Cowboys and Dinosaurs - Chapter 24

24. The Final Confrontation

The train sealed the world off behind him like a rolling wall, drowning out all sound of pursuit. He scrambled down the track, searching for an opening in the fence. There had to be one. The train was a long one, truck after truck after truck filled with grey truck ballast being pushed down the line, no doubt to where rail was still being laid, but it wouldn't last forever, and then the chase would be one again. There had to be a hole, a way through -

Even over the sound of the wagon bogeys, he heard the click behind him.

He turned and raised his hands redundantly, knowing it would make no difference. The train continued to thunder past, preventing anything in his immediate environment from changing, and the only people in that environment were himself and Lucian, and Lucian was the one with the gun. The gun was trained on the middle of his forehead, where the mystic third eye would be.

"LEAVE IT, MR. FANSHAW", said Lucian. It had to be Lucian - the sound was coming from his direction. But Lucian's voice had changed somehow. It had risen several social echelons. It had become level, even, glacially calm.

And Lucian himself was turning round to look at it.

Mr. Botham was standing ten yards directly behind Lucian, dressed in a cavalry greatcoat that flapped listlessly in the wind from the passing ballast wagons. His gaze was fixed intently on Lucian.

"Mr. Botham", began Steve hurriedly, "he has a gun."

The gun was now no longer on Steve. It hadn't yet lined up, however, on Mr. Botham.

"I cannot allow you", said Mr. Botham, "to harm one of my colleagues." He reconsidered a moment. "Unless it's Gary. Yes, I think I would be all right with you hurting Gary."

"Mr. Botham", said Lucian, "you and I have always had a very pleasant working relationship. Don't make me spoil it by murdering you."

Mr. Botham pulled the side of his greatcoat away from his body, revealing the unmistakeable outline of a gun holster - a beautifully made one, white calf on black snakeskin.

Lucian blinked.

He grinned. "No, you wouldn't. You couldn't."

Mr. Botham's eyes continued to hold Lucian's like a snake's.

Lucian's gun had continued to rise upwards, towards Mr. Botham's chest. At around his groin, however, it slowed and stopped, as if held there by the sheer force of Mr. Botham's will.

Then Lucian turned, threw down the gun, and ran away sobbing. The gun sparked off passing axles and dropped into the gravel. The last car trundled past. Lucian lurched down the track it had recently vacated, past Steve, towards the big dark tunnel to the north.

Mr. Botham looked up at Steve and wordlessly reached a hand down to his holster, bringing out a long, dangerous-looking banana, which he peeled methodically and ate.

"You're insane. What if he'd called your bluff?"

Mr. Botham looked down the track at Lucian as he grew dimmer in the gloom of the tunnel. He pondered the problem.

"I suppose", he said eventually, "I would have had to shoot him."

He turned, his greatcoat swishing around him, giving a tantalizing glimpse of another holster on the left hand side - black snakeskin on white calf. Then he walked away.

"The hole in the fence is this way", he said. "You went in the wrong direction."

Steve stood and gaped a moment, then followed hurriedly. Upwards to his right, he saw a Wehrmacht tank crew looking down at him from the top of the cutting. Every single weapon on the vehicle was positioned at too high an angle to fire downwards.

Mr. Botham looked up at them with disdain. "They're not going to win any wars by being afraid to get their tank dirty."

Steve looked up at the Tiger and saluted. The smart officer in the turret snapped out a deutschen Gruß.

"TODAY, ZE ÄDFÄNTAGE ISS YOURSS, TOMMY ENGLÄNDER. BUT VE VILL MEET AGAIN! DON'T KNOW VHERE! DON'T KNOW VHEN! BUT I KNOW VE'LL MEET AGAIN, SOME SUNNY DAY!"

He rose to his feet, singing inappropriately. Below the waist, he was dressed in fishnets and purple taffeta. He picked up a megaphone and began to shriek out Lili Marleen. His tank crew's iron Teutonic will collapsed. They began sobbing gently in their uniforms, tears rollling down their faces. Steve was unsure at this range whether this was due to amusement or starry-eyed German patriotism.

