Interrupted Journey

Chapter 5 - King Ron

It was a beautiful early summer afternoon with larks doing their ascending thing over the fragrant heather and the first few bilberries appearing. I was supposed to be out on a three man patrol with Mike and the older of the two Drummond lads - one of these days I really must learn their names - but I was having difficulty keeping my mind on business.

My attention was suddenly dragged back to the present as I sensed Mike flipping into combat mode. Without any conscious intervention from my brain, I hunched down, gripped my weapon tighter and my senses jumped to red alert.

I could hear it too. There was a major firefight taking place over towards the New Road.

"We need to know what's going on over there," Mike said. "I can hear grenades and at least one GIMPY, by the sound of things."

"GIMPY?" I replied, giving him a puzzled look.

"General-purpose machine gun," he explained. "It's not the sort of weapon you find just lying around."

He sent the Drummond lad back to report then Mike and I made our way, rapidly but cautiously, along the track round the side of the moor to a shoulder of land from which we could look down onto the scene below.

I'd seen plenty of firefights now - been involved in plenty - but the scale of slaughter here was far beyond anything I had ever been involved with.

Three armoured land rovers were parked in a triangle at the top of a small rise - just on the other side of the New Road. Defensive ditches had been hastily thrown up around them to give a temporary fort... and then a human wave had tried to overwhelm it.

From the look of things, it had almost succeeded.

Bodies surrounded the fort from several hundred yards away to within only feet of the Land Rovers. From our vantage point we could see straggling groups of the survivors making their way back up the New Road towards Barnfort.

"Rorkes Drift!" Mike muttered. "Rorkes Bloody Drift! Textbook improvised defensive structure. Looks like some gang from Barnfort tried to take on a military formation with real weaponry and got their arses handed to them. Pity I've no binoculars."

"Hang on," I said fishing around in the bottom of my rucksack. I hauled out the toy set that James had retrieved from our car - it seemed like years ago. Mike gave them a look of contempt but then gave a shrug and put them to his eyes.

"Looks like some strange sort of composite military formation," he reported. "They have at least a couple of survivors. We need to move in."

"What?"

"They survived, so they're not out of ammunition," he told me. "We need to see if we can get our hands on any of it."

I nodded and he led us down the hillside, coming out onto the New Road not far from the lorry we had stripped. By staying behind dry-stone walls, we managed to move within a hundred yards without being seen though, in one place, where the wall had collapsed we had to practice our low crawl.

"Hello there!" Mike called out. The barrel of the gun swung around in our direction and it was not the most comfortable sensation I had ever had. "Sergeant Mike Jenkins here," he went on. "I can see you're sitting on a Gimp but we've got a couple of SA80s here and could have taken you by now if we'd felt the urge."

"What do you want?" came a voice from behind the gun.

"We're after ammunition," Mike answered. "And any weapons we can find, too. In exchange we can offer, food, medical care and a place to stay for the two of you."

"Three," the man replied.

Mike looked at me and I nodded.

"OK, you can come in," the man said, "It's not like we've got a whole bunch of options here!" He eased back, returning his attention to the field of dead and dying while Mike and I stood up and shouldered our rifles and walked slowly into the camp.