attention. Stay here.
Try and keep in contact with Gondola. Don't go wandering off.
Taffari's storm-troopers will be scattered everywhere. Stay here until I come back for you. She nodded. Be careful, darling. Sepoo.
Daniel looked down at the little man. Stay here.
Look after Kara-Ki. With my life! Sepoo told him.
Kiss me! Kelly demanded of Daniel.
Just a quick one. More to follow, Daniel promised.
He left her and ran back towards the UDC buildings.
Before he had gone a hundred yards he heard men in the forest ahead.
Omeru! he shouted. It was the password. Omeru! they shouted back.
The Sun has Risen! Not yet, it bloody hasn't, Daniel muttered, and went forward.
There were a dozen men of the commando, the blue denim jackets were almost a uniform.
Come on! He gathered them up.
Before they reached the road that ran down to the mining cut he had thirty men with him. The rain had stopped by now, and Daniel paused on the edge of the forest. Before them stretched the endless plain of churned earth that the MOMU units had devoured. The, line of machines was ahead of them, ranged along the boundary where forest and red mud met. They looked like a line of battleships in a storm.
Closer still were the four Landrovers, scattered at abandoned angles on the muddy plain. As Daniel watched, the Hita guards were straggling across the open ground towards the nearest MOMU.
Daniel recognized Ephrem Taffari's tall uniformed figure leading them. It was clear that he had selected the nearest MOMU as the most readily defensible strong-point available to him, and Daniel conceded grimly that it was a good choice.
The steel sides of the gigantic machine would offer almost complete protection from small-arms fire. Even the RPG rockets would make no impression on its massive construction.
To reach it an attacker would have to cross soft open ground that could be covered by fire from the upper platforms of the MOMU. just as important, the steel fortress was manoeuvrable.
Once he was in control of it, Taffari could drive it anywhere.
Daniel looked about him quickly, by now there were fifty or so Uhali guerrillas congregated around him. They were noisy.
and over-excited, behaving like green troops after their first taste of fire. Some of them were cheering and firing at the distant figures of Taffari and his guards. They were well out of range, and it was a dangerous waste of their precious stocks of ammunition.
There was no point in trying to get them under control. He had to attack before they lost their wild spirits, and before Taffari reached the MOMU and organised its defence. Come on! Daniel shouted. Omeru!
'The Sun has Risen. He led them out on to the open ground, and they followed him in a rabble, cheering wildly. Omeru! they yelled.
Daniel had to keep the momentum going.
The mud was ankle-deep in places, knee- deep in others.
They passed the abandoned Landrovers. Ahead of them Daniel saw Taffari reach the MOMU and haul himself up one of the steel boarding ladders. As they ploughed on through the mud, their progress slowed to a plodding walk.
Taffari was organising his men as they came aboard the MOMU. They were taking cover behind the massive steel machinery. Bullets started slashing amongst the attackers, plugging into the mud, cracking around their heads. The man beside Daniel was hit. He went down face first in the mud.
The attack slowed, bogging down in the mud. The Hita on the MOMU were lodging in, hidden behind steel bulkheads.
They were shooting accurately, and more of Daniel's men were falling.
The attack stalled, some of the Uhali broke and started to stumble back towards the forest. Others crouched behind the stranded Landrovers. They were not soldiers. They were clerks and truck- drivers and university students faced by crack paratroopers in an impregnable steel fortress. Daniel could not blame them for breaking, even though the revolution was dying in the mud with them.
He could not go on alone. Already the Hita had singled him out.
Their fire was concentrating on him. He stumbled back to the nearest Landrover and crouched behind its chassis.
He saw the crew of the MOMU desert their stations and huddle helplessly on the lower platform. One of the Hita paratroopers gestured to them imperiously and with obvious relief they swarmed down the steel ladder and dropped into the mud like sailors abandoning a sinking ocean liner.
The engine of the MOMU was still running. The excavators were chewing into the earth, but now with no direction the gigantic rig was wandering out of its formation. The crews of the other rigs in the line saw what was happening and they too abandoned their posts and streamed overboard, trying to escape the bursts of gunfire that rattled and clanged against the steel plating.
It was a stand-off. Taffari's men had command of the MOMU and Daniel's commando were stalled in the mud unable to advance or retreat.
He tried to think of some way to break the impasse. He could not expect his shattered and demoralised survivors to mount another charge.
Taffari had fifteen or twenty men up there, more than enough to hold them off.
At that moment he became aware of another eerie sound, like the mewling of seagulls or the cry of lost souls. He looked back and at first saw nothing. Then something moved at the edge of the forest. At first he could not make it out. It was not human, surely?
Then he saw other movement. The forest was coming alive.
Thousands of strange creatures, as numerous as insects, like a column of safari ants on the march. They were red in their myriads, and the wild plaintive cry rose louder and more urgently from them as they swarmed out of the forest into the open.
Suddenly he realised what he was seeing. The gates of the labour camps were open. The guards had been overwhelmed and the Uhali slaves had risen out of the mud. They were red with it, coated with it, naked as corpses exhumed from the grave, starved to stick-like emaciation.
They swarmed forward in their legions, in their thousands, women and men and children, sexless in their coating of mud, only their white and angry eyes glaring in the muddy red masks of their faces. Omeru! they cried, and the sound was like a stormy sea on a rocky headland.
