Cowboys and Dinosaurs - Chapter 21

21. The Albanian Steamroller

"Lucian", blabbered one of the ordure-creatures that served the horrible man-mountain that now stood holding a gun to Gary's head. "What is that?"

The man-mountain turned and glared at its subordinate. "My name," it said, "is Gjeneral Major Zog. With a fucking J." It clapped a hand to its forehead and swooned at the incompetence of those it commanded. "Jesus Christ, that means we're going to have to kill all of them now."

"It's a tank", said another of the shit-men, his hand up tentatively as if in class.

"Congratulations", said Gjeneral Major Zog, "on recognizing a tank, Christian. The question is, what is a fucking tank doing in Hackney Marshes?"

"I thought my name was Gjon with a G", said one of the poo people.

"Well, it doesn't fucking matter what your bloody name is now, does it, Christian? You have let the bloody cat with a Q and a silent fucking Z out of the bag." Gjeneral Zog gestured wildly with his pistol. "Thanks to you, all these beautiful people, who no doubt have mothers and fathers and tiny little children, now have to die. How do you think that makes me feel, Christian? Christian, that was not a rhetorical question, I genuinely wish to know your feelings on this matter. How does it make me feel?"

Christian hung his head. "Bad, Lucian."

All the while, the huge green bulk of the tank crawled closer, crushing pieces of landscape beneath it, flanked by infantrymen carrying rifles.

"They got pieces, Lucian."

"I am aware they have pieces, Christian. What I do not know is why."

"Er, sir? Er, Gjeneral?" One of the stormtroopers had raised a hand.

The Gjeneral turned to Gary.

"Fuck me", he said. "Talking bacon." He peered at Gary's equipment intently. "Why don't you have a piece?"

"He wouldn't let us have them", said Gary.

Vicious realization began to fill the void behind Lucian's eyes.

"Who wouldn't let you have them?"

"Simpson", said Gary. "Steve Simpson."

***

"BASTARD. I nearly got it that time - hold the tree steady -"

The young man in the bobble hat watched in mystification as the woman in the fur coat swiped inelegantly at what hung buzzing from the tree with what appeared to be a chimney sweep's brush.

"It's a chimney sweep's brush", she explained. "It's all I could get at short notice that's this long. This has been hanging from this tree for months. A small mammalian child was quite badly injured back in July, needing hospital treatment - more from the fall than the stings, it was trying to climb the tree, you see, and revisit its primate heritage. So the Council have protected everyone by putting cones around the tree, as you see. Now, is that blanket in place? Taut, but not too taut."

The young man adjusted the bricks and cardboard boxes so the blanket stretched between them was not too taut.

"This one's waking up again", said the taxi driver, watching his taxi nervously, though it was only a hundred yards away. The woman in the fur coat had insisted he leave the engine running.

The woman in the fur coat tutted, extracted another enormous syringe from her coat, and slapped it into the facially bandaged man's buttocks like a thermometer into a chicken. He yelped briefly, then collapsed drooling into the earth once more.

"My meter's still going", said the taxi driver. "I'm going to have to charge you."

"Charge away", said the woman in the fur coat, grunting as she swung the heavy chimney brush. "AHA!"

The object of her attentions slammed down out of the tree in the middle of a cloud of angry buzzing insects. "Now wrap the blankets round it! CAREFUL! The queen has a sting up to eighteen inches long!"

Batting away ferocious stinging arthropods, the young man in the bobble hat complained that he'd only agreed to help the woman in the fur coat carry her sick friend to a taxi. Now that taxi was in the middle of Alexandra Park, and he was under attack from hostile hymenoptera.

"I will buy you a new sleeping bag", she said. "Possibly even a new bobble hat. I may even stretch to full sex, though I will stop at anal."

The taxi driver paused briefly for thought, then sucked in his breath with a view to renegotiating his rates.

"No time to talk! Hurry! Get it into the car. Get him into the car! We need to stop off at my house for the fish tank."

The taxi driver and the man with the bobble hat exchanged glances of troubled confusion.

***

Hereward St. John Greville-Hawkins of the Bredwardine Greville-Hawkinses pulled his horse to a stop at the edge of the Marshes. A soft white eiderdown of morning mist lay over everything, pierced by the occasional tree. Only a year before, in the Hindu Kush, he had been looking down from the same horse not on mist, but on clouds.

