Items related to Irene at Large
When a stranger in Asian garb is poisoned at the feet of Nell Huxliegh, Irene Adler does a little investigating, discovering that the Asian was actually an Englishman and that Dr. Watson's life is in danger.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
:The first book in Carole Nelson Douglas's Irene Adler series, Good Night, Mr. Holmes was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, won an American Mystery Award for Best Novel of Romantic Suspense, and a Romantic Times Best Historical Romantic Mystery Award. In addition to the Irene Adler series, Carole Nelson Douglas is the author of the bestselling contemporary Midnight Louie mystery series. She resides in Fort Worth, Texas.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Chapter One
WHEN TWO STRONG MEN...
Near Sangbur, Afghanistan: July 25, 1880
In the very lap of Asia lies a land so fierce and desolate--if not undefended--that were the demons of every faith to collaborate in creating a Hell that would prostrate Christian, Hebrew and Moslem alike in united terror, its name would remain...Afghanistan.
Stretching horizontally across the neck of the Indian subcontinent like a hangman's noose, Afghanistan bridges Persia on the west and Tibet and China on the east; British India on the south; and to the north--the great outstretched Russian bearclaw.
Searing in summer and frigid in winter, this unholy landscape huddles behind the scimitar curves of two great mountain ranges--the Himalayas and Karakorum on the east, and on the west the six hundred ridged miles of the Hindu Kush.
Wherever men of adventure and a martial bent gather, the Hindu Kush is spoken of in awed tones. To the timid home-bound soul, it is enough to say that the phrase translates as "dead Hindu."
No wonder is it that neither India nor Russia has extended its borders to meet across this dread wasteland. Nor is it any wonder that in the closing decades of the nineteenth century the two great nations of Russia and Britain should nervously dart closer to armed conflict there, like two dogs fighting over the same hideous bone. Possession and advantageous position are the only prizes of what has been called the Great Game between two strong empires. The bone itself is worthless, and bitter gnawing at that.
This is Tartary, ancient road of merchants and conquerors, the no-man's-land separating the northern frontiers of India--Kashmir and the Kush--and the southern fringes of Russia--Tashkent and fabled Samarkand. A lonely wasteland to the unobservant eye, the arid vastness of Afghanistan supports dozens of warring tribes, united only in their devotion to freedom from foreign meddling and their willingness to wreak havoc on interlopers. The traveler, and woe to anyone foolish enough to go solitary into these bleak acres, is never as alone as he may think--or as he may be allowed to think, for a time.
Thus, should a wheeling vulture spy a human form cast lengthwise in a notch atop a bleak ridge, he will not swoop closer to investigate unless he is especially hungry. Such culinary booty is common after the bandits have made their usual forays. Every abandoned traveler is assured of a final, grisly welcome somewhere.
But the lone man visible only to the airborne vulture on this particular summer's day was not lost, or mad, or abandoned. He was present for a purpose, and so was the telescopic spyglass pressed to one eye, its brass carefully darkened so no unnatural twinkle should alert any lurking marauders.
Even a spyglass could barely penetrate the jagged profiles of distance-blued mountain ranges and the tiny camel caravan trickling down a steep incline like a broken string of amber beads. Both men and the tough, two-humped beasts native to these forbidding steppes seemed cloaked in the sere shades of the desolate region, hardly more animate than the darker patches of thornbushes and other scrubby vegetation that punctuate the frozen waves of sand and rock.
The caravan was too immeasurably distant to alarm the watcher, but he rolled over suddenly, aware of the vulture's scant shadow, and turned a dark face to the blazing blue sky. Summer spread its searing, fawn-colored tent over Afghanistan and the heat was horrific, even under the billowing shade of a burnoose.
In an instant, the man collapsed his instrument and tucked it into the leather kit bag belted at his waist beneath the flowing robes. From the bag he pulled something that glinted in the hollow of his hand, a pocket watch, which he consulted. Then he snapped shut the engraved lid and quickly put it away.
