got my family to think about.'
Colonel Urwin looked at the sporting print hopelessly. He'd been right to suspect the British of having hidden depths he would never understand. No wonder the French spoke of 'perfidious Albion'. The bastards would always behave in ways one least expected. In the meantime he had to produce some explanation that would satisfy the General. 'Just say we've got a purely domestic problem on our hands,' he told the Captain, 'and rout Glaushof out. Base security is his baby.'
But before the Captain could leave the room Wilt had reacted again. 'You let that maniac anywhere near my kids and someone's going to get hurt,' he shouted, 'I'm not having them gassed like I was.'
'In that case you better exercise some parental control yourself,' said the Colonel grimly, and headed for the door.
Chapter 23
By the time they reached the parking lot by the gates it was clear that the situation had deteriorated. In an entirely unnecessary effort to rescue their mother from the sentriesEva had already felled one of the men with a knee-jerk to the groin she had learnt at a Rape Resistance Evening Classthe quads had abandoned the Wilts' car and, by dusting the second sentry with pepper, had put him out of action. After that they had occupied the gatehouse itself and were now holding the Lieutenant hostage inside. Since he had torn off his uniform to escape the ammonia fumes and the quads had armed themselves with his revolver and that of the sentry writhing on the ground outside, they had been able to isolate the guardhouse even more effectively by threatening the driver of an oil tanker which had made the mistake of arriving at the barrier and forcing him to offload several hundred gallons of fuel oil on to the roadway before driving tentatively into the base.
Even Eva had been appalled at the result. As the stuff swilled across the tarmac Lieutenant Harah had driven up rather too hurriedly in a jeep and had tried to brake. The jeep was now enmeshed in the perimeter fence and Lieutenant Harah, having crawled from it, was calling for reinforcements. 'We have a real penetration situation here,' he bawled into his walkie-talkie. 'A bunch of leftist terrorists have taken over the guardhouse.'
'They're not terrorists, they're just little girls,' Eva shouted from inside, only to have her words drowned by the Alert siren which Samantha had activated.
Outside in the roadway Mavis Mottram's busload of Mothers Against The Bomb had gathered in a line and had handcuffed themselves together before padlocking the ends of the line to the fence on either side of the gateway and were dancing something approximate to the can-can and chanting 'End the arms race, save the human' in full view of three TV cameras and a dozen photographers. Above their heads an enormous and remarkable balloon, shaped and veined like an erect penis, swung slowly in the breeze exposing the rather confusing messages, 'Wombs Not Tombs' and 'Screw Cruise Not Us' painted on opposite sides. As Wilt and Colonel Urwin watched, the balloon, evidently force-fed by a hydrogen cylinder, shed its few human pretensions in the shape of an enormous plastic foreskin and turned itself into a gigantic rocket.
'This is going to kill old B52,' muttered the Colonel who had until then been enjoying the spectacle of Lieutenant Harah covered in oil and trying to get to his feet. 'And I can't see the President liking it too much either. That fucking phallus has got to hit prime time with all those cameras.'
A fire truck shot round the corner past them and in a jeep behind it came Major Glaushof, his right arm in a sling and his face the colour of putty.
'Jesus,' said Captain Fortune, 'if that fire truck hits the oil we're going to have a body count of thirty of the Mothers.'
