Craig shrugged.

"You don't like him, "she accused.

"I love him, "he said. "In a funny sort of way." "You don't want to talk about him any more?" "I'd rather talk about you." "That suits me, what do you want to know?" He wanted to make her smile again.

"Start at the time you were born and don't. miss anything out." "I was born in a little village in Yorkshire, my daddy is the local veterinarian." "When? I said not to miss anything." She slanted her eyes mischievously. "What is the local expression for an indeterminate date some time before the rinderpest?" "that was in the 1890s."

"Okay," she smiled again. "I was born some time after the rinderpest."

It was working, Craig realized. She liked him. She smiled more readily, and their banter was light and easy. Perhaps it was just wistful imagination, but he thought he detected the first sexual awareness in her manner, the way she held her head and moved her body, the way she then abruptly he thought of Roland and felt the cold slide of despair.

Jonathan Ballantyne came out onto the veranda of King's Lynn, took one look at her, and went immediately into his role of the lustful rogue.

He kissed her hand. "You are the prettiest young lady that Craig has ever come up with by a street." Some perverse streak made Craig deny it. "Janine is Roly's friend, Bawu." "Ah," the old man nodded.

"I should have known. Too much class for your taste, boy." Craig's marriage had lasted a little longer than one of his jobs, just over a year, but Bawu had not approved of Craig's choice, had said so before the wedding and after it, before the divorce and after it and at every opportunity since then.

"Thank you, Mr. Ballantyne." Janine slanted her eyes at Jonathan.

"You may call me Bawu. "Jonathan gave her his ultimate accolade, made an arm for her and said, "Come and see my Claymore mines, my dear." Craig watched them go off on a tour of the de fences another sure sign of Bawu's high favour.

"He has three wives buried up on the kopje," Craig muttered ruefully, "and is still as randy as an old goat." Craig woke to his bedroom door cracking back on its hinges, and Jonathan Ballantyne's cry.

"Are you going to sleep all day? It's four-thirty already."

"Just because you haven't slept for twenty years, Bawu." "Enough of your lip, boy today's the big day. Get that pretty little filly of Roland's and we'll all go down to test my secret weapon." "Before breakfast?" Craig protested, but excited as a child invited to a picnic, the old man had gone already.

It was parked at a prudent distance from the nearest building.

The cook had threatened to resign if there were any more experiments conducted within blast range of his kitchen. It stood on the edge of a field of ripening seed maize, and it was surrounded by a small crowd of labourers and tractor drivers and clerks.

"What on earth is it?" Janine puzzled, as they crossed the ploughed land towards it, but before anyone could reply, a figure in greasy blue overalls detached itself from the crowd and hurried towards them.

"Mister Craig, thank goodness you are here. You've got to stop him." "Don't be a blithering old idiot, Okky,"Jonathan ordered. Okky van Rensburg had been chief mechanic on King's Lynn for twenty years.

Behind his back Jonathan boasted that Okky could strip down a John Deere tractor, and build up a Cadillac and two Rolls Royce Silver Clouds out of the spare parts. He was a wiry grease-stained little monkey of a man. He ignored Jonathan's injunction to silence.

"Bawu's going to kill himself, unless somebody stops him." He wrung his scarred blackened hands pitifidly.

But already Jonathan was donning his helmet and fastening the strap under his chin. It was the same tin helmet that he had worn on that day in 1916 that he won his Military Cross, and the dent in the side had been made by a shard of German shrapnel. There was an unholy gleam in his eyes as he advanced upon the monstrous vehicle.

"Okky has converted a three-ton Ford truck," he explained to Janine, "lifted the chassis," as though it were on stilts, the vehicle's body stood high above the huge lugged tyres, "put in deflectors here," he pointed out the heavy steel vee-shaped plates under the cab that would split the blast of a land mine "armoured the cab," the body looked like a tiger tank, with steel hatches, a driver's slit and gun ports for a heavy Browning machine-gun, "but look what we have got on top!" At a glance it could have been mistaken for the conning tower of a nuclear submarine, and Okky was still wringing his hands.

"He's got twenty galvanized steel pipes filled with plastic explosive and thirty pounds of ball-bearings each." "Good Lord, Bawu."

Even Craig was horrified. "The damn things will explode!" "He has set them in blocks of concrete," Okky moaned, "and aimed them out on each side just like the cannons on one of Nelson's ships of the line. Ten on each side." "A twenty-gun Ford," Craig breathed with awe.

"When I run into an ambush, I just press the button and boom, a broadside of three hundred pounds of ball, bearings into the bastards," Jonathan gloated openly. "A whiff of grape, as old Bonaparte said."