The vulture shadow fattened without warning. The man scrambled to his haunches, stretching an arm for the Enfield rifle that lay alongside him, but caution came too late. Another robed man stood motionless below him on the ridge back, a Snider breech-loading rifle slung over one shoulder carelessly enough to be instantly available.
"You are late," the first man said in a language shocking amid that arid wasteland--English.
"I forgo carrying a Burlington Arcade timepiece in Afghanistan," the other said sardonically, moving closer. "One day all of your native dialects will not suffice to talk you out of some tight corner, Cobra."
"Nor will your fabled trick of padding up behind a fellow unheard always save your skin, Tiger," the first man replied with an unamused grin that revealed disarmingly blackened teeth.
Tiger sat on a rock, baggy Turkish trousers ballooning around his knees. He doffed his burnoose's hood, revealing a turban. Under those native wrappings lay a broad, intelligent brow and strong, pugnacious features that indeed boasted the ferocious jaws of a tiger--and unblinking eyes of bright, lapis blue.
"I need that tracker's skill," Tiger said with harsh pride. "I lack your facility for passing among these mountain bandits as one of them. But stealth serves me as well as boldness has served you. We are both yet alive."
Cobra grunted. Unlike the other man, his skin had been toasted to the nut-brown color of a native, and his eyes, if a trifle hazel, seemed almost black in their swarthy setting. Yet beneath it all, and especially in conference with one of his own kind, lurked the aspect of a young English gentleman, no matter how dangerously he played at native tribesman.
"There will be battle," Cobra said, weary of their usual jousting. He did not like Tiger, did not trust the man, though he was an old India hand; Cobra could not say why.
The turban nodded. "Battle, blood and dust. We will have a rare round of it in a day or two. The command underestimates the Amir's forces, as usual. Burrows is a fool."
"He has not seen much action," Cobra admitted with the unease of a young officer discussing the commander. "And Ayub has some crackerjack artillery: two elephant-drawn heavy batteries, twenty-two horse artillery batteries and eighteen mule-drawn mountain batteries, not to mention seven bullock-drawn field batteries."
"The lad can count!" the older man sneered in a way meant to pass as humor-at-arms. "You will soon be heading behind-lines to report all this?"
Cobra nodded. "Not that the command much listens to me."
"The sash-and-sword set never puts much store in the advice of London lads gone native like yourself. You should have stayed in the regiment and clung to your spit-and-polish."
"After the war it is the political chaps who advance," Cobra put in. "And do they heed your reports any more than mine? So is your scouting done?"
"Oh, aye, I have sashayed up the ridges and down the gullies 'til the vultures are sick of the sight of me."
"Better to be seen by them than by the Ghazi fanatics or the Afghan tribesmen."
"Or the women!" Tiger gave a mock shudder. "The Ghazis may kill everything that moves for Allah, but I would rather face one any day. At all costs, do not get wounded and let the village women have at you, boy. They have a real taste for torture, even more than the men. Better to shoot yourself."
"War stories."
Tiger smiled. His teeth were strong and yellow, like a big cat's, leaving no question of why he had earned his nom de guerre. "War stories tend to be war truths. Remember that, and remember who told you."
"But you have scouted no surprises for our troops?" Cobra asked.
"No hidden caches of elephant-drawn artillery, no. I have spent two weeks crawling around this bloody dust-laden kiln, and I should know."
"Odd." Cobra got out his spyglass and swept it over the parched landscape below. "Hyena said he had seen you up north recently, in Balkh, near the Russian border."
"Hyena said, did he? Like all of his breed, he is much for slinking around after the danger--saying, and little for doing. But he is right, although it was a bit longer ago than that." Tiger leaned inward, his voice so compelling that Cobra lowered his glass to meet the bright blue gaze so ripe with conviction. "That is what I have come to pass to you today. The immediate area is clean as a camel's tooth, but a Russian agent has been doing a mazurka hereabouts to no good. 'Sable' is the code name--vicious, surreptitious beasts they are, too. That is all I've discovered: except for the fact that an officer in our command has been compromised."
"An officer? Will betray us? Why?"
