself. Particularly be did not wish to debate matters with a couple of drunks who belatedly remembered their orders against mentioning ships by name. He shrugged, and went back to his own table, where he called for more liquor.

  “That buzzard likes the stuff,” the redheaded seaman muttered, his voice carrying much further than he had intended.

  This remark solidified Rayne’s suspicions. Fellow Americans were mistaking him for an “effendi.”

  Kassim, meanwhile, directed a sharper scrutiny at Rayne. Apparently, the encounter had made him wonder. Rayne, realizing he was getting nowhere, headed for the street.

  Decidedly he had a hunch. Heavy cargo could not be dumped into the Canal. Nor could it be buried in the desert. But it might be sidetracked and hidden in Cairo’s many warehouses. That would be simple enough. If hidden, with the records altered, the spare parts could remain out of service for several months. That would be sufficient to cripple the defending army. Replacements might take weeks to arrive.

  A good hunch. But Rayne needed more details. No matter who he told, the pasha responsible would block investigation. The official clique, barring a few honorable exceptions, had for the last century been Egypt’s worst enemies. No wonder the fellahin were not worried about Rommel. Nazis would be a treat in a land looted by native officials.

  Rayne stepped into the darkness of an archway across the street. His wits were sharpening now. He was having one of those brief stretches of alertness which alternated with periods of intolerable sleepiness.

  His legs were tired. His feet burned. He squatted in the archway, easily and readily as any native. Then, hearing a mumbling and gurgling, he realized that he was not alone in the g
loom. The varnish odor and the incoherent words told him that someone was polishing off what remained of a bottle of Greek “mastika.”

  “Have one, brother,” the drunk sputtered, and passed him the flask of resin-flavored brandy.

  Rayne thanked him and pretended to take a pull. Meanwhile, the sailors, after making unsteady silhouettes in the doorway of Kassim’s place, reeled down the murky street.

  “That’s hot music,” one said, thickly.

  In some other dive, a girl was singing. “Zabbiyat il unsi ilaya…”

  “Koochie dance.”

  Probably he was right. The song ceased. The little kettle drums began to mutter. A sistra jangled metallically. Voices raised raucous shouts of “Ya sitti! Kamaan!”

  The seamen were in no shape to barge into a native cafe which featured dancing girls. Just the wrong quip, and they would get their throats sliced, or they would be slugged.

  Rayne also wanted to know what ship had brought them in. That thin hunch needed building up. So, still holding the mastika bottle by the neck, he set out after them.

  Though the Muski is not such a bad place if you knew the answers, it is not for two drunks in civilian clothes. Nor can it even be called healthy for a handful of hard-boiled men in uniform.

  Ahead flickered a yellow light. Rayne knew it marked the dive where the drums pounded, where Christians and renegade Moslems swilled arrak and cheered as a dancer shook her torso.

  Then Rayne saw business was picking up. From a cross alley, dark figures suddenly blended with the silhouettes of the seamen. A wrathful growl sounded, followed by the pop of a hard fist, and the sinister gleam of steel.

  CHAPTER II

  Into Moslem Byways

  Although outnumbered by assailants, the seamen defended themselves stoutly. So far as Rayne could tell, the attack had been launched utterly without justification. Regardless of that, he would have intervened, anyway. What now drove him on was the conviction some other reason than robbery, vengeance for breach of custom, had instigated the attack. As Rayne dashed forward he felt this fight embodied all of the hidden fires that he had sensed in his walk through modern Cairo.