The Flush of Victory: Jack Bottomly Among the Virgins

Prologue

So, Wim, I just talk at this laptop thingee and it will type what I say?

Ya, like I told you.

What if I slur my words?

Vell, at first ye going to have to type de corrections, but dis is a continuous speech voice recognition application, Jack, so it vill gradually learn de idiosyncrasies of ye pronunciation. It don’t work so good if ye pissed . . .

Pissed? Me?

Over by de lighthouse, flying pigs!

Yeah, yeah, so let’s get the screen turned around so I can . . . Son of a bitch, look at that, it’s already working!

De default language is English, so it recognizes ye speech, but it has trouble vit my accent.

Well, that’s bloody magic, put tits on it and call it a secretary. Okay, the Sol y Mar about eight – filet, lobster, champers, whatever you want.

Sure, Jack, tot ziens.

Tot ziens, Wim.

Now, to get started . . .

Oh, hell . . .

Maria!

Maria, you indolent tart, never mind flashing your cleavage at me, I need café! Muy caliente, muy negro, muy pronto . . . Oh, thanks, chica, didn’t see it there.

Okay, Big Daddy’s got some work to do here, muy segreto, so you vamoose for a few hours, and if lunch is tasty enough, we’ll take a nice siesta together . . .

Haw-haw.

And tell the palm trees to stop the damn clicking!

Haw-haw.

Like a pair of ripe cantaloups.

Hmm.

Giovanni assures me the statute of limitations has run out, but how would he know – he’s been disbarred in Italy, not in Canada. But I do know I can’t be extradited, otherwise I wouldn’t have joined this little ex-pat community in the first place. In any case, it happened long ago, in ‘the olden days’ as one character puts it, in a distant and desolate land of ice and snow, so I’ll chance telling my tale. I like to think it has educational merit for the youth of Canada.

So here it is, the true story, only a little changed to protect the guilty – me.

Haw-haw.

It begins in Ottawa, God help us, back in the spring of 1979 . . .

1.

THE DAY STARTED OUT well enough; I had just a touch of hangover, my piles slumbered on, and with the help of two dynamite pills I managed a productive session on the potty. The sun looked bright and warm, so I took my cup of instant out on the balcony and sniffed the breeze. By Christ, spring was here at last. This was so cheering that I pulled a stack of empties over to the railing and sat down to smoke my first fag of the day.

Bugger the bus, I decided, I’ll walk to the office this morning.

And walk I did, not because the MOs say it’s good for the health, but because after a long cold winter the secretaries would finally be out in their skirts and showing the first flash of leg since October. That’s the thing about Ottawa: it’s a government town and all those bureaucrats have to have someone to type their bumf. Otherwise, of course, it’s about as appealing as Bayonne, New Jersey. Or any small town in Iraq.

At any rate, it was with a relaxed and generous view of the world that I entered the tired old office building on Sparks Street and took the elevator up to the fifth floor. The sign on the door read:

HOPE FOR THE HOPELESS

A Registered Charity

Oddly enough, it was registered. People even sent us money now and then and straight into the hockey pool it went, I can tell you. Or football or baseball, depending on the season. I’ve won my share over the years and, when you’re paying alimony to two rapacious ex-wives and support for four or five kiddies, a tidy little windfall it can be.

‘Morning Laureen,’ I chirped to the bint behind the typewriter.

‘Oh good morning, sir. Lovely day, isn’t it?’

‘Spring is just bursting out all over,’ I said, eyeing her double Ds. ‘Spring and other things.’

‘Oh, Major Bottomly!’ she giggled.

‘Tut-tut, Laureen, no rank in the reception room. We’re only a charity. Loose lips sink ships.’

She frowned, then whispered: ‘But aren’t we air force intelligence?’

We got that one straightened out, and she said she’d try to remember.

‘Don’t worry love, it’ll come in time.’

Just like you, you luscious little thing. She pushed the hidden button and I went through to the main corridor of the Directorate of National Defence Intelligence/Air. A buzzing hive of espionage activity which, for my sins, had been my shop nigh on those ten years. I was still feeling chummy enough to peek into the orderly room and tell Corporal Quill I would carry my own mail down the hall.

He lifted his acne-ravaged face and right off began to ruin my day.

‘Yes sir, there’s a message here for you, came in during the night, and there’s the I-Bulletin and . . .’

