Without having seen one before, Ansell knew what it was.
‘It’s a fire-break!’
MacConnachie looked at him and roared with laughter.
Of course. That was why. The pilot wanted to keep them pegged in that part of the field that was ablaze. But there was more to it than that. There must be a gap. One end of the fire-break was still open, the cordon was incomplete. But which?
With the roaring and moaning of the flames growing steadily in volume at his back, and the sky dark with smoke that fled from them towards the river, MacConnachie struggled with the unaccustomed process of reasoning. The patrol that had started the fire would progress up the right flank; they must have reached the fire-break by now, and they couldn’t afford to ignore it; therefore some of them at least had turned down it. Therefore it must be the left flank that was open.
The helicopter had come right down low now, the pilot stolidly waiting their move; MacConnachie could see the observer quite clearly as he talked rapidly into his mouthpiece, and the pilot leaning forward, peering at him, consumed perhaps by a similar curiosity, wanting to know the face of the man whose tenacity matched his own. MacConnachie grinned, raised two fingers in obscene salute, and shouted to Ansell, ‘Come on!’
They splashed through the shallow sludge of water and mud, slopping their way over to the next wall of stalks, and, turning along it, began running down the break to their left. MacConnachie held his gun at the ready.
The helicopter reacted at once, pulling sharply back along their line of flight, coming in fast and low from behind. The next moment they were caught again in its buffeting down-draught and then, as the chopper rose away from them, a tiny cluster of tinsel-bright objects fell from it. MacConnachie seized Ansell’s arm to be sure he saw them and, as they both came to a skidding halt, dropped the case and brought the gun up to his shoulder for three quick shots, tight together, in an attempt at a sudden kill. It failed. The machine rose up unharmed, and a startling clang came back to them as one of the bullets spread itself against a rotor blade and spun off noisily.
The next instant, a barrier of piercing light flowered across the break in front of them as first one, and then two more phosphorus grenades exploded not a dozen feet ahead. An intricate pattern of fern-like structures leapt into the air, dazzlingly etched in pure white smoke, and the vituperative hissing of chemical discharge pitched back at them from the enclosing walls of stalks.
‘Round the side—we can’t go through—it clings like a bastard!’
MacConnachie plunged into the new field at his right, aiming to work his way round the furious active area of phosphorus, and emerge on the far side of it. Ansell followed. The helicopter was turning back.
As soon as he got among them, MacConnachie saw that the stalks in this field were, in one important respect, different from those in the last: they grew farther apart. This meant that he could run between them much more easily and quickly and that, since his field of vision was correspondingly enlarged, he could watch most of the helicopter’s movements most of the time. Also the air was notably clearer, the insects larger and less numerous, the danger of choking much diminished.
As the chopper bore down again, coming this time from their front, he looked up and stopped abruptly. The observer was leaning out of the cabin and aiming some sort of weapon at them. MacConnachie raised his own gun but before he could fire the other man discharged and a bright, glowing red ball flashed into the stalks in front of them. It took MacConnachie so completely by surprise that the observer had withdrawn and the helicopter broken off the contact before he could react.
It was a Very light, fired from a Very pistol. The pilot intended to set this part of the field ablaze as well. The stalks caught at once, flames spurting out from the furiously igniting centre of the conflagration. MacConnachie swung about.
‘Back to the break! We’ll operate from there!’
As he emerged again into the corridor, turning his face away from the hissing phosphorus, Ansell looked along the fire-break to his left and saw the leading members of the patrol rounding the bend into view. At the same instant they saw him, and aligned their weapons to fire.
‘Down, Mac!’
He pitched himself violently backwards into the stalks, taking MacConnachie down with him. A burst of rapid fire slapped and tore at the mushy strip in front of them.
MacConnachie was sure the Goons weren’t trying to kill them; they would have been ordered to take them alive. He scrambled up, stepped out into the corridor and fired three carefully aimed shots. Two men went down, the third ran for cover.
