Jimgrim - The Spy Thrillers Series. Talbot Mundy

the devils in the middle of the world.

      “We shouldn’t have let them get in with any TNT at all,” said Goodenough. “They’ll touch it off before we can prevent them.”

      “Uh-uh! They’re not that kind,” Grim answered. “They’ll fight for their skins. Have your gun ready, sir. They’ve laid their plans for a time-fuse and a quick getaway. They’ll figure the going may be good still if they can once get past us. Look out for a rush!”

      But when the door went down at last in a mess of splinters there was no rush—nothing but silence—a dark, square, stone room containing two cots and a table, and fruit scattered all over the floor amid gray dust and fragments of cement. Grim laughed curtly.

      “Look, sir!”

      The fruit-baskets were on the floor by one of the cots, and the TNT containers were still in them. They had tipped out the fruit, and then run at the sound of the battering ram.

      Goodenough stepped into the room, and we followed him. Beyond the table, half-hidden by a great stone slab, was a dark hole in the floor. Evidently the last man through had tried to cover up the hole, but had found the stone too heavy. The Sikhs dragged it clear and disclosed the mouth of a tunnel, rather less than a man’s height, sloping sharply downward.

      “What we need now is mustard gas. Smoke ’em out,” said Goodenough.

      “Might kill ’em,” Grim objected.

      “That’d be too bad, wouldn’t it!”

      “We could starve ’em out, for that matter,” said Grim. “But they’ve probably got water down there, and perhaps food. Every hour of delay adds to the risk of rioting. We’ve got to get this hole sealed up permanently, and deny that it was ever opened.”

      “We could do that at once! But I won’t be a party to sealing ’em up alive.”

      “Besides, sir, they’ve certainly got firearms, and they might just possible have one can of TNT down there.”

      “All right,” said Goodenough. “I’ll lead the way down.”

      “I’ve a plan,” said Grim.

      He took one of the fruit-baskets and began breaking it up.

      “Who has a white shirt?” he asked.

      I was the haberdasher. The others, Sikhs included, were all clothed in khaki from coat to skin. Grim’s Bedouin array was dark-brown. I peeled the shirt off, and Grim rigged it on a frame of basket-work, with a clumsy pitch-forked arrangement of withes at the bottom. The idea was not obvious until he twisted the withes about his waist; then, when he bent down, the shirt stood up erect above him.

      “If you don’t mind, sir, we’ll have two or three Sikhs go first. Have them take their boots off and crawl quietly as flat down as they can keep. I’ll follow ’em with this contraption. They’ll be able to see the white shirt dimly against the tunnel, and if they do any shooting they’ll aim at that. Then if the rest of you keep low behind me we’ve a good chance to rush them before they can do any damage.”

      I never met a commanding officer more free from personal conceit than Goodenough, and as I came to know more of him later on that characteristic stood out increasingly. He was not so much a man of ideas as one who could recognize them. That done, he made use of his authority to back up his subordinates, claiming no credit for himself but always seeing to it that they got theirs.

      The result was that he was simultaneously despised and loved— despised by the self-advertising school, of which there are plenty in every army, and loved—with something like fanaticism by his junior officers and men.

      “I agree to that,” he said simply, screwing in his monocle. Then he turned and instructed the Sikhs in their own language.

      “You follow last,” he said to me. “Now—all ready?”

      He had a pistol in one hand and a flashlight in the other, but had to stow them both away again in order to crawl in the tunnel. Grim had no weapon in sight. The two Sikhs who were to lead had stripped themselves of everything that might make a noise, but the others kept both boots and rifles, with bayonets fixed, for it did not much matter what racket they made. In fact, the more noise we, who followed, made, the better, since that would draw attention from the Sikhs in front. All we had to do was to keep our bodies below Grim’s kite affair, out of the probable line of fire.

      Nevertheless, that dark hole was untempting. A dank smell came out of it, like the breath of those old Egyptian tombs in which the bones of horses, buried with their masters, lie all about on shelves. You couldn’t see into it more than a yard or two, for the only light came through the doorway of the windowless room, and the tunnel led into the womb of rock where, perhaps, no light had been since Solomon’s day.

      But the leading Sikhs went in without hesitation and got down on their bellies. They might have been swallowed whole for all that I heard or saw of them from that minute. You could guess why the Turks and Germans had not really craved to meet those fellows out in No-man’s-land.

      Grim went in on all-fours like a weird animal, with my shirt dancing on its frame above his back. Goodenough went next, peering through that window-pane monocle like a deep-sea fish. All the rest of the Sikhs went after him in Indian file, dragging their rifle-butts along the tunnel floor and making noise enough to remind you of the New York subway.

      I went in at the tail end, trying at intervals to peer around a khaki-covered Punjaub rump, alternately getting my head and fingers bruised by heels I could not see and a rifle-butt that only moved in jerks when you didn’t expect it to. My nose was bleeding at the end of ten yards.

      But you couldn’t keep your distance. Whenever the men in front checked at some obstruction or paused to listen, all those behind closed up; and by the time those behind had run their noses against iron-shod heels the men in front were on their way again. You couldn’t see a thing until you rammed your head into it, and then the sense of touch gave you a sort of sight suggestion, as when you see things in a dream. As for sound, the tunnel acted like a whispering gallery, mixing all the noises up together, so that you could not guess whether a man had spoken, or a stone had fallen, or a pistol had gone off, or all three.

      Once or twice, when the line closed up on itself caterpillar-fashion, I was able to make out my white shirt dancing dimly; and once, where some trick of the tunnel sorted out the sounds, I caught a scrap of conversation.

      “D’you suppose they’ll be able to see the shirt?”

      “God knows. I can hardly make it out from here.”

      “When it looks like the right time to you, sir, turn the flashlight on it.”

      “All right. God damn! Keep on going—you nearly knocked out my eye-glass!”

      Even over my shoulder, looking backward, I could see practically nothing, for what little light came in through the opening was swallowed by the first few yards. There was a suspicion of paleness in the gloom behind, and the occasional suggestion of an outline of rough wall; no more.

      Nor was the tunnel straight by any means. It turned and twisted constantly; and at every bend the men who originally closed it had built up a wall of heavy masonry that Scharnhoff had had to force his way through. In those places the broken stones were now lying in the fairway, as you knew by the suffering when you came in contact with them; some of the split-off edges were as sharp as glass.

      It was good fun, all the same, while it lasted. If we had been crawling down a sewer, or a modern passage of any kind, the sense of danger and discomfort would, no doubt, have overwhelmed all other considerations. But, even supposing Scharnhoff had been on a vain hunt, and the veritable Tomb of the Kings of Judah did not lie somewhere in the dark ahead of us, we were nevertheless under the foundations of Solomon’s temple, groping our way into mysteries that had not been disclosed, perhaps, since the days when the Queen of Sheba came and paid her homage to the most wise king. You could feel afraid, but you couldn’t wish you weren’t there.

      I