He had seen the dead ground instantly, any soldier would have picked it up at a glance. Pass the word for the Mills bombs, he muttered to the striker beside him, and the man crawled away.
Fergus swung the glasses up along the road where it started to climb the kopies, and grunted with satisfaction.
The telephone wires had been cut, along with the power lines. He could see the loose ends dangling from the poles.
The police station was isolated.
The striker crawled back to Fergus side, dragging a heavy rucksack. He had a tooth missing from his upper jaw, and he grinned gap-toothed at Fergus. Give them hell, comrade. Fergus face was blackened with soot and his eyelashes were singed away. They had burned the Fordsburg Police Station a little before midnight. I want covering fire, on my whistle. You'll get it, never fear. Fergus opened the rucksack and glanced at the steel globes, with their deeply segmented squares for fragmentation, then he slung the strap over his shoulder and adjusted the burden to hang comfortably on his flank. Look after it well. He handed his Lee-Enfield rifle to the gap-toothed striker. We'll need it again today. He crawled away down the shallow drainage ditch that led to a concrete culvert which crossed under the road, The culvert was lined with circular tubes of rusty corrugated iron, and Fergus wriggled through it carefully, emerging on the far side of the road.
Lying on his side, he raised himself slightly to peer over the edge of the drainage ditch. The police station was a hundred and fifty yards away. The blue light over the front door, with the white lettered POLICE, was dead, and the flag hung limply on its pole in the still windless morning.
it was fifty yards to the slope of dead ground under the eastern windows of the brick building, and Fergus could see the rifle barrels of the defenders poked through the gaps in the sand-bags.
He pulled the silver whistle from his back pocket by its lanyard, and came up on his knees like a sprinter on the blocks.
He drew a deep breath and blew a long shrill ringing blast on the whistle. Immediately a storm of rifle fire crashed out from the hedges and ditches that surrounded the station.
The blue lamp shattered into flying fragments, and red brick dust popped off the walls like dyed cotton pods.
Fergus came out of the ditch at a run. A bullet kicked dust and stone chips stung his ankles, and another jerked like an impatient hand at the tail of his coat, then he was into the dead ground and out of their field of fire.
He still ran doubled over, however, until he reached the police station. Then he flattened himself against the wall between two of the sand-bagged windows while he struggled with his breathing.
A rifle barrel protruded from the left-hand window as it blazed away up the slope of the kopje. Fergus opened the rucksack and took out a grenade with his left hand. He pulled the pin with his teeth, while he groped for the Webley . 45 5 revolver stuck into the belt of his trousers.
He locked one arm over the barrel of the police rifle, dragging it harmlessly aside, then he stepped into the window, and, still holding the rifle, looked through the narrow hole in the sand-bags.
A young, beardless face stared back at him, the eyes wide with amazement, the mouth hanging open slightly and the police helmet pulled down low over his eyes.
Fergus shot him in the bridge of the nose, between the startled staring eyes, and the head was smashed backwards out of view.
Fergus hurled the grenade through the gap and ducked down. The explosion in the confined space was vicious and ear-numbing, Fergus bobbed up and tossed in another grenade.
Glass and smoke blew from the windows, and from within there were the screams and cries of the trapped police constables, the groans and gasping walls of the wounded.
Fergus threw in a third grenade, and screamed, Chew on that you bloody strike-breakers. The bomb exploded, shattering out a panel from the front door, and smoke billowed from all windows.
Inside a single voice started screaming. Stop it! Oh God, stop it! We surrender! Come out with your hands in the air, you bastards!
A police sergeant staggered out of the shattered doorway.
He held one hand above his head, the other hung at his side in a torn and blood-soaked sleeve.
The last call that went out from Newlands Police Station before the strikers cut the lines was a call for help. The relieving column coming over the ridge from Johannesburg in a convoy of three trucks got as far as the Hotel in Main Street where it was halted by rifle fire, and the moment it stopped, strikers ran out into the roadway behind it and set all the trucks ablaze with petrol bombs.
The police abandoned their vehicles and raced for cover in a cottage beside the road. It was a strong defensive position and they looked set to hold out against even the most determined attacks, but they left three dead constables lying in the road beside the burning trucks, and another two of their number lying near them, so badly wounded they could only cry out for succour.
A white flag waved from across the road, and the police commander stepped out on to the veranda of the cottage.
What do you want? he called across.
Fergus MacDonald walked out into the road, still waving the flag, a slight unwar-like figure in shabby suit and cloth cap. You can't leave these men out here, he shouted back, pointing at the bodies.
The commander came out with twenty un-armed police into the road to carry away the dead and wounded, and while they worked, strikers under Fergus, orders slipped in through the back of the cottages.
Suddenly Fergus whipped the Webley out from under his coat and pressed it to the commander's head. Tell your men to put their hands up, or I'll blow your bloody brains all over the road. In the cottage, Fergus' men knocked the weapons out of the hands of the police, and in the roadway armed strikers were among them.
You were under a flag of truce, protested the commander bitterly. We aren't playing games, you bloody black-
