Spear of Destiny E-Book

Daniel Easterman

• Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Seitenzahl: 445

Beschreibung

May, 1942 Entrenched in the searing sands of Libya, a group of soldiers uncover a tomb. Buried in the ancient dust and they find a macabre crown of thorns and the devastatingly powerful Spear of Destiny. They've discovered the last resting place of Christ. Sixty years later Gerald Usherwood and his old army pal Max Chippendale reunite with friends and family to trade stories and spread Christmas cheer. Dark shadows visit the old friends in the cold of a winter night and make them pay the ultimate price for the secrets they stole. Gerald's grandson, DCI Ethan Usherwood, is left to piece together the mystery behind the killings and to uncover the treasure they kept hidden for so many years. Stunning locations brilliantly portrayed, a riveting battle for survival, and a desperate hunt for the ultimate truth; Spear of Destiny is undeniably Daniel Easterman's most powerful thriller to date.

Leseprobe

PRAISE FOR DANIEL EASTERMAN

‘Daniel Easterman has a string of taut, exotically plotted, international thrillers to his credit… He can weave a web of suspense, laced with historical and mythological reference that baits the imagination, satisfactorily embroidered with bullet holes and bloodshed. All cracking examples of the genre’

The Times

‘Daniel Easterman’s thrillers are never less than enthralling, elegantly written and frighteningly credible. So when a writer with his gifts, Belfast born and bred yet also an expert in Islamic studies, turns his attention to combining the IRA, Muslim extremists, Christian fundamentalists and maverick British security in one tight plot, there’s nothing for it but to lie back and submit to the master… Stylish, shattering and spellbinding’

Val McDermid

‘Spear of Destiny is a very enjoyable book, with a strong cast of characters, enough plot twists and turns and dastardly villains to keep the biggest thriller fans happy. It ticks all the boxes, lopping in conspiracy theories, dark shadowy Nazi organisations, biblical history – in other words, there is much here to satisfy!’

My Favourite Books

Spear of Destiny

DANIEL EASTERMAN

Allison & Busby Limited

13 Charlotte Mews

London W1T 4EJ

www.allisonandbusby.com

Copyright © 2009 by DANIEL EASTERMAN

First published in hardback by Allison & Busby Ltd in 2009.

Published in paperback by Allison & Busby Ltd in 2010.

This ebook edition first published in 2010.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Digital conversion by Pindar NZ.

All characters and events in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any format other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed upon the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from

the British Library.

ISBN 978-0-7490-0930-4

DANIEL EASTERMAN is the bestselling author of seventeen international thrillers. Before taking up writing, he studied English, Persian, Arabic and Islamic studies at the universities of Dublin, Edinburgh and Cambridge, and lectured at the universities of Fez in Morocco, and Newcastle upon Tyne. He has also written eight critically acclaimed full-length novels as Jonathan Aycliffe. When not writing, he listens to the sad and enchanting music of Portuguese fado and its beautiful poetry. He lives in the north of England with his wife, the health writer and homeopath Beth MacEoin.

Available from

ALLISON & BUSBY

The Sword

To my wife of destiny, Beth, with love from her ancient relic.

PROLOGUE

Woodmancote Hall

Near Bishop’s Cleeve

Gloucestershire

England

December 2008

Christmas came to Woodmancote that year on wings of ice, amid flurries of snow that banked steeply against the stone walls and barn doors of Hamberley Farm. It had been a late winter in coming, but once its time had arrived, it descended with exceptional ferocity, turning autumnal skies to craggy ranges of arctic cloud. On Radio 4, they said it was due to global warming, and down in the Cap in Hand, old heads nodded and said it would get worse before it got better. They were droll old men, and they’d seen too many winters, lived through too many Christmases.

Snow covered fields and roofs and hedgerows with a solid sheet of white velvet, and for day upon day it would not melt. When the last flakes had fallen, there were nights of moonlight and starlight and shining lamps, nights when the whiteness of the countryside turned to silver, nights so crisp birds fell from the trees and berries froze and cracked on the branches. Animals died in their multitudes, sheep in the open fields, squirrels in their nut-filled trees, owls in the solitary darkness of the yews.

Throughout the week before Christmas, Woodmancote Hall was ablaze with light. Light from electric bulbs and candles, from twenty log fires, from a dozen chandeliers, from a thousand twinkling white fairy lights that sparkled on trees and mantelpieces. Softly from inside, music played: King’s College Choir singing the carols of all our lifetimes, ‘Once in Royal David’s City’, ‘Silent Night’, ‘Remember, O Thou Man’…

Seen from outside across the east lawn or the vast expanse of Parget’s Meadow, the house seemed like a liner sailing on waters of driven snow, a place of comfort and cheer, a haven from the bleak midwinter. Before the curtains were drawn across the tall mullioned windows, the lights inside each room would stream out across the untouched fabric of the snow, crisscrossing it with bars of light and shadow.

Old Gerald Usherwood, lord and master in Woodmancote, his family’s home for seven centuries, had been a King’s man in his day. It would be his eighty-third Christmas and, the day after, his eighty-fourth birthday. The lights and music were in his honour. A great party was planned, a party that would span the Christmas season and mark both his birthday and the Nobel Prize in economics he’d received at a ceremony in Stockholm two weeks earlier.

The family were there en masse. Though substantial, Woodmancote Hall was not a great house, and its ten bedrooms and hastily tidied attic rooms were far from enough to accommodate such a tribe of grandparents, parents, children, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Some late arrivals who could not be fitted in at the house or the lodge had to make do with rooms in the village or Bishop’s Cleeve. The allocation of rooms had caused not a few headaches to Gerald’s oldest son George, who, with his wife Alice, had taken overall responsibility for the grand gathering.

