The Toymaster's Castle

Chapter Fifty-One - Attack

It was about four days later when we received word from one of our forward positions that there was a large group approaching along the southern road. It was the shortest route - it certainly didn't look as if Angus was trying to be subtle.

So the first thing we did was send most of our guys who were still on the island across to the mainland in one of our RIBs. By sending them straight to the larger port, ten miles east of town, we could get them in position really quickly.

Then all we could do was listen in on the radio as Major Pilton reconfigured our defending forces to meet this threat. They were all talking in code, of course... we had to assume they would be listening in on everything we said on the radio... but Rambo had made sure that we knew all the codewords so it was easy enough to follow what was going on.

And Angus's men certainly weren't behaving as if they were listening in on our radio communications. By the time they reached our first guard post... about twelve miles outside town, we had three two-man squads in pre-prepared positions.

Of course the first thing they saw there was the big sign welcoming them to the 'Kingdom in the West'. Like I'd guessed, Angus took this as a personal insult and that gave us a way of coordinating our attack on them. Somebody was sent forward with an axe and, as he stepped up to the sign, the major gave the command...

When the first axe blow fell, the guys opened fire from our three positions up in the hills and from our auxiliaries in their trenches, just across the road.

Five of their officer types went down within the first few seconds and more died as they scrabbled around, desperately trying to find some sort of cover. More would have died as they milled around in panic but somebody had the bright idea of hiding themselves amongst the auxiliaries and soon it was hard to find any useful targets.

At that point, their entire army ran away.

Next time they advanced, they were a fair bit more cautious and tried to flank our guys up in the hills. Luckily, the major had predicted this so he had pulled our troops further out and back.

Unfortunately that meant that when the central thrust of their army attacked up the main road again, there was nobody in the hills to provide support for the two auxiliaries left behind in the trench.

Only one of them made it out. We had suffered our first casualty of the battle.

By the time the attacking forces reached our next defensive line - another four miles towards town - it was getting dark... and we were ready for them.

This time we used the radios to coordinate our ambush... by now it was obvious they weren't listening in on what we were saying. We were pretty confident that we had taken out another half dozen of their officer types but we couldn't exactly be sure - by now it was too dark.

They tried to do a bit of manœuvring in the night but they were loud and uncoordinated... and they discovered that our civilian volunteers had spent most of the last couple of days lining the fences and hedgerows around our positions with barbed wire.

At last I got fed up with the confused and confusing reports coming in over the radio and took myself off to bed. I sort of wished that I had Daniel there to snuggle me but I guess he felt he had a duty to stay up and try to follow what was going on.

It was still stupidly early when I woke, with just the faintest smudge of light on the eastern horizon, but I couldn't sleep so I went down to fire up the stove and put the coffee on.

By the time it was ready, the sky was a fair bit lighter so, after delivering a mugfull to Daniel... he gave a grunt of thanks but didn't seem desperately keen on waking up... I struggled up to the glass room at the top of the Lighthouse with a couple more mugs. Jake was on lookout and manning the radio.