Free The Avatari by Raghu Srinivasan Page B

about Yorkshire and the smiling, windblown pink cheeks of the children cycling over the cobblestones.
    ‘Yes, I understand,’ he said ‘Thank you, Sergeant. Now I think you had better get some sleep.’
    They were in their positions by 5 a.m., moving silently from the loose outer-cordon positions to the fire positions they had selected for their final cordon. The insurgents had a two-man observation post overlooking the track beyond the rickety old suspension bridge over the rivulet. Two men had been posted on their side of the bridge. Both had been withdrawn, as Ashton and his men had guessed they would be, at 4 a.m., without being replaced. Ashton received a whispered netting call on the radio from all the stops and the fire base. They were waiting for his signal.
    His own position overlooked the rivulet at the point where it was shallow – the direction in which he expected the insurgents to make their escape. Unlike the previous day, the sun was partially obscured by clouds. Ashton would have preferred a little more light to accurately pick up the fall of shot, but he couldn’t afford to wait; it was late enough and the camp would soon begin to stir. He whispered his signal into the receiver which Kamal Bahadur, who was also his radio operator, held up to his mouth.
    There was a muffled thump from the hill feature they had been on, where he had sited the mortar position. The bomb arced, invisible in the sky, and landed plumb in the centre of the camp, throwing up a small black cloud of smoke; the sharp crack followed a fraction later. Ashton muttered a silent prayer of thanks. They didn’t have the luxury of ranging; the insurgents would be out and away if they weren’t on target. More worrying was the fact that his stops were too close. He had sited them at the minimum safety distance, but could make out they had moved in much too close, each stop trying to improve their chances of killing. The bombs came crashing down in rapid succession and he was glad to see that the fourth round was white phosphorus; the pungent white smoke, mixed with high explosive, would add to the confusion. The mortar NCO had remembered his orders .
    It must have been a few seconds before they got a reaction, but it seemed an eternity. A bomb crashed into one of the buildings, lifting the thatched roof off its moorings; the sight bore an uncanny resemblance to a shot in slow motion of a similar scene in a film. Ashton could see the insurgents rushing out.
    ‘Get down!’ he screamed to his men, ‘you bloody buggers, get down!’
    He felt Duggy pushing him down and realized that in his anxiety, he had sprung to his feet.
    On cue, the mortar position began firing airburst bombs that blasted in midair above the camp. Ashton was sweating and his knuckles were white as he clutched his weapon. My men are much too close , he thought. Duggy leaned across him and took the transceiver of his radio, which had fallen in front of him, and whispered a command. Ashton realized that in his charged state, he had missed signalling the automatics. Trained on the camp, the automatics opened up in a belt of fire which drove the insurgents, now in total disarray, towards the rivulet. The camp, like the position he was now on, stood on slightly higher ground. Leaping off a ledge on to the rivulet’s sandy bank, the insurgents tried seeking refuge in the water ten yards away. Caught unawares, some of them hadn’t even had the time to pick up their weapons and were half-naked. Ashton felt it was like shooting ducks in a barrel. He could see his men coolly taking aim and picking off their targets unhurriedly, the insurgents crumpling awkwardly under fire. He raised his own weapon to take aim. Through the rifle’s backsight, he picked out the figure of a young man who, having jumped off the ledge, was frantically trying to scramble up the loose sand and grass in his effort to get out of the line of fire. His lower cloth had come off, revealing thin, bony legs.