Hell's Legionnaire (2 page)

Hell's Legionnaire

B
EHIND
them, the ambush was
sprung with the speed of a steel bear trap. One moment the Moroccan sunlight
was warm and peaceful upon this high pass of the
Atlas
Mountains. The next
lashed the world with the sound of flaming
Sniders
and
Mannlichers
and
flintlocks
.

Gray and brown
djellabas swirled behind protecting rocks. Bloodshot eyes stared down sights.
Scorching lead reached in with hammers and battered out lives with the gruesome
regularity of a ticking clock.

Ann Halliday's shrill
scream of terror was lost in an ocean of erupting sound. Her terrified Moorish
barb plunged under her, striving to dash through the jamming corridor of the
peaks.

Horses fell, maimed
and screaming. Men died before they could reach their holsters, much less their
guns. The two auto-rifles in the vanguard had been jerked from their packs but
now they were covered with dust and blood and their gunners stared with glazed,
dead eyes at the enemy, the
Berbers
.

John Halliday, Ann's
father, tried to ride back to her. Within five feet of her pony, he stiffened
in his saddle, shot through the back. The next instant his face was torn away
by a ricocheting slug. He pitched off at her feet.

Muskets and rifles
rolled like kettledrums. Black powder smoke drifted heavily above the pass, a
shroud to temporarily mark the passing of twenty men.

A voice was bellowing
orders in
Shilha
and, dying a shot at a time, the volleying finally ceased.
Then there was only dust and smoke and the blood-drenched floor of the pass.

Two Berbers, blue eyes
hard and metallic in the hoods of their djellabas, jerked Ann Halliday from her
barb. She struggled, but their sinews were trained by lifetimes spent on the
Atlas and she might as well have tried to break steel chains.

Her boots made swirls
of dust as she attempted to impede their progress. Once she looked back and saw
a Berber delivering the death stroke to a wounded expedition aide. She did not
look back again.

The Berbers half
lifted, half threw her to the saddle of a waiting horse. Other mountain men
were coming up, their arms filled with plunder. As though in a nightmare, Ann
saw them mount their ponies.

They filed down the
pass, up a slope, and trotted toward a mountain peak which loomed brown and
sullen before them. The rapidity of the events was too much for her. They dazed
her and made her slightly ill. But she had not yet realized that her party had
been slain, that she was in the hands of revolting tribesmen. Mercifully, a
sort of anesthetic had her in its grip.

Almost before she
realized they were on their way, they stopped. Teeth flashed in laughter. Men
were patting rifles and ammunition and bulky sacks of loot. Some of them
pointed to her and laughed more loudly. She did not understand, not yet.

She did not struggle
when they led her to the square block of a house. She thought that within she
might have time to rest and collect herself, that she might be able to devise
some means of escape. But when the cool interior surrounded her, she stared
across the room and knew that her experience had not yet begun.

A Berber was sitting
there, knees drawn up,
djellaba
hood thrown back. His eyes were gray and ugly.
His cheeks were thin and his strong arms were bundles of muscle as he extended
them before him. He was white, true, and his hair and beard were brown. But
from him there exuded a web of evil, almost tangible in its strength.

“Get thee from me!”
snapped the crouching one to her two guards. They went without a backward
glance, doubtless glad to be free and able to take their part in the loot division.

The bearded one on the
mat looked appraisingly at Ann. He saw her delicate face, her full lips, her
dark blue eyes. His study swept down. She was clothed in a cool, thin dress
which clung tightly to her beautifully molded body.

Her breasts were firm
and tight against the cloth. The material clung to her thighs, outlining
smooth, mysteriously stirring indentations and curves.

The Berber licked thin
lips, scarcely visible through the thickness of his beard. His eyes came back
with a jerk to her face.

“I,” he said slowly,
“am Abd el Malek, the man who shall soon sweep the
Franzawi
from the
plains and mountains of
Morocco
.” His French was flawless. “I wonder that they
did not kill you, but now . . .” He let his metallic eyes linger on her thighs.
“Now I am overjoyed that they did not.”

She threw back her
head, her eyes alight with anger: “Abd el Malek, dubbed ‘The Killer.' It might
please you to know that I am not a
Franzawi.
I am an American and if
anything should happen to me . . . I suppose you think you can wipe out an
expedition and fail to have
la Légion
after you.”

“La Légion!”
He spat as though the
name tasted bad. “What do I care about
la Légion
? There is no company
within five days' march. Resign yourself, my little one, to the time you pass
with me.”

Her eyes lost a little
of their rage. Something of terror began to creep into them. “But . . . but
there might be . . . ransom.”

“Ha! Ransom! What do I
care for ransom? In my stronghold over the Atlas I have the price to buy every
man, woman and child in Morocco. No, sweet morsel, I am not interested in
ransom. Ordinarily I would not be interested in you, Christian dog that you
are. I would not touch you.”

He stood up, towering
over her. She backed up against the mud wall.

“No,” he said, “I
would not be interested. But this campaign has been long, rather boring. My
women are far away, and . . .” He smiled, fastening his hot eyes on her body.

Reaching out he tried
to hold her wrist. She jerked it away and aimed a slap at his leathery cheek.
He laughed, displaying discolored, uneven teeth. “So,” he said, “you will have
it another way.”

