Whatever the Kommandant's reasons, and they were unknown to Konstabel Els, the sight of his only possible ally scuttling away and leaving him in the lurch convinced the desperate Els that the time had come to use the elephant gun if he were not to die alone and deserted at the hands of the desperados down the road. He could see movement in the bushes on the hillside opposite him and he decided to try a volley there. He mounted the great multi-barrelled rifle in the gun port, aimed at the bushes concealing the plain-clothes men and gently pulled the trigger.

The detonation that followed was of an intensity and had about it a seismic quality which came, when he could pick himself off the floor of tie blockhouse where the recoil had thrown him, as a complete surprise to Konstabel Els. Not that he hadn't heard it before, but on that occasion he had been slightly distracted by the attentions of the Dobermann. This time he could appreciate the true qualities of the weapon.

With a white face and with his eardrums reverberating quite astonishingly, he peered through the gun port and observed his handiwork with a sense of satisfaction that he had never known before, not even on the day he had shot two kaffirs dead with the same bullet. That had been a triumph. This was a masterpiece.

The four barrels of the elephant gun erupting simultaneously had opened up a vista before him he would never have believed possible. The great wrought-iron gates of Jacaranda Park lay a twisted and reeking heap of partially molten and totally unidentifiable metal. The stone gateposts had disintegrated. The boars rampant sculpted in granite that had surmounted the posts would ramp no more, while the roadway, itself bore witness to the heat of the gases propelling the shells in the shape of four lines of molten and gleaming tarmac which pointed down to what had once been the thick bushes that had obscured his view of his adversaries. Konstabel Els had no need now to complain that he couldn't see what he was shooting at.

The cover his enemies had used was quite gone. The hillside was bare, barren and scorched and it was doubtful if it would ever regain its original look. There was no such doubt about the five objects that remained littering the ground. Bare, barren and horribly mutilated, the five plain-clothes policemen who had sought cover from Els' fire in the bushes needed far more cover now than mere bushes could provide. Dying instantaneously, they had in some sense been luckier than their surviving comrades, some of whom, Els noted with satisfaction, were wandering about naked and blackened and clearly in a state of mental confusion. Els took advantage of their defenceless and shocked state to wing a couple with his revolver and wasn't very surprised that they seemed to take little notice of these new wounds which were obviously an anti-climax after the ravages of the elephant gun. The rest of the plain-clothes men who had been spared the effects of the volley, having dragged their naked and bemused colleagues out of the way of Els' gratuitous target practice, fell back down the hill and awaited the arrival of the main convoy before resuming their attack on the privet bush.

Standing in the turret of the leading armoured car, Luitenant Verkramp had heard the enormous explosion and had immediately jumped to the conclusion that the magazine at the police barracks had been blown up by saboteurs. Coming as it did in the wake of the chaos and panic that had marked the progress of the convoy through the countryside, it came as no great surprise. But looking down over the town he could see nothing to support this supposition. Piemburg lay in its quiet and peaceful hollow under a cloudless and azure sky. The only unusual feature he could spot through his binoculars was an unbroken chain of cars moving slowly along the main road from Vlockfontein.

'Funeral down there,' he muttered to himself, and, puzzled by the enormous length of the cortège, wondered what great man had died. It was only when he turned the next corner and saw the tiny group of naked and hysterical plain-clothes men that he realized for the first time that Kommandant van Heerden's frantic instructions had not after all been unwarranted. Whatever was going on at Jacaranda Park deserved the extraordinary show of force the convoy presented.

He held up his hand and the task force ground to a halt. 'What the hell has been going on?' he asked. There was no need to ask what had been coming off. Naked and blackened, the little group of plain-clothes cops presented a pitiful sight.

'Something has been shooting at us,' one of them managed to blurt out at last.

'What do you mean, something?' Verkramp snarled.

'It's a bush. A bush up by the gateway. Every time anyone goes anywhere near it, it shoots them.'

'A bush? Someone hiding behind a bush you mean. Why didn't you fire back at them?'

'What the fuck do you think we've been doing? And it's not anyone behind a bush. I'll take my oath on that. We've pumped hundreds of rounds into that fucking bush and it still goes on firing back. I tell you it's bloody well bewitched, that bush.'

Luitenant Verkramp looked up the road uncertainly. He certainly wasn't going to fall for any crap about bewitched bushes but on the other hand he could see that something pretty extraordinary had reduced the men to their pitiful condition. It was on the tip of his tongue to say, 'You're out of your minds,' but since they were out of just about everything else he thought it better not to. The question of morale was important and it had been at the back of his mind ever since they had left the station. One false move now and there would be a panic in the convoy. He decided to set the men an example.

'I want two volunteers,' he told Sergeant de Kock and while the Sergeant went off to dragoon two mentally retarded Konstabels into volunteering, Luitenant Verkramp turned back to the plain-clothes men.

'Where is this bush?' he asked.

'Just inside the gateway. You can't miss it.' they told him, adding, 'And it won't miss you either.'

'We'll see about that,' muttered the Luitenant and clambering off the Saracen he began to prepare for the reconnaissance. Luitenant Verkramp had attended an anti-guerrilla course at Pretoria and was well versed in the art of camouflage. By the time he had finished the three men who began crawling up the ditch towards Konstabel Els' privet bush resembled nothing so much as three small bushes themselves. They were not so well trimmed, it was true, and certainly not so bullet-proof, but whatever else their camouflage served to conceal it was quite impossible to tell even at close range that here were three uniformed men of the South African Police.

Chapter 6

Kommandant van Heerden had just paused for breath under an oak tree in the middle of Jacaranda Park and was trying to pluck up courage to return to the house when Konstabel Els fired the elephant gun. In the wake of the detonation that followed the Kommandant had his mind made up for him. For one thing a vulture which had been waiting with evident prescience in the branches above him was startled into flight by the roar of the gun and flapped horribly up into the sky. For another the Kommandant readied the immediate conclusion that the company of Jonathan Hazelstone was infinitely less murderous than the holocaust Konstabel Els was generating at the main gate. He left the cover of the tree and raced ponderously towards the house, looking for all the world like the maddened pachyderm the elephant gun had been designed to incapacitate.

Behind him the silence of recent death hung sombrely over Jacaranda Park. Ahead he could just make out the tall elegant figure of Miss Hazelstone standing on the stoep. She was looking tentatively up into the cloudless evening sky. As the Kommandant plunged past her into the drawing-room he heard her say, 'I thought I heard a clap of thunder just now. I do believe it's going to rain.' It was good to be back in a world of sanity, the Kommandant thought, as he dropped limp and exhausted into an easy chair.