over a wooden picket fence and across the paddock, scattering horses that seemed to stand almost as tall at the shoulder as Indian elephants.
‘Information: fifteen miles, one hundred and seventy-six yards in this direction.’
‘Right,’ said Liam, gripping both control sticks with white-knuckled concentration. ‘OK … fifteen miles.’
The tractor was romping along now, bouncing alarmingly on the uneven ground, swerving every now and then to avoid the unpredictable panicked movements of the shire horses flocking alongside it.
‘Whoa!’ Sal pointed through the cabin’s mud-spattered windscreen. ‘Mind the –’ The tractor rolled over a long wooden feeding trough, sending splinters of wood and cobs of maize into the air.
‘Never mind,’ said Sal.
Liam crashed out of the far side of the paddock and swerved right to avoid running into an open barn. A moment later they were rolling across a courtyard criss-crossed with laundry lines.
‘Watch out, look … kids!’
Several children playing amid fluttering bed sheets scattered in panic before them.
‘Oh Jay-zus! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!’ Liam bellowed through the open side window as they rumbled out of the far side, across someone’s vegetable garden and over a cheerfully coloured timber playhouse.
They were rolling across a vineyard a moment later, flattening row after row of budding grapevines. Sal pointed out a long line of greenhouses nestled between rows of vines. She noted the look of shock on an old man’s face as he stood in the doorway, watering can in one hand and pruning shears in the other. The tractor’s huge wheels churned a lane of soil mere inches away from him and the fragile framework of timber and glass.
‘Hey, Liam … you actually managed to miss something.’
His face was rigid with desperate concentration. ‘I’ve never driven anything before in me life!’
Branches of a vine thrashed against the windscreen, smearing it with grape juice.
‘Liam!’ said Sal.
He was squinting through the slime of juice and grime on the glass; too focused on seeing through it all to take heed of Sal.
‘LIAM!’
‘WHAT?’
Sal squeezed his shoulder gently. ‘Maybe someone else should be driving instead? Huh?’
‘Good God, yes!’ barked Lincoln, holding his head where he’d whacked it against the cabin’s low roof.
Liam nodded. ‘Uh … OK, yeah. That’s … probably … a good idea.’
He eased both throttle sticks back slowly, evenly, to prevent the tractor lurching one way or the other. Finally it came to a rest, the tractor’s idling engine grumbling irritably at the way it had just been treated.
Bob leaned over Liam’s shoulder. ‘Recommendation: I should drive this vehicle.’
Liam nodded eagerly, slowly easing his vice-like grip of the throttle sticks. ‘Uh, yeah … I think that might be best.’
CHAPTER 80
2001, New York
Devereau looked around him, for the moment not facing an adversary. The floor of the trench was already a squirming carpet of bodies, the dying and the dead, red, grey and blue tunics tangled with each other.
More British were dropping down into the trench, swinging the balance of numbers against Devereau’s men, a hundred different one-on-one duels becoming two-on-one.
We’re going to lose this trench … quickly.
Down the trench he could see Sergeant Freeman parrying and lunging with calm machine-like certainty. Behind the man a British soldier was getting ready to spike Freeman in the back. Devereau reached for his revolver, raised, aimed and fired it empty. Through the drifting smoke he saw the soldier drop and Freeman turn to see the fate he’d just narrowly escaped.
Devereau waved to join him and Freeman began to pick his way over the bodies, roughly shoving a couple of struggling men to one side before finally joining him. ‘Sir?’
‘This trench is lost. We need to sound a retreat to the horseshoe!’
Freeman nodded – his opinion as well, it seemed. ‘Aye, sir.’ The sergeant was reaching for the signal whistle on a chain, tucked into his breast pocket, when Devereau caught sight of new movement. The rear-most lip of the trench was suddenly lined with figures aiming guns down at them. He heard a voice give a command and at once the air was thick with clouds of gunsmoke and the deafening rattle of gunfire. Amid the elongated scrum of struggling men down the entire length of the borderline trench, men in red tunics were flung back against the muddy wall clutching ragged wounds.
Those British soldiers still standing as the gunfire started to falter and empty ammo clips pinged into the air began to disengage from their hand-to-hand duels and scramble back over the lip of the trench to beat a retreat down the slope.
Colonel Wainwright dropped down beside him. With