He stripped a bundle
of thongs from the wall. Taking one, he wheeled on her and, before she could
dodge, he had placed his arm about her shoulders, holding her there powerless.
She strived to writhe out of the grip, but he held her as though she had not
moved. His fingers stroked her body and he laughed.

Taking the thong, he
wrapped it quickly about her hands. Throwing it over a beam, he pulled it taut
and lashed it there. She was held rigidly upright, unable to move. Her trimly
shod feet barely touched the floor as she swung. Her brown hair cascaded down
over her shoulders.

Languidly, as though
this was something to be mouthed and enjoyed like a morsel of food too good to swallow,
he reached up to the throat of her dress.

He brought his hand
down with a wrench. The frail cloth ripped with a loud, rasping sound. Most of
the dress fell in shreds on the floor.

Then, seizing a crude
riding whip, he commenced to lash her body with all the lustful, sadistic
passion one finds in the
Riffs
, the Berbers and the
Jebel Druses
—a lust to
slay, to punish.

Ann threatened him,
insulted him, but did not plead for mercy. As a member of a geographical
expedition she had been in tight places before and knew that whining was not a
way out of this predicament. Besides, she knew only too well that the agony she
was undergoing was but child's play compared to the unspeakable mutilations and
tortures inflicted by the desert women on deserters or captured prisoners of
the
Foreign Legion
.

Suddenly he reached up
and crushed her swinging body to him. The djellaba was like sandpaper against
her skin. His beard was so many copper wires. She watched with horror-arrested
eyes, her throat too tight to loose a scream.

Then, seizing a crude riding whip, he commenced to lash her
body with all the lustful, sadistic passion one finds in the Riffs,
the Berbers and the Jebel Druses—a lust to slay, to punish.

His hand was going up
to the thongs. His hot foul breath beat in waves against her bosom. Abruptly, a
Berber's scream pierced the hot dry air. The scream was followed by a rattle of
machine-gun fire.

Head up, eyes eager,
Ann Halliday listened. From close by came the staccato, stirring notes of a
bugle sounding the charge.
La Légion!
The racketing snarl of an
auto-rifle hammered the compound. Slugs, maimed by rocks, shrilled as they
twisted through the air.

The babble of Berber
voices was shrill. A face jutted through the doorway.

“La Légion!”
shrieked the Berber.
“Thousands of them! There is no escape!”

Abd el Malek's
features were contorted with anger. He snatched a rifle from the wall and ran
outside. The blast of the auto-rifle was quickening. A man fell in front of the
door, digging agonized fingers into his waist.

Abd el Malek's shout
was distinct above the others. “It is the vanguard! Mount! We still have time
to escape!”

The crackle of Sniders
and Mannlichers ceased but the auto-rifle raved on. The hard, heat-caked earth
was hammered by the hoofs of departing horses. Another Berber dropped to the
ground, choking and calling on Allah.

And then everything
was quiet. The thin air of the Atlas was undisturbed beneath a spinning copper
sun.

Boots were scraping
the mud wall of the compound. Presently the regular steps of one man were
audible.

Ann Halliday called
out, “Over here! In this big hut!” Then, paradoxically, she wished she hadn't
spoken. Here she was nearly naked, hanging by her wrists from a beam. And one
had heard things about
Legionnaires
. . . .

A lean, tanned,
handsome face appeared in the entrance. Keen gray eyes opened wide with
surprise under the
Legion
kepi
. The man came forward, mute with astonishment.

His eyes traveled over
her body. He swallowed hard and reached for his tri-bladed bayonet. “I'm
sorry,” he said in English. “I don't mean to stare . . . stare at you . . . but
. . . God, lady, but you're beautiful!” His eyes went hard after that. Hard and
impersonal. He cut the thongs and she slumped into a sitting posture on the
floor.

He eyed the remnants
of her dress and then went outside. In a moment he was back, bringing some
white garments—white except for the place a bullet had passed. There, they were
red.

“I'm
sorry, miss,” said the Legionnaire. “I guess you'll have to wear this djellaba.
The rest of the clothes are pretty fresh and clean. I found them in that dead .
. . pardon me . . . in that Berber's pack.”

Turning away from him,
she slipped into the baggy garments and flung the cloak about her slim
shoulders. Then, although she was white of face and weak from reaction, she
smiled.

“You're American,” she
said.

“Yes. American. Come
on. We'll have to get out of here before they come back. They'll stop running
in a minute and . . .”

“But where are the
rest of you? The rest of your outfit, I mean?”

“Outfit?” He stared at
her blankly. “Miss, I haven't any outfit. Not any more, that is.”

“And what does that
mean?”

He glanced uneasily
toward the distant trail and then turned again to her. “I'm . . . well, ma'am,
I'm a deserter, I guess. I've been gone for twelve days.”

“But you mean you
drove them off by yourself?”

He grinned, his tan
face growing a little red. “Yes, I guess that's right. You see, ma'am, I took
this bugle and this auto-rifle when I left. That's all I'm carrying. Those and
bullets. I have to travel fast. These hills are dangerous and then . . . well,
there's a price on my head, you see. I . . . I killed a corporal back there at
the post. He was going to shoot me and . . . well, I killed him.

“Right now, ma'am,
we'd better get going. They're liable to come back. I'm trying to make
Casablanca
and the Atlantic.”