A train came out of the tunnel, its sides filling the aperture. It was only a single engine, not travelling fast - a huge yellow machine with control cabins fore and aft, a tamper following after the ballast trucks. The line was still under construction, after all. But it was difficult to see any way in which Lucian's body - Lucian's substantial, muscle-bulging body - could have fitted into the minute gap between tamper and tunnel wall. Steve had heard that railway tunnels contained refuges every few yards or so, into which a worker who knew the line could squeeze himself to shelter from an oncoming train. But the tunnel had been pitch black, and Lucian did not know the line.

He turned and followed after Mr. Botham. Beyond a padlocked gate which seemed somehow to have become mysteriously unlocked, the pool Volvo stood waiting.

***

It has been said that a predator chasing prey is only running for its dinner, whilst the prey is running for its life. Jules from Direct Marketing was running for oral sexual gratification, which overrode both impulses by a considerable margin.

The dead animal under his arm, he had left the field over an eight foot wall, through an under-road drain and through a bank of nettles, obstacles which would normally have made him go whoah now, hold on there Bald Eagle. He was now standing in a busy main street, dressed in Wehrmacht uniform, holding a headless goat.

Which way to go? He could already hear the clatter of pursuing hooves on tarmac. People were looking. People were staring. An elderly gentleman waiting at a bus stop raised his cane and poked Jules in the chest.

"I fought a war against people like you."

Jules wasn't sure whether the old man was expressing anger, or was simply proud he'd remembered something of his past existence.

The old man's bus had arrived. Jules got on it and sat down, removing his helmet to make himself less recognizable. The hooves cantered closer amid a cacophony of car horns.

"I were at Arnhem", said the old man, who was now sitting next to Jules.

"I went to a comprehensive myself", said Jules. "My parents couldn't afford private education."

"I killed people like you", said the old man. "Bastards", he added.

Jules locked gazes with a swarthy bearded man galloping alongside the bus. The man bared his teeth at Jules.

"You got a ticket?" said the old man. The bus driver had driven off in blissful unconcern.

"I get a special Nazi season rate", explained Jules.

"Bastards", said the old man.

The bus came to a halt. The swarthy bearded man came to a halt as well. A black man holding hands with a white man got on and paid the bus driver. The white man was reading HELLO! magazine.

"I fought a war against people like you", said the old man to the black man and the white man, poking them both with the cane.

"I got a whole load of grief off him too", said Jules sympathetically.

The white man and the black man looked at one another and went upstairs to sit down.

The bus was gathering speed now, though the horsemen - three of them - were easily keeping pace. Jules thought of running upstairs himself out of sheer panic, but there was only one way up to the top deck. There were two ways out of the bottom. Modern buses had only one entrance, past the driver, but at the back of every bus, there was an emergency exit.

The bus nosed up to a bus shelter. The shelter and the crowd would impede mounted attack, though they would only postpone the inevitable. There were no shops or buildings behind the bus stop that looked as if they might have easily accessible rear entrances.

He stroked the polyester fur of the clearly headless animal in his lap.

"It's all right, Tiny", he said. "We're gonna get you to a vet."

An old lady in the seat in front of him looked at him as if he were the sort of man who would sit on a bus in a Wehrmacht uniform in his spare time.

Who were these men? Had London been successfully invaded by Mongols? How had they got their horses on the ferry? Jules blamed the relaxation of quarantine regulations.

Another bus stop was looming. This one, however, was different. The bus ground to a halt, the pneumatics hissed the doors open, and he hurled himself out into the crowd. OAP's and nursing mothers rebounded off him like full backs as he charged towards a touchdown. He didn't have time to swear at the ticket machine whilst having his banknotes rejected, so he leapt clean over the barriers with only one hand on the turnstile.

"OI!" London transport employees began clucking excitedly all around him like a coop of uniformed hens.

"ОСТАНОВИТЕ ЕГО!" Incredibly, he could hear hooves behind him echoing on the tiling inside the building.

