Skinner's festival

72

There is no mistaking a Sidewinder missile for a firework.

Skinner watched, struck dumb by the horror, as one of them smashed right into the middle rows of the audience and exploded.

He saw that, at the moment of impact, several people, noticing the sudden commotion in the front row, had stood up trying, vainly, to catch a view in the dark. By a small mercy, the other Sidewinder flashed across the front of the stage, exactly where the Jaguar had: stood bare seconds before, over a figure lying face-down in the tarmac, and then off to explode in the trees beyond the theatre's iron gate.

Maggie Rose screamed out loud, and kept on screaming, until Skinner gripped her by the shoulders and shook her hard.

Even without night-glasses. Major Ancram could see the flashes of the missile strikes, and needed no telling what had happened.

'Mr Skinner, I'm calling out the garrison. I'll have to get every man down there.'

'Yes, Major,' said Skinner, recovering his power of speech.

'Fast as you can, too. Let's get down there.'

And then, suddenly, he changed his mind. 'No!' he said loudly, • and the Major, who had been heading away to gather his soldiers, stopped in his tracks and turned to stare in surprise. 1 'There's something else,' said Skinner, vehemently. 'I said that they want to get us tear-arsing around. That's what they've got now, in spades. But what happens next?'

He stood for perhaps twenty seconds, thinking hard, while Rose and Major Ancram stared at him. Then, decisions made, he looked again at the soldier. 'Major, OK, you get your men down there on the double, but leave half-a-dozen up here with me.

Maggie, you go on down with him, and do what you can.'

She nodded silently, determined to be as tough as anyone in Skinner's command, and ashamed of her earlier weakness.

'Major, how many men have you got?'

'Just now, three hundred.'

"Good. When you get down there, I want you to put armed men on guard around the National Gallery, and at the big bank branches at the Mound, St Andrew's Square, George Street and the West End. I'll tell you why later. For now, get going, and send that half-dozen men to me.'

A germ of a notion was festering in Skinner's mind, one so bizarre that he thought that it surely had to be fantasy, and yet it was there and he could not totally dismiss it as a possibility. An afterthought struck him and he called after the disappearing Ancram. 'Major, see if one of your men can find me a whistle!'