Cry Wolf - Smith Wilbur (книги онлайн без регистрации полностью .TXT) 📗

corner of the station building ten paces ahead of Vicky, and stopped

abruptly.

Under the lean-to shelter, the angular shape of Miss Wobbly was

wreathed in furious petals of crimson flame, and the black oily smoke

poured from her hatches. The Gallas had reached her first. She had

clearly been one of their first targets, and dozens of them pranced

around her as she burned and then scattered as the Vickers ammunition

in the bins began exploding.

Sara had halted for only a second, but it was long enough for

Vicky to reach her.

"The cedar forest," gasped Sara, a hand on Vicky's arm as they changed

direction.

The forest was two hundred yards away across the tracks, but it was

dense and dark, covering the broken ground along the river. They raced

out into the open, and immediately twenty other Gallas took up the

chase, their voices raised in the pack clamour.

The open yard seemed to stretch to eternity as Vicky ran on ahead of

the Gallas. The ground was slushy, so that she sank to the ankles with

each step, and the clinging red mud sucked one of the shoes off her

foot. So she ran on lopsidedly her feet sliding and her knees turning

weak under her.

Sara raced on lightly ahead, leaping the steel railway track, and her

feet flying lightly over the muddy ground.

The edge of the forest was fifty feet away.

Vicky felt a foot catch as she tried to jump the tracks and she went

down sprawling in the mud. She dragged herself to her knees. On the

edge of the forest Sara looked back, hesitating, her eyes huge and

glistening white in her smooth dark face.

"Run," screamed Vicky. "Run. Tell Jake," and the girl was gone into

the dark forest, with only a flicker of her passing like a forest

doe.

The butt of a rifle struck Vicky in the side, below the ribs, and she

went down with an explosive grunt of pain into the cold red mud.

Then there were hands tearing at her clothing, and she tried to

fight,

but she was blinded by the clinging wet tresses of her hair, and

crippled with the pain of the blow. They hoisted her to her feet, and

suddenly a new authoritative voice cracked like a whiplash, and the

hands released her.

She lifted her head, hunched up over her bruised belly and side.

Through eyes blurred with tears and mud, she recognized the scarred

face of the Galla Captain. He still wore the blue sham ma sodden now

with rain, and the scar twisted his grin, making it seem even more

cruel and vicious.

The front edge of the trench had been reinforced with sandbags and

screened with brush, and through the square observation aperture the

view down the gorge was uninterrupted.

Gareth propped one shoulder against the sandbags and peered down into

the gathering gloom. Jake Barton squatted on the firing step beside

him and studied the Englishman's face. Gareth Swales's usually

immaculate turnout was now red with dried mud, and stained with

sweat,

rainwater and filth.

A thick golden stubble of beard covered his jaw like the pelt of an

otter, and his mustache was ragged and untrimmed. There had been no

opportunity to change clothing or bathe in the last week. There were

new lines etched deeply into the corners of his mouth, his forehead,

and around his eyes, lines of pain and worry, but when he glanced up

and caught Jake's scrutiny, he grinned and lifted an eyebrow, and the

old devilish gleam was in his eyes. He was about to speak when from

below them another shell came howling up through the deep shades of the

gorge, and both of them ducked instinctively as it burst in close, but

neither of them remarked. There had been hundreds of bursts that close

in the last days.

"It's breaking for certain," Gareth observed instead, and they both

looked up at the strip of sky that showed between the mountains.

"Yes," Jake agreed. "But it's too late. It will be dark in twenty

minutes." It would be too late for the bombers, even if the cloud

lifted completely. From bitter experience they knew how long it took

for the aircraft to reach them from the airfield at Chaldi.

"It will clear again tomorrow Gareth answered.

"Tomorrow is another day," Jake said, but his mind dwelt on the big

black machines. The Italian artillery fired smoke markers on to their

trenches just as soon as they heard the drone of approaching engines in

the open cloudless sky. The Capronis came in very low,

their wing-tips seeming to scrape the rocky walls on each side of the

gorge. The beat of their engines rose to an unbearable, ear-shattering

roar, and they were so close that they could make out the features of

the helmeted heads of the airmen in the round glass cockpits.

Then, as they flashed overhead, the black objects detached from under

their fuselage. The 100, kilo bombs dropped straight, their flight

controlled by the fins, and when they struck, the explosion shocked the

mind and numbed the body. In comparison the burst of an artillery

shell was a squib.

The canisters of nitrogen mustard were not aerodynamically stable,

and they tumbled end over end and burst against the rocky slopes in a

splash of yellow, jellylike liquid that sprayed for hundreds of feet in

all directions.

Each time the bombers had come one after the other, endlessly hour

after hour, they left the defence so broken that the wave of infantry

that followed them could not be repelled. Each time they had been

driven out of their trenches, to toil back, upwards to the next line of

defence.

This was the last line, two miles behind them stood the granite portals

that headed the gorge, and beyond them, the town of Sardi and the open

way to the Dessie road.

"Why don't you try and get a little sleep, "Jake suggested, and

involuntarily glanced down at Gareth's arm. It was swathed in strips

of torn shirt, and suspended in a makeshift sling from around his

neck.

The discharge of lymph and pus and the coating of engine grease had

soaked through the crude bandage. It was an ugly sight covered, but

Jake remembered what it looked like without the bandage. The nitrogen

mustard had flayed it from shoulder to wrist, as though it had been

plunged into a pot of boiling water and Jake wondered how much good the

coating of greene was doing it. There was no other treatment,

however,

and at least it kept the air from the terrible injury.

"I'll wait until dark," Gareth murmured, and with his good hand lifted

the binoculars to his eyes. "I've got a funny feeling. It's too quiet

down there." They were silent again, the silence of extreme

exhaustion.

"It's too quiet, said Gareth again, and winced as he moved the arm.

"They haven't got time to sit around like this. They've got to keep

pushing pushing." And then, irrelevantly, "God, I'd give one testicle

for a cheroot. A Romeo y Juliette-" He broke off abruptly,

and then both of them straightened up.

"Do you hear what I think I hear?" asked Gareth.

"I think I do."

"it had to come, of course, said Gareth. "I'm only surprised it took

this long. But it's a long, hard ride from

Asmara to here. So that's what they were waiting for." The sound was

unmistakable in the brooding silence of the gorge, tunnelled up to them

by the rock walls. It was faint still, but there was no doubting the