by John Marsden
I realised in the middle of it that Homer was on the move again, without even telling me. He wriggled away towards a group of low flatfish rocks. ‘Thanks Homer,’ I thought crossly, following him. I knew I was grazing myself, dragging across the ground, taking skin off, bumping and scratching. But that didn’t seem too important. A bullet would do a lot more damage.
As suddenly as it began, the uproar ended. It was like someone threw a switch. My ears rang, but not from any new noises, just the after-effects of the firing. The fresh mountain air stank of gunpowder. A cloud of white smoke drifted away over the valley. Homer and I, both panting with fear, huddled into the tallest rock.
‘How many do you reckon there are?’ he asked me.
‘No idea.’
He didn’t say anything, so I whispered, ‘Let’s try down the steep side.’
‘OK. But I’m sure there’s at least one over there.’
‘Well have to shoot our way out.’
‘I know.’
I gave his hand a quick squeeze and we started sliding across the knobbly ground. It was so difficult doing it and holding the rifle ready at the same time. I realised I still hadn’t checked to see how many rounds were in the magazine, and cursed myself for being so careless. But it was too late now. I had to pray like mad that if I pointed it at someone and pulled the trigger, it would go off. The worst sound in the world for me would be the click of the firing pin, with no explosive blast to follow it.
A shot like a whiplash came from our left, and an instant later Homer fired straight ahead. He hit someone, because there was a terrible scream, and then a series of short sharp screams that went on and on. It was like a car’s burglar alarm. We both realised the noise might give us some cover, because it was so distracting. So we hurried forward, moving about ten metres in a quick rush. Then the sound stopped in mid-scream. There was a horrible gurgling noise that made me feel like I had ants running up the back of my neck. But I couldn’t think about that. I swivelled to the left, looking for the person who had fired from over there. I saw nothing. It was too dark in that direction. A glance behind showed Homer was covering the area to our right. At least I could concentrate on whoever was in those shadows. I peered and peered, screwing up my eyes, but I still couldn’t see any suspicious moves. I was getting desperate. We couldn’t afford to get pinned down for long.
Homer tapped me on the ankle and signalled that we should go forward.
We started our next wriggle. But the guy I’d been trying to pinpoint opened up on us. We lay there as a stream of bullets howled above our heads. The only shelter we had was rocks that looked about ten centimetres high. OK, thirty centimetres maybe. Anyway, they were low. Twice I felt like bullets actually touched my hair.
What was worse was that they were ricocheting, which meant they could go in any direction. Almost as bad were the fragments of stone. These guys were rearranging the landscape. Rocks exploded both sides of me. Chips whined all around us. I got hit by a couple, and even through my clothes they stung. I was lucky that was all they did. One of them going at full velocity would go through soft flesh like a bullet.
The moment the man stopped, Homer and I were both up and firing at him. Homer nearly shot my head off. Luckily he missed. But we both missed the man too. He fired two shots back at us, then I saw him at last, running to a new position. This time I could see where he’d gone, behind a tree down the ridgeline a little. I whispered to Homer, ‘Have you got much ammo?’
‘Yeah, still got a bit.’
‘Did you see where he went?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Can you pin him down?’
He hesitated, then nodded. He raised his rifle to his shoulder and opened fire on the tree. I went for my life – literally – over the chopped-up ground. I didn’t even look at the tree until I thought I’d gone far enough. All that time Homer kept banging away. Panting like I’d run a couple of k’s I got in behind a ridge of higher ground, and peeped over the top. Now I could see the man, a black smudge against the tree trunk. I couldn’t miss at that range. And the rifle fired when I squeezed the trigger. I definitely wasn’t out of ammo. I think I got him through the head.
I felt then that we might have a chance. Three down: how many could they have altogether? Surely not a huge number, way up here, so far from anywhere.
I heard a shuffling behind me and looked around. Homer had arrived. ‘You got him?’ he half-asked, half-said.
