by Ben Elton
‘So who’s running Rambo in there?’ Tyron jerked his thumb towards the door of the Portacabin.
‘No one’s running him! I’m telling you, Tyron. I’ve met them, they’re kids and ageing hippies; greenies. They have not got the faintest idea what’s going on. They’re just troublemakers taking a long punt on a short idea because of your stupid Nazi pogrom. Even this journalist from the States doesn’t know what she’s discovered. We have that from the report on what she told Toole. There is absolutely no reason to panic, and certainly no reason to go around slapping hippies.’
‘Know nothing!’ shouted Tyron, ‘know nothing!! Christ that damn hippy I just slapped had identified the world’s six biggest rocket silos! How much does he have to know?’
‘Yes, well he’s in our hands isn’t he? All we have to do is to try to persuade him to tell us where his friends are and then we’ll have all of them, won’t we? And let’s try to do it peacefully, eh?’
They re-entered the office to find Du Pont’s prostrate form stretched out on the floor looking like the victim of some terrible sexual liaison…
‘Oh man, we went all the way, just about bit off each other’s noses and everything.’ Whatever had happened, the prisoner was gone.
158: COUNCIL OF WAR
The little EcoAction team got out of the Culboon’s nice new house about ten minutes ahead of the horrible criminal squad who broke in and took the place to pieces, finding nothing but a note left by Mrs Culboon saying:
Dear Bad Fellahs, fuck you. PS could you leave the back door slightly ajar for the cat.
As it happened, by the time the leader of the search squad was presented with this note by a subordinate, the back door had already been reduced to match-wood.
Mr and Mrs Culboon knew a little place that they called their holiday home. It was about thirty kilometres in the opposite direction from the construction site; a tiny cave squeezed into the side of one of the piss-poor little hills that ringed the Bullens Creek area.
Quite a few Aboriginals, especially country ones, set a great deal of store by meditation, or dreaming, or just sitting staring into space, depending on individual mood, and the little cave in the hills was where the Culboons did their bit of drifting.
‘Reckon we’ve sat here dreaming and peaceful many a time, haven’t we, Mr Culboon?’ said Mrs Culboon.
‘Reckon so,’ replied her husband with a tinge of sadness.
‘It’ll make a nice change to sit here shitting ourselves in terror instead,’ she shrieked, and everybody laughed with her.
‘OK, you know, man,’ said Walter calling things to order. ‘It is time to assemble our thoughts; it is time to get it together man; it is time to make some kind of plan, dig?’
Of course they all dug very well.
‘The problem as I see it, you know? Right? Is that it is comparatively easy to dig the plan that we have to make a plan. It is less simple to dig the actual plan. I mean in order to do that, we have to have a plan, which we don’t. Dig?’
‘Of course we don’t,’ said Rachel, ‘but we haven’t had a plan from the beginning, have we? We’ve just followed our noses. And that’s all we can do now. It’s obvious that we have to help Zimmerman. We have to find a way through that wire and help him.’
‘I’m really sorry to be so negative,’ Chrissy replied, ‘but from my experience of these people, my guardian angel will be beyond hope by now. The guys he took on are more than a police force, or an army, or a government even. They’re money, dirty money, they are everything and they own everything, and that, I’m afraid, includes Mr Zimmerman.’
‘They don’t own Zimmerman, lady,’ said Walter. ‘He’s not a part of their world, he doesn’t even live on it. He got in a space rocket and left the minute he got back from ‘Nam.’
‘Anyway,’ Rachel asked slightly resentfully, ‘what do you suggest we do then?’ Rachel could not avoid thinking that things hadn’t been so bleak before Chrissy had turned up.
‘I don’t know,’ said Chrissy. ‘I just don’t know. We still don’t have a clue of what it is we’re really up against. Even if there was someone in authority that we could trust, we actually have nothing whatsoever to tell them. I suppose you’re right, Rachel, we will have to go in. On the million to one chance that instead of getting our butts shot off, we discover what they are up to.’
