“Come on, you fucking hopeless lot, they’re shooting the fucking shit outa yar! Get moving!”
    Your face is pushed into someone’s bum and someone else is lying on your legs and your hand is pinned under the third guy. You buck like a bronco to get yourself free, kicking people, thrusting people, just get yourself out of this mess.
    You escape the writhing green octopus that a few seconds before was a bunch of guys sitting in two orderly rows on the bench either side of the tray’s tray, until the crack-crack of a machinegun up the rise and the driver hit the air-brakes.
    The truck has swerved to the side of the road and you scramble clear of the mess of humanity and simply leap down onto the road. You land heavy, go down, skin off knees and elbows but there’s no chance to care about that.
    “Come on, you molls. Get up there and go after them.”
    That’s Harding, in the middle of the road, roaring berserkly.
    Scrambling up a slope that’s too steep and too slippery for men in full battle gear. “Come on, Duffy. You’re in this too.”
    They run, and slip back. Clawing straining, looking utter fools as they plaster their gear in red mud, scrambling up and slithering down.
    “Come on, MOVE! You’re sitting ducks here. Run up the bloody hill. Let’s see your arses:”
    It’s desperate. You almost wish there was real enemy to kill you and end it all.
    “Come on, Duffy. I said run!”
    But Duffy isn’t running. He is walking slowly and casually. The fact that he is closest to the top is inconsequential, to Harding anyway. “I said run, Duffy.”
    But Duffy crawls, walks, and is on top.
“You’d be fucking dead a dozen times by now, Duffy. Come down here!”
    Duffy comes down, red-faced and panting, too exhausted for the smart remark you know he is desperate to make.
    “When I tell you to fucking run, you’ll fucking run:”
 
Alistair MacLean dropped back into his old habits in Puppet on a Chain, including killing the heroine to make the hero mad enough to kill the villain. The day of these sorts of books—the most popular mainstream of the time—was almost done. It is for this reason that these days I take little notice of Stephen King, J.D. James, John Grisham or whoever else might be topping the bestseller lists.
    The final Alistair MacLean, for me anyway, was Bear Island, which was a weak effort, the man repeating himself and doing so poorly. I vowed never to read any more of this rubbish. It was a vow I almost kept.
    He crept back shamefully onto the reading list for a moment in the late 90s. I had allowed nine of his works to go by without interest, many of them published after his death, but then he came up with Goodbye California which, twenty years after it was published, I thought I needed to read as part of the research for The War of Immensities. I was wrong. Terrorists, you see, plant nuclear bombs on the San Andreas fault and then hold USA to ransom. But the super-hero thwarts the plan in the manner typical of such folk in the 1960s. Poor Alistair—he really did have nothing left to offer.
    Except a couple of rip-snorting movies which will be dealt with in their proper place