E. Hoffmann Price's War and Western Action Page 8

  “That gives me all the more reason for going to Kabul! Get Dad to help, from the inside.”

  “You’re not funny, darling, you’re not even amusing. A dozen M.A.s couldn’t make an impression.”

  She eyed him for a moment. “You’re so afraid of your career. You’re bent on overtaking him, for the honor of bringing him back.

  “I’m going to Kabul. I don’t care where you go, but I hope you roast!”

  CHAPTER VI

  Instead of quitting Peshawar as a Pathan, and afoot, Slade left in uniform, and driving a jeep. These, as well as other necessities had come from the supply depot. The fugitives, he reasoned, would not risk entering Afghanistan either by the Khyber or by any of the southern passes, since, despite century-old animosities, the British and the Afghans had a species of cooperation. Likewise, if Kellam and Yasmini were rash enough to risk the southern trails, they’d be captured, which would put them beyond Slade’s efforts. It simmered down to a painful simplicity which he summed up by saying to Shir Dil, “Unless they’ve headed for Swat Valley, there’s no use taking out after them.”

  They followed the railroad to its terminus at Dargai, on the frontier. Once more, Slade had gambled because he had no other choice.

  Shir Dil said, “Try the Malakand Pass, or try the Shahkot Pass, or try some others, they all lead to the same valley.”

  At Dargai, there were questions. Slade’s well prepared answers left the officer in command of the guard with no reason for making him stand further examination by the local political officer. Slade gestured to the bales lashed to the jeep, and said to the Indian Army captain, “Presents for the Wali of Swat. Field telephones, and walkie-talkie outfits.”

  The captain nodded. “The Wali is very fond of telephones. Thank you, don’t bother to show me. Pleasant trip, sir.”

  “Just one moment, Captain!”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “How far ahead is the Wali’s first inspection station?”

  “Perhaps ten miles. I doubt if it’s manned.”

  “I’m glad to hear that! The man who left ahead of me, late yesterday afternoon didn’t have instructions on that matter and might’ve been squeamish about pulling up for inspection, which’d cause trouble.” Slade offered another cigarette, and flicked his lighter.

  The captain for a moment ignored the flame. “He’s not as careless as you fear. He asked.”

  “Eccentric chap. Unpredictable. Quite a chance he’d gone by Shahkot, just to have his own way about something. Wonder if we’re thinking of the same man?”

  The Indian officer took a deep drag, flared his nostrils, exhaled slowly; he liked American cigarettes, and watched Slade’s groping for a carton of Luckies which projected from the dunnage. “This man,” he told Slade, “drove an army truck. A light one. A big man, red faced.”

  “You inspected his orders?”

  “They were correct in every detail.”

  “How many men with him?”

  “He was alone.”

  Slade cursed. “Helper probably was dead drunk and riding the load! Well, thanks a lot. Let me offer you a carton of smokes for the guard.”

  As they cleared the frontier station, Shir Dil wagged his beard and said, “Nice work! I bet you was born with a horseshoe in each hand, picking up Kellam the first crack.”

  Slade grinned and mopped the sudden rush of sweat from his face. “About time I got the breaks. Though if we’d tried Shahkot, and got no news, we’d’ve then guessed he must’ve come through this way.”

  By the time the jeep reached the summit, steam plumed from the radiator. Once a quarter of a mile down the reverse slope, Slade pulled up to look at the valley, whose upper end, narrow and rocky, was gripped between spurs of the Hindu Kush range. The left wall, nearly as high and sterile and foreboding, skirted the Afghan frontier. Far ahead, Slade saw a ridge along which ran a straggling row of poles. Insulators gleamed. “Telephone line,” Shir Dil explained. “Like I said.”

  “I was thinking of that. No matter where he goes, or we go, someone’ll give the Wali a buzz and tell him he’s got visitors. And if the Wali grabs Kellam and the loot we’re sunk!”

  “Buck up, major! You bet she got phony papers, everything fix up ahead of time, Yasmini is one smart girl.”

