could be exciting.
"I hope they know about us." Mike Haig lit his cigarette with a show of
nonchalance, but he peered over it anxiously at the piles of fresh earth
on each side of the tracks that marked the position of emplacements.
"These boys have got bazookas, and they're Irish Arabs," muttered
Ruffy. "I reckon it's the maddest kind of Arabs there is - Irish. How
would you like a bazooka bomb up your throat, boss?"
"No, thanks, Ruffy," Bruce declined, and pressed the button of the
radio.
"Hendry!" In the leading truck Wally Hendry picked up his set and,
holding it against his chest, looked back at Bruce.
"Curry?"
"Tell your gunners to stand away from the Brens, and the rest of them to
lay down their rifles."
"Right Bruce watched him relaying the order, pushing them back, moving
among the gendarmes who
crowded the forward trucks. Bruce could sense the air of tension that
had fallen over the whole train, watched as his gendarmes reluctantly
laid down their weapons and stood empty handed staring sullenly ahead at
the U.N. barrier.
"Drived" Bruce spoke again into the radio. "Slow down.
Stop fifty metres this side of the barrier. But if there is any shooting
open the throttle and take us straight through."
"Oui, monsieur." Ahead of them there was no sign of a reception
committee, only the hostile barrier of poles and petrol drums across the
line.
Bruce stood upon the roof and lifted his arms above his head in a
gesture of neutrality. It was a mistake; the movement changed the
passive mood of the gendarmes in the trucks below him. One of them
lifted his arms also, but his fists were clenched.
"U. N. - merde!" he shouted, and immediately the cry was taken up.
"U. N. - merde! U.N. - merde!" They chanted the war cry - laughing at
first, but then no longer laughing, their voices rising sharply.
"Shut up, damn you," Bruce roared and swung his open hand against the
head of the gendarme beside him, but the man hardly noticed it.
His eyes were glazing with the infectious hysteria to which the African
is so susceptible; he had snatched up his rifle and was holding it
across his chest; already his body was beginning to jerk convulsively
as he chanted.
Bruce hooked his fingers under the rim of the man's steel helmet and
yanked it forward over his eyes so the back of his neck was exposed; he
chopped him with a judo blow and the gendarme slumped forward over the
sandbags, his rifle slipping from his hands.
Bruce looked up desperately; in the trucks. below him the hysteria was
spreading.
"Stop them - Hendry, de Surrier! Stop them for God's sake." But his
voice was lost in the chanting.
A gendarme snatched up his rifle from where it lay at his feet; Bruce
saw him elbow his way towards the side of the truck to begin firing; he
was working the slide to lever a round into the breech.
"Mwembe!" Bruce shouted the gendarme's name, but his voice could not
penetrate the uproar.
In two seconds the whole situation would dissolve into a pandemonium of
tracer and bazooka fire.
Poised on the forward edge of the roof, Bruce checked for an instant to
judge the distance, and then he jumped.
He landed squarely on the gendarme's shoulders, his weight throwing the
man forward so his face hit the steel edge of the truck, and they went
down together on to the floor.
The gendarme's finger was resting on the trigger and the rifle fired as
it spun from his hands. A complete hush followed the roar of the rifle
and in it Bruce scrambled to his feet, drawing his pistol from the
canvas holster on his hip.
"All right he panted, menacing the men around him.
"Come on, give me a chance to use this!" He picked out one of his
sergeants and held his eyes. "You! I'm waiting for you - start
shooting!" At the sight of the revolver the man relaxed slowly and the
madness faded from his face. He dropped his eyes and shuffled awkwardly.
Bruce glanced up at Ruffy and Haig on the roof, and raised his voice.
"Watch them. Shoot the first one who starts it again."
"Okay, boss." Ruffy thrust forward the automatic rifle in his hands.
"Who's it going to be?" he asked cheerfully, looking down at them. But
the mood had changed. Their V
Awl attitudes of defrance gave way to sheepish embarrassment and a small
buzz of conversation filled the silence.
"Mike," Bruce yelled, urgent again. "Call the driver, he's trying to
take us through!" The noise of their passage had risen, the driver
accelerating at the sound of the shot, and now they were racing down
towards the U.N. barrier.
