'Charles,' I began, 'I know what's happening. Israel..

'What are you talking about?'

'Israel. Don't you see, Hebron is near Bethlehem.'

There was an exasperated silence. 'James, for heaven's sake... You're not suggesting that'

'Of course. The twelve young men, what else could they be preparing for? And why did the ArabIsraeli war end in only two days? How old is this boy?'

'Thirteen.'

'Let's say another ten years. Good, I had a feeling he would come.'

When Charles protested I handed the receiver to Judy.

As a matter of fact, I am quite certain that I am right. I have seen the photographs of Joshua Herzl taken at his press conference, a slightly difficult lad who rubbed quite a few of the reporters the wrong way. He vanished off the scene shortly afterwards, though no doubt his mother now has a pleasant whitewalled villa outside Haifa or Tel Aviv.

And Jodrell Bank is building an enormous new radiotelescope. One day soon we shall be seeing signs in the skies.

1968.

The Killing Ground As the last smoke from the burning personnel carrier rose through the wet dawn air, Major Pearson could see the silver back of the river three hundred yards from his command post on the hill. Pulverized by the artillery fire, the banks of the channel had collapsed into a network of craters. Water leaked across the meadow, stained by the diesel oil from the fuel tanks of the carrier. Working the binoculars with his thin hands, Pearson studied the trees along the opposite bank. The river was little wider than a stream, and no more than waistdeep, but the fields on both sides were as open as billiard tables. Already the American helicopters had climbed from their bases around the city, clattering in packs over the valley like mindless birds.

An explosion in the. driving cabin of the personnel carrier kicked out the doors and windshield. The light flared across the watersoaked meadow, for a moment isolating the faded letters on the memorial stone that formed the rear wall of the command post. Pearson watched the nearest flight of helicopters. They were circling the motorbridge a mile downriver, too far away to notice the wrecked vehicle and its perimeter of corpses. The ambush, though successful, had not been planned. The carrier had blindly driven up the embankment road as Pearson's unit was preparing to cross the river.

With any luck, Pearson hoped, the crossing would now be called off and they would be ordered to withdraw into the hills. He shivered in his ragged uniform. Corporal Benson had pulled the trousers off a dead Marine machinegunner the previous morning, and there had been no time to wash out the blood caked across the thighs and waist.

Behind the memorial was the sandbagged entrance of the storage tunnel. Here Sergeant Tulloch and the seventeenyearold lieutenant sent up overnight from the youth cadre were working on the field radio, rewiring the headphones and battery. Around the emplacement Pearson's thirty men sat over their weapons, ammunition boxes and telephone wire piled around their feet. Exhausted by the ambush, they would have little energy left for a river crossing.

'Sergeant... Sergeant Tulloch!' Pearson called out, deliberately coarsening his overprecise schoolmaster's voice. As he halfexpected, Tulloch ignored the shout. A pair of copper terminals clamped in his sharp mouth, he went on splicing the frayed wire. Although Pearson was in command of the guerilla unit, its real initiative came from the Scotsman. A regular in the Gordon Highlanders before the American landings six years earlier, the sergeant had joined the first rebel bands that formed the nucleus of the National Liberation Army. As Tulloch himself openly boasted, he had been drawn to the insurgent army chiefly by the prospect of killing the English. Pearson often wondered how far the sergeant still identified him with the puppet regime in London propped up by the American occupation forces.

As he climbed out of the slit trench gunfire flickered from the central traverse of the motorbridge. Pearson waited behind the plinth of the memorial. He listened to the roar of heavy howitzers firing from the American enclave five miles to the west. Here nine hundred Marine artillerymen had been holding out for months against two divisions of rebel troops. Supported from the air by helicopter drops, the Americans fought on from their deep bunkers, firing thousands of rounds a day from their seventy guns. The meadows around the enclave formed the landscape of a drowned moon.

The shell whined away through the damp air, the explosions lifting the broken soil. Between the impacts came the rattle of smallarms fire as the attack went in across the bridge. Slinging his Sten gun over his narrow shoulders, Pearson ran back to the tunnel.

'What's holding us up, Sergeant? This radio should have been checked at Battalion.'

He reached out to the mudsplattered console, but Tulloch pushed his hand away with the spanner. Ignoring the young lieutenant's selfconscious salute, Tulloch snapped: 'I'll have it ready in time, Major. Or are you wanting to withdraw now?'

