No sooner had the thought crossed his mind than a shout made him, his RAM comrades, and the Royal Marines freeze in place: “Who the devil’s sneaking around out there? Whoever you are, you’d better clear out, or you’ll be sorry.”
“Who are you?” Bushell called back. “Is this the residence of four gentlemen named Geoff and Patrick and Elgin and Benjamin?” The formalities had to be observed: there was the one-in-a-milliard chance he was wrong.
“Who wants to know?” that same voice yelled from inside the old shop. To Bushell’s horror, Felix Crooke broke cover and stood up, saying, “We are members of the Royal American Mounted Police and the Royal Marines. We have you outnumbered and trapped. Come out with your hands above your heads and you shall not be harmed.”
“Get down, you damned fool!” Bushell shouted, a split second behind Samuel Stanley. Crooke started to shake his head - afterwards, Bushell was almost sure of it. But an element of doubt always remained, for at that moment a rifle shot rang out. Crooke went down then, but not of his own will; he crashed to earth as if all his bones had suddenly turned to water.
Bushell stared in disbelief and horror. He’d warned Felix Crooke to think of the men they were after as soldiers, not ordinary criminals, but he hadn’t thought of them that way himself, not down deep where it counted. He’d never fired a weapon in the field in all his years as a RAM, and never dreamt of being fired on himself. That was something Russian Okhrana men worried about, or inquisitors of the Holy Alliance. The game was played by different rules in the British Empire. No. The game had been played by different rules.
“Come on, the lot of you, and you’ll get what he got!” The man inside the grocer’s shop sounded fiercely exultant, as if he had done something good and true and noble, not shot a man down in cold blood.
Shock at the unexpected gunplay held Bushell frozen, just for a moment. To the Royal Marines, though, gunfire was anything but unexpected. They opened up with a fusillade that sent bullets flying through the empty window frame from which the shot had come and made chips fly off the timbers of the building with the smoking chimney.
That great racket of riflery got Bushell moving. All at once, he wasn’t a RAM any more, but a subaltern with troops pinned down amid mesquite and chaparral not far from the Rio Grande. As he had then, he knew what wanted doing now: getting his wounded out of further harm’s way. He dashed out into the square to Felix Crooke. A bullet cracked past his head closer than he cared to think about: the Marines’ barrage hadn’t silenced the Sons of Liberty. He slung Crooke across his back and, staggering under the weight of the bigger man, carried him through an open doorway into a shop or home that perhaps had not known the tread of human feet since before he was born. He set Crooke down and groped for a pulse. He found none. Crooke’s eyes were wide and staring. Frantically, Bushell pulled off the khaki cape his fellow RAM was wearing and ripped open his tunic. The bullet - without a doubt, a three-line bullet, the clinical part of him reported: a bullet from a Nagant had struck just to the left of Crooke’s breastbone. He’d been dead, he must have been dead, before he hit the ground.
Cold and terrible anger filled Bushell. Later, when he had time, he would mourn. Now . . . Now he flicked the safety off his own rifle, heaved it to his shoulder, and fired at what he thought was movement back behind the abandoned shop Geoff and Patrick, Elgin and Benjamin had taken for their own. The kick from the Lee-Enfield was like the touch of an old friend: it had been away for a long time, but was immediately familiar. He worked the bolt. An empty brass shell casing flipped out of the breech and landed beside his feet with a small, metallic ting. A fresh round in the chamber, he peered out, waiting for a target.
After the first hail of lead, a lull came over the firing. A couple of Marines were down, one ominously still, the other twisting and writhing in pain. The rest had pulled back into the buildings across the overgrown square from the shop. Bushell couldn’t see Samuel Stanley. He couldn’t worry now, any more than he could mourn. Finishing this dreadful business came first.
“Give yourselves up!” he called across the square. “You’ll have a fair trial.”
“Not bloody likely,” came the reply - a different voice from the one that had spoken first. He fervently hoped the owner of that voice was dead. “We’d swing, and you bloody well know it. You want us, you stinking redcoat, you come get us and pay the price.” As if to punctuate his words, he fired at the spot from which he thought Bushell’s voice was coming. The bullet slammed into the back wall ten feet or so from where the RAM stood.
Several Marines blazed away at the muzzle flash. A mocking laugh told them they’d missed their target.
“Covering fire, sir, if you’d be so kind,” an unruffled voice said: after a moment, Bushell recognized it as Sergeant Fuller’s.
“Covering fire!” Lieutenant Green shouted. The Royal Marines banged away at their foes. Bushell emptied the box of ammunition in his rifle. He pulled another magazine from his pocket, clicked it into place, and shot again. The Sons of Liberty seemed to have plenty of cartridges. He was painfully aware he didn’t.
Sergeant Fuller and half his squad raced across the street where the square ended, to try to flank out the villains. Someone inside the building where the Sons of Liberty sheltered was screaming now, a high, shrill sound of torment that made the hairs on the back of Bushell’s neck try to rise. But firing kept coming from the building, and from a couple of others nearby. The Sons were not making it easy for anyone.
Charging straight across the square at them was nothing but a grandiose way of committing suicide. Flanking them out, as Fuller had realized, gave better odds. Bushell crawled to the rear of the building where he’d brought Felix Crooke, groped in gloom for a back door. His hand closed on something cold and wet and slimy that writhed as he squeezed it: a slug as big and thick as his forefinger. He made a choking sound of disgust, wiped his palm on the thigh of his denims, and at last found the latch he’d been seeking.
The door didn’t want to open. He got to his feet, hoping no one could see him from across the square, and slammed a shoulder against it. It gave all at once. He stumbled out into the overgrown alley behind the building.
Motion there made the barrel of his rifle automatically jerk toward it. He checked himself and exclaimed in glad relief: “Sam!”
“Chief!” Stanley had been swinging his rifle toward Bushell. “How’s Felix?” he demanded. Bushell gave a thumbs-down. Stanley grimaced. “Damn the bastards!” he said. “I figured our best chance at winkling them out was sliding round to one side.”
“Same thing I was thinking,” Bushell said. Together they trotted north past the edge of the square. Getting close a street at a time was different from running across the open space straight at the enemy’s guns.
“Had enough of coming under fire in my army days,” Stanley said. “Never thought it would happen to me as a RAM.”
“Neither did I,” Bushell answered. “Just because we’re up near Russia doesn’t mean we’re in it.”
They wrestled another back door open. The brass latch had turned green over the years, but was still strong. Brushing aside cobwebs, they went out to the front of the building and peered through a window. Bushell paused a moment to catch his breath. He could still smell the cheerful odor of the cookfire and faintly, beneath it, the reek from the rubbish the Sons of Liberty had discarded over their years here. He looked at Stanley, who nodded. They yanked open the front door and dashed for the buildings on the eastern side of the street.