Chapter 417 — The Men Behind the Uniforms III (Bonus)

Chapter 417: Chapter 417 — The Men Behind the Uniforms III (Bonus)

The third truck had a canvas back and two benches. James sat between Finn and a soldier he did not know. Eamon was across from them, with five more soldiers along both sides.

The truck lurched out of the compound and turned north.

Nobody said much at first. Then the soldier beside James, a man in his forties with a heavy moustache, said to nobody in particular, "My sister’s in Jonesborough. With her kids."

"They’ll have got them out," said the man across from him. "They’ve been moving everyone out of there since last night. Buses."

"She wasn’t answering her phone."

"Nobody’s phone’s working up there. Masts are down. Doesn’t mean anything."

The man with the moustache nodded and did not say anything else.

Further down the bench, a soldier who looked about nineteen leaned forward toward Eamon.

"Can I ask you something?"

"Go on."

"Can you lot survive that? Ordinary stuff. Bullets. Mortars. If you’re high enough."

Eamon thought about it seriously.

"High rank helps," he said. "Good kit helps a lot. The System makes you tougher than you’d believe. I’ve been hit by a rifle round and it felt like being punched." He tapped his chest. "But nobody’s bulletproof, son. Not me. Not him." He nodded at James. "A rifle won’t kill a high-level Challenger in one go, most of the time. Ten rifles might. A shell landing on you will. And you don’t heal when it’s over, out here. That’s the bit people forget."

The young soldier sat back.

James listened, and said nothing.

He knew how big the gap was between a Challenger at his level and an ordinary man. He knew he could probably walk through a hail of rifle fire that would kill everyone in this truck. He had numbers that said so.

He also knew he had never been shot at by an army. He had never stood in a field with shells landing on it, or watched for a sniper he could not see, or wondered whether the next thing coming was a man with a rifle or something worse. In the Tower, every enemy he had ever faced had been built by the Tower, for the Tower, with rules he could learn.

Out here, nobody had written the rules down. Or somebody had, and he had not read them.

---

The further north they went, the more the country changed.

The road was busy going the other way. There were cars full of people with suitcases on the roof, a farm trailer with a family in the back of it, and a tractor with a woman on it and two dogs. Then there was a house with its front wall gone and its roof hanging off one end. There was a petrol station with all its windows blown in. Soldiers at a junction were waving the southbound traffic through and stopping the northbound.

Every now and then, faint through the canvas, there was a sound. It was a low thud, or a rattle, or a crack. James could not tell which ones were close and which were far, or what most of them were.

Farrell’s voice came over the radio clipped to the soldier at the back.

"*All call signs. The crossing’s pulling wounded back now. We’re going in to help. Be ready.*"

The truck slowed.

---

James jumped down onto the road.

It smelled of smoke, and under the smoke there was something else. It was raw, like earth that had been torn open. Up ahead, maybe three hundred metres, the road went over a low bridge across a stream, and the Irish position was dug in along the near bank. James could see sandbags, a line of shallow trenches and a couple of armoured vehicles in hull-down positions. Smoke was drifting from somewhere behind them.

Soldiers were coming back down the road toward the trucks.

Some were walking. Some were carrying others. One man was being helped along by two of his mates, an arm round each of their necks, his leg strapped up. Another man was walking on his own with blood down his face. The medic beside him kept saying *let me*, and he kept saying *I’m fine, I can walk, I’m fine*.

James looked at their faces as they came past.

Some of them looked emptied out, done, as though nothing was left inside. But some were still watching the road behind them, the way you watch a door you have just closed on something.

An Irish sergeant came down the road at a jog and found Farrell.

"Ma’am. They’re on us. There’s a British company pushing the bridge, maybe more, and they’ve got Challengers with them. One at least. Big. We’ve lost the left side of the line. We’re holding the right, but not for long."

"How many wounded still up there?"

"Six. Maybe seven. We’re getting them out but they keep—"

There was a burst of noise from the bridge, loud enough to make everybody on the road duck. It was gunfire, a lot of it all at once, and then something heavier. A blast came up off the left side of the bank, dirt and smoke.

The sergeant turned toward it.

James looked where he was looking.

It was closer than he had thought, much closer.

"Right," said Farrell. "Kelleher, Ganner, Hale. With me. We’re going up the right side to help them get the last of the wounded out. Everyone else, cover the road and the trucks." She was already moving. "*Go.*"

---

They went up the right side of the road at a run, keeping low, behind the line of the ditch.

James had Durendal out before he had decided to draw it.

Two hundred metres up, a pair of Irish soldiers were trying to drag a third along the bottom of the ditch toward them. The one being dragged had both hands pressed against his stomach. The two dragging him were bent double and going far too slowly, because the ditch was half full of water and the man was heavy and kept slipping out of their grip.