The house party was made up of four groups of Usherwoods, some Draytons, a handful of Cornwallises, the Canterbury Grevilles, one or two Ellises, the Naseby twins, and a pair of distant cousins from Madeira who hadn’t set foot in England in over forty years. Some had travelled further, from the United States or Canada. Gerald’s sole surviving brother, Ernest, was there, riddled with cancer but determined to see another year pass. ‘Chips’ Chippendale, his fellow survivor from his days with the Long Range Desert Group during the North Africa campaign, was there and in fine fettle. Four of Gerald’s five children had made it a point of honour to be there with their spouses and children. The party would be lavish. A great part of the prize money had been spent on it.

As the days passed, between preparations for Christmas lunch and the birthday bash, guests came and went like ghosts, now here, now gone again, half glimpsed through a closing door. They brought presents and clamoured for commemorative photographs with their host. The children among them, caught up in the spirit of Christmas and a party whose end was not yet in sight, romped timidly or brashly through the crumbling passages and winding stairways of the hall like the children of Alain-Fournier’s lost domain.

One of the last to arrive was Ethan Usherwood, hot on the heels of his father, Guy, Gerald’s youngest son. Ethan turned up on Christmas Eve after driving down from Quedgeley, just outside Gloucester. Of all the Usherwoods, Ethan lived nearest to Woodmancote, to which he was a regular and welcome visitor. But he worked as a detective chief inspector with Gloucestershire Constabulary, and had only been able to escape in time for the main party by dint of lavish arse-licking, some judicious Christmas presents, and a promise to put in some heavy overtime in January. The homicide case he was working on had gone dead, and he hadn’t been in the least unhappy to put it to bed for the Christmas season.

‘Sorry, Granddad,’ he said as he walked up to Gerald in the Bentham Room, Woodmancote’s illustrious central chamber, with its Elizabethan wainscoting and the remarkable Grinling Gibbons fireplace. The old room was festooned today with every possible decoration. Ivy, holly, mistletoe and sprigs of berried juniper hung in swags across the walls, their dark green colours setting off hundreds of golden balls suspended from them. Stockings hung from the mantelpiece. On little tables around the room stood bottles of home-made sloe gin, all lovingly laid down by Gerald several months earlier and ready, as in every year, to bring warmth, cheer and inebriation to the Christmas festivities.

‘Got a mind to put you over my knee and spank you, young man,’ Gerald replied. His eyes twinkled. Ethan knew his grandfather was unpredictable. He might have taken his late arrival as an affront. ‘It’s the same every year. Last to turn up, first to leave.’

‘A spanking would constitute an assault on a police officer. You wouldn’t want me to arrest you on Christmas Eve, would you? You wouldn’t want to be hauled down to the nick, surely?’

Gerald cuffed him on the shoulder. He was clearly in a good mood this evening. Ethan smiled back. With a younger man, he’d have hugged him, but not with his grandfather.

‘Come with me. Have some sloe gin,’ said Gerald, grabbing him by the sleeve and steering him to a table on one side of the mantelpiece, right next to the nativity. ‘It’s better than usual this year,’ he went on. ‘Bigger berries and weeks early. Longer time to stew. It’s got a bite to it.’

He poured his grandson a glass and waited to see his response. Ethan took a couple of sips and nodded enthusiastically.

‘It is good,’ he declared, and took a longer sip. ‘Just the thing after the drive. It’s freezing outside.’

‘Didn’t I tell you to bring your young woman along, boy?’

Ethan imagined a wagging finger, and remembered Christmases long gone. ‘Why didn’t you bring that chum of yours from school?’ ‘Where’s your sister?’ ‘Where’s that girl I’ve heard so much about?’ ‘Where’s that wife of yours?’

Yes, Ethan thought: where is my sister? Where is that wife of mine? A verse of Byron’s that had been used in Abi’s funeral service drifted through his mind.

And thou art dead, as young and fair,

As aught of mortal birth;

And form so soft, and charms so rare,

Too soon returned to Earth!

They’d used the same verse at Pauline’s funeral years before. His sister had died of leukaemia at fifteen, two years his junior. Before her illness, she had dazzled everyone in sight. A glorious future had been predicted. All in the grave now, her name chiselled in stone above it.

Abigail had been twenty-five when she died. It was eight years ago now. He’d been thirty. Now, almost forty, he could not bear the starkness of mornings or the oncoming of sleep. The thought of her at such times tunnelled through his brain like a worm that had no end.

‘I don’t have a young woman, Granddad.’

Gerald frowned.

‘I’d understood—’

‘You understood wrong. Women don’t stay long with me. I’m married to my job, they all say that.’

‘Man needs a woman, boy. You should know that by now. Even when we were out in the desert on some bloody awful trip, we’d head straight for the Berka when we got back. Or have a night out with one of those gals from the MTC. You don’t have to love them, you know.’

Ethan smiled and said nothing. Women were one of his grandfather’s obsessions. He’d been married to his wife Edith for over forty years, but that hadn’t stopped him taking up with a steady string of ‘lady friends’. Edith had died fifteen years earlier, forgiving him, and it was said he hadn’t seen another woman once since then.

One of the grandchildren, an Ellis by the look of him, ambled up and pulled Gerald away. Ethan stayed by the nativity, a fine Arts and Crafts job with Italian pieces. His father found him there, and dragged him off to join the melee of aunts and cousins, half of whom he’d never met before.

