‘Oh God, oh God, it’s hopeless, Mac.’

‘No, kid! That’s what he wants you to say.’

‘It’s true.’

‘No!’

‘It’s true!’

‘No! No! He’ll not win! He’ll not!’

But the chopper ground back and forth over their heads, beating the message down, that he knew where they were, that he would never go away, that he would stay and stay until they were broken into the earth.

You’ll never beat us, you Goon shit, do you hear? Never. We’ll win in the end. We’ll break you. We’ll win.

‘Where are the other choppers?’

‘With him up there, they don’t need any others.’

‘What about the River Boys?’

‘It took us a day to reach the last height, it’ll take them half a day at least.’

‘They’re not hiding!’

‘They’re soldiers, they won’t flog themselves.’

Ansell stared at the knotted roots a few inches from his face.

‘Mac,’ he said, ‘we might have to crawl all the way.’

‘We might. If we have to, we will.’

Ansell had feared nothing more in his life. MacConnachie said,

‘But we won’t. He’ll be gone by then.’

He wasn’t.

As the sun progressed steadily up the sky to its most fierce height, the unrelenting search went on. No moment of relief, such as had come on the previous days, lifted the pressure from them. The suffocating torture was endless. First their finger-nails went, shredded and torn away, to leave their fingers bleeding stumps. The blood mingled with sweat and dirt to add one more sharp rawness to an already proliferating pain. And their cheeks flowered in a cross-work of multiplying scratches. Their arms and legs began to feel insecure in their sockets, as though stretched beyond their capacity to maintain contact, and necks and shoulders locked in a posture, almost comic, of strained watchfulness. To move at all had begun to demand a quality of will from the stomach that Ansell could feel flowing from him, useless, like spilled fuel.

At midday they reached a point level with the height on which they had spent the night, and crawled on.

Ansell’s body slithered in a sickly smell of sweat. His eyes, sightless now, ran with tears. There was no air that wasn’t excoriatingly hot and packed with a fine powder of dust. And all the time the helicopter flitted about with such dainty ease, with so little effort in the clean air, never quite leaving their field of vision, never allowing a moment of respite to rise and ease their wracked bodies.

There comes a moment when the body rejects pain and unconsciousness supervenes. Ansell prayed for it, but instead every nerve and tissue seemed only to become more agonizingly sensitive to the scraping jar of their journey. If only they could get up, if they could only rid themselves of the terrible anchor of the earth, which held them back with such vast competence. To tackle the slope in the least effective manner outraged his mind and heart, and rifled his store of courage.