He gestured at a pale lank creature in the corner. It was dressed in the dark green uniform of the Canadian Armed Forces; around each forearm was the thin gold stripe of a second lieutenant. It uncurled itself to full height and announced:

‘62072, Second Lieutenant Mellish, M.J., reporting for duty, sir!’

‘Ah yes, the computer merchant.’

‘Oh no, sir, I don’t sell computers, I . . .’

‘I know, son, you fly them for us.’

‘Fly them, sir?’

‘Just ask Quill here. His vocabulary runs to several hundred words and includes most service jargon. Now then, Quill, a cup of your best mochajava and I’ll mosey along to my office. When I’ve had a few moments to compose myself, you can send in this pipsqueak.’

‘Yes sir, and the message, sir?’

He held up two feet of triplicate message covered with standard fivedigit cipher groups.

‘I’ve done the first ten groups, sir. Top secret, Ops Immediate, and Eyes Only Major Bottomly.’

‘Don’t tell me: it’s from Nuke ’em Newcombe in Winnipeg. He’s discovered another broad in the typing pool with a Russian-speaking granny.’

‘No sir, it’s from Captain Saunders in Vancouver.’

‘Judas Priest, Quill, Rotary Saunders is so bad at enciphering it must have taken him a week to get that load of crap on the wire. And what the hell could he know that’s Top Secret? Eyes bloody Only and Ops bloody Immediate my ass: decipher it yourself. After you’ve brought me my coffee.’

I grabbed the rest of the mail and stomped out.

All this security business was a load of ripe bullshit. The biggest secret in Ottawa was the Prime Minister’s wife’s size in bras and the only reason that was a secret was she didn’t wear them; 36C if I’m any judge.

As for enciphering messages, it was about as useful as a limp dick at an orgy. The machine we used back in 1979 was the CAF 240/Mk IV Multi-Variable. Known around the shop as the Juke Box. Or the Joke Box.

You have a typewriter keyboard that produces electrical impulses; these impulses are pumped through a series of randomly wired rotors connected in a series. The impulses that come out on the far end are gibberish except to a fellow with an identical series of rotors for the decipherment. To change the key, you turn one or more rotors in relation to the others. An American named Hebern invented the thing in the early twenties. The US Navy bought a few of his machines, copied his design and screwed him on the royalties, which is about what you’d expect from those swine. In the meantime, several Europeans came up with similar rotor designs and one became the basis of the famous Nazi Enigma machine. One way and another the Brits managed to break the Enigma encipherment and so read a lot of German messages during the war. They also developed similar machines for themselves, as did the Yanks. In the late forties, the US Armed Forces Security Agency (later the National Security Agency) designed a model for export to NATO allies and that’s the Juke Box. Of course, NATO security is about as tight as the business end of a five-dollar whore, so before long you could pick up your own Juke Box anywhere from the Paris Flea Market to the duty free counters of Kai Tak airport in Hong Kong. Simplified versions could be found in the toy section of any Christmas catalogue.

I should add that the theory of breaking a rotor cypher has been around almost as long as the design. Actually breaking it used to be a tedious job, but since the era of modern computers, I gather rotor encipherment is as enigmatic as a TV commercial.

After Quill brought the coffee, I heard whispering in the hall. Mellish saying he’s scared, I expect, and Quill saying never mind, the old bugger has his coffee, he’s all right. Time for some good order and discipline.

‘Quill, stop that goddamn whispering, you sound like a virgin on her wedding night. Get back to work and send that dog’s breakfast in here.’

I made myself busy with the mail. The piece on top was still sealed in the familiar envelope stamped ‘Embassy of the United States of America. By Hand of Officer Only.’ The I-Bulletin.

As Mellish came quivering to attention, I pulled the contents out onto the desk. On top was a copy of Screw. I hastily turned the whole thing over and gave Mellish a slow north to south.

Weedy was the word for him. Weedy and chinless and pimply. Not Quill’s mask of terminal acne, but a florid concentration about the mouth. God, the things you have to take in volunteer service.

‘At ease Mellish and easy. Take a pew.’

He looked about uncertainly.

‘Sit down, Mellish.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Right then, let’s have the gen on you.’

‘Gen, sir?’

‘Information.’

‘Oh yeah, here’s, like, my R-101,’ he said, proffering a slim file folder.