An escalator loomed up; he evaded it and instead slid down the vertiginous aluminium glissade separating the UP and DOWN flights. Luckily, his fall was broken by metal wedges saying STAND ON THE RIGHT - NO SMOKING slamming into his groin at regular intervals. He tumbled off the end of the escalator onto a sea of insanitary tiling.

Behind him, he could hear the steady CLONG-CLONG-CLONG of someone riding a horse down a metal escalator.

With great difficulty, he pulled himself to his feet and ran.

***

Liz stood alone on the grass track, a hangman's noose in one hand. A discreet hundred yards behind her, the taxi she had come in stood with its engine running and two apparent taxi drivers - one of them wearing a bobble hat - skulking nervously. The slipknot on the hangman's noose hung around the neck of a handcuffed Noel, from whose back and buttocks protruded numerous gigantic hypodermic syringes. Noel could only be identified as Noel from his clothing, as his head was still swathed in bandages, and furthermore contained in a massive glass structure held together with aquarium glue. Noel's head entered the structure via a rubber collar glued to the glass around it, forming an airtight seal. Holes had nevertheless been punched in the glass, allowing the occupant to breathe.

"I cut that out for her out of an old wetsuit", said Gonoroid proudly.

The container was unlike a fish tank in that it was a complete cuboid of glass closed at the top. Besides the part of it that contained Noel's head, it also had another compartment.

"You made it for her?" said Syndii.

"I made it for good", pointed out Gonoroid. "But she's used it for evil."

The extra compartment, separated from the first by a sliding plane of glass, contained a head-sized cuboid of a grey papier mâché, around which a cloud of tiny particles buzzed angrily. His eyes visible through the slits in his dressings, Noel was staring at the other compartment in utter, utter terror.

Liz raised a megaphone to her lips. The hand that wasn't on her hangman's noose not only held not only the megaphone, but also had a pinky hooked through a hole cut in the separating glass panel, preventing it from dropping clean out of the tank.

"I HAVE YOUR MAN", she said. "YOU WILL RELEASE MY MAN, TO WIT STEVE SIMPSON, OR I WILL PULL MY FINGER OUT AND OPEN THIS DOOR TO UNLEASH THE HORNETS."

Mr. Dowd blinked in surprise. Syndii had the impression that surprise was not an emotion that occurred to him often. He looked sidelong at a lieutenant and mouthed the words: "Steve Simpson?" The lieutenant shrugged.

Mr. Dowd raised his voice and bellowed, surprisingly loudly: "I'M AFRAID WE HAVE NO-ONE OF THAT NAME." He looked Noel up and down. "IS THAT NOEL LEGGATT?"

Liz's hands trembled on Noel's leash.

"VERY WELL", she said, her voice unsteady. "IF THE THREAT IS NOT CARRIED OUT, THE CHILD WILL NEVER LEARN." She still, however, did not open the door between the compartments.

"ALL WELL AND GOOD", said Mr. Dowd. "I'D APPRECIATE IT IF YOU COULD HAND HIM OVER TO US AFTER YOU'VE DONE WITH HIM, HOWEVER. HE'S BEEN A VERY BAD BOY." He turned to his henchmen. "You know, she's really rather good. Shows talent. Who is she?"

In the meantime, a green Volvo had screeched to a halt behind the taxi further up the track. Two men, one of them preternaturally tall and dressed like a cowboy, had left the car; the second man was running forward, waving his arms at Liz in terror.

"LIZ! LIZ! IT'S ME! I'M HERE! NOOOOO!!!"

Liz turned dumbfounded, saw Steve, and involuntarily withdrew the finger attached to the sliding panel.

Noel shrieked audibly, even from inside the fish tank, and began, his head hanging lopsided with the great weight of the tank, effectively to attempt to run away from his own head. Liz let the hangman's noose drop in shock, and it trailed after Noel like a rat-tail as he pelted off over the marshes.

"You know", said Mr. Dowd, "that's really quite ingenious."

Noel began trying frantically to smash the tank to pieces on bits of landscape - stunted trees, blocks of concrete strategically placed to prevent joyriders from driving down public footpaths. The tank's sides held with absolute rigidity.

