The corner of his titanium-grey eye just caught the dull red ballistic airbursts a split femtosecond before the slugs from a brace of 7.62mm Schneitzler semiautomatic machine pistoles hammered into the historic iron gates of Buckingham Palace. Instantly he perceived the threat to their majesties and flung his whipcord-taught torso at the assailants’ armoured Mercedes. His parachute regiment training took over as his uranium-pointed heeltips penetrated the windscreen and snapped the driver’s jaw in several places.
“Pity.” he thought, as he remembered the Jermyn Street shoemaker whose finest handwaxed nubuck he had just shredded against the stubbly jowl of another johnny foreigner. The Mercedes slewed and bucked, the Scneitzlers barking wildly as the whole panjandrum veered towards the crowd of innocent wellwishers who had been queueing all night for a glimpse of their adored royal family. He reached in and wrenched the ignition loom from the speeding black behemoth, bringing it to rest inches from a small child holding a poignantly symbolic union flag.
The vehicle’s occupants, now in the gutter, were recognisable as Ali Turkman O’ Driscoll a fiendish foreign plotter, together with Hermann Schwartzpanzer a known assassin and devious henchperson. Both surrendered spinelessly when prodded by the gleaming chromium bayonet of a surprised grenadier guardsman. Although still dazed, they realised they had fallen foul of their ruthless nemesis, top-secret Agent ******* .