Читать книгу High Citadel / Landslide - Desmond Bagley, Desmond Bagley - Страница 23

For the rest of the day they practised, learning to allow for wind and the effect of a change of range. Miss Ponsky tightened still further her wire-drawn nerves and became instructress, and the general level of performance improved enormously.

O’Hara went down to the gorge and, by triangulation, carefully measured the distance to the enemy vehicles and was satisfied that he had the range measured to a foot. Then he went back and measured the same distance on the ground and told everyone to practise with the bow at that range. It was one hundred and eight yards.

He said to Benedetta, ‘I’m making you my chief-of-staff – that’s a sort of glorified secretary that a general has. Have you got pencil and paper?’

She smiled and nodded, whereupon he reeled off a dozen things that had to be done. ‘You pass on that stuff to the right people in case I forget – I’ve got a hell of a lot of things on my mind right now and I might slip up on something important when the action starts.’

He set Aguillar to tying bunches of rags around half a dozen bolts, then shot them at the target to see if the rags made any difference to the accuracy of the flight. There was no appreciable difference, so he soaked one of them in paraffin and lit it before firing, but the flame was extinguished before it reached the target.

He swore and experimented further, letting the paraffin burn fiercely before he pulled the trigger. At the expense of a scorched face he finally landed three fiercely burning bolts squarely in the target and observed happily that they continued to burn.

‘We’ll have to do this in the day-time,’ he said. ‘It’ll be bloody dangerous in the dark – they’d spot the flame before we shot.’ He looked up at the sun. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to drag this thing out as long as we can.’

It was late afternoon before the enemy ventured on to the bridge again and they scattered at a shot from Rohde who, after a long sleep, had taken over again from Forester. Rohde fired another shot before sunset and then stopped on instructions from O’Hara. ‘Keep the last two bullets,’ he said. ‘We’ll need them.’

So the enemy put in three more planks and stepped up their illumination that night, although they dared not move on the bridge.