In the blockhouse Konstabel Els was faced with the same problem. The five sinister figures who had crept round the corner of the road with revolvers in their hands had been so clearly bent on entering the Park illegally that he had shot the first two without hesitation. The answering spatter of bullets through the privet hedge had seemed fully to justify his action and, safe within the blockhouse, Konstabel Els broke open the ammunition packs and prepared for a long battle.
After ten minutes the plain-clothes men were reinforced by a dozen more and Els settled down to the business of defending the gateway with a relish that fully justified his early expectations that the afternoon would prove interesting.
Luitenant Verkramp had been having his own troubles. In trying to put into effect Kommandant van Heerden's orders he had run into a host of problems. It had been difficult enough to marshal the entire complement of the Piemburg Police force, including the sick and the walking wounded, at the barracks on their rugby afternoon. But when that had been accomplished he was faced with the problem of explaining where they were going and why, and since Kommandant van Heerden had omitted to explain the purpose of the expedition he was left to draw his own conclusions. The only two certain facts he had gleaned from the Kommandant's garbled instructions were that an outbreak of rabies at Jacaranda Park had coincided with the appearance of bubonic plague, a combination of disease so lethal that it seemed positively insane to send six hundred healthy men anywhere near the place. Far better in his opinion to send them in the opposite direction. Nor could he understand why six armoured cars were necessary to help abate the outbreak unless it was that the Kommandant thought they might be useful to control the riot that would certainly break out when the news became public knowledge. The order to bring the searchlights added to the Luitenant's confusion and he could only suppose that they were to be used to search out any infected animals at night so that they could be hunted across country by the armoured cars.
The speech that Verkramp finally made to the assembled policemen was not one to inspire them with any confidence in their own futures and it was only after he had stamped out several incipient signs of mutiny that the column of lorries and the expedition finally got under way. As it was the entire force, headed by six armoured cars bedecked with signs announcing the epidemic of bubonic plague and the rabies outbreak, wound its way slowly along side roads and through the country town of Vlockfontein exciting a degree of attention exceedingly gratifying to the policemen crowding the lorries, but hardly achieving the purpose Kommandant van Heerden had hoped for.
The bubonic plague signs caused a degree of alarm in Vlockfontein only surpassed by the rabies billboards which immediately preceded the lorries containing the untrained German guard dogs, one of which in the excitement broke loose and leapt from the lorry to bite a small boy who had been pulling faces at it. In the panic that ensued the guard dog went berserk, bit a number of other people, several other dogs and finally disappeared up a back alley in pursuit of a cat. Within minutes the convoy had been halted at the request of the Mayor who had insisted that the dog be shot before it could infect anyone else. Verkramp's assurances that the animal was perfectly healthy convinced no one and there was a delay of some twenty-five minutes until it was finally shot by an irate householder on the other side of town.
By that time its desperate search for safety had driven it through back gardens and across lawns, and for almost all the time it had managed to stay out of sight so that its pursuers could only judge its probable whereabouts by the barks and snarls of the dogs belonging to the householders of Vlockfontein. It was therefore not altogether surprising that the notion gained ground that the guard dog had infected the entire canine population of the town, a belief that was confirmed beyond any shadow of doubt by the strange behaviour of the Vlockfontein dogs who, sharing in the general excitement, yelped and barked and strained at their leashes and in general behaved in just that unusual manner that the rabies notices had warned people to look out for.
As the police convoy moved out of Vlockfontein the afternoon quiet was punctuated by the sound of shots as the massacre of the entire dog population began, while the boy who had caused the whole business was testifying to the extremely painful nature of the anti-rabies injections by adding his screams to those of the dying dogs. The discovery later that evening of several dead rats, which had been killed by dogs desperately trying to prove their utility, only added to the general sense of impending disaster among the Vlockfonteiners. Dead rats, they had learnt from the bubonic plague notices, were the first sign that the Black Death had arrived. By nightfall Vlockfontein was a ghost town littered with the corpses of unburied dogs while the roads into Piemburg were jammed with cars whose drivers were exhibiting all the symptoms of mass hysteria. It was clear that the aim that Kommandant van Heerden had hoped to achieve by the detour was not being realized.
The same thing could hardly be said of Konstabel Els. His aim, always accurate, had by this time become positively unerring. The casualties among the plain-clothes men were mounting so rapidly that they fell back from their more advanced positions and huddled in the hedgerow trying to think of some way of circumventing the deadly privet bush which was obstructing them so successfully in the course of their duty. Finally while some of them crept into the thick bushes that covered the hillside directly facing the gateway and far enough away to ensure the deadly revolver couldn't reach them, others decided to try to outflank the murderous bush.
To Konstabel Els it was beginning to become fairly clear that this was no ordinary gun-battle, but something quite new in his experience as an upholder of law and order. He listened with quiet confidence to the hail of bullets that flattened themselves against the walls of the blockhouse. Every now and again he peered out of the gun port that overlooked the Park to make sure that no one had worked his way round behind him, but the Park was clear. He need not have worried. Sir Theophilus had prepared for such an eventuality by constructing an extremely deep ditch which ran between the blockhouses that fringed the Park. As with so many of the Governor's devices this defensive haha was unexpectedly treacherous and so well camouflaged that anyone approaching it from the road was quite unaware of its existence until he was already impaled on the terrible iron spikes that lined its concrete bottom. The plain-clothes men lost two of their number in the haha before they gave up the attempt to outflank the concealed blockhouse.
The screams that followed this attempt heartened Konstabel Els who imagined that he had scored two new hits in what he had no doubt were extremely painful portions of the human anatomy. He was a little surprised at his success as he had not fired for several minutes and certainly not in the direction from which the screams came. He decided to check his rear again, and peering out of the gun port that overlooked the Park was just in time to see Kommandant van Heerden leave his hollow and scuttle towards the house with an astonishing turn of speed for a man of his age and sedentary habits. Kommandant van Heerden had also heard the screams that came from the haha and had reached the frantic conclusion that the time had come to leave the security of his hollow at no matter what cost to life and limb and return to Jacaranda House to try to find out what had happened to the cretinous Luitenant Verkramp.