Tiger shrugged. "Could be for gold, or for the rubies in the far Afghan hills--now there is a bribe to make a man's heart clench, a ruby mine! Could be a woman in Simla, with eyes brighter than the Koh-i-noor diamond, but another officer's wife, and blackmail. Oh, my poor lad, the world is rotten with fat fruit, ripe for teasing another's will to one's own. You are such a babe at espionage." Cobra stiffened in irritation, which no doubt further amused Tiger. "Still, I am the one to report back. What does it matter if the terrain favors us when one of our own may turn? Do you have a name?"
"A name." For the first time, Tiger seemed uncertain.
"Well?" After having his competence challenged, Cobra counterattacked with a vengeance. "What good is it to know the foul deed in advance if you do not know the doer? If you are right, and I happen to think you are, we will engage the Afghans within a day or two. Do you mean to say that all your slinking around on soft cat feet has only turned up a rumor?"
Tiger's mustache bristled like brutal whiskers. "I hesitate to name the man on a matter of such dishonor. But it is...Maclaine."
"Maclaine of the Royal Horse Artillery? We need all the artillery we have against the Amir." Cobra stirred, concealing his spyglass. "I had best be making for the plain. This is dire news."
"Wait!" Tiger pulled the burnoose hood over his head, putting his betraying blue eyes into deep shadow. "Let an old game hunter sniff out the trail before you start back. That vulture is still circling. It may spy only carrion, but--"
Cobra nodded. No scout superior to Tiger inhabited all of India. The older man scrabbled sideways across the rocks scorpion-swift, the rifle in his hand cocked like a stinger, until he was out of sight.
Tiger's bag lay on the rocks. Cobra hesitated, as if fearing a sting, but then rapidly unbuckled the straps and studied the contents--quinine pills, a compass and water flask like his own, ammunition, a mustache comb--more likely catch an Afghan with a pocket watch than with one of these! Cobra frowned. He knew not for what he searched, only that he did not trust the bearer.
And then he felt a welt within the leather. His sun-stained m fingers probed, working a secret flap loose. A folded document lay in his hand, written on heavy soft paper, so it should not crackle. Odd words. Afghan words. And Russian. Some sort of drawing, a cryptogram.
It took Cobra a moment's work to stuff the paper into his own kit, to replace Tiger's bag in the searing sun as if it had never been touched. He was not as green as Tiger thought. Something in the man's manner today had fanned Cobra's usual dislike into embers of outright suspicion. A British force and the fate of India were at stake. If he were wrong, he would take the consequences. And right or wrong, he would have Tiger to answer to.
He never, heard the espionage agent return, but a swelling shadow swooped down suddenly, like a vulture, and squatted near him.
"All clear," said Tiger, smiling...smiling like a well-fed big Bengal cat.
Khushk-i-Nakhud, Evening, July 26, 1880
* * *
On occasion the orchards surrounding Kandahar scented the night air with perfumes that infiltrated even the city's narrow, filthy streets. Here, however, in the British camp midway across the waste that lay between Kandahar and the river Helmond, the only certain fragrance wafted from the plentiful droppings of the beasts of burden needed to transport the baggage and equipment of twenty-five hundred fighting men.
Cobra, now in uniform, slipped unnoticed among the soldiers in the pungent darkness. Horses neighed in answer to ill-tempered bagpipelike brays from the camels. All beasts, native or not, led a brutal life in these parts, and often a short one.
By the muted lantern light of an army soon to go head-to-head with the forces of Ayub Khan, Cobra dodged the shoulder-high wooden wheels of E Battery, B Brigade of the Royal Horse Artillery. The commander of two of these big guns was Lieutenant Hector Maclaine.
Cobra found his man propped against one of the stone enclosures that bracketed the camp, staring into the impenetrable night. Stars sparkled like bright brass buttons above, but no enemy campfires mirrored these hot points of light below. The two men could have been alone in a coal mine with fool's gold salting the ceiling, save for the faint rustles of restless men and animals.
"Stan!" Maclaine greeted the newcomer in surprise. "I doubted you would return before we broke camp."
"Had to report," Cobra said shortly.
"And are we dragging pack and packhorse to greet Ayub Khan tonight, as rumor has it?"