‘Hey, Chrissy, you should curb it with the blind optimism,’ CD said. ‘We don’t want to jinx ourselves.’
Mrs Culboon, of course, laughed. Nobody else did much.
‘Well, you know, I guess we should not, like, all get down on it, right?’ said Walter. ‘Because, like, if Chrissy is right and whoever goes over that fence comes out dead, I for one would like to think that maybe somebody was left around to like try and tell the tale, and also feed the Culboons’ cat. I’m serious you know? I see no reason why like the cat should have to collect the bummer that we have walked into.’
‘If somebody’s going to try and eventually alert some form of authority,’ said Rachel, ‘it should be Chrissy. She’s got a real job and credit cards and everything. What are the rest of us? Just a bunch of no-goods. Chrissy should stay.’
Chrissy had, in the previous forty-eight hours, lied and robbed her way across the world, in the process of cheating death many times. Suddenly she felt very tired.
‘Sounds good to me,’ she said. ‘I ain’t the volunteering kind.’
‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Culboon, ‘Chrissy’s taken most of the shit so far, and she’s best qualified to speak up for our corpses. She should stay here. I guess she’s used up a heap of luck, what with stealing and pretending to smuggle drugs.’ Mrs Culboon laughed. She had greatly enjoyed Chrissy’s account of her adventures, told during the futile wait for Zimmerman.
‘I think Mr and Mrs Culboon should stay too, you know?’ Walter said. ‘Mr Culboon’s head man of a community. A lot of liberal politico’s dig that sort of thing and they’re the only ones who are going to listen to anything as weird as what we’ve got.’
‘Afr Culboon’s head man, I’m not,’ said Mrs Culboon. ‘I’m sticking with you, Walter. Shit, I want to know what the hell they’re doing to our old homestead.’
And so it was decided. Walter, Rachel, CD and Mrs Culboon would try to get inside the wire with the twin aims of trying to find Zimmerman, and of trying to find out what was going on. Meanwhile, Chrissy and Mr Culboon would remain holed up at the holiday home.
Mr Culboon went to the back of the station-wagon and unloaded the guns. ‘You know how to use these things?’ he asked the four newly commissioned commandos. ‘Because I’ve shot various rifles in my time,’ he continued and, shouldering one of the semi-automatic rifles, loosed off a couple of rounds. He was knocked off his feet by the kickback.
‘Yes, just as I thought,’ he said. ‘It’s much the same but you have to hold it a bit more firmly.’
159: TAKING COVER
The years slipped away from Zimmerman. It was the early seventies again and he was just the same as he had been then, except of course that he didn’t grow his bollocks back. But, apart from that, he was the same: a cunning, ruthless, hunted man, scared and exhilarated at the same time. He lay on the roof of the Portacabin, prostrate along the guttering, listening to the furious altercation below him.
‘We should have shot the bastard!!’ yelled Tyron. ‘We should certainly shoot you!’ he added, glaring at the unfortunate Du Pont who looked a sorry sight with his huge conk turned almost sideways.
‘I just hope it rains Du Pont,’ Tyron continued, ‘because the way the guy left that trunk of yours, you’re going to drown.’
‘Leave him alone. Do you want to have to indoctrine a new security chief into Stark? What happened to Du Pont could have happened to anyone.’ Even Du Pont, who was grateful for Sly’s spirited defence, had to privately concede that this was pushing it a bit. The chances of getting your nose half bitten off by a securely bound hippy seemed pretty slim.
‘Lo
ok, he can’t have gone far,’ declared Sly nervously, ‘and he can’t get out of the compound. The whole thing’s covered by cameras, and it’s open country all the way to the wire. We’ve got fifteen choppers for Christ sake, he can’t move.’
Zimmerman had actually already presumed all this for himself, which of course was why he hadn’t attempted to move. It was fairly audacious of him to stay on top of the Portacabin, but a calculated risk. A favourite method of hiding in the jungle had simply been to stand stock still and pretend to be a tree. Any searcher will look under hedges and behind rocks; few will study the open spaces very carefully, or, for that matter, the roofs of the prisons from which a person is supposed to be fleeing for his or her life. This was the reason that Zimmerman elected to stay where he was.