Mike Haig grabbed the set, shouted an order into it, and immediately the
brakes swooshed and the train jolted to a halt not a hundred yards short
of the barrier.
Slowly Bruce clambered back on to the roof of the coach.
"Close?" asked Mike.
"My God!" Bruce shook his head, and lit a cigarette with slightly
unsteady hands. "Another fifty yards-!" Then he turned and stared coldly
down at his gendarmes.
"Canaille! Next time you try to commit suicide don't take me with you."
The gendarme he had knocked down was now sitting up, fingering the ugly
black swelling above his eye. "My friend," Bruce turned on him, "later I
will have something for your further discomfort!" Then to the other man
in the emplacement beside him who was massaging his neck, "And for you
also! Take their names, Sergeant Major."
"Sir!" growled
Ruffy.
"Mike." Bruce's voice changed, soft again. "I'm going ahead to
toss the blarney with our friends behind the bazookas. When I give you
the signal bring the train through."
"You don't want me to come with you?" asked Mike.
"No, stay here." Bruce picked up his rifle, stung it over his shoulder,
dropped down the ladder on to the path beside the tracks, and walked
forward with the gravel crunching beneath his boots.
An auspicious beginning to the expedition, he decided grimly, tragedy
averted by the wink of an eye before they had even passed the outskirts
of the city.
At least the Mickies hadn't added a few bazooka bombs to the
altercation. Bruce peered ahead, and could make out the shape of helmets
behind the earthworks.
Without the breeze of the train's passage it was hot again, and
Bruce felt himself starting to sweat.
"Stay where you are, Mister." A deep brogue from the emplacement nearest
the tracks; Bruce stopped, standing on the wooden crossties in the sun.
Now he could see the faces of the men beneath the helmets:
unfriendly, not smiling.
"What was the shooting for?" the voice questioned.
"We had an accident."
"Don't have any more or we might have one also."
"I'd not be wanting that, Paddy." Bruce smiled thinly, and the
Irishman's voice had an edge to it as he went on.
"What's your mission?"
"I have a pass, do you want to see it?"
Bruce took the folded sheet of paper from his breast pocket.
"What's your mission?" repeated the Irishman.
"Proceed to Port Reprieve and relieve the town." & "We know about
you." The Irishman nodded. "Let me see the pass." Bruce left the tracks,
climbed the earth wall and handed the pink slip to the
Irishman. He wore the three pips of a captain, and he glanced briefly at
the pass before speaking to the man beside him.
"Very well, Sergeant, you can be clearing the barrier now."
"I'll call the train through?" Bruce asked, and the captain nodded
again.
"But make sure there are no more accidents - we don't like hired
killers."
"Sure and begorrah now, Paddy, it's not your war you're a-fighting
either," snapped Bruce and abruptly turned his back on the man, jumped
down on to the tracks and waved to Mike Haig on the roof of
the coach.
The Irish sergeant and his party had cleared the tracks and while the
train rumbled slowly down to him Bruce struggled to control his
irritation. - the Irish captain's taunt had reached him.
Hired killer, and of course that was what he was. Could a man sink any
lower?
As the coach drew level with where he stood, Bruce caught the hand rail
and swung himself aboard, waved an ironical farewell to the Irish
captain and climbed up on to the roof.
"No trouble?" asked Mike.
"A bit of lip, delivered in music-hall brogue," Bruce answered)
"but nothing serious." He picked up the radio set.
"Driver."
"Monsieur?"
"Do not forget my instructions."
"I will not exceed forty kilometres the hour, and I shall at all times
be prepared for an emergency stop."
"Good!" Bruce switched off the set and sat down on the sandbags between
Ruffy and Mike.
Well, he thought, here we go at last. Six hours run to Msapa
Junction. That should be easy. And then - God knows, God alone knows.
The tracks curved, and Bruce looked back to see the last white-washed
buildings of Elisabethville disappear among the trees.
They were out into the open savannah forest.
Behind them the black smoke from the loco rolled sideways into the
trees; beneath them the crossties clattered in strict rhythm, and ahead
the line ran arrow straight for miles, dwindling with perspective until
it merged into the olive-green mass of the forest.