Avoiding the lieutenant's eyes, Pearson said: 'We'll follow orders, Sergeant, when and if you repair this set.'

'I'll repair it, Major. Don't worry yourself about that.'

Pearson unfastened the chinstrap of his helmet. During their three months together the sergeant had clearly decided that Pearson had lost heart. Of course Tulloch was right. Pearson looked around the fortified position shielded from the air by the ragged willows, counting the pinched faces of the men huddled beside the field stove. Dressed in ragged uniforms held together with American webbing, living for months in holes in the ground, underfed and underarmed, what kept them going? Not hatred of the Americans, few of whom, apart from the dead, they had ever seen. Secure within their bases, and protected by an immense technology of warfare, the American expeditionary forces were as remote as some archangelic legion on the day of Armageddon.

If anything, it was fortunate that the Americans were spread so thinly on the ground, or the entire liberation front would long since have been wiped out. Even with twenty million men under arms, the Americans could spare fewer than 200,000 soldiers for the British Isles, a remote backwater in their global war against dozens of national liberation armies.

The underground free radio system which Pearson and Tulloch listened to at night as they huddled in their tunnels below the searching helicopters reported continuous fighting from the Pyrenees to the Bavarian Alps, the Caucasus to Karachi. Thirty years after the original conflict in southeast Asia, the globe was now a huge insurrectionary torch, a world Vietnam.

'Benson!' The corporal limped over, his captured carbine heavy in his thin arms. Pearson waved with a show of temper at the men slumped against the sandbags. 'Corporal, in half an hour we're going into an attack! At least keep them awake!'

With a tired salute, the corporal went off round the emplacement, halfheartedly nudging the men with his boot. Pearson stared through the trees at the river line. To the north, near the ruined castle at Windsor, columns of smoke rose below the helicopters as they plunged and dived, firing their rockets into the ragged forests that had grown among the empty surburban streets. In this immense plain of violence only the meadow below with its leaking river seemed quiet. The water ebbed around the personnel carrier, stirring the legs of the corpses. Without thinking, Pearson started to count his men again. They would have to run across the open ground, ford the river and penetrate the line of trees on the opposite bank. Perhaps the Americans were sitting there with their rapidfire Gatlings, waiting for them to break cover.

'... Major Pearson.' The lieutenant touched his elbow. 'You wanted to see the prisoners.'

'Right. We'll have another go at them.' Pearson followed the boy around the memorial. The presence of this young man barely older than his pupils at the mountain school in the north of Scotland gave Pearson some kind of encouragement. Already his age had begun to tell doubly against him. Over the years the losses in manpower had been so great, a million soldiers and a further million civilians dead, that older men were put in the more dangerous roles, saving the young for whatever peace would one day come.

The three Americans were behind the memorial, guarded by a soldier with a Bren gun. Lying on his back was a Negro sergeant who had been shot through the chest. His arms and shoulders were caked with blood, and he breathed unevenly through the thick crust on his mouth and chin. Leaning against him was a young private hunched over the knapsack on his knees. His tired student's eyes stared down at his manacled wrists, as if unable to grasp the fact of his own capture.

The third prisoner was a captain, the only officer in the ambushed patrol, a slimly built man with grey crewcut hair and a soft but intelligent face. In spite of his uniform and webbing he looked less like a combat soldier than a war correspondent or observer. Telephone wire was lashed around his wrists, forcing him to hold his elbows together. Nevertheless he was watching closely the preparations for the coming attack. Pearson could see him counting the men and weapons, the two machineguns and ammunition boxes.

As these sharp blue eyes turned to examine Pearson, running over his decrepit uniform and equipment, Pearson felt a surge of resentment at these intelligent and selfconfident men who had occupied the world with their huge expeditionary armies. The American was looking at him with that same surprise Pearson had seen on prisoners' faces before, a genuine amazement that these ragged little men could go on fighting for so long. Even the term the Americans used to describe the rebel soldiers, 'Charlie', inherited from the first Vietnam, showed their contempt, whether the soldier fighting against them was a Riff tribesman, Catalan farmer or Japanese industrial worker.

However, as the American knew all too well, if the order came through to attack, the three of them would be shot down where they sat.