"Won't work", tutted Gonoroid. "I made it out of perspex, not glass. To make it safer."

Noel's voice had reached a choirboy falsetto. He had now switched tactics, and appeared to be trying to headbutt the hornets individually from inside the fish tank. Mr. Dowd appraised the situation calmly, then nodded to two of his minions. They nodded back, ambled forward, and lifted Noel up by his armpits, walked him to the nearest drainage channel, and dunked him headfirst into it. Syndii saw brown water gushing into the tank, rising high around his nostrils as he kicked and screamed.

"That could kill him", said Syndii. "He could be drowned."

"Yes, but we also have to be prepared for the worst", said Mr. Dowd pleasantly. "He might survive. And alas alack, this seems to be the case." More brown water gushed out of the tank's airholes as Noel was yanked upright. "I will have to experience his increasingly ugly countenance at an extensive debriefing session. But first, I'm afraid, he actually will have to go to hospital. Our private medical facilities are limited in this area. It is rare for organized criminals to attempt to rub each other out using wasps. We have tried them, but they are slow and inefficient. You really do need a huge number of wasps to get the job done."

***

"I'm sorry we couldn't get here sooner", explained Gonoroid. "On a Sunday, Master had difficulty getting a mob together. Many of them were in church."

Syndii's imagination balked at the thought of mobsters meekly filing into Sunday service. "These are a non-spiritual subset of his crew, then."

"Far from it. They were supplied at short notice by one of Master's newest business partners." Gonoroid waved at a shellsuited, shaven-headed figure in the back of the limo. The figure smiled happily and made a Fear-Not gesture back. Gold chains clanked on its wrist as it did so.

"Isn't that the guy from Balls and Bandits?" said Syndii.

"Not any more. He's an ascended Zen master nowadays. All these guys round the car, he supplied them at short notice. That guy over there, Marlon, was brought up a Quaker by his grandmother. He's spending one thousand days as a vicious gangster to follow Devasekhara's example." He looked north to where the green Volvo that had brought Steve was reversing frantically back up the grass track, as if late for an urgent appointment.

Syndii's lips pursed. "Of course, you do realize that is the most colossal balls."

"A Fool Laughs When He Hears Of The Way", quoted Gonoroid. "If He Didn't Laugh, It Wouldn't Be The Way."

"That's the Tao Te Ching, not Buddhism. Devasekhara's just found a handy way to justify being an arsehole via religion." Syndii re-examined her statement. "Uh, like most of the other religions, I suppose."

"Ah, you begin to see the light."

"You be careful. He'll have you spend a thousand days as a heterosexual."

Gonoroid shuddered. "Perish the thought. To put my thing in there? Babies come out of there, and babies do all manner of foul stuff. No, I'll stick with the tradesman's entrance. Poo doesn't grow up to borrow your car and wreck it."

***

The 11:30 to Morden-via-Bank was sparsely populated, even this close to lunchtime; it was a Sunday, after all. Jules was sitting, rocking gently backwards and forwards with the motion of the train, staring into the unforgiving eyes of an entire carriage full of Orthodox Jews who had got on at Golders Green. Bizarrely, whatever discomfort this might cause him was a blissful irrelevance in comparison to the steely-eyed glare boring through the compartment window from the next carriage along, where an entire horse had somehow been convinced to squash itself into the strap-hanging space by the double sliding doors. The massively bearded man still sitting, bent over by the ceiling, in the horse's saddle never took his eyes from Jules, his target. His turban was still sitting high and proud on his head. Jules wondered how it was done, and whether hat pins were involved.

He had changed trains once already at Moorgate, and changed direction at Brent Cross. Even that had not stopped the pursuit. Even now, the bearded rider was speaking furtively into a mobile phone he probably hoped Jules hadn't noticed he had. Pursuit was being coordinated both underground and over. It was like being hunted down by the Wombles.

A young Orthodox Jew facing him sneered disparagingly at his Iron Cross.

"For God's sake", said Jules, "it's fucking ironic."

The Jew looked away in massive disdain.

