Ed wound the window down. They could hear the shooting quite clearly now – sharp, argumentative bursts of machine-gun fire, countered by the deep blasts of shotguns. The night air was warm and dusty, but it was dark too, with clouds covering the moon, and it was difficult to make out what was happening up ahead. They could smell gunsmoke drifting their way on the fresh easterly wind.

In the light of his headlamps, Ed saw somebody lying in the roadway. He pulled up, opened the Wagoneer’s door, and jumped down. Della said, ‘What is it? What have you stopped for?’

Ed didn’t answer, but crouched his way forward beside the Jeep’s front wheel, and then scuttled out to where the man was sprawled out in the dust. There was blood everywhere, most of it dried in dark Rorschach prints, but some of it still wet and globular. Ed carefully eased the man over on to his back, and then he saw who it was.

‘Oh, Jesus,’ he said, through his teeth.

It was young Jack Marowitz, dead. He looked as if he had been hit five or six times in the chest by a machine-gun, because the front of his yellow college sweatshirt was mushy with blood. As Ed turned him over, a strange sighing noise came from his perforated lungs.

Ed heaved the body over to the side of the road, and then crouched his way back to the Jeep. The firing was much closer now, and he could hear unfamiliar voices shouting something which sounded like, ‘Get behind them! Circle around them, George! Get behind them!’

Della said, ‘What’s happening? Who was that in the road?’

Ed slid into the driver’s seat, slammed the door, and revved up the Wagoneer’s engine. ‘Jack Marowitz, my crop adviser. One of the best in the business, as far as I was concerned.’

‘But what’s going on? Who shot him?’

‘I don’t know. It sounds like some kind of a raiding party. They’re over there on the right, most of them. At least it sounds that way, from the gunfire.’

‘Where are your people?’

Ed drove cautiously ahead for three or four hundred yards without lights. As he drove, he pointed to the fence which ran alongside the entrance road on the left-hand side. ‘That’s where Dyson was hiding himself yesterday, so I guess that’s where they are tonight. It was Willard, Jack, and one of the garage hands on guard duty until three o’clock.’

There was a brief snatch of firing, and a sudden rattling of bullets against the side of the Jeep. Ed immediately swerved off the track, and stopped the vehicle beside the protective camouflage of a clump of stunted bushes. He pushed open the driver’s door, and scrambled quickly out into the grass, followed by Della.