They had barely got onto the tarmac of the airfield when gunfire erupted and shattered the windows in the corridor they had come down. The door blasted opened and smashed against the wall. The deathly pale Pieter took aim as Arthur, X and Sfret dove for cover.

The PM lowered himself to one knee, lined up the bead on the approaching figure and emptied an entire clip at the advancing warrior, who took every shot in the chest and staggered backwards. But rather than keeling over dead as expected, the commando shuddered and groaned and then stood upright, and in a dark and foreboding voice said 'I am protected.'

'What is he,' gasped X, 'some kind of zombie?'

'I am one of the chosen who will stand beside the new ruler in the coming age of rebirth!' the zombified Pieter called back.

'Excellent hearing,' X gulped.

'Switzerland will stand strong so long as I am its Prime Minister! This new ruler will never claim dominion over these lands!' the Swiss premier bellowed back.

'You are gravely mistaken, mein herr,' Pieter sneered.

'Quick, get out of here!' the Swiss PM hissed to Arthur. I'll handle this.'

'We can't just leave you!'

'Do it! I've taken on worse than one soldier with delusions of grandeur before.'

'But your condition!' Sfret implored.

'Go! Get to the planes!' the Swiss PM begged as he stepped out to face his foe.

'I don't think we can be of much help here.' Arthur put a hand on his partner's shoulder. 'Come on.'

An explosion of gunfire and some Swiss cursing erupted behind them. Arthur, X and Sfret ducked under wing after wing of parked jets, fleeing the fight behind them. Eventually they reach one on the end of a row that had easy access to the nearby runway. X shimmied up the ladder and stealthily broke the lock and lifted up the canopy.

X clambered into the front of the cockpit, while Arthur and Sfret clambered into the rear double-seat.

'Can you fly one of these?' Arthur asked nervously.

'After a fashion,' X said clipping on his harness and checking the controls.

Alarmed, Arthur asked, 'What do you mean, "after a fashion"?'

'Well,' X said, initiating the flight systems, 'the going up bit — that was a doddle. I never was terribly good at landings... well, I say landings, haha....'

'You crashed?' Arthur asked, panic creeping into his voice.

After a thoughtful pause X replied, 'Well no, not crashed exactly... more like sunk....'

Sfret, sat with his back to Arthur, turned his head and said, 'Remember, I'm agrophobic. I don't like heights either. I think I'll keep my eyes closed if it's all the same.'

'I think I'll join you,' Arthur whimpered in mute terror as he heard X mutter something about finding 'the "make-it-go" button'. 'Wait!' Arthur said. 'What about the PM? The zombie is going to kill him!'

'Well, what can we do? You saw what happened when he shot him, Arthur — he got back up!'

'There's got to be a way around that,' said Arthur the pragmatist. 'What weapons has this thing got?'

The Swiss Prime Minister jogged through a series of pallets, which carried some serious-looking missiles with jaunty slogans daubed across the tips because this shows even death has a sense of humour, apparently. He was being pursued through the maze of armaments by the seemingly possessed, undead body of Gunnery Sergeant Pieter, who had murdered in cold blood an entire squad of marines and senior commanders in the Geneva base. Pieter was now pursuing the Prime Minister for the final kill.

Unbeknownst to Pieter, the Prime Minister suffered in secret from a condition known as Schwarzenegger's Syndrome and this gave him an advantage against even an undead assassin. This was because, rooted in an almost puritanical self-belief in ultimate victory, there lay a little-known fact about the condition, which was this: any senior politician suffering from Schwarzenegger's Syndrome, when placed in a perilous situation pitted against odds of seeming insurmountable difficulty, will always prevail — even if they have to take of their shirt to do it.

The PM took of his shirt, exposing a lean muscular physique and a string vest. He hung the shirt on the nosecone of a plane and slid into the shadows. He checked the chamber of the magazine in the gun. Only one bullet left. Damn.

Just then Pieter caught up with him. He saw the shirt, flapping gently in the breeze, and riddled it with the Uzi. Pieter advanced on the torn and tattered shirt. 'Come out, come out wherever you are!'

The PM tried to line up the shot, but Pieter was smart. He kept to the shadows and didn't stay still.

'You are close, mein herr. I can see you.' Pieter fired in the opposite direction, illuminating the spaces between the planes.

Reasoning that he wasn't able to take down Pieter like this, the PM moved on.

