Today mike made me laugh.  I asked him about Trump’s stash of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.  “Well,” opined mike, “it takes chutzpah to spend years whining about Hilary’s basement server and then sneak off with boxes of classified documents, including some you squirreled away in your desk, especially since you said you didn’t have anything.  The man’s not a quick study of his own thoughts.”  

Sometimes I’m not a quick study either.  I asked Bart and Fielding about the stash of secrets.  They told me they could care less.  They were still furious that snowbacks from the Canadian wilds were still sneaking into our country because Trump broke his promise to build a big, beautiful wall.  Instead, Fielding hooted, our country is to be infested by paedophile polar bears.  Nobody’s child will be safe.  Those polar bears will have their way with our kids and then eat them.  I figured Fielding was reading Q-anon again.

None of this matters right now.  I want to write about the Reading Rumble.  

Recall, gentle readers, that Lucky had discussed covert ops with Charles at the Connaught.  When the journalist in me pressed for more on Charles, Lucky told me he was a man of skill.  He had begun his career by working as a mercenary in Francophone Africa. He was good at it.  He has killed more people than a carefree teen girl has ova in her body.   And throughout the years, Charles has been a friend of China.  Even in Africa, he worked for us. 

 His father was a French diplomat married to a Chinese concert pianist.  Charles’ dad came to his senses and began spying for us.  He eventually got found out because of a French fink and now lives in Shanghai where he runs a brothel for foreign travellers.  The cruel French impugned the man’s good name, saying he became a spy because of monstrous gamblig debts acquired in Macau.  Lucky added she knew nothing about those scurrilous charges.  She could only vouch for Charles’ remarkable gifts as an operative.  Charles, she assured me, also loved his work.

Now keep in mind, I’m not much for directions.  I’m no homing pigeon.   Just like deaf, dumb, and blind kids who play a mean pinball, I can play Daniel Boone–deaf, monocular, and dimwitted though I be–just fine without any street signs.  It’s maps and signs that confound me.

The night of the Reading Rumble, Lucky and I had left London in a van that had a crew of rough looking Asians in its back.  I’m not a weapons expert, but I think that van alone had more weapons on it than a 3rd ID Stryker.  I guessed Lucky had us headed to Reading, HQ of Munitions Galore.  I wish I knew that before I got on board.  Now we had gone 60 or so klicks from London.  We were on Reading’s Trafford Road.  What a pit!

Lucky turned off of it.  Before long, she was headed toward the HQ of  Munitions Galore.  As she sped toward the MG gate, she fired up the van’s stereo system.  At earsplitting volume, I heard David Bowie singing “Panic in Detroit”: Looks a lot like Che Guevara/ drives diesel van/ packs his gun in quiet seclusion . . .  If only the guns had stayed packed in seclusion.  Are you surprised that Lucky was signing along?  

At the gate, Lucky shot several guards by emptying a full-auto TEC 9 on them.  She stepped from the van, telling me “Stay put, darling.”  I saw a MG guard leave cover to aim a rifle at Lucky.  She moved her arm up.  Her 1911 went off.  Another guard bit the dust.  She then jogged to the van’s backdoor.  It opened.  She accepted an SA80 with a UGL.  I saw Charles step out carrying a FN Minimi Mk3.  He used it to cut down 3 guards running towards the MG fence.  It looked like old-hat to him.

Lucky and Charles had a Reading Rumble going.   Alarms were blaring and only 30 seconds or so had passed.  A bullet crashed through the front window. I decided now the time had come to hide.  I went toward the gate to get behind a barricade.  There was no reason to fire on the gate.  Everybody there was dead, in part because Lucky shot the wounded with her SA80 as she jogged  by.

She moved forward to a luxurious front office.  An explosion followed her pulling the trigger on the UGL.  A wave of panicked guards rolled out of the building. Charles, using the Minimi’s tripod for support, hosed them dead.  How he grinned when using that Mimimi. 

During this firefight, I heard other shots going off from the squad of guys Lucky had brought along.  They were also shooting any MG opposition. They also were burning anything that would burn.  Everything was as synchronised as the best imaginable symphony orchestra, but louder.  Then something happened.

I heard a loud pop and a scream to my left.  I hid but preserved a view.  Woe, there was Constance commanding a platoon of MG Guards.  I recognised her features as flames licked about her.  She walked to a chap trying to reload his carbine, and then shoved her Colt Python to his head.  When she pulled the trigger, his head went to pieces like a watermelon hit by a round round from a deer rifle. 

I think Constance said, “Thank you” as she grabbed the corpse’s reloaded carbine.  She then shot dead another member of Charles’s squad.  Meanwhile Charles and Lucky were being pinned down by another MG platoon coming around from the right side of the MG HQ building.  

Lucky and Charles were in a leapfrog retreat to safety when heard Lucky shout, “Ah, fuck.”  I noticed blood spilling from her left buttock down her leg.  She had a bad limp. Her left leg was dragging.  Charles was in deplorable shape.  Somebody had fired an RPG at him.  The missile blew off his left foot.  Charles was lucky that the grenade skidded away with his foot.  It blew up at a safe distance from him.  

Then I saw Constance was moving fast in their direction. Her celerity amazed me.  There are advantages to being a badger.  Pity Lucky and Charles.

I prepared myself to say adieu to Lucky.   And how could I not feel sorry for Charles?   What I saw next was a miracle. 

 A scream in the night drew my gaze.  Everybody seemed to look that way.  A  member of team Lucky was holding his groin.  Something was savaging him.  I knew the style.  Fielding was putting it to him. He didn’t have a chance.  

When Fielding let go, he was a goner.  Like a bullet, Fielding barrelled full speed across a stretch of asphalt to spear Constance’s right back thigh.  Fielding wore a trophy from the Great War, a  German helmet with a huge spike on its top.  Unsatisfied with a mere stabbing, Fielding then bit a chunk of Achilles tendon from Constance.  Down old Constance went.  

The ensuing chaos was a tableau of escapes.  A blue Rolls Royce sped to Constance like an Army ambulance. In she went.  I could make out Lord Caligula in the backseat.  I think I spotted Peregrine driving and Wolverine, a Streetsweeper shotgun in his arms, firing to clear an escape route.  A squad of whooping Asians ran from around the right side of the building. Rather than invade the building, they targeted  the remnants of a platoon of MG guards that were still firing away at Lucky and Charles..  

All of a sudden, a van roared up, its corpsmen loaded Lucky and Charles aboard.  In a war song of shots and blasts, everybody fled.  Many went on foot instead of vans.. SWAT-like Reading coppers were arriving to end the fight.  In the chaos, they were ineffective in catching anybody. But check out Reading’s crime rate.  What else is new?  Or so it all seemed to me from my vantage point in the van. 

The adrenaline you get from unmitigated terror got me into that van. It wasn’t long before we loaded into a Jaguar. We got shelter in a river view suite in the Savoy.  Well, not all of us made it there.  I heard Charles got put into a Peugeot that transported him to the Chinese Embassy.

At the Savoy, a surgeon pulled the .357 slug from Lucky’s cute buttock. She stitched a small hole shut.  The buttock was swollen.  It had coloured into a gruesome heliotrope, yet the doc pronounced Lucky in good shape.  

As soon as Lucky saw me, she asked, “Do you know that cat, sweetheart?” 

I nodded.  

“Who is she?”

I gulped and said, “She is Fielding, Fielding Gray.”

Lucky’s eyes widened.  She said, “I owe her a warrior’s life debt.”