by Wilbur Smith
His rebellious expression was unmistakable. Sir, he began, and Sean shouted at him, And don't take that tone to me, young man! An uncaring, completely irresponsible dark rage descended on Mark. He didn't give a damn for the consequences and he leaned forward, pale with fury, and opened his mouth.
The regiment was bunched up now, halted in the open roadway, neat symmetrical blocks of khaki, six hundred men in ranks three deep.
The shouted orders of the N. C. O. s halted each section, one after the other, and stood them at the easy position.
From the top of the steel headgear, they made an unforgettable sight in the rich yellow light of early morning. Ready, luv, whispered Fergus MacDonald, and Helena nodded silently. Reality had long faded and been replaced by this floating dreamlike state. Her shoulders were raw where the carrying straps of the heavy ammunition boxes had bitten into the flesh, but there was no pain, just a blunting numbness of body. Her hands seemed bloated, and clumsy, the nails broken off raggedly and rinded with black half -moons of dirt, and the harsh canvas of the ammunition belts between her fingers felt smooth as silk, the brass cartridge cases cool, so that she felt like pressing them to her dried cracked lips.
Why was Fergus staring at her that way, she wondered with a prickle of irritation that did not last, once again the dreamy floating sensation. You can go down now, Fergus said quietly. You don't have to stay. He looked like a very old man, his face shrivelled and falling in upon itself. The stubble of beard on his lined and haggard cheeks was silvery as diamond chips, but the skin was stained by smoke and dirt and sweat.
Only the eyes below the peak of the cloth cap still burned with the dark fanatic flames.
Helena shook her head. She wanted him to stop talking, the sound intruded, and she turned her head away.
The men below stood shoulder to shoulder in their orderly ranks. The low sun threw long narrow shadows from their feet across the red dust of the roadway.
A second longer Fergus stared at her. She was a pale, wasted stranger, the bones pushing through the smooth drawn flesh of her face, the scarf wound like a gypsy around her head, covering the black cropped hair. All right then, he murmured, and tapped the breech of the Vickers, once, twice, training it slightly left.
There was a group of officers near the head of the column. One of them was a big powerful man with a dark beard. The sunlight sparkled on his shoulder-tabs, Fergus lowered his head and looked through the rear sight of the Vickers.
There was a younger slimmer officer with the other, and Fergus blinked twice rapidly, as something stirred deep in his memory.
He hooked his fingers into the automatic safety-bar and lifted it, priming the gun, and he brought his thumbs on to the firing button.
He blinked again. The face of the young officer moved something in him, he felt a softening and blurring of his determination and he rejected it violently and thrust down on the button with both thumbs.
The weapon juddered on its tripod, and the long belt was sucked greedily into the breech, Helena's small pale hands guiding it carefully, and the empty brass cases spewed out from under the gun, tinkling and ringing and bouncing off the steel girders of the headgear.
The sound was a deafening tearing roar that seemed to fill Helena's head and beat against her eyes, like the frantic wings of a trapped bird.
Even the most skilled marksman must guard against the tendency to ride up on a downhill shot. The angle from the top of the headgear was acute and the soft yellowish early light further confused Fergus aim. His first burst carried high, shoulder-high instead of belly-high, which is the killing line for machine-gun fire.
The first bullets struck before Mark heard the gun. One of them hit Sean Courtney high up in the big bulky body.
It flung him forward, chest to chest with Mark, and both of them went down, sprawling in the roadway.
Fergus tapped the breech block, dropping his aim a fraction on to the belly line, and traversed in a long unhurried sweep along the ranks of standing soldiers, cutting them with the scythe of the Vickers in the eternal seconds that they still stood in stunned paralysis.
The stream of tracer hosed them, and washed them into crazy heaps, piled them on each other, dead and wounded together, their screams high and thin in the rushing hurricane of Vickers fire.
Sean rolled half off Mark, and his face was contorted, angry and outraged, as he tried to struggle on to his knees, but his one arm was dangling. His blood splattered them both and he flopped helplessly.