The horse had had to be transported here from Afghanistan. He was not an ordinary horse - he had been specially trained for one purpose only. There were not a hundred horses like him in the whole world.

Down here, in the grimy city, the air smelled thick, foul, and pre-used. Breathing it, after Nangarhar, felt like drinking someone else's saliva. It had the advantage, however, of not containing bullets. Nangarhar Province had been a hotbed of Taliban resistance, and 3 Coy, Second Battalion, Royal Corniche Fusiliers had been given the task of rooting them out. It had been a hard job spotting men running away on the horizon through binoculars, calling in the USAF and spending the next thirty minutes frantically digging foxholes in case the wrong coordinates had been relayed for the ensuing daisycutter. But it had not all been bad. He had won the hearts and minds of the local population, introducing them to the civilized concepts of foxhunting and point-to-point. And in turn, they had introduced him to the sport which would enable him to tell his children yes, Fleur, yes, Frederick, Daddy was in the Olympics. And dared he say, Daddy won an Olympic medal?

It was possible. The Afghans would be hard to beat to gold, but the Tadzhiks and Kirghiz looked less solid, particularly since the new rules disallowed the use of the whip to attack other riders. And the Japanese, though enthusiastic, were new to the sport, and kept falling off their ponies.

No, the British team would teach them the British could learn from the Afghans. The game would be be watched and cheered on in London pubs and Kabul hookah-houses; nineteen million people would watch it via the Galaxy 19 satellite all over central Asia, and would know the British could play fair and beat the fuzzy-wuzzies at their own game. And Greville-Hawkins would do this with his fellow Britons, Maiwand Khudaidadzai, Arzhang Kabuli, Abd al Hakim Tareen, and Islam Chughtai, by his side. Not forgetting, of course, Captain Ben Quorroll, Master of the Helmand Hunt, famous in the left wing rags for having allegedly set suspected Taliban sympathizers free, carefully explained the rules of foxhunting to them, given them a head start and pursued them on horseback with dogs up to the Pakistani border. It had been a game the whole village had been able to understand. It had crossed cultural boundaries. True, many suspected Taliban sympathizers were innocent and had simply been informed on by their neighbours, but didn't many hunted foxes escape? Overall, the right number of evildoers had been brought to justice.

The team were all technically British, having been born in the British Isles, Gibraltar, or in the case of Maiwand Khudaidadzai, on the threshold of the British Consulate in Kabul. Kabuli, the left midfielder, was a Tadzhik whose family came from the opium fields of Badakhshan, far in the north; he could hardly understand the other members of the team, and this was not an isolated problem. For that reason, Greville-Hawkins had decided on Russian, which many of the team had been taught in Soviet schools as children, as the medium of communication. Tareen, whose family were Pashtuns from Uruzgan, was on the right wing to prevent him engaging in tribal micro-warfare with Kabuli, whilst Khudaidadzai, also a Pashtun and a second cousin of Kabuli, had nevertheless been put in the right midfield as, despite the fact that they were both muslims, Khudaidadzai was a Shia whilst Kabuli was a Sunni. Chughtai, meanwhile, a small, wiry Mongol who seemed glued to his horse, had had to be made Protector of the Circle of Justice or, as Greville-Hawkins preferred to think of it, goalie. He had been relegated to this dishonourable position due to the fact that every Sunni member of the team disliked him, as his family, though also Sunnis, were not followers of Imam Abu Hanifa, but of Imam Malik, the hated new-fangled second century reformer.

The structure of the team, insofar as it had been possible to impose a structure, had been based loosely on football, with the exception that there were no defenders, as nobody could be persuaded to play in defence. These men were the first half of the A team; and somewhere out there in the mist between here and the other side of the field were the B Team. Hungrier than the A Team and far more dangerous, because they played like big fat girls, and Greville-Hawkins knew only too well that Fat Girls Tried Harder.

Two of the B's, the wingers Quoroll and Raskolnikov, were now facing him. Raskolnikov, the Afghan Russian, had had to be placed in the B's with Ben Quoroll as substantial friction existed between him and the other Afghans. Greville-Hawkins hoped to promote him to the A's in time, once a mutual spirit of brotherly comradeship had been established. Currently Khudaidadzai was staring down Raskolnikov in a way which betokened a promise to tear his throat out with his teeth,and the stare was mutual.