  Ahead, the road narrowed and became rutted. It branched into tracks which lost themselves in the sun-baked upper slopes. This was one of the ways by which invaders had come from Turkestan and High Asia to loot the plains of Hindustan, but since it was not suited to vehicular traffic it had in modern times lost its ancient military importance.

  After pulling into the shadow of a ledge, Slade put on Pathan finery. That done, he took binoculars and studied the country. “Couldn’t go far with a truck. He’ll have to find pack animals, and soon.”

  “Maybe wait till Yasmini’s friends help her. That means, she is hide some place. Not too far from where the truck can’t go no more.”

  They lacked any plan more definite than getting into the hills, where Shir Dil would question Pathan farmers. With each crest capped by a walled sheep fold, and a watch tower, no stranger could go far without being observed. How Yasmini expected to keep the mountaineers from sharing the wealth was beyond Slade’s reckoning; but since that fascinating lady had made the attempt, she and her clique must have devised a way.

  “Suppose the Wali is getting a cut of the loot?”

  Shir Dil shrugged. “Can be.”

  “If I knew the Wali, I could talk it over.”

  “Very bad! Suppose the Wali has got a present from Yasmini? He sends you back, quick. Suppose the Wali has not got a present from Yasmini? Then he helps you hunt, and he keeps every damn all!”

  Slade grimaced ruefully. “You think I’ll get by as a visiting Kurd wearing Peshawar finery?”

  The old Pathan sized him up from hobnailed shoes to turban. “Very nice, only don’t talk too much.”

  Shir Dil took the wheel. Steam began to spout from the radiator. The jeep jounced and pitched, wove and skittered, as the wiry mountaineer picked a course between boulders. Presently, the rock and baked clay ended. The stretch ahead was dusty. “Wheel tracks!” Slade shouted, “Pull up!”

  They got down to study the prints. Shir Dil said, “The Wali has one car. Each year, he makes one-two mile of road.”

  “Modern, eh?”

  “Damn right. Got one very nice hospital, all the time full of fellows shot up with feuds.”

  “Quail tracks cross the wheel prints,” Slade observed; after they had idled along for several hundred yards.

  Shir Dil frowned and squinted. “Quail run this early morning, but the wind don’t blow in too much dust. The wheels, she run last night, you understand?”

  At the end of another mile, Slade got further evidence. Crankcase drippings showed where the truck had halted. The dust recorded a the change. Shir Dil said, “One man, American style shoe. One lady, small feets. One woman, big feets. She help the man, the lady sits there, she don’t do nothing only smoke the cigarette.”

  Further on, rainfall had cut a deep slash athwart the trail. The fugitives had stopped to bridge this bad gash with boulders. “Step on it!” Slade urged, “Every bit of road building they do, it gives us a break!”

  His exultation did not last long. Shir Dil, twisting the jeep around a hairpin curve, forgot his English and yelled, “Allah curse their religion!” A wall of rocks blocked the trail. He booted the brakes and went into a spin which brought the car broadside against the obstacle.

  “What the billy-hell?”

  From behind boulders on the upper slope, and out of dry washes on the downgrade side, men with weather-beaten faces popped up. Their baggy pants were ragged and greasy. Their sheepskin jackets had a mangy look. However, they leveled Enfields whose stocks and barrels were groomed as though for inspection. Slade muttered, “Talk, and
talk fast! That old buzzard with the red beard has a trigger-happy face if I ever saw one.”

  He got out of the jeep, hoping that Shir Dil had the right answers. The delegation from the adjoining hills, however, ignored the old Pathan, and concentrated on Slade. They fingered his vest and his turban. They admired his shoes. One drew the silver-hafted dagger. Another found the wrist-watch a thing of intense interest.

  They reeked of garlic, asafetida, and sheep. Their hands were gnarled and grimy. Their belts sagged from daggers and cartridges. One finally questioned Slade, who tapped his chest, and answered, grandly, “Min kurdim!”

  Shir Dil sounded off. His remarks aroused interest and approval. Finally, he said to Slade, “I tell these fellow we take the jeep from two soldiers. Now they say, we go to the khelat, that stone place up on the hill.”

  “What for?”

  “Meet the khan, he is boss, his name is Akbar, very nice fellow.”

