Chapter 15
Burner lay in the snow at the top of the rise and looked at a truck that should not exist.
"Sparrow," he said.
They brought him up the line. He came at a crouch with his burned hand held against his chest and got down in the snow beside Burner and took the glasses.
He looked for a long time.
"That's the plow truck," he said.
"You told me you cut the fuel line."
"I cut the fuel line on the plow truck and I pulled the caps off the flatbed and the pickup." Sparrow's voice was tight. "Four minutes. I did it in four minutes with smoke coming under the door and I did it right."
"Then how is it running?"
"Because a fuel line is eleven inches of rubber hose," Sparrow said, "and there's a coil of it on the wall of the shop, or there was, and I didn't burn the shop, the grass did."
Burner took the glasses back.
The truck sat inside the gate with its exhaust going straight up in the cold. The plow blade was still mounted. There were men around it, four that he could count, and one of them was under the front end on his back.
"They've had four weeks," Sparrow said. "And a mechanic."
"Is the mechanic alive?"
"Rowe would know."
Rowe was two hundred yards back down the column on a sled because he could not walk on what was left of his feet, and it took eleven minutes to get an answer relayed up, and the answer was yes.
"His name's Ives," the runner said. "Rowe says he was not on the list. Rowe says he'd be the last man Halstead ever put on a list."
Burner lay in the snow and rebuilt the whole thing in his head for the fourth time in three weeks.
"What does it change?" Halloran asked.
"Everything and nothing."
"Pick one."
"It doesn't change what's in that yard," Burner said. "Eleven men, four hundred doubtful rounds, eleven days of food, twenty-two people. That's all still true and Rowe's been right about everything else."
"And the everything?"
"It means he's mobile." Burner handed the glasses to Halloran. "Which means he doesn't have to sit in that yard and wait for us. He can come out."
"With one truck?"
"With one truck and a plow blade on four hundred acres of burned open ground with two inches of snow on it." Burner shook his head slowly. "That's not a vehicle, that's a moving wall. Eleven men can walk behind that thing across open country and there is nothing in our hands that will stop it."
Otway, lying to his left, said, "The .270 might."
"Through a plow blade?"
"Through a radiator, if he turns."
"He won't turn."
They pulled the column back off the rise and put it in a fold of dead ground three quarters of a mile north, and Burner walked the whole line twice and did the thing he had been dreading since the bench.
He looked at them.
Seventy-two people who had walked twenty-six miles in four days in October.
Four litters. Nineteen children. Delacroix sitting on a sled with her rifle across her knees, forty pounds lighter than she had been in September, who had walked the last six miles herself because she would not be carried into a fight.
They could not fight here.
They could not go back.
"Say it," Halloran said, watching his face.
"We've got about six hours of daylight and there's nowhere to put seventy-two people that isn't open ground."
"We knew that."
"We knew it as a sentence. I'm looking at it."
They sat down in the snow in a circle. Halloran, Weathers, Sable, Otway, Neve, Teague, Sparrow, Delacroix, and Burner, and they did not call it a council because nobody had ever called it anything.
"Options," Halloran said.
"The first one's obvious," Burner said. "We go now, in daylight, all of us, across four hundred yards of open burn, at a chain link fence with eleven men behind it. We'd get through. We'd lose fifteen people doing it and four of them would be children who were standing in the wrong place."
"No," Weathers said.
"No," Burner agreed. "The second is we sit here in the open in October with no fires and wait for him to bring the truck out at a time of his choosing, which is worse."
"Third?"
"Third is that we make him come out at a time of ours."
He picked up a stick.
"Every single thing in that yard has one weakness and it's the same weakness," he said. "He's got eleven days of food for twenty-two people. Everything he owns, everything he needs, is inside a chain link fence in a yard he can see across."
"You want to burn it again," Otway said.
"There's nothing left to burn. That's the point. He's got no grass, no fuel, no timber. The yard is concrete and ash."
"Then what?"
Burner drew a rectangle in the snow.
"The well," he said.
Nobody spoke.
"Rowe said it four times and I did not hear it properly until about an hour ago," Burner said.
"There's one well. It's a hand pump on a casing in the northwest corner, forty feet inside the fence, and it is the only water for four miles because the creek's frozen and the fire took every stock tank they had."
