Then he saw that the helicopter had turned back and was sowing a second barrier beyond the first, and he remembered the endless lines of fields they had seen before ever they committed themselves to the stalks, and he knew for certain that they were nowhere near the edge of the field, and that no escape lay in this direction. His brain shrieked, ‘We can’t make it, Mac, we can’t make it!’ and, although he didn’t know it, his voice took up the cry:

‘We can’t make it, Mac!’

Just for a moment he wondered whether MacConnachie meant to kill them both, and then he saw the big man stagger and veer away to the right, and they began to run along the growing wall of fire, heading again towards the river, in a desperate bid to beat the spread of the flames to the far barrier. There was just a chance that they might reach the gap in the top left-hand corner of the field before the two walls joined and became one.

They didn’t. They came nowhere near doing so. By the time they got there, there was no sign that the two fires had ever existed as separate entities. A solid wall of flames raged and swayed in front of them, and as they turned slowly in a complete circle, they saw no gap anywhere.

The fire behind rolled slowly up the field towards them; MacConnachie gave it ten minutes, no more.

Then the helicopter came and sat above them, waiting.

It’s odd, thought Ansell, how calm you feel at the moment of realization. If he tells me to fight, I’ll fight. If he tells me to die, I’ll die. But I won’t surrender.

The smoke swept down towards them and fled past overhead, to be lost abruptly in the uprush of flame so close at hand. He didn’t feel uncomfortably hot, but the sun was well up in the sky now, and their clothes were oily with sweat; he disliked the smell that issued from the neck of his native coat.

MacConnachie looked up at the helicopter, which hovered thoughtfully just sufficiently distant to avoid troubling them with its turbulence, and contemplated a proposition he had deliberately driven from his mind hitherto: do we surrender, or don’t we? Is that what the boy would want? If we do, we’ll be kindly treated, that’s the Goons’ way. But we’ll not be ourselves any more. We’ll have been defeated.

He turned to the boy.

‘Well?’

‘Whatever you say, Mac. I’m not bothered.’

That’s a big help.

MacConnachie looked at the chopper again. In sudden anger, he brought up the gun and fired three shots at the rotor. It was a waste of time, but it was an answer; or a way of not answering, perhaps.