Bruce and Ruffy fired together, raking the windows, emptying their automatic rifles into them. As he reloaded Bruce glanced back at where
Wally’s men had been hit.
With disbelief he saw that Wally was the only one still on his feet; crossing the road, sprinting through an area of bullet-churned earth towards them, he reached the verandah and fell over the low wall.
“Are you wounded?” Bruce asked.
“Not a touch - those bastards couldn’t shoot their way out of a
French letter, Wally shouted defiantly, and his voice carried clearly in the sudden hush. He snatched the off the bottom of his rifle, threw
it aside empty magazine and clipped on a fresh one. “Move over,” he growled, “let me get a crack at those bastards.” He lifted his rifle and rested the stock on top of the wall, knelt behind it, cuddled the butt into his shoulder and began firing short bursts into the windows of the office block.
“This is what I was afraid of.” Bruce lifted his voice above the clamour of the guns. “Now we’ve got a pocket of resistance right in the centre of the town. There must be fifteen or twenty of them in there - it might take us days to winkle them out.” He cast a longing look at the canvascovered trucks lined up outside the station yard.
“They can cover the lorries from here, and as soon as they guess what we’re after, as soon as we try and move them, they’ll knock out that tanker and destroy the trucks.” The firelight flickered on the shiny yellow and red paint of the tanker. It looked so big and vulnerable standing there in the open. It needed just one bullet out of the many
hundred that had already been fired to end its charmed existence.
We’ve got to rush them now, he decided. Beyond the office block the remains of Wally’s group had taken cover and were keeping up a heated fire. Bruce’s group straggled up to the hotel and found positions at the windows.
“Ruffy.” Bruce caught him by the shoulder. “We’ll take four men with us and go round the back of the offices. From that building there we’ve got only twenty yards or so of open ground to cover. Once we get up against the wall they won’t be able to touch us and we can toss grenades in amongst them.”
“That twenty yards looks like twenty miles from here,” rumbled Ruffy, but picked up his sack of grenades and crawled back from the verandah wall.
“Go and pick four men to come with us,” ordered Bruce.
“Okay, boss. We’ll wait for you in the kitchen.”
“Hendry. Listen to me.”
“Yeah. What is it?”
“When I reach that corner over there I’ll give you a wave. We’ll be ready to go then. I want you to give us all the cover you can - keep their heads down.”
“Okay,” agreed Wally and fired another short burst.
“Try not to hit us when we close in.” Wally turned to look at
Bruce and he grinned wickedly.
“Mistakes happen, you know. I can’t promise anything.
You’d look real grand in my sights.”
“Don’t joke,” said Bruce.
“Who’s joking?” grinned Wally and Bruce left him. He found Ruffy and four gendarmes waiting in the kitchen.
“Come on,” he said and led them out across the kitchen yard, down the sanitary lane with the steel doors lor the buckets behind the outhouses and the smell of them thick and fetid, round the corner and across the road to the buildings beyond the office i lock. “They stopped then and crowded together, as though to draw courage and comfort from each other. Bruce measured the distance with his eye.
“It’s not far,” he announced.
“Depends on how you look at it,” grunted Ruffy.
“There are only two windows opening out on to this side.”
“Two’s enough - how many do you want?”
“Remember, Ruffy, you can only die once.”
“Once is enough,” said Ruffy. “Let’s cut out the talking, boss.
Too much talk gets you in the guts.” Bruce moved across to the corner of the building out of the shadows. He waved towards the hotel and imagined that he saw an acknowledgement from the end of the verandah.
“All together,” he said, sucked in a deep breath, held it a second and then launched himself into the open. He felt small now, no longer brave and invulnerable, and his legs moved so slowly that he seemed to be standing still. The black windows gaped at him.
Now, he thought, now you die.
Where, he thought, not in the stomach, please God, not in the stomach.
And his legs moved stiffly under him, carrying him half way across.
Only ten more paces, he thought, one more river, just one more river to Jordan. But not in the stomach, please God, not in my stomach. And his flesh cringed in anticipation, his stomach drawn in hard as he ran.
Suddenly the black windows were brightly lit, bright white oblongs in the dark buildings, and the glass sprayed out of them like untidy spittle from an old man’s mouth.
Then they were dark again, dark with smoke billowing from them and the memory of the explosion echoing in his ears.
“A grenade!” Bruce was bewildered. “Someone let off a grenade in there!” He reached the back door without stopping and it burst open before his rush. He was into the room, shooting, coughing in the fumes, firing wildly at the small movements of dying men..
In the half darkness something long and white lay against the far wall. A body, a white man’s naked body. He crossed to it and looked down.
“Andre,” he said, “it’s Andre - he threw the grenade.” And he knelt beside him.
Curled naked upon the concrete floor, Andre was alive but dying as the haemorrhage within him leaked his life away. His mind was alive and he heard the crump, crump of Bruce’s grenades, then the gunfire in the street, and the sound of running men. The shouts in the night and then the guns very close, they were in the room in which he lay, He opened his eyes. There were men at each of the windows, crouched below the sills, and the room was thick with cordite fumes and the clamour of the guns as they fired out into the night.
Andre was cold, the coldness was all through him. Even his hands drawn up against his chest were cold and heavy.
His stomach only was warm, warm and immensely bloated.
It was an effort to think, for his mind also was cold and the noise of the guns confused him.
He watched the men at the windows with a detached disinterest, and slowly his body lost its weight. He seemed to float clear of the floor and look down upon the room from the roof. His eyelids sagged and he dragged them up again, and struggled down towards his own body.
There was suddenly a rushing sound in the room and plaster sprayed from the wall above Andre’s head, filling the air with pale floating dust. One of the men at the windows fell backwards, his weapon ringing loudly on the floor as it dropped from his hands; he flopped over twice and lay still, face down within arm’s length of Andre.
Ponderously Andres mind analysed the sights his eyes were
recording. Someone was firing on the building from outside. The man beside him was dead and from his head wound the blood spread slowly across the floor towards him.
Andre closed his eyes again, he was very tired and very cold.
There was a lull in the sound of gunfire, one of those freak silences in the midst of battle. And in the lull Andre heard a voice far off, shouting. He could not hear the words but he recognized the voice and his eyelids flew open. There was an excitement in him, a new force, for it was Wally’s voice he had heard.
He moved slightly, clenching his hands and his brain started to sing.
Wally has come back for me - he has come to save me. He rolled his head slowly, painfully, and the blood gurgled in his stomach.
I must help him, I must not let him endanger himself these men are trying to kill him. I must stop them. I mustn’t let them kill Wally.