The applicability of all this to the current situation was as follows: pigs could root under just about any obstruction using their nose weapons. Just ahead of Rufus, on the left, there was a stretch of airport fence no more than twenty feet wide that had become overgrown with vines. This must be because there was water there. There must be a low soft patch of earth where some kind of underground drainage situation was happening. Pigs could smell that kind of thing from a mile away. Beneath the fence there was enough of a washout to accommodate Snout. Which meant plenty of room for any other pig in his herd. Pretty soon they were charging under the fence three or four abreast. They paused momentarily on the runway side of the fence. Then, impelled by whatever had panicked them in the first place, they bolted across open land beyond: the airport.
Rufus stopped his truck just in time to avoid hitting the alligator that was running after the pigs. He was marveling at this creature, which was long enough to block both lanes of the highway, when he heard a loud noise to the left. He looked over to see a small jet, landing gear skimming the runway. Blood erupted from a collision
between it and one or more hogs, and the entire plane slewed to the right and came down wrong and hard on its front gear.
After that it was just a long tumbling skidding disaster. A whole section of fence went down. Rufus gunned his truck across it and came as close as he deemed prudent given the possibility of fire. He was half out the door when he saw the alligator run right by him. He reached back in and pulled his Kalashnikov down from the gun rack in the truck’s rear window. He had carried it halfway to the plane before it occurred to him to wonder what shocked observers in the control tower would make of a brown man with an assault rifle prowling around a jet crash.
But more pressing matters than that held his attention for a few minutes. When the gator was dead and the wounded man’s bleeding leg tied off, he turned his back on the scene and walked over to where Snout was lying on his side on the runway. Hind legs paralyzed, evidently. Blood coming from his anus and from his quivering nostrils.
Four hundred kilograms if he weighed an ounce. Maybe the cops would weigh him later and publish official stats.
Snout was dazed, eyes half closed. He still had that old pattern of spots on his muubi.
His nostrils twitched as he caught Rufus’s scent. His eyes came open and he tossed his head. But Rufus was too smart to be within range of those six-inch tusks. Anyway, this gave Rufus the impetus to do what needed doing, which was to fire four 7.62 mm slugs into Snout’s brain.
He was still standing there weeping when the blond woman from the jet crash walked up to him and said, “Are you all right, friend?”
Once it became clear that the people with the knives were solely interested in harvesting meat from the dead pigs and the alligator, the queen’s team evacuated the plane and began to collect the luggage. Some of this had hurtled into the cabin through a broken door and the remainder had tumbled out the rear of the plane after the tail section had ruptured. Willem and Alastair helped Johan, the concussed co-pilot, get out of the cockpit and then out
of the plane. Lennert got clear of the wreck by hopping on one leg. This seemed like a very bad idea for a man who had suffered such a grievous injury, but fuel had been leaking from a ruptured wing tank near where he’d been reclining, and he had been thinking about possible implications.
Not far away, a large pickup truck was parked atop a flattened section of airport fence. Its owner, the tourniquet-savvy man with the Kalashnikov, was up to something a couple of hundred meters away, back on the runway where the initial jet/pig impact had taken place. A minute earlier this man had predicted, in colloquial English, that no fire trucks would be coming to their aid because of perceived security risks. Thus far his prediction had been borne out by events, or lack thereof. Sirens were audible but none were getting louder.
The queen’s top priority, now that all members of her team had got to a safe distance from the plane, was to get Lennert and Johan to a hospital. The only capable vehicle she could see nearby was this man’s pickup truck. So she was going to talk to him. As she strode across churned turf in his wake, she saw a second, similar vehicle pull up and park next to his. This one had a cartoon of an alligator painted on its door. A woman got out of the driver’s seat. This woman seemed primarily interested in the man with the Kalashnikov, and not in the sense that she saw him as a threat. She was looking after him.
That somehow emboldened Frederika Mathilde Louisa Saskia to walk right up to the man even after he had discharged four rounds at point-blank range into the face of a fantastically enormous boar reclining on the tarmac.