Jack Higgins – In the Hour Before Midnight

In late spring or early summer when the first real heat begins, violent thunderstorms are common in the Sicilian high country, and occasionally a drenching downpour settles firmly over the mountains for half a day or more.

I think, looking back on it, that it was the rain which saved us. Some people are rainwalkers by nature-it gives them a shot in the arm just to be abroad and feel it beating down on them. I’ve always been one of that happy band, so the rain-storm which broke over the Cammarata that morning gave me a psychological lift to start with. But there was more to it than that. Sud-denly the earth came alive, I was no longer moving through a dead world, there was a freshness to every-thing.

Perhaps I had become a little delirious, because I found myself singing the famous old marching song of the Foreign Legion that Legrande had taught me a couple of centuries before when we were still brothers, before corruption had set in.

The rain was hammering down now and I went over a rise that blocked the end of a small valley, looked down through the grey curtain and saw Bellona beside the white smear that was the road.

I laughed out loud and shouted to the sky, ‘I’ll have you now, Burke. By God, I’ll have you now.’

I turned to reach for the donkey’s bridle and found that Joanna’s head had moved to one side, that her eyes were open. She stared blankly at me for a long moment and then, with infinite slowness, smiled.

I couldn’t speak, simply touched her gently on the cheek, took the bridle and stumbled down the hillside, tears of a kind mingling with the rain on my face.

FOURTEEN

that final hour on the lower slopes was worst of all for the sparse turf, soaked by the incessant rain, proved difficult to negotiate. I slipped and lost my balance twice, and once the donkey slid to one side, tearing his bridle from my grasp, bringing the heart into my mouth. For a moment it had seemed he would roll over and the result would have been catastrophic.

Joanna Truscott’s eyes were closed again and I pre-sumed she had sunk back into unconsciousness. I got a grasp on the donkey’s bridle close to the muzzle and started down the next bank, holding his head up with what strength I had left, and will-power.

Time again ceased to exist, but now, I suspect, be-cause I had become more than a little light-headed. We floundered down through mud and rain together, and once I was aware of someone pleading with the don-key, in the most reasonable of tones, to stand up like a man and keep going. And then the same voice broke into song again, the same faint trumpet call that had echoed from the Hoggar Mountains of the Southern Sahara to the swamps of Indo-China.

I seemed to sink into a well of darkness where noth-ing existed, only a tiny, flickering point of light at the end of a long tunnel, came out into it, blinking, and found myself hanging on to the bridle for dear life with both hands.

At what point I had unstrapped my right arm I don’t know. Only that I had used it-presumably had needed to-and that blood soaked through the field dressing.

It was beautiful-the most beautiful colour I had ever seen, vivid against the muted greens and browns of my camouflaged jump suit. The world was a wonder-ful, exquisite place, the blood mingling with the green and the grey rain falling.

Sheep poured over a bank top like a flood of dirty water and milled around me and beyond, a ragged shepherd stared, turned and ran along the track to-wards the village.

I passed the place where I had sat with Rosa, lain with her in a hollow in the sun. Lovely, lovely Rosa who had wanted to warn me, but who was too afraid- afraid of Karl Hoffer.

There was blood below my feet now, which was strange. I shook my head and the stain turned into a red Alfa Romeo in the yard behind Cerda’s place two hun-dred feet below. There was confused shouting, men running along the track towards me.

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