Pearson knelt by the Negro sergeant. With the barrel of his Sten gun he nudged the young soldier clutching his knapsack. 'Can't you do anything for him? Where's your morphine?'

The soldier looked up at Pearson, and then let his head drop, staring at the fuel oil that formed rainbows on his boots. Pearson raised his hand, about to hit him with the back of his fist. Then the sounds of gunfire on the motorbridge were lost in the overhead whoom of a shell. Coming across the river, the heavy 120 mm soared over the meadow and plunged into the woods below the hillcrest. Pearson crouched behind the memorial, hoping the shell was a stray. Then Sergeant Tulloch signalled that two more had started on their way. The next fell without exploding into the watermeadow. The third landed fifty feet below the memorial, spattering its surface with broken earth.

When it was quiet again Pearson waited as Corporal Benson pulled the knapsack away from the young soldier and emptied its contents. He slit the captain's pockets with his bayonet and jerked off his ID tag.

There was little to be gained from any formal interrogation. American weapons technology had advanced to the point where it made almost no sense at all to the rebel commanders. Artillery fire, battle dispositions and helicopter raids were now computerdirected, patrols and sorties programmed ahead. The American equipment was so sophisticated that even the wristwatches stripped off dead prisoners were too complicated to read.

Pearson reached down to the clutter of coins and keys beside the private. He opened a leatherbound diary. Inside was a series of illegible entries, and a folded letter from a friend, evidently a draftdodger, about the antiwar movement at home. Pearson tossed them into the pool of water leaking below the plinth of the memorial. He picked up an oilstained book, one of a paperback educational series, Charles Olsen's Call Me Ishmael.

As he held the book in his hands, Pearson glanced back to where Sergeant Tulloch stood over the field radio, well aware that the sergeant would disapprove of this unfading strand of literacy in his own character. He wiped the oil off the American eagle. What an army, whose privates were no longer encouraged to carry fieldmarshals' batons in their knapsacks but books like this.

To the captain he said: 'The US Army must be the most literate since Xenophon's.' Pearson slipped the book into his pocket. The captain was looking down over his shoulder at the river. 'Do you know where we are?' Pearson asked him.

The captain turned himself round, trying to ease the wounds on his wrists. He looked up at Pearson with his sharp eyes. 'I guess so. Runnymede, on the Thames River.'

Surprised, Pearson said ungrudgingly: 'You're better informed than my own men. I used to live about ten miles from here. Near one of the pacified villages.'

'Maybe you'll go back one day.'

'I dare say, Captain. And maybe we'll sign a new Magna Carta into the bargain. How long have you been out here?'

The captain hesitated, sizing up Pearson's interest. 'Just over a month.'

'And you're in combat already? I thought you had a threemonth acclimatization period. You must be as badly off as we are.'

'I'm not a combat soldier, Major. I'm an architect, with US Army Graves Commission. Looking after memorials all over the world.'

'That's quite a job., The way things are going, it has almost unlimited prospects.'

'I hate to have to agree with you, Major.' The American's manner had become noticeably more ingratiating, but Pearson was too preoccupied to care. 'Believe me, a lot of us back home feel the war's achieved absolutely nothing.'

'Nothing...?' Pearson repeated. 'It's achieved everything.' An armoured helicopter soared across the hillcrest, its heavy fans beating at the foliage over their heads. For one thing, the war had turned the entire population of Europe into an armed peasantry, the first intelligent agrarian community since the eighteenth century. That peasantry had produced the Industrial Revolution. This one, literally burrowing like some advanced species of termite into the subsoil of the twentieth century, might in time produce something greater. Fortunately, the Americans were protected from any hope of success by their own good intentions, their refusal, whatever the cost in their own casualties, to use nuclear weapons.

Two tanks had moved on to the parapet of the bridge, firing their machineguns along the roadway. A scout helicopter shot down into the fields across the river was burning fiercely, the flames twisting the metal blades.

'Major!' Corporal Benson ran to the tunnel mouth. Tulloch was crouched over the radio, headphones on, beckoning towards Pearson. 'They're through to Command, sir.'

Ten minutes later, when Pearson passed the memorial on his way to the forward post, the American captain had managed to lift himself on to his knees. Wrists clamped together in front of his chest, he looked as if he were praying at some ruined wayside shrine. The wounded Negro had opened his eyes, shallow breaths breaking through the caked blood on his lips. The young private slept against the plinth of the memorial.

