The House of Cards Complete Trilogy (76 page)

He was also hungry. On the way up he and his younger brother, Eurypides, thirteen and practically one half, had stopped to plunder honey from the hives owned by the old crone Chlorides, who had mean eyes like a bird and horribly gnarled fingers—she always accused them of robbing her, whether they had or not, so a little larceny used up some of their extensive credit. Local justice. George had subdued the bees with the smoke from a cigarette he had brought along specifically for the purpose. He’d almost gagged—he hadn’t taken to cigarettes yet, but would, he promised himself. Soon. As soon as he had had IT. Then, maybe, he could get to sleep at nights.

Not far to go. The terraced ledges where a few wizened olive trees clung to the rock face were now far behind; they were already two kilometers above the village, less than another two to climb. The light had started to soften, it would be dark in a couple of hours and George wanted to be home by then.

He gave the donkey another fierce prod. The animal, beneath its burden of rough-hewn wooden saddle and bulging cloth panniers, was finding difficulty in negotiating the boulder-strewn trail and cared nothing for such encouragement. The beast expressed its objection in the traditional manner.

“Not over my school uniform, dog meat!” Eurypides sprang back in alarm, too late, and cursed. There was a beating if he did not attend school in uniform. Even in a poor mountain village they had standards.

And they had guns.

Like the two Sten guns wrapped in sacking at the bottom of one of the panniers they were delivering, along with the rest of the supplies, to their older brother. George envied his older brother, hiding out with five other EOKA fighters in a mountain lair.

EOKA. Ethniki Organosis Kyprion Agoniston—the National Organization of Cypriot Fighters—who for a year had been trying to blast open the closed colonial minds of their British rulers and force them to grant the island independence. They were terrorists to some, liberation fighters to others. To George, great patriots. With every part of him that was not concerned with sex he wanted to join them, to fight the enemies of his country. But the High Command was emphatic; no one under the age of eighteen could take up arms. He would have lied, but there was no point, not in a village where everyone knew even the night of his conception, just before Christmas 1939. The war against the Germans was only a few months old and his father’s brother George had volunteered for the Cyprus Regiment of the British Army. Like many young Cypriots he had wanted to join the fight for freedom in Europe, which, once won, would surely bring their own release. Or so they had thought. His uncle’s farewell celebration had been a long night of feasting and loving, and he had been conceived.

Uncle George never came back.

The younger George had much to live up to. He idolized the uncle he had never known, but he was only fifteen and almost three-quarters and instead of marching in heroic footsteps was reduced to delivering messages and supplies.

“Did you really do it with Vasso? Seriously, George.”

“Course, stupid. Several times!” George lied.

“What was it like?”

“Like
peponia
, soft melons of flesh,” George exclaimed, gyrating his hands in demonstration. He wanted to expand but couldn’t; Vasso had taken him no further than the buttons of her blouse where he had found not the soft fruits he had anticipated but small, hard breasts with nipples like plum stones.

Eurypides giggled but didn’t believe. “You didn’t, did you?” he accused. George felt his carefully constructed edifice wobbling beneath him.

“Did.”

“Didn’t.”

“
Psefti
.”

“
Malaka!
”

Eurypides threw a stone and George jumped, stumbling on a loose rock and falling flat on his rump, fragments of his dream scattered around him. Eurypides’s squeals of laughter, by turns childishly high pitched and pubescent gruff, filled the valley and cascaded like acid over his brother’s pride. George felt humiliated; he needed something to restore his flagging esteem. Suddenly he knew exactly how.

George loosened the string neck of one of the panniers and reached deep inside, beneath the oranges and side of smoked pork, until his fingers grasped a cylindrical parcel of sacking. Carefully he withdrew it, then a second slightly smaller bundle. In the shadow of a large boulder he laid both on the carpet of soft pine needles, gently removed the wrappings, and Eurypides gasped. It was his first trip on the supply run; he hadn’t been told what they were carrying. Staring up at him from the sacking was the dull gray metal of a Sten gun, modified with a folding butt to make it more compact for smuggling. Alongside it were three ammunition mags.