"Perhaps. I merely report to St. John. He carries the news to Slade and the brigadier. Then news becomes rumor."
"Insane that a frontline scout never reports directly. Damn clumsy system."
"Perhaps." Cobra was silent for several moments, as if, used to hurried clandestine meetings, he had forgotten how to converse in other than staccato fashion. "I have uneasy news, Maclaine, and from the look of it, the command will not listen."
"Command lives to order others to listen, not to heed its own scouts' words." The smile in Lieutenant Maclaine's voice was evident even in the dark.
"That is what I fear!" Cobra burst out. "They will not listen, not about Ayub Khan's superior artillery, not about Tiger...not about anything."
"What is wrong, old man? Too much time spent in solitary on the boiling sands?"
"Burrows is getting spoiled spy-work, and I know it. I am going out again to scout Maiwand. The previous report sounds too perfect: a long ravine for an attack base and no flaws in the terrain."
"That does not sound like the Afghanistan that has scrubbed our boots raw," Maclaine agreed.
"Just what I thought. I have scoured the ground like a dust devil, and found a secondary ravine to the east no one has reported. If we see action at Maiwand tomorrow, the RHA will be in the vanguard. Keep your eyes and ears open, full-bore," Cobra cautioned him. "You have nothing...troubling you?"
"Nothing save dust and heat, a gulletful of quinine pills and a noseful of horse manure. Have I ever struck you as a nerve-ridden man?"
"No, you have not," Cobra answered soberly. "That is what troubles me. Someone who has no notion that I know you has accused you of having a guilty conscience."
"I?" Maclaine leaped up. "Who is this liar? I'll call him out in midbattle, though six dozen Ghazi fanatics charge us."
"This is serious spy-work," Cobra said. "Leave it to me. But for God's sake, Mac, keep a sharp eye about yourself from now on."
"Can you say no more?"
"Nothing until I learn more. God guard you all tonight."
"And you, Stan," Lieutenant Maclaine said. "I vouchsafe we will next meet on a battlefield--or in ...
WHEN TWO STRONG MEN...
Near Sangbur, Afghanistan: July 25, 1880
In the very lap of Asia lies a land so fierce and desolate--if not undefended--that were the demons of every faith to collaborate in creating a Hell that would prostrate Christian, Hebrew and Moslem alike in united terror, its name would remain...Afghanistan.
Stretching horizontally across the neck of the Indian subcontinent like a hangman's noose, Afghanistan bridges Persia on the west and Tibet and China on the east; British India on the south; and to the north--the great outstretched Russian bearclaw.
Searing in summer and frigid in winter, this unholy landscape huddles behind the scimitar curves of two great mountain ranges--the Himalayas and Karakorum on the east, and on the west the six hundred ridged miles of the Hindu Kush.
Wherever men of adventure and a martial bent gather, the Hindu Kush is spoken of in awed tones. To the timid home-bound soul, it is enough to say that the phrase translates as "dead Hindu."
No wonder is it that neither India nor Russia has extended its borders to meet across this dread wasteland. Nor is it any wonder that in the closing decades of the nineteenth century the two great nations of Russia and Britain should nervously dart closer to armed conflict there, like two dogs fighting over the same hideous bone. Possession and advantageous position are the only prizes of what has been called the Great Game between two strong empires. The bone itself is worthless, and bitter gnawing at that.
This is Tartary, ancient road of merchants and conquerors, the no-man's-land separating the northern frontiers of India--Kashmir and the Kush--and the southern fringes of Russia--Tashkent and fabled Samarkand. A lonely wasteland to the unobservant eye, the arid vastness of Afghanistan supports dozens of warring tribes, united only in their devotion to freedom from foreign meddling and their willingness to wreak havoc on interlopers. The traveler, and woe to anyone foolish enough to go solitary into these bleak acres, is never as alone as he may think--or as he may be allowed to think, for a time.
Thus, should a wheeling vulture spy a human form cast lengthwise in a notch atop a bleak ridge, he will not swoop closer to investigate unless he is especially hungry. Such culinary booty is common after the bandits have made their usual forays. Every abandoned traveler is assured of a final, grisly welcome somewhere.
