Carswell said, ‘Uhm, you wouldn’t have a drop whiskey or brandy to liven that up, would you?’
Jud nodded. ‘I think we have some. Will Irish do you?’
‘Oh, any port in a storm, but it does have the aroma of the bog about it, don’t you think?’
‘Okay, Carswell,’ Sam said as Jud set the whiskey bottle on the table. ‘Before you ask us to sit up and beg or lick the dog poop off your boots or whatever else you’ve got in mind, are you going to tell us this master plan of yours for stopping those murdering bastards coming back into town and killing every man, woman and child?’
‘Seeing as I’m not doing this out of sweet Christian charity, I can safely ignore your impertinence.’
Jud frowned. ‘But who’s paying you?’
‘And how much?’ asked Sam.
‘I don’t think vulgar price-taggery is important at a time like this. Let’s just say I’m here as a professional consultant.’
‘You mean we’ve got to pay you some kind of consultancy fee for helping us?’
Carswell didn’t answer.
At that moment Ryan Keith came in. He looked like a zombie. His hair was stuck on end, and his eyes were red and sore. He saw the whiskey on the table, poured himself half a cupful and went and sat on a stool by the fire. So absorbed was he by the death of his wife just a few hours earlier that he didn’t even notice the three men in the room.
After giving Ryan a dismissive glance Carswell poured a small tot of whiskey into his cup. ‘Well, that’s injected some spirit into the coffee. Now, to action…’ He pulled half a dozen sheets of neatly folded paper from his pocket. ‘To save your lives from the next attack will require superb planning – that’s my department. And a great deal of hard work and, ultimately, courage – which is your department. You’ll also have to sell this scheme to the whole town and persuade every man Jack of them to work with you. In the end, they will have to fight alongside you. Fight like lions, I should add. Fight with every ounce of determination and strength they can muster. Because this isn’t going to be easy… it’s not going to be easy at all. Now, gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to Operation Rolling Vengeance.’
Carswell began to unfold the sheets of paper. As he smoothed them down onto the tabletop he told them what they needed to do.
Carswell said, ‘Today is Tuesday. My guess is that the next time the Bluebeards strike will be at dawn, probably either Friday morning or Saturday at the latest.’
‘So?’
‘So, my dear Mr Baker, I suggest we should be ready to attack them the moment they exit the time gate – which, Rolle informs me, is down by the river.’
‘Attack the Bluebeards? Are you serious?’
‘Absolutely serious,’ Carswell said crisply. ‘The best form of defence is attack.’
‘But how? We’ve a town full of exhausted civilians, not a garrison full of crack marines.’
‘But you’ll have surprise on your side. Always a worthy ally. As you say, the Bluebeards will emerge from their lair expecting no opposition from a demoralised and beaten population with no weapons worth speaking of. What they will find – to their amazement – is an effective, well-armed fighting force with more than a few surprises up its sleeve.’
‘Hell, Carswell. In the past you’ve accused me of coming up with some fanciful ideas. Now this really takes the biscuit.’
‘Hear me out, Mr Baker.’ Carswell tapped a sheet of paper. ‘These are the blueprints of your war machines. If you’re lucky, you have around 72 hours – at the most – to build them.’
‘What on Earth are they?’ Jud angled his head. ‘That’s a drawing of the tour bus, isn’t it?’
‘Spot on, Mr Campbell. And it shows just how you’re going to turn it from a vehicle designed to carry trippers about the countryside into a rolling fortress on wheels.’
‘A rolling fortress?’ Sam looked at Jud, who worriedly nipped his bottom lip between finger and thumb. ‘You mean something like a tank?’
‘Well, perhaps something more like a battleship – only one that moves on land rather than water.’
Sam glanced at Jud again. ‘Jud, do you think it’ll work?’
Jud stared back down at the plans, his lip still pinched between finger and thumb. After a while he looked up at Sam and said in a small voice, ‘It’s going to have to, isn’t it?’
43
Tuesday night, 21st December 1865
Countdown commenced at nine o’clock that Tuesday night.
Carswell had brought the mantelpiece clock from the farmhouse and stood it on a shelf in the barn where everyone could see it. Then in firm, bold letters on the wall above the clock he chalked:
Through the open doors of the barn Sam could see the falling snow. Beyond that the fields lay in darkness. A darkness that was so deep and dense it was nearly tangible.
And for all anyone knows, Sam thought bleakly, those barbarians might be moving this way again. To finish looting the town. And to clear out the outlying houses they missed on their first raid. Houses like this one.
Sam looked back at Carswell, who was striding round in his iridescent red waistcoat barking orders. In the cold air of the barn his breath came out in huge bursts of white vapour.
First, he ordered that as many oil lamps as possible should be brought into the barn. ‘This is where we will work night and day,’ he told them as the lamps were lit, filling the great void of the barn with a golden light. ‘This is where we’ll eat; this will be home until the conversion work is finished.’
Most of the people there were men and women who’d made the first time-jump back from 1999. Even so, they’d started to go native after living and working in Casterton for the last seven months of 1865. They looked at the cars, the ice-cream van, the tour bus, with surprised expressions, as if seeing them for the first time. Many were still bewildered by the plan outlined by Carswell. And there were more than a few objections.
A grey-haired man held up his hand. ‘Why can’t we just get out of town until all this is over?’
Carswell sighed, irritated by what he saw as flagrant stupidity. ‘Do I have to explain all over again? The roads are now blocked. We are marooned here as effectively as if we’d been washed up on a desert island.’
A woman shook her head. ‘But how can we attack these barbarians? From what we’ve heard, there were thousands of them.’
‘Probably no more than two thousand, maximum.’
‘But you were saying that we’d probably only have about two or three hundred people at most to fight them. That’s suicide.’
Sam saw Carswell’s hands clench as he fought down the anger growing inside of him. ‘Dear lady. In 480 BC, in Greece, a force of four hundred or so Spartan warriors successfully held back the entire Persian army of several hundred thousand men.’
‘Don’t patronise me, Mr Carswell.’ The woman had the bearing of a schoolteacher. ‘At Thermopylae the Spartans delayed the Persian invasion of Greece by several days. However, those Spartans were highly-trained fighting men, and even so they died to a man. So how in heaven’s name do you suppose a few hundred townsfolk from Casterton are going to wipe out all those barbarians when they come marching into town?’
‘I don’t suppose for a moment we will kill them all.’