The Iron Tiger - Jack Higgins [36]
Cheung stood there in the rain, staring at him for a moment, his face quite white. He seemed to pull himself together, saluted, turned and clambered up beside the driver of the first troop carrier. A moment later, the two vehicles moved up the slope, their tracks spurning the wet earth and disappeared into the mist.
8
Forced March
VAGUELY through his numbed mind, Drummond became aware that something was digging into him. After a while, he realised that another large tree had drifted into them. They floated together, branches intertwined, their combined weight considerably slowing down the speed at which they were travelling.
Hamid was still secure in his perch amongst the branches and after a while he called, 'I can see the other side. The river must be narrowing.'
Drummond turned his head. Through the torrential rain, the opposite bank was just visible and it seemed to draw nearer every moment. The water became rougher and trees and flotsam of every description raced through the white-capped waves.
Suddenly, the bank was very close and seemed to increase in size as the river churned through a deeper and narrowing channel. There was a sickening, body-shaking jar and the tree grounded.
Drummond heard a cry and saw Hamid flung into the water. He unhooked his cramped limbs and found that he could stand waist deep. He forced his way along, pushed by the current, and caught Hamid by the belt before the river took him. There was a crashing sound behind and, as he turned, the trees were lifted by a sudden swell of the water and swept away again.
The water boiled around them as they braced themselves against the current. Slowly they forced their way to the steeply shelving banks and scrambled to temporary safety. They lay face down, their battered bodies heaving as they retched up river water.
After a while, they got to their feet and clambered up the mud bank away from the river. They stood looking across the river through the mist, listening. Hamid was shaking with cold, his uniform moulded to his body although strangely enough, his turban was still intact.
'Sooner or later they'll get men across by boat,' he said. 'They're bound to find an odd one or two missed by the refugees.'
'But they'll be on foot, just like us,' Drummond reminded him. 'The nearest place they have a hope of crossing with vehicles is Kama and that's twenty miles north from here. The shallows there could well be impassable because of the rain.'
'Well, one thing is certain,' Hamid said with a savage grin. 'There's only one road out to India and there's only one way we're going to get to it.'
They began to walk south through the rain, slowly, because the ground was fast turning into a quagmire. Drummond found it an effort to lift one foot in front of the other, and after a while found himself falling behind the hardy hillman.
They moved into a grey impenetrable mist that shrouded them completely from the outside world. Nothing existed now except the two of them and the rain and Drummond stumbled on through the mud, wondering what he was doing here and where it was all going to end.
It was perhaps half an hour later that he became aware that Hamid was calling to him. He was standing on top of a small hill about fifty yards away. When Drummond joined him, he saw a herdsman's hut in a small hollow below.
There was no sign of life and they moved cautiously down into the hollow. Drummond didn't feel tired any more. He didn't feel anything. He knew he was alive and that was about all.
It was a poor place of mud and wattle construction and a thin tracer of smoke lifted through a hole in the straw roof. Hamid opened the door and led the way in.
The fire on the stone hearth was banked with earth and smoke drifted in a heavy layer against the ceiling. It was filthy and