Chapter Eighteen: You're My Wingman

The balloon drifted off into the high blue skies, and as our city faded from view, I asked Alfonso (the small grey beetle – or weevil, to be precise – who has made his home on my desk), if he knew how to actually fly the thing.

To my astonishment, the little fellow was already in full US regulation olive green overalls, and as I spoke, snapped the visor down from his helmet and started flicking switches in the control panel which had just materialised above his head.

Black screens started sliding down out of the balloon over the basket, filled with rotating luminous green data fields and diagrams. A control tower rose out of the wicker floor, and with a soft hiss, machine gun emplacements slowly emerged from either side of the ballast sacks.

“Alfonso!” I protested. “What are you doing! This is not that kind of adventure! I want us to be looking at little village church spires, and the green fields dotted with sheep, a line of deer racing across the brow of a hill, a solitary fisherman on a sheltered lake, and perhaps some villagers dancing merrily yet sinisterly with horns on their head!”

But Alfonso merely said into his helmet mic-

“OK Ice, this is Maverick, over - I’m taking the lead, let’s identify him..”

The balloon suddenly swung violently to the left and I grabbed onto one of the support ropes for dear life. The radar screen on the picnic hamper started bleeping violently, as it tipped over, and tubs of homemade wild boar pate and bottles of rose rolled towards me.

Unperturbed, Alfonso continued into his helmet-

“We have a bogie, over, I repeat a bogie... I can’t get them off my tail goddamit!”

“Alfonso” I said, “I ‘m not enjoying this game any more.”

And then I peeked through one of the gaps in the screens, and saw violently screaming towards us, a battered red Mig fighter jet, with smoked glass windows – which looked oddly familiar...

TO BE CONTINUED