After dinner, the younger children, all in a state of high excitement, their thoughts fixed on chimneys and men in white beards, were sent to bed or driven off to the village. The rest of the party settled down in the Long Room, with its selection of battered armchairs, sofas, and window seats. Old friendships were revived, old animosities buried or given new life.

‘You must be Ethan,’ said a voice beside him. He looked round to find a woman standing next to his chair. A dark-haired woman in her mid- to late-twenties. He did not recognise her, and yet something about her was familiar. He got to his feet.

‘Afraid so,’ he said. ‘You must be…?’

She laughed.

‘You haven’t a clue, have you?’

He shook his head.

‘You’re familiar, but I don’t think we can have met.’

‘Of course we have. Think hard.’

He scrutinised her features. Short black hair, green eyes that danced, pale cheeks, a full mouth that might have been made from cherries. As he struggled to place her, he realised he wasn’t dealing with memory at all, but with the surprising clarity of her face, its beauty and the secret claim it seemed to make on him, whether from the past or the present.

‘I’m Sarah,’ she said. ‘Your niece, in case you’ve forgotten. We last met when I was ten years old. Your parents brought you down to Canterbury. I thought you were terribly grand. In fact, I had a crush on you for weeks, you were my divine creature next to Mr Boko, my pony.’

He looked at her, and the memory flooded back. The pony had been piebald and short-winded.

‘You’ve changed a lot,’ he said.

‘Thank you.’

He shook his head.

‘I didn’t say you’d changed for the better.’

‘Ethan, when I was ten I was a geeky little girl with bad teeth. Old Boko looked better than I did. Surely I’ve improved since then.’

He thought back to the impression he had formed back then, when she was ten and he was twenty.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘You have improved. Quite a lot, actually.’

He looked at her admiringly. If only the rest of the family were as elegant and poised, he thought.

‘Sit down again,’ she said. ‘I’ll pull up a chair. We have eighteen years to catch up on.’

Two hours later, they’d gone about ten years down the line and were just settling in to the next eight when Ethan’s father got to his feet.

‘It’s half past eleven, everybody. Those who want to go to midnight mass had better get a move on. St Benedict’s isn’t at all large, so there’ll be standing room only if we get there late.’

As though summoned by him, a magus in tweeds, the bells of the parish church started clanging through the still night. As though angels had come to Earth. Or, some thought later, demons in the disguise of angels.

Hats and coats were fetched, galoshes grabbed from the hall, little groups formed. The road between the hall and the church had been cleared earlier that day. While the older folk cadged lifts, anyone below the age of sixty walked, and soon a crocodile of worshippers crept down the icy path, their way lit by the gentle fall of moonlight as it glittered on icicles and varnished the snow. Ahead, the lights of the little church shone out like beacons on a world become a virgin filled with God. Even the solid band of non-believers shivered, not from cold, but the mere beauty of the scene. As they drew near the church, the sound of singing reached them across the snow.

Sarah took Ethan’s arm and stood with him at the rear throughout the service. The parish choir sang valiantly, carol after carol booming through the decorated nave, medieval songs mingling with modern lullabies, as though all was at peace in the world. They sang against the darkness and the cold, against grey misery and black grief. The coming birth of the new god seemed to exorcise all evil from the world, to draw a line between past and present, darkness and the coming light.

Ethan watched and listened, joining in the hymns when called upon, remembering, trying to forget. Sarah slipped her hand through his arm. She’d heard of his demons, of the night that shadowed his days. And though she did not believe in angels or powers or principalities, nor worship a god in a manger, she prayed for him.

Gerald and his old mate Chips had stayed behind at the hall, along with half a dozen of the seriously old brigade. Leaving the others to a round of bridge, the two old soldiers went upstairs to Gerald’s study. Chips stepped for the first time into a cluttered room where the master of Woodmancote kept a lifetime’s souvenirs, some scattered across desks and tables, others locked away in dark cabinets or shoved into drawers. The walls were lined from floor to ceiling with bookshelves, these latter crammed with a higgledy-piggledy collection of books. The volumes were of every colour, size and binding; some stood straight between the shelves, dozens were laid horizontally across their fellows. On the floor, piles of books had grown like stalagmites, some built into tall towers, others crumpled as though they had rested on a geological fault and come to grief. The study was the inner sanctum of the house, a hideaway to which few outside the family had ever been admitted.

On either side of a wide fireplace sat two easy chairs, old, battered and, to tell the truth, no longer very comfortable, save for the air of habitude and familiarity they exuded. To these the former comrades repaired. On his way, Gerald picked up a bottle of his beloved Benromach, which he sat on a low table between them. Two tumblers and a jug of water had been placed there earlier by Mrs Salgueiro, the Portuguese housekeeper.

It was over ten years since the pair had last met. In that time, old friends had grown ill, and some had died. There were no more annual reunions, hadn’t been in years. Memories once sharp as blades were blunted now, but if much of the past had blurred in their minds, the time they had spent together in the deserts of North Africa was as if it had been yesterday. As they talked between sips of whisky and puffs on their foul-smelling pipes, the past came alive for them, a living thing, as vivid to one as to the other, Gerald’s recollections sparking off anecdotes from his friend, Chips’s store of off-colour jokes bringing back long days and nights when death had seemed a likely thing, and a moment like this beyond all credence.

‘Do you keep them by you still?’ Chips asked after his third tumbler of whisky.

Gerald nodded.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘Where they’ve always been.’

‘Who will have them after you?’

A shrug.

