“You can arrest me later,” Jack snapped. “I’m kind of busy right now.”

“I may not arrest you at all,” replied Briggs. “I’ve just been talking to Vinnie Craps, Bartholomew and Ursula Bruin.”

“She can talk?”

“She can write. And she’s indicated a few very interesting facts about Demetrios that need closer scrutiny. Plus, Mr. Fuchsia’s neighbors have positively identified Agent Danvers as one of the Men in Green who were there this morning.”

Jack suddenly felt a huge weight begin to lift from his shoulders. For the first time that day, he had the feeling that everything might just possibly come out all right. As he began to breathe more easily, there was a thud of mortar fire, and he turned. Several parachute flares arced gracefully into the night sky and ignited above the theme park, illuminating the pockmarked landscape in a harsh white light. He turned back to his cell phone.

“The Gingerbreadman and Bisky-Batt are dead, sir, the cookie by me and Horace by Demetrios. I’m at SommeWorld. The fourth bear, McGuffin and Danvers are here, and I believe that Mary is in very grave danger. If you want to arrest me, you can—but please, after Mary is safe.”

There was a pause.

“Hold firm, Jack, I’m sending everything I have.”

Jack paused for a moment in thought then ran to the costume store. He returned to the turnstiles, used a fire ax on a large glass door and stepped into the cool night and the jagged, unnatural landscape of the park. The star shells drifted down, their bright white light trailing long streams of smoke in the clear sky. Then a single faint whompa pierced the quiet. A barrage was about to begin, and Mary was probably right in the center of it.

Jack ran down one of the supply roads as the steady crump, crump, crump of the barrage began to fill the air. The parachute flares faded and died, and the park was plunged into inky blackness. Jack stopped. He could hear the barrage building up, but the smoke had cleared and the night was pitch-black—he couldn’t even see his hand in front of his face. There was another thud of mortars as more star shells flew into the air, and with a crackle the parachute flares once more illuminated the landscape. Suddenly Jack jumped out of his skin—Danvers was not more then six feet from him, and she looked as startled as he was. He didn’t pause for a second—he planted a fist on her chin. She went down with a thump, and he relieved her of her pistol as she lay dazed on the ground. She had a pair of cuffs, so he dragged her to a nearby Model T and clipped her to a wheel spoke.

“I’m National Security!” she yelled as she regained what little sense she possessed. “I’ll have your head on a platter for this!”

“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.