Boris Johnson - Seventy-Two Virgins

‘Pisser,’ hissed Pickel, squinting again through the sight.

‘…did not say a few words on a subject which…’

In the ambulance in New Palace Yard, William Eric Kinloch Onyeama had fully regained consciousness, with no assistance from the emergency services, and was struggling to get up. His chest hurt like hell, as though he had been involved in a car crash.

His long brown fingers reached for something to help him upright, and wrapped themselves round some wires which were protruding from a box.

‘…is evidently controversial, and which arouses strong opinions across the globe . .

‘Say something interesting, you silly man!’ yelled Jones the Bomb, who was fed up to the back teeth with British parliamentary procedure. He stood still and pressed the button to activate the automatic dialling system.

Pickel had the vein in his sights. He began the squeeze on the trigger, so delicately that he could not possibly disturb the barrel.

‘All right, you tosser,’ said Roger Barlow. ‘I say to hell with you and the rest of you chippy, pathetic, pretentious, evil, envious, Islamic nutcases. I say vote for America!’

‘Sit down!’ screamed Jones the Bomb. ‘Sit down and shut up.’

And just as Pickel pulled the trigger, Jones jerked the President forward a foot and a half, and placed the crown of the presidential head in the path of the thyapentine sodium dart as it was dispatched with a muzzle velocity of 3,100 feet per second.

‘Ow,’ said the President. ‘What the fuuurggghh…’

‘You fools,’ said Jones. The Yanks were attacking. He pushed again at the mobile, and the number flashed on the screen.

DIALLING, said the mobile.

It took only a second for the stuff to begin to work on the President, who weighed less than a sixth of the average white rhino. He toppled forward. The dart was sticking out of the top of his head. It looked terrible on TV.

DIALLING, said the mobile.

And as the President went down he dragged Jones down with him. The mobile spilled out of his hand.

DIALLING, said the screen as the mobile spun across the flags.

Pickel knew what he had to do. With what the citations would call a characteristic disregard for his own safety, he flung his seventeen stone off the little wooden platform beneath the flèche, and abseiled from the ceiling. He aimed at the form of Jones, and in order to hit him he threw himself forward. He went too far and too fast.

ENGAGED, said the mobile.

Pickel landed awkwardly, at 34 miles an hour, on the fifth step, twelve away from Jones the Bomb. Oxlike though it was in dimension and construction, his left tibia was cleanly snapped by the violence of his arrival.

Jones was now crawling towards the mobile, and thinking what an idiot he had been. He had dialled himself! He panted as he tried to lug the inert mass of the President across the old striated shale. All he had to do was dial Dean or Habib, he thought; and it may or may not be an indication of some ultimate failure of his character that he did not think to activate by hand the detonator on his own jacket.

ENGAGED, said the mobile. RETRY?

As Jones crawled towards the mobile the broken-limbed Pickel crawled up the steps towards Jones. His gun was gone, but he had his knife, and he had the courage of a wounded lion as it charges down the rifle of some mock-brave white hunter.

Hardly bothering to look, Jones turned his Browning round and shot Pickel in the chest. The 9 mm bullet ripped through the trapezius of his right breast, scraped a rib and a scapula, and lodged in his vast sternocleidomastoid withers. The damage was very severe. And still that great heart beat on. Army knife to the fore, he slithered on up the stairs to save his Head of State and Commander in Chief.

In his shame and rage, Adam made forward, to help the injured man. But Cameron held him back.

Five steps to go, reckoned Pickel, now in tremendous pain from both his chest and his leg. Four more agonizing tiger-crawling steps, and he would give Wanda and Jason Jr something they could be eternally proud of.

Three more steps and he would expunge any guilty memory of the incinerated car in Baghdad.

Two more steps and he would wash away the stain that had been left on his name by that pisser Barry White.

If he had managed one more step, he would have been upon Jones the Bomb and the President, as they advanced in a crumpled pushme-pullyou across the floor.

ENGAGED, said the mobile. RETRY?

But Jones did not wait for Pickel’s arms to come within swinging distance. He aimed the Browning at Pickel’s head and shot at him again.

And that might have been the end of Jason Pickel. By the laws of ballistics the bullet should have entered his brain and killed him instantly. He would have died far from home, fighting on a foreign flagstone, in the protection not just of the President, but of British citizens, as many brave Americans have died before.

And later the news would have been brought to his wife, at that moment running the early morning bath for another man.

Except that Jones’s trigger finger was just closing when his gun arm was kicked sharply at the elbow by Roger Barlow, who felt that his speech had not been exactly coherent, and that now was the time for action, not words.

‘You idiot MP!’ said Jones, and would have blown Roger away with the bullet meant for Pickel; only his gun now jammed.

‘Yo! Roger!’ sang out his beautiful research assistant, and Adam saw her exultant eyes, and wished they had been turned on him.

But Jones the Bomb was not finished yet. By dragging and shoving the recumbent President, whose anaesthetic dart waggled absurdly from the top of his skull, he had at last extended his fingers to within six inches of the master Nokia.

At which point Dean stepped forward, and kicked it aside.

‘No!’ shrieked Jones the Bomb, and Habib ran after it, directing a hideous Arab imprecation at the Wulfrunian recruit.

Across Westminster Hall, the audience was now screaming and shouting instructions, and rising from their places in fear.

Adam was saying how much he wished he had a gun, but Cameron was not listening to Adam. She was looking at the back of the head of Jones the Bomb, as he crouched over the President, spitting and waving his Browning.

There was a little bald spot in the greying crown. She knew what she wanted to do. Her eyes went to the group of heraldic figures behind the black railing. Before she could ask to borrow it, the necessary object was thrust without a word into her hand.

‘Come on, you idle bastard,’ shrieked Jones at the comatose form of the President, as he scrabbled feebly after Habib and the Nokia, trying with one hand to slide the bolt and unjam the Browning. Now he would shoot him. No, he had better shoot himself. Or should he shoot Dean?

He realized that he must have only one or two bullets left in the magazine. He was sitting there, crouched over and grizzling with irritation when Cameron came up behind him…

And before she could act she found that Roger had materialized beside her, and taken the ancient artefact with a wink; and because he was her boss, she naturally deferred to him.

Then Roger drew back his arm with a wristy motion he had first learned as a child when thwacking the tops of the thistles in the meadow, and hit him very hard, on the base of the skull.

Jones the Bomb said not a word, and subsided prone over the President’s motionless shins. Black Rod smiled to see his eponym put to such good use. It was there to protect the House of Commons, and it had done its job.

But now Habib had found the phone, and handed it to Benedicte. ‘Wait,’ she said, ‘or I will detonate the dirty bomb. There is another bomb in the ambulance, my friends, and this time it is the beeg one!’ She called up the menu screen, found what she wanted, and pressed.