‘They might.’ Frank laid down his rifle to look for wood.
‘My old man boasted all his life about a night attack in the Argonne Wood in 1918. He lost his whole battalion capturing four shell-holes, and got a string of medals for it. He’s retired from the Army now, after a lifetime of service. Always wanted me to go in the Army, but they threw me out of military college, which broke the old man’s heart, as my family said, and I never thought it’d be so easy, because that had always been my sole aim in life. They play right into your hands, parents.’
‘That way they really cut you up,’ Frank said, ripping at a tinderous bush with hand and boot. ‘Best to keep away from them, then there’ll always be a bit of love left between you. You should start a guerrilla war in the Deep South, and if the Yanks send the Army to put it down, you might get a chance of shooting your old man between the eyes — if it means that much.’
Shelley spat. ‘You’re a real barrack-room lawyer. I liked it better when you were a taciturn Limey who didn’t know his own mind.’
‘When was that? There never was such a time. I’ll bet we get them out of that post. They’ll think it’s a group of nomads over here, and come to check up.’
Fires were lit below the col, on the blind side from the camp, so that only smoke and a glow would be visible to their observant eyes. They would imagine that whoever it was hadn’t yet seen them, and would come out to make a surprise round-up of the fires.
‘It’s a tightrope,’ Shelley said. ‘There are six of us, seven with the guide, which is too few to pull it off. Mokhtar’s forgetting the basic principles, and I don’t like it one flat bit.’
So as to move quickly in the dark and not lose contact they tied a length of string from hand to hand. The moon had flowed behind the hills. Even if they don’t fall for it, we can make a surprise raid and vanish, and if they don’t check on the fires, they won’t come out and pursue us. If they do come for the fires, it means we’re not outnumbered, since we’ve split them. Divide the mind, a decision one side that you could never make, and on the other something that went fatally wrong, because it was too easy. That way was madness and defeat. When you sharpened the mind to its perfect logic, it was always too late to withdraw from plans whose contemplation made them perfect and so could not be abandoned to the anarchy of futile speculation. Three fires cracked into flame, sere branches bunching and falling apart, then shooting up again, sparking and bursting around their faces. They stood a few minutes among swirling smoke, then drew back as upshooting flames strangled it.
They descended the slope, convicts chained by the dark string of an idea that could only snap through panic or disaster. Voices were curbed, even thoughts, as they slid through the darkness and flanked away from the treacherous pull of the heart which would have led to a premature clash with any group snared towards the smoke. The situation was spun out of nothing, a needle of fire, a shadowy trick, and as far as Frank could see, it might be only a nomad camp they were approaching to blow the middle out of.
They paused, still visible to each other. He loathed silence, the dangerous voiceless steppe over which all the stars of the universe were poised like a planetarium, the white blood of the Milky Way fixed in that atrophied spurt towards the ultimate back-end of creation. Each star was a spyhole through a great black wall laid over the sky; above, it was all dazzling phosphorescent light that shone through these pinpricks. The cool wind blew at his shirt and shook his matted hair. With relief, he heard the jackal blowing its heartbreak back in the hills. If it was a nomad camp there’d be a place at the fire, a dish of beans, and tea. Then more walking, machinery, marching, counter-marching, involved trigonometrical exercises through the Djebel Amour, the barren mountains of love parsimoniously decked with alfa and shrubs that hardly sustained the life in your boots. Myra must be back in England, and he pictured her in bed with a baby in its nearby cot, breathing through the hours of similar silence wherein he went over the rocks and stones in darkness. Sensing danger, he felt alone, not belonging to the other six as they belonged to him and to each other, but a man trapped by extreme isolation, caught under the stars and fixed like a fly on the steppe which seemed of absolute immensity now that they’d been an hour on it. They were descending slightly, and he wondered if ever peace would come so that he could see the hills with the good eyes of someone who is not hunted. They were a band of men marked down, and since they were in a land where other groups roamed, they had not yet been identified and cordoned off. They struck, grabbed, ran, hid, sweating and starving in the lonely darkness, but so far, the precise military tactics of the French had not pinned them down and scorched their rage and rags off the face of the earth. Napalm and flamethrower, the cruel and wicked kiss of the sun-god was out to get them, but this great land gave them cover, and the people of similar faith somehow found them food. Such hard living settled his regard for Myra and brought on a greater longing to see his child, because it seemed that they’d probably given him up for ever — whether or not he might one day go back again. This comfortless, stark knowledge had strengthened him at the time of his greatest despair when traversing the sandwaste and pure dust of the blinding dunes, a week after crossing from Morocco. With little water and no food they staggered for days over the blinding sand and grit of Satan’s earth, scorched and bleeding from mouth and rectum, scabbed and tortured as they held on to rifles and submachine-guns, insane and sick, followed by huge birds waiting for them to finally drop. It was the only way to survive the hedgehog fort-zone of Colomb-Bechar, throw themselves into the worst land of the earth. Remembering it made this stony, mountainous, scrub-wilderness seem like paradise.
Both fires were visible, a dying glow from their own, the other constant as if continually built on. At the half-way point they moved in silence and slow motion, the guide covering them a few yards to the left and keeping a sharp watch to avoid any investigating party. The night was as big as the land, endless, and it needed to be, he thought, for all they had to do. At a signal, they lay flat, no stone disturbed. The noise of boots came so close that Frank thought they would be walked on, used like stepping-stones across some shallow stream. His ear to the ground, he heard their weight, heavily built and laden, not too extended, fearing nothing because they were being as cautious as they knew how, though grunting and baulking over the unexpected distance.
Mokhtar stood up. Frank walked slow, quiet, hunched. Several universes had passed over their heads but nothing had altered. Space, stars, apprehensions were the same. They quickened, keeping a single file. A Very light went over the hills from the outgoing party, a thin luminous snake vanishing into some black window of the sky as if to do its worst on the inhabitants within. A reply shell curved from the point they were approaching. Mokhtar must be happy, he thought, sensing his smile of satisfaction, forehead creased with anxiety at evidence that his plan of vengeance was half-way coming to pass.
The fire on the hills was out, and no doubt the soldiers imagined they’d been sighted and so were extending their line for the round-up. Pitch night seemed like day to Mokhtar, for he had fixed the now darkened camp in his deepset eyes for so long that he knew exactly where it was. They closed up and followed him like cats to the leeward side from which a raid would be least expected, and which was also the best direction for a retreat, since another line of broken hills sloped up out of the plain a few miles away. The pinpricked skullcap of the sky held darkness firmly over them, and with sensibility and care they picked a way bund to the far flank of the entrenchment.