Harkaway's Sixth Column Read Online Free

hand. ‘They’ll need cleaning - they’re covered with grease - but they seem all right. There must be a couple of hundred rifles here.’
    ‘Good ones?’
    ‘Depends what you call good. Most of ‘em seem to be single-shot Martinis. Old as God. Recoil like a kick in the face. Big bore. Soft-nosed bullet. Used to use ‘em on the North-west Frontier for native levies.’
    ‘I expect that’s what they’re doing here,’ Harkaway said. ‘In case they raised native troops who never aim properly anyway.’ He bent over the boxes. ‘Plenty of ammunition,’ he went on. ‘All types.’
    ‘They made it good and secret,’ Tully said, staring about him. ‘Nobody’s been here.’
    ‘If they had, we’d have been out long since stopping a massacre.’ Harkaway was peering about him, his eyes alert and interested. ‘This country’s full of warriors and they’d as soon kill as look at each other.’
    It didn’t take them long to get a fire going. There were four large primus stoves but Harkaway suggested that, since they had no idea how long they were likely to be there, it might be a good idea to conserve their supply of paraffin for the hurricane lamps, and there were plenty of dried thorn bushes about. With the aid of twigs, they soon had a billy can of water boiling. They were even beginning to feel cheerful and, since it was their first day and Watson’s unexpected death had shocked them a little, it didn’t seem amiss to have a can of beer each.
    ‘It’s hot enough for two,’’ Gooch pointed out.
    ‘One,’ Harkaway insisted. ‘We might be here a long time.’
    As they prepared the meal they were all busy with their thoughts. Harkaway sat by the fire, staring at the flames, and Grobelaar perched on a rock overlooking the plain, playing a nostalgic Afrikaner tune on a harmonica. Gooch, the armourer, was quietly rubbing at his rifle with a cloth while Tully crouched over the radio. He had discovered that a bullet had struck the transmitter so that, while they could hear what was happening, they couldn’t tell anyone where they were or what had happened. There seemed to be a lot of radio traffic and it was clear there was a lot of panic on the road towards Berbera.
    By the following day, the suggestion Harkaway had made of harassing the Italians seemed to have lost its point because most of the twenty-five thousand Italians heading for Berbera were already between them and the British, anyway.
    ‘We could still blow up the road,’ Harkaway said.
    Nobody argued. Three of them were regular soldiers, two of them nearing the end of their career when the war had broken out and, though Harkaway was the youngest, he was also the natural leader of the group, with a brisk no-nonsense manner that nobody ever questioned. Even Grobelaar knew the facts as well as any of them. He had arrived in Berbera from Cape Town donkey’s years before and had worked with the army since the war had started the previous year, a good mechanic who knew his job, stoop-shouldered from bending over engines but with an anxious look always on his face as if he constantly expected to be let down. The few officials in Berbera he’d dealt with had always been urging him on with ‘Come on, Piet, you can do it,’ when they wanted him to repair their vehicles out of turn, but they’d never invited him to eat with them, had never offered him anything more than an occasional beer, and his worried expression seemed to suggest that if he’d ever realized how difficult his job would be, he’d never have taken it on.
    Two days later they were still there, still trying to decide what to do. By this time they had learned from the radio that Hargeisa had fallen and that the Italians were heading for the Tug Argan Gap while the Royal Navy was preparing for the evacuation to Aden. Abyssinians, Arabs, Indians, even some Somalis, with their wives and families, had gone rather than accept Italian rule. Civilians and administrative officials had also