High Citadel

I

O’Hara had lost his flask.

He thought that perhaps he had left it in the pocket of the leather jacket he had given Forester, but then he remembered going through the pockets first. He looked about the shelter, trying not to draw attention to himself, but still could not find it and decided that it must be up at the camp.

The loss worried him unreasonably. To have a full flask at his side had comforted him; he knew that whenever he wanted a drink then it was there ready to hand, and because it was there he had been able, in some odd way, to resist the temptation. But now he felt an aching longing in the centre of his being for a drink, for the blessed relief of alcohol and the oblivion it would bring.

It made him very short-tempered.

The night had been quiet. Since the abortive attempt to burn the bridge the previous evening, nothing had happened. Now, in the dawn light, he was wondering whether it would be safe to bring down the trebuchet. His resources in manpower were slender and to bring the trebuchet from the camp would leave the bridge virtually defenceless. True, the enemy was quiet, but that was no guarantee of future inactivity. He had no means of telling how long it would take them to obtain more timber and to transport it.

It was the common dilemma of the military man — trying to guess what the enemy was doing on the other side of the hill and balancing guesses against resources.

He heard the clatter of a stone and turned his head to find Benedetta coming towards him. He waved her back and slid down from his observation post. ‘Jenny has made coffee,’ she said. ‘I will keep watch. Has anything happened?’

He shook his head. ‘Everything’s quiet. They’re still there, of course; if you stick your neck out you’ll get your head blown off — so be careful.’ He paused; he badly needed to discuss his problems with someone else, not to shrug off responsibility but to clarify the situation in his own mind. He missed Forester.

He told Benedetta what he was thinking and she said immediately, ‘But, of course, I will come up to the camp.’

‘I might have known,’ he said unreasonably. ‘You won’t be separated from your precious uncle.’

‘It is not like that,’ she said sharply. ‘All you men are needed to bring down this machine, but what good can Jenny and I do down here? If we are attacked we can only run; and it does not take two to watch. Four can bring the machine from the camp quicker than three — even though one of them is a woman. If the enemy attacks in force Jenny will warn us.’

He said slowly, ‘We’ll have to take the risk, of course; we’ve got no choice. And the sooner we move the better.’

‘Send Jenny down quickly,’ said Benedetta. ‘I’ll wait for you at the pond.’

O’Hara went up to the shelter and was glad of the mug of steaming coffee that was thrust into his hands. In between gulps he rapidly detailed his plan and ended by saying, ‘It puts a great deal on your shoulders, Jenny. I’m sorry about that.’

‘I’ll be all right,’ she said quietly.

‘You can have two shots — no more,’ he said. ‘We’ll leave both bows cocked for you. If they start to work on the bridge, fire two bolts and then get up to the camp as fast as you can. With luck, the shots will slow them down enough for us to get back in time to fight them off. And for God’s sake don’t fire them both from the same place. They’re getting smart over there and they have all our favourite posts spotted.’

He surveyed the small group. ‘Any questions?’

Aguillar stirred. ‘So I am to return to the camp. I feel I am a drag on you; so far I have done nothing — nothing.’

‘God in heaven!’ exclaimed O’Hara. ‘You’re our kingpin — you’re the reason for all this. If we let them get you we’ll have fought for nothing.’

Aguillar smiled slowly. ‘You know as well as I do that I do not matter any more. True, it is me they want, but they cannot let you live as well. Did not Doctor Armstrong point out that very fact?’

Armstrong removed his pipe from his mouth. ‘That might be so, but you’re in no condition to fight,’ he said bluntly. ‘And while you’re down here you are taking O’Hara’s mind off his job. You’d be better out of the way up at the camp where you can do something constructive, like making new bolts.’

Aguillar bent his head. ‘I stand corrected and rightly so. I am sorry, Señor O’Hara, for making more trouble than I need.’

‘That’s all right,’ said O’Hara awkwardly. He felt sorry for Aguillar; the man had courage, but courage was not enough — or perhaps it was not the right kind of courage. Intellectual bravery was all very well in its place.

It was nearer three hours than two before they arrived at the camp, the slowness being caused by Aguillar’s physical weakness, and O’Hara was fretting about what could have happened at the bridge. At least he had heard no rifle fire, but the wind was blowing away from the mountains and he doubted if he would have heard it anyway. This added to his tension.

Willis met them. ‘Did Forester and Rohde get away all right — and our good friend Peabody?’ asked O’Hara.

‘They left before I awoke,’ said Willis. He looked up at the mountains. ‘They should be at the mine by now.’

Armstrong circled the trebuchet, making pleasurable noises. ‘I say, you’ve done a good job here, Willis.’

Willis coloured a little. ‘I did the best I could in the time we had — and with what we had.’

‘I can’t see how it can possibly work,’ said O’Hara.

Willis smiled. ‘Well, it’s stripped down for transport. It’s more or less upside-down now; we can wheel it down the road on the axle.’

Armstrong said, ‘I was thinking of the Russo-Finnish war; a bit out of my field, I know, but the Finns were in very much the same case as we are — dreadfully under-equipped and using their ingenuity to the utmost. I seem to remember they invented the Molotov Cocktail.’

O’Hara’s mind leapt immediately to the remaining drum of paraffin and to the empty bottles he had seen lying round the camp. ‘My God, you’ve done it again,’ he said. ‘Gather together all the bottles you can find.’

He strode across to the hut where the paraffin was stored, and Willis called after him, ‘It’s open — I was in there this morning.’

He pushed open the door and paused as he saw the crate of liquor. Slowly he bent down and pulled out a bottle. He cradled it in his hand, then held it up to the light; the clear liquid could have been water; but he knew the deception. This was the water of Lethe which brought blessed forgetfulness, which untied the knots in his soul. His tongue crept out to lick his lips.

He heard someone approaching the hut and quickly put the bottle on a shelf, pushing it behind a box and out of sight. When Benedetta came in he was bending over the paraffin drum, unscrewing the cap.

She was laden with empty bottles. ‘Willis said you wanted these. What are they for?’

‘We’re making bombs of a sort. We’ll need some strips of cloth to make wicks and stoppers; see if you can find something.’

He began to fill the bottles and presently Benedetta came back with the cloth and he showed her how to stuff the necks of the bottles, leaving an easily ignitable wick. ‘Where are the others?’ he asked.

‘Willis had an idea,’ she said. ‘Armstrong and my uncle are helping him.’

He filled another bottle. ‘Do you mind leaving your uncle up here alone?’

‘What else can we do?’ she asked. She bent her head. ‘He has always been alone. He never married, you know. And then he has known a different kind of loneliness — the loneliness of power.’

‘And have you been lonely — since...’

