The Complete McAuslan. George Fraser MacDonald

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ needed him. Perhaps I was overwrought, but I told him rather brusquely to stop bringing me unnecessary complaints, to mind his own business, to go back to his compartment, and generally to get off my neck. He was indignant, and shocked, he said. I advised him again to go back to his compartment, and he said stiffly that he supposed he must take my orders, but he would certainly make a report …

      “All right, padre,” I said. “Do that. But for the present just remember that to obey is better than sacrifice, and hearkening than the fat of rams. O.K.?”

      He said something about the Devil and Scripture, and I went back to my compartment pretty depressed. It seemed suddenly that I had loused things up fairly substantially: two rockets were on the way, I had failed to control the troops efficiently at Gaza, I hadn’t covered myself with glory in accommodating the A.T.S., I couldn’t even change a nappy. What was I good for? I lay down and fell asleep.

      Your real hero can sleep through an elephant stampede, but wakes at the sound of a cat’s footfall. I can sleep through both. But the shriek of ancient brakes as a train grinds violently to a halt wakes me. I came upright off the seat like a bleary panther, groping for my gun, knowing that something was wrong and trying to think straight in a second. We shouldn’t be stopping before Jerusalem; one glance through the window showed only a low, scrubby embankment in moon-shadow. As the wheels screamed to a halt I dived into the corridor, ears cocked for the first shot. We were still on the rails, but my mind was painting vivid pictures of a blocked line and an embankment stiff with sharpshooters.

      I went through the door to the platform behind the tender; in the cabin I could see the driver, peering ahead over the side of his cab.

      “What the hell is it?” I shouted.

      He shouted back in Arabic, and pointed ahead.

      Someone was running from the back of the train. As I dropped from the platform to the ground he passed through the shaft of light between two coaches and I recognised Black’s balmoral. He had his Luger out.

      He slowed down beside me, and we went cautiously up past the engine, with the little wisps of steam curling up round us. The driver had his spotlight on, and the long shaft lit up the line, a tunnel of light between the embankment walls. But there was nothing to see; the embankment itself was dead still. I was turning to ask the driver what was up when he gave an excited little yelp behind us. Far down the track, on the edge of the spotlight beam, a red light winked and died. Then it winked again, and died.

      A hoarse voice said: “Get two men with rifles to the top of the bank, either side. Keep everyone else on the train. Then come back here.”

      It had almost finished speaking before I realised it was my own voice. Black faded away, and a moment or two later was back.

      “They’re posted,” he said.

      I wiped my sweaty hand on my shirt and took a fresh grip of the revolver which I ought to have remembered back in Cairo, so that some other mug could have been here, playing cops and robbers with Bert Stern or whoever it was. “Let’s go,” I said, just like Alan Ladd if he was a soprano. My hoarse voice had deserted me.

      We walked up the line, our feet thumping on the sleepers, the spotlight behind us throwing our shadows far ahead, huge grotesques on the sand. The line “The dust of the desert is sodden red” came into my head, but I hadn’t had time even to think the uncomfortable thought about it when he just materialised in front of us on the track, so suddenly that I was within an ace of letting fly at him. I know I gasped aloud in surprise; Black dropped on one knee, his Luger up.

      “Hold it!” It was my hoarse voice again, sounding loud and nasty. And with the fatal gift of cliché that one invariably displays in such moments, I added, “Don’t move or I’ll drill you!”

      He was a young man, in blue dungarees, hatchet-faced, Jewish rather than Arab. His hands were up; they were empty.

      “Pliz,” he said. “Friend. Pliz, friend.”

      “Cover him,” I said to Black, which was dam’ silly, since he wasn’t liable to be doing anything else. Keeping out of line, I went closer to him. “Who are you?”

      “Pliz,” he said again. He was one of these good-looking, black-curled Jews; his mouth hung open a bit. “Pliz, line brok’.” And he pointed ahead up the track.

      I left Black with him, collected the driver and his mate, and went off up the track. Sure enough, after a little search we found a fish-plate unscrewed and an iron stake driven between the rail ends—enough to put us off the track for sure. I didn’t quite realise what that signified until the driver broke into a spate of Arabic, gesturing round him. I looked, and saw we were out of the cutting; now the ground fell away from the track on both sides, a rock-strewn slide that we would have crashed down.

      While the driver and his mate banged out the stake and got to work on the fishplate, I went back to where Black had the young Jew in the lee of the engine. There was a small crowd round them, contrary to my orders, but one of them—an Arab Legion officer—was talking to him in Hebrew, and getting results.

      “What’s he say?” I asked.

      “Oh, God, he’s a dope,” said the officer. “He found the rail broken, I think, and heard the train coming. So he stopped us.”

      “He found the rail broken? In the middle of the bloody night? What was he doing here?”

      “He doesn’t seem to know.” He directed a stream of Hebrew at the youth and got one back, rather slower. The voice was thick, soft.

      “Don’t believe a word of it,” a voice was beginning, but I said, “Shut up,” and asked the officer to translate.

      “He was looking for a goat. He lives in a village somewhere round here.” It sounded vaguely biblical; what was the story again … the parable of the shepherd …

      “What about the red light?” It was Sergeant Black.

      Questioned, the youth pulled from his pocket a lighter and a piece of red cellophane.

      “For God’s sake,” I said.

      “He’s probably a bloody terrorist,” said someone.

      “Don’t be a fool,” I said. “Would he warn us if he was?”

      “How dare you call me a fool?” I realised it was my old friend the pouchy half-colonel. “Who the—”

      “Button your lip,” I said, and I thought he would burst. “Who authorised you to leave the train? Sergeant Black, I thought I gave orders?”

      “You did, sir.” Just that.

      “Then get these people back on the train—now.”

      “Now, look here, you.” The half-colonel was mottling. “I’ll attend to you in due course, I promise you. Sergeant, I’m the senior officer: take this man”—he indicated the Jew—“and confine him in the guard’s van. It’s my opinion he’s a terrorist …”

      “Oh, for heavens’ sake,” I said.

      “… and we’ll find out when we get to Jerusalem. And you,” he said to me, “will answer for your infernal impudence.”

      It СКАЧАТЬ