‘Du Pont,’ snapped Sly, ‘I want every man on this, and I want more brought in. At the moment he is a maximum of half a kilometre away; a minimum of a few yards.’
Zimmerman went slightly cold. This bastard was a bit too clever for his liking.
‘Get on it, take the place apart, fanning out from around this Portacabin,’ Sly continued. And Zimmerman hoped that Du Pont would not take this to mean upwards as well as outwards. If he survived the next fifteen minutes, Zimmerman reckoned he was safe. He then resolved to stay exactly where he was for quite a while, long enough for them to become worried and confused. Long enough for them to begin to wonder whether he had got out after all.
Fifteen minutes later Du Pont, Tyron and Sly were gone. Zimmerman smiled to himself. He was in the shadow of the heating flue and considered it extremely unlikely that he would be spotted from the air. He was pretty safe for the time being. He curled up in the gutter with his Phantom comic. He had plenty of time and he intended to luxuriate over every page; digging all of the pictures in detail. Quite often there were little jokes and bits of drama in the drawings that it was easy to miss if you skimmed through. What’s more, after the Phantom, he also had two new Judge Dreads, he reckoned it could be a pretty good day. All he hoped was that CD had got the woman away and that they all had the sense to stay put.
160: THE BRIGHT LIGHTS OF A DARK INTENT
Zimmerman of course hoped in vain. For as the sun set, in all its blazing desert glory, and as the billions of volts of Moorcock lighting came on, almost eclipsing it, the little EcoAction commando unit moved out.
The first major clash of the titans was at hand, for the two armies were approaching each other. Du Pont’s men, dogs, trucks and helicopters were heading for the wire from within, spreading ever outwards, looking for Zimmerman.
Meanwhile, from the opposite direction, outside the wire, the resistance forces were rushing to their fate; a huge peace freak, a lovesick dickhead, a born again environmentalist and a middle-aged woman with a degree in sarcasm. The last of these was driving and she was having some difficulty, because they had elected to travel without lights in an effort to sneak up on their quarry.
‘That’ll fox ‘em right enough,’ said Mrs Culboon, pursuing her preferred line of humour. ‘If we turn the lights off they’ll never see us. After all, they only rule the world.’
Progress was being rendered more than unusually difficult by the weaving, flickering lights on the horizon. The distant sky was a blaze of eerie, unnatural colour. This turned the pitted, wind shaped desert floor into a mass of treacherous shadows, any one of which could be deep enough to snap a twenty-five-year-old axle. Even more disconcerting was that occasionally one of the shadows turned out to weigh ten stone and be capable of jumping sixteen feet. It was a tense situation, Rachel’s car was a soft top and they had visions of being joined from above by a kangaroo.
‘There just isn’t room back here,’ CD said, ‘it will have to sit in the front on your lap, Walter.’
They abandoned the car about a kilometre from the perimeter wire and, carrying their guns and a set of wire clippers, began to slowly approach the scene of what they realized could be their destruction. They recalled all too vividly the trigger-happy encounter on their previous visit to the wire. This time there would be no Zimmerman to miraculously save them. In fact, it seemed, there was a good chance that Zimmerman was already dead. The things they had learnt from the new comrade, Chrissy, had been shocking and fearful. Billionaires plotting together; ruthlessly slaughtering anyone who got on their trail. They crept up to the brightly lit wire with an almost fatalistic detachment.
‘Oh man!’ whispered Walter, pointing. ‘Closed circuit TV in the desert! These people are unnecessarily paranoid.’
He had spotted a camera mounted high on a pole. It was turning slowly towards them. That was it, he, CD and Rachel thought. The moment it focussed on them the game was up.
‘The thing probably has a death ray fitted as standard,’ Walter whined.
Mrs Culboon raised the night-sighted rifle that she was carrying and destroyed the camera with a single shot. There was a surprised silence — silence that is, apart from the humming din emanating from the centre of the construction site. ‘Well done, Mrs Culboon,’ said CD after a pause, ‘I was thinking of doing that myself.’
