Not enough current, not enough time, no blood out there in the stream. Then Snowy got down on his knees and peered into the water more closely. What he saw were bubbles. I looked too and saw a rippling face, looking like it was about to explode. Reaching down, we grabbed him and hauled him onto the bank. He’d be pulling the old Daniel Boone trick of hiding under the bank, trying to breathe through a hollow reed. Obviously, it worked a lot better in books and movies than in reality.
   A chopper arrived to collect the prisoner and a crewman with a clipboard read out three names, Greyman’s, Snowys’ and mine.
    “Get on, you three. You’re going home,” he said.
    We had barely time to wave to the others.
    “Gowan, fuck off,” Nigel yelled. “We don’t need fuckin civilians here.”

I continued to mistake Harold Robbins for a major writer when I read his very neat drama Never Love a Stranger, the story of a street kid who rises to be a major gangster, then gets drafted and dies a hero in the D-day invasion. The character is compared to Hitler, and he redeems himself only when he realises it is true.
    Finally I shed the skin of Harold Robbins with The Adventurers, which wasn’t so bad, except that the women were too beautiful and willing and the men’s penis’ far too large.
They moved toward him threateningly. He pushed the bottle under the pillow and crossed his arms on his chest. Abruptly they snatched the blanket away, leaving him naked on the bed. This time he made no move to cover himself. “Well, what are you going to do about it.”
    “Did you ever see anything so immensely beautiful?” Enid whispered in an almost awed voice as she reached up to unbutton the blouse of her pajamas.
    Sometime during the night one of the sisters got out and fetched another bottle of brandy but Dax was not sure which. They kept changing places so often that he was never quite clear which was which. The one thing he was certain of was that this was not the first time they had played games like this together.
    Now Enid—or was it Mavis—took a drink from the bottle. “I don’t know ever when I was so well screwed.” She sighed, and looked down at Dax’s face in her lap. “And to think we had you down for a fag.”
    The story actually tells of the rebels in the hills, their success, how they became tyrants and the new rebels rise in the hills—the eternal cycle that gives the word revolution its true political meaning. But the whole thing was swamped in a lot of shoddiness. I gave up on him at last.