"Look, there's the fucking poster child for Al Qaeda sitting on horseback in the next carriage. All I'm doing is sitting her quietly taking my pet to the vet's. You are harassing me just because of the way I dress. Am I giving you the eyeball because of the way you dress? You got to admit, dressing that way and coming in here when you know I'm gonna be dressed the way I am is a bit of a provocation."

One of the more painfully thin Jews felt a need to explain. "We dress like this all the time. It's our religion."

Jules was appalled. "What, even on Sundays?"

"You don't get any days off being a Jew", said the Jew.

"What, even for good behaviour?"

Some of the younger Jews laughed. The older Jews looked at them sternly.

"You know", said one of the older Jews, "what that uniform represents."

"I'm only obeying orders", said Jules.

"What orders?" said the one who Jules now christened, mentally, the Chief Rabbi.

"I have to deliver this poor little headless animal to a vet, any vet, before that big hairy Moslem get on the horse gets him. And here's the thing. If I get him to a vet, I get a blow job. And she'll swallow."

The Chief Rabbi looked at his congregation. One by one, they nodded. Male solidarity ran deeper than Judaism. The Chief Rabbi looked back at Jules.

"Why didn't you say so before?" he said.

***

***

"MIND the GAP."

"Go! Go, go, go!"

"MIND the GAP."

Jules ran from the train like a flying pig out of Jew Hell.

"MIND the GAP."

An embolism of Orthodox hats and beards had erupted from the carriage and completely blocked the platform before the rider could convince his thoroughly confused horse to move. Already, Jules was clattering up the UP escalator, with Tiny held in the Chief Rabbi's hat. The Chief Rabbi, meanwhile, was running conspicuously away onto the northbound platform holding Jules's German helmet on his head.

Hideous Pashtun cursing - or what Jules imagined was hideous cursing, the bearded horseman might have been yelling an Afghan double glazing advert for all he knew - blued the air of the platforms below. Eventually, Jules heard clipping, interspersed with clopping. The rider tore past the base of the escalator onto the northbound platform.

"Five or six doors down from the Underground station, on the left. Whitfield Moreau and partners, veterinary surgeons. They rent the premises from us. We call it the House of Pain.

"Erm -

"You do know your animal's already dead, don't you?"

"Blow job."

"Oh yes. Yes, I had forgotten."

***

Whilst a trio of Mr. Dowd's bodyguards held down a struggling Noel in an attempt to break into the glass cabinet round his head, Steve and Liz had their own private moment. Principally, to begin with, it consisted of Steve having the breath crushed from him as if by an attacking octopus.

"Er. Liz. I have to inhale at some point..."

She did not release her grip. "Yes. Yes, you inhale very well. It is one of your finest qualities."

"...or I will die."

She released her grip, and hung off him like a dead weight instead. "I was so concerned. There are so few of our species left."

"Uh, yes. Yes, we're a dying race all right."

"NOT ANY MORE!" She separated from him, her face childishly excited, and patted her belly. "I am With Egg. I am a gravida. I am oviparous. I am in my first trimester. I have constipation and gastroesophageal reflux. Isn't it wonderful?"

Steve stared at her for several seconds.

"It's kicking", she said. "It must be kicking its way out of the shell. If there is a shell. I must absorb it internally post-partum if there is one; there was no trace of it the last two times."

"Kicking", he said.

"Quite painfully", she said. "Isn't it great?"

He hung his head and rubbed the back of his neck. "Yeah. Great. Um - just for information, phantom pregnancies, ovarian cysts and wind, they don't kick, right?"

"Absolutely not." She drew back from him a second, her enthusiasm evaporating. "You do think it's great, don't you?"

He frowned. Then, suddenly, a smile began to infect the frown.

"You know", he said, "I do. I actually do. As long as it has my eyes and your tail."

"You know I don't have a tail, silly. We lost our vestigial tails so we could walk among the mammals without them noticing."

"Crikey. Kind of lucky they lost their own tails too, then."

"Evolution is a cosmic bagatelle. What shall we call it?" She linked arms with him and led him back towards the taxi. "I was thinking Euryapsida, if it's a girl."