But the lone man visible only to the airborne vulture on this particular summer's day was not lost, or mad, or abandoned. He was present for a purpose, and so was the telescopic spyglass pressed to one eye, its brass carefully darkened so no unnatural twinkle should alert any lurking marauders.
Even a spyglass could barely penetrate the jagged profiles of distance-blued mountain ranges and the tiny camel caravan trickling down a steep incline like a broken string of amber beads. Both men and the tough, two-humped beasts native to these forbidding steppes seemed cloaked in the sere shades of the desolate region, hardly more animate than the darker patches of thornbushes and other scrubby vegetation that punctuate the frozen waves of sand and rock.
The caravan was too immeasurably distant to alarm the watcher, but he rolled over suddenly, aware of the vulture's scant shadow, and turned a dark face to the blazing blue sky. Summer spread its searing, fawn-colored tent over Afghanistan and the heat was horrific, even under the billowing shade of a burnoose.
In an instant, the man collapsed his instrument and tucked it into the leather kit bag belted at his waist beneath the flowing robes. From the bag he pulled something that glinted in the hollow of his hand, a pocket watch, which he consulted. Then he snapped shut the engraved lid and quickly put it away.
The vulture shadow fattened without warning. The man scrambled to his haunches, stretching an arm for the Enfield rifle that lay alongside him, but caution came too late. Another robed man stood motionless below him on the ridge back, a Snider breech-loading rifle slung over one shoulder carelessly enough to be instantly available.
"You are late," the first man said in a language shocking amid that arid wasteland--English.
"I forgo carrying a Burlington Arcade timepiece in Afghanistan," the other said sardonically, moving closer. "One day all of your native dialects will not suffice to talk you out of some tight corner, Cobra."
"Nor will your fabled trick of padding up behind a fellow unheard always save your skin, Tiger," the first man replied with an unamused grin that revealed disarmingly blackened teeth.
Tiger sat on a rock, baggy Turkish trousers ballooning around his knees. He doffed his burnoose's hood, revealing a turban. Under those native wrappings lay a broad, intelligent brow and strong, pugnacious features that indeed boasted the ferocious jaws of a tiger--and unblinking eyes of bright, lapis blue.
"I need that tracker's skill," Tiger said with harsh pride. "I lack your facility for passing among these mountain bandits as one of them. But stealth serves me as well as boldness has served you. We are both yet alive."
Cobra grunted. Unlike the other man, his skin had been toasted to the nut-brown color of a native, and his eyes, if a trifle hazel, seemed almost black in their swarthy setting. Yet beneath it all, and especially in conference with one of his own kind, lurked the aspect of a young English gentleman, no matter how dangerously he played at native tribesman.
"There will be battle," Cobra said, weary of their usual jousting. He did not like Tiger, did not trust the man, though he was an old India hand; Cobra could not say why.
The turban nodded. "Battle, blood and dust. We will have a rare round of it in a day or two. The command underestimates the Amir's forces, as usual. Burrows is a fool."
"He has not seen much action," Cobra admitted with the unease of a young officer discussing the commander. "And Ayub has some crackerjack artillery: two elephant-drawn heavy batteries, twenty-two horse artillery batteries and eighteen mule-drawn mountain batteries, not to mention seven bullock-drawn field batteries."
"The lad can count!" the older man sneered in a way meant to pass as humor-at-arms. "You will soon be heading behind-lines to report all this?"
Cobra nodded. "Not that the command much listens to me."
"The sash-and-sword set never puts much store in the advice of London lads gone native like yourself. You should have stayed in the regiment and clung to your spit-and-polish."
"After the war it is the political chaps who advance," Cobra put in. "And do they heed your reports any more than mine? So is your scouting done?"
"Oh, aye, I have sashayed up the ridges and down the gullies 'til the vultures are sick of the sight of me."
"Better to be seen by them than by the Ghazi fanatics or the Afghan tribesmen."
"Or the women!" Tiger gave a mock shudder. "The Ghazis may kill everything that moves for Allah, but I would rather face one any day. At all costs, do not get wounded and let the village women have at you, boy. They have a real taste for torture, even more than the men. Better to shoot yourself."