‘Don’t know. Haven’t thought. Maybe a museum. Couldn’t say.’

‘You know we ruled that out,’ said Chips, raising the glass to his lips. He was a tall man, somewhat stooped now, but wiry, as if his muscles had not lost their flexibility and strength.

‘And you?’ Gerald asked. ‘And the others?’

Chips shrugged.

‘They’re happy for you to hold on to them. But you’re getting old; we’re all getting old. It’s time to find a keeper. We’ve talked of this many times before. We have to talk of it now.’

Gerald looked at his old friend. So many years had passed, it was hard to believe how close they had grown during the years of fighting. They’d stuck together, all of them, through the gross inhumanity of the war and its dreary aftermath. Someone had nicknamed them The Invincibles; but after Leary was killed by a landmine, the name had dropped out of common use.

‘Do you mean tonight?’ Gerald murmured. ‘I thought perhaps to wait until the festivities are over. Till they all leave. Maybe Donaldson will come after all. Skinner possibly. They were both invited. The roads have been blocked, they may not have made it through. You were lucky.’

Chips ran a hand over his cheeks, his fingers scraping the stubble. He’d worn a beard when he was younger, but shaved it in middle age, once it started to show traces of grey and white.

‘What about the girl?’ he asked.

‘Girl? Which girl?’

‘Don’t be provocative. The one I saw tonight. You know perfectly well which girl I mean.’

Gerald nodded.

‘Sometimes I forget. There have been so many girls. In any case, she isn’t a girl, not any longer. She’s a grown woman. You can’t have missed that.’

‘Does she know?’

Gerald poured a little water into his glass and sipped anxiously. His liver had been playing up recently; Doc Burns had told him to ease up on the spirits. He shook his head.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not yet. Haven’t told her. She’s not ready yet. When the time comes, old boy. You know that.’

Their cheeks flushed, their hair coated in rime frost, their breath become plumes of mist against the lamplight, the guests returned to Woodmancote Hall. They came in groups of two and three, laughing, chatting earnestly, full of Christmas spirit. Ethan escorted Sarah again, and she held on to him tightly, her arm locked through his, fearful of a spill in the oversized Wellington boots she’d picked up for the walk. Her head was filled with carols and her lips, when seen in the light, were blue with cold. She talked volubly, answering his questions, piquing his curiosity. They spoke of books and films and journeys, of parents and cousins, of the numerous times their paths had almost crossed. It was too soon to speak of his dead wife or her brother, committed to a mental hospital at twenty-one and unlikely to leave it. By some instinct grown of adversity or conscience, they knew there would be time for all that later.

Indoors, there was much puffing and panting and stamping of frozen feet. Compacted snow fell on doormats and began to melt.

Senhora Salgueiro had warmed mince pies and set out mulled wine in the drawing room. The adults crowded round the table, ravenous from cold and the rigours of standing so long on the uncarpeted stones of the church. The older children, who had accompanied them, were sent straight off to bed, where hot pies, ginger beer, stockings, and fitful sleep awaited them.

The adults, with less to buoy them up by way of anticipation, felt the effects of age, overeating and a late hour more keenly than their offspring. For all that, sitting round a twinkling Christmas tree in such fine surroundings and in what was, for the most part, good company acted on their sense of nostalgia. They wanted sleep, yet were driven to prolong the moment. One by one, they gave up the struggle.

Ethan showed Sarah upstairs to her room.

‘Thank you, Ethan,’ she said. ‘You’ve been very kind to a poor relation.’

‘Sarah,’ he chided, ‘I’m a policeman, not a banker.’

‘That may be, but I’m an academic, and that means poverty, as in church mouse.’

It was the first time she’d said anything about her work.

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘I only finished my PhD a few years ago, so I’m a lowly lecturer with dismal prospects. I might get a readership when I’m fifty, if I’m lucky. Now, with your permission, I’ll retire to bed. To be truthful, I’ll crash out. And so will you. Which means Father Christmas won’t visit us.’

He leant over and kissed her lightly on the cheek. She blushed and said goodnight before slipping into her room.

It is not known if Father Christmas arrived that night, for the house was woken prematurely, at about five-thirty, by a piercing scream, followed by a series of screams that descended in the space of several seconds to mere sobbing and, at last, to silence. In their rooms, all but the most heavily sleeping of guests sat bolt upright in bed. Ethan was the first to his feet and the first in the corridors.

The screams, he was certain, had not come from any of the rooms in his immediate vicinity nor, indeed, from the attic floor at all. They had been located somewhere below, on the second floor. Wrapped only in a light dressing gown and shivering in the bitter cold, he hurried for the narrow staircase. As he started down it, he heard other doors opening in the corridor behind.

As he came through the doorway that led onto the floor below, he became aware that a commotion had begun. Several of the bedroom doors stood wide open, and half a dozen guests, all men in pyjamas or dressing gowns, had gathered round a sobbing woman. Mrs Salgueiro, her hair in curlers, her quilted housecoat wrapped tight against the chill air, was being comforted by Ethan’s father. From time to time she would exclaim in Portuguese, ‘Ai, que medo! Que susto! Os pobres homens!’ then recommence her sobbing.

Guy Usherwood, not knowing what to make of these utterings, sighed with relief when he saw his son coming towards them.

‘Father, what’s going on?’

‘Don’t know. I can’t get the woman to speak in English. She’s had a bad turn, that’s obvious. Look at her: she’s as white as a sheet and shaking all over.’

At that moment, another door opened, and Sarah stepped into the corridor. She was wearing a black gown trimmed with gold, and her hair was sticking up in post-slumber spikes. Seeing what was amiss, she went up to the weeping woman and put her arms round her, uttering soothing words, trying to calm her.