‘Since my family were killed?’ She looked up and there was something in her dark eyes that he could not fathom. ‘Yes, I have. I joined my uncle and we were two lonely people together in foreign countries.’ Her lips curved. ‘I think you are also a lonely man, Tim.’

‘I get along,’ he said shortly, and wiped his hands on a piece of rag.

She stood up. ‘What will you do when we leave here?’

‘Don’t you mean, if we leave here?’ He stood too and looked down at her upraised face. ‘I think I’ll move on; there’s nothing for me in Cordillera now. Filson will never forgive me for bending one of his aeroplanes.’

‘Is there nothing you want to stay for?’

Her lips were parted and on impulse he bent his head and kissed her. She clung to him and after a long moment he sighed. A sudden wonder had burst upon him and he said in surprise, ‘Yes, I think there is something to stay for.’

They stood together quietly for a few minutes, not speaking. It is in the nature of lovers to make plans, but what could they plan for? So there was nothing to say.

At last Benedetta said, ‘We must go, Tim. There is work to do.’

He released her. ‘I’ll see what the others are doing. You’d better throw the booze out of the liquor crate and put the paraffin bottles in it; we can strap it on to the trebuchet.’

He walked out of the hut and up to the other end of the camp to see what was happening. Halfway there he stopped in deep thought and cursed quietly. He had at last recognized the strange look in Benedetta’s eyes. It had been compassion.

He took a deep breath, then straightened his shoulders and walked forward again, viciously kicking at a stone. He heard voices to his left and tramped over to the hillside, where he saw Willis, Armstrong and Aguillar grouped round an old cable drum.

‘What’s all this?’ he asked abruptly.

‘Insurance,’ said Armstrong cheerfully. ‘In case the enemy gets across the bridge.’

Willis gave another bang with the rock he was holding and O’Hara saw he had hammered a wedge to hold the drum in position. ‘You know what this is,’ he said. ‘It’s one of those wooden drums used to transport heavy cable — looks like a big cotton reel, doesn’t it?’

It did indeed look like a cotton reel, eight feet in diameter. ‘Well?’ said O’Hara.

‘The wood is rotten, of course — it must have been standing in the open for years,’ said Willis. ‘But it’s heavy and it will roll. Take a few steps down the hill and tell me what you see.’

O’Hara walked down the hill and came to a steep drop, and found he was overlooking a cutting, blasted when the road was being made. Willis said from behind him, ‘The drum is out of sight of the road. We wait until a jeep or a truck is coming up, then we pull away the chocks and with a bit of luck we cause a smash and block the road.’

O’Hara looked back at Aguillar, whose grey face told of the exertions he had made. He felt anger welling up inside him and jerked his head curtly to Willis and Armstrong. He walked out of earshot of Aguillar, then said evenly, suppressing his anger, ‘I think it would be a good idea if we didn’t go off half-cocked on independent tracks.’

Willis looked surprised and his face flushed. ‘But—’

O’Hara cut him short. ‘It’s a bloody good idea, but you might have had some consultation about it. I could have helped to get the drum down into position and the old man could have filled paraffin bottles. You know he’s got a heart condition, and if he drops dead on us those swine on the other side of the river have won.’ He tapped Willis on the chest. ‘And I don’t intend to let that happen if I have to kill you, me and every other member of this party to get Aguillar away to safety.’

Willis looked shocked. ‘Speak for yourself, O’Hara,’ he said angrily. ‘I’m fighting for my own life.’

‘Not while I’m in command, you’re not. You’ll bloody well obey orders and you’ll consult me on everything you do.’

Willis flared up. ‘And who put you in command?’

‘I did,’ said O’Hara briefly. He stared at Willis. ‘Want to make an issue of it?’

‘I might,’ said Willis tightly.

O’Hara stared him down. ‘You won’t,’ he said with finality.

Willis’s eyes flickered away. Armstrong said quietly, ‘It would be a good idea if we didn’t fight among ourselves.’ He turned to Willis. ‘O’Hara is right, though; we shouldn’t have let Aguillar push the drum.’

‘Okay, okay,’ said Willis impatiently. ‘But I don’t go for this death-or-glory stuff.’

‘Look,’ said O’Hara. ‘You know what I think? I think I’m a dead man as I stand here right now. I don’t think we’ve a hope in hell of stopping those communist bastards crossing the bridge; we might slow them down but we can’t stop them. And once they get across they’ll hunt us down and slaughter us like pigs — that’s why I think I’m a dead man. It’s not that I particularly like Aguillar, but the communists want him and I’m out to stop them — that’s why I’m so tender of him.’

Willis had gone pale. ‘But what about Forester and Rohde?’

‘I think they’re dead too,’ said O’Hara coldly. ‘Have you any idea what it’s like up there? Look, Willis; I flew men and equipment for two Yankee mountaineering expeditions and one German. And with all their modern gadgets they failed in their objectives three-quarters of the time.’ He waved his arm at the mountains. ‘Hell, half these mountains don’t even have names, they’re so inaccessible.’

Armstrong said, ‘You paint a black picture, O’Hara.’

‘Is it a true picture?’

‘I fear it is,’ said Armstrong ruefully.

O’Hara shook his head irritably. ‘This isn’t doing any good. Let’s get that contraption down to the bridge.’

II

It was not as difficult as O’Hara anticipated getting the trebuchet down the mountain road. Willis had done a good job in mounting it for ease of transportation and it took only three hours to get back, the main difficulty being to manoeuvre the clumsy machine round the hairpin bends. At every bend he half expected to see Miss Ponsky running up to tell them that the communists had made their attack, but all was quiet and he did not even hear the crack of a rifle. Things were too quiet, he thought; maybe they were running out of ammunition — there was none of the desultory firing that had gone on the previous day.

They pushed the trebuchet off the road to the place indicated by Willis, and O’Hara said expressionlessly, ‘Benedetta, relieve Jenny; tell her to come up and see me.’

She looked at him curiously, but he had turned away to help Willis and Armstrong dismantle the trebuchet preparatory to erecting it as a weapon. They were going to mount it on a small knoll in order to get the height, so that the heavy weight on the shorter arm could have a good fall.

Miss Ponsky came up to him and told him that everything had been quiet. He thought for a moment and then said, ‘Did you hear any trucks?’

‘Not since they took away the jeep this morning.’

He rubbed his chin. ‘Maybe we hit them harder than we thought. You’re sure they’re still there?’

‘Oh, yes,’ she said brightly. ‘I had that thought myself some hours ago so I waggled something in full view.’ She blushed. ‘I put my hat on a stick — I’ve seen it done in old movies on TV.’

He smiled. ‘Did they hit it?’

‘No — but they came close.’

‘You’re doing all right, Jenny.’