"He's going to blow himself to hell,"Okky moaned.

"Oh, do stop being an old woman," Jonathan told him. "And give me a leg up." "Bawu, this time I really do agree with Okky." Craig tried to stop him, but the old man went up the steel ladder with the agility of a vervet monkey, and posed dramatically in the hatchway, like the "commander of a panzer division.

"I'll let off one broadside at a time, the starboard side first."

Then his eyes lit on Janine. "Would you like to be my co-pilot, my dear?" "That is astonishingly civil of you, Bawu, but I think I'll get a better view from the irrigation ditch over there." "Then stand back everyone." Jonathan made a wide imperious gesture of dismissal, and the Matabele labourers and drivers who had been witnesses to. Jonathan's previous test took off like a brigade of Egyptian infantry departing from the Six-day War. Some of them were still running as they crossed the ridge of the kopje.

Okky reached the irrigation ditch half a dozen paces ahead of Craig and Janine, and then the three of them cautiously lifted their heads above the bank. Three hundred yards away, the grotesque Ford stood in monumental isolation in the middle of the ploughed land, and from the hatchway Jonathan gave them a cheery wave, and then disappeared.

They covered their ears with both hands and waited. Nothing happened.

"He's chickened out," Craig said hopefully, and the hatch opened again. Jonathan's helmeted head reappeared, his face red with outrage.

"Okky, you son of a bitch, you disconnected the wiring," he roared. "You are fired, do you hear me? Fired!".

"Third time he has fired me this week," Okky muttered morosely.

"It was the only way I could think of to stop him." "Hold on, my dear," Jonathan addressed himself to Janine. "I'll have it connected up in a jiffy." "Don't worry on my account, Bawu" she yelled back, but he had disappeared again.

The minutes passed, each one a separate eternity, and, their hopes gradually rose again.

"It's not going to work." "Let's get him out of there." "Bawu, we are coming to get you," Craig cupped his hands and bellowed. "And you'd better come quietly." He rose slowly out of the ditch, and at that moment the armoured Ford disappeared in a huge boiling cloud of smoke and dust. A sheet of white flame licked over the field of standing maize, scything it flat as though some monstrous combine-harvester had swept across it, and they were enveloped by such an appalling blast of sound, that Craig lost his balance and fell back into the ditch on top of the other two.

Frantically they scrambled to untangle themselves in the bottom of the ditch, and then looked out fearfully again across the ploughed field. The dreadful silence was broken only by the singing in their own ears, and the dwindling yelps of the old man's pack of savage Rottweilers and Dobermann pinschers as they fled in utter panic back up the road towards the homestead. The field was obscured by a dense curtain of drifting blue smoke and red-brown dust.

They climbed up out of the ditch and stared into the smoke and dust, and the breeze blew it gently aside. The Ford lay upon its back.

All four of its massive lugged tyres were pointing to the heavens as though in abject surrender.

"Bawu!" Craig cried and raced towards it. The gaping mouths of the pipe cannons were still oozing oily wreaths of smoke, but there was no other movement.

Craig wrestled the steel hatch open, and crawled into it on his hands and knees. The dark interior stank of acrid plastic explosive burn. " "Bawu!" He found him crumpled in the bottom of the cab, and he knew instantly that the old man was in extremis. The whole shape of his face had altered, and his voice was an unintelligible blur.

Craig caught him up in his arms and tried to drag him towards the hatch, but the old man fought him off with desperate strength, and at last Craig understood what he was saying.

"My teeth, blown my bloody teeth oud" He was back on his hands and knees searching desperately. "Mustn't let her see me, find them, boy, find them." Craig found the missing plates under the driver's seat, and with them once more in place, Jonathan shot out of the hatchway and confronted Okky van Rensburg furiously.

"You made it top-heavy, you Withering old idiot." "You can't talk to me like that, Bawu, I don't work for you any longer. You fired me."

"You're hired," bellowed Jonathan. "Now get that thing right way up again." Twenty sweating, singing Matabele heaved the Ford slowly upright and at last it flopped over onto its wheels again.

"Looks like a banana," Okky remarked with obvious satisfaction.

"The recoil of your cannons has bent it almost double. You'll never get that chassis straight again." "There is only one way to straighten it," Jonathan announced and began tightening the strap of his tin helmet again.

What are you going to do, Jon-Jon?" Craig demanded anxiously. , "Fire the other broadside, of course," said Jonathan grimly.

"That will knock it straight again." But Craig seized one of his arms, Okky the other, and Janine murmured soothingly to him as they led him away to the waiting Land-Rover.