The captain pointed with his wired hands at the men strapping up their packs. Pearson ignored him, and was about to move on. Then something about the American's posture, and their shared community of fatigue and hopelessness, made him stop.

'We're going forward.'

Eyes halfclosing, the American stared down at his wrists, as if aware of the effort he had wasted in trying to prevent the abrasions from opening. 'That's bad luck. Not my day.' His face grew stiff and wooden as the blood emptied from his cheeks.

Pearson watched Sergeant Tulloch supervise the stowage of the radio and begin his rounds of the men, waiting with weapons at the ready. 'Why did you come up the river?'

The captain tapped the memorial stone with his wrists. 'We wanted to see about moving this. The Kennedy Memorial.'

'Kennedy...?' Pearson turned and stared down at the broken lettering on the stone. Vaguely he remembered the memorial built by a previous British government at Runnymede to commemorate the assassinated President. In an amiable, if sentimental, gesture an acre of English ground had been given to the American people overlooking Magna Carta island. The President's widow had been present at the unveiling.

The American was feeling the broken lettering. He pulled off his cap and dipped it in the pool of oilstained water beside the plinth. He began to work away at the memorial, scraping off the mud, as Pearson moved down through the trees to the forward post.

When Pearson returned shortly afterwards the American was still working away at the memorial with his wired hands. Below the surface dirt were the residues of earlier defacements, slogans marked in engine grease or cut with bayonets. There was even one, 'Stop US Atrocities in Vietnam', almost as old as the monument itself. Pearson remembered that the memorial had been regularly defaced since its unveiling, a favourite target of vandals and agitators.

'Major, we're ready to move off, sir.' Tulloch saluted him smartly, for the first time that day. The American was still scraping at the stone, and had managed to clean at least half of the front surface.

The lead platoon moved down the slope. As the captain dropped his cap and sat down, Pearson signalled to Sergeant Tulloch.

'Okay, Charlie off your backside!' Tulloch had drawn his.45 automatic. The rear platoon was filing past, the men's eyes fixed on the gaps in the trees, none of them paying any attention to the prisoners.

The American stood up, his eyes almost closed. He joined the two prisoners lying behind the memorial. As he began to sit down again Tulloch stepped behind him and shot him through the head. The American fell on to the sleeping private. Tulloch straddled his body with one leg. Like a farmer expertly shearing a sheep he shot the other two men, holding them as they struggled. They lay together at the base of the memorial, their legs streaming with blood.

Above them, the drying stone was turning a pale grey in the weak sunlight.

It was almost white twenty minutes later when they began their advance across the meadow. Fifty yards from the bank a murderous fire had greeted them from the Americans concealed among the trees along the opposite shore. Pearson saw Tulloch shot down into the waterlogged grass. He shouted to Corporal Benson to take cover. As he lay in a shallow crater the white rectangle of the memorial was visible through the trees behind him, clear now as it would not have been that morning. In his last moments he wondered if the cleaning of the memorial had been a signal, which the watching Americans had rightly interpreted, and if the captain had deliberately taken advantage of him.

Mortar shells fell in the damp grass around him. Pearson stood up, beckoning to the young lieutenant to follow him, and ran forward to the wreck of the personnel carrier. Ten steps later he was shot down into the oilstained water.

1969.

A Place and a Time to Die Shotguns levelled, the two men waited on the river bank. From the shore facing them, four hundred yards across the bright spring water, the beating of gongs and drums sounded through the empty air, echoing off the metal roofs of the abandoned town. Firecrackers burst over the trees along the shore, the mushy pink explosions lighting up the gunbarrels of tanks and armoured cars.

All morning the illmatched couple making this last stand together Mannock, the retired and now slightly eccentric police chief, and his reluctant deputy, Forbis, a thyroidal usedcar salesman had watched the mounting activity on the opposite shore. Soon after eight o'clock when Mannock drove through the deserted town, the first arrivals had already appeared on the scene. Four scoutcars carrying a platoon of soldiers in padded brown uniforms were parked on the bank. The officer scanned Mannock through his binoculars for a few seconds and then began to inspect the town. An hour later an advance battalion of field engineers took up their position by the dynamited railway bridge. By noon an entire division had arrived. A dusty caravan of selfpropelled guns, tanks on trailers, and mobile fieldkitchens in commandeered buses rolled across the farmland and pulled to a halt by the bank. After them came an army of infantry and campfollowers, pulling wooden carts and beating gongs.

