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eardrums reverberating quite astonishingly, he peered

    through the gun port and observed his handiwork with a sense of satisfaction that he had

    never known before, not even on the day he had shot two kaffirs dead with the same bullet.

    That had been a triumph. This was a masterpiece.
    The four barrels of the elephant gun erupting simultaneously had opened up a vista

    before him he would never have believed possible. The great wrought-iron gates of

    Jacaranda Park lay a twisted and reeking heap of partially molten and totally

    unidentifiable metal. The stone gateposts had disintegrated. The boars rampant

    sculpted in granite that had surmounted the posts would ramp no more, while the roadway,

    itself bore witness to the heat of the gases propelling the shells in the shape of four

    lines of molten and gleaming tarmac which pointed down to what had once been the thick

    bushes that had obscured his view of his adversaries. Konstabel Els had no need now to

    complain that he couldn’t see what he was shooting at.
    The cover his enemies had used was quite gone. The hillside was bare, barren and

    scorched and it was doubtful if it would ever regain its original look. There was no such

    doubt about the five objects that remained littering the ground. Bare, barren and

    horribly mutilated, the five plain-clothes policemen who had sought cover from Els’

    fire in the bushes needed far more cover now than mere bushes could provide. Dying

    instantaneously, they had in some sense been luckier than their surviving comrades,

    some of whom, Els noted with satisfaction, were wandering about naked and blackened and

    clearly in a state of mental confusion. Els took advantage of their defenceless and

    shocked state to wing a couple with his revolver and wasn’t very surprised that they seemed

    to take little notice of these new wounds which were obviously an anti-climax after

    the ravages of the elephant gun. The rest of the plain-clothes men who had been spared the

    effects of the volley, having dragged their naked and bemused colleagues out of the way of

    Els’ gratuitous target practice, fell back down the hill and awaited the arrival of the

    main convoy before resuming their attack on the privet bush.
    Standing in the turret of the leading armoured car, Luitenant Verkramp had heard the

    enormous explosion and had immediately jumped to the conclusion that the magazine at

    the police barracks had been blown up by saboteurs. Coming as it did in the wake of the

    chaos and panic that had marked the progress of the convoy through the countryside, it came

    as no great surprise. But looking down over the town he could see nothing to support this

    supposition. Piemburg lay in its quiet and peaceful hollow under a cloudless and azure

    sky. The only unusual feature he could spot through his binoculars was an unbroken chain

    of cars moving slowly along the main road from Vlockfontein.
    “Funeral down there,” he muttered to himself, and, puzzled by the enormous length of

    the cortège, wondered what great man had died. It was only when he turned the next corner

    and saw the tiny group of naked and hysterical plain-clothes men that he realized for the

    first time that Kommandant van Heerden’s frantic instructions had not after all been

    unwarranted. Whatever was going on at Jacaranda Park deserved the extraordinary show

    of force the convoy presented.
    He held up his hand and the task force ground to a halt. “What the hell has been going on?”

    he asked. There was no need to ask what had been coming off. Naked and blackened, the little

    group of plain-clothes cops presented a pitiful sight.
    “Something has been shooting at us,” one of them managed to blurt out at last.
    “What do you mean, something?” Verkramp snarled.
    “It’s a bush. A bush up by the gateway. Every time anyone goes anywhere near it, it

    shoots them.”
    “A bush? Someone hiding behind a bush you mean. Why didn’t you fire back