Then the machine-gun fire started.

Jesus H. Particular Christ on a crutch, I thought frantically, whatever it is that's happening they're going to find me with come on the front of my trousers.

And every bone in my body broken, I think.

The machine gun suddenly stopped stuttering and I thought I heard a voice cry "Earwicker, Bloom and Craft."-I've still got Joyce on my mind, I decided. Then the third explosion came, and I covered my head as parts of the ceiling began falling on me.

A key suddenly clanked against his cell door. Looking up, I saw a young woman in a trench coat, carrying a tommy gun, and desperately trying one key after another in the lock.

From somewhere else in the building there came a fourth explosion.

The woman grinned tensely at the sound. "Commie motherfuckers," she muttered, still trying keys.

"Who the hell are you?" I finally asked hoarsely.

"Never mind that now," she snapped. "We've come to rescue you-isn't that enough?"

Before I could think of a reply, the door swung open.

"Quick," she said, "this way."

I limped after her down the hall. Suddenly she stopped, studied the wall a moment, and pressed against a brick. The wall slid smoothly aside and we entered what appeared to be a chapel of some sort.

Good weeping Jesus and his brother Irving, I thought, I'm still still dreaming.

For the chapel was not anything that a sane man would expect to find in Mad Dog County Jail. Decorated entirely in red and white-the colors of Hassan i Sabbah and the Assassins of Alamout, I remembered incredulously-it was adorned with strange Arabic symbols and slogans in German: "Heute die Welt, M or gens das Sonnensystem," "Ewige Blumenkraft Und Ewige Schlangekraft!" "Gestern Hanf, Heute Hanf, Immer Hanf."

And the altar was a pyramid with thirteen ledges-with a ruby-red eye at the top.

This symbol, I now recalled with mounting confusion, was the Great Seal of the United States.

"This way," the woman said, motioning with her tommy gun.

We passed through another sliding wall and found ourselves in an alley behind the jail.

A black Cadillac awaited us. "Everybody's out!" the driver shouted. He was an old man, more than sixty, but hard and shrewd-looking.

"Good," the woman said. "Here's George."

I was pushed into the back seat-which was already full of grim-looking men and grimmer-looking munitions of various sorts-and the car started at once.

"One for good measure," the woman in the trench coat shouted and threw another plastic bomb back at the jail.

"Right," the driver said. "It fits, too-that makes ft five."

"The Law of Fives," another passenger chuckled bitterly. "Serves the commie bastards right. A taste of their own medicine."

I could restrain myself no longer.

"What the hell is going on?" I demanded. "Who are you people? What makes you think Sheriff Cartwright and his police are communists? And where are you taking me?"

"Shut up," said the woman who had unlocked my cell, nudging me none too affectionately with her machine gun. "We'll talk when we're ready. Meanwhile, wipe the come off your pants."

The car sped into the night.

(In a Bentley limousine, Fedrico "Banana Nose" Mal-donado drew on his cigar and relaxed as his chauffeur drove him toward Robert Putney Drake's mansion in Blue Point, Long Island. In back of his eyes, almost forgotten, Charlie "The Bug" Workman, Mendy Weiss, and Jimmy the Shrew listen soberly, on October 23, 1935, as Banana Nose tells them: "Don't give the Dutchman a chance. Cowboy the son of a bitch." The three guns nod stolidly; cowboying somebody is messy, but it pays well. In an ordinary hit, you can be precise, even artistic, because after all the only thing that matters is that the person so honored should be definitely dead afterwards. Cowboying, in the language of the profession, leaves no room for personal taste or delicacy: the important thing is that there should be a lot of lead in the air and the victim should leave a spectacularly gory corpse for the tabloids, as notification that the Brotherhood is both edgy and short-tempered and everybody better watch his ass. Although it wasn't obligatory, it was considered a sign of true enthusiasm on a cowboy job if the guest of honor took along a few innocent bystanders, so everybody would understand exactly how edgy the Brotherhood was feeling. The Dutchman took two such bystanders. And in a different world that is still this world, Albert "The Teacher" Stern opens his morning paper on July 23, 1934, and reads FBI SHOOTS DILLINGER, thinking wistfully If Icould kill somebody that important, my name would never be forgotten. Further back, back further: February 7, 1932, Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll looks through the phone-booth door and sees a familiar face crossing the drugstore and a tommy-gun in the man's hand. "The god-damned pig-headed Dutchman," he howled, but nobody heard him because the Thompson gun was already systematically spraying the phone-booth up and down, right and left, left and right, and up and down again for good measure… But tilt the picture another way and-this emerges: On November 10, 1948, the "World's Greatest Newspaper," the Chicago Tribune announced the election to the Presidency of the United States of America of Thomas Dewey, a man who not only was not elected but would not even have been alive if Banana Nose Maldonado had not given such specific instructions concerning the Dutchman to Charlie the Bug, Mendy Weiss and Jimmy the Shrew.)

Who shot you? the police stenographer asked. Mother is the best bet, Oh mama mama mama. I want harmony. 1 don't want harmony, is the delirious answer. Who shot you? the question is repeated. The Dutchman still replies: Oh mama mama mama. French Canadian bean soup.

We drove till dawn. The car stopped on a road by a beach of white sand. Tall, skinny palm trees stood black against a turquoise sky. This must be the Gulf of Mexico, I thought. They could now load me with chains and drop me in the gulf, hundreds of miles from Mad Dog, without involving Sheriff Jim. No, they had raided Sheriff Jim's jail. Or was that a hallucination? I was going to have to keep more of an eye on reality. This was a new day, and I was going to know facts hard and sharp-edged in the sunlight and keep them straight.

I was stiff and sore and tired from a night of driving. The only rest I'd gotten was fitful dozing in which cyclopean ruby eyes looked at me till I awoke in terror. Mavis, the woman with the tommy gun, had put her arms around me several times when I screamed. She would murmur soothingly to me, and once her lips, smooth, cool and soft, had brushed my ear.

At the beach, Mavis motioned me out of the car. The sun was as hot as the bishop's jock strap when he finished his sermon on the evils of pornography. She stepped out behind me and slammed the door.

"We wait here," she said. "The others go back."

"What are we waiting for?" I asked. Just then the driver of the car gunned the motor. The car swung round in a wide U-turn. In a minute its rear end had disappeared beyond a bend in the Gulf highway. We were alone with the rising sun and the sand-strewn asphalt.

Mavis motioned me to walk down the beach with her. A little ways ahead, far back from the water, was a small white-painted frame cabana. A woodpecker landed wearily on its roof like he had flown more missions than Yossarian and never intended to go up again.

"What's the plan, Mavis? A private execution on a lonely beach in another state so Sheriff Jim can't get blamed?"

"Don't be a dummy, George. We blew up that commie bastard's jail."

"Why do you keep calling Sheriff Cartwright a commie? If ever a man had KKK written all over his forehead, it was that reactionary redneck prick."

"Don't you know your Trotsky? 'Worse is better.' Slobs like Cartwright are trying to discredit America to make it ripe for a left-wing takeover."