‘Files be buggered, Mellish, that’s what we have Quill for. You’re an officer, and that hole in your face isn’t just for stuffing cake into. Where did you go to school? Not Royal Military College, I hope.’

‘No sir,’ and named a medium-sized college in southwestern Ontario. Good enough, I figured, with that kind of background he won’t be putting on airs.

‘Majoring in?’

‘Computer science, sir.’

‘Good marks?’

‘I, like, led the class in some courses, sir.’

‘And trailed in others?’

‘Well . . .’

‘And you couldn’t get a job in business because they considered you erratic, so you took the Queen’s shilling.’

‘Sir?’

‘Signed up. An old saying. And Mellish, go a bit easy on the sirs and the attention and the salutes and such. We like the help to be slavish around here, but officers should try to be slavish in mufti.’

‘Sir? I mean . . .’

‘In a civilian manner; in civilian clothes. Like not wearing your uniform to the office: don’t do that again. Cover, you know.’

‘Cover, sir? Oh, you mean like Hope for the Hopeless?’

And I could have been reading Screw.

‘Exactly. Now you’re here to run all those shiny new computer things they installed down the hall. You push a few buttons, some lights blink, and these gizmos do all the work for us. That the general idea?’

It was his turn to look superior.

‘Well sir, that’s what people thought in the olden days, but it’s, like, a little more complicated than that.’

‘Yeah, I gathered that, actually. NDHQ had Sergeant Miller and myself over for a one-week fam course last month and I must say I couldn’t make head or tail of it. All this memory and processing units and compilers and such. I have my own ideas about input and output, and they have nothing to do with electronic brains, I can tell you.’

‘Well, sir, that’s one of the big mistakes people make about computers, calling them brains, like. They’re great for simple repetitive calculations and they do them real fast so it looks like they’re real smart, but they aren’t at all. They don’t have any common sense, like.’

‘I should have thought that was rather obvious from Vietnam.’

‘Sir?’

‘A war, Mellish. Computers played a part. Happened in the olden days. Carry on.’

‘Well, sir, I’ll be putting all your files into storage, but that’s mostly a clerical job. It’ll take a year or two. What I’m here for mostly, I’m here to write the programmes that, like organizes your data, and lets you access what you want but makes sure no one else can access it.’

‘You mean you can’t trust the jeesley things?’

‘Oh, you can trust the machines, sir, it’s the people you can’t trust. The stuff you want me to put on tape is all, like, pretty secret I guess, so you want to limit the access pretty tight, eh?’

It wasn’t the time to disillusion him on that point.

‘Sure, but we lock the doors at night. I suppose we could get better locks, but . . .’

‘Gee, sir, they sure didn’t tell you much on that course. Have you looked at the hardware yet? Corporal Quill let me see it before you came in.’

‘I glanced at it the other day, but I was afraid I might get electrocuted or something.’

‘Well, like, maybe it would be easier if I just showed you around the place myself.’

Hell’s Bells, the kid had only been here an hour, and already he wanted to give me a Cook’s Tour of my own empire. I glanced at the I-Bulletin. The lead article was entitled: ‘Parameters of Conversion Capability of Polish Tractor Factories to AFV Manufacture: An Overview.’

‘Lead on, young Mellish,’ I said.

As we got to the door labelled ‘Data Processing Centre,’ Mellish asked, ‘What did you used to use these rooms for, sir?’

‘Old files,’ I replied, for I hadn’t the heart to tell him the truth.

How times change. Back when I first joined the shop, when it was still Royal Canadian Air Force Intelligence, back when there was a Royal Canadian Air Force with spiffy blue uniforms and honest air force ranks like Wing Commander and Squadron Leader (as a Major is called in a real air force), back before we were forced into a shotgun marriage with the Army and Navy and renamed the Canadian Armed Forces and nothing Royal about it, back when Canadian governments still cared about the military, when we got decent budgets and new aircraft to play with now and then, back when we made at least the pretence of defending our sovereign territory and NATO took us seriously: why, back then, in the olden days, we had an establishment of fifteen officers, never mind a mob of big-titted WACs in Central Registry, and a hotshot crew we were too. In those days, this room had been filled with the laughter of lively young jet jocks on ground tour and any day of the week we had enough bods for a poker game and four for bridge on the side and TGIF at the Gloucester Street Mess like as not had become TGIS before we staggered home. But those days were gone the way of single digit inflation and politicians with a war record. Where once caroused a gang of lusty lads and winsome women, there now sat this pimple-faced kid with his shiny machines. I swear I felt a lump in my throat as I stepped through the door.