Bit by bit, the sobs subsided, and the senhora came a little to herself.

‘Senhor Usherwood! His friend. No gabinete…in study. Please…’

She burst into tears again, putting her hands to her face, as though to cover her eyes from some dreadful sight.

Ethan’s father, the most senior family member present, made to enter the room, but Ethan stopped him.

‘Dad, it’s obvious something’s wrong. Grandfather may have had a heart attack. I’m more used to this sort of thing than you. Let me go in first.’

His father hesitated, then backed off. Ethan put a hand on the doorknob and turned it reluctantly. If something had happened to his grandfather, it would cut him to the heart. He stepped inside and shut the door behind him.

A couple of lamps had been left alight. The fire had burnt down, however, leaving the room chilly and imperfectly lit. It took Ethan’s eyes several moments to adjust to the low lighting. He reached for a light switch near the door, but could not find one. As he recalled, the old study had never been fully lit.

With his dark-accustomed eyes, he scoured the room. And he saw what Senhora Salgueiro had seen, saw what had come close to driving her insane. Hardened as he was to sights of criminal horror and gross domestic violence, nothing in his experience had prepared him for the sight that now met his eyes.

To the right of the curtained window ran a long row of bookcases, divided into narrow sections by a series of fluted oak pillars. To these pillars had been nailed the body of Ethan’s grandfather. The Nobel laureate’s throat had been sliced right across the windpipe, and his hands had been lifted above shoulder level, where they had been fixed to two pillars with small knives. These must have been rammed home with force, for they held his body hard in place. Ethan could make out signs of blood on other parts of his torso, suggesting that he had been stabbed several times before receiving the coup de grâce. Blood soaked the carpet all around him.

Chips Chippendale had been despatched in a different manner. His killer had decapitated him before suspending his body from cords attached to two wall lights, then set his head at his feet. The eyes had been removed and placed on a china plate that sat next to the head. A pool of blood had gushed from the severed torso, and now lay congealed and frozen in the light from a desk lamp.

It was Christmas morning, and Ethan fancied he heard in the heavens a sound of vast, harrowing wings. Not the wings of angels, nor the pinions of cherubim or seraphim, but the coarse leather wings of demons. He shook his head, knowing he heard nothing in truth but the rush of vital blood as it coursed dizzy through his brain.

Taking a deep breath that seared his lungs with the cold morning air, he went to the study door and opened it a fraction. He slipped through the opening, shutting the door firmly behind him, and turned to face the expectant crowd of relatives that had assembled in the corridor outside.

PART ONE

‘The hidden city of Wardabaha is white like a dove, and on its gate is carved a bird. Take in your hand the key in the beak of the bird, then open the door of the city. Enter, and there you will find great riches, also the king and queen sleeping in their castle. Do not approach them, but take the treasure.’

From the fifteenth-century Arabic magical treatise, Kitab al-la’ali al-makhfiyya.

1

The Shifting Sands

The Western Desert

Libya

16th May 1942

The sandstorm came in from the south shortly after noon. It had been preceded by the hot wind the local Arabs called a qibli, a searing, all-engulfing torment that seemed to blow straight from the deepest pits of hell, burning and suffocating everything it came in contact with. They had sat out qiblis before now, wasted days during which all you could do was endure, grit your teeth, swear, sweat, and lie as still as possible in temperatures as high as 118°F.

They’d been struggling through this particular qibli for the second day when Corporal Skinner had cut loose with a string of profanities enough to scorch even this overheated air.

‘I do not fucking believe this’ were the first intelligible words he uttered. He’d said them so often, so many times before, that no one paid him the slightest bit of notice.

‘Lieutenant,’ he said, ‘I think you should sit up and take a gander.’

Lt Usherwood groaned and crawled out from the low camouflage canvas under which they’d been taking shelter.

‘Sorry, sir. Went for a pee, sir. Thought you should see this.’

‘What’s up?’ the commander asked, his tired voice little more than a drawl.

Skinner just pointed. On the southern horizon, the light of midday was giving way to darkness, as black clouds roiled and tumbled across the desert sand. Gerald Usherwood snatched up his long-distance glasses and trained them on the clouds. Not clouds at all, of course, but huge billows of sand that stretched across the horizon from east to west, driven by a high wind that was picking up speed with every second it raced towards them.

‘Get everyone back on board,’ the lieutenant ordered. ‘It’ll be on us in minutes.’

‘We’re not too far from the RP, skipper. Should we try to head back while we can? Supplies are running short, and this could go on for days.’

Usherwood shook his head.

‘There’s too much risk of losing our way in this. We won’t be able to take our bearings at night, and I don’t trust the sun compass in a storm. There’ll be time enough to head for the RP once this blows over. Hurry and get some canteens into the cabs.’

The rallying point for the two-vehicle patrol was just over one hundred miles away, at Rebiana. They’d gone out from base at Kufra Oasis as a full patrol of six Chevvys, but the two trucks under Lt Usherwood’s command had carried on further west, deep into the Rebiana Sand Sea, on a search for wells. The others had gone north to Taiserbo, where there was talk of German forward units reconnoitring behind British lines.

Something big was coming up. It had been all the talk in Cairo two weeks earlier, and there was a buzz at Kufra, the western HQ for the Long Range Desert Group which had been taken from the Italians just over a year before.

