corner of the station building ten paces ahead of Vicky, and stopped
abruptly.
Under the lean-to shelter, the angular shape of Miss Wobbly was
wreathed in furious petals of crimson flame, and the black oily smoke
poured from her hatches. The Gallas had reached her first. She had
clearly been one of their first targets, and dozens of them pranced
around her as she burned and then scattered as the Vickers ammunition
in the bins began exploding.
Sara had halted for only a second, but it was long enough for
Vicky to reach her.
"The cedar forest," gasped Sara, a hand on Vicky's arm as they changed
direction.
The forest was two hundred yards away across the tracks, but it was
dense and dark, covering the broken ground along the river. They raced
out into the open, and immediately twenty other Gallas took up the
chase, their voices raised in the pack clamour.
The open yard seemed to stretch to eternity as Vicky ran on ahead of
the Gallas. The ground was slushy, so that she sank to the ankles with
each step, and the clinging red mud sucked one of the shoes off her
foot. So she ran on lopsidedly her feet sliding and her knees turning
weak under her.
Sara raced on lightly ahead, leaping the steel railway track, and her
feet flying lightly over the muddy ground.
The edge of the forest was fifty feet away.
Vicky felt a foot catch as she tried to jump the tracks and she went
down sprawling in the mud. She dragged herself to her knees. On the
edge of the forest Sara looked back, hesitating, her eyes huge and
glistening white in her smooth dark face.
"Run," screamed Vicky. "Run. Tell Jake," and the girl was gone into
the dark forest, with only a flicker of her passing like a forest
doe.
The butt of a rifle struck Vicky in the side, below the ribs, and she
went down with an explosive grunt of pain into the cold red mud.
Then there were hands tearing at her clothing, and she tried to
fight,
but she was blinded by the clinging wet tresses of her hair, and
crippled with the pain of the blow. They hoisted her to her feet, and
suddenly a new authoritative voice cracked like a whiplash, and the
hands released her.
She lifted her head, hunched up over her bruised belly and side.
Through eyes blurred with tears and mud, she recognized the scarred
face of the Galla Captain. He still wore the blue sham ma sodden now
with rain, and the scar twisted his grin, making it seem even more
cruel and vicious.
The front edge of the trench had been reinforced with sandbags and
screened with brush, and through the square observation aperture the
view down the gorge was uninterrupted.
Gareth propped one shoulder against the sandbags and peered down into
the gathering gloom. Jake Barton squatted on the firing step beside
him and studied the Englishman's face. Gareth Swales's usually
immaculate turnout was now red with dried mud, and stained with
sweat,
rainwater and filth.
A thick golden stubble of beard covered his jaw like the pelt of an
otter, and his mustache was ragged and untrimmed. There had been no
opportunity to change clothing or bathe in the last week. There were
new lines etched deeply into the corners of his mouth, his forehead,
and around his eyes, lines of pain and worry, but when he glanced up
and caught Jake's scrutiny, he grinned and lifted an eyebrow, and the
old devilish gleam was in his eyes. He was about to speak when from
below them another shell came howling up through the deep shades of the
gorge, and both of them ducked instinctively as it burst in close, but
neither of them remarked. There had been hundreds of bursts that close
in the last days.
"It's breaking for certain," Gareth observed instead, and they both
looked up at the strip of sky that showed between the mountains.
"Yes," Jake agreed. "But it's too late. It will be dark in twenty
minutes." It would be too late for the bombers, even if the cloud
lifted completely. From bitter experience they knew how long it took
for the aircraft to reach them from the airfield at Chaldi.
"It will clear again tomorrow Gareth answered.
"Tomorrow is another day," Jake said, but his mind dwelt on the big
black machines. The Italian artillery fired smoke markers on to their
trenches just as soon as they heard the drone of approaching engines in
the open cloudless sky. The Capronis came in very low,
their wing-tips seeming to scrape the rocky walls on each side of the
gorge. The beat of their engines rose to an unbearable, ear-shattering
roar, and they were so close that they could make out the features of
the helmeted heads of the airmen in the round glass cockpits.
Then, as they flashed overhead, the black objects detached from under
their fuselage. The 100, kilo bombs dropped straight, their flight
controlled by the fins, and when they struck, the explosion shocked the
mind and numbed the body. In comparison the burst of an artillery
shell was a squib.
The canisters of nitrogen mustard were not aerodynamically stable,
and they tumbled end over end and burst against the rocky slopes in a
splash of yellow, jellylike liquid that sprayed for hundreds of feet in
