The Khufra Run

I grabbed her by the shoulders and turned her round roughly. ‘Look, that plane was all I had in the world and it’s not salvageable, so I’m finished, Sister. A ruined man because I played the Good Samaritan last night. At least I’m entitled to know why’

She looked up at me calmly without struggling and nodded. ‘You are right, dear friend. I owe you that at least. Perhaps there is a quiet place you know of? Somewhere we could talk …’

I took the road to Talamanca then followed a cart track that brought us after a couple of miles to an old ruined farmhouse in an olive grove above the sea. There wasn’t a soul around. She sat on a low stone wall which had once marked the boundary of the grove and I sprawled on the ground at her feet and smoked a cigarette.

It was a marvellous day and quite suddenly, nothing seemed to matter very much. I narrowed my eyes, watching a hawk spiralling down out of the blue and she said, ‘Did you really mean what you said back there in the church? That you are ruined?’

‘As near as makes no difference.’

She sighed, ‘I too, know what it is like to lose everything.’

‘Is that supposed to make me feel better?’

She looked down at me sharply, something very close to anger in her face for the first time, but she controlled it admirably.

‘Perhaps if I told you about it, Mr Nelson.’

‘Has it anything to do with this present affair?’

‘Everything.’ She plucked a green leaf from a caper shrub, shredding it between her fingers as she stared back into the past. ‘I was born in Algeria. In the back country. My father was French, my mother, Bedu.’

‘An interesting mixture,’ I said. ‘Where do you keep your knife?’

She ignored me completely and carried straight on. ‘We had a large estate. Two vineyards. My father was a wealthy man. When de Gaulle declared Algeria independent in 1962 we decided to stay, but by 1965 things were very bad. All agricultural land owned by foreigners had been expropriated and most of the French population had gone. When my mother died, my father decided it was time we left also.’

‘How old were you then?’

‘Just fourteen. He decided to fly us out secretly, mainly because he considered it unlikely that the authorities would allow us to leave with anything worth having.’

‘There was another reason?’

‘I think you could say that.’ She smiled faintly. ‘There was a convent of the Little Sisters of Pity not far from our place at Tizi Benou. An old Moorish palace built like a fortress. I received my education there. During those difficult early years of independence, it acted as a refuge many times and churches over the entire region sent their more tangible assets there for safe keeping rather than see them looted.’

The whole thing was beginning to sound more than interesting and I sat up and turned to face her. ‘These tangible assets - what exactly did they consist of?’

‘Oh, the usual things. Church plate, precious objects of various kinds. Most of this was rendered down into bullion at the convent, crudely, but effective enough.’

‘Why bullion?’ It was something of a superfluous question for I already knew the answer.

‘So that my father could fly it out.’

‘And how much did that little lot come to?’

‘Something over a million pounds sterling in gold and silver. A rough approximation only and then there was a considerable amount in precious stones impossible to estimate and the most important item of all was priceless.’

‘And what was that?’

‘A statue of the Virgin in beaten silver, known as Our Lady of Tizi Benou, but actually manufactured by the great Saracen silversmith, Amor Khalif in Damascus in the eleventh century’

‘My God, but they must have loved you when you flew in with that little lot.’ I said. ‘But we didn’t, Mr Nelson,’ she said calmly. ‘That’s the whole point. It’s still there.’

‘The pilot my father hired was a man named Jaeger. A South African. He flew in from France by night at four hundred feet. He told me that was to foil their radar.’ She shook her head and there was a kind of sadness in her voice. ‘He was so alive. A great, black-bearded man who seemed to laugh all the time and wore a pistol in a shoulder holster. I think he was the most romantic figure I’d ever seen in my life.’

‘What was the aircraft?’

‘A Heron, is that right?’

I nodded, ‘Four engines. They used them for the Queen’s Flight a few years back. What about passengers?’

‘My father and I and Talif who was overseer of the vineyards.’

‘What was his story?’

‘He had worked for my father for years. They were very close.’ She shrugged. ‘He preferred to come with us rather than stay. There should have been others, but there was trouble at the last moment and we had to leave in a hurry.’

‘What went wrong?’

‘Oh, I don’t really know. Somehow the local area commander got to know - Major Taleb. He and my father never really got on. Taleb’s mother had been French, but for some reason that only seemed to make him hate France more. He’d fought with the F.L.N. for years.’

‘What happened?’

‘We took off as Taleb arrived to arrest us. Not that it did us any good. I suppose he must have got on to their air force straightaway’

‘And you were intercepted?’

She nodded. ‘Over the Algerian coast near Cape Djinet. Are you familiar with that coast at all? Do you know the Khufra Marshes?’

‘I’ve heard of them.’

‘Jaeger managed to crash-land and in one of the lagoons in there. He and my father were killed and the Heron went to the bottom, but Talif managed to get me out in time. He took me to a fishing village not far away, a place called Zarza and nursed me back to health. Later, he got me to France and placed me in the care of the Little Sisters at Grenoble.’

‘And did you tell anyone about all this?’

‘Only the Sisters, but there was nothing to be done about the situation obviously. To the Algerians, of course, we were all dead.’

‘So what happened then?’

‘The Order used its influence to get Talif work in Marseilles. I continued my education with them and eventually realised I had a vocation. After my training as a nurse, they sent me to our centre in Dacca.’

‘And now you’re back.’

‘For a time only. I had yellow fever very badly. It was thought that a spell in Grenoble would prove beneficial.’

Which was all absolutely fascinating, but came nowhere near explaining more recent events.

‘So what’s all this got to do with Redshirt and his friends?’ I demanded.

‘That’s simple enough. They work for Taleb. He’s a colonel now in the Algerian Security Police. I’ve made enquiries.’