The word was that Rommel planned a push on the Gazala line along the coast. The trouble for anyone trying to hold that line was simple: you could fix one end on the sea and defend it there against all comers, but down south it ran into open desert all the way down to deepest Africa. Jerry could slip down below your defences and twist round to spike you in the rear. R Patrol was probing for lightweight German manoeuvres, while Usherwood’s Sandboys were trying to open a path further west than anyone had tried before.

They were looking for wells and hunting an oasis, a lost paradise called Ain Suleiman: Solomon’s Spring. This secret place had long been the stuff of legend. The Bedouin said it had once provided the water for the magical city of Wardabaha, built in the sands by King Solomon, the source of all magic in Arab tradition. According to some blue-veiled Tuareg of the Fezzan, it still existed and was inhabited by a tribe of their brethren, a branch of the Kel Ajjer of Ghat. But no modern explorer had set eyes on the place. It was on no map, save for a map of the mind, where it floated, now here, now there. At the Royal Geographical Society, men in sober suits made fun of Ain Suleiman and its hidden city of magic.

But Gerald Usherwood had believed in it. He’d learnt enough Tamasheq to speak with the Tuareg in their own tongue, something the men in Lowther Lodge were incapable of doing, and he had come to trust them. Ain Suleiman was there, they said, but no one knew the way. It was in the worst part of the sands, they said, it was unreachable by camel, it was probably silted up by now. He knew they were hiding something, and guessed they knew their way there well enough but thought it wise to avoid entanglements with the Italians or Germans or British. If they were hiding something, he reckoned that meant there was something to hide.

They had barely put their sand goggles over their eyes when the storm struck. One moment the sky was bright blue, the next they found themselves in a thick haze that dropped visibility down to around twenty feet.

Closing the doors and windows kept the full blast of the sandstorm out, but the dust was like powder and crept in through every crack, chink, and cranny it could find. As time passed, a fine coating of sand covered every surface inside the trucks. The patrol wrapped their gutras tightly round their faces, but the sand was relentless. It worked its way inside the goggles, into ears and noses and throats, through clothing, down through ammo boots, where it irritated horribly.

Gerald had been through so many sandstorms now he thought his lungs had turned to desert. He knew there was nothing to be done but to grit your teeth, keep your watering eyes closed, and sit it out. This was a bad one, he knew it straight away, one of the worst he’d seen. It could last a day or a week, there was no telling.

All the other members of the patrol were old hands, and they’d seen their fair share of the desert winds. No one was chosen for the LRDG who wasn’t able to put up with a bit of discomfort. Whether they were British, New Zealanders, Aussies or Indians, they were that strange species of human being for whom the empty wastes and searing heat of the Sahara were more home than the Home Counties, Wellington or Calcutta. They positively longed for the silence and the ever-present danger. So they sat and waited, keeping radio silence, singing the latest hits and telling long tales of battles they had fought and women they had bedded.

The storm did not let up for three days. When it ended, it did so suddenly, shortly after 6 a.m. on the third day.

‘Thank God for that,’ said Gerald. Back home in Gloucestershire, he had no time for a deity, and attended church only because he was the local squire and knew it was bad form to let the side down, the side being the Usherwood family. But here in the long vistas of the desert, beneath night skies thick with the eternal light of endless galaxies, he became a believer. Had he not been brought up in the C of E, he’d have made a happy Muslim ascetic, his heart grown fanatical from the harshness of the empty sands.

Each truck had a sun compass perched above the dashboard. Along with the latest RAF navigational tables by day and theodolites by night, the sun compass allowed patrols to navigate through uncharted territory. It took moments to get their bearings again, and longer to dig the trucks out of the blown sand, using sand mats. At last, they brushed themselves down and headed west again.

A barrier of seif dunes, all over three hundred feet high, pushed them further south, away from the route they’d planned to stay on. They drove through a waste devoid of life, beneath a cruel sky empty of birds or planes. Somewhere to the north, a war was in progress, but down here it seemed that the guns had fallen silent. It was as if the war had ended and all that remained was this desolation, this all-pervasive death.

Dusk had started to fall when Staff Sergeant Chippendale, who was riding shotgun on board Gerald’s Chevvy, gave a low whistle. Max Chippendale’s great talent – and his main qualification for the LRDG – was his remarkable eyesight. He’d been scanning the horizon ahead with glasses, calmly surveying the sands each time they reached the crest of a dune, before the controlled drop to the west flank.

He put his hand urgently on the driver’s arm.

‘Hold your horses, you great lummox,’ he shouted. ‘Weary’ Leary, the Kiwi trooper Gerald had borrowed from T patrol, turned the wheel sharply, bringing the truck to a stop just short of the precipice in front.

‘What is it?’ the lieutenant asked from his seat behind.

‘Not sure yet, skipper. Something out there. Give us a moment.’

Chippendale, an Oxford Classics don before hostilities began, scanned and rescanned the landscape ahead. He pursed his lips and murmured something inaudible. That was about as enthusiastic as Chips Chippendale ever got. He passed the glasses back to Gerald, who jumped out onto the slipping surface of the dune.

‘Middle distance, skip. Looks like we’ve found it.’

And so they had. They’d been heading straight for the oasis. Without the storm, they might have gone on further to the north, along their original trajectory, and missed it entirely.

‘Ain Suleiman,’ whispered Gerald. ‘Solomon’s Spring.’

Little did he guess what else lay buried in the great sand sea. A secret much greater than a mere oasis or a hidden city, more portentous than a desert route for the fighting and winning of a war, more deadly than Rommel’s tanks or the battalions of Hitler’s Reich.

A puff of wind lifted a plume of sand lower down the western flank of the great dune. Gerald climbed back into the truck.

