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?’
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.