'Well?'
'He – he didn't have one.'
'Huh! Well, it wouldn't have done him any good. Here – set the sheet beside him and we'll roll him on to it.'
Unfeeling butcher's hands rolling dead meat – Roskill flopped awkwardly, heavily and loosely as he guessed dead meat would flop. The sheet enclosed him like a shroud.
'Hurry, now!'
There was a numbness in his leg and along his side — not pain, but numbness. That was the side on which he had fallen when Yaffe cannoned into him ... As he was clumsily swung into the air, dummy2
jumbled in the groundsheet, Roskill was suddenly fully aware at last that he had been hit, how badly he couldn't tell. But it couldn't be too badly, otherwise he wouldn't be conscious – or did one retain consciousness as clear as this while shock kept the pain at bay?
The swinging stopped and he was thumped down and half rolled out of the sheet, face down again ... They were scattering something over him, leaves or dead bracken...
Someone – not Jahein – spoke urgently in Arabic.
Silence. Merciful, life-giving silence.
He must not spoil it now: he must wait and let the silence flower into safety.
Roskill started to count slowly, first to one hundred – with an extra ten because he had a feeling he'd jumped from seventy to ninety.
Then another slow hundred...
His eyes wouldn't open: his eyelids seemed gummed together.
Gently he eased his right hand towards his face and wiped them.
He tried again: there was a small beetle, shiny black, exploring a twig six inches in front of him, and beyond that a wall of green.
Somewhere close at hand a bird took flight, carrying its shattering alarm cry through the woods.
Roskill began to explore his body. The side was still numb, but he could twitch his toes inside his shoe. So far, so good.
With his right hand he began to feel gingerly down his back: it was soaked with blood – poor Yaffe's blood. As if the thought focused dummy2
his vision he saw just to his right the Israeli's feet sticking out from under the edge of the groundsheet. He didn't want to look any further
He felt the bitter anger swell up in his throat – after all the warnings he had had, to be chopped down –
The thought was cut off dead as his hand touched an enormous crater in the left cheek of his backside — Christ! He'd been shot in the arse!
He forced himself to touch the edge of the crater again. It couldn't be as big as his fingertips told him it was, but by the size of it, it had to be an exit wound. As he touched it he felt pain for the first time: his brain was telling him what his body wasn't yet ready to admit.
The question was – where was the entry wound?
Sudden fear drenched him again. It didn't matter where he was hit, but only that he get to hell out of here before they came back.
He wrenched the groundsheet back, scattering the bracken and sending arrows of pain up his left side from the mangled buttock.
He raised himself stiffly on his hands and looked around. He was still close to the edge of the wood – he could see the light through the trees – but down an incline away from the path. He lifted his head higher and took his weight on his right knee.
Still not a movement anywhere. Away to his left he could now see the sunshine bright in the meadow, beyond a steep, sandy bank –
there was a stream there at the meadow's edge.
He glanced down and caught his breath: he was covered in blood, dummy2
saturated in it, his shirt and trousers sodden. God! No wonder they hadn't looked twice at him — he was like a slaughter house!
The thing now was to get away fast. He stood up – and cried out in pain and surprise as he pitched forward.
No, blast it – he rolled desperately to protect his backside – of course it was there! But it felt as though it wasn't and whatever was wrong with it, he wasn't going anywhere on it.
Roskill pounded the soft earth in fear and anguish. He couldn't stay here, but he couldn't go far hopping or dragging himself. He felt thirsty and dizzy – two of the classic shock signs the squadron M.
O. had dinned into his heads. He was hurt worse than he'd thought.
Falling blood pressure, rapid irregular pulse; skin pale, cold, clammy and moist... he could remember Doc Farrell reciting the litany.
But there was something else Farrell was always preaching in his survival course – what was it?
