Cry Wolf

pumping straight up into the air.

The Ras raced on towards the other survivors, and his men roared

angrily and swarmed forward after him. Jake uttered a horrified oath

and started forward to restrain them.

"Easy, old son." Gareth caught Jake's arm, and swung him away.

"This is no time for one of your boy scout acts." From below them rose

the ugly blood roar of the destroyers, as they fell upon the survivors

of the other tanks, and the Italians" screams cut like a whiplash

across Jake's nerves.

"Let's leave them to it." Gareth drew Jake away. "Not our business,

old boy. The beggars have got to take their own chances.

Rules of the game." Across the crest of the dune they leaned together

against the steel hull of Priscilla. Jake was panting heavily from his

exertions and his horror. Gareth found him a slightly crumpled cheroot

in the inside pocket of his tweed jacket, and straightened it carefully

before placing it between Jake's lips.

"Told you before, your sentimental but endearing ways will get us both

into trouble. They'd have torn you to pieces also if you'd gone down

there." He lit Jake's cheroot.

"Well, old boy-" he changed the subject diplomatically.

"That takes care of our biggest problem. No tanks no worries,

that's an old Swales family motto," and he chuckled lightly. "We'll be

able to hold them at the mouth of the gorge for another week now. No

trouble at all." Abruptly the sunlight was obscured, and instantly the

temperature dropped sharply. Both of them glanced up involuntarily at

the sky, at the gloom and the sudden chill.

In the last hour, the masses of cloud had come slumping down from the

mountains, blotting them out completely, and spreading out on to the

fringes of the Danakil desert.

From this thick, dark mattress of swirling cloud, fine pale streamers

of rain were already spiralling down towards the plain. Jake felt a

droplet splatter against his forehead and he wiped it away with the

back of his hand.

"I say, we're in for a drop or two," murmured Gareth, and as if in

confirmation the deep mutter of thunder echoed down from the

cloud-shrouded mountains, and lightning flared sulkily, trapped within

the towering cloud masses and lighting them internally with a

smouldering infernal glow.

"That's going to make things-" Gareth cut himself off, and both of them

cocked their heads.

"Hello, that's decidedly odd." Faintly on the brooding air,

carrying above the mutter of thunder, came the popping of musketry and

the sound of machine-gun fire, like the sound of tearing silk, made

indistinct and un warlike by distance and the muting banks of heavy

cloud.

"Deuced odd." Gareth repeated. "There should not be any firing from

there." It was in their rear, seeming to come from the very mouth of

the gorge itself.

"Come on," snapped Jake, picking his binoculars out of Priscilla's

hatch and scrambling through the loose red sand for the crest of the

tallest dune.

The cloud and misty streamers of rain obscured the mouth of the gorge,

but now the sound of gunfire was continuous.

"That's not just a skirmish," muttered Gareth.

"It's a full-scale fire fight," Jake agreed, peering through the

binoculars.

"What is it, Jake?" Gregorius came up the dune to where they stood. He

was followed by his grandfather but the old man moved slowly, exhausted

and stiff with age and the aftermath of burned-out passions.

"We don't know, Greg. "Jake did not lower the binoculars.

"I don't understand it." Gareth shook his head. "Any Italian probe

from the south would have run into our positions in the foothills, and

from the north it would have run into the Gallas. Ras

Kullah is in a pretty strong spot there. We would have heard the

fighting. They can't have gone through there-"

"And we are here in the centre, "Jake added, "they didn't come through

here."

"It doesn't make sense." At that moment, the Ras reached the crest. He

paused wearily and removed the teeth from his mouth, wrapped them

carefully in a kerchief and tucked them away in some secret recess of

his sham ma The mouth collapsed into a dark empty pit, and immediately

he looked his age again.

Quickly Gregorius explained this new phenomenon to the old man,

and while he listened he ran the blade of his sword into the dune

between his feet, scrubbing it clean of the clotted black blood in the

dry friable sand. He spoke suddenly in his tremulou's old man's

voice.

"My grandfather says that Ras Kullah is a piece of dried dung of a

venereal hyena," Gregorius translated quickly.

"And he says my uncle, Lij Mikhael, was wrong to treat with him,

and that you were wrong to trust him."

"Now what the hell does that mean?" Jake demanded fretfully, and

lifted the binoculars sweeping again towards the mouth of the Sardi

Gorge away across the undulating golden plain then he exclaimed again.

"Damn it to hell, everything is blowing up. That crazy woman! She

promised me, she swore on oath that she would keep out of it for once

and now here she comes again!"

Emerging through the curtains of rain, indistinct under the dark

rolling mass of cloud, throwing no dust column on the rain-dampened

earth, the tiny sand-coloured shape of Miss Wobbly came bowling towards

them with its distinctive stately gait. Even at this distance, Jake

could make out the dark speck of Sara's head in the hatch of the

high,

old-fashioned turret.

Jake started to run down the slip-face of the dune to meet the oncoming

car.

"Jake!" Vicky screeched above the engine beat, before she came to a

halt, her head thrust out of the driver's hatch, her golden hair

shaking in the wind and her eyes huge in the pale intense face.

"What the hell are you doing? "Jake shouted back angrily.

"The Gallas," Vicky screeched. "They've gone! Every last man of them!

Gone!" She braked hard and tumbled down to the ground so that

Jake had to catch and steady her.

"What do you mean gone?" Gareth demanded, coming up at that moment and

Sara answered him from Miss Wobbly's turret with her dark eyes

sparkling hotly.

"They went, like smoke, like the dirty hill bandits they are."

"The left flank-"Gareth exclaimed.

"Nobody there. The Italians have come through without firing a shot.

Hundreds and hundreds of them. They are at the gorge, they have

overrun the camp."

"Jake, they would have cut off all our own Harari,

it would have been a massacre Sara gave the order, in her grandfather's

name, she ordered them to abandon the right flank."

"Oh,

good Christ!"

"They are trying to fight their way back into the gorge now but the

Italians are covering the mouth with machine guns. It's terrible,

Jake, oh the desert is thick with the dead."

"We've lost it all. Everything we gained, at a single throw, it's all

gone. This was a feint, the tanks were sent to draw us off. The main

attack was through the left but how did they know the Gallas had

deserted?"

"As my grandfather says, never trust either a snake or a Galla."