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.
There were narrow cracks in the woodwork through which bright lines of open sky showed clearly, and as he watched he saw one of the lines of light interrupted by a dark movement beyond. It was that flicker of movement that caught his attention, and he realized that he was looking at the body of the person who served the gun. He must be squatting directly over one of the narrow joints in the floor of the platform, and his movements blocked out part of that bright line of light.
A bullet through the gap would cripple and pin him, but he glanced at the broken weapon in his hand and knew that he would have to get closer, much closer.
He began to run upwards and though he tried to keep his weight lightly on the balls of his feet, the hobnails in his boots rang on the steel stairs.
Fergus MacDonald heard them and checked his own run, shrinking into the protective lee of one of the steel girders. One man only, he muttered. But coming up fast He dropped on one knee and peered down through the gaps between the stairs, hoping for sight of the man who he was hunting. The steps overlapped each other like fanned playing-cards, and the lateral supports of the tower formed an impenetrable steel forest below him.
The only way he could hope for a glimpse was to hang out over the handrail and look down the central shaft- well.
The idea of that thousand-foot black hole repelled him, and he had formed an estimate of his opponent high enough to guess that the reward for putting his head over the side would be a bullet between the eyes.
He edged into a better position where he could cover the next spiral of staircase below him. I'll let him come up to me, he decided, and braced his arm against the girder at the level of his chin, and laid the Webley over the crook of his elbow to give the heavy pistol support. He knew that over ten paces it was wildly inaccurate, but the dead rest would give him at least one fair shot.
He cocked his head slightly to listen to the clatter of booted feet on steel, and he judged that the man was very close. One more spiral of the stair would bring him into shot. Carefully, he thumbed back the hammer of the Webley and looked down over the slotted rear-sight.
Above them, the Vickers fired again, and Mark paused to catch his breath and check the situation of the gunner, and to his dismay he realized that he had climbed too high in the tower.
He had changed the angle of sight, and could no longer see through the cracks in the timber platform. He had to retreat carefully down the staircase before once again the bright lines of light opened in the dark underbelly of timber.
A vague blur of movement reassured him that the gunner had not changed his position. He was still squatting over the joint, but the shot was almost impossible.
He was shooting directly upwards, awkward even in the best conditions, but now he had no butt to steady the rifle and no foresight, he was shooting into a single dark mass of timber and had to guess the position of the crack because the gunner's body obscured the light from the far side. The crack itself was only two inches wide, and if he missed by a smallest fraction the bullet would bury itself harmlessly in the thick timber.
He tried not to think that there would be only one shot, the jammed breach made that certain.
He put his hip to the guardrail and leaned out over the open shaft, squinted upwards trying to set the target in his mind as he lifted the broken rifle in an easy natural movement. He knew that he had to make the shot entirely by instinct. He had no chance if he hesitated or tried to hold his aim steadily on the target.
He swept up the shattered weapon and at the moment the long barrel aligned, he pressed the trigger.
In the flash and thunder of the shot a tiny white splinter of wood jumped from the edge of the crack. The bullet had touched wood and Mark felt an instant of utter dismay.
Then the body that had obscured the light was jerked abruptly aside, and the crack was a single uninterrupted line again, and on the platform somebody screamed.
Helena MacDonald had just reached the count of twenty again, and was aiming at a gathering of men she could see grouping beyond one of the lorries. She squatted low over the gun and was on the point of jamming her thumbs down on the firing button, when the bullet came up through the floor timbers.
It had touched one of the hard mahogany baulks, just enough to split the casing of the bullet and alter its shape, mushrooming it slightly, so that it did not enter her body through a neat round puncture.
It tore a ragged entry into the soft flesh at the juncture of her slightly spread thighs and plunged upwards through her lower abdomen, striking and shattering the thick bony girdle of her pelvis, glancing off the bone with still enough impetus to bruise and weaken the lower branch of the descending aorta, the great artery that runs down from the heart, before going on to embed itself in the muscles high in the left side of her back.
it lifted Helena into the air, and hurled her across the platform on to her face. Oh God, oh God, help me! Fergus! Fergus! I don't want to die alone, she screamed, and the sound carried clearly to the two men in the steel tower below her.
Mark recognized the voice instantly. It did not need the name to confirm it.
His mind shied at the enormity of what he had done.
The broken rifle almost slipped from his hands, but he saved it and caught at the handrail for support.
