The colonel leaves her there, after instructing Dr. Akimwe to see her safely back to her seat and strap her in. “Take care of Mr. Greaves too,” he adds.
“Do you have any suggestions as to how I might do that?” Akimwe inquires politely.
Carlisle doesn’t, so says nothing. He refreshes his e-blocker, noting with approval that McQueen and Phillips are doing the same. Then with the two men at his back he opens the mid-section door and steps out.
Into a raw, clear afternoon. Mist lies on the ground, but from knees on up there’s good line of sight. Perhaps there are hidden attackers snaking through the long grass on their bellies. If so, their snaking skills are commendable and they have found a way to fit grass blades with silencers.
Notwithstanding this, Carlisle elects not to speak. He signals to McQueen to cover him and Phillips while they check the treads and the underside of the vehicle.
Once again they feel the absence of Private Lutes, who knew Rosie’s skin like his own. They are able to verify that they haven’t blown a tread and that there is no visible damage to the chassis. Confident now that they are alone, Carlisle brings Sixsmith out from the cockpit to join them. As the most competent engineer out of the five of them, she is best qualified to make a full visual inspection of the tread connects. The colonel also orders her to check the rear-mounted air vents. The vents are high enough off the road that it’s unlikely they would have been touched, but he doesn’t want to neglect something so crucial to their survival.
Everything is fine, or seems to be.
“Was that an ambush?” McQueen demands. From the crew quarters, he wasn’t able to see a thing when they actually rolled over the obstacle, which is clearly a sore point.
“There was definitely a built barricade,” Carlisle says, sticking to what he knows. “Branches. Stones. Some sharpened stakes.”
“Stakes?” McQueen is incredulous.
Carlisle sketches in the air. “Lengths of wood about four to six feet long, split at one end and with glass shards wedged into the fork.”
“It was an ambush,” Sixsmith says flatly. “You need to see this.”
On Rosie’s rear right flank there are shallow scratch marks, scoring the olive-drab paint. Below them, a small soot-blackened ellipse shows where someone tried to set a fire. The four of them stare at these baffling signs as though they’re trying to read them like runes.
“Last night?” McQueen demands at last.
“Has to be,” Sixsmith says. “We were A-one at Lloyd’s after we got out of Invercrae. I went over every inch.”
“Why didn’t this show in the MAC checks?” the colonel demands.
Sixsmith shoots him a hunted look. He has impugned her and she feels it, especially after running right into the barricade. “Sir, the MAC is about moving parts. We don’t go over the armour.”
McQueen is still focused on the invisible enemy—the crucial point here. “So someone got through the motion sensors and the traps and had a go at us?”
“Yeah, but with penknives,” Phillips says, with a nervous laugh. “Penknives and a cook-up. Who tries to stab a tank?”
McQueen is not amused. He scans the empty horizon, scowling like a demon. “Who tries to stab a tank?” he repeats. “The same people who went up against us in Invercrae yesterday with slingshots. The same people who killed Lutes with fucking kitchenware. They’ve followed us.”
Carlisle shakes his head. He has considered this, but it seems entirely implausible to him. “And got ahead of us? On this road? How, Mr. McQueen? No, if this was an ambush, it was laid for someone else. Someone who’s not riding inside four inches of steel and ceramic laminate.”
But there is another possibility, he allows in his own mind. It could be someone who saw them coming and preposterously underestimated them. If he and his team had stepped out to inspect the treads on the spot, would woad-painted savages have run out of the trees to attack them with spears and clubs?
No, of course not. It has only been ten years since civilisation fell apart. People don’t devolve to the stone age in a single decade. In any case, Phillips did a thorough scan with the thermal goggles and saw nobody in the woods beside the road. Even if you were to accept the hypothesis that this could have been done by savages, there would still seem to be a logical contradiction in the idea of savages who set an ambush and then wander off to pick flowers.
Despite his orders, Dr. Fournier emerges from Rosie, exiting via the cab rather than through the mid-section door. Unused to the high running board, he almost slips and falls. He is very flustered as he crosses to join them, indignation and belligerence clearly visible on his face. Something else is there too, disguised and half-effaced under these banner-headline emotions. Carlisle puts it down to fear. It is understandable for the doctor to be afraid, and to want to hide it. There is no reason as far as he knows to believe that Fournier has anything else to hide.
Fournier is trembling uncontrollably, and his stomach churns with nausea. He has just disabled the radio in Rosie’s cab. The circuit board he pried out of it is sitting in his pocket now, along with the Allen key he used to detach the radio’s fascia from the console and get access to its innards.
All the while he was working, he was in full view of the colonel and his soldiers. They could have turned at any point and seen him, and then come back to the cockpit to find out what he was doing there. It was, quite simply, the bravest thing he has ever done, and he is amazed at himself. He was amazed even as he was doing it, to find that he was capable of such reckless courage.
Now he is suffering the reaction, surplus adrenalin making his body rebel against his conscious will like an unbroken horse. There is no way that he can come across as his normal self, so he lets the soldiers see that he is out of control. They will mistake it for cowardice, but that’s fine. For once, their lack of respect for him will work in his favour.
“Is it too much to ask that you brief me on what just happened?” he asks Carlisle. The pitch of his voice wavers. Good. Let it.
“We hit a roadblock, Doctor,” the colonel explains. “We took no harm, and we can be on our way again.”
Which is very good news under the circumstances, but flushed with the success of his recent exploits Fournier senses an opportunity to make it even better. The brigadier’s orders to him were to see that Rosie was delayed: this looks like a perfect justification for a delay, and if there is no actual danger then so much the better. He demands details, and more details on top of those. As civilian commander, he announces with calculated shrillness, he has a right to know.