‘You must be hungry — I’ll make a meal.’ Her lips twitched. ‘I think this is fun, you know.’ She turned and hurried up the road, leaving him standing dumbfounded. Fun!

Assembling the trebuchet took two hours and when it was completed Armstrong, begrimed but happy, said with satisfaction, ‘There, now; I never expected to see one of these in action.’ He turned to O’Hara. ‘Forester came upon me sketching a trebuchet for Willis; he asked if I were drawing the scales of justice and I said that I was. He must have thought me mad, but it was perceptive of him.’

He closed his eyes and recited as though quoting a dictionary entry. ‘From the medieval Latin trebuchetum; old French, trébuchet; a pair of scales, an assay balance.’ He opened his eyes and pointed. ‘You see the resemblance?’

O’Hara did see. The trebuchet looked like a warped balance, very much out of proportion, with one arm much longer than the other. He said, ‘Does this thing have much of a kick — much recoil?’

‘Nothing detectable; the impact is absorbed by the ground.’

O’Hara looked at the crazy system of ropes and pulleys. ‘The question is now — will the beast work?’

There was an edge of irritability to Willis’s voice. ‘Of course it will work. Let’s chuck this thing.’ He pointed to a round boulder about the size of a man’s head.

‘All right,’ said O’Hara. ‘Let’s give it a bang. What do we do?’

‘First we haul like hell on this rope,’ said Willis.

The rope was connected, through a three-part pulley arrangement, to the end of the long arm. As O’Hara and Willis pulled, the arm came down and the shorter arm with the weight rose into the air. The weight was a big, rusty iron bucket which Willis had found and filled with stones. As the long arm came to the ground, Armstrong stepped forward and threw over a lever and a wooden block dropped over the arm, holding it down. Willis picked up the boulder and placed it in the hub-cap which served as a cup.

‘We’re ready,’ he said. ‘I’ve already aligned the thing in the general direction of the bridge; we need someone down there to call the fall of the shot.’

‘I’ll go,’ said O’Hara. He walked across to where Benedetta was keeping watch and slid down beside her, being careful to keep his head down. ‘They’re going to let fly,’ he said.

She turned her head to look at the trebuchet. ‘Do you think this will work?’

‘I don’t know.’ He grimaced. ‘All I know is that it’s a hell of a way to fight a war.’

‘We’re ready,’ shouted Armstrong.

O’Hara waved and Armstrong pulled the firing lever sharply. The weight dropped and the long arm bearing the missile flipped up into the air. There was an almighty crash as the iron bucket hit the ground, but O’Hara’s attention was on the rock as it arched over his head. It was in the air a long time and went very high; then it reached the top of its trajectory and started to fall to earth, gaining speed appreciably as it plummeted. It fell far on the other side of the bridge, beyond the road and the burned vehicles, into the mountainside. A plume of dust fountained from the side of the hill to mark its fall.

‘Jesus!’ whispered O’Hara. ‘The thing has range.’ He slipped from his place and ran back. ‘Thirty yards over — fifteen to the right. How heavy was that rock?’

‘About thirty pounds,’ said Willis offhandedly. ‘We need a bigger one.’ He heaved on the trebuchet. ‘We’ll swing her a bit to the left.’

O’Hara could hear a babble of voices from across the river and there was a brief rattle of rifle fire. Or should I call it musketry? he thought, just to keep it in period. He laughed and smote Armstrong on the back. ‘You’ve done it again,’ he roared. ‘We’ll pound that bridge to matchwood.’

But it was not to prove as easy as he thought. It took an hour to fire the next six shots — and not one of them hit the bridge. They had two near misses and one that grazed the catenary rope on the left, making the bridge shiver from end to end. But there were no direct hits.

Curiously, too, there was no marked reaction from the enemy. A lot of running about and random shooting followed each attempt, but there was no coherent action. What could they do after all, O’Hara thought; nothing could stop the rocks once they were in flight.

‘Why can’t we get the range right — what the hell’s the matter with this thing?’ he demanded at last.

Armstrong said mildly, ‘I knew a trebuchet wasn’t a precision weapon, in a general way, of course; but this brings it home. It does tend to scatter a bit, doesn’t it?’

Willis looked worried. ‘There’s a bit of a whip in the arm,’ he said. ‘It isn’t stiff enough. Then again, we haven’t a standard shot; there are variations in weight and that causes the overs and unders. It’s the whip that’s responsible for the variations from side to side.’

‘Can you do anything about the whip in the arm?’

Willis shook his head. ‘A steel girder would help,’ he said ironically.

‘There must be some way of getting a standard weight of shot.’

So the ingenious Willis made a rough balance which, he said, would match one rock against another to the nearest half-pound. And they started again. Four shots later, they made the best one of the afternoon.

The trebuchet crashed again and a cloud of dust rose from where the bucket smashed into the ground. The long arm came over, just like a fast bowler at cricket, thought O’Hara, and the rock soared into the sky, higher and higher. Over O’Hara’s head it reached its highest point and began to fall, seeming to go true to its target. ‘This is it,’ said O’Hara urgently. ‘This is going to be a smash hit.’

The rock dropped faster and faster under the tug of gravity and O’Hara held his breath. It dropped right between the catenary ropes of the bridge and, to O’Hara’s disgust, fell plumb through the gap in the middle, sending a plume of white spray leaping from the boiling river to splash on the underside of the planking.

‘God Almighty!’ he howled. ‘A perfect shot — and in the wrong bloody place.’

But he had a sudden hope that what he had said to Willis up at the camp would prove to be wrong; that he was not a dead man — that the enemy would not get over the bridge — that they all had a fighting chance. As hope surged in him a knot of tension tightened in his stomach. When he had no hope his nerves had been taut enough, but the offer of continued life made life itself seem more precious and not to be lost or thrown away — and so the tension was redoubled. A man who considers himself dead has no fear of dying, but with hope came a trace of fear.

He went back to the trebuchet. ‘You’re a bloody fine artilleryman,’ he said to Willis in mock-bitter tones.

Willis bristled. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean what I say — you’re a bloody fine artilleryman. That last shot was perfect — but the bridge wasn’t there at that point. The rock went through the gap.’

Willis grinned self-consciously and seemed pleased. ‘It looks as though we’ve got the range.’

‘Let’s get at it,’ said O’Hara.

For the rest of the afternoon the trebuchet thumped and crashed at irregular intervals. They worked like slaves hauling on the ropes and bringing rocks to the balance. O’Hara put Miss Ponsky in charge of the balance and as the afternoon wore on they became expert at judging the weight — it was no fun to carry a forty-pound rock a matter of a couple of hundred yards, only to have it rejected by Miss Ponsky.

