'Right. That place is full of ordnance and I'm bloody well having it, standing orders or not.'
'We could wait 'til after dark, sir,' offered Green.
'And if they've got night goggles we hand them a major advantage, numbnuts. Nah, we need to do this quickly.' He pulled out the binoculars again.
'Two wires we need to trace. The tannoy ones and the puppet one. Let's see where they go.'
As he tried to trace the tannoy wires back to the mic I caught a glimpse of a flash from the top floor of the main windows. I looked closer and there it was again. I tapped Mac on the shoulder and pointed it out. He took a look.
'It's Bates,' he said. Not 'the Colonel' I noticed. Interesting. 'Signalling us with a mirror. Bloody idiot, keep your head down.' But it was too late. A burst of machine gun fire raked across the face of the building, splintering the window frame and spraying the remaining shards of glass inward at Bates and the others. The pillbox was manned.
'I think someone's hit, can't see who,' said Mac. 'Fuck, this is a shambles. Right, enough of this.' He handed the binoculars to me. 'Green.'
'Sir?'
'The tannoy wires go to the pillbox and the puppet wire leads down to the main gate. I think there's a man in cover there, probably a sniper in camouflage. You could probably walk right up to him and not see him, if he knows his job. But I want you to keep in the trees and move down to cover the area. He won't risk a shot until he sees a target the pillbox can't deal with, so I need you, Keegan, to draw his fire.'
'Sir?' I asked, trying not to sound incredulous.
Mac grinned. 'I know you're the better shot, Keegan, but Green's not going to be doing the 100 metre sprint anytime soon, are you Green?'
'No sir,' he said, abjectly.
'And you can shoot that damn thing, right?'
'Yes sir.'
'Well then. You're the bait, Keegan, and Green shoots the shooter. Sorted.'
'And what will you be doing while I'm being shot at, sir?' I asked.
He opened his backpack, pulled out a stick of dynamite and waved it in my face. 'Passed a quarry on my way back to Castle, didn't I? I'm going to blow that fucking pillbox wide open.'
'And the Colonel?'
'Fuck him, if he's not been shot already he deserves to be. We're dealing with this. With me?'
'Yes sir!' yelped gung-ho Green.
Oh yeah, this was going to end well.
We synchronised our watches and then, always staying in the trees, Green and I went left, while Mac went right, towards the pillbox. Green took up position covering the long grass near the main gate and I kept going. I travelled some way past the complex, out of any possible sniper's line of sight, and scurried across the road leading to the gate. I made it safely into the trees on the other side and started to move back towards the fence. It didn't take long to find a breach and I snaked under the chain link and crawled through the grass until I was behind the first outbuilding on the opposite side of the road to Green.
Even higher on my list of Things-I-Never-Want-To-Do than 'shoot somebody' was 'be shot by somebody else'. So I wasn't entirely comfortable with Mac's plan that I should run up and down in plain view of a sniper, presenting a nice juicy target for a thumb-sized piece of supersonic, superheated lead that could push my brains out through my face.
I lay there for a minute, breathing deeply, calming myself, considering. Should I leg it? Just cut my losses and run? Go it alone? Did I need to remain at the school, taking orders from nutters and idiots, getting involved in unnecessary gunfights and risking my life… for what? For the school? For Matron?
But where else could I go? And if I left, how would Dad find me?
No, there was no choice. I'd made my decision to return to the school and I was stuck with it. I just had to stay alive long enough for Dad to come get me, and then I could split and leave Mac and Bates to their stupid army games. Until then I had to play along. After all, there was supposed to be safety in numbers, wasn't there?
I checked my watch. Time to go. I walked forward slowly. The gap between this outbuilding and the next was about ten metres. I had to cover that distance slowly enough to allow the sniper to notice me, sight, and fire, but sufficiently quickly that he didn't quite have time to take aim accurately enough to kill me. I'm sure an experienced SAS man would be able to do some calculation based on distance, running speed and firing time and tell you, to the second, how long he should be visible for. I was just going to have to guess using my vast experience of watching DVDs of 24.
Fuck it.
I ran.
Three steps, that's all it took. Three bloody steps and I was flat on my face unsure what had hit me, and where. My mouth was full of grass before I even heard the shot.
And then, as I tried to work out if I was bleeding to death, a burst of machine gun fire and a huge explosion from up ahead. Shards of pillbox brick impacted all around me.
And then, before the dust had settled, a series of sharp reports off to my right, as the sniper and Green exchanged fire.
And then a scream.
And then silence.
CHAPTER FOUR
The problem with being in a battle is that if you get killed you never know whether your side wins or not. Sacrificing your life in a blaze of heroic glory is fine, but only if you're willing to accept that it might not have achieved anything.
Movie battles have a good solid story structure – beginning, middle, end – and the audience gets to see how it all works out, how the actions of certain characters shape events, how their deaths either do or don't have any meaning. But as I lay there in the cool grass, shot, bleeding, going into shock, I realised that the characters in those films, the ones who save the day by charging the machine guns or providing diversions so their mates can escape, the ones who say 'leave me, I'll only slow you down' or 'I can delay them, give you time to escape,' die alone, clinging to the hope that maybe they've made a difference but not really sure if they've just thrown their lives away for no good reason.
I had no idea if Green had shot the sniper or vice-versa. Even if Green had shot him, our 'side' might still not get the weapons. And if we did get the weapons we still might not survive the coming year. In which case what possible point did my slow, silent, blood-soaked death on a patch of scrubland between two prefabs actually have? How had I helped? Would I be remembered as a hero who sacrificed himself for the greater good, or would I just end up a leg attached to a piece of string underneath a car somewhere, luring other poor bastards into an ambush?
Luckily, the thing about shock is that pretty quickly you stop giving a toss about much of anything, so I soon stopped philosophising. I then briefly, dispassionately, considered giving up or going on, and then began crawling towards cover.
The sniper must have been aiming for my upper body. I wasn't sure whether I was lucky that he'd only hit my left thigh, or unlucky that he'd hit me at all. A thigh wound might sound painful but non-threatening – all that muscle to absorb the slug, no major organs to hit – but you've got arteries running through your legs, and if the bullet had hit one of those I wasn't going to be around for much longer, no matter how much cover I found.
I made it into the shade of the next outbuilding without being shot again. I propped myself up against the wall and examined my leg. It was bleeding freely but not spurting. Lucky. I pulled my belt out of my trousers, looped it around my leg just above the wound, and pulled it tight. Up to now there'd been hardly any pain, but as the belt dug in I had to work hard to stifle a scream.
I fastened the belt and tried to stand, using my rifle as a crutch. As soon as I was upright I had a massive