‘Now,’ said Mellish, as he waved at the gadgetry, ‘what does this thing remind you of?’

He looked as cocky as young self in my first Sabre jet. No ‘sir’ on his own turf, I noticed.

‘Well, it’s like one of those airline reservation things.’

‘Right. It’s called a terminal. The screen part is the monitor. It’s got a 24 by 80 character display in 7 by 12 UC/LC plus graphics . . .’

‘Uhh . . . Mellish . . .’

He raved on.

‘. . . and this is the modem that lets this terminal, like, talk with other computers. And over here is the printer. I suppose you’d say it looks just like a fancy typewriter, without the keyboard, but it’s not, it’s a 9 by 7 dot matrix with tractor drive and friction drive. Now with this hardware we can interface with . . .’

‘Mellish!’

‘Sir?’

‘Mellish, this is about as appealing as walking backwards into a Greek.’

‘Sir?’

‘What I’m curious about, and only vaguely curious at that, is what the hell you do with all this.’

‘Well sir, I put all your secret files into storage. Then you can access them right here.’

‘No shit.’

‘Now, let’s say you got files on, like, a hundred Russian spies operating here in Canada.’

I didn’t have the heart to tell him the truth about that one either. ‘Right. A hundred prying Ivans and a one-inch file on each.’

‘Now, say you wanted to read just one page from one of those files, like listing the one guy’s phony names and the colour of his eyes and all, say you only wanted that. Well, you could access it on the monitor here and read it or you could have the page printed out on the printer, then you could take it back to your office and read it there. Got that?’

‘Roger.’

‘Huh?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh yeah, I get it. Like on TV, in the war shows, right?’

‘We’re a fighting service, my boy.’

‘Gee!’ he said and paused to consider it. Short attention span; in ten seconds, he shook his head and went on. ‘Anyways, you could also have the whole hundred pages if you wanted, in, like . . .’

He punched some keys, ‘about six and a half minutes, tops.’

‘Amazing,’ I said. ‘Well, I guess I’ll get on back to my own pressing work and leave you to it.’

‘Okay sir . . . Oh wait, let me just show you something. It’s kind of neat and I bet they never showed you anything like this on that course you took.’

His duffel bag stood in the corner; he pulled it open and began groping about in its depths. He pulled out a plastic box which contained a bunch of floppy discs – those I knew about. He riffled through them, selected one, and slid it into a slot in the terminal. The screen lit up and he began tapping on the keys. Then he went round the other side and opened a carton on the floor. He pulled up some continuous form paper and fed it into the printer.

‘That should have it,’ he said as he returned to his chair. He tapped a few more keys and sat back.

All at once the printer made a noise like a ripping bed sheet and began to pull a stream of paper through itself. Mellish grinned at me expectantly.

‘What the hell?’ I exclaimed, but then it hit me: the noise wasn’t just noise, it was some kind of ghastly music.

As the light showed in my eyes, Mellish said, ‘I know it’s not the right time of year, like, but...’

The printer was playing ‘Jingle Bells.’

I WAS FEELING a bit thirsty so I told Mellish to stay with his machines for a quarter of an hour then come see me and I’d take him along to meet Colonel Potter, the Lord High Mucky-Muck. His eyes revolved in confusion.

‘Don’t ask,’ I said.

Quill was in Secret CR slaving away at the message from Rotary Saunders.

‘I’m about a third of the way through, sir.’

‘Right. Discovered another split among the Trots at Simon Fraser U., has he?’

Vancouver is Canada’s centre for political nut cases and the Trotskyites are the pistachios of the lot, hard-shelled, half-cracked, and red right through. Whenever you get three of them together they argue and split into two factions. Sort of the dialectic in reverse.

‘Well, actually sir, I think Captain Saunders may be onto something.’

‘Quill, the only thing Ed has been onto in the last twenty years is the po, and the last time I saw him he wasn’t very securely on that.’

‘No, it’s some sort of sabotage, sir. He seems to have evidence.’

In Vancouver it just might be possible.