O’Hara kept an eye on his watch and recorded the number of shots, finding that the rate of fire had speeded up to above twelve an hour. In two and a half hours they fired twenty-six rocks and scored about seven hits; about one in four. O’Hara had seen only two of them land but what he saw convinced him that the bridge could not take that kind of pounding for long. It was a pity that the hits were scattered on the bridge — a concentration would have been better — but they had opened a new gap of two planks and several more were badly bent. It was not enough to worry a man crossing the bridge — not yet — but no one would take a chance with a vehicle.

He was delighted — as much by the fact that the enemy was helpless as by anything else. There was nothing they could do to stop the bridge being slowly pounded into fragments, short of bringing up a mortar to bombard the trebuchet. At first there had been the usual futile rifle-fire, but that soon ceased. Now there was merely a chorus of jeers from the opposite bank when a shot missed and a groan when a hit was scored.

It was half an hour from nightfall when Willis came to him and said, ‘We can’t keep this up. The beast is taking a hell of a battering — she’s shaking herself to pieces. Another two or three shots and she’ll collapse.’

O’Hara swore and looked at the grey man — Willis was covered in dust from head to foot. He said slowly, ‘I had hoped to carry on through the night — I wanted to ruin the bridge beyond repair.’

‘We can’t,’ said Willis flatly. ‘She’s loosened up a lot and there’s a split in the arm — it’ll break off if we don’t bind it up with something. If that happens the trebuchet is the pile of junk it started out as.’

O’Hara felt impotent fury welling up inside him. He turned away without speaking and walked several paces before he said over his shoulder, ‘Can you fix it?’

‘I can try,’ said Willis. ‘I think I can.’

‘Don’t try — don’t think. Fix it,’ said O’Hara harshly, as he walked away. He did not look back.

III

Night.

A sheath of thin mist filmed the moon, but O’Hara could still see as he picked his way among the rocks. He found a comfortable place in which to sit, his back resting against a vertical slab. In front of him was a rock shelf on which he carefully placed the bottle he carried. It reflected the misted moon deep in its white depths as though enclosing a nacreous pearl.

He looked at it for a long time.

He was tired; the strain of the last few days had told heavily on him and his sleep had been a matter of a few hours snatched here and there. But Miss Ponsky and Benedetta were now taking night watches and that eased the burden. Over by the bridge Willis and Armstrong were tinkering with the trebuchet, and O’Hara thought he should go and help them but he did not. To hell with it, he thought; let me have an hour to myself.

The enemy — the peculiarly faceless enemy — had once more brought up another jeep and the bridge was again well illuminated. They weren’t taking any chances of losing the bridge by a sudden fire-burning sortie. For two days they had not made a single offensive move apart from their futile barrages of rifle-fire. They’re cooking something up, he thought; and when it comes, it’s going to surprise us.

He looked at the bottle thoughtfully.

Forester and Rohde would be leaving the mine for the pass at dawn and he wondered if they would make it. He had been quite honest with Willis up at the camp — he honestly did not think they had a hope. It would be cold up there and they had no tent and, by the look of the sky, there was going to be a change in the weather. If they did not cross the pass — maybe even if they did — the enemy had won; the God of Battles was on their side because they had the bigger battalions.

With a deep sigh he picked up the bottle and unscrewed the cap, giving way to the lurking devils within him.

IV

Miss Ponsky said, ‘You know, I’m enjoying this — really I am.’

Benedetta looked up, startled. ‘Enjoying it!’

‘Yes, I am,’ said Miss Ponsky comfortably, ‘I never thought I’d have such an adventure.’

Benedetta said carefully, ‘You know we might all be killed?’

‘Oh, yes, child; I know that. But I know now why men go to war. It’s the same reason that makes them gamble, but in war they play for the highest stake of all — their own lives. It adds a certain edge to living.’

She pulled her coat closer about her and smiled. ‘I’ve been a school teacher for thirty years,’ she said. ‘And you know how folk think of spinster schoolmarms — they’re supposed to be prissy and sexless and unromantic, but I was never like that. If anything I was too romantic, surely too much so for my own good. I saw life in terms of old legends and historical novels, and of course life isn’t like that at all. There was a man, you know, once...’

Benedetta was silent, not wishing to break the thread of this curious revelation.

Miss Ponsky visibly pulled herself together. ‘Anyway, there I was — a very romantic young girl growing into middle age and rising a little in her profession. I became a headmistress — a sort of dragon to a lot of children. I suppose my romanticism showed a little by what I did in my spare time; I was quite a good fencer when I was younger, and of course, later there was the archery. But I wished I could have been a man and gone away and had adventures — men are so much freer, you know. I had almost given up hope when this happened.’

She chuckled happily. ‘And now here I am rising fifty-five and engaged in a desperate adventure. Of course I know I might be killed but it’s all worth it, every bit of it; it makes up for such a lot.’

Benedetta looked at her sadly. What was happening threatened to destroy her uncle’s hopes for their country and Miss Ponsky saw it in the light of dream-like romanticism, something from Robert Louis Stevenson to relieve the sterility of her life. She had jibbed at killing a man, but now she was blooded and would never look upon human life in the same light again. And when — or if — she went back home again, dear safe old South Bridge, Connecticut, would always seem a little unreal to her — reality would be a bleak mountainside with death coming over a bridge and a sense of quickened life as her blood coursed faster through parched veins.

Miss Ponsky said briskly, ‘But I mustn’t run on like this. I must go down to the bridge; I promised Mr O’Hara I would. He’s such a handsome young man, isn’t he? But he looks so sad sometimes.’

Benedetta said in a low voice, ‘I think he is unhappy.’

Miss Ponsky nodded wisely. ‘There has been a great grief in his life,’ she said, and Benedetta knew that she was casting O’Hara as a dark Byronic hero in the legend she was living. But he’s not like that, she cried to herself; he’s a man of flesh and blood, and a stupid man too, who will not allow others to help him, to share his troubles. She thought of what had happened up at the camp, of O’Hara’s kisses and the way she had been stirred by them — and then of his inexplicable coldness towards her soon afterwards. If he would not share himself, she thought, perhaps such a man was not for her — but she found herself wishing she was wrong.

Miss Ponsky went out of the shelter. ‘It’s becoming a little misty,’ she said. ‘We must watch all the more carefully.’

Benedetta said, ‘I’ll come down in two hours.’

‘Good,’ said Miss Ponsky gaily, and clattered her way down to the bridge.

Benedetta sat for a while repairing a rent in her coat with threads drawn out of the hem and using the needle which she always carried stuck in the lining of her handbag. The small domestic task finished, she thought, Tim’s shirt is torn — perhaps I can mend that.

He had been glumly morose during the evening meal and had gone away immediately afterwards to the right along the mountainside, away from the bridge. She had recognized that he had something on his mind and had not interrupted, but had marked the way he had gone. Now she got up and stepped out of the shelter.

