Harkaway's Sixth Column by John Harris Page B

blew up the road - and me with it.’
    They looked at each other. She’d made no further mention of the incident and they’d assumed she’d not known the culprits.
    ‘How did you know it was us?’ Harkaway asked quietly.
    ‘I’m not a fool.’
    Grobelaar smiled. ‘No offence taken?’
    ‘It was in a good cause. It still would be. Why don’t you fight the Italians?’
    ‘Four of us?’ Gooch said.
    She looked coldly at him. She knew about guns and had no fear of them. Before her father’s bankruptcy, he and her brothers had all shot and she’d often handled guns. And when the Italians had come to Abyssinia, she’d several times been under fire while helping the wounded.
    ‘Five,’ she said quietly. ‘There are five of us now.’
     
    They were still staring at her when Grobelaar stood up, suddenly alert and peering over the plain below. Harkaway joined him and the two of them moved to where the three vehicles they’d been discussing stood on the edge of the road, overlooking the rocky slope. ‘Lorries,’ Grobelaar said.
    ‘Here?’ At once Gooch and Tully were on their feet and staring with them. As Bronwen Ortton-Daniells joined them, she saw the lorries - four of them, with an armoured car and a scout car - were approaching the white mud-walled flat-roofed houses of Eil Dif.
    ‘They’ll find us,’ Gooch said.
    ‘No, they won’t!’ Harkaway gestured briskly at the lorries. ‘Kom-Kom, drive ‘em higher up the hill! High as you can get ‘em! Hide ‘em among the rocks, then sweep the road so there are no tracks. You drive the Lancia, Danny.’
    Her head jerked up. She’d never like the name Bronwen, associating it somehow with the rigid attitudes of her father. Somehow, also, it could never be shortened so that people had always addressed her by her full title as ‘Miss Ortton-Daniells,’ which had always seemed too much of a mouthful. ‘Danny’ seemed so natural she couldn’t imagine why she’d never thought of it before, and she hurried to the Lancia, her heart surging with happiness and the feeling that somehow, here, among these rocks, in the company of soldiers, she was finding herself for the first time.
    As the engine of the Bedford roared and the gears crashed wildly, Harkaway grabbed the crowbar and led the other two down the hill. They could see the Italian vehicles now pulling into Eil Dif, trailing their feathers of dust.
    Half a mile down the slope, there was a gap in the piled rocks. It lay just on the lower side of a group of high boulders that towered above it in silent towers and screes. On the other side of the road, the mountain fell away into tormented rifts and valleys filled with scrub and bare stunted trees. They’d more than once parked the lorry here when they’d been searching for buck and there were plenty of wheel-tracks left in the dust.
    ‘Let’s have those rocks down,’ Harkaway said, pointing. ‘Across the road.’
    Struggling with the crowbar, his big muscles bulging, Gooch loosened several of the boulders which crashed down and rolled across the road in a cloud of dust. Tully and Harkaway worked below him and after a while Grobelaar and Danny Ortton-Daniells joined them. Together the five of them sweated and strained until they had a respectable-looking pile of rubble spread across the road as if from a fall of rocks.
    ‘Now,’ Harkaway said. ‘Get some of that scrub and sweep the tracks beyond them. Make the bastards think we never went higher than this.’
    They had almost finished when they heard the grind of gears and, with a last flick at the road, they disappeared into the rocks. A few minutes later, the armoured car appeared, followed by one of the lorries. Reaching the scatter of rocks, the armoured car stopped. A head appeared, then two or three men jumped from the lorry and peered about them. Hands pointed and there was a quick conversation in Italian.
    ‘What are they saying, Danny?’ Harkaway whispered.
    “They’ve decided no one