Behind them, just on the far side of a gap in the hedge, three British soldiers had come round the end of the bank. They were in full kit, with rifles up, going for the gap. If they got through it, they would be looking straight down the ditch at the three Irishmen with nothing between them.

James went.

He came up out of the ditch and across the open ground at the edge of the road. It was forty metres, and he covered it in a time no ordinary person could have.

The first British soldier saw him at about ten metres and swung his rifle round. James was inside it before the barrel had finished moving. He hit it upward with the flat of Durendal and the shots went into the sky. Then he put his shoulder into the man’s chest, and the man went backwards off his feet into the hedge and did not get up.

The second one fired.

It hit James in the left side, below the ribs. It did feel like being punched, hard, by someone very big. He grunted and kept going. He took the second soldier’s rifle by the barrel with his free hand and wrenched it out of his grip. The man let go rather than lose his fingers. James threw the rifle into the stream.

The third soldier had dropped back to the corner of the bank and was shouting into his radio. James saw his eyes as he did it. They were very wide, and young.

He did not go after him.

"*Go!*" he shouted at the ditch. "*Go now!*"

The two Irish soldiers went. They hauled the wounded man down the ditch, and Finn came past James at a sprint and got his arms under the man’s shoulders. The three of them got him back along the ditch toward the road and the waiting medics, with Eamon in front of them and a pale shimmer of a ward already up across the gap in the hedge behind them.

It lasted perhaps thirty seconds.

The second British soldier had his hands up. The third had gone back round the bank. The first was groaning in the hedge.

James stood there with Durendal in his hand and his side throbbing and looked at the man with his hands up. Then he turned and went back along the ditch.

---

One of the two Irish soldiers who had been dragging the wounded man passed him on the way back up. He was young, with mud to the eyes.

"Thanks," he said.

Then he went straight on up the ditch, to get the next one.

He did not ask James what floor he had cleared. He did not say his name. He did not even slow down.

Eamon came back down from the road.

"He’s out," he said. "The lad with the stomach. Ruth’s lot have him." He looked at James’s side, where his coat was torn. "That’s a hole."

"It’s fine."

"Ruth’s going to—"

"I know. Later."

Eamon looked up the road toward the bridge. His face had gone completely still.

"It’s getting worse up there."

Farrell had her radio to her mouth, crouched in the ditch ten metres away. James heard the end of it.

"*—confirm. British Challengers committed. Repeat, enemy Challengers are engaging—*"

Then James felt something.

It came from the direction of the bridge, like pressure in his ears before a storm. It was not a sound. It was power, a great deal of it, being used all at once, a surge of something that was not gunpowder and was not anything the Tower had made.

Every soldier in the ditch felt it too. He saw them flinch.

Somebody up the line shouted, "*Challenger! Challenger on the bridge!*"

---

The Irish line on the far right of the bridge was still holding. It was a line of sandbags, men behind it firing, and an armoured vehicle tucked behind a wall.

Then the air above the bridge burst.

It burst outward, a flare of power that came off the bridge and hit the sandbag line like a wave. Men went backwards off their feet, three or four of them. A sandbag wall folded in. The armoured vehicle rocked on its suspension.

And British soldiers came across the bridge in the gap it left, fast, in good order, behind someone.

There was a Challenger walking in front of them.

James could not see much at that distance. He could see a figure in dark kit, walking across the middle of the bridge as though walking down a street, while the soldiers behind spread out to either side. The Challenger did not hurry, did not duck, and did not run. It came across the bridge in a straight line with complete confidence, as if it had done this a hundred times. It was not like the soldiers around it at all, not in any way.

He could not tell what the class was, or what the ability was. He could not even tell, at that distance, whether it was a man or a woman.

But he knew what it was. He had seen people move like that on the top floors of the Tower.

It was someone very, very good.

Eamon had seen it too. He had stopped beside James in the ditch, and he was not smiling at all.

"That’s one of theirs," he said quietly. "That’s a big one. They’re committing them now." He looked at James and Finn. "This is where it starts getting bad."

Farrell’s radio crackled. She listened, and she was already moving before it had finished.

"That’s it," she said. "We reinforce the bridge now, or we lose it. Kelleher, I want a ward on the right of that line in two minutes. Ganner, Hale, with him. Hold the right and get the last of the wounded back. Everyone else, on me." She looked at them. "Go."

---

James tightened his grip on Durendal.

Beside him, Finn had both axes in his hands. Eamon was already climbing up out of the ditch, the faint shimmer of a ward gathering round his fingers.

James looked across the field toward the bridge.

The British Challenger was still coming, at an easy walk, across the middle of it. The Irish soldiers on that side were falling back in front of it.

He had fought fallen angels. He had died twice and come back. He had killed one of the Seven with a broken scythe in a room full of demons.

He had never fought a person who had come to take his country.

He went up out of the ditch and toward the bridge.