She came upon him suddenly from behind after being guided by the clink of glass against stone. He was sitting gazing at the moon, the bottle in his hand, and was quietly humming a tune she did not know. The bottle was half-empty.

He turned as she stepped forward out of the shadows and held out the bottle. ‘Have a drink; it’s good for what ails you.’ His voice was slurred and furry.

‘No, thank you, Tim.’ She stepped down and sat beside him. ‘You have a tear in your shirt — I’ll mend it if you come back to the shelter.’

‘Ah, the little woman. Domesticity in a cave.’ He laughed humourlessly.

She indicated the bottle. ‘Do you think this is good — at this time?’

‘It’s good at this or any other time — but especially at this time.’ He waved the bottle. ‘Eat, drink and be merry — for tomorrow we certainly die.’ He thrust it at her. ‘Come on, have a snort.’

She took the proffered bottle and quickly smashed it against a rock. He made a movement as though to save it, and said, ‘What the hell did you do that for?’ in an aggrieved voice.

‘Your name is not Peabody,’ she said cuttingly.

‘What do you know about it? Peabody and I are old pals — bottle-babies, both of us.’ He stooped and groped. ‘Maybe it’s not all gone — there might be some to be saved.’ He jerked suddenly. ‘Damn, I’ve cut my bloody finger,’ he said and laughed hysterically. ‘Look, I’ve got a bloody finger.’

She saw the blood dripping from his hand, black in the moonlight. ‘You’re irresponsible,’ she said. ‘Give me your hand.’ She lifted her skirt and ripped at her slip, tearing off a strip of cloth for a bandage.

O’Hara laughed uproariously. ‘The classic situation,’ he said. ‘The heroine bandages the wounded hero and does all the usual things that Hollywood invented. I suppose I should turn away like the gent I’m supposed to be, but you’ve got nice legs and I like looking at them.’

She was silent as she bandaged his finger. He looked down at her dark head and said, ‘Irresponsible? I suppose I am. So what? What is there to be responsible for? The world can go to hell in a hand-basket for all I care.’ He crooned. ‘Naked came I into the world and naked I shall go out of it — and what lies between is just a lot of crap.’

‘That’s a sad philosophy of life,’ she said, not raising her head.

He put his hand under her chin to lift her head and stared at her. ‘Life? What do you know about life? Here you are — fighting the good fight in this crummy country — and for what? So that a lot of stupid Indians can have something that, if they had any guts at all, they’d get for themselves. But there’s a big world outside which is always interfering — and you’ll kowtow to Russia or America in the long run; you can’t escape that fate. If you think that you’ll be masters in your own country, you’re even more stupid than I thought you were.’

She met his eyes steadily. In a quiet and tranquil voice she said, ‘We can try.’

‘You’ll never do it,’ he answered, and dropped his hand. ‘This is a world of dog eat dog and this country is one of the scraps that the big dogs fight over. It’s a world of eat or be eaten — kill or be killed.’

‘I don’t believe that,’ she said.

He gave a short laugh. ‘Don’t you? Then what the hell are we doing here? Why don’t we pack up our things and just go home? Let’s pretend there’s no one on the other side of the river who wants to kill us on sight.’

She had no answer to that. He put his arm round her and she felt his hand on her knee, moving up her thigh under her skirt. She struggled loose and hit him with her open palm as hard as she could. He looked at her and there was a shocked expression in his eyes as he rubbed his cheek.

She cried, ‘You are one of the weak ones, Tim O’Hara, you are one of those who are killed and eaten. You have no courage and you always seek refuge — in the bottom of a bottle, in the arms of a woman, what does it matter? You’re a pitiful, twisted man.’

‘Christ, what do you know about me?’ he said, stung by the contempt in her voice but knowing that he liked her contempt better than her compassion.

‘Not much. And I don’t particularly like what I know. But I do know that you’re worse than Peabody — he’s a weak man who can’t help it; you’re a strong man who refuses to be strong. You spend all your time staring at your own navel in the belief that it’s the centre of the universe, and you have no human compassion at all.’

‘Compassion?’ he shouted. ‘I have no need of your compassion — I’ve no time for people who are sorry for me. I don’t need it.’

‘Everyone needs it,’ she retorted. ‘We’re all afraid — that’s the human predicament, to be afraid, and any man who says he isn’t is a liar.’ In a quieter voice she went on, ‘You weren’t always like this, Tim — what caused it?’

He dropped his head into his hands. He could feel something breaking within him; there was a shattering and a crumbling of his defences, the walls he had hidden behind for so long. He had just realized the truth of what Benedetta said; that his fear was not an abnormality but the normal situation of mankind and that it was not weakness to admit it.

He said in a muffled voice, ‘Good Christ, Benedetta, I’m frightened — I’m scared of falling into their hands again.’

‘The communists?’

He nodded.

‘What did they do to you?’

So he told her and in the telling her face went white. He told her of the weeks of lying naked in his own filth in that icy cell; of the enforced sleeplessness, the interminable interrogations; of the blinding lamps and the electric shocks; of Lieutenant Feng. ‘They wanted me to confess to spreading plague germs,’ he said. He raised his head and she saw the streaks of tears in the moonlight. ‘But I didn’t; it wasn’t true, so I didn’t.’ He gulped. ‘But I nearly did.’

In her innermost being she felt a scalding contempt for herself — she had called this man weak. She cradled his head to her breast and felt the deep shudders which racked him. ‘It’s all right now, Tim,’ she said. ‘It’s all right.’

He felt a draining of himself, a purging of the soul in the catharsis of telling to another human being that which had been locked within him for so long. And in a strange way, he felt strengthened and uplifted as he got rid of all the psychic pus that had festered in his spirit. Benedetta took the brunt of this verbal torrent calmly, comforting him with disconnected, almost incoherent endearments. She felt at once older and younger than he, which confused her and made her uncertain of what to do.

At last the violence of his speech ebbed and gradually he fell silent, leaning back against the rock as though physically exhausted. She held both his hands and said, ‘I’m sorry, Tim — for what I said.’

He managed a smile. ‘You were right — I have been a thorough bastard, haven’t I?’

‘With reason.’

‘I must apologize to the others,’ he said. ‘I’ve been riding everybody too hard.’

She said carefully, ‘We aren’t chess pieces, Tim, to be moved as though we had no feelings. And that’s what you have been doing, you know; moving my uncle, Willis and Armstrong — Jenny, too — as though they were just there to solve the problem. You see, it isn’t only your problem — it belongs to all of us. Willis has worked harder than any of us; there was no need to behave towards him as you did when the trebuchet broke down.’