In between both teams, the trainer, Ghilzai, wearing a traditional lungee, was acting as mounted referee. Ghilzai's black garments bore swirling stylized Arabic calligraphy which Greville-Hawkins had feared might lead to controversy with the International Olympic Committee until he had realized that Ghilzai, who was not particularly religious and whose first language was Pashto, could not read Arabic. He had had Ghilzai's garments surreptitiously switched with others that read not SLAY THE IDOLATERS WHEREVER YE FIND THEM but HAVE A NICE DAY.

Ghilzai held the carcass - the politically correct vegan carcass the Olympic Committee had insisted on - aloft with one arm. The goatskin had been made with an ethically aware naugahyde substitute, whilst the goat hair was cotton. Greville-Hawkins had even had some difficulty persuading some of the more fruitarian members of the Olympic Committee of the acceptability of cotton.

Ghilzai's face was fearsome, that of a warlord of the steppes. His beard belonged on such a man, or on a Barbary pirate, or possibly on W. G. Grace. The goat carcass was heavy; it gave pause to think that Ghilzai, supposedly an old man, could still pick the carcass up from the ground by dipping sideways from the saddle. This was the calibre of man Greville-Hawkins had faced, often at distances at half a kilometre or less, in Nangarhar, and which the team would be facing on The Day.

In his day job, Ghilzai had been a librarian in Kandahar. Greville-Hawkins shuddered to think what the penalties might have been for returning a book late.

He could hear CRACKs and BANGs from the distance. Someone appeared to out shooting. In this mist, that was surely foolish. Someone might get hurt.

Unsettlingly, Ghilzai had something long and rifle-shaped slung over his shoulder wrapped in oilcloth. Greville-Hawkins hoped against hope that it was a small portable tent, or possibly even a shooting stick. He heard more CRACKs and BANGs - many, many more. Maybe not shooting, then. That was surely impossible. Maybe kids playing with fireworks. He hoped it would not spook the horses.

Teeth gritted, Ghilzai shrieked the only words of English he knew besides "hello", "goodbye", and "death to America". Greville-Hawkins had taught them to him very carefully, and they were:

"PLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY BUZKASHI!"

The vegan carcass thudded down; riders thundered in to take it.

***

Syndii had taken her eyes from the binoculars again. "So, let's get this straight one last time, Steve. What made you think we could piss off a group of vicious gangsters, your own Sales team, and two groups of intractable sociopaths with their very own tanks, without any of it backfiring on us?"

"Dave told me to do it", complained Steve.

"That landlord's nothing but a crazy old man".

"I never thought they'd actually talk to each other".

"Steve, vicious gangsters aren't necessarily stupid, just vicious." She set the glasses to her eyes again. "Ah, that's better. They're pointing guns at each other again."

***

Lucian, his complete lack of any uniform invisible due to his all-over-body coating of human excrement, had been waddling forward, boots squeaking with other people's bum filth, towards the advancing Soviet army, when that army, as one man, raised its rifles and fired. Lucian yelped and raised his hands to his eyes; all around him, ricochets pinged off brick, concrete, helmet metal, and in some unfortunate cases, helmet papier-mâché. The SS advance guard squealed and hid themselves behind the boundary wall.

Then Lucian, his face covered by a river of blood from a scalp wound, took his hand from his forehead and stared at his open palm.

"Blanks", he said. "Fucking blanks." He looked up at an advancing political commissar, grabbed his rifle, and reversed it, mangling the man's trigger finger and belting him in the mouth with the stock. All around him, revolutionary soldiers levelled their Moisin Nagants at him in indignation, firing repeatedly, sealing wads impacting on his slimy integument with wet splats. You ain't playing fair! If you're shot, you gotta play dead! Some of them jabbed him with bayonets. The bayonets had ball bearings welded solidly to their tips, and in Lucian's current state of mind, had as much impact as poking an elephant with a stick.

Very slowly, Lucian raised the heavy revolver he was holding to a line between his eye and the nearest soldier; the soldier looked back at him.

"Hey, not in the face", said soldier, crestfallen. "The rules."

Lucian grinned around a mouthful of his own blood and somebody else's shit, and pulled the trigger.

The gun clicked, and did nothing.

"Bastard", said Lucian. "Bastard bastard BASTARD!"

