Bagley, Desmond - The Spoilers Read online

  'Yes, I can see that,' said Tozier. 'And it's happening in Iraq, you say.'

  'Barzani is fighting for Kurdish autonomy in Iraq,' said Ahmed. 'He is a clever man and a good soldier; he has fought the Iraqis to a standstill. With all their war planes, tanks and heavy artillery the Iraqis have not been able to subdue him -- so now President Bakr is reduced to negotiation.' He smiled. 'A triumph for Barzani.'

  He closed the atlas. 'But enough of politics. Have more whisky and tell me of England.'

  Warren and Tozier left rather late the next morning. Ahmed was prodigal in his hospitality, but they did not see Sheikh Fahrwaz again. Ahmed kept them up late at night talking about his life in England and quizzing them about current English affairs. In the morning, after breakfast, he said, 'Would you like to see the farm? It's typically Kurdish, you know.' He smiled charmingly. 'Perhaps I will yet see my father's farm on the screen.'

  The tour of the farm was exhaustive -- and Ahmed was exhausting. He showed them everything and kept up a running commentary all the time. It was after eleven when they were ready to leave. 'And where do you go now?' he asked.

  Tozier looked at his watch. 'Johnny hasn't turned up yet; maybe he's in trouble. I think we ought to go back and find him. What do you say, Nick?'

  'It might be as well,' said Warren. 'But I bet he's gone back to have another look at that encampment he was so enthusiastic about. I think we'd better chase him up.' He smiled at Ahmed. Thank you for your hospitality -- it's been most kind.'

  Typically Kurdish,' said Ahmed cheerfully.

  They exchanged a few more polite formalities and then departed with a wave from Ahmed and his 'God speed you,' hi their ears. As they bumped back along the road to the pass Warren said, 'What did you think of that?'

  Tozier snorted. Too bloody good to be true, if you ask me. He was altogether too accommodating.'

  'He certainly took a lot of trouble over us,' said Warren.'

  'Typical Kurdish hospitality',' he quoted.

  'Hospitality, my backside,' said Tozier violently. 'Did you notice he took us into every building -- into every room? It was as though he was deliberately demonstrating he had nothing to hide. How did you sleep?'

  'Like the dead,' said Warren. 'He was very liberal with his Chivas Regal. I felt woozy when I turned in.'

  'So was I,' said Tozier. 'I usually have a better head for Scotch than that.' He paused. 'Maybe we were doped with some of that morphine we're looking for. Is that possible?'

  'It's possible,' said Warren. 'I must admit I felt a bit dreary when I woke up this morning.'

  'I have a vague idea there was quite a bit of movement during the night,' said Tozier. 'I seem to remember a lot of coining and going with camels. The trouble is I don't know if it really happened or if it was a dream.'

  They came to the top of the pass and Warren looked back. The settlement looked peaceful and innocent -- a pleasant pastoral scene. Typically Kurdish, he thought sardonically. And yet Sheikh Fahrwaz was the consignee for those damned chemicals. He said, 'We saw everything there was to be seen down there, therefore there was nothing to hide. Unless . . .'

  'Unless?'

  'Unless it's so well hidden that Ahmed knew we wouldn't spot it.'

  'How much room would Speering need for his laboratory, or whatever it is?'

  Warren considered the ridiculous amount of chemicals that Javid Raqi had come up with. 'Anything from two hundred square feet to two thousand.'

  Then it's not there,' said Tozier flatly. 'We'd have seen it.'

  'Would we?' said Warren thoughtfully. 'You said you've searched villages for arms caches. Where did you usually find them?'

  'Oh, for God's sake!' said Tozier, thumping the wheel violently. 'Underground, of course.

  But just in bits and pieces -- a few here and there. There was never any big-scale construction like you'd need here.'

  'It wouldn't be too difficult. The ground in the valley bottom isn't rocky -- it's soil over red clay; quite soft, really.'

  'So you think we ought to go back and have a look. That's going to be difficult, as well as being dicey.'

  'We'll talk about it with the others. There's Ben now.'