He patted her head. "I can see we're going to have long and involved discussions on the subject."

He moved apart from her as the Rolls cruised past, now a battlefield ambulance full of injured Zulus. In the middle distance, two tanks had drawn up alongside each other, and their two commanders were openly french kissing in full view of their troops. Their troops were applauding. Further down the track, Noel was still not out of the fish tank. Steve heard a voice, carried to him on the wind, offer the opinion: "I dunno. Maybe if we wedged his head under the front of the tank tracks and just nudged it into forward gear -"

The Wehrmacht and Red Army troops, meanwhile, had started a game of trench football with the vutwamini. The game appeared to be Shirts v. Skins. The vutwamini were playing Skins.

"No fair! Foul, ref! She's not technically in skins!"

"If you think I'm playing football without a sports bra, you've got another wishful think coming, tovarich."

"Why do you have to restrain them? They want to express themselves freely!"

"Imagine your testicles were the size of a child's head and attached to your chest. That is the ballpark we're talking about here. There is no freedom of expression on my chest. My chest is a one party state benevolently administered by Bravissimo."

Gonoroid hissed in Steve's left ear: "Pssst! Did I hear Liz mention pregnancy?"

"I believe so."

"Steve, I've seen so many young talented men who could have given so much to the cause of world homosexuality taken down in this way. As soon as that evil bundle of joy pops out of her, your life is over."

"I have a woman who is beautiful, outstandingly intelligent, earns more money than I do, and is prepared to confront armed gangsters for me", said Steve. "What do you have?"

"Master is pretty much the same", claimed Gonoroid. "Only, you know, with a penis."

Steve grinned and shook his head. "I've always been more of an orifice kind of guy."

"That's what everyone in the pub says", nodded Gonoroid.

***

- and now here he was on the High Street, whatever High Street it was, Tiny still firmly in his arms, puffing and panting towards victory! Four doors, five doors, six - and there it was. Whitfield and Moreau, Veterinary Surgeons, Small Toy Dogs a Specialty, Please Ring And Speak Into The Buzzer When Called!

He rang, and waited. No-one called. The Nazi uniform was beginning to chafe his groin. He adjusted his groin while a posse of feral children took his picture on their mobile phones and uploaded it to the internet.

CLIP clop CLIP clop CLIPPETY clop -

He turned as a dark bearded shadow eclipsed the sun.

"Oh", he said. "Hello."

He could not run any further.

The face was bloodstained, careworn, bruised by bumping into air vents and signs saying PLATFORM 1 SOUTHBOUND, singed by contact with white-hot fluorescent tubes. The eyes, a brilliant Persian lapis lazuli blue, promised vengeance.

"I believe", said the voice from inside the beard, "you have something that belongs to me." The voice had an Oxbridge accent. "Possibly you picked it up by accident. My name is Greville-Hawkins." A hand extended for Jules to shake. "How do you do."

The hand was shaking, whether from rage or exertion Jules had no idea.

Then the man on the horse rode his horse in place for many, many seconds, making a gentle hissing noise and steaming slightly as he bounced up and down in the static saddle for no apparent reason, emitting the occasional spark. Then he collapsed, crumpled and fell from the horse onto the bonnet of a nearby Volkswagen, making a head-shaped dent in it as he did so.

A second bearded figure rode up the High Street, holding a device almost the size and shape of a rifle. A car battery appeared to form part of it. The second horseman looked down at the first.

"He out of bounds", explained the second horseman to Jules. "He offside."

He nodded at Jules, turned his horse back into the mist, and galloped away, leaving Jules in the twenty-first century again.

Behind Jules, the door clicked open. A young man in a veterinary nurse's smock looked out into the street. He looked at Jules. He looked up at the horse.

"I'm sorry, can I help you?"

Jules looked at the young man, a grin running rings around his head.

He punched the air.

"YEESSSSSSS!!!!"

***

A Zulu ball bounced over one of the Nazo-Soviet goalposts, a German helmet hung on a rifle bayoneted into the ground.

"IN! In! It went in!"

"Over the helmet is not in!"

"It went in!"