He hefted the rifle again and began beating those around him with it like a club. Encouraged by the example, others of his group tumbled from the walls and rushed forward to engage the Red menace.

***

"Hey! Blanks!"

"They're firing blanks!"

"We can shoot them! And they can't shoot us back -"

Lucian paused idly from beating the brains out of a passing starshina-grade officer to lay a restraining hand on the arm of his associate. "Geoffrey, you are aiming a weapon whose barrel is full of the bum soil of your fellow man, at your fellow man. What will happen if you squeeze the trigger of such a weapon?"

Geoffrey hung his head.

"...it'll blow up in my face, Lucian..."

Lucian turned the revolver round in Geoffrey's hand, decocked it, and put on the safety catch. "Hit him with the hard end. I feel this will tax your intelligence less."

He looked up, as if in only mild surprise, to see the bottle-green bulk of a tank the size of a bungalow looming towards him. The tank attempted ponderously to turn itself round on its tracks to confront him.

Geoffrey looked up at the tank in turn, evidently concerned. "Er - do you think they've got blank cartridges in that too, Lucian?"

Lucian looked idly at the tank. Clasping his hands behind his back, he ambled up to it. The turret clanked into motion, turning a gun the size of a telegraph pole around to bear on him. The gun depressed as far as it could, looking Lucian directly in the face with a bore large enough admit a child's head.

Lucian reached into his inside pocket, extracted a packet of cigarettes, bit one free of its fellows. This did not stop him from tasting a mouthful of faeces. He managed to smile sweetly nonetheless, and also to light up one-handed.

"Luckily", he said to the tank, "It seems I am not giving off quite enough methane to catch fire like a big brown human torch of poo."

He took a deep draw on the cigarette, and deliberately blew out a long plume of smoke directly up the barrel of the tank.

"YOU KNOW", he said, louder than was strictly necessary to make himself heard to Geoffrey alone, "IT STRIKES ME THAT THE WADDING IN A BLANK CARTRIDGE OF THIS DIAMETER COULD DO A MAN SOME SERIOUS DAMAGE. IT COULD LIFT ME WIG OFF."

He reached into a deeper inside pocket and extracted a perfect white handkerchief. He bent down, took up a dropped rifle, and knotted the handkerchief to the end of the rifle's bayonet. Then he raised the rifle and waved it experimentally in front of the tank's vision slit.

***

"He is waving a white flag at it", said Syndii. "They are talking to each other. And making friends. Soon they will be linking hands and dancing in a circle happily singing DEATH TO STEVE AND SYNDII."

Steve looked on, ashen, as his beautiful plan flew apart and resolving into an army of face-eating spiders who liked Steve's face before all other faces. "No. It wasn't supposed to happen like this -"

"If they make friends and come north together to open further friendly dialogue with us, we are going to have a really bad day, Steve."

Steve swallowed hard. "I think we should be getting back to our cars."

"That five bar gate isn't going to stop a tank." She adjusted the magnification on her field glasses. "They could probably drive that fucking thing clean across the stream without slowing down."

"Gary is talking to them now", said Steve in disgust, not needing magnification to see this. "They're talking to Gary. They're supposed to be beating him savagely till he squeals like a little girl."

Syndii lowered the binoculars, having come to a decision. "We have to leave. Now."

As if on cue, the walkie-talkie at her elbow crackled into life. "CCCH DEUTSCHE KAMERADEN! WIR HABEN EINEN GEMEINEN FEIND! AN UNSERN NICHTANGRIFFSPAKT 1939 SICH ERINNERN! ES GIBT ZULUS AUF DIESEM SCHLACHTFELD!"

"Shit", said Syndii. "Shit shit SHIT! They got radio."

"WIR HÖREN SIE, TOVARISCHI! WO SIND DIESE KOKOSNÜSSE?"

"NÖRDLICH VOM EINFAHRT."

"They just said 'fart'", said Steve. "At any other time I would consider that very, very funny. I would be inconsolable."

"WIR SIND DABEI, GESAGT GETAN. SIE ENTFLIEHEN NICHT."

"Go!" hissed Syndii. "Run! Now!"

She pelted in the direction of the exit road.

"Why?" said Steve, beginning to run in sympathy nonetheless.

"Because I paid fucking attention at school. 'Einfahrt' in fact has little to do with flatulence, but in fact means 'the only road out of here', and is where your Germans are heading right now."

