“You’ll have to get in line.”
“YOU WON’T MAKE IT TO COURT, SPRATT!” yelled Danvers as Jack ran off into the park, the recent rain making the ground slippery. Ahead of him a support trench zigzagged down the hill, the detritus of war all around him. The propane burners had just been ignited, and the park was now aglow with flames that eerily illuminated the plumes of earth that were being blown skyward by the air mortars as the barrage increased in intensity. The Somme offensive had begun—but with only a couple of participants and this time, hoped Jack, without any loss of life. He took a left turn toward a forward observation post as several machine guns started to rattle somewhere ahead of him. He popped his head up in the OP and borrowed a pair of field binoculars that were lying on the firestep. He trained the glasses on the lines opposite and could see the plumes of soil lift large sections of the barbed-wire emplacements into the air. He stopped. In the middle of this no-man’s-land was an abandoned artillery piece and cuffed to it, being plastered by dirt and debris as air mortars detonated nearby, was Mary.
Jack ran as he had never run before. He slid into craters, pulled himself over barbed wire and climbed past piles of rubble toward the artillery barrage, the buried mortars blasting and churning the ground, each whompa unleashing up to a half ton of earth and throwing it fifty feet into the air. Jack didn’t stop when he reached the wall of destruction; he just carried straight on into it.
Mary was not in what you might call “a calm frame of mind.” The barrage had started a full thousand yards away and had slowly moved toward her, gaining in strength as it came. She had attempted to beat the handcuffs off her with a shell casing but without luck. The barrage moved closer and intensified around her, the harsh pressure waves making her feel nauseous and disoriented. A small charge detonated six feet away and blew her jacket and shoes clean off. Then, as the barrage seemed to reach a point at which every different explosion had merged into one huge directionless noise that reverberated around her, a corridor suddenly opened up in the curtain of flying soil, and a man dressed in torn clothes and covered in mud ran into the maelstrom and fell to the ground near her. Almost instantly the bombardment pulled back from where they were, and within a radius of ten feet, all was calm. Jack produced a set of clippers he had taken from a raiding-party kit and snipped the chains on her handcuffs.
“Can you walk?”
She nodded, and he led her into the bombardment, which seemed to part as they moved through it. By the light of the star shells and the flames, Mary could see the artillery piece that she had been handcuffed to only a moment earlier being tossed skyward as an almighty concussion lifted it clear of the ground.
“What the hell…?” screamed Mary, but Jack didn’t answer. Wherever they walked, the bombardment subsided. It was like moving through a crowd that respectfully parted to let you go in any direction. Jack led her back across no-man’s-land, and within a few minutes they were safely back on the support road—and Danvers, who glared sullenly at them as they walked past.
“How the hell did we manage that?” asked Mary, panting with exertion and fear. “Not be killed by the barrage, I mean?”
He pulled out of his pocket one of the safety-proximity alerts that Haig had shown them the first time they’d visited. They could have stood in the barrage all night, and not one mortar would have hit them.
“Where’s Demetrios?”
“What?” asked Mary, temporarily deafened by the barrage.
“WHERE’S DEMETRIOS?”
She pointed up to the control room, and they both ran back toward the building, just in time to see a figure dash into the visitors’ center clutching a black leather briefcase. The profile was unmistakable.
“DEMETRIOS!!!” yelled Jack.
The bear couldn’t hear him; Jack couldn’t even hear himself. He yelled at Mary to try to find McGuffin and stop the bombardment, then ran in the direction the head of NS-4 had taken. The bear was not out of shape and made far better speed on all fours than Jack could do on two. Jack only caught up with him at the parking lot, and only then because Mr. Demetrios had stopped. It was not difficult to see why. In the parking lot and facing the Small Olympian Bear was perhaps the biggest armada of police cars that Jack had ever seen. Briggs had outdone himself. There was everything. It looked like a field full of twinkling blue lights. Two police helicopters hovered overhead, their powerful search beams centered on the small bear. Abruptly, the barrage stopped. A silence descended on the scene. Jack’s ears were ringing, and he still shouted, even though it was hardly necessary.