‘Let’s go down and take a look,’ he said.

Leary swung the wheel, engaged first gear, and let the Chevvy topple over the crest to start its slow descent back down to the desert floor.

Ain Suleiman waited for them, wrapped in its age-old silence, the most remote of human habitations.

2

Ain Suleiman

The Western Desert

18th May

As they drove down to the oasis, the sleepy settlement burst into vibrant life, woken by the roar of the patrol’s engines. Dogs barked. Men rushed out of low zaribas, wrapping their blue veils over their faces. Others ran from further off, where they’d been tending to the camels. They were followed by women in black shawls, and children of all sizes, some clothed, the youngest naked.

With a jolt, Gerald realised he and his men might be the first outsiders these people had ever set their eyes on, and that the trucks, rushing down from the dune towards them, must seem objects of horror, grim monsters from the depths of whatever hell they believed in. He ordered Leary to stop, and signalled to Bill Donaldson in the following Chevvy to pile on the brakes as well. They slid to a stop, their tyres digging hard into the soft sand, where they sank almost to the axles.

‘Switch off the engine,’ Gerald ordered. In the car behind, Donaldson followed suit. A silence fell, as deep as the ocean and as wide, broken only by the braying of camels and the barking of the dogs. Above the oasis, hundreds of little birds flew in circles. In the west, the sun was changing hue as it began its descent to the heat haze that lay stretched across the horizon.

The skipper stepped out, calling on the others to get down too, without weapons.

‘Don’t do anything to startle them,’ he said. ‘Let me do the talking. Clark, stay here and cover us with the machine gun.’

They walked forward. Gerald went in front, striding confidently toward the group of Tuareg men who had formed a defensive line in front of their women and children. They all wore the tagelmoust, the elaborate indigo-coloured headdress that covers the head and face but for the eyes.

Gerald turned and beckoned Max Chippendale forward.

‘Max, see the Johnny in front? He belongs to the Imashaghen, the ruling class. The shorter man on his right is their Anislem. The preacher. He’s the one to watch out for. If there’s going to be trouble, he’ll be behind it.’

The Tuareg waited patiently for the five soldiers to reach them. They were tall men, lean, with the keen grey eyes of desert travellers. Behind a handful of Imashaghen stood their vassals, while a group of black slaves cowered with the women and children near the huts. Gerald made a swift calculation. The settlement must number around one hundred souls and some thirty camels.

Walking into the oasis, the soldiers, dry after so long in the open sands, felt the air around them change. The desiccated, searing desert heat turned moist and soft, washing their lungs as if in oil from the olive trees that grew on the far side of the little lake. Gerald breathed in deeply. He knew he would only have moments in which to convince the Tuareg leader of their honourable intentions. At the back of his mind, he calculated what proportion of their rations they could afford to hand over as a token of goodwill. Each of the Tuareg men wore a short sword slung across his left thigh, and Gerald knew they were fierce fighters who could use even these simple weapons to great effect. He noticed that two of the Imashaghen carried rifles over their shoulders, Italian Carcano M91/38 carbines.

If trouble did break out, he and his men had their service pistols, and Teddy Clark was a steady hand on the Browning. But the last thing he wanted was a massacre. If he had to choose between the lives of his patrol and those of anyone trying to kill them, he knew he could make the choice. But he wasn’t sure if he could live with it afterwards.

‘Al-salam ‘alaykum,’ he called out, using the universal Muslim greeting, and adding in Tamasheq, ‘Ma toulid?’

The man in the centre, inches taller than his brethren, continued to survey him from behind the blue veil, his eyes boring into him, looking neither to right nor left. Gerald stopped and waited for a response.

The Anislem, a Qur’an clutched ostentatiously in his right hand, bent sideways and whispered briefly in his lord’s ear. Behind Gerald, the rest of the patrol had come to a halt. He could almost feel their edginess, or perhaps it was just his own. These were men with whom he’d shared the most intense days of his young life. They had fought together; pissed on the same sand; picked fleas from each others’ bodies and lice from one another’s hair; gone in search of women together in the Berka. They had headed into the desert together time after time, and come out alive again time after time.

Gerald waited patiently for a reply. The men of the desert lived an almost timeless existence, in a world where little changed from year to year, from century to century. No Tuareg would let himself be hurried.

But the headman had made up his mind.

‘‘Alaykum al-salam,’ he responded. ‘Al-khayr ras, al-hamdu li’llah.’

Gerald spoke haltingly, explaining who he was and where he and his men had come from. ‘Min al-Qahira,’ he said, ‘from Cairo.’ Even this deep in the desert, Cairo was a legend. The Tuareg leader listened impassively, neither warmth nor coldness showing in his eyes. The other Imashaghen watched. No one fidgeted or shuffled or raised a hand to swat the flies that buzzed all round them. These were Kel Tamasheq: as straight as guardsmen, they looked ahead without visible emotion.

‘A people have come to this land who are no friends of the Muslims,’ Gerald said. ‘They despise the Arabs because they belong to an inferior race, they hate the blacks because their skins are not white, they look down on the Berbers and the Tibu and the Kel Tamasheq because they ride on camels. In my language, they are called Germans. My people have come here to wage war with them. If they win this war, they will tear down the mosques, and kill the learned, and make slaves of the Muslims. They will send soldiers into the Ténéré, into the deep sands, they will carry off your wives and children to be slaves in the land they come from, where it is always dark and cold.

‘My people are not a Muslim people, but we are the greatest nation on earth, and we have been friends to the Muslims wherever we have gone. We have come here to speak with you. We need your help to fight our war, and we bring tokens of our friendship.’