"War stories."
Tiger smiled. His teeth were strong and yellow, like a big cat's, leaving no question of why he had earned his nom de guerre. "War stories tend to be war truths. Remember that, and remember who told you."
"But you have scouted no surprises for our troops?" Cobra asked.
"No hidden caches of elephant-drawn artillery, no. I have spent two weeks crawling around this bloody dust-laden kiln, and I should know."
"Odd." Cobra got out his spyglass and swept it over the parched landscape below. "Hyena said he had seen you up north recently, in Balkh, near the Russian border."
"Hyena said, did he? Like all of his breed, he is much for slinking around after the danger--saying, and little for doing. But he is right, although it was a bit longer ago than that." Tiger leaned inward, his voice so compelling that Cobra lowered his glass to meet the bright blue gaze so ripe with conviction. "That is what I have come to pass to you today. The immediate area is clean as a camel's tooth, but a Russian agent has been doing a mazurka hereabouts to no good. 'Sable' is the code name--vicious, surreptitious beasts they are, too. That is all I've discovered: except for the fact that an officer in our command has been compromised."
"An officer? Will betray us? Why?"
Tiger shrugged. "Could be for gold, or for the rubies in the far Afghan hills--now there is a bribe to make a man's heart clench, a ruby mine! Could be a woman in Simla, with eyes brighter than the Koh-i-noor diamond, but another officer's wife, and blackmail. Oh, my poor lad, the world is rotten with fat fruit, ripe for teasing another's will to one's own. You are such a babe at espionage." Cobra stiffened in irritation, which no doubt further amused Tiger. "Still, I am the one to report back. What does it matter if the terrain favors us when one of our own may turn? Do you have a name?"
"A name." For the first time, Tiger seemed uncertain.
"Well?" After having his competence challenged, Cobra counterattacked with a vengeance. "What good is it to know the foul deed in advance if you do not know the doer? If you are right, and I happen to think you are, we will engage the Afghans within a day or two. Do you mean to say that all your slinking around on soft cat feet has only turned up a rumor?"
Tiger's mustache bristled like brutal whiskers. "I hesitate to name the man on a matter of such dishonor. But it is...Maclaine."
"Maclaine of the Royal Horse Artillery? We need all the artillery we have against the Amir." Cobra stirred, concealing his spyglass. "I had best be making for the plain. This is dire news."
"Wait!" Tiger pulled the burnoose hood over his head, putting his betraying blue eyes into deep shadow. "Let an old game hunter sniff out the trail before you start back. That vulture is still circling. It may spy only carrion, but--"
Cobra nodded. No scout superior to Tiger inhabited all of India. The older man scrabbled sideways across the rocks scorpion-swift, the rifle in his hand cocked like a stinger, until he was out of sight.
Tiger's bag lay on the rocks. Cobra hesitated, as if fearing a sting, but then rapidly unbuckled the straps and studied the contents--quinine pills, a compass and water flask like his own, ammunition, a mustache comb--more likely catch an Afghan with a pocket watch than with one of these! Cobra frowned. He knew not for what he searched, only that he did not trust the bearer.
And then he felt a welt within the leather. His sun-stained m fingers probed, working a secret flap loose. A folded document lay in his hand, written on heavy soft paper, so it should not crackle. Odd words. Afghan words. And Russian. Some sort of drawing, a cryptogram.
It took Cobra a moment's work to stuff the paper into his own kit, to replace Tiger's bag in the searing sun as if it had never been touched. He was not as green as Tiger thought. Something in the man's manner today had fanned Cobra's usual dislike into embers of outright suspicion. A British force and the fate of India were at stake. If he were wrong, he would take the consequences. And right or wrong, he would have Tiger to answer to.
He never, heard the espionage agent return, but a swelling shadow swooped down suddenly, like a vulture, and squatted near him.
"All clear," said Tiger, smiling...smiling like a well-fed big Bengal cat.
