The Long Fuse by Alan White

Author:Alan White
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canelo
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

When Sergeant-Major Dai Williams came down the hill at 22:00:00 on the night before the broadcast, François was waiting for him with the truck and the squad. The sergeant-major, Freddie and Frank, John and Jack and Jim all climbed aboard, took the long-handled shovels.

‘We have to wait,’ François said. ‘Five minutes.’ The truck had been pulled into a small track beneath trees. It was invisible from the road. The Dutchman, Henk, was standing in the trees by the roadside. Several German military vehicles went past but saw nothing. Bright night, but no moon.

‘Everything going according to plan?’ Dai Williams asked François. He was a man used to routine, carrying out the orders of his superiors, which he accepted without question. He’d been born and bred up in the Brecon Beacons and, though the industrial towns of the Ebbw Vale were near, he had never had sufficient interest to go down the hillside to them. His father owned a small cottage in the middle of a thousand acres of common land. Sheep grazed there, and Welsh mountain ponies; the ground was covered with peat and moss, bracken and ferns, gorse and wild flowers. In that natural setting Dai Williams had flourished. He was a strangely silent boy whose only interest seemed to be the out-of-doors; who wouldn’t read a book but would spend hours with a scrap of paper and a pencil drawing rock formations, details of flowers or animals. His father had no objections; Dai fed the pot regularly with rabbits and hares, even partridge and pheasant. He could find a lost sheep by instinct and knew the mountain flocks so well that frequently he was called in to settle a dispute of ownership. When the war came, he walked down into Ebbw Vale. He was twenty-one and they took him immediately for the South Wales Borderers. His first instructors were amazed; he could fire a rifle better than any of them; strip a gun down he’d never seen before and reassemble it faster than anyone they’d ever watched. When they came to teach him fieldcraft, he was confused at first since he could not relate the ground, directions and distances, to map and compass; but let him put aside these unnatural aids and he could walk straight as an arrow along any direction they showed him, cross any field unseen, light a fire even in the pouring rain. When they were forming the first Special Services without having much of an idea what the ‘Specials’ would have to do, they tapped him as an instructor. He’d been instructing a year when they sent him on his first job. Since then, he’d never cared to go back to school, not even as a teacher. Let Dai Williams loose on a piece of ground and it became an open book; he could look at a field of grass, observe the way the blades of grass were bent and tell you immediately what animals, including human, had used it; listen to the birds cawing hundreds of yards away and say if they had been frightened by a cat or a human.

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