With any luck, Pearson hoped, the crossing would now be called off and they would be ordered to withdraw into the hills. He shivered in his ragged uniform. Corporal Benson had pulled the trousers off a dead Marine machine-gunner the previous morning, and there had been no time to wash out the blood caked across the thighs and waist.
Behind the memorial was the sandbagged entrance of the storage tunnel. Here Sergeant Tulloch and the seventeenyear-old lieutenant sent up overnight from the youth cadre were working on the field radio, rewiring the headphones and battery. Around the emplacement Pearson’s thirty men sat over their weapons, ammunition boxes and telephone wire piled around their feet. Exhausted by the ambush, they would have little energy left for a river crossing.
‘Sergeant… Sergeant Tulloch!’ Pearson called out, deliberately coarsening his over-precise schoolmaster’s voice. As he half-expected, Tulloch ignored the shout. A pair of copper terminals clamped in his sharp mouth, he went on splicing the frayed wire. Although Pearson was in command of the guerilla unit, its real initiative came from the Scotsman. A regular in the Gordon Highlanders before the American landings six years earlier, the sergeant had joined the first rebel bands that formed the nucleus of the National Liberation Army. As Tulloch himself openly boasted, he had been drawn to the insurgent army chiefly by the prospect of killing the English. Pearson often wondered how far the sergeant still identified him with the puppet regime in London propped up by the American occupation forces.
As he climbed out of the slit trench gunfire flickered from the central traverse of the motor-bridge. Pearson waited behind the plinth of the memorial. He listened to the roar of heavy howitzers firing from the American enclave five miles to the west. Here nine hundred Marine artillerymen had been holding out for months against two divisions of rebel troops. Supported from the air by helicopter drops, the Americans fought on from their deep bunkers, firing thousands of rounds a day from their seventy guns. The meadows around the enclave formed the landscape of a drowned moon.
The shell whined away through the damp air, the explosions lifting the broken soil. Between the impacts came the rattle of small-arms fire as the attack went in across the bridge. Slinging his Sten gun over his narrow shoulders, Pearson ran back to the tunnel.
‘What’s holding us up, Sergeant? This radio should have been checked at Battalion.’
He reached out to the mud-splattered console, but Tulloch pushed his hand away with the spanner. Ignoring the young lieutenant’s selfconscious salute, Tulloch snapped: ‘I’ll have it ready in time, Major. Or are you wanting to withdraw now?’
Avoiding the lieutenant’s eyes, Pearson said: ‘We’ll follow orders, Sergeant, when and if you repair this set.’
‘I’ll repair it, Major. Don’t worry yourself about that.’
Pearson unfastened the chin-strap of his helmet. During their three months together the sergeant had clearly decided that Pearson had lost heart. Of course Tulloch was right. Pearson looked around the fortified position shielded from the air by the ragged willows, counting the pinched faces of the men huddled beside the field stove. Dressed in ragged uniforms held together with American webbing, living for months in holes in the ground, under-fed and under-armed, what kept them going? Not hatred of the Americans, few of whom, apart from the dead, they had ever seen. Secure within their bases, and protected by an immense technology of warfare, the American expeditionary forces were as remote as some archangelic legion on the day of Armageddon.
If anything, it was fortunate that the Americans were spread so thinly on the ground, or the entire liberation front would long since have been wiped out. Even with twenty million men under arms, the Americans could spare fewer than 200,000 soldiers for the British Isles, a remote backwater in their global war against dozens of national liberation armies.
The underground free radio system which Pearson and Tulloch listened to at night as they huddled in their tunnels below the searching helicopters reported continuous fighting from the Pyrenees to the Bavarian Alps, the Caucasus to Karachi. Thirty years after the original conflict in south-east Asia, the globe was now a huge insurrectionary torch, a world Vietnam.
‘Benson!’ The corporal limped over, his captured carbine heavy in his thin arms. Pearson waved with a show of temper at the men slumped against the sandbags. ‘Corporal, in half an hour we’re going into an attack! At least keep them awake!’
With a tired salute, the corporal went off round the emplacement, half-heartedly nudging the men with his boot. Pearson stared through the trees at the river line. To the north, near the ruined castle at Windsor, columns of smoke rose below the helicopters as they plunged and dived, firing their rockets into the ragged forests that had grown among the empty surburban streets. In this immense plain of violence only the meadow below with its leaking river seemed quiet. The water ebbed around the personnel carrier, stirring the legs of the corpses. Without thinking, Pearson started to count his men again. They would have to run across the open ground, ford the river and penetrate the line of trees on the opposite bank. Perhaps the Americans were sitting there with their rapid-fire Gatlings, waiting for them to break cover.
‘…Major Pearson.’ The lieutenant touched his elbow. ‘You wanted to see the prisoners.’
‘Right. We’ll have another go at them.’ Pearson followed the boy around the memorial. The presence of this young man barely older than his pupils at the mountain school in the north of Scotland — gave Pearson some kind of encouragement. Already his age had begun to tell doubly against him. Over the years the losses in manpower had been so great, a million soldiers and a further million civilians dead, that older men were put in the more dangerous roles, saving the young for whatever peace would one day come.
The three Americans were behind the memorial, guarded by a soldier with a Bren gun. Lying on his back was a Negro sergeant who had been shot through the chest. His arms and shoulders were caked with blood, and he breathed unevenly through the thick crust on his mouth and chin. Leaning against him was a young private hunched over the knapsack on his knees. His tired student’s eyes stared down at his manacled wrists, as if unable to grasp the fact of his own capture.
The third prisoner was a captain, the only officer in the ambushed patrol, a slimly built man with grey crew-cut hair and a soft but intelligent face. In spite of his uniform and webbing he looked less like a combat soldier than a war correspondent or observer. Telephone wire was lashed around his wrists, forcing him to hold his elbows together. Nevertheless he was watching closely the preparations for the coming attack. Pearson could see him counting the men and weapons, the two machine-guns and ammunition boxes.
As these sharp blue eyes turned to examine Pearson, running over his decrepit uniform and equipment, Pearson felt a surge of resentment at these intelligent and self-confident men who had occupied the world with their huge expeditionary armies. The American was looking at him with that same surprise Pearson had seen on prisoners’ faces before, a genuine amazement that these ragged little men could go on fighting for so long. Even the term the Americans used to describe the rebel soldiers, ‘Charlie’, inherited from the first Vietnam, showed their contempt, whether the soldier fighting against them was a Riff tribesman, Catalan farmer or Japanese industrial worker.
However, as the American knew all too well, if the order came through to attack, the three of them would be shot down where they sat.
Pearson knelt by the Negro sergeant. With the barrel of his Sten gun he nudged the young soldier clutching his knapsack. ‘Can’t you do anything for him? Where’s your morphine?’