O’Gilroy, who was routing in the pile of captured weapons to replace the Winchester with a proper bolt-action Mauser, suddenly stood up. “Oh shit. I’d best be telling Mrs Finn. Getting her down here.”
“You brought Corinna?”
“She brought me, more like. Ye know how she is,” O’Gilroy protested.
Ranklin let his fury subside and nodded. He knew. “Get her, then.”
And now he could look at the gun properly.
It had no shield, but he guessed why: it would just be a metal plate about a yard square, an awkward load and dispensable if you didn’t expect to come under small-arms fire. That apart, it was small, no higher than its wheels which were about three feet diameter. It looked like a toy – no, crouching with its squat nose slightly raised, it looked like an ugly metal toad. Yet it was beautiful. The Devil may have invented artillery but it took man, created in God’s image, to make guns such lovely things.
He ran his hand lovingly over the breech, warm from the shooting, noted the position of the breech-handle on the right of the horizontal sliding block, the elevating and traversing wheels and dial sight to the left. Very simple, merely the reverse of most British gun layouts.
And the love for such weapons, built up over twenty years and which he thought he had set aside, came back with a rush. Suddenly the knowledge he had acquired as a spy, the tricks of disguise and pretence and mistrust, all became a handful of pennies beside the fortune of understanding he had amassed in the Guns. He had never seen this type before, yet already he knew it, it was part of him, stretching his reach to miles and giving him the power of legions. Alexander, Caesar, even Napoleon, had never known such power. Give me a lever and I will move the world? Hah! Give me a gun and start looking for a new world!
If, in that mist, he could work out which direction to fire the bloody thing.
The Arabs were standing around, chatting to Bertie but all eyeing the gun eagerly. Absently, Ranklin picked up the shell the dead loader had dropped, noted the safety pin had already gone, and began wiping it clean of grit on his sweater sleeve while he worked out what to do.
Zurga would be forward in the trench with the machine-gun, bugler and alclass="underline" a commander wanted to see the enemy, not his own guns. So now what would he be thinking? He must have heard the firing from where there should be none, would guess his second gun had been attacked yet not know if the attack had been beaten off. And you hadn’t worked out a bugle call to answer that question, had you?
Still, he’d know this gun hadn’t fired recently, and that itself must have postponed the attack – there had been no shooting, no bugle calls, for minutes now. Zurga wouldn’t launch an attack covered by just one gun and with his rear in doubt. So he’d want to know the situation. Would he send a runner back? Come himself? Wait for the crew of the other gun, which must be closer to here, to investigate? . . . Oh damn: that escaped loader that O’Gilroy had reported, he’d probably have reached that gun and be pouring out the sad tale . . .
. . . And if that gun had protecting troops to spare, they might even now be charging up the riverbed towards him.
“M’sieu Lacan?”
Bertie turned from the Arabs. “Do I still have the pleasure of addressing the Honourable Patrick Snaipe?”
“You don’t, actually, but-”
Bertie shook his head sadly. “Helas – I made a mistake, so many mistakes . . . You have seen Hakim?”
“Yes. They let the hostages go -” Bertie’s half-closed eyes flicked open “- but Hakim kept the survey map. I’ve got it.” He took it out and shook it open.
Very still now, Bertie stared at it and said: “I hope it will not go back to the Railway.”
“Right now, I need it myself. The problem is . . .” But Bertie understood immediately “. . . so would you take three men forward to give us warning and try to delay an attack? If you can get up on the high ground here, opposite where the dry ravine comes in, you can’t be flanked . . . Don’t be heroic, but send a man back to say when you’re retreating.”
Bertie nodded at the gun. “And will you shoot that?”
“Probably.”
“And you know how?”
“It’s my work.”
Bertie smiled. “Not the Honourable Snaipe.” He turned back to the Arabs. None of them wanted to go with him. They wanted to shoot Turks, yes, but that was old hat; right now they wanted to see this gun fired, maybe even help. But Bertie knew his business: he chose three of them, then trotted off. Reluctantly, they followed.
Ranklin turned to the ammunition boxes, a dozen of them with eight rounds to a box. He hadn’t time to fathom the abbreviated German on each shell that told what it was, but could identify two boxes of shrapnel by the time-fuse bands on their noses. He didn’t want to fool with unfamiliar time-fuses and was relieved that the rest had pull-ring safety pins so must be common shell.
O’Gilroy and Corinna tacked down the slope from the pass, each leading a pony and keeping them well apart.
Ranklin went towards them. “I think-”
“Captain Ranklin of the Artillery, I presume? Well, looks like you’ve got yourself a gun again.”
“I think” Ranklin said firmly, “you should get on that horse and get back to . . . wherever. Somewhere safer.”
Corinna just slapped the leading rein into the hand of the nearest, and rather astonished, Arab. “I’ve been stuck out of sight being a horse-holder the last half-hour. So who are you going to fire it at? And why are those guys sleeping on – oh.”
She realised she was looking at a row of bodies, collected against the bank.
“You heard shooting,” Ranklin growled. “That’s what it causes. Now will you get on that horse?”
She may have looked a little paler, but: “I’d be more scared on my own in this country. I’ll stick with you, so give me something to do. Who are you going to shoot at?”
“I’m not sure.” He waved to O’Gilroy. “Tie up the horses upstream, away from the mules.” Those, more than a dozen of them, were tethered a hundred yards down the riverbed. They should be closer, but these were civilian animals, not accustomed to gunfire.
He went on: “It might be better to blow this gun up than actually fire it at anyone-”
“Oh, you’ll fire it at someone, all right.”
Ranklin clenched his teeth. Of course he wanted to shoot this gun, as much as any of the Arabs, but he needed a sensible target. Or to persuade himself he had one.
He reopened the survey map. He couldn’t be sure of his exact position, but the map showed the line of the riverbed well enough that he could guess within a few yards. Measuring with the boxwood protractor he reckoned the gun had been firing at nineteen degrees magnetic, and the attackers’ trench lay at about forty-three – “about” because it was a linear target. But he’d need to be pretty exact about the range, always the most difficult. Or maybe not: the important thing might be to let the Turkish troops know they were now under fire, give their morale a jolt. Or would that just be confirming to Zurga that the gun had been captured?
Damn it, fire the thing and you may be lucky, even hit Zurga. You won’t if you don’t.
He had O’Gilroy, Corinna and two Arabs as his crew.
“Hoick up the trail and swing her round . . . No! Wait!” He stooped to the sight and squinted; it was focussed on a dead pine standing out on the bank two hundred yards upstream. He might as well keep that as the aiming point; it was meaningless in itself, just a reference point from which you measured the angles of targets. “All right, move her now . . . point about here . . .” He adjusted the sight to show the aiming point again and found they had moved only fifteen degrees. “Bit further round . . . stop! . . . back a fraction . . .” With O’Gilroy translating orders into action, the Arabs jostled each other to help. They were willing slaves if he proved master of this weapon.