“Demetrios!”
The small bear turned.
“You’re under arrest, bear—for murder.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I do. On the ground.”
“You can’t arrest me.”
“I can.”
“You can’t!”
“He’s right, Jack.”
It was Briggs, and he approached the two of them cautiously.
“He’s NS-4, Jack, and outside our jurisdiction. We have to get a warrant from the Home Secretary. The Chief Constable is on the phone to her at the moment, but the case is taking some explaining. Don’t worry, though. We’ll still have him. Once you write your report, he’ll be inside quicker than you can say ‘corrupt civil servant.’”
The bear looked at Jack. He had been surprised himself at the turn of events.
“Let him go now and you’ll not see him again!” Jack shouted to Briggs. “Contained in that briefcase are the details of a technology that will grant him asylum in any nation he chooses!”
“The law is the law, Jack,” insisted Briggs. “We can’t touch him.”
Jack’s shoulder’s slumped, and Demetrios grinned.
“Like he said, Jack, You can’t arrest me. I’ll be on my way with my property.” He patted the briefcase and adjusted his tie. “Bad luck, Inspector. I guess I’ll see you about.” He looked around for transport. “And do you know,” he added, “I think I’ll even borrow your car.”
“Be my guest.”
Demetrios smiled again, but it was a smile of relief. The probable course of events that Jack had outlined was pretty near the truth. He would be out of England in less than an hour, and he could then pick a country at leisure in which to instigate phase two of his plan. He jumped into Jack’s Allegro and threw the briefcase on the passenger seat. He started the car and drove slowly toward the gates of the theme park, the assembled officers moving aside to let him pass.
“I’m sorry,” said Briggs. “We couldn’t hold him. Politics.”
“Don’t be,” replied Jack quietly. “He won’t get far.”
As they watched, one side of the car collapsed, a suspension arm giving way. The rear screen shattered, followed by a clattering noise from the engine and a few puffs of blue smoke from the exhaust. With a grinding of metal, the front of the car started to pull itself in, releasing a trail of brown radiator water. Rust popped out along the bottom of each door, and all the lights extinguished. The car juddered to a halt as another suspension arm gave way and all four tires burst in quick succession. A dent appeared in the roof, and the damage that Jack had inflicted on the car against the tree started to make itself known again, the rear buckling up as the car squirmed and shook and it gently imploded with a shudder. There was an agonized cry from within as the Small Olympian Bear tried to escape, then, with a rattling and grinding of metal, the car rapidly collapsed in on itself, crushing Mr. Demetrios to a painful death and leaving the car nothing more than a piece of gnarled scrap sitting in a lake of black sump oil and rusty water.
“Gosh,” murmured Briggs, “was that an NCD thing?”
“Not really,” replied Jack, “but the theory’s similar.”
He stared at the crushed car and thought that if it hadn’t been for Mary and Ash, that might have been him winging his way to eternal damnation. As it was, it occurred to him that perhaps the Dark One had got a bum deal—Demetrios would have made his own
way to hell in the fullness of time, without an Allegro Equipe to take him there.
“Jack,” said Briggs, laying a hand on his shoulder, “you’ve got a serious amount of explaining to do.”
“Of course,” replied Jack. “There were these three bears, see, and one morning they made some porridge and went into the forest while it cooled—”
“Not now. Get a decent night’s sleep, and I’ll see you in the morning. You did well. Congratulations.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Jack,” said Mary, who had just arrived at his side, “I want you to meet Professor McGuffin. I found him in the—” She looked around in confusion. “That’s funny,” she murmured. “He was here a second ago.”
Jack smiled, opened his cell phone and dialed home. Madeleine would want to know he was all right, but, more important, he just wanted to hear her voice.
DCI Jack Spratt was unanimously declared “more or less sane” by a medical review board and was reinstated as head of the Nursery Crime Division. He received a Distinguished Conduct Award for his expert tackling of the Gingerbreadman. He continues to live and work in Reading.