  Half a dozen of the tribesmen packed themselves into the vehicle. The others broke the road block. Shir Dil said, “They say, go ahead, is a road to the khelat.”

  Slade took the wheel. Beyond the trail fork, the ascent made the rough spots previously covered seem smooth as a boulevard. In compound low, the jeep required man-handling to make the final quarter of a mile.

  The khelat commanded watered slopes on the further side of the ridge. Dogs the size of Shetland ponies came bounding out. Armed men followed the snarling brutes. But despite the interest aroused by the arrival of strangers in a car, the two men stationed in the high watch tower remained at their post. However much the Wali of Swat had gone modern, the hillmen still felt that only a fool trusted his neighbors.

  Children, and unveiled women joined the crowd. They came out of the mud-walled houses which hugged the stone wall of the khelat. And before he was herded into the gloom of the central building, from whose corner rose the watch tower, Slade decided that while a telephone network to keep the Wali in touch with the headmen of the principle villages was a splendid idea, modern plumbing and a garbage disposal system were what the valley most urgently needed.

  Mustering up his first lessons in Pushtu, Slade asked the red-bearded man, “Where is Akbar Khan?”

  “He comes back soon. You tell me how to steal cars. Where are the presents?” Slade gestured to Shir Dil, and spoke a few words in Kurdish. The old mad went to the jeep to get cigarettes and K-rations. When he came back, he said, “No telephone line to this place.”

  “I noticed that,” was the glum reply. “But we’ll be staying here long enough for the news to get to the Wali.”

  CHAPTER VII

  Shir Dil, having wolfed the last bits of cheese and the leathery bread which the red-bearded second in command had offered them, was not a bit impatient. He squatted in his corner, and nodded as he smoked. Slade finally asked, “How do you figure that road block? They couldn’t’ve seen us from far enough way to have had time to build it. No matter how much dust we kicked up.”

  Shir Dil left the answer to Allah.

  Slade however continued to grapple with his query. “The captain at Dargai had lots of information for us. Then, just to make it nice, Kellam changed a tire. Next, there’s a road-block and a reception committee. Nothing missing but the smell of Yasmini’s perfume, and a gallon of that wouldn’t hurt this place at all!”

  Shir Dil grinned. Seeing that the old man would not bother to deny the possibility that they had been trapped by allies of the fugitives, Slade got up from his sheepskin mat and made for the entrance of the watch tower. The men who dozed at the other side of the hearth looked up, but offered no objections when Slade stepped in, and began to climb the ladder of poplar trunks to which rungs had been lashed.

  The sound of his ascent warned the two who stood guard. They were blue-eyed, and sun-tanned rather than swarthy. Welcoming a close look at the visitor they had spied from a distance, the sentries made room for Slade on the small platform, and greeted him amiably.

  “And the peace upon you, and the blessing of Allah,” he answered. “Min kurdim. A Kurd from Kurdistan. These mountains, they are like my own home. But you have more grass here.”

  He offered them smokes. The more he studied their thin lips and straight noses, the greater became his confidence in his disguise. Since, as far as their features were concerned, these mountaineers did not look foreign to him, he could hardly seem outlandish to them.

  They asked questions, many of which he understood, though he answered only a few, and some of those, absurdly, to make his ignorance of Pushtu seem even greater than it actually was.

  At last Slade produced the field glasses. Neither of the guards objected; and both were interested. After carefully focusing the eye pieces, he scanned the hills.

  “Over there,” he said, gesturing. “Those sheep. Count the ewes, the rams, the lambs.”

  With vision about twice as keen as the air corps required, the naked eye had a chance of classifying the animals grazing on the distant slope. The man wearing the felt jacket answered, “There are no rams. Of the ten ewes, two have two lambs each, the others, one each.”

  “Shabash!” Slade exclaimed, admiringly. “But there is something else, O Brother! Too small for any man’s eye.”

  The guards accepted the challenge. That gave Slade his chance at details more important than the age and sex of mutton. Far off, almost at the furthest reach of binoculars, he noted ancient ruins, half buried in rubble. He studied these, and the neighboring country until one of the sentries shouted, “By Allah, you’re right! A child asleep under a juniper. Well away from the sheep.”