The far field was deeply ravaged now, with a tall wall of fire racing towards them; the phosphorus raged blindingly, and the new conflagration set off by the observer was beginning to bite and spread.
‘Come on! We haven’t any choice!’
They ran into the second half of the field. The race against time and fire was on with a vengeance now. But at least the ground favoured them very slightly: the deeper they committed themselves, the more the stalks thinned out—not dangerously, but enough to provide narrow, roughly uniform corridors down which they could run at full tilt.
But there was still the helicopter.
For some moments MacConnachie was puzzled by its behaviour, for, far from pegging them tight, it began to describe a circle too wide to give any but an approximate idea of their position to the pursuers on the ground. Then he saw another glowing fireball shoot down from the aircraft to bury itself in the field to their right, and he understood. The pilot intended to surround them with a ring of fire.
By now they were running flat out, swishing through the stalks as fast as their legs would carry them, the field having become for them both a series of blurred impressions rushing past on either side and instantly snatched away. The blood roared in their ears, drowning all but the most penetrating sounds, as of a sudden outbreak of unexplained shooting to their right.
When he saw the second light fall MacConnachie jinked left, Ansell stumbling after him. The helicopter curled round behind them and, coming up to pass over their left-hand quarter, discharged another flare into the dried-out stalks. This one was closer and as they ran on they heard the flames begin to crackle and bite. MacConnachie continued his bias to the left but the pilot, completing his manoeuvre, flew across their front, and the observer laid his fourth incendiary directly in their path, thirty yards ahead.
MacConnachie ran straight at it, extending his legs even farther, conscious of Ansell gasping and thudding to his rear. He knew that their best chance to escape the first ring of fire was to pass this flare before it could take and spread to the flares on his right. Already, from that direction, he could see smoke and flames reaching fiercely into the sky.
As he approached it, the ground yawing and pitching in his field of vision, he saw that the flames had crossed the natural path down which they fled, and were already hungrily devouring the file of stalks to his right. But the fire came rushing to meet him so rapidly that, without thought, he lowered his head and plunged through it. In an instant they were on the other side, with barely time to suffer the intense heat before they had left it. At their backs, the flames soared up in a sudden gust of wind to seal the gap through which they had escaped, towering over them, leaning like a building about to fall and crush them.
Again it was necessary to accelerate and, as Ansell flogged himself to keep pace with MacConnachie, the returning pressure of panic forced itself up in his throat, halving what little air his gaping mouth could capture. They had run for many minutes without pause, and there seemed no escape from their predicament: either they would surrender, or they would be burned to death. His whole body pulsated in sympathy with his wrenching heart and, although it was the running that was breaking him, he was only distantly and dizzily aware of this activity. Some part of him inside was about to rupture explosively.
Slack-kneed and flagging, MacConnachie watched the helicopter through a haze of discomf
ort and strain, cursing uselessly at the frustration of their position. He was coming to a stop, they would have to recover their breath and their wits. There must be a way out, there must be.
Neatly and methodically, the pilot and navigator were sowing a fresh line of incendiaries across their front, but this time far enough distant that MacConnachie could not hope to reach them before they had taken a thorough hold in depth. Even in the time it took him and Ansell to travel another thirty feet, the thin, swirling smoke had sprung all across their front. He came to a stop, gasping, ‘You bastard! Oh, you bloody bastard!’
Ansell ran straight into him, and they crashed together to the ground.
For some moments they lay as they had fallen: MacConnachie half-supported by his arms as though unwilling, even in this extremity, to adopt a posture of complete exhaustion; Ansell collapsed across his legs, their bodies whooping with the involuntary, racked undulations of landed fish. Then MacConnachie began to fight back in blind anger, crushing his own body into submission to his will, wrenching Ansell’s into a sitting position.
‘Sit up! Sit up, damn you!’
