Simon Clark - The Fall

And above it all, Carswell worked at his pieces of paper, calculating, sketching, pondering, occasionally breaking off to watch his people labouring.

‘Sam… Sam. Catch the line.’ Jud threw the line back up onto the bus’s roof.

Sam caught it deftly enough and began feeding it through one of the iron rings set into the top of the king post. The post itself ran down through a hole in the bus’s metal roof, down again through into the floor of the passenger compartment, then on down farther into the luggage hold beneath, where it was secured to a hefty baulk of timber bolted to the chassis of the bus.

Good God, at least we’re making progress.

What they didn’t need now was to hit some fundamental flaw in Carswell’s plans. Not for the first time, it occurred to Sam that it would be touch and go whether they could even get the king post under the frame of the barn door, high though it was.

Jud’s brain worked in a similar direction. ‘Not that I want to pour cold water on Carswell’s plans at this stage, but…’

‘Go on.’

‘But he’s been making some basic practical errors.’

‘I know. I still wouldn’t like to bet my life on those light bulb fuses firing the rockets.’

‘And he had me box in the bus driver’s compartment with the wooden doors before he told me I had to cut slots so the driver could see out. It seems obvious now, but at the time he was keeping us in the dark.’

‘That’s deliberate,’ Sam said. ‘He likes to keep us ignorant of his master plan so it shows him up as some kind of genius.’

‘Which will cause problems. It might not seem a major difficulty, but if I could have chiselled those view-slots while I had the doors out there on the ground it would have taken me half the time that it did after they were in place.’ He held up a hand with three fingers bound in sticking plaster. ‘Cost me a drop or two of blood, trying to chop the wood out at a difficult angle. If only he’d explained what he wanted earlier it would have saved time as well as blood and effort.’

‘He sees himself as the grand architect.’ Sam heaved the line tight through the iron ring on the king post. ‘He’s not going to welcome us suggesting we form a committee to oversee his plans.’

‘I know, but I wish he’d have the sense to agree to some kind of consultation before we actually begin the next job. I was a carpenter for 25 years, surely that experience counts for something?’

‘Not in his eyes, Jud. If you grab that end of the line I’ll cut it… There, got it. No, if anything the human element is going to be the weak link. After all, he’s expecting 19 thCentury soldiers to man the guns on this bus – a machine they’ve never seen before – and perhaps fire the guns as the damn thing charges across a field at maybe 40 miles an hour. Rather than loading and firing they’re going to be hanging on for dear life.’

‘Then maybe we should be talking our concerns through with Carswell?’

‘Yeah,’ Sam said doubtfully. ‘But who’s going to break it to him that he’s going to have stop playing the dictator and start accepting advice from others?’

‘Well, it certainly won’t be now. Here come the cavalry.’

At that moment troops arrived on horseback. They were dressed in bright red coats and wore brass helmets from which crests of green feathers caught the still-falling snowflakes. A moment later field guns, hauled by sturdy ponies, arrived in the farmyard. The gun barrels were a silvery-gold in colour and perhaps seven inches in diameter and five feet in length.

Sam grinned. ‘It looks as if the Reverend Thomas Hather has a silver tongue after all. He’s persuaded the military to join us.’

‘Hell. Take a look at those cannon. They’re solid-looking brutes, aren’t they? It’s going to take some sweat hauling them on board here.’

‘As Carswell might say, there’s no time like the present.’

Carswell, after gentle persuasion by Jud and Sam, agreed to introduce a shift system of working to allow the exhausted men and women to sleep. Even so, he stipulated that these rest periods would be limited to five hours.

However, with the arrival of the troops the conversion work did become easier – once the men had overcome their surprise at the bizarre machines taking shape there in the barn. Strange devices like the bus, with its mast, rigging lines and stumpy wings. Then there was the Range Rover with its own wing-like rocket launchers sprouting either side at its roof level. And there also were the other motley vehicles, from the ice-cream van (still garishly painted with pictures of comets and lollies) to the domestic cars. The cars would be used as support vehicles for the bus and Range Rover gunships.

Jud called across to Sam as he helped Zita wire the rocket launchers to the Range Rover, ‘Sam, it’s time for your rest break.’

Back muscles aching, his hands still throbbing and painful from unbolting the seats on the bus, Sam headed across the snowy yard to the farmhouse. It was midday; he’d not slept in more than 30 hours.

He did wonder if he would sleep at all, what with the tension of the impending confrontation with the Bluebeards, but the moment his head touched the pillow his eyes closed and he slept without dreaming.

‘These are the grenades,’ Carswell told Sam. He was sitting at the table in the hayloft. ‘I don’t expect you’ll have the opportunity to use them – they’ll be in the hands of the professional soldiers – but you might as well see what they look like and how they work.’

Carswell handed Sam what appeared to be a section of iron piping about the same size as a beer can. It was a discoloured bluey-black and looked pretty roughly made; it was far heavier than Sam had expected, too.

Carswell said, ‘You’ll see that it’s basically a section of iron piping sealed at both ends by welded discs of iron plate. Then it’s filled with blasting powder, and this is the fuse. If you should ever need to use one of these beauties, light the end of the fuse with a match, then throw the grenade at the enemy. The fuse will detonate the powder five seconds later and anyone close enough will be sliced to pieces by the red-hot chunks of iron pipe hurled outwards by the blast. So make sure you throw it far enough away from you. Got that?’

Sam nodded. ‘Have you decided where we – the civilians – will be during the battle?’

‘I have, and I was just coming to that. Most will be stationed at the amphitheatre car park. The plan being that the bus and cars drive close enough to the barbarians as they emerge through the time-gate. They fire a volley of rockets and artillery shells at the enemy, then return to the car park to reload. Of course, the artillery men can keep reloading and firing their guns several times before we need to return.’

‘But you will need some of us to drive the vehicles.’

‘That’s true. Lee Burton will drive the bus… He’s had some experience of it in the past.’

‘He has a PSV licence?’

‘Ah, no, he used to move the bus from the car park to the front of hotels.’

‘So he’s had no real experience driving the bus on roads? Never mind on the kind of open terrain where we’ll be fighting this battle?’

‘No, but he’ll be able to practise before we attack.’

Sam felt his face tighten. A little practice in the road between here and the amphitheatre wouldn’t be nearly enough. It would demand all an experienced driver’s expertise to throw that coach around snow-covered fields as though it was an army tank while the artillery fired broadsides or rockets whistled from their firing tubes.

Carswell moved on crisply. ‘Needless to say, we need a relief driver.’