The ground was lumpy and difficult to run over. Steve had decided he did not like the countryside. Above the roar of the Joseph Stalin 2's motors, he could hear a second, more raucous vibration, like a mobile earthquake - and then, over a mess of weed-grown concrete, he saw it, high as a house, blotchy with grey bruises of disruptive patterning. The nettles all around it parted like the Red Sea admitting a later, more anti-semitic Moses.

"Uh, Syndii? Syndii? That's the Tiger, and it's going the same way we are." He caught hold of her uniform cuff. "Syndii?"

"It's going the same way we are because IT - IS - TRYING - TO - CUT - US - OFF!" She was moving at a sprint now, devouring the landscape on impossibly long legs. It was difficult to talk and maintain this kind of pace simultaneously.

"- but they only got - - blank cartridges -"

"Are you crazy?" She stopped dead on a stile in front of him, possibly to catch her breath, more likely to let him catch his. "Have you seen the sort of mess a blank cartridge makes of your face?"

"- but - we've got guns -"

"Replica firearms. Most of 'em don't even fire blanks."

"But -" - " the shotgun -"

"The only real piece we got, and we've used up the only two shells I could find for it. If my dad knew I had it he'd disinherit me. It's supposed to be locked up at the gun club separate from the ammunition. He could be forced off the bench."

Steve sucked in air in amazement. "Off the bench? Your dad's a footballer?"

Syndii attempted to kill him with her eyes. He thought quickly.

"Your dad's a judge? I thought you, thought you had all the guns because you were some sort of -" he searched for an apposite phrase -"Yardie gangsta massive."

She dropped off the stile and ducked below a man-high stand of nettles to avoid being seen by the advancing Russians. Then she turned and fixed him with a stare no mere eighty-five-millimetre gun bore could equal.

"Steve, I have a degree in philosophy."

"But you work in a launderette!"

She nodded, and looked murderously at careers advisors only she could see. "I repeat - I have a degree in philosophy. Steve, we have got to get out of here, or we are going to die."

Still fighting for breath, Steve looked up at Syndii, his mouth treacherously filling his throat with saliva when he most needed it to operate at maximum aperture.

"Fuck this", he said suddenly, and spat violently into the undergrowth. He felt giddy, weirdly elated by hypoxia.

"What?" said Syndii.

Steve felt disturbed at the sensation of Syndii being in more fear than he was. "I am sick to death of running. I am not a man; I am a mouse. But if I'm going to be forced to fight, I will fight like a fucking cornered mouse."

"Cornered rat", corrected Syndii. "The expression is cornered rat, Steve."

"I don't care what the fucking expression is. I'm going to stand and fight, even if you're not." He sat down in the weeds, folding his arms grumpily.

She spyhopped up over the nettles again, looking out towards the last known position of the Tiger 2. "I've news for you. Neither of us have that choice any longer. Their heavy armour is now sitting astride the only way out of here." She lifted the binoculars to her eyes and scanned around her. "We are outflanked. Soon, we'll be surrounded."

"It may be time to consider offering terms", said Steve obstinately. "They might let the rest of you go with just a vicious kicking if you hand me over."

"Not if they fucking pay me." She lowered the binoculars guiltily. "You know, if we slip out of here together, we might be able to...get help, maybe? Call the cops?"

"I think I can guarantee that every policeman in this area of London has something frightfully important to do that doesn't involve being anywhere near here. Besides", he said, fixing her with his gaze, "a Zulu commander sticks with her troops. What good is a buffalo with only one horn?"

She was almost hysterical. "They've got more guns than us!"

"They've got more guns that fire blank cartridges. And cartridges run out. And you have assegais. And assegais don't. They are strung out into two unconnected groups along a very wide front. Remember Isandhlwana!"

"Steve, the Zulus didn't win at Isandhlwana because the British were strung out along a very wide front. They won because they outnumbered the British fifteen to one."

Steve considered this, then nodded, stood up, stepped onto the stile and reconnoitred the battlefield.

"Remember Rorke's Drift, then", he said, pointing. "That old factory. It has good solid concrete walls, Alasdair won't dare drive a tank through it, it'll ruin his beautiful camo job." He rested a hand on Syndii's shoulder in a way in which, formerly, he would not have dared. "I'm going to teach you Zulus how to fight and die like Welshmen."