‘Right, Quill, keep at it. Either I’ll be in with the Colonel or in my office reading . . . the I-Bulletin.’

‘Hey, great sir, what did you get this time? Can I have it before noon? I have to go over to the NDHQ Orderly Room and I could . . .’

‘First I read it, then you give me the money, then you can copy it.’

‘But I’ll have to go to the bank.’

‘That’s why the good Lord gave you legs and lunch hours.’

Although the I-Bulletin was a CIA publication, we got it via the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency. Their Canadian Forces Liaison man, Chip Foley, had tastes that ran in my direction: cheap booze and a grab at the waitress’s bum. Which is probably why he was stuck in a dead-end job like the Canadian Desk. Anyway, he usually slipped a beaver book in with the I-Bulletin which crossed the border in the US diplomatic bag, thus avoiding the scrutiny of those fascists in Canada Customs. I’ve never been much on gash photography myself, but I sold the mags to Quill at fifty bucks a pop and he would run off a buckshee stack of copies which he then flogged to other spotty NCOs. Chip got a bottle of Canadian whisky every Christmas, I got some help with the alimony, Quill bought another gross of acne treatment, and all over Ottawa a lot of lonely corporals were building up the muscles in the arms thanks to Mrs. Hand and her Five Flaming Daughters. A mere footnote to the history of capitalist enterprise, but profitable nonetheless. At DNDI/Air, we took what we could get.

When Mellish came trotting in, I was in the middle of an article about new styles in jewellery. It seemed earlobes weren’t the only things you could pierce for earrings. Despite the accompanying photographs, I thought the whole business highly imaginative, but recent history has proved me wrong.

‘I’m here, sir.’

‘No shit, Mellish, I thought it was maybe Albert Einstein wanting to borrow the crossword.’

‘Einstein is dead, isn’t he, sir?’

‘Well, I guess it must be you, then. About turn, quick march.’

I shepherded him along the hall and peeked in. Colonel Potter was seated behind his desk, so I knocked on the doorpost, waited for the grunt, then waved Mellish through. He came to attention in roughly the right spot and said his little speech.

‘What?’ said the Colonel. ‘What? What?’

‘New man, sir. Mellish. Computer wallah.’

The Colonel sucked his great belly up toward his chest and gave Mellish the steely eye of leadership. When he spoke it was with that voice you hear in WWII movies when the CO says, ‘Right lads, tonight it’s the Ruhr.’

‘Welcome Lieutenant. It’s good to have some young blood around here. I’m sure you’ll be a great help to us at DNDI/Air . . . especially now that the tempest has burst upon us.’

Oh shit.

‘Yes, Jack,’ he said, turning to me. ‘I was about to summon you. We are at war.’

2.

COLONEL PERCIVAL (PISS) POTTER, Director of National Defence Intelligence/Air, had actually flown in the Battle of Britain and had destroyed four aircraft. One was a Stuka he stumbled on while they were both about a hundred miles off course over Wales. The Stuka was a notoriously easy kill for a Hurricane and this one was low on fuel and out of ammunition. At that it took him ten minutes to down the poor bastards. Allegations that the Luftwaffe lads were already dead and the plane on autopilot were never proved.

His other three kills were Hurricanes. In each case the pilot was Piss Potter himself, taking off into haystacks and landing with the wheels up. He spent the rest of the war as a Squadron Intelligence Officer debriefing returning aircrew and cloning his chin.

When that show was over he escaped being thrown back into the pitiless cold of civvy street only because he was willing to stay in I-Branch, an even worse backwater than the Padre Corps. Through sheer inertia and his hefty seniority, it was but a matter of time before he made it to the top. A fair bit of time: twenty-six years to be precise. But there he sat, at the pinnacle of his profession, living proof that shit floats.

‘Is it bad?’ I asked.

‘Jack, the enemy has stolen a march on us. Unexpected tactics. We are outflanked. It is possibly a rout.’

‘That bad?’

‘It’s a fight to the death this time, Jack. To the death. You had better have a seat. You too, Mirvish. A fresh mind on the subject might well shed light into the dark.’

When the Colonel went all Churchillian like this, you knew the dung boat was in, loaded to the scuppers.

