A handful of rebels managed to survive the initial killing frenzy. Some of them broke to the left and right, fleeing across the open ground, diving behind any scraps of cover they could find. Two guys in matching red headscarves dropped to the grass and let off a couple of quick bursts at the rooftop. But it wasn’t accurate fire. They were reacting on instinct, firing in the vague direction of the opposition. Shooting because they felt they needed to, because they were confused and afraid. Bullets slapped into the parapet somewhere off to Bowman’s right. The bee-like buzz of a bullet several inches above his head. He fixed his cross hairs on the headscarf twins and hit them with a blast from the Gimpy. They disappeared in a spray of blood and guts.

Bowman was dimly aware of several muzzle flashes from the gun pit beside the pagoda. The Karatandan soldiers were getting ahead of themselves, putting down rounds on the rebels.

‘Cease fire!’ Mallet thundered over the radio. ‘Tell your men to cease fire, Major! You’re wasting rounds. Leave them to us!’

By now, five seconds into the skirmish, at least twenty of the attackers were dead. Bowman and Loader swept their GPMGs from left to right, tearing up any surviving rebels, the mechanical patter of the machine guns punctuated by the sounds of the .50 cal and the AWC rifle. Webb and Mallet focused their fire on the archway, killing those few rebels attempting to escape back to the clearing. The remaining Boys fell back from the entrance and tacked left or right, looking for another way out. They ran straight into the hail of murderous gunfire from the two Gimpys.

Mallet called out across the roof, directing the GPMGs towards a section of the fence to the right of the arch. Bowman slid his weapon across, saw three figures trying to scale the chain-link fence in a futile effort to escape the massacre. Before he could open fire the earth suddenly exploded around the rebels as Loader cut them down with two controlled bursts. They dropped to a bloodied heap at the foot of the fence.

‘Two more rebels in dead ground,’ Webb shouted over the cacophony. ‘Three posts to the left of the archway.’

Bowman arced the Gimpy back across to the spot Webb had identified and fixed his sights at the swale a few metres south of the fence. He waited a beat. Two heads popped up from the grassy trough, like meerkats looking out from their burrows. Bowman fired. Flames burped out of the muzzle. Spent brass dinked against the cement floor. The rounds thumped into the rebels. Their jolting bodies fell back into the swale.

‘Got them,’ Bowman said.