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 whitewashed 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.