A bullet kicked up dirt a couple of feet away from Bushell. He dove straight through a window as bare of glass as a skull’s eye socket was of flesh. “Oof!” he said as he landed on a hard floor, but he bounced to his feet. Sam Stanley sailed through the window next to the one he’d chosen, and came to earth no more gracefully than he had. He too, though, quickly got up again.
The back door to this building opened without a squeal or a groan, for which Bushell was grateful. Lee-Enfield at the ready, he stepped out into the alley. Samuel Stanley came right behind him. “Watch yourself, Chief,” Stanley said, his eyes flicking every which way. “The buggers have been moving about “
“Don’t I know it.” Bushell too was scanning every building, every window, every doorway. The inside of his mouth felt dry and rough. His heart pounded. Breath whistled in and out of his nostrils. He’d forgotten what combat did to a man.
The firing picked up again off to the north, this time from the flank. “That Fuller, he knows what he wants to do and how to do it,” Stanley said, now sounding intensely satisfied. Bushell nodded, unsurprised at the way his adjutant responded to an NCO’s professional competence.
From the south, a young man came dashing round the corner. He wore a bushy beard, but the hair atop his head was cropped Roundhead close. He carried a rifle in his right hand.
“Hold it right there!” Bushell shouted, at the same instant as Samuel Stanley screamed, “Drop that gun or you’re dead!”
Instead of dropping it, the man started to raise it to his shoulder. Bushell and Stanley fired together. The rifle flew from the young man’s hands. He let out a grunt, a sound more of startlement than of pain. One finger started to move toward a hole in his wool plaid shirt, as if wondering how it had got there. Before the motion was more than well begun, he crumpled amidst the ferns.
Bushell ran to him. The fellow had fallen facedown, which let Bushell see the exit wounds in his back. He was still breathing, but more feebly with every moment that passed. “He’s not going to make it, Sam,” Bushell said.
“Not with one in the chest and one in the belly, he won’t,” Stanley agreed. He knelt beside the Son of Liberty. “We have to try, though. Cover me while I work on him - wish I had a proper wound dressing here; this’ll cost me my vest.” He shrugged out of his anorak, unbuttoned his shirt, and peeled off the white cotton vest beneath it.
Bushell trotted up toward the corner, sprawled behind a long-abandoned barrel. From there, he could pick off anyone who tried to come by. The firing by the old grocer’s shop had died down again. He heard running feet. His finger tensed on the trigger.
No one came into sight. From around the corner came Sergeant Fuller’s no-nonsense tones: “If that’s you, you RAMs, give me your names.”
“Bushell and Stanley,” Bushell answered. “We have one of the villains down here, Sergeant.”
“He’s gone, Chief,” Stanley said. He rubbed his hands on the ground, then reached for his shirt and anorak.
“We have two dead, one wounded further south,” Sergeant Fuller said, showing himself now. “That should be the lot.” His face went grim, or rather, grimmer. “Good riddance, I say.”
VII
Bushell pulled out his watch and looked at it. When he saw the hour was just past nine, he shook his head in astonishment. The fight with the Sons of Liberty seemed to have lasted for hours, not bare minutes. He’d run into that before, down on the Nuevespañolan border. One more thing about combat I’d managed to forget, he thought.
“What now?” Sam Stanley asked. “The cutter isn’t due back till noon.”
“We search the area and we question the prisoner,” Bushell said. “I wish Felix hadn’t bought his plot. He was the one who knew the Sons backwards and forwards.” He turned to Fuller. “What were your casualties, Sergeant?”
“Not counting your comrade, sir, two dead and four wounded,” the noncom answered. “None of the wounds seems likely to prove fatal, but one of the lads will be on a stick for a long time to come, I’m afraid: took a bullet in the ankle.”
“I’m sorry,” Bushell said. “I never dreamt it would come to - this.” Few criminals in the NAU had firearms, few of those who had them used them when the forces of the law caught them up, and none who did resort to firearms fought with such determination. None had, at any rate - not till now.
“In what sort of shape is the one you captured?” Stanley asked.
“Bullet in the shoulder, through-and-through flesh wound in the leg.” Sergeant Fuller spat in the dirt.
“Bugger’ll live to hang. Waste of good rope, I call it, but what can you do?”
“Can he answer questions?” Bushell said.
A murky light kindled in Fuller’s eyes. “If he doesn’t, by God, we’ve ways to make him sing.”
Two things flashed through Bushell’s mind: Sam would never say such a thing and then, a moment later, Thank heaven the military stays out of police work most places. He kept that to himself; Fuller had put his life on the line to bag the Sons of Liberty. What he did say was, “Take us to him. We’ll see what he tells us.”
“Yes, sir.” Sergeant Fuller led them back toward the grocer’s shop. They passed several two-man teams of Royal Marines methodically going through the abandoned businesses of Buckley Bay. “I set them searching, sir,” Fuller said, noting Bushell’s glance. “We don’t know for a fact there were only the four of them, do we?”
“No, we don’t.” Bushell took a tighter grip on his rifle; he hadn’t thought of that. His soldierly skills, at least in the field, left a good deal to be desired these days. He hoped he’d made up for that loss with what he’d learned as a RAM. Given the way The Two Georges had vanished from under his nose, he had no proof of that, either.
No more gunshots rang out, from which he presumed the Marines found no one new to flush from cover. Lieutenant Green and a couple of other men crouched on the ground beside a fellow who, from his looks, could have been a cousin to the Son of Liberty Bushell and Stanley had shot. He had a bandage on his shoulder and another on his leg, both stained with red. Green looked up. “Here he is, Colonel. Says his name is Elgin Goldsmith. Past that, he’s kept mum, except to say he wants to speak to a solicitor.”
Bushell glowered at the prisoner. “To hell with him and to hell with what he wants. Your men are more important to me, Lieutenant. How are your wounded? Sergeant Fuller says they should pull through.”
“Seems that way, yes,” Green said, nodding, “though poor Metcalf took a nasty one. Do you want to see what you can get out of Mr. Goldsmith here?” He made the title one of contempt.
“What I want is to drag him into the woods and let the bears have him,” Bushell said savagely. “If I do that, though, I sink to his level, which isn’t a place I care to go.” He squatted beside Lieutenant Green.
“All right, Goldsmith, you may as well talk. It can’t make things worse for you, and it might make them better.”
Pain twisted Goldsmith’s face, but his pale eyes blazed at that. “Don’t make me laugh,” he said. “You’ll fucking try me and you’ll fucking hang me, whether I nark or not.”
Since that was true, Bushell didn’t bother arguing it. “Where did you get the rifles you were posting down to New Liverpool?” he asked. Goldsmith set his jaw and said nothing. In a conversational tone of voice, Bushell remarked, “I wonder what would happen if I hit that shoulder of yours with my rifle butt purely by accident, of course.”