Bruce lifted his eyes. Half the sky was clear and tropical blue, but in
the north it was bruised with cloud, and beneath the cloud grey rain
drifted down to meet the earth.
The sunlight through the rain spun a rainbow, and the cloud shadow moved
across the land as slowly and as darkly as a herd of grazing buffalo.
He loosened the chin strap of his helmet and laid his rifle on the roof
beside him.
"You'd like a beer, boss?"
"Have you any?"
"Sure." Ruffy called to one of the gendarmes and the man climbed down
into the coach and came back with half a dozen bottles. Ruffy opened two
with his teeth. Each time half the contents frothed out and splattered
back along the wooden side of the coach.
"This beer's as wild as an angry woman," he grunted as he passed a bottle
to Bruce.
"It's wet anyway." Bruce tasted it, warm and gassy and too sweet.
"Here": how! said Ruffy.
Bruce looked down into the open trucks at the gendarmes who were
settling in for the journey. Apart from the gunners at the Brens, they
were lying or squatting in attitudes of complete relaxation and most of
them had stripped down to their underwear. One skinny little fellow was
already asleep on his back with his helmet as ! pillow and the tropical
sun beating into his face.
Bruce finished his beer and threw the bottle overboard.
Ruff opened another and placed it in his hand without comment.
"Why we going so slowly, boss?"
"I told the driver to keep the speed down - give us a chance to stop if
the tracks have been torn up."
"Yeah. Them Balubas might have done that - they're mad Arabs all of
them." The warm beer drunk in the sun was having a soothing effect on
bruce. He felt at peace, now, withdrawn from the need to make decisions,
to participate in the life around him.
"Listen to that train-talk," said Ruffy, and Bruce focused his hearing,
on the clicketv-chock of the crossties.
"Yes, I know. You can make it say anything you want it to," agreed
Bruce.
"And it can sing," Ruffy went on. "It's got real music in it, like
this." He inflated the great barrel of his chest, lifted his head and
let it come.
His voice was deep but with a resonance that caught the attention
of the men in the open trucks below them. Those who had been sprawled in
the amorphous shapes of sleep stirred and sat up. Another voice joined
in humming the tune, hesitantly at first, then more confidently; then
others took it up, the words were unimportant, it was the rhythm that
they could not resist. They had sung together many times before and like
a well-trained choir each voice found its place, the star performers
leading, changing the pace, improvising, quickening until the original
tune lost its identity and became one of the tribal chants. Bruce
recognize it as a planting song. It was one of his
favourites and he sat drinking his lukewarm beer and letting the
singing wash round him, build up into the chorus like storm waves, then
fall back into a tenor solo before rising once more.
And the train ran on-through the sunlight towards the rain clouds in the
north.
Presently Andre came out of the coach below him and picked his way
forward through the men in the trucks until he reached Hendry. The two
of them stood together, Andre's face turned up towards the taller man
and deadly earnest as he talked.
"Doll boy" Hendry had called him, and it was an accurate description of
the effeminately pretty face with the big toffee eyes; the steel helmet
he wore seemed too large for his shoulders to carry.
I wonder how old he is; Bruce watched him laugh suddenly, his face still
turned upwards to Hendry; not much over twenty and I have never seen
anything less like a hired killer.
"How the hell did anyone like de Surrier get mixed up in this?" His
voice echoed the thought, and beside him Mike answered.
"He was working in Elisabethville when it started, and he couldn't
return to Belgium. I don't know the reason but I guess it was something
personal. When it started his firm closed down. I suppose this was the
only employment he could find."
"That Irishman, the one at the barrier, he called me a hired killer."
Thinking of Andre's position in the scheme of things had turned Bruce's
thoughts back to his own status.
"I hadn't thought about it that way before, but I suppose he's right.
That is what we are." Mike Haig was silent for a moment, but when he
spoke there was a stark quality in his voice.
"Look at these hands!" Involuntarily Bruce glanced down.
at them, and for the first time noticed that they were narrow with long
moulded fingers, possessed of a functional beauty, the hands of an
artist.
"Look at them," Mike repeated, flexing them slightly; they were
fashioned for a purpose, they were made to hold a scalpel, they were
made to save life." Then he relaxed them and let them drop on to the
rifle across his lap, the long delicate fingers incongruous upon the