E. Hoffmann Price's War and Western Action Page 9

  “I’ve always needed a car,” Akbar continued. “I can’t find horses big enough for me.”

  “There’s not much gas left.”

  “I’ll tend to that, Mister—never mind what the name is, Ayyub is good enough.”

  “Do you know how to drive a jeep, Akbar Khan?”

  “I don’t have to know how. You are staying to be my chauffeur. Whatever you’ve done on the other side of the border, I don’t care but stealing a car is reason for not going back. You’re crazy if you want to go ahead. A lot of people in this valley, they don’t like foreigners.”

  “Look here,” Slade protested, “I’ve got business in Afghanistan.”

  “Then I’m saving your life by keeping you here. Those chaps over there—” He pointed toward the further wall of the valley. “—are cut-throats, they murder each other when there aren’t any strangers. You stay. You’re under my protection. Even the Wali would think twice before he tried to send you back to Peshawar. Go in there and wait for me!”

  Akbar turned to his followers. Slade and Shir Dil went into the assembly room of the fortress.

  “Chauffeur by special appointment to his majesty! You did a fine job fixing me up to look like a mountaineer.”

  Presently, Akbar came in. The young man who trailed after him had that same rough-hewn facial expression, though he was not as heavy as the khan. Akbar said to Slade, “Very nice clothes. They make me look foolish, I am not dressed so good as my chauffeur.”

  Shir Dil intervened. “Huzoor, his are too small for you.”

  Akbar smiled. “That is why I bring my son, my little son, Daoud. With letting out some seams, he can wear those things. Be pleased to change, Mr. Ayyub-whoever-you-are.”

  When the swap was complete, Akbar wagged a heavy finger. “You should be pleased, Mr. Ayyub. You give my little boy one suit too small, he gives you the same as two suits.”

  Stately and incredible, the human mountain stalked out. His son, a mere hill, followed at a respectful distance. Slade eyed Shir Dil; the old man said, “Look, some guards go over to watch the car, like he told them to.”

  “How come he skipped my watch and binoculars?”

  “Not polite, taking everything too quick.”

  “You better start studying the dogs again. We’ve got to get out of here. The more I think it over, the more I’m sure that Kellam has to be within a few miles. He couldn’t have gone much further.”

  “Where you think he hides?”

  “Some place where a truck won’t show. Looking west from the watch tower, I saw some tumbled down buildings. Half buried. Big, lots bigger than anything these hill people build.”

  “Two thousand, maybe three thousand years, the King of Roum, Iskander Dhulkarnayn—” Shir Dil gestured. “Iskander with the two horns.”

  “Alexander the Great?”

  “Yes, he is king of all this country. Plenty of cities. Today, under the ground, from earth shakings, from, hill slidings, from armies busting down the walls.”

  “That’s where I’m going. He might have made it in the truck. If we lose each other in the scramble, head for that place.”

  Though the shadow of the watch tower now reached far beyond the wall, Akbar Khan, sitting under a striped awning, was still busy settling the disputes which had come up during his absence. As he listened, he studied the jeep; but the durbar, public audience, was an obligation he could not evade for any private purpose. Slade went out and seated himself on the ground near the others who listened.

  If the disputed horse trade took too long Slade would have to depend on Shir Dil’s devices. If the argument ended too early he would be equally handicapped.

  Finally, Akbar gave his decision. When he got up, and gave the audience permission to leave, Slade accosted him, saying, “I’d like to borrow a horse.”

  “Why?”

  Slade pointed to the jeep. “I lost a can of gas. We were going to go back after it when your men held us up. Someboy’s likely to find it and cut it in half for a cooking pot.”

  The khan’s glance shifted to the animals stabled along the wall. For a moment, Slade feared that he would get exactly what he’d asked for. Then Akbar said, “You’re fool enough to try to get away.”

  “Send a man with me.”

  “We’ll be eating soon.” Akbar eyed the guards, who had not yet tired of taking turns at the wheel of the jeep, “But we’ll go in that.”

  “We?”

  “Of course! I want an idea of what the thing is good for.”