Ansell’s head flopped about, his neck corded with strain, the breath rushing in and out tormentedly between his clenched teeth.
‘I’m all right . . . A’righ . . .’
But when MacConnachie released him, he began to teeter back and, renewing his grip more firmly on the front of Ansell’s native coat, MacConnachie shook him again until the teeth parted in complaint and clashed together.
‘Sit—up—damn—you—will—you—sit—up!’
‘’kay—’kay!’
Ansell, face shocked and dazed, put his hands down on MacConnachie’s arms to restrain him and, when this support was removed, continued the gesture until, fumblingly, he touched the earth. But he remained upright under his own power.
Deriving his strength now from fury rather than any other source, MacConnachie pushed himself into a standing position and looked about, swaying with fatigue. The sky was dark with hurrying smoke that swept past above the tips of the stalks, and, for the first time, as well as hearing the peculiar moaning of the flames, he could feel the waves of heat that preceded the inferno. Time was desperately short. He sought a glimpse of the helicopter in all the murk, and finally caught sight of it: away to the right, as though he were a child composedly finishing an essay by dotting his ‘i’s and crossing his ‘t’s, the navigator was neatly sealing off the right flank. Once he had done that, he would turn to the left, and the ring of fire would be complete.
‘Come on!’
Without looking back, MacConnachie grabbed the suitcase and gun, and set out as fast as he could for the left flank.
The sounds of the fire were everywhere now, roaring around them, and wherever they looked, except to the left, the pale barriers were writhing across the fields towards them. MacConnachie was dimly aware that there was an exception to this: the last complete barrier laid down, the one across their front, was moving away from them, since the general tendency of the fire was to move towards the river. But he didn’t see how this could be turned to their advantage. If they tried to follow this front wall out of the field, they would be caught by the back wall rolling up the field behind them.
Anyway, he concluded as he ran, there was still a chance of squeezing out through the left flank.
And then, in seconds, this hope was taken from them. The helicopter came across, four Very lights were discharged into the field, and the last fire-free area was ablaze.
MacConnachie hesitated for a moment then, barely breaking his stride, shouted back to Ansell,
‘Run like hell! We’re going through!’
There was a chance. The stalks were catching rapidly, but the flares had fallen only a hundred yards ahead. If they could get there quickly enough, the flames would be high but not deep.
Even as he strove hopelessly to extract additional speed from his floundering body, Ansell knew they would never make it. He kept repeating to himself: ‘A man can run the hundred yards in 9.2 seconds; a man can run the hundred yards in 9.2 seconds.’
I think it’s 9.2.
But the flames leapt up with terrifying speed, skipping from stalk to stalk across their front, and as he peered past MacConnachie’s weaving body, desperately anxious now for a clear view of every detail of what lay ahead, the conviction grew in him that to plunge into the fire was to commit suicide. They were getting there far too slowly. It was beyond their stunted capacity.
Then he saw that the helicopter had turned back and was sowing a second barrier beyond the first, and he remembered the endless lines of fields they had seen before ever they committed themselves to the stalks, and he knew for certain that they were nowhere near the edge of the field, and that no escape lay in this direction. His brain shrieked, ‘We can’t make it, Mac, we can’t make it!’ and, although he didn’t know it, his voice took up the cry:
‘We can’t make it, Mac!’
Just for a moment he wondered whether MacConnachie meant to kill them both, and then he saw the big man stagger and veer away to the right, and they began to run along the growing wall of fire, heading again towards the river, in a desperate bid to beat the spread of the flames to the far barrier. There was just a chance that they might reach the gap in the top left-hand corner of the field before the two walls joined and became one.
They didn’t. They came nowhere near doing so. By the time they got there, there was no sign that the two fires had ever existed as separate entities. A solid wall of flames raged and swayed in front of them, and as they turned slowly in a complete circle, they saw no gap anywhere.
The fire behind rolled slowly up the field towards them; MacConnachie gave it ten minutes, no more.
