The Secret War by Dennis Wheatley & Tony Morris

Author:Dennis Wheatley & Tony Morris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 1977-11-13T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XIV

OUT OF THE PAST

Valerie mopped the perspiration from her face.

She had given up trying to keep it powdered hours before. It was eight o’clock at night, and they had only arrived at Jibuti at ten o’clock that morning, yet she felt as limp and washed-out as if she had lived for a month under the blazing, fiery sun that burnt up the capital of French Somaliland.

Their journey had not proved too fortunate. With previous records in her mind and a supreme confidence in her abilities as an air-woman, she had attempted the seventeen-hundred-and-fifty-mile flight from Alexandria in one hop, but on the previous afternoon her plane had developed engine trouble over the Red Sea and she had been forced to come down at Massawa.

The Eritrean capital had been literally crawling with Italian troops and all the auxiliaries who infest the principal base of a big military campaign. The harbour, if you could call it that, was packed with transport, hospital ships, cruisers and submarines, which stretched along the coast as far as the eye could see. Thousands of men, looking in the distance like a swarm of ants, worked frantically upon the new mole which would protect the anchorage. Innumerable engines puffed and snorted as they drew their loads over the intricate network of light railways. Legions of blacks were unloading munitions and supplies from countless lighters at every wharf. The town itself was a positive hive of activity. Italian soldiers thronged the pavements of all the principal streets, and every one of them seemed to be hurrying somewhere. Thousands of Askaris, lithe, smartly turned-out native troops, the coloured tassels in their tarbooshes lending a note of colour to the scene, marched, drilled and manœuvred in every available open space.

Beds were not to be obtained at any price, and they had been compelled to sleep with their clothes on in the plane.

Valerie had located the trouble, and, first thing next morning, they had set off on their last four hundred miles to the south.

After Massawa, Jibuti seemed a quiet backwater yet, as the headquarters of all the neutral hangers-on in the war, it was crowded to capacity.

Christopher’s money and Lovelace’s method of dealing with cosmopolitan innkeepers secured them two rooms in a small hotel. They at once made inquiries about Abu Ben Ibrim, and found that every guttersnipe in Jibuti knew the house of the powerful Arab. Lovelace wrote a letter mentioning Melchisedek of Alexandria and requesting an interview. It was dispatched by hand, and a reply came back that Ben Ibrim would receive them, in the cool of the evening, at nine o’clock. Through most of the day they had remained sweltering in the hotel while the inhabitants of the town apparently slept.

Owing to the intense heat, Government offices and most business houses opened at five in the morning, closed at nine, and did not open again until eight in the evening, as Lovelace told his friends, but, new to this slice of tropical Africa, Christopher and Valerie

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