O’Hara sighed. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘But it seemed the last straw. I was feeling bloody-minded about everything just then. But I’ll apologize to him.’

‘A better thing would be to help him.’

He nodded. ‘I’ll go now.’ He looked at her and wondered if he had alienated her for ever. It seemed to him that no woman could love him who knew about him what this woman knew. But then Benedetta smiled brilliantly at him, and he knew with relief that everything was going to be all right.

‘Come,’ she said. ‘I’ll walk with you as far as the shelter.’ She felt an almost physical swelling pain in her bosom, a surge of wild, unreasonable happiness, and she knew that she had been wrong when she had felt that Tim was not for her. This was the man with whom she would share her life — for as long as her life lasted.

He left her at the shelter and she kissed him before he went on. As she saw the dark shadow going away down the mountain she suddenly remembered and called, ‘What about the tear in your shirt?’

His answer came back almost gaily. ‘Tomorrow,’ he shouted, and went on to the glimmer of light where Willis was working against time.

V

The morning dawned mistily but the rising sun soon burned away the haze. They held a dawn conference by the trebuchet to decide what was to be done next. ‘What do you think?’ O’Hara asked Willis. ‘How much longer will it take?’

Armstrong clenched his teeth round the stem of his pipe and observed O’Hara with interest. Something of note had happened to this young man; something good. He looked over to where Benedetta was keeping watch on the bridge — her radiance this morning had been unbelievable, a shining effulgence that cast an almost visible glow about her. Armstrong smiled — it was almost indecent how happy these two were.

Willis said, ‘It’ll be better now we can see what we’re doing. I give us another couple of hours.’ His face was drawn and tired.

‘We’ll get to it,’ said O’Hara. He was going to continue but he paused suddenly, his head on one side. After a few seconds Armstrong also caught what O’Hara was listening to — the banshee whine of a jet plane approaching fast.

It was on them suddenly, coming low up-river. There was a howl and a wink of shadow as the aircraft swept over them to pull up into a steep climb and a sharp turn. Willis yelled, ‘They’ve found us — they’ve found us.’ He began to jump up and down in a frenzy of excitement, waving his arms.

‘It’s a Sabre,’ O’Hara shouted. ‘And it’s coming back.’

They watched the plane reach the top of its turning climb and come back at them in a shallow dive. Miss Ponsky screamed at the top of her voice, her arms going like a semaphore, but O’Hara said suddenly, ‘I don’t like this — everyone scatter — take cover.’

He had seen aircraft behave like that in Korea, and he had done it himself; it had all the hallmarks of the beginning of a strafing attack.

They scattered like chickens at the sudden onset of a hawk and again the Sabre roared over, but there was no chatter of guns — just the diminishing whine of the engine as it went away down river. Twice more it came over them and the tough grass standing in clumps trembled stiff stems in the wake of its passage. And then it was gone in a long, almost vertical climb heading west over the mountains.

They came out of cover and stood in a group looking towards the peaks. Willis was the first to speak. ‘Damn you,’ he shouted at O’Hara. ‘Why did you make us hide? That plane must have been searching for us.’

‘Was it?’ asked O’Hara. ‘Benedetta, does Cordillera have Sabres in the Air Force?’

‘That was an Air Force fighter,’ she said. ‘I don’t know which squadron.’

‘I missed the markings,’ said O’Hara. ‘Did anyone get them?’

No one had.

‘I’d like to know which squadron that was,’ mused O’Hara. ‘It could make a difference.’

‘I tell you it was part of the search,’ insisted Willis.

‘Nothing doing,’ said O’Hara. ‘The pilot of that plane knew exactly where to come — he wasn’t searching. Someone had given him a pinpoint map position. There was nothing uncertain about his passes over us. We didn’t tell him; Forester didn’t tell him — they’re only just leaving the mine now — so who did?’

Armstrong used his pipe as a pointer. They did,’ he said, and pointed across the river. ‘We must assume that it means nothing good.’

O’Hara was galvanized into activity. ‘Let’s get this bloody beast working again. I want that bridge ruined as soon as possible. Jenny, take a bow and go downriver to where you can get a good view of the road where it bends away. If anyone comes through, take a crack at them and then get back here as fast as you can. Benedetta, you watch the bridge — the rest of us will get cracking here.’

Willis had been too optimistic, because two hours went by and the trebuchet was still in pieces and far from being in working order. He wiped a grimy hand across his face. ‘It’s not so bad now — another hour will see it right.’

But they did not get another hour. Benedetta called out, ‘I can hear trucks.’ Following immediately upon her words came the rattle of rifle shots from downriver and another sound that chilled O’Hara — the unmistakable rat-a-tat of a machine-gun. He ran over to Benedetta and said breathlessly, ‘Can you see anything?’

‘No,’ she answered; then, ‘Wait — yes, three trucks — big ones.’

‘Come down,’ said O’Hara. ‘I want to see this.’

She climbed down from among the rocks and he took her place. Coming up the road at a fast clip and trailing a cloud of dust was a big American truck and behind it another, and another. The first one was full of men, at least twenty of them, all armed with rifles. There was something odd about it that O’Hara could not at first place, then he saw the deep skirting of steel plate below the truck body which covered the petrol tank. The enemy was taking precautions.

The truck pulled to a halt by the bridge and the men piled out, being careful to keep the truck between themselves and the river. The second truck stopped behind; this was empty of men apart from two in the cab, and O’Hara could not see what the covered body contained. The third truck also contained men, though not as many, and O’Hara felt cold as he saw the light machine-gun being unloaded and taken hurriedly to cover.

He turned and said to Benedetta, ‘Give me that bow, and get the others over here.’ But when he turned back there was no target for him; the road and mountainside opposite seemed deserted of life, and the three trucks held no profit for him.

Armstrong and Willis came up and he told them what was happening. Willis said, ‘The machine-gun sounds bad, I know, but what can they do with it that they can’t do with the rifles they’ve got? It doesn’t make us much worse off.’

‘They can use it like a hose-pipe,’ said O’Hara. ‘They can squirt a steam of bullets and systematically hose down the side of the gorge. It’s going to be bloody dangerous using the crossbow from now on.’

‘You say the second truck was empty,’ observed Armstrong thoughtfully.

‘I didn’t say that; I said it had no men. There must be something in there but the top of the body is swathed in canvas and I couldn’t see.’ He smiled sourly. ‘They’ve probably got a demountable mountain howitzer or a mortar in there — and if they have anything like that we’ve had our chips.’

Armstrong absently knocked his pipe against a rock, forgetting it was empty. ‘The thing to do now is have a parley,’ he said unexpectedly. ‘There never was a siege I studied where there wasn’t a parley somewhere along the line.’