He went on like this for about ten minutes, and not once did the Tuareg betray their feelings. For all he knew, they might be laughing at him. Or planning how to kill him.

The Anislem, a man of learning who had studied the Qur’anic sciences and the Traditions of the Prophet in the now-decayed schools of Timbuktu, watched the infidels intently. His rank was clear from the leather wallets he wore slung across his shoulders, containing a copy of the Qur’an and other sacred writings. From his left hand hung an amber rosary, whose beads he turned and twisted through gnarled fingers. His name was Shaykh Harun agg Da’ud, and he had lived for many years among the Kel Adrar at Ghadames further north. He had long served the people of Ain Suleiman, performing marriages, burying the dead, writing down verses of the Qur’an to wear as amulets, inscribing talismans in the ancient Tifinagh script, guarding the secrets of the oasis. He knew that these strangers, like the Italians he’d met in Ghadames and the French he’d seen in Timbuktu, were a threat to his prestige and authority.

When Gerald came to a halt, the headman remained silent for a time. He had heard rumours of a war far to the north, but knew nothing of its currents and did not fear its outcome. Perhaps the stranger was telling the truth, perhaps he lied: he was some sort of unbeliever, after all. These were the first unbelievers he had ever set eyes on.

Gerald whispered to Leary, telling him to go back to the trucks with Bill Donaldson, and to bring several items back with them. The silence continued.

When they returned, Leary and Donaldson carried an armful apiece. They laid their offerings on the ground in front of the headman, and stepped back. One by one, Gerald presented an odd mixture of military supplies: two pairs of chapplies, the desert sandals every trooper was issued with; a spare Jerry can; a pair of sand goggles for the headman; the desert stove from Donaldson’s vehicle; a folding tent; and a selection of desert rations.

Last of all, Gerald unstrapped his Smith and Wesson .38 and handed it, holster and all, to the headman.

‘I will teach you how to fire and reload it,’ he said.

The headman did not move. Even the poorest Tuareg had his pride. Gerald waited. On the dunes, sand danced in a light breeze. The fronds on the palm trees whispered. Somewhere, a child cried raucously. It would not be hard to take this place by force, thought Gerald. Each Chevvy carried two air-cooled .30 Browning machine guns. A Waffen-SS commander might have used them. Gerald fervently prayed he would not have to.

The Tuareg leader stretched out his hand and took the weapon.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘It is much appreciated. As are all these gifts.’

‘There will be more and better if you will give us your help.’

‘My name is Si Musa agg Isa Iskakkghan. I am lord of this oasis. You and your men are welcome to stay. As for these other matters, we shall talk of them later.’

At that moment, a young woman who had been standing with the others in the rear came running forward. She was visibly distressed, and when Gerald looked more closely, he saw that some of the other women were agitated too.

‘Si Musa,’ she called out. ‘Ask the strangers if they have brought medicine. Perhaps they will know how to save our son.’

Si Musa did not turn to look at her. The woman was dark-skinned and pretty, with flashing teeth and large eyes that were red from weeping.

‘Go back to the women, A’isha,’ her husband said. ‘Shaykh Harun has prayed for our child. He will pray again later. If it is God’s will, Yaqub will live. If not, he will die.’

But A’isha did not budge.

‘Let the strangers prove their power, Si Musa. If our child lives, it will be God’s way of showing you that they can be trusted. If he dies…’ she sighed ‘…then they will have to leave.’

Back among the dwellings, the crying of the child redoubled in force. The later sunlight raked the oasis like a purple claw. In the distance, the sand shimmered, conjuring up a mirage, as if crenellated castles danced on the skyline where the dunes and the sky met one another.

Si Musa, inwardly as frightened for his son and heir as his wife, conceded. He turned on his heel and walked back to the encampment, his wife following. Gerald signalled to Donaldson. Donaldson, apart from his driving and navigational skills, was the patrol’s medic. He was a Scot who’d been studying medicine at Edinburgh when war broke out.

‘What’s up, skipper?’ he asked.

‘Fetch the first-aid kit, Bill. Be quick about it. Their child is sick.’

In the headman’s hut, it took only moments for Donaldson to make his diagnosis. The air was cooling as night approached, but he could still feel sweat trickling from his forehead.

‘Tetanus,’ he announced. ‘Quite advanced, by the look of it. The jaw’s rigid, and the bairn has lost weight, I daresay. Ask the mother how long it is since he got the wound.’

He pointed to a wide, unhealed cut on the boy’s forearm. It was red and puffy, and the child – he seemed between one and a half and two – had clearly made matters worse by scratching it.

Gerald asked, but no one could tell him exactly how long. In the desert, they counted seasons and years and sometimes months; but days and weeks meant nothing.

In one corner, the holy man had insinuated himself. He watched, his eyes never straying far from the dying child. Beneath his breath, he murmured something, whether a prayer or a curse, Gerald could not tell.

Donaldson unwrapped a glass vial of antitoxin and injected it into the child’s arm. The mother, already hopeless, made no protest. Si Musa watched the priest, his shrewd eyes seeking out what was hidden in the old man’s heart.

When they left the hut, the sun was setting like a ball of liquid fire, its hues of crimson, rose, gold and turquoise shredded by a billion spores of fine sand that turned them to greens and ochres, vermilions and russets. Fires were lit, using camel dung for fuel. The desert stove was rolled out, and Skinner got it going, surrounded by a bevy of giggling Tuareg women who had never seen a man sully his hands with domestic labour.