As I walked in circles in the Somalian desert as murderous al Shabaabian raiders hurtled toward me, little did I know what Lucky was doing.  Fielding and Bart were busy spreading dead cobras about the coming battlefield.  They seemed to have a limitless supply.  Lucky was nowhere in sight.

Now I know that she, Danny, and Saul had a heated argument about me.  Lucky wanted an immediate rescue party formed.  Danny and Saul preferred to pretend my fate was with the gods.  

Once Lucky realised she was not going to be able to commandeer the CV-22, she grabbed her AK, a few additional mags, and put MREs and water into a rucksack.  She donned the sack, and then headed out to where I got left, about 22 miles as the crow flies, if I lucky right.  You can picture here making double time across the dessert to mind me.  

As Fielding and Bart wandered about the detonation site, Bart found a welcome addition on a dead al Shabaab.  In his frozen arms, he clutched a PKP Pecheneg machine gun. Bart began stroking its barrell.  “Look at this commie killer.  It shoots good up to just short of a mile.  It shoots 600 to 800 rounds a minute.”

Bart then ordered me and Fielding to get it mounted on the tripod.  “I’ll use this dead booby as cover.  These Shaboobs are in for a surprise, I’ll tell you that.”  

Before I could get assigned further tasks, I slipped away.  Bart and Fielding were too busy loading the machine gun to notice.  Bart loved machine guns.

I could hear Bart and Fielding continue to chatter about tactics.  Boring!  If I had the basic idea right, they planned to let the first Shabaabs come in unopposed.  Bart would not aim for the foremost men. Instead, she’d pick targets at the rear.  Fielding would also start making her kills from the rear.  When the foremost group spotted the dead cobras, they’d get careful.  Bart would then blow away a few of the forward group.  

Time has taught me that Saul and Danny had no objection to going back to the detonation site.  In fact, it was part of their plan.  They wanted to document how many Africans the Russians had murdered with Ice-10.  They planned to splatter the worlds papers with photographs of the dead, including the dead Russians.  What they did object to was going back to the site before the CV-22 fueled up and had a lot of bullet holes repaired.  

All this went on as Lucky, like Lola, did her Run, Lucky, Run march.  Sweaty and dusty, she ran.  Towards me, she ran.

Hours passed before we heard the voices of the al Shabaab raiders.  I had counselled Bart and Fielding that we should hide in the ravine, rather than pick a fight.  Fielding glared and me. “And let the terrorist tramp through here scot-free?  Where’s the fun in that?”  So, Bart stretched out behind the PKP.  Fielding went out a mile to the edge of the accurate range of the PKP. 

I had moved into a hollow in the ground.  The journalist in me was defying danger to be an eyewitness to the pending conflict.  I was peering from my hollow when the first al Shabaab began to arrive. 

There was a near infinitely large group, perhaps 40, but, as I’ve told you before, a parietal lobe injury had reduced my brilliance as a mathematician.  I kept expecting something to happen.  Instead, I heard footsteps, chatter, buzzing flies, and birdsong on a background wash of silence.  The sun had climbed past the meridian in the azure sky.  

Let’s admit from the start that the al Shabaab were small-brained.  As the last of them moved beyond Bart’s position, she sprang to action.  The poisoned on her helmet began putting one raider after another down as she rammed their calves. The front of the troop had by then seen dead cobras.  Believing it was a bad omen, they slowed down.  If I had to guess, they assumed each dead snake should get a check, as a live one would be in a bad and biting mood.   The forward guys were probably at least a 1/2 mile from Bart. 

When Bart opened up her PKP, a clump of guys in the rear of the formation got blood-stained.  Fielding ran over to do shallow dives to drive her helmet’s spike into their foramen magnum.  The wounded on the ground, but not yet dead, took their big sleep. Fielding was getting a scarlet staining.  At the front of the formation, a few of the baffled al Shaboobies fired without aiming.  A small cluster must have located Bart.  Their shots were going plink-plink about her. 

Unlike them, Bart did aim. That cluster went to gore lickity-split.  When I listened carefully, I could hear Bart mewing her satisfaction.   I then heard her singing “Sympathy for the devil.”  Again and again, over the battle noise, I heard “Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a cat of wealth and fame” followed by a burst at 600 to 800 rpm.  

Everything was going well from my perspective.  Despite my pessimistic nature, Fielding and Bart had made a killing field.   I relaxed.

I shouldn’t have done, as I had a maddened al Shaboobie coming at me.  How terrifying he was with a massive beard and a huge bayonet he was waving at me.  Somebody shouted “Tawaquf” at him.  A second later a bullet hole blossomed on his forehead.  I felt a lice body land next to me.  “I told him to halt, darling.  He had no ears . . . Of course I’d have shot him anyway. He had bad character.”  Lucky then began to shoot more al Shaboobs with her AK.  Even with it, she was a dead shot.  Three Shaboobies trying to flank Bart fell.  

Lucky then got up and ran forward firing, dropping Shaboobs on the way.  Of course, I should have noticed it before, but I then heard the powerful Rolls Royce engines of a CV-22.  It had two machine guns blazing.  Everybody that Bart, Fielding, and Lucky had not already killed died. 

Lucky pulled a gun from a dead Shabooby.  One by one she began addressing each body on the battlefield.  She’d put killing rounds into each body whether it was already dead.  As she explained to me later, “It’s just good practice, sweetie.  You make sure the scum you shoot dead are all dead.  If you need a prisoner, you can spare him for the moment.”  

Perhaps after 30 minutes, Lucky came back for me.  She was a sweaty, blood-spattered, dusty mess of a woman.  She took non-essentials from her back.  She took pictures of a few frozen corpses, and she picked me up, stroked my face, and put me gently in her rucksack.  ‘You stayed alive, darling, just as I told you.  And I have found you.” I got a kiss on the forehead. She moved off.  

I was a bit confused. It turned out Lucky knew that Saul and Danny would be documenting the Ice-10 effects at the al Shabaab encampment.  When we got there, Danny and Saul were all smiles, but Lucky not so much.  The Ice-10 bomb had killed everybody in the encampment.  Danny said, “That bomb is a boy.”  Lucky said, “Fuck you.”

Nobody wasted any time.  Fielding and Bart had already hopped on the CV-22.  The rest of the party loaded on.  As soon as Lucky saw Fielding, she reached out to Fielding, “I’ve seen you work, ma’am.  It is an honour to shake your paw.”  When she looked at Bart, she also thanked her for her fine work with the PKP.  “You’re small, but you are cut from the same cloth as Fielding.”  She shook Bart’s paw.  Bart purred.

Our aircraft was in the air.  We were all headed northwest to Kampala.