"It so did not, it was too high anyway, it bounced off the invisible crossbar."

"Three - one! THREE - one! Three - one! Three - one -"

"Look, don't take the piss, all right?"

"We're not taking the piss! We're saluting you! We're saluting fellow braves!"

"Jew wanna fight about it or sammink?"

"Wooo, don't go all Horns of the Buffalo on us!"

"Horns of the Buffalo? I'm gonna go Operation Overlord on your ass!"

Steve turned away. As he walked north towards the Volvo, he noticed Syndii, sitting on a massive concrete bollard that seemed to have been put in place purely to stop people from having fun by riding dirt bikes into the marshes. She was watching the two parked tanks wistfully.

"You know", she said, "we really could do with one of those."

"I don't think they had them in the Zulu War", said Steve.

Syndii grinned and gave a dismissive hand wave. "Zulu, schmulu. All that power in motion...Shaka would have approved."

"Who's Shaka?"

"The inventor of the Zulu empire." Syndii clicked her jackboot heels on the concrete wall. "Before Shaka, all the Zulus did when they were pissed off with each other was stand at a distance and chuck spears at each other. The spears were long-shafted ones, balanced for throwing. Not many people got hurt. Shaka's principal discovery was a shorter-shafted spear designed for walking up to your enemy and sticking in him."

"Which no-one had thought of prior to that", said Steve dubiously.

Syndii shrugged. "I dunno. Maybe they had, but just thought it was ungentlemanly. Like the longbow. The Welsh had the longbow for hundreds of years before the English took it and turned it into a device for killing hundreds of French knights. Just imagine", said Syndii, holding up a rhetorical finger, "if Shaka had had tanks."

"He'd probably have invented a tank you had to drive right up to your enemy and stick into him", said Steve.

Syndii grinned again.

A noise like an insistent mosquito, only a thousand times louder, made him lift his head. A police helicopter was flying above them. Right now it was just hovering, its pilot and observer simply looking down in uncertain disapproval, trying to work out what, if any, branches of the law were being broken here.

"STOP WHATEVER YOU ARE DOING", yelled a voice uncertainly through loudspeakers.

Ground-bound police sirens could be heard closing in from east and west.

"Time to go", said Syndii. "Though we'll probably not get to the exit in time now. They'll close it off and do us for possession of German helmets with attempt to supply."

A tall figure in a leather duster had risen out of a bank of reeds and was approaching through the lady Zulus and the occasional female Russian sniper, its cowboy hat doffed respectfully. It walked right up to Steve and Syndii, and yelled over the noise of the helicopter turbine.

"MIGHT I BE PERMITTED TO OFFER A LIFT? I'VE TAKEN THE LIBERTY OF REMOVING MY CAR TO A SIDE STREET OFF THE ROAD ON THE SOUTH BOUNDARY. I've laid planks over three of the drainage ditches", he added more quietly, as the tank commanders saluted to one another and reversed off in separate directions, giving the helicopter a dilemma as to which one to follow. It chose to shadow the Tiger. After all, reasoned Steve, a seventy tonne armoured fighting vehicle might easily lose itself in the nearest crowd if not pinpointed by aerial surveillance.

"You had planks in your car", accused Steve, "ready."

"It pays to be prepared", said Mr. Botham defensively. "We can, at least in theory, walk right out of here. I believe my boot could accommodate a certain number of Zulus. Once I take all the other stuff out of it, of course."

"The other stuff you were prepared for", said Steve.

Mr. Botham nodded. "The smoke flares, the bolt croppers, the self contained underwater breathing apparatus. It's difficult to know what to prepare for."

Steve examined looked more closely at the cowboy gear. "That is your cavalry hat, Mr. Botham."

Mr. Botham smiled thinly. "It's just something I threw on before I came out." He helped Syndii down off the wall; the jackboots made it difficult for her to jump. "By the way, I have a new concept for our latest release of the B301."

"Which is?" said Steve.

"Zulus and Stormtroopers", said Mr. Botham proudly.

"Wherever did you get that idea", said Steve.

"I just come up with them", said Mr. Botham. "I'm a great creative."