  Akbar welcomed an excuse; his dignity had thus far kept him from the joy ride which his followers would have taken immediately upon getting possession of the vehicle. Several of those who had lingered after the durbar now came up, earnestly discussing the jeep and its possibility. Akbar ignored them, and their hints. He wasn’t interested in finding out how many passengers the devil-wagon could haul.

  Slade took the wheel, and watched Akbar Khan perform the miracle of wedging himself into the other scat.

  “This is the starter—” The engine roared to life. “This is the gear shift. You can drive with all four wheels, in rough places, or you can drive with the hind wheels, to go fast on good roads.”

  “Two wheels are faster than four? Don’t lie to me!”

  “This is the clutch—now watch—”

  Slade cut the wheel sharply and goosed the throttle. Accelerating on a small radius made the top heavy khan sway as though an agile horse had almost unseated him. Then, straightened out, the jeep swooped for the gate. The cheering of mountaineers for a moment drowned the voice of the engine. They made a rush for the picket line, to get horses and give the devil wagon a race.

  “Faster!” Akbar commanded, as he looked over his shoulder.

  “Too steep and too rough.”

  The clattering of hooves and the shouts of riders mocked the khan, who demanded more speed; but Slade answered, “Wait till we get to the road, then I’ll show them.”

  The sun barely peeped over the peaks which rimmed the valley. The floor was already dark. Long shadows and ruddy bands of light marched along the upper slopes. Slade blasted the horn; the laughing horsemen who had overhauled the jeep made way, as further evidence of their triumph. Horses tossing their heads sprayed passenger and chauffeur with foam and sweat. Slade booted the throttle to the floorboard.

  Gravel rattled like hail on a tin roof as he swung into the road. Dust hid the horsemen. Now that he was clear of them, he raced into the rapidly deepening dusk, trusting the headlights to pick out the worst ruts and boulders.

  “They’ll never catch up!” he yelled.

  Between jarring and jouncing, Akbar Khan contrived to grin. Finally, on a stretch that forced the jeep to a crawl, he said, “Now go back.”

  “Can’t turn till the next wide spot. How do you like it?”

  “Very nice.”

  Akbar had forgotten all about the spare gas can. He’d been too busy to wonder why Slade had driven in the wrong direction. And then the widening of the road, and Slade’s next maneuver combined to keep the khan’s mind on the moment at hand.

  Slade cut the wheel, and as the whiplash spin began, he kicked the brake. There were two possible destinations for the top-heavy khan: over the side, or over the windshield. Akbar took the former. Knocked breathless, he rolled, all the while clawing gravel to keep himself from going over the shoulder and into the ravine. Slade came out of the spin and raced on.

  While he didn’t hear what Akbar Khan was saying, he heard the three shots which smacked overhead. The fourth pistol slug thumped into the luggage. Then a curve blacked out the tail-light.

  Slade pulled up. He got his field kit, as well as the carefully concealed pistols and carbine whose existence Akbar Khan’s people had not yet suspected. Next, he uncapped the remaining can of gas and set it afire. As the flames shot up, he pus
hed the jeep over the shoulder.

  When the gas tank, almost empty, let go with a roar and a geyser of fire, Slade shouldered his pack and set out afoot. Akbar Khan, reasonably assuming that his shots had taken effect, would be hoofing in the opposite direction.

  CHAPTER VIII

  During his march along the rutted track, Slade heard the barking of dogs but neither farmer nor shepherd challenged him. When moonrise made for easier going, he at times fancied that he could distinguish his goal, the far off ruins. Most of the time, as he plodded through silence broken only by the whine of the wind, he debated whether to hike only by night, or to risk daylight, and being sighted by suspicious mountain men.

  At dawn, he scanned the crests, and was tempted by the nearness of the ruins heaped on a broad shelf jutting from a mountainside. Cornices and the stumps of decapitated columns jutted from the debris of landslide and earthquake. The slope of the approach was comparatively gentle. His goal was too near to permit rest. He resolved to press on. And at the same time, he scanned the steep grades below the trail, half fearing that he might see the wreckage of Kellam’s truck.