I nodded.
‘Good on you.’
I tried to think. We had to make a critical decision. If we went further down the ridgeline and soldiers were behind us or in front, we’d be totally exposed, because we’d have no cover down there. On the other hand if we went back up on the summit we might walk into another ambush, or get surrounded again. That’s where the rocks were though, and they gave good cover. The temptation was to head downhill, because ultimately, it led to safety. But if we tried to get there too early ... Patience might save our lives, yet.
I said to Homer, ‘I think we should go back up into the rocks.’
He looked doubtful. He was as unsure as I was. I said, ‘They won’t be expecting it.’
That clinched it. Homer always loved doing the last thing the enemy expected. We started sliding back up the hill. Then I had a better idea. ‘Wait,’ I hissed to Homer, who was two body lengths ahead of me.
I made a fast move to the right, sliding part of the way, crouching and running part of it. It was tough: every moment I expected my head to be blown off my shoulders. But I was at the tree sooner than I thought.
The man was dead all right. I’d got him with a head shot, like I thought. One side of the skull was still untouched, but the rest was simply blown away. There was blood and stuff everywhere, against the trunk of the tree and over the rocks and ground. I didn’t look at it much. Somehow he’d fallen so that the butt of his rifle was under him, and I had to lever the barrel backwards and forwards a few times before I could get it out. It was like the man I’d run over in the corridor at the Whittakers’.
But I did get it. And for the first time in this battle I felt a little confidence. I knew this type of rifle. Iain and the Kiwis used the same ones. They were called M-somethings, I think. The magazine was plastic, and had at least twenty rounds.
My hands were sticky with blood from the butt. I wiped them on my jeans, and set out on the return journey to where Homer was waiting.
I nearly didn’t make it. A wall of gunfire started blazing at me, from downhill. At least we’d been right, deciding not to go down there. I wasn’t thinking about that though. I dived like a Rugby player, both hands still holding the new rifle, and flew through the air. Counting the bounces I must have gone six or eight metres, because I sure did bounce: over a series of small rocks, and coming to rest beside Homer.
I nearly bashed him with the gun.
The moment there was a break in the fire we took off again, this time ducking and weaving and zigzagging madly to get to the cover of the bigger rocks. We both aimed for the same little hollow, which wasn’t a good idea, as there was barely room for one. We arrived there together and somehow squeezed in, gasping and shaking.
‘I think there’s three of them,’ Homer said.
‘Oh God,’ was all I could say.
But after a minute I said, ‘I’ll go higher, see if I can get a view from up above. Once those clouds blow away, there might be quite a bit of light.’
‘All right. Be careful. I’ll go up that side, and cover you.’
‘Don’t shoot me by mistake.’
I set off up the ridgeline, bearing to the left. I got about halfway before the firing started again, and again it was full-on. I went to ground, waiting for it to stop. It was just too dangerous. I didn’t know if they’d seen me. The firing seemed to be pretty random. Bullets were flying everywhere. Only at the last moment before it stopped did I realise what it was really about. I caught a glimpse of a guy running across the hill above me, from le
ft to right. Of course. They were providing cover for one or more people up there, so they could get in better positions. I called to Homer, ‘Look out, they’re above us.’
‘Thanks,’ he called back.
I felt I had to keep going up. Absolutely the worst thing would be to stay in one spot for any length of time. Grimly, wondering what I was letting myself in for, I snuck a little further. The shots from below had stopped again and no-one had fired from their new positions above.
From my right I heard Homer’s rifle speak, once, twice, three times. It was easily recognisable, a light little crack compared to the continuous bangs of the military weapons. It was an encouraging sign, that he had found a target. I hoped he’d hit it.
I got to a little knob of high ground and at last got a useful view, although not of the people down the ridgeline. I searched for them but couldn’t see anyone in among the trees.