‘Hey, Mrs Culboon, I was never hip to the fact that you could shoot,’ said Walter, excited and impressed.
‘Mr Culboon hates the fact that I can out shoot him every time so I try not to rub it in,’ Mrs Culboon laughed modestly. And there was momentary elation at their minor victory until Rachel reintroduced a touch of realism.
‘I reckon pretty soon somebody will be beginning to wonder why a screen’s gone dark and start thinking about looking into it,’ she reminded everybody. ‘So I think we should make the most of our small advantage.’
‘Dig,’ said Walter.
They cut the wire, which was not electrified. This had been a deliberate decision on Sly’s part, the last thing he wanted was a load of barbecued kangaroos drawing the unwelcome attention of animal lovers.
For a moment the scared little group stood on the outside, staring at the hole that they had made. Then, with hearts beating nineteen-to-the-dozen, and bowels struggling to maintain some semblance of control over the situation, they climbed through.
At first they had it very easy. They walked for an hour, covering maybe four kilometres and did not see one truck, one guard or one helicopter. Of course they didn’t realize it but this was because the security people were not worrying about intruders that night. In fact, nobody had even noticed the dead camera that Mrs Culboon had destroyed. They were all looking for Zimmerman, every single one of them. The four intrepid Eco-commandos had not yet reached the exapanding area covered by the search, but they soon would.
‘Well, you know, man,’ said Walter, lazily rolling a cigarette as he sauntered along, his hunched lope growing looser and more relaxed with every step. ‘I guess maybe the chick Chrissy has lived too long in the US of A. I guess maybe, like a few Yankees I’ve met, her paranoia dial is set to double ape-shit. I make this observation because we have been strolling in the lion’s den so to speak for the space of five whole cigarettes now and, as I hope you have noticed, we are by no means dead.’
‘Yeah,’ added CD. ‘You know, if I’d known that terrorist infiltration was going to be as easy as this I would have taken it up long ago. Don’t you think, Rachel, I mean, we could have skipped all those peace bazaars and stuff and just strolled into the White House and kidnapped the President.’
‘Listen you two idiots,’ Rachel snapped, causing CD to shiver with frustrated urgings. Such was his monumental desire for a passionate encounter with Rachel that CD relished any display of emotion towards him on her part, even when it was derogatory. He would have got a hard on if she’d tattooed ‘what a wanker’ on his forehead while he was asleep.
‘I love it when you’re bitching,’ he observed irritatingly.
‘Colin please try to be less pathetic,’ said Rachel, causing tense little sparks of suppressed sauciness to pitter patter up and down CD’s trousers. ‘You’re both being pathetic,’ she continued. ‘We haven’t done
anything yet, we haven’t found anything out, we haven’t rescued Zimmerman, in fact we haven’t started. Still being alive is the absolute minimum we could have achieved. So don’t be so bloody smug.’
‘Ha ha, I reckon Rachel told you boys,’ said Mrs Culboon, and even with the ever present industrial roar in the distance her voice could still shatter granite. ‘Here’s you two congratulating yourselves like we’ve saved the world and all we’ve done is take a walk under the stars.’
‘All I’m saying, man, is that maybe the people we’re up against are not such a terminal bummer as we had imagined, dig? All I’m saying,’ insisted Walter, ‘is that maybe these people aren’t as big as they’d like to think they are, maybe they ain’t so tough and all powerful, and maybe we’re a match for them. Is that so dumb?’
And Walter’s question was answered because shortly after he had made this monumentally optimistic observation, they came to the edge of a small ridge in the land and the full and majestic scale of their opponent was revealed to them in all its roaring, burning, terrible beauty.
They had been climbing very gently since crossing the wire and were now crossing the little undulating hills which had once ringed the Culboons’ quiet, dingy existence and now ringed the central axis of the Stark conspiracy. From where they now stood, the desert floor swept down into a very shallow valley, a valley which was in fact really little more than a dip in the vast, flat desert.