  Vultures wheeled black against the sky. Recklessly, and wooden from weariness, he lurched on until, from the opposite crest, a puff of smoke blossomed. Perhaps a second later, a high velocity slug popped past, to glance from an outcropping rock. He rolled for cover. Then came a second bullet, raking up dirt, and moving so slowly that it did not whine. Two reports followed: the dry whack of cordite, and the boom of a muzzle loader charged with black powder.

  “Bum shot with good gun misses, or I’d not have ducked the musket—wonder if she’s a Tonk jezail?”

  For a quarter of an hour, he lay in the shadow of a ledge. The slope from which the shot had come showed no further trace of life. He tried to puzzle it out: the watchers might have mistaken him for an enemy they had hoped to ambush; they might have fired on the general principle that a stranger is a menace, or that a man plodding alone was a fool to be put out of his misery. Or, bored by watching, the two had welcomed any moving target.

  Lying motionless gave fatigue a chance to grip. When Slade awakened, the sun was half past the meridian. Mirage danced over the rocky slopes. Except from close range, not even the best marksman would have a chance. He took a pull at his canteen, ate part of a K-ration, and risked coming from cover.

  The vultures no longer circled. After an hour he rounded a sharp curve. Two bearded men squatted in the shade, their heads drooping to their chests. On the rock between them was half a cake of bread, part of an onion, and a scrap of granite-like cheese.

  Slade halted. For moments, he waited, carbine ready, until, finally, he moved on. Whether from weariness, or from too much opium, they did not awaken. The encounter gave him a new problem; that of meeting people who might pass through Akbar Khan’s territory and chatter about a stranger who mangled the language.

  “Can’t cold caulk ’em, can’t shoot ’em in their tracks,” he summed it up. “So—hole up, and dodge the issue.”

  This was a hard decision. However Kellam might be traveling, each hour of Slade’s hiding out would get the other just so much nearer Afghanistan.

  From his perch, he watched two mountain men trudging along the trail below him. They plied their long barreled rifles as walking sticks. He studied their slow, swinging stride, and the way they carried their shoulders.

  “Looks like hell on the parade ground, but it eats the miles.”

  He waited until nightfall to practice what he had observed.

  Finally, the trail skirted the slope leading to the shelf which held the ruin. When Slade climbed to the level stretch, he was surprised by its expanse. From somewhere in the gloom below him came the trickle of water. He wondered why there were neither villages nor sheepcotes in the vicinity.

  Iskander, he remembered, had once proposed hewing a granite mountain into the image of a god whose extended hand would hold an entire city; Iskander, ploughing the earth with war, had sown cities as a farmer scatters grain, though with more of whimsy than of purpose. The fallen heads of columns picked out by moonrise were Grecian. Who but Iskander of the Two Horns would have built a marble city for no reason except that a shelf was there to hold one? Though this place, whatever its name had been, might once have guarded the Valley of Suastos, now called Swat.

  The ground shivered under his feet. At first he thought this to be a trick played by tired legs until, irritated, he stopped and stamped the earth. There was a hollow sound, separate from that made by his hobnailed shoes; and the yielding was unmistakable. This place had more than met the eye. No wonder herdsmen didn’t like such ground.

  Slade began to think of a name for the place. Iskanderville…no good…cold as billy-be-damned—no, I’m so tired I’m shivering in this louse-ridden jacket… Swat…that’s Babe Ruth… Suat… Soo-at, that’s better…not pretty, not funny either… Welcome to Suat, Major Slade, be one of the ghosts of the Suat Rotary Club…

  He stopped a moment. From the shadows came a rumbling, a vocal sound. He forced a grin and thought, “Heck, it’s not Rotary, it’s the Lions Club, and they’re saying, “Oooooo-Wahhhh!”

  He sniffed the air, and nearly laughed aloud. The smell was that of a bat colony; the vocalizing, a trick of the wind which forced air from out of the buried houses of Suastos. Bat-wings kissed his cheeks and made him shudder. Tiny claws hooked his turban; elfin piping twittered in his ears as the bats rushed out.

  But no gust of air should frighten the creatures.

  Slade stepped into the gloom which gaped from the base of the column-riddled mound. The opening was wide, and its ceiling high over his head. Once more there was a roar. Air compression struck his ear drums, as from the blast of a shell exploding a long way off.

