The Angels Weep - Smith Wilbur - Страница 170

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"Craig, you are bloody standing still," Roland called. "Christ, man, have you lost your nerve?" Craig flinched at the accusation. He should have checked the pattern to his left, there should be an AP at a 30,degree angle from the last one he had found, and a twenty-four, inch gap between them, if he had correctly read the pattern. To check it would mean two minutes" work.

"Move, damn you, Mellow!" Roland's voice lashed him. "Don't just stand there. Move!" " Craig steeled himself, the chance was three-to-one in his favour. He stepped forward one pace, and gingerly put his weight onto his left foot. It was firm. He took another pace, placing his right foot with the delicacy of a cat stalking a bird, firm again. Now the left foot, a droplet of sweat fell from his brow into his eye, flooding it and half-blinding him. He blinked it away and completed the step. Safe again.

There must be a Claymore mine on his right now. His legs were trembling, but he lowered himself into a squat. The wire, it wasn't there! He had mis-read the pattern. He was blind in the middle of the field, living on chance. He blinked his eyes rapidly, and then with a surge of relief he picked up the almost invisible wire exactly where it should have been. It seemed to quiver with tension like his own nerves. He reached out with the side-cutters, and had almost touched the wire when Roland's voice spoke just at his shoulder.

"Don't waste time-" Craig started violently and jerked his hand away from the deadly wire. He looked back. Roland had followed the coloured tape marker, he had come out into the minefield, and he was down on one knee with his FN rifle across his thigh only a pace behind Craig. His face was masked with a thick layer of camouflage paint, like some primitive warrior from another time, savage and monstrous.

"I am going as fast as I dare." Craig used his thumb to squeeze the heavy drops of nervous sweat from his eyebrows. "You aren't," Roland told him flatly. "You have been in here almost twenty minutes, and you haven't moved twenty paces. It will be dark before we get through if you chicken it." "Damn you! "Craig whispered hoarsely.

"Yes," Roland encouraged. "Get mad. Get fighting mad." Craig reached forward and snipped the trip-wire. It made a tiny quivering spring like a guitar string lightly plucked with a fingernail.

"That's it, Sonny. Move!" Roland's voice was at his back, a low monotonous litany.

"Think of those bastards, Sonny. They are out there, running like rabid jackals. Think of them getting away." Craig moved forward, taking each pace more firmly.

"They killed everybody on that Viscount, Craig. Everybody, men and women and children. Everybody except. her." Roland did not use her name. "They left her alive. But when I found her, she couldn't speak, Sonny. She could only scream and struggle like a wild animal."

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.

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