Earlier that morning Mannock had climbed the watertower at his brother's farm. The landscape below the mountains ten miles away was crisscrossed with dozens of motorized columns. Most of them were moving in an apparently random way, half the time blinded by their own dust. Like an advancing horde of ants, they spilled across the abandoned farmland, completely ignoring an intact town and then homing on an empty grain silo.

By now, though, in the early afternoon, all sections of this huge field army had reached the river. Any hopes Mannock had kept alive that they might turn and disappear towards the horizon finally faded. When exactly they would choose to make their crossing was hard to gauge. As he and Forbis watched, a series of enormous camps was being set up. Lines of collapsible huts marked out barrack squares, squads of soldiers marched up and down in the dust, rival groups of civilians presumably political cadres drilled and shouted slogans. The smoke from hundreds of mess fires rose into the air, blocking off Mannock's view of the bluechipped mountains that had formed the backdrop to the river valley during the twenty years he had spent there. Rows of camouflaged trucks and amphibious vehicles waited along the shore, but there was still no sign of any crossing. Tankcrews wandered about like bored gangs on a boardwalk, letting off firecrackers and flying paper kites with slogans painted on their tails. Everywhere the beating of gongs and drums went on without pause.

'There must be a million of them there for God's sake, they'll never get over!' Almost disappointed, Forbis lowered his shotgun on to the sandbag emplacement.

'Nothing's stopped them yet,' Mannock commented. He pointed to a convoy of trucks dragging a flotilla of wooden landingcraft across a crowded parade ground. 'Sampans they look crazy, don't they?'

While Forbis glared across the river Mannock looked down at him, with difficulty controlling the distaste he felt whenever he realized exactly whom he had chosen as his last companion. A thin, bittermouthed man with overlarge eyes, Forbis was one of that small group of people Mannock had instinctively disliked throughout his entire life. The past few days in the empty town had confirmed all his prejudices. The previous afternoon, after an hour spent driving around the town and shooting at the stray dogs, Forbis had taken Mannock back to his house. There he had proudly shown off his huge home arsenal. Bored by this display of weapons, Mannock wandered into the dining room, only to find the table laid out like an altar with dozens of farright magazines, pathological hatesheets and heaven knew what other nonsense printed on crude home presses.

What had made Forbis stay behind in the deserted town after everyone else had gone? What made him want to defend these few streets where he had never been particularly liked or successful? Some wild gene or strange streak of patriotism perhaps not all that far removed from his own brand of cantankerousness. Mannock looked across the water as a huge catherinewheel revolved into the air above a line of tanks parked along the shore, its puffy pink smoke turning the encampment into an enormous carnival. For a moment a surge of hope went through Mannock that this vast army might be driven by wholly peaceful motives, that it might suddenly decide to withdraw, load its tanks on to their trailers and move off to the western horizon.

As the light faded he knew all too well that there was no chance of this happening. Generations of hate and resentment had driven these people in their unbroken advance across the world, and here in this town in a river valley they would take a small part of their revenge.

Why had he himself decided to stay behind, waiting here behind these few useless sandbags with a shotgun in his hands? Mannock glanced back at the watertower that marked the northwest perimeter of his brother's farm, for years the chief landmark of the town. Until the last moment he had planned to leave with the rest of the family, helping to gas up the cars and turn loose what was left of the livestock. Closing his own house down for the last time, he decided to wait until the dust subsided when the great exodus began. He drove down to the river, and stood under the broken span of the bridge which the army engineers had dynamited before they retreated.

Walking southwards along the shore, he had nearly been shot by Forbis. The salesman had dug himself into a homemade roadblock above the bank, and was waiting there all alone for his first sight of the enemy. Mannock tried to persuade him to leave with the others, but as he remonstrated with Forbis he realized that he was talking to himself, and why he sounded so unconvincing.

For the next days, as the distant dustclouds moved towards them from the horizon, turning the small valley into an apocalyptic landscape, the two men formed an uneasy alliance. Forbis looked on impatiently as Mannock moved through the empty streets, closing the doors of the abandoned cars and parking them along the kerb, shutting the windows of the houses and putting lids on the rubbish bins. With his crazy logic Forbis really believed that the two of them could hold up the advance of this immense army.