No, the Americans hadn’t sent twenty armoured divisions across the border, nor had the Russians launched a thousand-bomber raid on Saskatoon: they were both too busy buggering one another in every rathole of Woggery to be bothered with boring old Canada. What was it, then? A pre-emptive nuclear strike by the Albanians? Too far away. The Greenlanders, perhaps? A rampaging horde of Eskimos, 250 harpoons strong, thundering across the ice of Davis Strait to spread rapine and pillage over five square miles of Baffin Island: lichen put to the torch, lemmings slaughtered wholesale, innocent walrus carted home in shackles to be sold into concubinage? I waited for the awful truth. But the Colonel was in no hurry to tell it.

‘Jack, I am a peaceful man, am I not?’

‘As befits a senior officer in a peacetime armed service, sir.’

‘I do not, I think, attack without provocation?’

I raised a doubtful eyebrow at his pushbutton telephone console, the trophy of nearly a year of gruelling hand-to-hand.

‘Jack,’ chided the Colonel with a jiggle of his jowls, ‘as I have explained – and the DNDA agreed with me – pushbutton dialling saves valuable time. An average of nine seconds on every local call. Little enough each time, but over a year those seconds add up to an unconscionable amount of time for the DNDI/Air to sit watching a dial wind itself backwards.’

‘I agree, Colonel. I was only pointing out that you got the pushbuttons before . . .’

‘The enemy. Yes, I did. Stole a march on him with that little manoeuvre, I must admit. But it was not unprovoked, may I remind you. It was in retaliation for our defeat at the Battle of Arras.’

The enemy, it may now be revealed, was the DNDI/Sea, Colonel G.B. (Naval) Neville. The Battle of Arras ended with Colonel Neville’s acquisition, for his office wall, of a nasty old rug featuring an improbable fourmaster with all sails set. Quite against Administrative Orders, of course, but the greater victory therefore.

The War, in the large view, was the improvement of one Colonel’s empire with some trinket, embellishment, or privilege not possessed by the other. It was a titanic struggle which occupied all the Colonels’ waking hours and much time of their respective underlings.

Our war staff had the ususal sections. There was research (Quill and his adding machine); espionage (even the walls have ears, i.e., my successful bugging of their Other Ranks Latrine or ‘head’ as they have it in their quaint naval lingo); CHQ Plans (myself, Piss Potter, and Sergeant Miller); CHQ Command Ops (the Colonel); and, during actual campaigns all such regular and auxiliary odds and sods as necessary from the dauntless Colonel himself right down to Laureen Lungs and her IBM Selectric with all the balls.

There was only one rule: neither Colonel could actually buy anything with his own money. But bribes, either from our Hope for the Hopeless fund or the Navy’s Anglo-Canadian Sea Shanty Archive, were not only fair play but a major source of financing.

Some of the more notable encounters:

The Battle of Loos. Colonel Potter converts the mop closet across the hall from his office into the ‘Director’s Washroom.’ It was a stunning victory, and not the easy one it might seem. Hooking up the pipes and installing the porcelain was no problem, but the Colonel had to wage a bitter six-month struggle with the Ministry of Public Works to get the sign on the door and lock added. The winning factor was an art magazine I got from a Danish chappie at a NATO meeting. Quill was heartbroken at the loss.

The War of the Roses. A paltry victory for the Navy, as Neville liberates a pair of crystal vases from the Senior Officers Lounge, probably in exchange for some leave for a bent steward.

The Battle of Mons. Colonel Neville captures for his reception desk (from the NDHQ OR) the smashing Francine Colby who wore her slacks so tight about the crotch that Quill was a basket case for a week after he first saw her. We mounted a counter-attack on this one. Quill swore Neville’s Orderly Room was pimping her; the threat of exposure would have won us a commission on Francine’s take plus perhaps their ditto machine. Alas, she was a non-profit nympho.

The Battle of Sedan. In which news came to yours truly of a buckshee chesterfield being built for Neville in exchange for unspecified favours, probably Francine’s. A few clandestine alterations to the documents and the finished product was delivered in the dead of night, not to the Sea Shanty Archive on the fourth floor, but to Hope for the Hopeless on the fifth. Possession being nine points of the law, the beastly thing was still in Colonel Potter’s office.

This, then, was the War of which the Colonel spoke. It had already lasted longer than the American Civil War, World War I, or the War of Jenkins’ Ear. Everyone aside from the two principals called it, inevitably, The Bore War. It was not, as Colonel Potter had suggested, a fight to the death, but one kept hoping.

