"How about a bomb?" said Warren.

Gus rallied, straightening a finger at him. "That might be more like it, Wozz."

"How about a nail bomb?" offered Col.

Gus said, "I tend to think not. I like to think of myself as a bit of a gentleman bandit. A nail bomb, that's the type of thing could give us a bad name."

Blue said: "What about a suicide bomb?"

"Expand," Gus said.

"You know. You just drive right up to him in a van packed with explosives."

"I'm listening Blue -- provided you're not referring to my Kombi."

"It doesn't even have to be a van, Gus. You can do it in a ute, whatever. I've even heard of some freak doing it on a motorbike. The bomb was actually strapped to him."

Gus was still interested. "You've got a bike, Blue. You volunteering to be the freak?"

Here Blue's enthusiasm tapered off. He looked solemnly down into his beer. "I can't Gus. My licence got suspended mate. I took a joyride while I was pissed."

Gus chuckled dismissively, moving back over to the hotplate. "As if that matters, you spastic." He was turning the steaks again. How many sides did he think a steak had? "Mind you," he said thoughtfully, "your bike'd most probably lead the pigs straight back to us. And your body, for that matter. Of course we could always claim you were rogue, I suppose. Acting off your own bat. Or maybe -- I'm thinking aloud here -- but maybe we could just strap that much gear to you that you just get friggin' vaporised."

"Then they'll just use his dental records," Col pointed out.

Blue looked on with mounting concern.

"Not necessarily," said Gus. "What if we broke into his dentist's beforehand and taxed all his X-rays? I've often wondered why nobody does that. That way they'd have nothing to go on to make the i.d., would they? Or you could -- and I'm just talking speculatively here, Blue. I'm just thinking out loud. But you could knock all his teeth out, couldn't you, before he strapped on the gear..."

Gus fell into a ruminative silence. He tapped his tongs rhythmically against the hotplate. Blue watched him with deep unease, saying nothing. Apparently his fear of displeasing Gus outweighed, for the moment, his fear of becoming a strap-on motorcycle bomber.

"But let's think about this properly," Gus said. "Let's think about the whole logistics of it. For one thing, we'd have to be dead sure the bomb went off at the exact moment the bike hit the bloke. Wouldn't we? I mean, we wouldn't want it go off early, would we? Not even by a few seconds. Because then you'd have the farcical situation of this flaming fucking skeleton just rolling towards the guy at about two miles an hour. And what sort of statement would that make? Frankly, I doubt the bike'd even stay upright. Even if it did, the bloke could just step out of the way of it."

He pensively tapped the hotplate. He was vexed. "By the same token," he slowly went on, "we wouldn't want it to go off too late, either. What would we be looking at then? This cat on a motorbike just ploughs into the wall of the guy's house or office or whatever... And then he just sits there waiting to explode. Assuming he's survived the stack. And then maybe ten minutes later or so he blows, by which time our target'd pretty obviously be well out of there. Or is Blue meant to dismount from the wreckage and just sort of run after him till the thing goes off? Fuck me. This is actually a lot more complicated than it sounds, isn't it? It's fair dinkum giving me a headache."

He laid down the tongs and massaged his troubled skull. Finally he sighed with resignation.

"You might be in luck here, Bluey. I'm starting to think we might have to shelve this one. There's too many imponderables. I mean, what exactly are we meant to prang the bike into, for starters? Just the front wall of his house? It doesn't vibe right. There's no class to it. His office? How do we get the bike up there? In the lift? It's bloody two storeys up. But what other option have we got? I mean we can hardly just mow the guy down as he's walking along the street, can we? That'd be ludicrous. Why bother with a bomb at all, if you're already going to be creaming the bloke with a motorbike at top speed? You can't kill the guy twice. But then if you've got no bomb... If you've got no bomb, the whole political element of it goes out the window. Basically you'd be looking at an everyday hit and run. The only political ingredient being that the bloke on the bike has maybe got no teeth."

Kirk Kinbote's explosive novel "A Dancing Bear" can be read in full at http://www.adancingbear.com

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