  Feeling his way, he went further, until he noted light which at first seemed the trick of tired eyes; but when it did not flash or dance, he knew it was not inside his head. He sniffed again. The scent of wood prevailed over the stench of bat-droppings, and there was still another smell.

  “Gas, by God! Lube, and rubber.”

  Now the light was strong enough to show deeply rutted flagstones; the wear of Iskander’s chariot wheels, or those of Kanishka, the Tartar who had ruled a Graeco-Buddhist kingdom.

  He crouched to take off his shoes. After tying them to his belt, he walked on, avoiding slabs of fallen masonry, and earth which had pushed through the wall he skirted.

  The lion-roar kept him from hearing whoever waited by the fire around the corner, so that when he at last turned the angle to step from penumbra to full glow, he had his carbine leveled.

  He stood looking at the man and the woman until he could lick his lips, swallow the dust in his throat, and gulp the cramp which gripped it. His presence aroused the two, but not until Slade was able to say, “Hello, Steve. Never mind the gun. It’s me, not a hill-billy.”

  “Dave, for heck’s sake!” Steve Kellam exclaimed, as he hitched about, putting himself between Yasmini and the man who had found life in the bones of Suastos.

  Yasmini sat unveiled, and unafraid.

  Something stirred in the shadow of the truck. Slade’s carbine shifted. “Come out or I’ll let you have it!” he warned, and fired at the figure; anyone but the captain was fair game.

  “Take it easy!” Kellam shouted above the clash of the carbine’s bolt as a fresh cartridge went home.

  A grizzled hag, big-footed and barefooted, came out screeching.

  Yasmini’s reassurance bit deep: “Don’t worry, it’s just Halima, my maid.”

  “Don’t be trigger happy,” Kellam protested. “How’d you get here?”

  Slade answered, “You might’ve known that Peshawar spills top-secrets in no time. How could you possibly not be found?”

  “Who’s with you?”

  “More than are with you. But none within hearing distance. I’ve sold them the idea that
this is between you and me. Nothing you say can be held against you.”

  Kellam became thoughtful. Yasmini smiled seductively, and rearranged the tunic which she wore in place of dancing girl’s skirt. With no jewelry, and without even a stud to disfigure her nose, Yasmini filled the eye as she had never before.

  Slade squatted in the angle of a pilaster which gave flank protection. “Let’s go back.”

  “I can’t.” The captain drew a deep breath, glanced at the truck. “All snafu.

  Yasmini’s inward smile lighted her face; it made her look like a goddess who contemplates her work, without either loving or hating it.

  Slade’s hands tightened on his carbine. Then he relaxed, resigning himself to chicken heartedness that forbade knocking her over with a bullet. After all, he wasn’t sure what such a decisive move would do to Kellam. Then sanity came back to Slade. Yasmini smiled understandingly. She nodded, as though she had weighed him and found him to be worthy of her respect, for having appraised the merits of blotting her out, if need be, for quicker victory.

  “The mountaineers don’t know you’re here,” Slade went on. “They didn’t tell me. I learned in other ways.”

  “My friends,” Yasmini said, “haven’t arrived, and Steve doesn’t want to leave me here alone. Do you understand him now?”

  “A bit too well.”

  “Just as I understand you.”

  “That loot,” Slade resumed, “belongs to Pratap Singh Bahadur. While you were heading for the frontier, I was catching hell from all sides for not bringing you up before the commissioner, Mr. Bowley. I knew by then you were gone, and who with, so I told him to find you and serve a warrant if he felt he had enough to make it stick.”

  “You came to bring me back?”

  “No, to tell you, so you’d want to come back. You were dumped on from the start. Guarding her so-called belongings was well, not too smart, but I can understand. Conniving to get a million in loot across the border, using U. S. Army as the front, that’s something you can’t do, Steve.”

  “I’ve done it.”

  Kellam’s voice told far more than he realized; it explained that something other than fatigue and tension had marked him. Wrath made the base of Slade’s brain ache intolerably; pain compressed his temples. Once again, Yasmini’s life depended on a trigger finger. There’d be no complications. In the Valley of Suastos, a Kashmiri dancing girl counted even less than the woman of a True Believer.