‘I think so. No rain, therefore potassium nitrite.’
‘Not potassium nitrite. Much more exciting. Ytterbium nitrite.’
Inspiration visited Hugo. He said, ‘Otherwise known as Smitherite.’
There was dead silence in the hut. Hugo looked up and saw that both men were staring at him.
‘If you know nothing about minerals,’ said Wandyke, ‘where did you hear that name?’
‘Colonel Rex – he’s my arms contact-man – certainly knew about it. But I’d heard it once before, too. I can’t remember if it was Taverner at the F.O. or the Ruler.’
‘Damn, damn and damn,’ said Cowcroft. The Ruler’s been shooting his mouth off. I was afraid something like that had happened when I saw those Yanks arrive.’
‘Is Ringbolt here?’
‘He got in on Friday with a private army. And he’s not the only one. Hammuz and that Iraqi jackal of his, Dr. Kassim, have been having a few unscheduled visitors in the last day or two. Envoys from flag, I imagine. Where there’s dirt, the dogs will roll in it.’
Seeing Hugo look blank, he said, ‘flag is the Federation for the Liberation of the Arabian Gulf. They’re backed by the Chinese, and their roots are in the Yemen, but they’re moving north. They’ve got a link with the Ba’ath party in Iraq, which is probably where Dr. Kassim fits in.’
Hugo remembered Lord Twinley saying something like: ‘If I was a cartoonist I’d draw you a picture of little Umran with three suitors, each with a bouquet in one hand and a bomb in the other.’ He said, ‘What is it about Smitherite that makes it so compulsively attractive?’
‘Ytterbium is a fairly rare mineral,’ said Wandyke. ‘In every other case where it’s been discovered it’s been in the form of ytterbium aluminium silicate. You can extract it, all right, but it’s a difficult and expensive process. Here you’ve got it on a plate. Because it’s in the form of ytterbium nitrite. That’s to say in large globules, which can be separated by centrifuging. Which simply means twirling the stuff round until the heavier particles shoot out to the circumference. It’s a simple and inexpensive operation which anyone can carry out. All right so far?”
Hugo said, slowly, ‘I understand that when you find ytterbium in this particular form you can get a lot more of it out, a lot quicker, and a lot cheaper. What I don’t follow is why it’s so important.’
‘Very simple. Scientists on both sides of the Iron Curtain have discovered that if you alloy titanium with ytterbium it increases its strength-weight ratio
and
it approximately doubles its melting point. Titanium’s the most important metal used in rocket construction.’
They were halfway back to the Palace when the police driver braked suddenly.
‘What’s up. Sergeant?’ said Cowcroft.
The Sergeant pointed to a spot ten yards ahead of them where there was a re-entrant between two spurs into the
djebel.
When they were coming up the track it had been in shade, but the sun had moved across now, and the marks were quite clear. A vehicle of some sort had been driven up the re-entrant.
The Sergeant had got out and was sniffing at the tracks like a gun dog on a fresh spoor. He said, ‘Army truck. Four-wheel drive.’
‘It can’t have gone far.’
‘Gone and come back again.’ The Sergeant was on his knees, unravelling the marks. Ten, twelve hours ago.’
‘We’ll go on foot. Avoid messing up the signs.’ He looked out of the corner of his eye at Hugo and said, ‘You can come if you like.’
‘I’d rather come with you than sit here,’ said Hugo. The heat in the little amphitheatre was ferocious. He plodded after them up the re-entrant. They kept well to one side, to avoid messing up the wheel tracks which were clearly visible, coming and going. At the second bend Cowcroft raised his hand to stop Hugo and the Sergeant went forward alone. He shouted something, and they followed him.
The body was tumbled among the bushes in a cleft in the rocks. No particular attempt had been made to conceal it. The Sergeant was on his knees beside it. He touched the head gently and it rolled round. The throat had been cut so savagely that the head had almost been severed from the body.
‘It is Mahmoud,’ said the Sergeant.
The man was dressed in peasant clothes. His feet were bare. The swarm of flies which had been at work buzzed resentfully at the interruption.
Cowcroft was staring down abstractedly at the body. He said to Hugo, ‘Mahmoud was one of our men. He was working as a kitchen hand in Sheik Hammuz’s Palace,’ and to the Sergeant, ‘They tortured him before they killed him.’
The Sergeant said, ‘They broke up his feet.’
