We find the gun ten minutes later. At a signal from the scout the lieutenant has us gather in a hollow and dismount. The men shoulder their heavy packs and heft their weapons; the horses are tethered to trees. The lieutenant looks over her men, eyes flitting over faces, packs, guns. She whispers to a few, smiles, pats them on the arm.
She comes to me and puts her mouth to my ear. ‘This is the dangerous bit, Abel,’ she whispers. ‘Soon the shooting starts.’ I can feel her breath on my cheek, sense the physicality of this low murmur entering the soft convolutions of cartilage and flesh. ‘You can stay here with the horses, if you like,’ she tells me. ‘Or come on with us.’
I shift my head, put my lips to her ear. Her olive dark skin smells of nothing at all. ‘You’d trust me with the horses?’ I ask, amused.
‘Oh, you’d have to be tied up,’ she says softly.
‘Tied up or getting to watch,’ I tell her. ‘You spoil me. I’ll come.’
‘I thought you might.’ Suddenly there is a huge, serrated knife in front of my eyes, its blade covered with matt stripes of dark paint, only the extremity of its scalloped edge left naked in a wavy, shining line. ‘But not a sound after this, Abel,’ she breathes, ‘or it’ll be your last.’ I tear my gaze from that fearsome blade and try to detect some irony in those grey eyes, but see only the reflection of still greyer steel. My eyes have gone wide; I narrow them and smile as tolerantly as I can, but she is already turned and gone. In the distance, on the breeze, I can hear an engine running.
We leave the horses, cross a low bank and another shallow depression then clamber up the steep, root rutted side of a taller ridge; the engine noise grows louder all the time. At the summit of the incline, in the midst of damp, brown bracken through which the lieutenant and her men insinuate themselves with delicate grace and minimal disturbance which I attempt to emulate we come out above a cliff.
The gun stands caught in sunlight, barely a grenade’s throw away. It lies in the middle of an old mine’s buildings, surrounded by the ruins of a failed enterprise; a corroded lattice of brown, narrow gauge rails, a tilted, rickety wooden tower topped with a single wheel, peeling, tumbledown sheds with vacant, shattered windows, skewed and crumpled corrugated iron roofs and a scatter of dented, rusting drums.
The gun alone looks efficient and whole, its metal form a dull, dark green. Its body is longer than the trucks we left in the farm. It rests on two tall rubber tyred wheels; beneath the barrel there is a parallel pair of long, sealed tubes and protecting its crew there is a flat plate sloped over the breech, where a confusion of wheels, handles, levers and two small bucket seats are perched above a broad circular base that looks as if it can be lowered to take the weapon’s weight.
Behind, two long, spade footed legs have been swivelled together to form a towing bar. A group of soldiers is engaged in hooking it up to a noisy farm tractor, while behind them an opendecked civilian truck waits, engine idling. A few other uniformed men are loading bags, packs and boxes on to the truck, making journeys from the least ruined of the mine’s buildings; a twostorey brick construction that looks as if it was an office. I count only a dozen men altogether, none of them carrying obvious weapons. The smell of diesel exhaust drifts on the air.
The lieutenant, beside me, uses her field glasses, then whispers urgently to her men; orders are passed along the line in each direction, over my head. I sense an excitement in her communicating itself to her soldiers, two groups of whom are scuttling away on either side just below the summit of the ridge, their shadows scattering, merging dark in darkness. They are moving quicker than they did on the approach, any noise they make covered by the engines and the favouring wind. The lieutenant and the remaining third of her little force are all reaching into packs; withdrawing magazines and grenades.
I look around, at the perfect, lifeless blue of the sky above, at the mass of dark fir trees on the ochre slope behind the mine, at the orange sun, hanging on the hill’s far rim like fingers clawing a ledge, then down at the gun again, now held within the shade of the western hills. It has been secured to the tractor. The truck behind is moving now, the driver leaning half out of his opened door as the vehicle backs up by the side of a fallen down building towards a twin axled trailer covered with a tarpaulin. Four soldiers get behind the trailer and try to shift it forward to meet the truck, but fail. They laugh, voices echoing, and shake their heads, settling for beckoning the truck onwards.
The lieutenant stiffens suddenly; she tilts her head, as though listening for something, or to something. She looks at me, frowning, but I think does not see me. Perhaps I can hear something. It might he distant gunfire; not the nebulous ‘thudding of artillery but the flat crackling of automatic small arms. The lieutenant steadies her gun, lowering her cheek to the stock. The soldiers lying along from her see this and take sight too.
I look back to the soldiers at the mine. The tractor sits idling, connected to the gun. They seem to be having problems with the trailer’s towing point. Half a minute passes.
Then a soldier comes running out of the brick building, waving a rifle and shouting something. Instantly the mood changes; the soldiers start looking around, then move; some head for the office building, others make for the cab of the truck, where the driver is standing on the cab’s step, looking, it seems, right at us.
Then firing sounds from somewhere to our right, and the ground beneath the soldiers heading for the office building leaps and flicks in miniature detonations of earth and stone. Two men drop.
The lieutenant makes a hissing noise, then her gun erupts, spearing flame and hammering twin spikes of pain into my head. I jam my fingers in my ears, eyes screwing up involuntarily, as I duck back and down. The last thing I see of the mine is the windscreen of the truck shattering white, pocked with wide black holes, and the driver being thrown back, falling and folding as though belly kicked by a horse.
The firing continues for some time, punctuated by the sharp snap of grenades failing amongst the buildings of the mine; I glimpse up to see the lieutenant pausing to flip her magazine, then again to change the spent pair for another taped together set lying by her hand, each movement executed with a smooth, unhurried skill; the gun barks on, hardly pausing. The air reeks with a bitter, acrid scent. A couple of thuds behind and below may be the impact of returned fire, and I think I hear the lieutenant’s radio squawking, but she is either ignoring it or cannot hear. Soon the only sound is from the lieutenant’s guns and those of her men.
Then it stops.
The silence rings. I open my eyes fully, gazing at the prone form of the lieutenant. She is looking along the row of men lying by her side. They are each looking, checking. All seem uninjured.
I pull myself back up to the little tunnel of flattened bracken I left at the summit of the cliff and gaze down to the mine. A little smoke drifts. Some of the office building’s windows look eroded, the metal frames buckled, the brick surrounds edging them pulverised to curves, with flakes and fragments of orange brick scattered on the ground beneath. The front of the truck looks as though a giant has filled an immense brush with black paint and then flicked it, spattering dark spots all over the metalwork. Steam issues from its grille and the holes punched in its engine cover. A dark pool of diesel spreads slowly out from underneath like blood beneath a corpse. The tractor lists, one tall rear wheel and both front tyres flattened. Bodies lie fallen and sprawled all across the ground, a few with guns at their sides or still clutched in their hands.
Then, movement at the door of the office building. A rifle is thrown out, landing and skidding along a length of the narrow gauge rails.. Something pale flutters in the doorway’s gloom. The lieutenant mutters something. A man hobbles out of the building, face bloody, one arm dangling, the other waving what looks like a sheet of white paper. He is shot from our right, his head flicking back. He falls like a sack of cement and lies still. The lieutenant makes a tutting noise. She shouts something but the words are lost in the sound of firing coming from the top storey of the office building. Returning fire from our right flank kicks dust out from the bricks around the window and then, with a bang, something flashes over the tractor, gun and truck and disappears through the same opening; the explosion follows almost immediately, pulsing a quick cloud of debris through the window and shaking dust from the caves of the building’s corrugated iron roof.