Mark wriggled out from under him, and looked up at the headgear. He saw the tracer flickering like fire-flies and darting into the crowded roadway on the triumphant fluttering roar of the gun. Even in his own confusion and despair, he saw that the gunner had picked a good stance.
He would be hard to come at.
Then he looked down the road and a cold fist clenched on his guts as he saw the bloody execution. The ranks had broken, men running and stumbling for what little cover the vehicles and ditches offered, but the road was still filled.
They lay in wind-rows and piles, they crawled and cried and twisted in the dust which their blood was turning to chocolate-red mud, and the gun swivelled and came back, flickering tracer into the carnage, chopping up the road surface into a spray of dust and leaping gravel, running viciously over the piles of wounded, coming back to where they lay.
Mark twisted up into a crouch, and slipped an arm under the General's chest. The weight of the man was enormous, but Mark found strength that he had not known before, goaded on by the fluttering rushing roar of the Vickers.
Sean Courtney heaved himself up like a bull caught in quicksand, and Mark got him on to his feet.
Bearing half his weight, Mark steadied him and kept him from falling. He weaved drunkenly, hunched over, bleeding badly, breathing noisily through his mouth, and Mark forced him into an ungainly crouching run.
The gun swept their heels, kicking and smashing into the back of a young lieutenant who was creeping towards the ditch, dragging both useless legs behind him. He dropped face down and lay still.
They reached the drainage ditch and tumbled into it. It was less than eighteen inches deep, not enough to cover the General fully, even when he lay flat on his belly, and the Vickers was still hunting.
After that first long slicing traverse, it was firing short accurate bursts at selected targets, more deadly than random-fire, keeping the gun from overheating and preventing a stoppage, conserving ammunition. Mark, weighing it all, realized that there was an old soldier up there in the tower. Where are you hit? he demanded, but Sean struck his hands away irritably, twisting his head to peer up into the tall steel headgear. Can you get him, Mark? he grunted, and pressed his fingers into his shoulder, where the blood welled up thick and dark as molasses. Not from here, Mark answered quickly. It had taken him seconds to assess the shoot. He's holed up tight. Merciful Jesus! My poor boys. He's built himself a nest. Mark studied the steelwork.
The platform below the winch wheels was covered with heavy timber, fitted loosely into the framework of steel.
The gunner had pulled these up and built himself four walls of wood, perhaps two feet thick. Mark could see the light glimmering through the open gaps in the floor boards, and make out the shape and size of the fortified nest. He can hold us here all day! Sean looked down at the piles of khaki bodies in the roadway, and they both knew many of the wounded would bleed to death in that time.
Nobody dared go out to them.
The gun came back, ripping a flail across the earth near their heads and they ducked their faces to the ground, pressing their bodies into the shallow ditch.
The ground sloped down very gradually towards the steel tower, only when you lay at ground level like this was the gradient apparent. Somebody will have to get under him, or behind him, Mark spoke quickly, thinking it out.
It's open ground all the way, Sean grunted.
On the opposite side of the road fifty yards away, a narrow-gauge railway ran down the short open grassy slope
to the foot of the tower. It was used to truck the waste material from the shaft-head to the rock dump, half a mile away.
Almost opposite where they lay, half a dozen of the steel cocoa pans had been abandoned at the beginning of the strike. They were small four-wheeled tip-trucks, coupled to each other in a line, each of them heaped high with big chunks of blue rock.
Mark realized he was still wearing his pack and he shrugged out of the straps as he planned his stalk, judging angles and range as he groped for the field-dressing and handed it to Sean. Use this. Sean tore open the package and wadded the cotton dressing into the front of his tunic. His fingers were sticky with his own blood.
Mark's P-14 rifle lay in the road where he had dropped it, but there were five clips of ammunition in the pouches on his webbing belt. Try and give me some covering fire when I start to go up, he said, and watched the tower for the next burst of tracer. You'll never get there, said Sean. We'll bring up a thirteen-pounder and shoot the bastard out of there. That will take until noon, it will be too late for them. He glanced at the wounded in the road, and at that moment a stream of brilliant white tracer flew from the tower, aimed at the far end of the column, and Mark was up and running hard, stooping to gather the rifle at full run, crossing the road in a dozen flying strides, stumbling in the rough ground beyond, catching his balance and sprinting on.
