By midnight the junction looked like somewhere people meant to stay.
The Irish had dragged the burnt-out British vehicle across the northern road and packed sandbags along its side. They had cut firing slits in the upper windows of the two-storey building with a crowbar. They had gone through the boxes the British left behind and taken anything useful, and stacked the rest by the petrol station to be blown later. A tractor from the farm behind the houses had been borrowed, without the farmer's permission, to tow the wrecked jeep off the connector road so the vehicles could get by.
Down the connector, trucks were coming up from the south with ammunition and water, and going back with wounded.
James was kneeling in the sandbagged position beside the burnt vehicle, with a sergeant he did not know. They were trying to work out why one end of it kept collapsing, when Finn came up the road.
"Farrell wants us," he said. "Challengers. Now."
"What's happening?"
