There were shouts from two sides. George sprang to retrieve the donkey but already it was too late. A hundred yards beneath them, and closing, was a soldier in khaki and a Highland bonnet. He was waving a .303 in their direction.
Eurypides was already running; George delayed only to sweep up the Sten and two remaining magazines. They ran up the mountain to where the trees grew more dense, brambles snatching at their legs, the pumping of their hearts and rasping breath drowning any sound of pursuit until they could run no further. They slumped across a rock, wild eyes telling each other of their fear, their lungs burning.
Eurypides was first to recover. ‘Mum’ll kill us for losing the donkey,’ he gasped.
They ran a little more, until they stumbled into a shallow depression in the ground which was well hidden by boulders, and there they decided to hide. They lay face down in the centre of the rocky bowl, an arm across each other, listening.
‘What’ll they do if they catch us, George? Whip us?’ Eurypides had heard dream-churning tales of how the British thrashed boys they believed were helping EOKA, a soldier clinging to each limb and a fifth supplying the whipping with a thin, ripping rod of bamboo. It was like no punishment they received at school, one you could get up and walk away from. With the Tommies, you were fortunate to be able to crawl.
‘They’ll torture us to find out where we’re taking the guns, where the men are hiding,’ George whispered through dried lips. They both knew what that meant. An EOKA hide had been uncovered near a neighbouring village just before the winter snows had arrived. Eight men were cut down in the attack. The ninth, and sole survivor, not yet twenty, had been hanged at Nicosia Gaol the previous week.
They both thought of their elder brother.
‘Can’t let ourselves be captured, George. Mustn’t tell.’ Eurypides was calm and to the point. He had always been less excitable than George, the brains of the family, the one with prospects. There was even talk of his staying at school beyond the summer, going off to the Pankyprion Gymnasium in the capital and later becoming a teacher, even a civil servant in the colonial administration. If there were still to be a colonial administration.
They lay as silently as possible, ignoring the ants and flies, trying to melt into the hot stone. It was twelve minutes before they heard the voices.
‘They disappeared beyond those rocks over there, Corporal. Havnae seen hide nor hair o’ them since.’
George struggled to control the fear which had clamped its jaws around his bladder. He felt disgusted, afraid he was going to foul himself. Eurypides was looking at him with questioning eyes.
From the noises beyond the rocks they reckoned that another two, possibly three, had joined the original soldier and corporal, who were standing some thirty yards away.
‘Kids you say, MacPherson?’
‘Two o’ them. One still in school uniform, Corporal, short troosers an’ all. Cannae harm us.’
‘Judging by the supplies we found on the mule they were intending to do someone a considerable amount o’ harm. Guns, detonators. They even had grenades made up from bits of piping. We need those kids, MacPherson. Badly.’
‘Wee bastards’ll probably already huv vanished, Corporal.’ A scuffling of boots. ‘I’ll hae a look.’
The boots were approaching now, crunching over the thick mat of pine debris. Eurypides bit deep into the soft tissue of his lip. He reached for George’s hand, trying to draw strength, and, as their ice-cold fingers entwined, so George started to grow, finding courage for them both. He was the older, this was his responsibility. His duty. And, he knew, his fault. He had to do something. He pinched his brother’s cheek.
‘When we get back, I’ll show you how to use my razor,’ he said, smiling. ‘Then we’ll go see Vasso, both of us together. Eh?’
He slithered to the top of the rock bowl, kept his head low, pointed the Sten gun over the edge and closed his eyes. Then he fired until the magazine was empty.
George had never been aware of such a silence. It was a silence inside when, for a moment, the heart stops and the blood no longer pulses through the veins. No bird sang, suddenly no breeze, no whispering of the pines, no more sound of approaching footsteps. Nothing, until the corporal, voice a tone deeper, spoke.
‘My God. Now we’ll need the bloody officer.’
The officer in question was Francis Ewan Urquhart. Second Lieutenant. Age twenty-two. Engaged on National Service following his university deferment, he personified the triumph of education over experience and, in the parlance of the officers’ mess, he was not having a good war. Indeed, in the few months he’d been stationed in Cyprus, he’d barely had any war at all. He craved action, all too aware of his callow youth, desperate for the chance to prove himself, yet he had found only frustration. His commander had proved to be a man of chronic constipation, his caution denying the company any chance to show its colours. The EOKA terrorists had been bombing, butchering and even burning alive so-called traitors, setting them in flames to run down the streets of their village as a sign to others, yet Urquhart’s company had broken more sweat digging latrines than hauling terrorists from their foxholes. But that was last week. This week, the company commander was on leave, Urquhart was in charge, the tactics had been changed and his men had walked four hours up the mountain that afternoon to avoid detection. And the surprise seemed to have worked.
At the first crackle of gunfire, a sense of opportunity had filled his veins. He had been waiting two miles down the valley in his Austin Champ and it took him less than fifteen minutes to arrive on the scene, covering the last few hundred yards on foot with a spring in his step.
‘Report, Corporal Ross.’
The flies were already beginning to gather around the bloodied body of MacPherson.
‘Two boys and a donkey? You can’t be serious,’ Urquhart demanded incredulously.
‘The bullet didnae seem to unnerstand it was being fired by a bairn. Sir.’
The two, Urquhart and Ross, were born to collide, one brought into the world in a Clydeside tenement and the other by Highland patriarchs. Ross had been burying comrades from the Normandy beaches while Urquhart was still having his tie adjusted by his nanny.
A year earlier, Urquhart had been the officious little subaltern who had busted Ross from sergeant back down to private after a month’s liquor allowance had disappeared from the officers’ mess at Tell-el-Kebir and Urquhart had been instructed to round up suitable suspects. Ross had only just been given back the second stripe, still making up the lost ground. And lost pay.
Urquhart knew he had to watch his back, but for now he ignored the other’s insolence; he had a more important battle to fight.
The children had stumbled into a remarkably effective natural redoubt. Some twenty feet across, the scraping in the mountainside was backed by a picket line of boulders that effectively denied a clear line of either sight or fire from above, while the ground ran gently away on the valley side, making it difficult to attack except by means of a frontal and uphill assault, a tactic that had already been shown to be mortally flawed. Clumps of bushes hugged the perimeter providing still further cover.
‘Suggestions, Corporal Ross?’ Urquhart slapped the officer’s Browning at his belt.
The corporal sucked a little finger as though trying to remove a splinter. ‘We could surrender straight away, that’d be quickest. Or blow the wee bastards into eternity, if that’s what you want, Lieutenant. One grenade should do the job.’
‘We need them alive. Find out where they were headed