Craig stopped dead, and looked back. His face was icy pale.
"Don't stop, Sonny. Keep going." Craig stooped and probed quickly. The AP was there, exactly where it should be. He went forward into the corridor with quick short steps and Roland's dry cold whisper was in his ear.
"They had raped her, Sonny, all of them. Her leg was broken in the crash, but that didn't stop them. They got on top of her, like rutting animals one after the other." Craig found himself running forward up the invisible corridor, merely counting his paces not using the tape, measure to check the length of it not using the compass to measure the angle of the turn.
At the end he fell flat and stabbed frantically into the earth with the probe, but Roland's voice was there behind him.
"When they had all finished, they started again," he whispered.
"But this time they rolled her over and sodomized her, Sonny-" Craig heard himself sob with each stroke of the probe. He hit the casing of a mine lying just under the surface, and the force of the blow jarred his arm. He dropped the probe and scratched with his fingers into the earth, exposing the circular top of the AP mine. It was the size of one of those old-fashioned tins of fifty Players Navy Cut cigarettes.
Craig lifted it out of its cavity, set it aside and went forward, but Roland's whisper followed relentlessly.
"One after the other they did it to her, Sonny, all except the last one. He couldn't manage it twice, so he took his bayonet and pushed that up her instead." "Stop it, Roly! For Chrissake, stop it!" "You say you love her, Sonny then hurry, for her sake, hurry!"
Craig found the second AP mine and plucked it from the earth, he hurled it away from him down the length of the minefield and it bounced and rolled like a rubber ball before disappearing into a clump of grass.
It did not explode. Craig clawed his way forward, stabbing the probe ferociously as though into the heart of one of them, and he found the third mine, the last one in the ninety-degree corner of the corridor.
It was open all the way to the opposite perimeter of the minefield, where there would be two Claymore trip-wires. Craig jumped to his feet and ran down the corridor, with violent death only inches on each side of his flying feet. He was almost blinded by his own tears, and he sobbed in time to his run. He reached the end of the corridor and stopped. Only the trip-wires now, only the trip-wires of the Claymores and they would be through the cordon sanitaire.
"Well done, Sonny," Roland's voice close behind, "well done, you've got us through." Craig changed the side-cutters into his right hand and took one step more. He felt it move under the sole of his right foot, the almost infinitesimal give, as though he had stepped on a subterranean mole, run and it had collapsed.
"It shouldn't have been there," he thought despairingly, and time seemed to be suspended.
He heard the click of the primer. It sounded like the release of a camera-shutter, but muted by the thin layer of sand over it.
"The wild one," he thought, and still time was frozen. He had time to think. "It's the wild one in the pattern." And nothing happened, just that click. He felt a spring of hope. "It's dud, it's a misfire." He was going to get away with it.
Then the mine exploded under his right foot. It felt as though someone had hit him with a full swing of a crow-bat under the sole.
There was no pain, just that stunning slam of shock into his foot, driven up his spine until his jaws clashed and he felt his tongue split between his teeth, bitten clean through.
No pain, just the deafening implosion of the shock-wave into his eardrums, as though somebody had held a double-barrelled shotgun, close to his head and fired both barrels together.
No pain, just the blinding rush of dust and smoke past his face, and then he was flung into the air as though he were the plaything of a callous giant, and he came down again on his belly. The wind driven from his lungs, so he wheezed for breath, his mouth filled with blood from his bitten tongue. His eyes were stinging from flying grit and smoke. He wiped them clear and Roland's face was in front of his, hazy and wavering like a heat mirage. Roland's lips were moving, but Craig could not hear the words. His ears buzzed viciously from the blast.
"It's all right, Roly," he said, and his own voice was almost lost in the singing memory of the explosion. "I'm all right," Craig repeated.
He pushed himself up and rolled into a sitting position. His left leg stuck straight out ahead of him, the inside of the calf was lacerated and discoloured purple black from the explosion, and blood oozed from out of the opening of his short khaki pants, shrapnel must have flown up into his buttocks and lower belly, but the velskoen was still on his left foot. He tried to move his foot and it responded immediately, waggling at him reassuringly.
But there was something wrong. He was dazed and groggy, his ears still dinning, yet through it he realized there was something dreadfully wrong and then gradually it dawned on him.
There was no right leg, just the short fat stump of it sticking out of the leg of his pants. The heat of the explosion had cauterized the raw end of the stump, and seared it white-, the dead bloodless white of frostbite. He stared at it, and knew it was a trick of his eyesight, because he could feel his leg was still there. He tried to move the missing foot, and he felt it move, but there was nothing there.
"Roly." Even through the din in his ears, he heard the high hysterical tone of his own voice. "Roly, my leg. Oh God, my leg!
It's gone!" Then at last the blood came, bursting through the hear seared flesh in bright arterial spurts.
"Roly, help me!" Roland stepped over him, squatting with a foot on each side of Craig's body, his back to Craig, screening him from his own mutilated lower body. Roland unrolled the canvas wallet that contained his field medical kit, and strapped the tourniquet from it around the stump. The haemorrhage shrivelled and he bound the field-dressing over the stump. He worked quickly, with the dexterity of practice and experience, and the second that he finished, he swivelled to look into Craig's pale dusty sweat-streaked face.
"Sonny, the Claymores. Can you do the Claymores? For her sake, Sonny, try!" Craig stared at him. "Sonny for Janine," Roland whispered, and pulled him up into a sitting position. "Try! For her sake, try!" "Side-cutters!" Craig mumbled, staring with great hurt eyes at the blood-soaked turban that wrapped his stump. "Find my side-cutters!" Roland pressed the tool into his hand. "Turn me onto my belly, "Craig said.
Roland rolled him carefully, and Craig began to slide himself forward, walking his elbows in the torn dusty earth, he dragged his one remaining leg over the shallow crater left by the exploding AP mine, and then stopped and reached forward. There was the guitar twang, as the first trip-wire parted in the jaws of the cutter, and, laboriously as a maimed insect squashed under a gardener's heel, Craig dragged himself onto the very edge of the minefield. For the last time he reached out. His hand was shaking wildly, and he seized his own wrist with his left hand to steady it, sobbing with the effort he guided the open jaws of the cutter over the hair-thin steel wire, and bore down.