Pat woke us with a muffled tap on the wooden door. That’s not quite true. Both of us had been awake and waiting for it, and had heard the vehicle arrive a minute before. We had a nondescript four-wheel drive Humber one-tonner, with a canvas tilt over the back: the windscreen had a makeshift wire-mesh grille. She was probably originally army green, but was filthy dirty with that Cyprus dull dust, which had softened its lines. It had once had UN markings and a serial number, but they had been daubed over with a dirty green wash. The steel cab had a round metal port, like a dustbin lid, over the passenger seat, and there were thin mattresses in the wagon bed under the tattered canvas.
Pete and I climbed over the tailboard, and lay in the back beneath the tops of the metal side panels, a .5 cal heavy machine gun between us. It was set up, and ready to go – all we had to do was lift it onto its mount. When I looked up I could see that the inside of the canvas tilt had been lined with chicken wire – with a bit of luck any hand grenade would bounce back to its thrower, and give him a surprise.
‘I jus’ realized something,’ Pete said as he closed his eyes, and prepared to doze.
‘What’s that?’
‘Ain’t gonna be a comfortable drive, is it?’
I grinned in the half-light. It was good to be back with him.
Warboys drove. In the SAS they do a lot of things back to front – the officers do a lot of the driving, and carry loads as heavy as their men’s. It seems to work for them. Pat Tobin sat alongside him. Under his sheepskin jerkin his unit flashes had disappeared, so he looked like me, and as I glanced into the cab before I mounted up I saw a Bren propped up behind his seat. Part of me felt the old adrenalin rush, the other part asked me what the fuck I thought I was doing.
Two hours later we were back in the lower Troodos, and it was beginning to get colder. Warboys pulled up under a tree which spread a wide low canopy over a sharp climbing bend in the mountain road. Pete and I got out and stretched. We both pulled on our flying jackets, and mounted the machine gun so it had a field of fire over the tailgate.
Pat Tobin stood on his seat and mounted the Bren on the port above him, and handed me and Pete a Sten gun apiece each with two spare mags. When he got back in his seat he cradled his own Sten in his lap.
‘I don’t know if I could get to the Bren in time,’ he told me, ‘but it discourages the natives to see it up there.’
We got back in the wagon bed and hunched down, and Warboys put it into gear.
I don’t know how far we got into the Troodos on that trip, but at noon we were still climbing along roads that were barely more than goat tracks. It was bright and chilly.
He pulled off the road again just as we crested a saddle; there was a small village spread out immediately beneath us, white houses, freshly painted, clustered around a village square with a small church on the far side. We all dismounted again. I asked, ‘Do they know we’re here?’
Warboys muttered, ‘For certain. Mechanical noises travel for miles in the mountains.’
As if to confirm his observation a black-robed priest, wearing one of those tall boxy hats, came out of the church and looked up at us. My previous idea of priests had them swinging smoking censers, and wearing strings of black juju beads and crucifixes. It’s hard not to conclude that there is something seriously wrong with people who face the world with an image of a horribly executed man around their necks.
This one was different: instead of a crucifix he had a pair of binoculars around his neck. He looked at us through them long enough to be doing a head count, and then walked back up the two steps into his church. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry. A minute later the church’s single, tinny bell began to toll. I’ve heard cow bells which sound like that in the Pyrenees.
Still Warboys held us back.
We watched the houses disgorging their inhabitants – play people, dolls. Some were larger than others, and some were faster. Warboys waited until they had all gone into the church. One boy was late, raced across the square, and had to hammer on the door for admission.
‘OK, chaps,’ Warboys told us. ‘Now we go.’
We tore down the track into the village so fast that I was sure we’d break a spring over some of the embedded boulders we jumped over. Warboys raced the truck in a tight circle around the square, and came to a halt with me and the .5 which Pete squatted behind, facing the church door. Pete had been the rear gunner of Tuesday’s Child – I know, I’ve told you that already. He was always very serious about heavy machine guns, so putting him on the trigger had been an obvious choice. The bloody scientists would probably call it natural selection, and use the fact to prove that the apes we descended from were basically homicidal. I knelt beside him with a Sten.
Time stopped.
Not only were Pete and I facing the church, it left us facing the four guys and a girl ranged across the square in front of it. I don’t know where they came from. The men stood like the sheriff and his three deputies facing the bad guys in a bad Western film. I also knew that Pete would drop them if they so much as twitched without permission.