PC Ashley was taken home, patched, refilled with rambosia vitae and had his memories uploaded from his memory jar. Due to the infrequency with which he had conducted backups, the last two weeks of his life were irretrievably lost. He still works at the NCD, has no idea why he was awarded the Ursidae Order of Friendship and hopes one day to pluck up enough courage to ask Mary out for a date.
DS Mary Mary was not charged or reprimanded over her “lewd behavior.” It was decided that jurisdiction could not be firmly established, since the offense occurred 220 miles above the Atlantic Ocean in an advanced form of alien technology at twelve times the speed of sound. She continues to work at the Nursery Crime Division and hopes that Ashley might once again ask her out for a date.
Nick Demetrios died from multiple crush injuries. The recovered briefcase contained notes relating to the highly improbable idea of using auto-deuterium-extracting cucumbers as fuel for a Cold Ignition Fusion reaction. Such an idea is quite impossible and belongs in the realms of loony pseudoscience. The briefcase also included a pickle, presumably his lunch. It was consigned to the waste-bin.
Professor McGuffin, despite being hazily identified by DS Mary, remains officially dead. Two years after Nick Demetrios’s death, a garden near Madrid erupted into a fireball that fused soil and melted iron. No suitable explanation has yet been forthcoming, but Dr. Parks is investigating.
Punch and Judy sold their house next to Jack and Madeleine, explaining that they wanted to go and make some noise next to some real neighbors. They were last heard of making an appalling nuisance of themselves in Slough and continue to be the finest marriage counselors in the Southeast.
Sherman Bartholomew retired from politics and returned to his legal practice in Reading. He now specializes wholly in nursery law, and does pro bono work for bears. He is currently defending Tarquin Majors on charges of smuggling forty thousand gallons of surplus Europorridge to needy bears in Eastern Splotvia.
SommeWorld is still behind schedule, but problems should be ironed out “by Christmas.” Despite this, Mr. Haig insists “the situation is favorable.”
Josh Hatchett remains a staunch supporter of the NCD and backs it fully in all its undertakings. The job of uninformed criticism of the NCD has been taken over by Hector Sleaze of The Mole.
The Great Long Red-Legg’d Scissor-man was sentenced to eight years for assault but was released over a technicality. His whereabouts are unknown. The NCD has issued a bulletin exhorting children not to suck their thumbs, just in case.
The Gingerbreadman’s hospital uniform, fountain pen, thumb, elephant gun and a single glacé cherry eye can now be viewed in a special exhibition at Reading Museum, along with his original seven-foot-high cutter, and declassified Project Ginja Assassin material, kindly loaned by the QuangTech Trust (Foss), PLC.
Mr. and Mrs. Bruin survived the attack on their lives and have returned to their cottage. They received counseling from the Punch™ marriage counselors and are delighted to report that there are now only two beds in the house. They continue to eat porridge and take long walks in the forest.
My thanks to:
John Wooten of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, for his assistance in matters regarding physics and atoms and fusion and suchlike.
Elmarie Stodart of Cape Town, who coined the “right to arm bears” phrase, which lent itself well to the novel.
Bill Mudron and Dylan Meconis of Portland, Oregon, for their excellent frontispiece and work on my postcards and merchandising. Further examples of their artwork can be found at www.thequirkybird.com (Dylan), www.excelsiorstudios.net/ (Bill).
Also to:
Mari Roberts, who once again puts up with a partner who is in residential absentia for five months of the year.
Carolyn Mays and Molly Stern, two editors cut from the finest cloth, who never push me that hard, even when the manuscript is the teeniest-weeniest bit late.
Gretchen Koss and Emma Longhurst, the best publicity gurus in the known galaxy, whom I am lucky to have.
The unsung multitudes at Hodder and Penguin Group (USA), who have been so utterly supportive of my efforts.
Tif Loehnis, Eric Simonoff and all the hardworking associates at Janklow and Nesbit, without whom I would as likely as not still be making Snicketty-Dicketty breakfast cereal commercials, and hating it.
And:
To the master himself, Jonathan Swift, for the initial inspiration for this novel:
He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers.
—Gulliver’s Travels, “A Voyage to Laputa”
The Fourth Bear Page 34