‘So, which way?’ Liam shouted above the din of the rattling engine.
Bob pointed off the dirt track they were running along, across a paddock full of what looked like eugenically modified shire horses. ‘That way.’
‘Hold on!’ said Liam, pulling the left stick back a little. The tractor’s gigantic fat wheels rolled effortlessly over a wooden picket fence and across the paddock, scattering horses that seemed to stand almost as tall at the shoulder as Indian elephants.
‘Information: fifteen miles, one hundred and seventy-six yards in this direction.’
‘Right,’ said Liam, gripping both control sticks with white-knuckled concentration. ‘OK … fifteen miles.’
The tractor was romping along now, bouncing alarmingly on the uneven ground, swerving every now and then to avoid the unpredictable panicked movements of the shire horses flocking alongside it.
‘Whoa!’ Sal pointed through the cabin’s mud-spattered windscreen. ‘Mind the —’ The tractor rolled over a long wooden feeding trough, sending splinters of wood and cobs of maize into the air.
‘Never mind,’ said Sal.
Liam crashed out of the far side of the paddock and swerved right to avoid running into an open barn. A moment later they were rolling across a courtyard crisscrossed with laundry lines.
‘Watch out, look … kids!’
Several children playing amid fluttering bed sheets scattered in panic before them.
‘Oh Jay-zus! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!’ Liam bellowed through the open side window as they rumbled out of the far side, across someone’s vegetable garden and over a cheerfully coloured timber playhouse.
They were rolling across a vineyard a moment later, flattening row after row of budding grapevines. Sal pointed out a long line of greenhouses nestled between rows of vines. She noted the look of shock on an old man’s face as he stood in the doorway, watering can in one hand and pruning shears in the other. The tractor’s huge wheels churned a lane of soil mere inches away from him and the fragile framework of timber and glass.
‘Hey, Liam … you actually managed to miss something.’
His face was rigid with desperate concentration. ‘I’ve never driven anything before in me life!’
Branches of a vine thrashed against the windscreen, smearing it with grape juice.
‘Liam!’ said Sal.
He was squinting through the slime of juice and grime on the glass; too focused on seeing through it all to take heed of Sal.
‘LIAM!’
‘WHAT?’
Sal squeezed his shoulder gently. ‘Maybe someone else should be driving instead? Huh?’
‘Good God, yes!’ barked Lincoln, holding his head where he’d whacked it against the cabin’s low roof.
Liam nodded. ‘Uh … OK, yeah. That’s … probably … a good idea.’
He eased both throttle sticks back slowly, evenly, to prevent the tractor lurching one way or the other. Finally it came to a rest, the tractor’s idling engine grumbling irritably at the way it had just been treated.
Bob leaned over Liam’s shoulder. ‘Recommendation: I should drive this vehicle.’
Liam nodded eagerly, slowly easing his vice-like grip of the throttle sticks. ‘Uh, yeah … I think that might be best.’
CHAPTER 80. 2001, New York
Devereau looked around him, for the moment not facing an adversary. The floor of the trench was already a squirming carpet of bodies, the dying and the dead, red, grey and blue tunics tangled with each other.
More British were dropping down into the trench, swinging the balance of numbers against Devereau’s men, a hundred different one-on-one duels becoming two-on-one.
We’re going to lose this trench … quickly.
Down the trench he could see Sergeant Freeman parrying and lunging with calm machine-like certainty. Behind the man a British soldier was getting ready to spike Freeman in the back. Devereau reached for his revolver, raised, aimed and fired it empty. Through the drifting smoke he saw the soldier drop and Freeman turn to see the fate he’d just narrowly escaped.
Devereau waved to join him and Freeman began to pick his way over the bodies, roughly shoving a couple of struggling men to one side before finally joining him. ‘Sir?’
‘This trench is lost. We need to sound a retreat to the horseshoe!’
Freeman nodded — his opinion as well, it seemed. ‘Aye, sir.’ The sergeant was reaching for the signal whistle on a chain, tucked into his breast pocket, when Devereau caught sight of new movement. The rear-most lip of the trench was suddenly lined with figures aiming guns down at them. He heard a voice give a command and at once the air was thick with clouds of gunsmoke and the deafening rattle of gunfire. Amid the elongated scrum of struggling men down the entire length of the borderline trench, men in red tunics were flung back against the muddy wall clutching ragged wounds.
Those British soldiers still standing as the gunfire started to falter and empty ammo clips pinged into the air began to disengage from their hand-to-hand duels and scramble back over the lip of the trench to beat a retreat down the slope.
Colonel Wainwright dropped down beside him. With a blood-rush roar he scrambled up the far side, firing his revolver wildly at the withdrawing British troops.
Reckless fool.
‘James! Get down!’
Volley fire from further down the slope brought Wainwright to his senses as plumes of dirt erupted beside him. He dropped back down with a whoop of excitement.
The rest of the men in the trench carried his whooping cry, and turned it into a regiment-wide jeer at the beaten redcoats, gathering back down on the shingle, taking cover in the relative safety of the craters, behind the ruined stumps of wall by the riverside.
Freeman spat the whistle out of his mouth, grinned at Devereau. ‘Hell, sir … we showed ’em some fight! Didn’t we, sir?’
‘Yes, we did that, Sergeant.’
He looked at Wainwright moving down among the men, swinging his sabre in the air triumphantly. ‘See to our wounded, Sergeant.’ He squeezed past Freeman and a dozen other men lofting their helmets above them on the tips of their bayonets.
‘Helmets back on, you fools!’ he shouted.
Finally, standing beside Wainwright: ‘Colonel! I thought the plan was for you to remain in the horseshoe! Whatever happened here?’
Wainwright shrugged guiltily. ‘True, but it would have been a shame to lose a trench so early in the battle, would it not, William?’
Devereau’s scowl eased. It would at that.
‘Well … it seems you came down at just the right moment.’
They watched the British troops rallying down on the shingle. Regimental sharpshooters firing off sporadic rounds up at the borderline to keep them from daring to press their attack down on them.
‘Fact is they have a toehold on this side now,’ he added.
Wainwright nodded. ‘We could charge them? They are still disorganized — we have the height and the element of surprise?’
‘But not the numbers. There are over a thousand men down there, and we have just under six hundred. Not enough. Our best bet is digging in and holding fast like ticks on a dog’s back.’
Both men watched the British over the top of their sandbags. Engineers were hastily detaching the landing-raft side-panels and assembling them on the shingle, creating rudimentary fortifications for them to huddle behind; their wounded were being dragged to the relative safety of covered positions to be treated by a field physician. Devereau marvelled at their discipline under fire, so quickly, efficiently, turning a complete rout into entrenchment, temporary defeat into consolidation.