After a minute I glanced to my left. I’m glad I did. To my intense surprise I realised I was looking straight at a nice ambush prepared for Homer. Somehow they hadn’t heard me coming. I scanned the area like I had a TV camera in my head. There were only two of them – that I could see, anyway – but they were perfectly placed. Or they thought they were.
Just as they hadn’t seen me, Homer hadn’t seen them. Feeling like I was in a spell, almost unable to believe they hadn’t noticed me, I peered at the closer one over the sights of my rifle.
I had to gamble that there were only two. But suddenly they both moved forward a few metres. Now I didn’t have good shots at either of them. With one, I could just see the top of his head. With the other I could see an arm, and a bit of one leg.
It was no good waiting any longer. Homer was a second away from being blown to bits.
Was I ever grateful for my new rifle. I lined them up again, felt for the little switch on the left-hand side of the receiver, swivelled it down to ‘continuous shot’ and pressed the trigger. It was a beautiful rifle, light, but I realised after a few rounds that the rebound was making it drift up, and I was shooting high. A few seconds later it did it again. I turned the switch back to ‘3’s, and that seemed to suit it better. It held its line pretty well now.
It was their turn to come under heavy fire. I just hoped Homer wasn’t getting hit by ricochets. But in fact the next time I saw him was when he shot at one of the men. He sure had reacted quickly. He’d moved right up to a neat line of rocks near the very top of Wombegonoo. From there he popped up, fired one shot, and bobbed down again.
I think he wanted to advertise his presence, and it worked. Now the two men started to panic. They suddenly realised that instead of pinning Homer down and picking him off at random, they were themselves caught in a crossfire. I could hear them shouting at each other. Then one of them bolted, charging straight down the hill, carrying his rifle, but with one hand over his head, as if to stop a bullet hitting him. I swung my rifle around, lined him up and hesitated. But I didn’t have to do anything. Homer wasn’t as squeamish as me. He dropped the man with two shots, fired so close together it sounded almost like one. Crack, crack.
Everything up until then had happened fairly quickly. There’d been periods of stillness and silence, like when I’d shot the first guy, but not for long. Now everything happened so fast my head spun. It started with one of the worst moments of the entire war. The last soldier up here near the summit threw his rifle out from behind his rock. I’d never seen anyone do that before but I realised what it must mean: he was surrendering. A moment later he came into the open with his hands stretched in front of him. Almost like he was holding them for someone to put handcuffs on his wrists. I don’t know why he didn’t put his hands up in the air, like they do in movies. If he did he would have saved his life. Homer, coming down through the rocks, swiftly and silently and bravely, saw the man from behind, saw him emerging from his hiding place towards me, and thought he was holding a weapon in front of him. Homer shot him down from behind before I even realised he was there.
It was a terrible thing but I can see how it happened. It wasn’t like Homer had five minutes to weigh up the situation, consider the evidence and make a decision. He had a millisecond. Even as he pulled the trigger he knew he’d made a mistake, but guns don’t know about mistakes. Guns don’t believe in mistakes.
Another millisecond later, before I could even think about the man dead on the ground, and the massive river of blood flooding from his body, the soldiers down the ridge launched a full-on attack. With their rapid-fire rifles they protected themselves behind a curtain of bullets. It completely intimidated me. They attacked in a different way, advancing up the ridge, out in the open, firing non-stop. By now I guess they’d figured there were only two of us.
Homer was as intimidated as I was. We both dived into the nearest cover, for me a shallow depression, for Homer a little rock crater, almost rectangular. I lay there, heart still pounding from the shock of seeing the man surrender and then get killed, the shock of seeing so much blood, more blood than I’d ever seen from one person before, my heart pounding all the harder as I realised that this was the crisis. There was nothing we could do except maybe stand up and die in a death-and-glory shoot-out, hoping to get one of them before they got us.
To make things worse, Homer was too far away and there was too much noise for us to plan anything. If we could have stood up together we might have even got two of them but I was sure, judging by the heavy fire, that there were more than two. It seemed we were both going to die alone.