The PM first visited a small arms dump, then found in a utility shed just the things he needed. He hoisted the canister up on his shoulder and used the rope to tie it securely to his back. He put the other item in his pocket and scurried as fast as he dared across open airfield to the crane.

The crane was huge — it was used to stack and load containers from B-52s on humanitarian aid stopovers. It looked like an normal construction crane: long like a heron perched on a riverbank, but yellow like custard, except this one had a huge claw contraption used for hoisting container crates into the air. It reminded the PM of those games you see in amusement arcades that exchange money for a teddy bear you can't ever quite seem to pick up.

From the other side of the airfield, Pieter spotted him and let off a volley of shots that ping'd above his head. The Prime Minister began to climb. 'This had better work,' he thought as more bullets rang on with each handfall against a rung and every footfall on the ladder beneath him pushing ever upward on already-tired legs. The weight on his back threatened to drag him loose of the ladder and to his death, but the comforting ricochet of bullets from Pieter's rifle gave a continual imperative to carry on climbing.

The Prime Minister reached the cabin and crawled inside. A bullet scraped the heel of his boot and he knew Pieter had started to ascend behind him. He didn't have much time. This had to work.

He tipped the gas cannister down onto the studded metal floor of the cabin and feverishly began turning the wheel. Squeak followed squeak and then a gentle hiss of escaping gas that caused the PM to put his arm to his mouth. Still, he kept turning. The sound of Pieter closing the gap was closer now. He took the hand grenade out of his pocket, pulled the pin, placed the grenade on the crane driver's chair and clambered on top of the console and backed out of the window.

Pieter's hand appeared over the lip of the cabin door.

The PM attached the rappelling clasp to the cabin window frame, just as Pieter's head appeared into view.

Usually at this moment a cheerfully relevant witticism would come naturally to the PM, but Pieter was relentless and the grenade was primed, so he just stepped out into space and began to hastily rappel down the front of the crane.

Pieter smelled the gas as soon as he climbed up. He saw the grenade pin on the floor and the grenade on the chair. He had only seconds. He picked up the pin and re-inserted it into the cradle.

'That was cl—'

The cabin exploded in a huge orange flame, raining chunks of bent metal over a wide area.

'Good shot, X!' Arthur cried.

'Did I do that? I thought that button was for the wipers.'

The crane came tumbling down in a cacophonous roar of twisted metal. Illuminated against a backdrop of fire and a curiously well-placed Swiss flag, the Swiss Prime Minister stood in a torn and tattered vest, scars on his back and the last strands of his hair flying about madly in the breeze, triumphant.

X taxied the jet across the tarmac to where he stood and opened the canopy.

'So Switzerland is safe again,' Arthur said.

'We've won this battle, but at a high cost. So many dead.' The PM seemed genuinely shaken.

'Yeah, a real shame you had to kill that soldier,' Arthur added.

'He was one of our very best,' the PM reflected.

Arthur was watching his partner hawkishly and recognised the signs quickly. Acting swiftly, he diplomatically muffled his partner by clamping his hand around the back of X's chair and over his mouth, illiciting a slew of muffled protests.

'Indeed a tremendous pity,' the PM continued with a sigh. 'Peiter was a real high-flier.'

X succeeded in riding Arthur's hand from in front of his mouth, took a big gulp of air and said, 'Yeah — and in all those different directions at the same time.'

In the distance some crickets chirruped, despite the inclement conditions. Switzerland also, it should be noted, has a deficit when it comes to tumbleweeds. Nevertheless, one tumbled phlegmatically across the tarmac as silence swallowed X's untameable wit. Arthur hung his head.

The Swiss PM ignored all this and turned to face them in the plane. 'I must leave you now, my friends. I have a country to prepare for the worst. There is still sedition afoot! Forgive my curiosity, however, but what was in the note?'

'The note?' Arthur said. 'Oh, the note!' He reached inside his jacket pocket and pulled out the crumpled teleprint.

'It's an Agency dispatch!' Arthur exclaimed, his eyes darting quickly back and forth as he read it out. 'It says: Proceed at once to the Louvre Museum. Make contact with... the Curator.'

'Then your destiny is set,' the Swiss PM said. 'I... my name is Martin.'

'Arthur,' said Arthur, 'and this is X.'

'A pleasure doing business with you, gentlemen. Please, keep the jet. Godspeed to Paris.'

A few moments later, watched by Martin, X put on the throttle and the jet tore down the runway and lifted into the night sky. Soon the Agents would be beyond Switzerland's borders forever.

The h2g2 Storytime III Archive

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