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covered in blood from a mass of cuts, but apart from being dazed appeared to have no other injuries. They sat him at the crater’s edge, where he rapidly began to recover, and went back in to investigate another source of groaning, nearer the back.
    Several of the passengers had been decapitated by the scything hunks of metal that had come in through the front. A head rolled under Clarence’s foot as he climbed over the heaped bodies to reach the other survivor. He had to grit his teeth and close his mind to what it was he was clambering over. He hated any form of physical contact, loathed the feel of other flesh on his. Even a handshake was more than he could abide.
    The proximity of others when travelling in the skimmer was something he’d forced himself to tolerate, but only because it served his purpose. He regarded it as a battle taxi; it took him to the killing ground so he put up with the crowding and jostling and smell. But it took a great effort for him to touch the still warm bodies, slippery and stinking of blood and vomit and half-digested food spilled from opened stomachs.
    The second survivor was in a bad way, with an ugly gaping wound in the side of his head that their largest field dressing couldn’t completely cover. Leaving him with the black, they returned for a last check.
    Clarence stood and concentrated. ‘Do you hear something?’ He listened, but all Dooley could hear was the tree crackling outside, and an occasional ticking from the remaining engine as it cooled. ‘Let’s get out, this can is brewing up.’
    As he went to leave, Dooley stopped abruptly and looked at a tangle of wire and distorted metalwork. He reached in and pulled a couple of loose sheets of aluminium aside. ‘It’s the Sarge!’
    Master Sergeant Windle was still alive. He had fallen from the commander’s seat and been almost completely hidden by the mass of metal that the external explosion had forced back and wrapped around him. His injuries were terrible, but he retained a measure of consciousness and limply gestured with his remaining hand to Dooley.
    Even uniting their efforts, there was no way Clarence and the big man could free the sergeant from the tangled metal. Smoke was filtering into the compartment, and the pool of blood on the hull floor was beginning to boil. The stink of burning rubber now swamped all other smells.
    A gaping wound in his throat had deprived the sergeant of speech, but he pointed repeatedly to Dooley’s slung Colt Commando submachine gun and then to himself. His meaning was abundantly clear. Understanding that he was trapped, and aware that the craft was burning, he didn’t want to be still alive when the flames reached him.
    ‘Shit. I can’t do that. What the hell does he want to go getting himself into a mess like this for?’ Dooley half-raised the short-barrelled version of the M16, then lowered it again.
    ‘It’s that or leave him to burn. We’ve still got to get the other two back to the Cow.’ Clarence looked at his watch. They’d already been gone too long. ‘What are you going to do?’
    ‘Oh Jesus. Killing him would be like killing our luck.’ The Colt was heavy in Dooley’s hands, its metal and plastic wet with the sweat of his palms. He looked at Clarence, sensing that the sergeant’s eyes were still on him.
    ‘You want me to do it?’
    Small spurts of red flame came from an electronics panel at the back, adding further urgency. Dooley snatched up a .45 automatic from the floor and tried to fit it into Windle’s hand, moulding the stained fingers around it. The moment he let go, it fell from the nerveless grasp and clattered back to the floor.
    ‘Yeah, yeah you do it.’ The big man stepped aside. Clarence borrowed Dooley’s submachine gun, refraining from using his own rifle for a task such as this. He pushed the tip of the flash suppressor to within an inch of the dying man’s open mouth, and fired. The noise in the small metal com- partment was painful.
    As