"You want to poison a well," Weathers said flatly.
"No."
"Because I'll tell you right now that I will stand up in front of seventy-two people and"
"Weathers. No." Burner held her eyes. "There are seven people in that building who aren't there by choice and one of them is Ferris's wife, and there are four women who are, and I am not going to poison a well that a child might drink out of,
and I want everybody in this circle to hear me say it plainly so nobody has to wonder later."
Weathers sat back.
"Then what about it?"
"I want to take it."
Sable said, "Forty feet inside a fence."
"Forty feet inside a fence in the northwest corner, which is the corner furthest from the block building, and which is behind the shop frame from anybody standing in the main yard." Burner tapped the snow. "Sparrow. Confirm that."
Sparrow leaned over and looked at the rectangle.
"The shop's between the block building and the well," he said slowly. "It always was. That's why the mechanic had a hose run."
"Is the shop still standing?"
"The frame is."
"So there's a steel skeleton and nine hundred pounds of tools sitting between the northwest corner and every man in that camp."
"Yes."
Burner sat back on his heels.
"Then here's what I'd do," he said. "We don't attack the yard. We take the northwest corner and nothing else. Twenty people, in the dark, through the fence, into the shop frame, and we hold sixty feet of concrete and a hand pump."
"And then?"
"And then every drop of water in that camp has to be fought for."
Neve spoke for the first time.
"They'll rush it."
"They'll have to."
"Within a day."
"Within eight hours," Burner said. "And they'll be coming across their own open yard at a steel frame full of rifles, in daylight, because he won't do it at night with women and children forty feet behind him."
He looked around the circle.
"That's the whole idea," he said. "I can't attack eleven men behind a fence. But I can make eleven men attack me, and the difference between those two things is about twenty lives."
Nobody said anything for a while.
Teague said, "And the truck?"
"The truck's why it has to be tonight."
They took the vote at three in the afternoon, standing in the snow in a fold of ground with the light already going.
Halloran read it out in full, including the number Burner had given for the likely cost, which was four dead and eight hurt, and which Burner had arrived at honestly and which he said out loud in front of everybody.
Somebody asked how sure he was of the number.
"Not at all," Burner said. "I've been wrong four times this month. It's a guess made by a tired man and you should treat it as one."
The vote was fifty-six to fourteen with two abstaining.
The twenty were picked in an hour and it was the worst hour of Burner's life to that point, because there were thirty-one volunteers and he had to say no to eleven of them and every single no was a reason.
He took Sable, who had the ground memorized.
He took Delacroix, who could not run and did not need to, and who would go in on a sled and be laid in the shop frame with the .270 and three hundred yards of open concrete in front of her.
He took Priest and Teague and Otway and Brill and Neve, and Ferris, who asked for the building and was told the building would come and that this was the road to it.
He took Nate, Sable's brother, whose leg had reset straight in three weeks and who could walk without the splint and who knew the inside of that shop better than anyone alive because he had been chained to the floor of it.
He did not take Sparrow.
"Say why," Sparrow said.
"Because you can't hold a rifle with that hand and because you're the only person in this camp who can talk, and if this works there will be a moment in about a day where somebody needs to be talked to."
"That's the real reason?"
"That's half of it."
"And the other half?"
"The other half is that I asked you to walk into that yard once already," Burner said, "and you did it, and I'm not going to be the man who does that to you twice in a month."
Sparrow looked at him for a long moment.
"All right," he said.
They went at half past nine at night.
It was twelve degrees and there was no moon and the snow had stopped, and the burned ground between the rise and the fence was black under two inches of white, which meant that a man lying down on it was a shadow and a man walking on it was a line.
They crawled the last four hundred yards.
It took two hours and eleven minutes.
Burner went first, with Sable at his shoulder, and behind them nineteen people came in a column so tight that each one had a hand on the boot of the person ahead, because that was the only way to keep a line together in the dark without a word being spoken.
The wire came up out of the dark at eleven forty.
Teague and Brill cut it. Four cuts and a peel, exactly as they had done in September, and Burner lay with his face in the snow beside the fence and listened to eleven seconds of bolt cutters that sounded like a church bell and were probably inaudible at thirty feet.
They went through into the northwest corner of the maintenance yard.
The shop was a skeleton.