  Bryan waved them off the road into a little side valley which was hardly more than a ravine, and jumped on to the running-board as they passed. After two* hundred yards the ravine bent at right-angles and they saw the other vehicle parked, with Follet sitting on the ground in front of it. He looked up as they stopped. 'Any trouble?'

  'Not yet,' said Tozier briefly. He joined Follet. -'What's that you've got there?'

  'A photograph of the valley. I took a dozen with the Polaroid camera.'

  Those could be useful. We have to go in there again -- discreetly. Let's have a look at them, Johnny -- all of them.'

  Follet spread the photographs on the bonnet of the Land-Rover. After a while Tozier said, 'There's not much joy here. Anyone coming down the pass can be spotted in daylight. and you can lay odds that a watch is kept. It's four miles from the bottom of the pass to the settlement -- eight miles there and back -- that's a long way at night on foot. And when we get there we have to stumble around in the dark looking for something that might not be there. I can't see it.'

  'What are you looking for?' asked Follet.

  'A secret underground r oom,' said Warren.

  Follet pulled a face. 'How in hell do you expect to find that?'

  'I don't know how we're going to find it,' said Warren a little wearily.

  Bryan leaned over and picked up a photograph. 'Andy seems more concerned about getting to the settlement unseen,' he said. 'There's more than one way of skinning a cat.' His finger traced the lane of 'craters'. Tell me more about this underground channel.'

  The qanat? It's just a means of tapping water from the mountains and leading it to the valley.'

  'How big is it? Big enough for a man to walk through?'

  Warren nodded. 'It must be.' He tried to remember what he had read about them. 'They send men down to keep them in repair.'

  'There you are,' said Bryan. 'You don't have to go stumbling around. That's an arterial highway pointing straight at the settlement. You can pop down a hole here and pop up another there just like a rabbit.'

  Tozier stared at him for a moment. 'You make it sound so easy,' he said with heavy irony. 'What's the slope in these things, Nick?'

  'Not much. Just enough to keep the water moving.'

  'I don't think that's very much, either. Maybe a foot.' Warren felt a sense of desperation. 'Look, Andy; I don't know much about this. All I know is what I've read.'

  Tozier ignored that. 'What's the footing like? Is it flat?'

  Warren closed his eyes, trying to visualize the illustrations he had seen. At last he said, 'Flat, I think.'

  Tozier looked at the photographs. 'We go down the pass on foot just after dark. We drop down a shaft into the qanat. If the footing is reasonable we ought to make two miles an hour -- that's two hours to the settlement. We come up as close as possible and we can search until just before daybreak. Then we pop back down our hole and come back underground and unseen. We take our chances coming up the pass in daylight -- there's a reasonable amount of cover. It's becoming practicable.'

  Follet snorted. 'Practicable! I think it's crazy. Burrowing underground, for Christ's sake!'

  'Supposing the qanat route is practicable,* said Warren. 'I doubt it, but let's suppose we can do it. How are we going to search the settlement without being nabbed?'

  'You never know your luck unless you try,' said Tozier. 'In any case, can you suggest anything else?'

  'No,' said Warren. 'I can't, damn it!'

  Tozier supervised the preparations. He hauled more rope out of the Land-Rovers than Warren had thought they carried -- light nylon rope with a high breaking strain. From a toolbox he took crampons. 'Dropping down a shaft will be easy,' he said. 'We can do that on the end of a rope. Getting up another might be difficult. We'll need these.'

  He produced high
-powered electric torches and knives to go in their belts, but Warren was surprised when he began to take apart one of the photographic tripods. 'What are you doing?'

  Tozier paused. 'Supposing you find this laboratory -- what do you intend to do?'

  'Destroy it,' said Warren tightly.

  'How?'

  'I thought of burning it, or something like that.'

  That might not work underground,' said Tozier, and continued to strip the tripod. He took off the tubular aluminium tegs and from them shook several brown cylinders. This will do it, though. You don't need much gelignite to make a thorough mess of a relatively small installation.'

  Warren gaped as he watched Tozier wrap the gelignite into a neat bundle with strips of insulating tape. Tozier grinned. 'You left the fighting preparations to me -- remember?'

  'I remember,' said Warren.