Hugo could see, now, the splintered ends of bone sticking out through the skin.
‘He would not talk,’ said Cowcroft. ‘Whatever they did to him, he would say nothing.’
Hugo tried to visualise what it would feel like to have your feet smashed up with a hammer, and quite suddenly the whole thing became too much for him. The blackened blood, the greedy flies, the heat, the smell and his own imaginings came on him together, the earth and the sky changed places, and he was on his back, propped up against a rock in the shade, with Cowcroft forcing some brandy down his throat from a hip flask.
He put it aside, and climbed shakily to his feet. He was angry, and his anger cleared his head quicker than brandy.
He said, ‘A bloody fine show, I’m meant to be your military adviser, and I pass out at the sight of blood.’
‘I expect it was the heat,’ said Cowcroft. ‘Let’s get back to the car. I’ll leave the Sergeant here to see that no one disturbs things until we can get a party out.’
Back at the Land Rover he switched on the wireless and spoke into it at length. Then he got behind the wheel and they drove back towards the Palace.
Hugo said, ‘I think you’d better put me in the picture about one or two things. You mentioned Sheik Hammuz. He’s the Ruler’s brother, isn’t he?’
‘His younger brother, by eleven months.’
‘And you had a man planted to spy on him. Why?’
The Land Rover had travelled some distance before Cowcroft answered. Then he said, ‘It sounds a bit odd when you put it that way. But there are two factions in this country, and always have been. The eastern seaboard is the progressive side. It’s got Mohara, which is the only town worth dignifying with the name. And the main dhow harbour and the boat jetty, and the best roads, and now it’s got the air-strip too. The other side’s primitive. Jungly, we should have called it in India. There’s a bit of farming along the coast. Most of the farmers dabble in smuggling as well. The rest of them live in the desert or up in the
djebel.
The hill men are a pretty wild lot. When a light plane belonging to one of the local oil companies made a forced landing there last year they rescued the four men in it all right. Then they sold them back to the company, for eight thousand pounds. A thousand pounds a leg was the way they put it.’
‘And the company paid up?’
‘Certainly. They didn’t want a first instalment of legs delivered. They paid up and kept quiet about it.’
‘And Sheik Hammuz, the Ruler’s brother, is a Westerner.’
‘He’s their tribal chief. Chief Smuggler, principal brigand, and – by God, here he is.’
They had swung round the last corner, and were turning into the Palace entrance. Just inside the double gate an enormous six-seated Cadillac was parked. It was painted dark red and was flying a blue and yellow flag on its bonnet.
Cowcroft parked his dusty Land Rover beside it. It was like a tramp steamer mooring alongside a battleship.
‘Come on,’ he said, ‘Let’s go in and see what the bugger’s up to now.’
Sheik Hammuz bin Rashid bin Abdulla was seated next to the Ruler, his brother. He had the thin prow-like nose which was the hall-mark of the Ferini family, but he was clean-shaven. This surprised Hugo, who knew that, among the desert Arabs, for a leader not to wear a beard was a sign of eccentricity, if not of actual effeminacy. He wondered if some glandular trouble might have been at the root of it. It was unfortunate that this lack of hair should have revealed so nakedly the pendulous cheeks, the full lips, and the rounded dimpled chin.
A slight, pretty, young man wearing an incongruously well-cut lounge suit was standing beside Sheik Hammuz. Hugo put him down as a Syrian or Lebanese, but was wrong on both counts. For this was Dr. Kassim, and he was a full-blooded Iraqi.
The Ruler effected the introduction. Sheik Hammuz did not rise, but waved a fat, heavily ringed hand in Hugo’s direction. Kassim said, ‘His Excellency is glad to see you here, Mr. Greest, and hopes that you will be able to work for the good of all.’
‘I hope so, too,’ said Hugo.
‘You have seen the mining camp?’ said the Ruler.
‘We’ve seen something else,’ said Cowcroft abruptly. There’s a dead man in the
djebel,
five miles north of here.’
‘An accident?’
‘Not unless he cut his own throat, accidentally.’
‘Tell us.’
Cowcroft told them what he had found. When he described the injuries to the man’s feet, Kassim said, ‘That would no doubt be robbers. They would torture him to reveal where he hid his money:’
‘Odd sort of robbers,’ said Cowcroft. They were driving a standard army truck. We traced it back as far as this Palace.’
