Moroka said, “Too late, Crawford. He would have got away.” The South African started to his feet, brushing sand from his khaki bush shorts.
The others were beginning to come up, and from the Tuareg encampment a rush of Guémama’s men started in their direction.
Crawford said unhappily, looking down at the dead native at their feet, “I hate to see unnecessary killing.”
Moroka looked at him questioningly. “Unnecessary? Another split second and his knife would have been in your gizzard. What do you want to give him, another chance?”
Crawford said uncomfortably, “Thanks, Dave, anyway. That was quick thinking.”
“Thank God,” Donaldson said, coming up, his wrinkled face scowling unhappily, first at the dead man at their feet, and then at the one almost a hundred yards away. “Are these local men? Where were your bodyguards?”
Cliff Jackson skidded to a halt after rounding the tent. He’d heard only the last words. “What bodyguards?” he said.
Moroka looked at Crawford accusingly. “El Hassan,” he said. “Leader of all North Africa. And you haven’t even got around to bodyguards? Do you fellows think you’re playing children’s games? Gentlemen, I assure you, the chips are down.”
VI
El Hassan’s Tuaregs were on the move. After half a century and more of relative peace the Apaches of the Sahara, the Sons of Shaitan and the Forgotten of Allah were again disappearing into the ergs to emerge here, there, and ghostlike to disappear again. They faded in and faded away again, and even in their absence dominated all.
El Hassan was on the move, as all men by now knew, and he, who was not for the amalgamation of all North Africa, was judged against him. And who, in the Sahara, could afford to be against El Hassan when his Tuaregs were everywhere?
Refugees poured into Tamanrasset for the security of Arab Legion arms, or into In Salah and Reggan to the north, or Agades and Zinder to the south. Refugees who had already taken their stand with the Arab Union and Pan-Islam. Refugees who were men of property and would know more of this El Hassan before risking their wealth. Refugees who took no stand, but dreaded those who drank the milk of war, no matter what the cause for which they fought. Refugees who fled simply because others fled, for terror is a most contagious disease.
Colonel Midan Ibrahim of the crack motorized units of the Arab Legion which occupied Tamanrasset was fuming. His task was a double one. First, to hold Tamanrasset and its former French stronghold Fort Laperrine; second, to keep open his lines of communication with Ghadmes and Ghat, in Arab Union-dominated Libya. To hold them until further steps were decided upon by his superiors in Cairo and the Near East-whatever these steps might be Colonel Midan Ibrahim was too low in the Arab Union hierarchy to be in on such privy matters.
His original efforts, in pushing across the Sahara from Ghadmes and Ghat, had been no more than desert maneuvers. There had been no force other than nature’s to say him nay. The Reunited Nations was an organization composed possibly of great powers, but in supposedly acting in unison they became a shrieking set of hair-tearing women: the whole being less than any of its individual parts. And El Hassan? No more than a rumor. In fact, an asset, because this supposed mystery man of the desert, bent on uniting all North Africa under his domination, gave the Arab Union its alibi for stepping in with Colonel Ibrahim’s men.
Yes, the original efforts had been but a drill. But now his Arab Legion troopers were beginning to face reality. The supply trucks, coming down under convoy from Ghadmes, reported the water source at Ohanet destroyed. The major well would take a week or more to repair. Who had committed the sabotage? Some said the Tuareg, some said local followers of El Hassan, others, desert tribesmen resentful of both the Arab Union and El Hassan.
One of his routine patrols, feeling out toward Menier to the north, had suddenly dropped radio communication, almost in midsentence. A relieving patrol had thus far found nothing, the armored car’s tracks covered over by the sands.
And rumors, rumors, rumors. Colonel Midan Ibrahim, born of aristocratic Alexandrian blood, though trained to a sharp edge in Near Eastern warfare, was basically city bred. The gloss of desert training might take on him, but the bedouin life itself was not in his experience, and it was hard for him to trace the dividing line between possibility and fantasy.
Rumors, rumors, rumors. They seemed capable of sweeping from one end of the Sahara to the other in a matter of hours. Faster, it would seem, than the information could be dispensed by radio. El Hassan was here. El Hassan was there. El Hassan was marching on Rabat, in Morocco; El Hassan had just signed a treaty with the Soviet Complex; El Hassan had been assassinated by a disgruntled follower. Or El Hassan was a renegade Christian; El Hassan was a Moslem of Sheriffian blood, a direct descendant of the Prophet; El Hassan was a pagan come up from Dahomey and practiced ritual cannibalism; El Hassan was a Jew, a veteran of the Israel debacle.
But this Colonel Ibrahim knew—the Tuareg had gone over to the new movement en masse. Something there was in El Hassan and his dream that had appealed to the Forgotten of Allah. The Tuareg, for the first time since the French Camel Corps had broken their strength, were united—united and on the move.
The Tuareg were everywhere. In most sinister fashion —everywhere. And all were El Hassan’s men.
Colonel Ibrahim fumed and wondered what kept his superiors from sending in additional columns, additional armored elements. And, above all, adequate air cover. Ha! Give the colonel sufficient aircraft and he’d begin snuffing out bedouin life like candles—and bring the Peace of Allah to the Ahaggar.
So Colonel Ibrahim fumed, demanded further orders from mum superiors, and put his legionnaires to work on bigger and better gun emplacements, trenches and pillboxes surrounding Fort Laperinne and Tamanrasset.
El Hassan’s personal entourage numbered exactly twenty persons. Of these, five were his immediate English-speaking, Western-educated supporters, Cliff, Isobel and the new Jack and Jimmy Peters and Dave Moroka. Rex Donaldson had been sent south again to operate in Senegal and Mali, to take over direction of the rapidly spreading movement in such centers as Bamako and Mopti and later, if possible, in Dakar.
The other fifteen were carefully selected Tuareg, picked from among Guémama’s tribesmen, taking care to show no preference to any tribe or clan, and taking particular care to choose men who fought coolly, unexcitedly, and didn’t froth at the mouth when in action: men who were slow to charge wildly into the enemy’s guns—but slower still to retreat when the going was hot. El Hassan was prone to neither hero nor coward in his personal bodyguard.
They kept under movement: in Abelessa one day, almost in range of the mobile artillery of the Arab Legion; in Timassao the next, checking the wells that meant everything to a desert force; the following day as far south as the Tamesna region to rally the less warlike Irreguenaten, a half-breed Tuareg people largely held in scorn by those of the Ahaggar.
Homer Crawford was killing time whilst stirring up as much noise and dust as his handful of followers could manage. Killing time until Elmer Allen from the Chaambra country, Bey-ag-Akhamouk from the Teda, and Kenny Ballalou from the west could show up with their columns. He had no illusions of how things now stood. At best, he could hold together a thousand Tuareg fighting men. No more. The economics of desert life prevented him a larger force, unless he had the resources of the modern world at hand, and he didn’t. Besides that, the Tuareg confederation could provide no larger number of fighting men and at the same time continue their desert economy.
He stood now with Isobel, Cliff and Dave Moroka in one of the Western-type tents which the Peters brothers had brought with them in their hover-lorries, and poured over the half-adequate maps which covered the area.