That stumble had cost him a tenth of a second, the margin of life and death perhaps, while the gunner high up in the tower spotted him, swivelled the gun and lined up.
The steel cocoa pans were just ahead, fifteen paces, but he wasn't going to make it, the warning flared in his brain, and he dropped into the short grass and rolled sideways, just as the storm of Vickers fire filled the air about him with the lash of a hundred bullwhips.
Mark kept rolling, like a log, and the gun gouged a furrow out of the dry stony earth inches from his shoulder.
He came up against the wheels of the cocoa pan with a force that bruised his hip and made him cry out involuntarily. Vickers bullets hammered and clanged against the steel body of the truck and howled off in ricochet, but Mark was under cover now.
Mark, are you all right? the General's bull-bellow carried across the road. Give me covering fire. You heard him, lads, shouted the General, and one or two rifles began firing spasmodically from the ditches, and from behind the stranded motor lorries.
Mark dragged himself on to his knees, and quickly checked the rifle, brushing the sights with his thumb to make certain they were cleaned of dirt and undamaged in the fall.
Then he worked his way to the coupling of the cocoa pan and threw the release toggle. The brake wheel was stiff and required both his hands to unwind it. The brake chocks squeaked softly as they disengaged, but the slope of the ground was so gentle that the truck did not move until Mark put his shoulder to it.
He strained with all his weight before the steel wheels made a single reluctant revolution, then gravity took her and the cocoa pan began to roll. Give the bastard hell! Sean Courtney yelled, as he realized suddenly what Mark was going to do, and Mark grinned without mirth at that characteristic exhortation, and he trotted along, doubled up behind the heavily-laden steel truck.
A terrible tearing, hammering storm of Vickers broke over the slowly rolling truck, and instinctively Mark ducked lower and steadied himself against the metal side.
He realized that as he came closer to the tower, so the gunner's angle would change until he was shooting almost directly down on top of Mark, then the side of the truck would give him no cover, but he was committed. Nothing would stop the slowly accelerating rush of the cocoa pan down the slope, it had the weight of ten tons of rock behind it and its speed was gathering. Soon he would not be able to keep up with it, already he was running, and the Vickers roared again, the bullets screeching and wailing furiously off the steel body.
Twisting as he ran, he slung the rifle on one shoulder and reached up to hook both hands over the side of the truck. He was pulled instantly off his feet, and they dangled without foothold, in danger of being caught up in the spinrung steel wheels. He drew his knees up under his chin, hanging all his weight on his arms and taking the intolerable strain in his belly muscles as the truck flew down into the stretching octopus shadow of the headgear.
Still hanging on his arms, Mark flung his head back and looked up. The tower was fore shortened by perspective, and it crouched over him like some menacing monster, stark against the mellow morning sky, crude black steel and timber baulks pyramiding into the heavens. At its zenith, Mark could see the pale mirrortike face of the gunner, and the thick water-jacketed barrel of the Vickers trained down at its maximum depression.
The gun flamed, and bullets rang the steel near his head like a great bell. They churned into the blue rock, disintegrating into chips of buzzing metal and shattering the rock into vicious splinters and pellets that cut at his hands so that he screwed his eyes shut and clung helplessly.
Such was the speed of the truck now that he was under fire for only seconds, and the gunner's aim could not follow it, as it raced down on to the concrete loading bank, and slammed into the buffers. The force of the impact was brutal and Mark was hurled from his perch, the rifle-strap snapped and the weapon sailed away, and Mark turned in the air and hit the sloping concrete ramp on his side with a crash that jarred his teeth in his head. The rough concrete ripped away the thick barathea cloth from his hip and leg and shoulder, and scared the flesh beneath with gravel burn.
He came up at last against a stack of yellow-painted oildrums, and his first concern was to roll on to his back and stare upwards.