The firing was so continuous and intense that I couldn’t even peep over the edge to see what was happening. I knew they were approaching at a pretty fast bat. I got my rifle ready. The racket became deafening. Smoke drifted across my head. I looked up, expecting at any moment to see the top of a cap, then a head, then a gun barrel that would blow my life into oblivion. I caught a quick glimpse of the night sky, a smattering of stars, and thought, ‘Well, I guess that’s a good last sight to see.’
Better to die here, in my beloved bush, on a mountain, than in a gutter or a dump-bin.
Then behind the wall of noise, quite a way off, sounding thin and light, I heard a series of other shots. And suddenly my ears rang with silence, where a moment earlier they had rung with noise. The smoke drifted but there were no more shots. As I lay there, trembling, wondering what was happening, whether this was another trap, a new noise did start up. It was a series of coughs, four in a row, going from strong to weak, then starting again, strong to weak, four at a time. They could be heard clearly in the still air.
I heard a different voice.
‘Ellie! Homer!’
I peeped over the edge of the shallow hollow. I was ultra-cautious, because it seemed too good to be true. The first thing that caught my eye was a body: a soldier about ten metres from me. He was the one doing the coughing. As I stared at him, his head fell quietly to one side, his mouth slowly opened, his eyes opened like he’d seen something very surprising, and I realised he’d coughed for the last time. I looked beyond him. I saw three people I’d almost forgotten about. They looked beautiful, walking up through the trees, out of the mist, or the smoke, whichever it was.
Lee and Kevin, and in the distance behind them, Fi.
Chapter Thirteen
Our gunfight had raged so long that it gave Lee and Kevin time to grab weapons and the last of our ammo and come belting up out of Hell. I guess it would have been the last thing on the minds of the enemy patrol, that in this wild and remote spot we’d have reinforcements coming up behind them.
The whole area was a mess. We found eight bodies altogether. Some were intact: just lying there, no blood even. Some weren’t.
After we’d checked it all out we met halfway between the summit and the top of the path into Hell. We had a conference that we knew was hugely important. We had to make some decisions, based on guesses, but they had to be right.
No sooner had we started than Gavin arrived. I don’t think any of us were surprised to see
him.
‘The others were too scared to come,’ he said, ‘but I wasn’t.’
In some ways he was tougher than us. As he passed one body he gave it a kick in the side. Homer grabbed him fiercely. ‘Don’t do that,’ he said.
Gavin just shrugged.
‘Well?’ Lee asked me.
‘My mother told me not to sit on cold things,’ Fi said, tucking her legs under her, ‘or I’d get something horrible, I can’t remember what.’
We were sitting on a ring of cold rocks. Fi was shivering continuously.
‘Haemorrhoids,’ Homer said.
Seemed like everyone was trying to distance themselves from what had happened, but no-one more than Fi. There was a blankness about her that I hadn’t seen too often. She was trying to be funny, to make a joke, sure, but it didn’t work. Her heart wasn’t in it. She could have been a thousand k’s away.
We couldn’t afford luxuries like distance. We had to concentrate.
‘They would have been a patrol, either doing a general check of the area, or looking for us in particular,’ I said. ‘We know people were camping up here a few weeks ago. I guess it was these guys.’
I looked around at their faces as I tried to think this through. It wasn’t easy while I was still shaking from the narrow escape we’d had, the number of soldiers we’d just killed. But trying to keep my voice steady, talking carefully but urgently, I kept going.
‘I’ve seen some of their packs, down there,’ I said, nodding at the trees. ‘It looks like they’ve got a heap of stuff. That suggests they were up here for a while. We’ve got that much in our favour. Sure they’ll have radios for reporting to someone, but by the time those people realise they haven’t heard from them for a day or two, and then get someone all the way up here to look for them, and, most importantly ...’ I paused, as I suddenly realised how we could buy time, ‘by the time they find the bodies, I reckon we’ve got at least three days.’