Khushk-i-Nakhud, Evening, July 26, 1880
* * *
On occasion the orchards surrounding Kandahar scented the night air with perfumes that infiltrated even the city's narrow, filthy streets. Here, however, in the British camp midway across the waste that lay between Kandahar and the river Helmond, the only certain fragrance wafted from the plentiful droppings of the beasts of burden needed to transport the baggage and equipment of twenty-five hundred fighting men.
Cobra, now in uniform, slipped unnoticed among the soldiers in the pungent darkness. Horses neighed in answer to ill-tempered bagpipelike brays from the camels. All beasts, native or not, led a brutal life in these parts, and often a short one.
By the muted lantern light of an army soon to go head-to-head with the forces of Ayub Khan, Cobra dodged the shoulder-high wooden wheels of E Battery, B Brigade of the Royal Horse Artillery. The commander of two of these big guns was Lieutenant Hector Maclaine.
Cobra found his man propped against one of the stone enclosures that bracketed the camp, staring into the impenetrable night. Stars sparkled like bright brass buttons above, but no enemy campfires mirrored these hot points of light below. The two men could have been alone in a coal mine with fool's gold salting the ceiling, save for the faint rustles of restless men and animals.
"Stan!" Maclaine greeted the newcomer in surprise. "I doubted you would return before we broke camp."
"Had to report," Cobra said shortly.
"And are we dragging pack and packhorse to greet Ayub Khan tonight, as rumor has it?"
"Perhaps. I merely report to St. John. He carries the news to Slade and the brigadier. Then news becomes rumor."
"Insane that a frontline scout never reports directly. Damn clumsy system."
"Perhaps." Cobra was silent for several moments, as if, used to hurried clandestine meetings, he had forgotten how to converse in other than staccato fashion. "I have uneasy news, Maclaine, and from the look of it, the command will not listen."
"Command lives to order others to listen, not to heed its own scouts' words." The smile in Lieutenant Maclaine's voice was evident even in the dark.
"That is what I fear!" Cobra burst out. "They will not listen, not about Ayub Khan's superior artillery, not about Tiger...not about anything."
"What is wrong, old man? Too much time spent in solitary on the boiling sands?"
"Burrows is getting spoiled spy-work, and I know it. I am going out again to scout Maiwand. The previous report sounds too perfect: a long ravine for an attack base and no flaws in the terrain."
"That does not sound like the Afghanistan that has scrubbed our boots raw," Maclaine agreed.
"Just what I thought. I have scoured the ground like a dust devil, and found a secondary ravine to the east no one has reported. If we see action at Maiwand tomorrow, the RHA will be in the vanguard. Keep your eyes and ears open, full-bore," Cobra cautioned him. "You have nothing...troubling you?"
"Nothing save dust and heat, a gulletful of quinine pills and a noseful of horse manure. Have I ever struck you as a nerve-ridden man?"
"No, you have not," Cobra answered soberly. "That is what troubles me. Someone who has no notion that I know you has accused you of having a guilty conscience."
"I?" Maclaine leaped up. "Who is this liar? I'll call him out in midbattle, though six dozen Ghazi fanatics charge us."
"This is serious spy-work," Cobra said. "Leave it to me. But for God's sake, Mac, keep a sharp eye about yourself from now on."
"Can you say no more?"
"Nothing until I learn more. God guard you all tonight."
"And you, Stan," Lieutenant Maclaine said. "I vouchsafe we will next meet on a battlefield--or in ...
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherTor Books
- Publication date1992
- ISBN 10 0312852231
- ISBN 13 9780312852238
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
- Number of pages381
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Book Description Condition: New. Buy with confidence! Book is in new, never-used condition. Seller Inventory # bk0312852231xvz189zvxnew
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Irene at Large
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Book Description Condition: New. New! This book is in the same immaculate condition as when it was published. Seller Inventory # 353-0312852231-new
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Book Description Hardcover. Condition: New. Seller Inventory # Abebooks55610
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US$ 64.00
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IRENE AT LARGE
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Book Description Condition: New. New. In shrink wrap. Looks like an interesting title! 1.45. Seller Inventory # Q-0312852231
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US$ 60.00
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