Then the helicopter came and sat above them, waiting.
It’s odd, thought Ansell, how calm you feel at the moment of realization. If he tells me to fight, I’ll fight. If he tells me to die, I’ll die. But I won’t surrender.
The smoke swept down towards them and fled past overhead, to be lost abruptly in the uprush of flame so close at hand. He didn’t feel uncomfortably hot, but the sun was well up in the sky now, and their clothes were oily with sweat; he disliked the smell that issued from the neck of his native coat.
MacConnachie looked up at the helicopter, which hovered thoughtfully just sufficiently distant to avoid troubling them with its turbulence, and contemplated a proposition he had deliberately driven from his mind hitherto: do we surrender, or don’t we? Is that what the boy would want? If we do, we’ll be kindly treated, that’s the Goons’ way. But we’ll not be ourselves any more. We’ll have been defeated.
He turned to the boy.
‘Well?’
‘Whatever you say, Mac. I’m not bothered.’
That’s a big help.
MacConnachie looked at the chopper again. In sudden anger, he brought up the gun and fired three shots at the rotor. It was a waste of time, but it was an answer; or a way of not answering, perhaps.
The helicopter rose up a few feet, then came gently to settle again, waiting. Ansell smiled. Good psychology. Be brave now, but let’s see you in five minutes.
MacConnachie said, ‘That was stupid.’
Silence; then MacConnachie turned to him, scowling.
‘So what do we do? I’m not just standing here.’
‘I don’t know what we can do, quite honestly.’
‘Well, use your bloody brains—that’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?’
‘Is it?’
MacConnachie turned away, muttering bitterly,
‘Might as well . . . doing.’
‘What?’
MacConnachie swung back and shouted,
‘Might as well be on my own, the good you’re doing!’
‘What do you expect—a bloody miracle?’
‘Yes! Yes! How do we get out of here?’
Again Ansell was filled with the terrible feeling that he had let MacConnachie down, as though h
e were expected, like some species of god, to intervene only at such times as MacConnachie’s own courage and ingenuity were unavailing. Doubtfully, he said,
‘Could we take over the chopper?’
‘What?’
‘Perhaps we could whistle it down and take it over.’
‘Can you fly the bastard?’
‘No.’
‘Neither can I, so that’s shit that!’
‘For God’s sake . . .’
‘Be some bloody use, why don’t you? I trusted you! You’re the brains!’
‘I’m sorry I’ve been such a nuisance so far!’
‘Get stuffed!’
To Ansell there was something grotesque and, for the first time, deeply hopeless about this mean little argument in the midst of such danger; it was almost as though, by its very meanness, it ought in some way to diminish the threat that they faced, but it didn’t. MacConnachie turned to him with a look of the utmost disenchantment and reproach.
‘We might as well try to follow the front wall out. Come on.’
As he turned and began to walk towards the forward wall of fire, the one that moved so slowly away from them, MacConnachie looked, as he had sounded, at last defeated. Ansell called after him, ‘I’m sorry, Mac!’
And then he started to follow.
‘There’s nothing I can do.’
They trudged in file, ignoring the helicopter, the situation and one another. At their backs, the flames roared up in a fresh gust of wind, and the heat rolled down over them. The volume of sound was immense, a vast moaning and roaring and crackling, so loud that even the buzz of the helicopter came only intermittently to their ears.
When he looked back, Ansell was appalled by the size and rate of progress of the wall of fire. It was creeping forward to left and right and little faster than at the centre, which somehow made the spectacle more horrifying; and the flames reached all of thirty feet into the air, the heat so intense that it was only after another ten feet of rushing vapour that smoke formed and swirled down towards them. It looked to be a horrible death, and yet he found that he could face it. It was the smaller, more personal inconveniences that distressed him: the heat, the smell, the noise, the sense of oppression.
Figures in a Landscape Page 11