  Then Tozier did something even more surprising. Using a screwdriver he removed the clock from the dashboard. This is already gimmicked,' he said. 'See that spike on the back? That's a detonator. All we do is to ram that into one of those sticks of gelignite and we can set the clock to explode it at any time up to twelve hours in advance.' He laughed. The art of preparation is the art of war.'

  'Got any more surprises?' asked Warren drily.

  Tozier looked at him seriously and jerked his thumb in the direction of the settlement. Those boys are gangsters and they'll use gangster's weapons -- knives and pistols. In these parts maybe rifles, too. But I'm a soldier and I lite soldier's tools.' He patted the side of the Land-Rover. These aren't the same vehicles that left the factory. The Rover company wouldn't recognize some of the parts I put in, but then, neither would a customs officer.'

  'So?'

  'So what does a gun look like?'

  Warren shook his head in a baffled way. 'It has a barrel, a trigger, a stock.'

  'Yes,' said Tozier. He went to the back of the Land-Rover and began to take out one of the struts which held up the canopy. He hauled it out and the canopy sagged slightly but not much. There's your barrel,' he said, thrusting it into Warren's hands. 'Now we want the breech mechanism.'

  He began to strip the vehicle of odd bits of metal -- the cigarette lighter from the dashboard was resolved into its component parts, an ashtray which was apparently a metal pressing turned out to be a finely machined slide, springs were picked out of the toolbox and within ten minutes Tozier had assembled the gun.

  'Now for the stock,' he said, and unstrapped the spade from the side of the Land-Rover. With a twist of his wrist it came neatly in half and the handle part was slotted into the gun to form a shoulder rest. There you are,' he said. 'An automatic machine-pistol. There's so much metal in a truck that no one recognizes small components for what they are -- and the big bits you disguise as something else.' He held out the gun. 'We couldn't just walk into the country with a thing like this in our hands, could we?'

  'No,' said Warren, fascinated. 'How many of those have you got?'

  Two of these little chaps and a rather decent air-cooled machine-gun which fits on one of the tripods. Ammunition is the difficulty -- it's hard to disguise that as anything else, so we haven't got much.' He jerked his thumb. 'Every one of those sealed cans of unexposed film carries its share.'

  'Very ingenious.'

  'And then there's the mortar,' said Tozier casually. 'You never know when a bit of light artillery will come in useful.'

  'No!' said Warren abruptly. 'Now, that's impossible.'

  'Be my guest,' said Tozier, waving at the Land-Rover. 'If you find it you can have my bonus -- or as much of it as Johnny Follet leaves me with.'

  He went away, leaving Warren to look at the Land-Rover with renewed interest. A mortar was a big piece of equipment, and search as he would he could not find anything remotely resembling one, nor could he find any mortar bombs -- sizeable objects in themselves. He rather thought Tozier was pulling his leg.

  They made the final preparations and drove up to the top of the pass and parked the Land- Rovers off the road behind some boulders. At sunset they began to descend the pass. Going down into the valley was not too difficult; it was not yet so dark that they could not see a few yards in front of them, but dark enough to make it improbable that they should be seen from a distance. From the top of the pass to the first ventilation shaft of the qanat was just over a mile, and when they got there it would have been quite dark but for the light of the newly risen moon.

  Tozier looked up at the sky. 'I'd forgotten that,' he said. 'It could make it dicey at the other end. We're damned lucky to have this underground passage -- if it works.' He began to uncoil a rope.

  'Hold on,' said Warren. 'Not this shaft.' He had just remembered something. This will be the head well -- the water's likely to be deep at the bottom. Try the next shaft.'

  They walked about fifty yards along the line of the qanat until they came to the next shaft, and Tozier unslung the rope. 'How deep are these things, Nick?"* 'I haven't a clue.'

  Tozier picked up a pebble and dropped it down the hole, timing its fall by the ticking of his watch. 'Less than a hundred feet. That's not too bad. We might have to come up this one in a hurry.' He gave one end of the rope to Bryan.

  'Here, Ben; belay that around something -- and make sure it's something that won't shift.'