  Slade shifted the binoculars. “By Allah, what eyes! The grandfather of eyes!”

  “Let me try the glasses,” one demanded.

  Slade thumbed the eyepiece adjustment. “Welcome, O Brother!”

  There was muttering and frowning. Then, “Satan fly away with them, they make us blind.”

  “These be for poor eyes, not for good ones like yours.”

  After wishing them a peaceful watch, Slade went down the ladder. Shir Dil came out of his cat-nap. The man who had been lounging in the dusky room where Akbar Khan and his men assembled of an evening were gone. Outside, horses switched flies, and made chains jingle. Two big dogs lay just beyond the entrance.

  “Those devils,” Slade said, “will keep us from sneaking out. Even if the jeep didn’t wake everyone up.”

  “No good to go too soon,” Shir Dil objected. “Stay to find out why these fellows make a road block before they see our dust come up on the wind.”

  “I got a look from the watch tower.” He tapped the binoculars. “I saw something to look into. Suppose Akbar Khan’s men saw a truck roll by, or heard one pass during the night. They knew it can’t go very far.”

  Shir Dil straightened. “Hai! The man drives, they say, then he got to come back, to try another road, this time they block him.”

  “Right! They thought we were Kellam, that we’d come back for a fresh try, along another branch. They’d heard Kellam roll past the first time. They didn’t bother to wonder why they didn’t hear him go back for a fresh start. Seeing us made them think they’d missed something. Something that doesn’t count because they’ve got us finally.”

  After a moment of finger combing his beard, Shir Dil agreed. Then, “I fix something for the dogs. We got no arrack, no cardamoms, nothing for making post. I use the opium with—”

  “Use K-rations,” Slade told him. “These dogs’ll eat anything.”

  Shir Dil went to the jeep. When he came back with all the ingredients for a canine Mickey Finn, Slade asked, “Anyone snoop around enough to find our guns?”

  “That is one thing not yet snafu. You watch me fraternize with the dogs.”

  But the first move was interrupted before it could begin. The sleeping brutes raised their heads. They bristled, they sniffed the air, they snarled; t
hen the monsters raced for the gate. Human voices joined in the racket. Hooves clattered up the trail. Horses in the courtyard snorted, and whinnied. There were answers from outside.

  Shir Dil thrust bait and opium into his pocket. After listening to the voices, he said, “Akbar Khan is come home quick, now we say something nice, give him presents, and tomorrow, we go. I told you better keep the pants on, too much hurry, he is bad.”

  They went out to greet the returning chieftain, who was followed by a dozen men. The Khan rode a long-legged bay Turkoman, the biggest horse Slade had seen on the frontier; no smaller animal could have carried such a burden.

  Akbar loomed up like a mountain. His beard flamed red in the wind. Little blue eyes squinted from a face which seemed to have been hewn, and crudely, from a block of teak. Grooms led two weary horses almost as big as the khan’s exhausted mount.

  Had the khelat been on the next ridge, the last of Akbar’s horses would have given out.

  When the khan dismounted, cat-nimble, Slade wondered which was the heaviest, horse or rider. Then Shir Dil stepped forward to greet the master of the fortress.

  “I am one of your own people, and this is my blood brother, Ayyub Khan, a Kurd from Kurdistan. He does not speak our speech, but he learns fast and rides hard.” Slade made his salaam. After returning the compliment, and with little ceremony, Akbar stalked over to the jeep, which he sized up as he would a horse.

  Having completed his inspection, Akbar faced Slade. “If you’re a Kurd,” he said, in English which, despite its thick accent, was dismayingly easy to understand, “then I’m a bloody Englishman.”

  “I speak a little English, your Excellency, I went to a mission school in Iraq.”

  Akbar Khan’s eyes began to twinkle. “You don’t walk like a mountain man, and your eyes don’t look like a mountain man’s. That car is no good to you, so I am keeping it. The road gets worse the further you go.

  “That’s gospel,” Slade answered. “I was about to tell you that we’re in a hurry to move on, but we’ve waited to offer it to you. On the roads around your place, it’s pretty good.”