'Maybe for only a few hours,' he assured Mannock with quiet pride. 'But that'll be enough.'

A few seconds, more likely, Mannock reflected. There would be a brief bloody flurry somewhere; one burst from a machinepistol and quietus in the dust 'Mannock !' Forbis pointed to the shore fifty yards from the bridge embankment. A heavy metal skiff was being manhandled into the water by a labourplatoon. A tank backed along the shore behind it, testrotating its turret. Exhaust belched from its diesel.

'They're coming!' Forbis crouched behind the sandbags, levelling his shotgun. He beckoned furiously at Mannock. 'For God's sake, Mannock, get your head down!'

Mannock ignored him. He stood on the roof of the emplacement, his figure fully exposed. He watched the skiff slide into the water. While two of the crew tried to start the motor, a squad in the bows rowed it across to the first bridge pylon. No other craft were being launched, In fact, as Mannock had noted already, no one was looking across the river at all, though any good marksman could have hit them both without difficulty. A single 75mm shell from one of the tanks would have disposed of them and the emplacement.

'Engineers,' he told Forbis. 'They're checking the bridge supports. Maybe they want to rebuild it first.'

Forbis peered doubtfully through his binoculars, then relaxed his grip on the shotgun. His jaw was still sticking forward aggressively. Watching him, Mannock realized that Forbis genuinely wasn't afraid of what would happen to them. He glanced back at the town. There was a flash of light as an upstairs door turned and caught the sun.

'Where are you going?' A look of suspicion was on Forbis's face, reinforcing the doubts he already felt about Mannock. 'They may come sooner than you think.'

'They'll come in their own time, not ours,' Mannock said. 'Right now it looks as if even they don't know. I'll be here.'

He walked stiffly towards his car, conscious of the target his black leather jacket made against the white stationwagon. At any moment the bright paintwork could be shattered by a bullet carrying pieces of his heart.

He started the motor and reversed carefully on to the beach. Through the rearview mirror he watched the opposite shore. The engineers in the skiff had lost interest in the bridge. Like a party of sightseers they drifted along the shore, gazing up at the tankcrews squatting on their turrets. The noise of gongs beat across the water.

In the deserted town the sounds murmured in the metal roofs. Mannock drove round the railway station and the bus depot, checking if any refugees had arrived after crossing the river. Nothing moved. Abandoned cars filled the sidestreets. Broken store windows formed jagged frames around piles of detergent packs and soup cans. In the filling stations the slashed pump hoses leaked their last gasolene across the unwashed concrete.

Mannock stopped the car in the centre of the town. He stepped out and looked up at the windows of the hotel and the public library. By some acoustic freak the noise of the gongs had faded, and for a moment it seemed like any drowsy afternoon ten years earlier.

Mannock leaned into the back seat of the car and took out a paper parcel. Fumbling with the dry string, he finally unpicked the ancient knot, then unwrapped the paper and took out a faded uniform jacket.

Searching for a cigarette pack in his hip pockets, Mannock examined the worn braid. He had planned this small gesture a pointless piece of sentimentality, he well knew as a private goodbye to himself and the town, but the faded metal badges had about the same relevance to reality as the rusty hubcap lying in the gutter a few feet away. Tossing it over his left arm, he opened the door of the car.

Before he could drop the jacket on to the seat a rifle shot slammed across the square. A volley of echoes boomed off the buildings. Mannock dropped to one knee behind the car, his head lowered from the thirdfloor windows of the hotel. The bullet had starred the passenger window and richocheted off the dashboard, chipping the steering wheel before exiting through the driver's door.

As the sounds of the explosion faded, Mannock could hear the rubber boots of a slimly built man moving down the fireescape behind the building. Mannock looked upwards. High above the town a strange flag flew from the mast of the hotel. So the first snipers had moved in across the river. His blood quickening, Mannock drew his shotgun from the seat of the car.

Some five minutes later he was waiting in the alley behind the supermarket when a running figure darted past him. As the man crashed to the gravel Mannock straddled him with both legs, the shotgun levelled at his face. Mannock looked down, expecting to find a startled yellowskinned youth in quilted uniform.

'Forbis?'