  Bryan scouted around and found a rock deeply embedded in the earth around which he looped the rope, tying it off securely. Tozier hauled on it to test it, then fed the other end into the shaft. He handed his machine-pistol to Warren. 'Ill go first. I'll flash a light three times if it's okay to come down.' He sat on the edge of the shaft, his legs dangling, then turned over on to his belly and began to lower himself. 'See you at the bottom,' he whispered, the sound of his voice coming eerily from the black hole.

  He went down hand over hand using his knees to brace against the wall of the shaft which was about three feet in diameter. One by one he came to the bits of cloth he had tied to the rope at ten-foot intervals and by which he could judge his distance and, at just past the ninety-foot mark, his boots struck something solid and he felt the swirl of water over his ankles.

  He looked up and saw the paler blackness of the sky. It flickered a little and he guessed someone was looking down the shaft. He groped for his torch, flashed it three times upwards, then he shone it around and down .the qanat. It stretched away, three feet wide and six feet high, into the distance, far beyond the range of his light. The bare earthen walls were damp and the water flowed about nine inches deep.

  He felt the rope quiver as someone else started down the shaft and a scattering of earth fell on his head. He stepped out of the way downstream and presently Warren joined him, gasping for breath. Tozier took the gun and said, This is it, Nick.' He played the light o n the earthen roof. 'God help us if that caves in.'

  'I don't think it will,' said Warren. 'If there's a danger of that they put in big pottery hoops to retain it. Don't forget that people are working down here pretty regularly to keep the waterway unrestricted. They don't want to get killed, either.' He forebore to tell Tozier that the men who worked in the qanats had an aptly descriptive name for them -- they called them 'the murderers'.

  'How old do you think this is?' asked Tozier.

  'I don't know. Could be ten years -- could be a thousand, or even more. Does it matter?'

  'It don't suppose so.'

  Bryan joined them and was soon followed by Follet. Tozier said, 'The shaft we want to go up is the thirty-fifth from here . . .'

  "The thirty-fourth,' said Warren quietly.

  'Oh, yes; I forgot we skipped the first one. We'll all keep a count just in case. If there's an argument the majority vote wins. And we go quietly because I don't know how sounds carry up the shafts. I go first with a gun, Nick next, then Ben and lastly Johnny with the other gun as rearguard. Let's go.'

  It was ridiculously easy and they made far better time than Warren had expected -- at least three miles an hour. As Bryan had said, it was a main highway pointing at t
he farm. The footing was firm and not even muddy or slippery so that it was even easier than walking in the middle of an English stream. The water was not so deep as to impede them unduly and Tozier's powerful torch gave plenty of light.

  Only once did they run into a minor difficulty. The water deepened suddenly to two feet and then to three. Tozier halted them and went ahead to kick down a dam of soft earth where there had been a small roof fall. The pent-up water was released and gurgled away rapidly until it fell to the normal nine inches or so.

  But still, it was a hard slog and Warren was relieved when Tozier held up his hand for them to stop. He turned and said softly, "This shaft is thirty-three -- are we agreed on that?' They were. He said, 'Now we go canny. Remember that the settlement is just above us. Gently does it.'

  They carried on into the darkness with Tozier meticulously checking his paces. Suddenly he stopped so that Warren almost collided with him. 'Do you hear anything?' he asked in a low voice.

  Warren listened and heard nothing but the gentle chuckle of the water. 'No,' he said, and even as he said it he heard a throb which rapidly died away. They kept quiet, but heard nothing more.

  At last Tozier said, 'Come on -- it's only another twenty yards.' He pushed on and stopped under the shaft. Abruptly he turned and whispered, 'There's a light up there. Have a look and tell me what you think it is!"

  Warren squeezed past him and looked up the shaft. Far above he saw the pale circle of the sky but there was another and brighter light shining on the wall of the shaft not so far up, which seemed to be emanating from the side of the shaft itself. He estimated that it was about fifty feet up.

  He drew back and said quietly, 'We were looking for something underground, weren't we? I think this is it. The place would have to be ventilated somehow so they're using the qanat shaft. And this shaft is the nearest to the farm.'

  Tozier's voice was filled with incredulity. 'You think we've stumbled across it first crack out of the box?'