He was under the headgear now, protected from the gunner by the legs and intricate steel girders of the tower itself, and he pulled himself to his feet, dreading the give and crippling drag of broken bone. But though his body felt crushed and bruised, he could still move, and he hobbled to where his rifle lay.
The strap was broken, and the butt was cracked and splintered, and as he lifted it, it snapped into two pieces.
He could not fire from the shoulder.
The foresight had been knocked off, and the broken metal had a sugary grey crystalline look. He could not aim the weapon. He would have to get close, very close.
There was a deep bright scar in the steel of the breech.
He muttered a prayer, Please God! as he tried to work the bolt open. It was jammed solid and he struggled with it fruitlessly for precious seconds. All right, he thought grimly. No butt to hold to the shoulder, no foresight with which to aim, and only the one cartridge in the breech, it's going to be interesting. He looked around him quickly.
Beneath the steel tower, the two square openings to the main shaft were set into the concrete collar, protected by screens of steel mesh. The one cage stood at the surface station, doors open, ready for the next shift. The other was at the bottom station, a thousand feet below ground level.
They had stood that way for months now. On the far side was the small service elevator which would take maintenance teams the hundred feet to the summit of the tower in half a minute. However, there was no power on the shaft head, and the elevator was useless.
The only other way up was the emergency ladder. This was an open steel stairway that spiralled up around the central shaft, protected only by a low handrail of inch piping.
High above Mark's head the Vickers fired again, and Mark heard a scream of agony out there on the roadway. it hastened him, and he limped to the stairway.
The steel-mesh gate was open, the padlock shattered, and Mark knew by what route the sniper had reached his roost.
He stepped on to the stairway and began to climb, following the coils up the casing round and round, and up and up.
Always at his right hand, the open black mouth of the shaft gaped, an obscene dark orifice in the earth's surface, dropping straight and sheer into the very bowels, a thousand dark terrifying feet.
Mark tried to ignore it, dragging his bruised and aching body up by the handrail, carrying
the broken weapon in his other hand, and strained his neck backwards for the first glimpse of the gunner above.
The Vickers fired again, and Mark glanced sideways. He was high enough now to see into the road, one of the trucks was burning, a tall dragon's breath of smoke and sullen flame pouring into the sky, and the drab khaki bodies were still strewn in the open, death's discarded toys.
Even as he watched, the Vickers fire thrashed over them, mangling already dead flesh, and Mark's anger became cold and bright as a dagger's blade. Keep firing, luv, Fergus croaked in that husky stranger's voice. Short bursts. Count to twenty slowly, and then a touch on the button. I want him to think that I am still up here. He pulled the Webley from his belt, and crawled on his belly towards the head of the steep staircase. Don't leave me, Fergus. It'll be all right, he tried to grin, but his face was grey and crumpled. Just you keep firing. I'm going down to meet him halfway. He'll not expect that. I don't want to die alone, she breathed. Stay with me. I'll be back, luv. Don't fuss yourself, and he slid on his belly into the opening of the staircase.
She felt like a child again, in one of those terrible dark nightmares, trapped and enmeshed in her own fate, and she wanted to cry out. The sound reached her lips but died there as a low blubbering moan.
A rifle bullet chunked into the barricade of timber beside her. They were shooting from down below. She could not pick them out, for they were hidden in the ditches and the irregularities of the ground, screened by long purple shadows, and her eyes were blurred with tears and with exhaustion; yet she found the last few grains of her strength and crawled to the gun.
She squatted behind it and her hands were almost too small to reach the firing button. She pressed the barrel downwards, and forced her blearing vision to focus, marvelling at the little toy figures in the field of the sight. The gun juddered in her hands like a living creature. A short burst, she whispered to herself, repeating Fergus instructions, and lifted her thumbs from the firing button. One, two, three, she began to count to the next burst.
Mark paused at the next burst of firing and stood for a moment staring up. He was over halfway to the top, and now he could make out the floor of the service platform below the winch wheels, the platform on which the Vickers was sited.