George was delighted with the effect. Within a few seconds, as his older brother had taught him the week before, he had prepared the Sten, a lightweight machine gun, swinging and locking into position the skeletal metal butt, engaging one of the magazines. He fed the first bullet into the chamber. It was ready.

“Didn’t know I could use one of these, did you?” He felt much better, authority reestablished. He wedged the gun in the crook of his elbow and adopted a fighting pose, raking the valley with a burst of pretend fire, doing to death a thousand different enemies. Then he turned on the donkey, dispatching it with a volley of whistled sound effects. The beast, unaware of its fate, continued to rip at a clump of tough grass.

“Let me, George. My turn,” his brother pleaded.

George, the Commander, shook his head.

“Or I’ll tell everyone about Vasso,” Eurypides bargained.

George spat. He liked his little brother who, although only thirteen and practically one half, could already run faster and belch more loudly than almost anyone in the village. Eurypides was also craftier than most of his age, and more than capable of a little blackmail. George had no idea precisely what Eurypides was planning to tell everyone about him and Vasso, but in his fragile emotional state any morsel was already too much. He handed over the weapon.

As Eurypides’s hand closed around the rubberized grip and his finger stretched for the trigger, the gun barked, five times, before the horrified boy let it fall to the floor.

“The safety!” George yelped, too late. He’d forgotten. The donkey gave a violent snort of disgust and cantered twenty yards along the path in search of less disturbed grazing.

The main advantages of the 9 mm Sten gun are that it is light and capable of reasonably rapid fire; it is neither particularly powerful nor considered very accurate. And its blowback action is noisy. In the crystal air of the Troodos, where the folds of the mountains spread away from Mount Chionistra into mist-filled distances, sound carries like a petrel on the wing. It was scarcely surprising that the British army patrol heard the bark of the Sten gun; what was more remarkable was the fact that the patrol had been able to approach so closely without George or Eurypides being aware of their presence.

There were shouts from two sides. George sprang to retrieve the donkey but already it was too late. A hundred yards beneath them, and closing, was a soldier in khaki and a Highland bonnet. He was waving a .303 in their direction.

Eurypides was already running; George delayed only to sweep up the Sten and two remaining magazines. They ran up the mountain to where the trees grew more dense, brambles snatching at their legs, the pumping of their hearts and rasping breath drowning any sound of pursuit until they could run no further. They slumped across a rock, wild eyes telling each other of their fear, their lungs burning.

Eurypides was first to recover. “Mum’ll kill us for losing the donkey,” he gasped.

They ran a little more until they stumbled into a shallow depression in the ground well hidden by boulders, and there they decided to hide. They lay facedown in the center of the rocky bowl, an arm across each other, listening.

“What’ll they do if they catch us, George? Whip us?” Eurypides had heard dream-churning tales of how the British thrashed boys they believed were helping EOKA, a soldier clinging to each limb and a fifth supplying the whipping with a thin, ripping rod of bamboo. It was like no punishment they received at school, one you could get up and walk away from. With the Tommies, you were fortunate to be able to crawl.

“They’ll torture us to find out where we’re taking the guns, where the men are hiding,” George whispered through dried lips. They both knew what that meant. An EOKA hide had been uncovered near a neighboring village just before the winter snows had arrived. Eight men were cut down in the attack. The ninth, and sole survivor, not yet twenty, had been hanged at Nicosia Jail the previous week.

They both thought of their elder brother.

“Can’t let ourselves be captured, George. Mustn’t tell.” Eurypides was calm and to the point. He had always been less excitable than George, the brains of the family, the one with prospects. There was even talk of his staying at school beyond the summer, going off to the Pankyprion Gymnasium in the capital and later becoming a teacher, even a civil servant in the colonial administration. If there was still to be a colonial administration.

They lay as silently as possible, ignoring the ants and flies, trying to melt into the hot stone. It was twelve minutes before they heard the voices.

“They disappeared beyond those rocks over there, Corporal. Havnae seen hide nor hair o’ them since.”