‘For God’s sake, talk sense,’ said O’Hara. ‘You can only parley when you’ve got something to offer. These boys are on top and they know it; why should they parley? Come to that — why should we? We know they’ll offer us the earth, and we know damned well they’ll not keep their promises — so what’s the use?’

‘We have something to offer,’ said Armstrong calmly. ‘We have Aguillar — they want him, so we’ll offer him.’ He held up his hands to silence the others’ protests. ‘We know what they’ll offer us — our lives, and we know what their promises are worth, but that doesn’t matter. Oh, we don’t give them Aguillar, but with a bit of luck we can stretch the parley out into a few hours, and who knows what a few hours may mean later on?’

O’Hara thought about it. ‘What do you think, Willis?’

Willis shrugged. ‘We don’t stand to lose anything,’ he said, ‘and we stand to gain time. Everything we’ve done so far has been to gain time.’

‘We could get the trebuchet into working order again,’ mused O’Hara. ‘That alone would be worth it. All right, let’s try it out.’

‘Just a minute,’ said Armstrong. ‘Is anything happening across there yet?’

O’Hara looked across the gorge; everything was still and quiet. ‘Nothing.’

‘I think we’d better wait until they start to do something,’ counselled Armstrong. ‘It’s my guess that the new arrivals and the old guard are in conference; they may take a while and there’s no point in breaking it up. Any time we gain is to our advantage, so let’s wait awhile.’

Benedetta, who was standing by quietly, now spoke. ‘Jenny hasn’t come back yet.’

O’Hara whirled. ‘Hasn’t she?’

Willis said, ‘Perhaps she’ll have been hit; that machinegun...’ His voice tailed away.

‘I’ll go and see,’ said Benedetta.

‘No,’ said O’Hara sharply. ‘I’ll go — she may need to be carried and you can’t do that. You’d better stay here on watch and the others can get on with repairing the trebuchet.’

He plunged away and ran across the level ground, skirting the bridgehead where there was no cover and began to clamber among the rocks on the other side, making his way downriver. He had a fair idea of the place Miss Ponsky would have taken and he made straight for it. As he went he swore and cursed under his breath; if she had been killed he would never forgive himself.

It took him over twenty minutes to make the journey — good time considering the ground was rough — but when he arrived at the most likely spot she was not there. But there were three bolts stuck point first in the ground and a small pool of sticky blood staining the rock.

He bent down and saw another blood-spot and then another. He followed this bloody spoor and back-tracked a hundred yards before he heard a weak groan and saw Miss Ponsky lying in the shadow of a boulder, her hand clutching her left shoulder. He dropped to his knee beside her and lifted her head. ‘Where were you hit, Jenny? In the shoulder?’

Her eyes flickered open and she nodded weakly.

‘Anywhere else?’

She shook her head and whispered, ‘Oh, Tim, I’m sorry. I lost the bow.’

‘Never mind that,’ he said, and ripped the blouse from her shoulder, careful not to jerk her. He sighed in relief; the wound was not too bad, being through the flesh part of the shoulder and not having broken the bone so far as he could judge. But she had lost a lot of blood and that had weakened her, as had the physical shock.

She said in a stronger voice, ‘But I shouldn’t have lost it — I should have held on tight. It fell into the river, Tim; I’m so sorry.’

‘Damn the bow,’ he said. ‘You’re more important.’ He plugged the wound on both sides with pieces torn from his shirt, and made a rough bandage. ‘Can you walk?’

She tried to walk and could not, so he said cheerfully, ‘Then I’ll have to carry you — fireman’s lift. Up you come.’ He slung her over his shoulder and slowly made his way back to the bridge. By the time he got to the shelter and delivered her to Benedetta she was unconscious again.

‘All the more need for a parley,’ he said grimly to Armstrong. ‘We must get Jenny on her feet again and capable of making a run for it. Has anything happened across there?’

‘Nothing. But we’ve nearly finished the trebuchet.’

It was not much later that two men began to strip the canvas from the second truck and O’Hara said, ‘Now we give it a go.’ He filled his lungs and shouted in Spanish, ‘Señors — Señors! I wish to speak to your leader. Let him step forward — we will not shoot.’

The two men stopped dead and looked at each other. Then they stared across the gorge, undecided. O’Hara said, in a sardonic aside to Armstrong, ‘Not that we’ve got much to shoot with.’

The men appeared to make up their minds. One of them ran off and presently the big man with the beard appeared from among the rocks, climbed down and walked to the abutments of the bridge. He shouted, ‘Is that Señor Aguillar?’

‘No,’ shouted O’Hara, changing into English. ‘It is O’Hara.’

‘Ah, the pilot.’ The big man responded in English, rather startling O’Hara with his obvious knowledge of their identities. ‘What do you want, Señor O’Hara?’

Benedetta had returned to join them and now said quickly, ‘This man is not a Cordilleran; his accent is Cuban.’

O’Hara winked at her. ‘Señor Cuban, why do you shoot at us?’

The big man laughed jovially. ‘Have you not asked Señor Aguillar? Or does he still call himself Montes?’

‘Aguillar is nothing to do with me,’ called O’Hara. ‘His fight is not mine — and I’m tired of being shot at.’

The Cuban threw back his head and laughed again, slapping his thigh. ‘So?’

‘I want to get out of here.’

‘And Aguillar?’

‘You can have him. That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?’

The Cuban paused as though thinking deeply, and O’Hara said to Benedetta, ‘When I pinch you, scream your head off.’ She looked at him in astonishment, then nodded.

‘Bring Aguillar to the bridge and you can go free, Señor O’Hara.’

‘What about the girl?’ asked O’Hara.

‘The girl we want too, of course.’

O’Hara pinched Benedetta in the arm and she uttered a blood-curdling scream, artistically chopping it off as though a hand had been clapped to her mouth. O’Hara grinned at her and waited a few moments before he raised his voice. ‘Sorry, Señor Cuban; we had some trouble.’ He let caution appear in his tone. ‘I’m not the only one here — there are others.’

‘You will all go free,’ said the big man with an air of largesse. ‘I myself will escort you to San Croce. Bring Aguillar to the bridge now; let us have him and you can all go.’

‘That is impossible,’ O’Hara protested. ‘Aguillar is at the upper camp. He went there when he saw what was happening here at the bridge. It will take time to bring him down.’

The Cuban lifted his head suspiciously. ‘Aguillar ran away?’ he asked incredulously.

O’Hara swore silently; he had not thought that Aguillar would be held in such respect by his enemies. He quickly improvised. ‘He was sent away by Rohde, his friend. But Rohde has been killed by your machine-gun.’

‘Ah, the man who shot at us on the road just now.’ The Cuban looked down at his tapping foot, apparently undecided. Then he lifted his head. ‘Wait, Señor O’Hara.’

