Soldier No More

The engine stalled, but the lights still searched out every detail of the Tower—every small unevenness and shadow, everything pale bright yellow or black—and the cottage way past it, trailing creeper and blank windows, and a man throwing himself down out of the door—

He rolled down sideways as the window starred and cracked and burst in on him, even as the noise of the automatic weapon caught up with the sound of the shattering windscreen.

Everything went dark around him—inky black, pitch dark, after the brightness. He fumbled for the pistol, which he remembered out of the past—he had put it on the seat, ready to hand, as he had entered the car. It wasn't there—he felt around for it—it wasn't there— it wasn't anywhere, and it was too late to go on searching for it.

The door on the driver's side had already burst open with the impact, so that his legs were sticking out of it; he pushed himself in the same direction, holding on to the wheel to enable him still to keep his balance as his feet felt the ground.

But then standing upright no longer seemed sensible: hit the ground was what the Staff Sergeant always shouted—

He dropped flat, willing the earth to open up. But it was hard as rock under him.

Silence.

dummy5

He lifted his head cautiously. It wasn't really night, he realised—not now that the bright light had been extinguished: it was almost night—there was a thick quilt of cloud high above him, illuminated by the moon far above the quilt... but he could still see too much, and could be seen too easily if he moved away from the shadow of the car.

The sudden sound of breaking glass broke the stillness. Then a sharper crack—the crack of a pistol—fixed the sound ahead and above: Audley had fired out of the high arrow-slit in the Tower, smashing the window first like the cowboys in the films.

Silence settled down again.

'You bastards down there!' An American voice rang thin but clear from above. 'You just keep your goddamn heads down—

okay?'

Bradford was buying time—and he was buying it in the belief that the crash or the burst of fire which had blacked out the lights had finished off Roche's rescue attempt, and Roche himself with it.

As a diversion, he had started well, but he had screwed everything up after that—as usual, Roche summed himself up. Madame Peyrony would expect better of him than that.

And Lexy too—if the Perownes died hard, then what about the Roches?

Out here in the open he was lost anyway. As soon as one of the fellagha snaked up close enough ... it was only pure dummy5

accident that one of them hadn't spotted him already . . . and it was only a matter of time before his time ran out on him.

He had nothing to lose any more—he had had it all, but he had thrown it away, and for no reason that made sense now.

Silence.

But not silence: he could hear sounds building up all around him. They were moving in on him at last, and it was too late for heroics.

He pulled himself upright against the wing of the Delaroche.

He ought to do something, but he couldn't think of anything to do. It seemed a silly way to die, was all he could think.

'Oh . . . shit!' he said angrily to himself, but also to the world at large.

The spurt of flame registered in the ten-thousandth of the second before the impact of the bullet slammed him against the car.

A great light flowered in the sky above him—unearthly, as he expected it to be—but in a point of incandescence which reflected up to the clouds as well as down on the woods and the Tower and the car.

He stared at the light, somehow puzzled by it, and yet at the same time recognising it from out of the distant past.

A thunderclap burst vivid orange-red on the edge of the wood twenty yards away, silhouetting the man who had shot dummy5

him as it exploded—the impact of the sound hit him like a second bullet, pressing him back on the car a second time.

Pain and understanding came together, as a second mortar-bomb exploded to his left, on the far side of the road. With disembodied interest he remembered that a good mortar-man would have half-a-dozen bombs in the air before the first one hit the ground, and the best mortar-man in the French Army could probably do even better than that, even allowing for three-score-years-and-ten and only Little Gaston to help him—

As the third bomb landed a mixture of weakness and delayed instinct slid him down flat alongside the car. Its great bulk was comforting, and the darkness beneath it enticed him to try to roll under it. But for some reason his body at first refused to follow the idea.

And when it did, he fell into a great black hole with no bottom.

EPILOGUE:

Soldier no more