‘And further?’
‘After this it’s a made-up road. A truck will leave no traces.’
‘A pity,’ said Kassim. ‘For it will make it very difficult to trace the murderer.’
‘Army trucks with these particular tyres aren’t common,’ said Cowcroft.
This produced a moment of silence, but no other reaction.
‘I am sure,’ said the Ruler, ‘that you will do your best to discover the murderers, Commandant. When you discover them they shall be condignly punished.’
They took this as dismissal. When they got outside they found the Sergeant talking to Major Youba.
The Major said, ‘Some of my men heard a truck drive past here just after midnight. They assumed that it was going back to the diggings. It returned about half an hour later. This was curious. It could not have reached the diggings and returned in that time, so what was it doing? They listened to it drive off down the road. They thought that it turned off the road towards Hammuz.’
‘Could they conceivably hear that?’ said Hugo. ‘It’s all of three miles to the turning.’
‘On a very still night.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ said Hugo. ‘If they heard that truck turn off the road, it turned off somewhere before that road junction.’
‘It is possible,’ said Major Youba. There is a track. It makes a short cut back to the Hammuz road.’
‘Let’s have a look at it,’ said Cowcroft.
The track went off to the right, about a mile from the Palace. The marks of the tyres were quite plain.
‘Bloody impertinence,” said Cowcroft. ‘They didn’t mind what traces they left. All they cared about was getting home to bed. We’ll have a look at the other end. Better go by road, then we shan’t spoil the trail.’
They drove to the road junction, turned right towards Hammuz, and found the exit point of the track. The tyre marks were there, plain as the pugs of a tiger making his insolent way to his cave after a night’s hunting.
As they were examining them, the huge Cadillac came purring up the road behind them, checked, and drove on. Sheik Hammuz and Dr. Kassim were sitting together in the back.
‘Holding hands,’ said Cowcroft. ‘What a sweet pair. We shan’t get anything more out of this. And if we go down to Hammuz and start asking questions we’ll have a riot on our hands. Get into my car. One of my men can take yours. There are several things I’d like to talk about.’
However, they were in the outskirts of Mohara before Cowcroft spoke again. Then he said, ‘In the course of a long life, I’ve met a lot of nasty people. Chinese pirates, Afghan mullahs, African witch-doctors, fakirs and fakers. But I’d give that Kassim three-star rating in any company.’
‘I didn’t much like his looks,’ agreed Hugo. ‘He seems rather young to be a hardened villain.’
‘By the record, he’s twenty-five. And he’s packed in more villainy into that quarter of a century than most people could get through in a lifetime. He’s been an active member of the Ba’ath party since he was a boy. He was twelve years old when he carried the bomb, in a school satchel, that failed to kill King Hussein of Jordan and blew three of his bodyguard to shreds. He was in prison before he was fourteen, and got out by seducing the governor. He disappeared for a bit after that, and was thought to have been in Egypt. He was next heard of in the American University at Beirut where he got a doctorate in zoology, and was sacked for master-minding a riot which ended in the principal’s house being gutted. When the dust had died down, he came back to Iraq and was involved in the unsuccessful July coup. He came out the right side of that and was allowed, as a reward, personally to execute three of the Colonels involved. It’s commonly believed that he copied Himmler’s favourite method, and had them strung up with a butcher’s hook through the point of the jaw.’
‘You seem to know a lot about him.”
‘It’s my job to know these things,’ said Cowcroft. ‘Block ahead. Watch it.’
The street they were in was congested with cars, carts and bicyclists. Something seemed to have happened. Horns were blowing and people were shouting.
The Sergeant swung the car to the right, down a side street between market stalls, then left, into an alley so narrow that they seemed to be scraping the walls on either side, and out into an open dusty space where half a dozen boys were playing football. They crossed the pitch, interrupting a nice solo dribbling effort, bumped along a second alley, and came out into a broad road running west out of the town.
‘Never stop behind a traffic block,’ said Cowcroft. ‘It makes things too easy for the man on the roof with a rifle.’
‘Do you mean it was a put-up job?’
‘Probably not. But it doesn’t pay to find out.’ They were running alongside a high white wall, with occasional barred windows in it and a sprinkling of broken glass along the top. The gateway at the far end had a bar across it, and there were two sentries on duty. One of them saluted. The other raised the bar, and they drove in.