‘How long?’

‘A few minutes, that is all.’ He walked up the road and disappeared among the rocks.

Armstrong said, ‘He’s gone to consult with his second-in-command.’

‘Do you think he’ll fall for it?’

‘He might,’ said Willis. ‘It’s an attractive proposition. You baited it well — he thinks that Rohde has been keeping us in line and that now he’s dead we’re about to collapse. It was very well done.’

The Cuban was away for ten minutes, then he came back to the bridge accompanied by another man, a slight swarthy Indian type. ‘Very well,’ he called. ‘As the norteamericanos say, you have made a deal. How long to bring Aguillar?’

‘It’s a long way,’ shouted O’Hara. ‘It will take some time — say, five hours.’

The two men conferred and then the Cuban shouted, ‘All right, five hours.’

‘And we have an armistice?’ shouted O’Hara. ‘No shooting from either side?’

‘No shooting,’ promised the Cuban.

O’Hara sighed. ‘That’s it. We must get the trebuchet finished. We’ve got five hours’ grace. How’s Jenny, Benedetta?’

‘She will be all right. I gave her some hot soup and wrapped her in a blanket. She must be kept warm.’

‘Five hours isn’t a long time,’ said Armstrong. ‘I know we were lucky to get it, but it still isn’t long. Maybe we can string it out a little longer.’

‘We can try,’ said O’Hara. ‘But not for much longer. They’ll get bloody suspicious when the five hours have gone and we haven’t produced Aguillar.’

Armstrong shrugged. ‘What can they do that they haven’t been trying to do for the last three days?’

VI

The day wore on.

The trebuchet was repaired and O’Hara made plans for the rage that was to come. He said, ‘We have one crossbow and a pistol with one bullet — that limits us if it comes to infighting. Benedetta, you take Jenny up to the camp as soon as she can walk. She won’t be able to move fast, so you’d better get a head start in case things blow up here. I still don’t know what they’ve got in the second truck, but it certainly isn’t intended to do us any good.’

So Benedetta and Miss Ponsky went off, taking a load of Molotov cocktails with them. Armstrong and O’Hara watched the bridge, while Willis tinkered with the trebuchet, doing unnecessary jobs. On the other side of the river men had popped out from among the rocks, and the hillside seemed alive with them as they unconcernedly smoked and chatted. It reminded O’Hara of the stories he had heard of the first Christmas of the First World War.

He counted the men carefully and compared notes with Armstrong. ‘I make it thirty-three,’ he said.

‘I get thirty-five,’ said Armstrong. ‘But I don’t suppose the difference matters.’ He looked at the bowl of his pipe. ‘I wish I had some tobacco,’ he said irritably.

‘Sorry, I’m out of cigarettes.’

‘You’re a modern soldier,’ said Armstrong. ‘What would you do in their position? I mean, how would you handle the next stage of the operation?’

O’Hara considered. ‘We’ve done the bridge a bit of no good with the trebuchet, but not enough. Once they’ve got that main gap repaired they can start rushing men across, but not vehicles. I’d make a rush and form a bridgehead at this end, spreading out along this side of the gorge where we are now. Once they’ve got us away from here it won’t be much trouble to repair the rest of the bridge to the point where they can bring a couple of jeeps over. Then I’d use the jeeps as tanks, ram them up to the mine as fast as possible — they’d be there before we could arrive on foot. Once they hold both ends of the road where can we retreat to? There’s not a lot we can do about it — that’s the hell of it.’

‘Um,’ said Armstrong glumly. ‘That’s the appreciation I made.’ He rolled over on his back. ‘Look, it’s clouding over.’

O’Hara turned and looked up at the mountains. A dirty grey cloud was forming and had already blotted out the higher peaks and now swirled in misty coils just above the mine. ‘That looks like snow,’ he said. ‘If there was ever a chance of a real air-search looking for and finding us, it’s completely shot now. And it must have caught Ray flatfooted.’ He shivered. ‘I wouldn’t like to be in their boots.’

They watched the cloud for some time and suddenly Armstrong said, ‘It may be all right for us, though; I believe it’s coming low. We could do with a good, thick mist.’

When the truce had but one hour to go the first grey tendrils of mist began to curl about the bridge and O’Hara sat up as he heard a motor engine. A new arrival pulled up behind the trucks, a big Mercedes saloon car out of which got a man in trim civilian clothes. O’Hara stared across the gorge as the man walked to the bridge and noted the short square build and the broad features. He nudged Armstrong. ‘The commissar has arrived,’ he said.

‘A Russian?’

‘I’d bet you a pound to a pinch of snuff,’ said O’Hara.

The Russian — if such he was — conferred with the Cuban and an argument seemed to develop, the Cuban waving his arms violently and the Russian stolidly stonewalling with his hands thrust deep into his coat pockets. He won the argument for the Cuban suddenly turned away and issued a string of rapid orders and the hillside on the other side of the gorge became a sudden ants’ nest of activity.

The idling men disappeared behind the rocks again and it was as though the mountain had swallowed them. With frantic speed four men finished stripping the canvas from the second truck and the Cuban shouted to the Russian and waved his arms. The Russian, after one long look over the gorge, nonchalantly turned his back and strolled towards his car.

‘By God, they’re going to break the truce,’ said O’Hara tightly. He grabbed the loaded crossbow as the machine-gun suddenly ripped out and stitched the air with bullets. ‘Get back to the trebuchet.’ He aimed the bow carefully at the Russian’s back, squeezed the trigger and was mortified to miss. He ducked to reload and heard the crash of the trebuchet behind him as Willis pulled the firing lever.

When he raised his head again he found that the trebuchet shot had missed and he paled as he saw what had been pulled out of the truck. It was a prefabricated length of bridging carried by six men who had already set foot on the bridge itself. Following them was a squad of men running at full speed. There was nothing that a single crossbow bolt could do to stop them and there was no time to reload the trebuchet — they would be across the bridge in a matter of seconds.

He yelled at Willis and Armstrong. ‘Retreat! Get back up the road — to the camp!’ and ran towards the bridgehead, bow at the ready.

The first man was already across, scuttling from side to side, a sub-machine-gun at the ready. O’Hara crouched behind a rock and took aim, waiting until the man came closer. The mist was thickening rapidly and it was difficult to judge distances, so he waited until he thought the man was twenty yards away before he pulled the trigger.

The bolt took the man full in the chest, driving home right to the fletching. He shouted in a bubbling voice and threw his hands up as he collapsed, and the tightening death grip on the gun pulled the trigger. O’Hara saw the rest of the squad coming up behind him and the last thing he saw before he turned and ran was the prone figure on the ground quivering as the sub-machine-gun fired its magazine at random.