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.