What, then was the latest incident? The Colonel was gradually coming to the point.

‘Jack, have you ever heard of the Art Bank?’

‘Place where they keep hearts for transplant, I suppose.’

He smiled indulgently and spelled it out.

‘Yeah, yeah, a little scam run by the National Gallery, isn’t it? Or perhaps the Canada Council?’

‘I’m not yet sure of the jurisdiction. Sergeant Miller is running it to earth for me. Do you know how it works?’

‘Let me guess. The snobs down at the National Gallery buy a couple of truckloads of paintings from starving artists in Toronto. Then they ship them out to those little art centres across the country, the ones they built during the centennial pork barrel in ’67. The peasants charge in at the rate of two, even three a week to gawk at the stuff. Voila! a nation of cultured Canadians. Right?’

‘More or less. But you have missed one small detail.’

‘Beats me.’

‘The paintings are also available for hanging in government offices.’

‘And Neville already has one?’

‘Alas, Jack he has three.’

‘Hmm. Well, Colonel, you’re the same rank. You can just whip down there and take your pick. Piece of cake.’

He shook his head sadly.

‘I’m surprised at you, Jack. Admittedly this coup has taken me aback as well, but your counter-thrust is merely imitative. Hardly the initiative, the . . . imagination you showed in the Battle of Sedan.’

Of course he was right, but it was a bit early in the day for dreaming up lunatic schemes. I tried again.

‘Well, here’s another thought. You drop by the National Gallery to pick up your paintings. While you’re there, you mention that Neville’s are hanging alongside that mouldy rug of his from the Battle of Arras. Polluting the pure air of art. Down comes the rug or down come the paintings. Second Battle of Arras.’

The Colonel stroked his chin.

‘Yes, I think you might have something there. Horns of a dilemma.’

‘Right, sir. Psychological warfare. Sap his morale. Borers from within.’

‘But only a temporary foray, I fear. What we need is a crushing blow where it will hurt him the most. A massive stroke.’

‘Reduce his cities to rubble. You’re right, sir. Look, why don’t I go and think it over? You get Sergeant Miller in here and go over the details of Second Arras and I’ll see if I can figure out something to do while Neville’s back is turned.’

Colonel Potter did not quite rise from his seat, but he made a sort of rising gesture.

‘Thank you, Jack,’ he intoned. ‘I know I can always trust you when the storm clouds gather and the thunder threatens from the mountains.’

I dearly wanted to ask what mountains he was thinking of, but I bit my tongue, gave him a solemn Per Ardua Ad Astra, and headed for the door. Mellish tried to follow but the Colonel waved him back into his chair.

‘No, no, Melnick, you stay here. I want to put you more fully in the picture.’

‘The p-picture, Colonel?’ Mellish began. I could see this was going to turn into a proper balls-up and was tempted to eavesdrop, but the safety of my office beckoned. Besides, I was furious. I was about to call for a coffee when Quill’s pustulant face appeared in the doorway.

‘Here’s the message in clear, sir. If you’ve finished with the magazine, I . . .’

I caught him cleanly on the ear with a copy of Queen’s Regulations, Vol. 1 and he went yelping off to lick his wounds. God’s teeth, I thought, this office doesn’t need me, it needs a proctologist.

Another face appeared, but one of surpassing wisdom and calm. Sergeant Miller stopping by on his way to the front.

‘Christ, Sarge, that senile old sack of shit is going to be the death of me yet.’

‘I apologize, sir, I should have warned you.’

‘Never mind, I should have suspected something, him being in his office before noon. Mellish is with him. You’d better get in there before the kid catches on and dies laughing.’

I thought again of coffee, but what I really wanted was a beer. The bar at the mess wouldn’t be open for another half hour, so I kicked the wastebasket and picked up the message from the floor. Anything Rotary Saunders took seriously had to be comic relief.

I was halfway through when I began to wonder if maybe Ed was on to something. Unlikely as it seemed, somebody apparently wanted to steal one of our Argus anti-submarine patrol aircraft.

A BIT OF background gen here. Canada has ocean on three sides. Because of various treaties with NATO, with the Americans, and for reasons of our own, we patrol these oceans with ships and aircraft. The main aircraft we used back then was the CP-107 Argus, a big four-engined brute based on a Bristol Britannia airframe and built by