George struggled to control the fear that had clamped its jaws around his bladder. He felt disgusted, afraid he was going to foul himself. Eurypides was looking at him with questioning eyes.

From the noises beyond the rocks they reckoned that another two, possibly three, had joined the original soldier and corporal, who were standing some thirty yards away.

“Kids you say, MacPherson?”

“Two o’ them. One still in school uniform, Corporal, short troosers an’ all. Cannae harm us.”

“Judging by the supplies we found on the mule they were intending to do someone a considerable amount o’ harm. Guns, detonators. They even had grenades made up from bits of piping. We need those kids, MacPherson. Badly.”

“Wee bastards’ll probably already huv vanished, Corporal.” A scuffling of boots. “I’ll hae a look.”

The boots were approaching now, crunching over the thick mat of pine debris. Eurypides bit deep into the soft tissue of his lip. He reached for George’s hand, trying to draw strength, and as their ice-cold fingers entwined so George started to grow, finding courage for them both. He was the older, this was his responsibility. His duty. And, he knew, his fault. He had to do something. He pinched his brother’s cheek.

“When we get back, I’ll show you how to use my razor,” he smiled. “Then we’ll go see Vasso, both of us together. Eh?”

He slithered to the top of the rock bowl, kept his head low, pointed the Sten gun over the edge and closed his eyes. Then he fired until the magazine was empty.

George had never been aware of such a silence. It was a silence inside when, for a moment, the heart stops and the blood no longer pulses through the veins. No bird sang, suddenly no breeze, no whispering of the pines, no more sound of approaching footsteps. Nothing, until the corporal, voice a tone deeper, spoke.

“My God. Now we’ll need the bloody officer.”

The officer in question was Francis Ewan Urquhart. Second Lieutenant. Age twenty-two. Engaged on National Service following his university deferment, he personified the triumph of education over experience and, in the parlance of the officers’ mess, he was not having a good war. Indeed, in the few months he’d been stationed in Cyprus he’d barely had any war at all. He craved action, all too aware of his callow youth, desperate for the chance to prove himself, yet he had found only frustration. His commander had proved to be a man of chronic constipation, his caution denying the company any chance to show its colors. The EOKA terrorists had been bombing, butchering, and even burning alive so-called traitors, setting them in flames to run down the streets of their village as a sign to others, yet Urquhart’s company had broken more sweat digging latrines than hauling terrorists from their foxholes. But that was last week. This week the company commander was on leave, Urquhart was in charge, the tactics had been changed, and his men had walked four hours up the mountain that afternoon to avoid detection. And the surprise seemed to have worked.

At the first crackle of gunfire a sense of opportunity had filled his veins. He had been waiting two miles down the valley in his Austin Champ and it took him less than fifteen minutes to arrive on the scene, covering the last few hundred yards on foot with a spring in his step.

“Report, Corporal Ross.”

The flies were already beginning to gather around the bloodied body of MacPherson.

“Two boys and a donkey? You can’t be serious,” Urquhart demanded incredulously.

“The bullet didnae seem to unnerstand it was being fired by a bairn, sir.”

The two, Urquhart and Ross, were born to collide, one brought into the world in a Clydeside tenement and the other by Highland patriarchs. Ross had been burying comrades from the Normandy beaches while Urquhart was still having his tie adjusted by his nanny.

A year earlier Urquhart had been the officious little subaltern who had busted Ross from sergeant back down to private after a month’s liquor allowance had disappeared from the officers’ mess at Tel-el-Kebir and Urquhart had been instructed to round up suitable suspects. Ross had only just been given back the second stripe, still making up the lost ground. And lost pay.

Urquhart knew he had to watch his back, but for now he ignored the other’s insolence; he had a more important battle to fight.

The children had stumbled into a remarkably effective natural redoubt. Some twenty feet across, the scraping in the mountainside was backed by a picket line of boulders that effectively denied a clear line of either sight or fire from above, while the ground ran gently away on the valley side, making it difficult to attack except by means of a frontal and uphill assault, a tactic that had already been shown to be mortally flawed. Clumps of bushes hugged the perimeter providing still further cover.