The Eternal War

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 a blood-rush roar he scrambled up the far side, firing his revolver wildly at the withdrawing British troops.

Reckless fool.

‘James! Get down!’

Volley fire from further down the slope brought Wainwright to his senses as plumes of dirt erupted beside him. He dropped back down with a whoop of excitement.

The rest of the men in the trench carried his whooping cry, and turned it into a regiment-wide jeer at the beaten redcoats, gathering back down on the shingle, taking cover in the relative safety of the craters, behind the ruined stumps of wall by the riverside.

Freeman spat the whistle out of his mouth, grinned at Devereau. ‘Hell, sir … we showed ’em some fight! Didn’t we, sir?’

‘Yes, we did that, Sergeant.’

He looked at Wainwright moving down among the men, swinging his sabre in the air triumphantly. ‘See to our wounded, Sergeant.’ He squeezed past Freeman and a dozen other men lofting their helmets above them on the tips of their bayonets.

‘Helmets back on, you fools!’ he shouted.

Finally, standing beside Wainwright: ‘Colonel! I thought the plan was for you to remain in the horseshoe! Whatever happened here?’

Wainwright shrugged guiltily. ‘True, but it would have been a shame to lose a trench so early in the battle, would it not, William?’

Devereau’s scowl eased. It would at that.

‘Well … it seems you came down at just the right moment.’

They watched the British troops rallying down on the shingle. Regimental sharpshooters firing off sporadic rounds up at the borderline to keep them from daring to press their attack down on them.

‘Fact is they have a toehold on this side now,’ he added.

Wainwright nodded. ‘We could charge them? They are still disorganized – we have the height and the element of surprise?’

‘But not the numbers. There are over a thousand men down there, and we have just under six hundred. Not enough. Our best bet is digging in and holding fast like ticks on a dog’s back.’

Both men watched the British over the top of their sandbags. Engineers were hastily detaching the landing-raft side-panels and assembling them on the shingle, creating rudimentary fortifications for them to huddle behind; their wounded were being dragged to the relative safety of covered positions to be treated by a field physician. Devereau marvelled at their discipline under fire, so quickly, efficiently, turning a complete rout into entrenchment, temporary defeat into consolidation.

‘Good God … it’s no wonder half of this world is under the Union Jack.’ He stepped back down into the mud, turned to see Wainwright squatting and inspecting the collar pips on the uniform of a dead redcoat.

‘And they’re just a regular line regiment, William. Not even elite troops.’

Devereau nodded. There was worse yet to come, then – perhaps one of the notorious regiments: the Black Watch, the Grenadier Guards, the King’s Guard.

‘You did it!’ Both colonels looked up to see Maddy and Becks standing on the lip of the trench.

‘Best get down here, ma’am!’ said Wainwright. ‘They have sharpshooters.’

As he spoke a single shot whistled close by. Maddy scrambled down into the trench. ‘Oh my God! Was that … ?’

‘Aimed at you?’ Devereau nodded sternly. ‘Yes.’

Becks dropped down beside her.

Maddy looked around at the bodies splayed along the bottom of the trench, some still stirring, moaning. She glimpsed ragged wounds, puckered pink flesh, dark blood leaking, spurting. She could smell the burn of cordite in the air, but, beneath that, the other smells of battle: sweat, vomit. And the murmur of pitiful voices of dying men.

She felt ill: light-headed and queasy.

Wainwright noticed. ‘How quickly we forget what war actually looks like.’

Maddy swallowed, pale-faced, choking back her own urge to vomit. ‘I … uh … I came to find you.’ She took a few deep breaths. ‘I sent another message through. To make the rendezvous sooner.’

‘How soon?’

‘I can’t say, but we have a way of knowing when they’re there. And the moment they arrive, we can pick them up.’

‘When?’ asked Devereau.

‘It could be any time,’ she replied.

A grin flashed across his face. Wainwright shared it. ‘Then the longer the British fool about down there on the beach, the better it is for us.’

‘Indeed.’ Devereau turned to Maddy. He lowered his voice. ‘And the moment you send your colleagues back to … What year was it?’

‘1831.’

‘1831 … this world will change?’

‘Pretty soon after, yeah. Sometimes immediately. Sometimes a few hours.’

‘It is impossible to accurately predict the arrival time of a reality wave after a timeline event alteration,’ added Becks.

‘But it would be soon,’ Maddy reassured them. She glanced around quickly at the shifting carpet of bodies. ‘Soon enough that, you know, you could stop this fighting as soon as I’ve sent them back.’

‘You mean surrender?’ Wainwright and Devereau shared a look. ‘I wonder … would this time wave arrive soon enough for us to both escape the firing squad?’

Maddy shook her head. ‘I … I can’t say when. It might even be a day or so –’

‘Then I think we are in agreement, Colonel Wainwright, that we would rather fight on until the moment this wave arrives?’

Wainwright nodded. ‘Complete agreement, Colonel Devereau.’

Maddy puffed air. ‘All right, but …’ She turned and pointed up the slope towards the horseshoe trench and beyond that to the very top of the hump of bricks in the shadow of the overhanging ruins of Williamsburg Bridge. ‘The antennae array … that has got to be protected whatever happens. Do you understand? If it gets damaged, then this is all over.’

‘Then we shall keep the fight down there for as long as we can,’ said Wainwright. ‘What of my tank? Is its engine still running?’

‘Yeah, it’s running; we’ve got power. And the displacement machine is charged up and ready to use. So that’s good.’

‘So our business is waiting, then,’ said Devereau.

Maddy nodded. ‘I find I do a lot of that in this business … you know? Waiting.’ She half smiled. ‘Kinda sucks.’