Free Harkaway's Sixth Column by John Harris

they noticed that each evening just before dark a single lorry passed. It went by every night at speed, but only when, on the fourth day, it roared by with its tarpaulin flapping loose did it dawn on them that it was carrying cans of petrol.
    ‘Two men,’ Harkaway breathed. ‘Just two men! We could fix two of the bastards.’
     
    Two days later the same camel train that had visited Bidiyu moved slowly from Eil Dif south through the foothills of the Bur Yi to Guidotti’s Strada del Duce. Guidotti’s lorries passed them without their drivers even noticing them, because there were plenty of other camel trains on the road, moving towards Berbera.
    As the vehicles roared past, the flying grit they lifted settled on the dusty hides of the camels, in the folds of the travellers’ clothing, and in the wrinkles of their skin. The perspiration made it stick so that they were masked like mummies, a layer of moist dust like mud on their faces. After their fashion, the camels grunted and belched and farted as they plodded slowly along the road. On their backs they carried the same bundles of hides that had been to Bidiyu.
    As they halted to drink from a water skin, the tallest of the drivers looked round. ‘This is the place,’ he said.
    He gestured with his head at the entrance to the Wirir Gorge whose sides towered over the road. The fierce white light of the sun reflected dazzlingly from the rocks and made the place look clinical and sterile.
    ‘A charge under that rock there,’ he said, pointing, ‘and it’ll bring the lot down.’
    He looked up as a car approached, trailing its cloud of dust. As it passed, he lifted his hand and waved - in the Italian manner the Somalis had been quick to learn, with the back of his hand to the recipient, the fingers moving slowly.
    There was a small recess at the side of the road where the hills lay back and where convoys had been in the habit of halting. Its surface was covered with powdery dust criss-crossed with the marks of tyres. At one end, where the camels of nomad tribesmen stopped, the surface was composed of trodden dung and the heavy smell of the animals hung in the air. With a stick, Harkaway prodded the camels forward and persuaded them to kneel. Then they squatted down by the rocks, waiting, watching the traffic. There were no guns and few troops. They had passed through long since. Now it was only lorries bringing up supplies, or an occasional car containing an officer.
    ‘You sure them explosives are safe?’ Tully asked.
    ‘Perfectly.’
    Tully eyed the sack on the nearest camel. ‘It’s bloody near,’ he said. ‘Suppose it fell of?’
    ‘Do no harm,’ Harkaway assured him. ‘You could burn it and it’d only fizz. It has to be put in a hole and tamped down, with a fuse attached.’
    ‘You sure?’
    Harkaway smiled in the quiet way of his that irritated the other two so much, then as a car approached, heading at full speed through the pass, he stiffened and did his Italian wave again.
     
    As dusk came, the reds and greys around them died into blues and purples and the sky was full of wild vermilion fires. The traffic stopped and a hot wind came through the pass from the plain, blowing the dried dust of ancient camel dung and lifting the surface of hard fine shale from the earth until little ridges appeared like bones in the reddish sand.
    ‘We’d better get on with it,’ Harkaway said. ‘Get the crowbar.’
    Tully began to unfasten the heavy iron bar they’d found in the cave at Shimber Addi.
    ‘That ought to make a hole big enough,’ Harkaway said. ‘We’ll find a crack and work on that. Get up the slope, Paddy, and keep a look out. Give us a whistle when the petrol lorry comes. If we’re ready first we’ll whistle to you to come down.’
    As Tully began to scramble up the rocky slopes, Harkaway began to jab with the crowbar at a crack in the rock beneath one of the huge pillars that held back the cliff.
    ‘Christ,’ Gooch said disgustedly.