Chapter 421 — No Ground to Give I

Chapter 421: Chapter 421 — No Ground to Give I

James was running his thumb down Durendal’s edge, checking for nicks from Eleanor Harcourt’s sword, when Farrell called them over.

"Challengers. Here."

An officer James did not know had a map spread out across the bonnet of a jeep, weighted down at the corners with a radio, a water bottle and two magazines. Farrell stood over it with one hand flat on the paper.

"This is where the unit on our left was," she said. She put her finger on a junction east of the industrial estate where two roads crossed beside a cluster of buildings. "They’ve pulled back to here." She moved her finger south. "The British have the junction."

"What’s it for?" said James.

"This road." She traced it. "It’s the connector. It joins this sector to the next one north. It’s how our people up there get reinforcements in, and how they get their wounded out. With the British sat on the junction, the unit up north is on its own. They can still get out the long way round, but the long way round takes three hours and goes past two places the British can shell."

Finn leaned over the map.

"Are we being told to take the whole position back?"

"No." Farrell shook her head. "This isn’t an offensive. Nobody’s asking us to push them back over the border. The job is the junction, and the ground immediately round it. We take it and hold it long enough for the unit up north to reconnect and reorganise. That’s all." She looked up. "There are other people doing other things up and down this line. I can’t count on any of them getting here before we’re finished. So we plan like it’s just us."

---

Eamon came over with his kit already on and his helmet in his hand.

He was moving all right, but not quite properly. James saw him favour his left side, holding the arm Ruth had dressed a little in against his ribs. When he bent to put the helmet down on the bonnet, he did it carefully.

"Should you be going?" said Finn.

"Course I should be going."

"Your arm—"

"My arm is fine. The thing you want to be worried about is Ruth, not the British. If she finds out I’ve opened this again, there won’t be enough of me left for the British to shoot." He grinned. "I’ll be grand."

Finn did not argue with him. But James watched him, a minute later, find a reason to stand on Eamon’s left while they waited. He asked him to hand over a water bottle he could easily have reached himself, and watched how Eamon lifted his arm to do it.

Eamon lifted it all the way. Slowly, but all the way.

Finn nodded to himself and said nothing.

---

Farrell went through it name by name.

She called out every soldier available and checked them off against the folder. She split them into two groups. One would go up the road toward the junction with Finn and Eamon and the volunteer Challengers, take the connecting road and hold it. The other, smaller, would go with James, up the side through the buildings toward whatever was protecting the junction.

"Ganner. You’ve got the enemy Challengers," she said. "If they’ve got one sitting on that junction protecting their people, I want them dealt with so my soldiers can get onto the road. Not chased. Dealt with. Hale and Kelleher, you’re with the road group. You keep their Challengers off my soldiers while my soldiers take the ground." She looked round. "And everybody listens to the officer you’re with. If you think something needs doing that isn’t your job, you tell them, and they tell me. Nobody goes off on their own."

"Understood."

"What do we know about their Challenger?" said James. "The one on the junction."

"Not a lot." Farrell glanced at the officer at the bonnet. "The lads who pulled back say there was at least one. Protecting the British troops as they came on. They don’t know what class, or what it actually did. They just know it made the junction impossible to hold."

James looked at the map.

He did not need to know the class. That would have been nice, but he did not need it. He needed to know where the Challenger was standing, what it was protecting and how much ground that protection covered. He needed to know whether killing it would let Farrell’s soldiers onto the road, or whether there was something else behind it that would stop them anyway.

He would find all that out when he got there.

---

They went in the trucks as far as the trucks could go, and then they walked.

The closer they got, the more of the other unit’s withdrawal they saw.

A military jeep had been pushed half off the road into a ditch, with its windscreen starred and one wheel off. Somebody had stripped it of anything useful before leaving it. Further on, there was a heap of equipment beside a dry-stone wall. There were ammunition boxes, a jerry can and a roll of wire, dropped where somebody had decided they could not carry it any further. A boot lay on its side in the middle of the road.

Ahead, where the road bent round, there was a temporary position in the yard of a farmhouse. A couple of hundred metres south of the junction, the soldiers who had pulled back were gathered in it. Some of them were sitting. Some of them were standing at the wall with their rifles on it, watching north.

The air smelled of diesel and smoke. Every now and then, off to the east beyond the buildings, there was a burst of gunfire, and then nothing, and then another.

Farrell went to find the officer in charge.

James stayed close enough to hear.

The officer was a lieutenant, about Farrell’s age, with a bandage round one hand and a face that had been up all night and then been told it had to keep going. He did not salute. He did not have the energy.

"We held it as long as we could," he said. "I want you to know that. We held it for four hours. Then they brought a Challenger up and the whole thing went." He shook his head. "We’d hit them and nothing would happen. The rounds weren’t getting through. It was like shooting at a wall. And they just kept coming on behind it."

"Casualties?"

"Six wounded we got out. Two dead that I know of." His jaw tightened. "And three I can’t account for. Three of mine. Nobody saw them come back. Nobody saw them go down. They were on the left when it broke, and then they weren’t anywhere."

"We’ll look," said Farrell.

"I’d be grateful."

---

James knew one of the soldiers in the farmyard.

It was the lad from the builders’ yard. He had hauled his mate back behind the pallets by the webbing, and afterwards he had sat against the wall in the loading bay with a bottle of water and told James about his friend’s elbow.

He recognised James at the same moment, and came over.

"You were at the yard," he said.

"I was."

"Owen. Owen Walsh. Corporal." He held out a hand. James shook it. Owen was older than James had thought, close up. He was mid-twenties, with a broken nose that had set slightly crooked and mud dried into the creases of his face. "I never said thanks properly. For Shane. For getting him back behind the blocks."

"How is he?"

"They took him on to Dundalk." Owen shrugged. "I’ve rang twice. Nobody tells you anything. They said it was his elbow and it was bad. That’s all I’ve got."

James nodded.

Owen did not stand there being grateful. His eyes went to the map case on Farrell’s hip, and to the way the two groups were splitting up, and he worked it out.

"You’re going for the junction?"

"Yeah."

"I was up there," said Owen. "Before. They moved me across from the yard this morning to help hold it." He looked at Farrell. "Ma’am. I know the ground. If it helps."

Farrell looked at him. Then she unfolded the map on the top of the farmyard wall.

"Show me."