My Little Armalite (34 page)

And now the masked gunman walks into the room.

When you know what's coming this makes a fascinating few seconds of viewing, and I have often stopped the film myself here. Look: those on the spot, who don't have hindsight, are incredibly slow to take in what's happening. Like all decisive events, my would-be killer enters the frame of history well before his significance is realised, and even when he's been seen, the clearest reaction on all those unexpecting faces is simple disbelief. This cannot be happening. No doubt we will all
look like that when the oil finally dries, the first vast tidal surge hits, or Iran nukes Tel Aviv.

Then he sprays bullets into the ceiling, bringing down plaster, screaming in Arabic, and they believe, fast.

Once again, the subtitles come to the world's aid: he is demanding that the cameras should keep running in order to show the world the fate of
the devil Goode
,
child of hellfire and servant of Zion
. (I suppose I really shouldn't have written to all the papers a week before, saying that if my union wanted to boycott Israeli academics, it should do the same to all scholars who took salaries from self-proclaimed Islamic states. Only the most right-wing of them printed it, of course, but that was apparently enough.) He grabs the podium microphone and adds, live, in shouted English:
No phone or all die! Where is John Goode?

I am, at this point, less than six feet from him, but he looks around again and pauses in confusion.

This is the point at which, on that first
Newsnigh
t, the impossibly rugged ex-SAS novelist, brought in to explain the botched assassination, freezes the pictures.

He tells how, the night before, whilst I, all innocent of my impending doom, had been very openly pubcrawling Oxford with my colleagues, an email had been sent to several major newspapers from an Internet café near Finsbury Park. Coming from a group calling itself the Caliphate Committee, the message threatened
fire for the enemies of Mohammed (PBUH
)
who succour the devil Zionism
. The same terminal at the same Internet café had downloaded and printed, not two minutes beforehand, a copy of the Staff Contact Sheet from the Student Experience Assurance Unit, freely available on the UCL website, showing myself smiling plumply, hair around my shirt collar, tie loose, bearded and wearing large, heavy spectacles. This document had, as it happened,
recently been updated (by myself) to stress the proud fact that I was giving a plenary address at the upcoming national conference in Oxford, even giving the precise time and place.

However, by the time of the planned shooting, I was clean-shaven, crop-haired, dressed in a black rollneck jumper and sporting my new Dolce & Gabbana rimless glasses, the very model of a modern modern linguist.

The ex-SAS novelist now compares blown-up versions of these two images and explains that I have
recently modified my personal appearance
(a lesson to all in public life, he hints), meaning that
outdated intelligence
has
degraded
the gunman's ability to
acquire the target
. It is this unexpected complication, this minor but very good example of the
fog of war
, suggests the shagsome former warrior, which has led to my would-be killer‘s evident
combat stress
, leading to the second burst of fire over my peers' heads.

The one-time soldier hits PLAY again and the footage resumes.

That second blast of bullets sends the assembled scholars cowering even lower.
Show me Goode or all die!
screams the masked terrorist. This is a decisive error, says the voice of the ex-SAS man over the images, for in
combat stress
it is hard, terribly hard, it seems, to maintain an
accurate round-count
when firing automatically.

I count three!
roars the gunman, jumping down to the front row of seats where the most senior Germanists of Britain and Ireland shrink in terror:
One!

Behind him, I slowly rise to my feet.

Panke clings to the floor in a highly unleaderlike way. There is no
Spartacus
moment. On the contrary, a few of my colleagues actually point out to the gunman what is going on behind him. He swings.
I am John
Goode
, I say, steadily. And without the slightest hesitation he shoots me down.

The images freeze again.

The ex-SAS man explains once more: the gunman's unprofessional failure to
maintain an accurate round-count
has led to his having only one bullet left when he actually comes to
neutralise the target
. This means that he now has to
break off the action and reload
after having shot me once, which is apparently a very bad thing when
in contact.

Things move once more. The world sees the faceless gunman wrenching furiously at his gun. It sees him slap and pull and push until at last a bit of the gun comes free. The bit that holds the bullets, you know, whatever you call
that
! He allows it to drop to the floor and starts trying to fit another one in. But it seems not to go. Pause again. Digital effects allow us to zoom in to the frozen image of the gun itself. Our expert points out the notorious flaw of the Armalite ever since Vietnam: its tendency to jam. This proves fatal, or rather (the militaristic scribe, having unconsciously fallen into the camaraderie that binds all trained psychopaths, hastily corrects himself) non-fatal.

Unpause. The gunman lets fly a final volley of Arabic oaths, kicking me and spitting at me. Pause again, so that a pixelated and voice-disguised expert from GCHQ can comment on my enemy's language, which, like the email from Finsbury Park, apparently betrays
the grammatically poor Arabic of a non-Arab Muslim, containing phraseology characteristic of the Afghani jihadist camps
.

And now run on to the memorable end. A car horn is heard to blare repeatedly outside, and the gunman, after some hesitation, turns and runs from the hall. After a ridiculously long while, women begin to sob and men pull themselves cautiously upright. No viewer
can see this section of the film without inwardly screaming at them all to hurry up and help me. Eventually, some do. Panke is not among them. He remains prone. Phones appear in people's hands. Others run for the doors. I insist on being carried to the microphone, where, despite being evidently in great pain and visibly losing blood, I am able to declare that while I quite understand, and therefore forgive, my attackers, and indeed join with them in condemning Bush's imperialism, I will never be silenced by the enemies of truth and look forward keenly to a new Democratic administration in the White House that will forge closer links with Europe to peacefully resolve the situation in the Middle East in a way that will recognise Palestinian aspirations yet guarantee the security of Israel. I finally stress my full commitment to a multicultural Britain free of all religious bigotry, apologise for being unable to deliver my paper, movingly declare my love for my wife and children, faint, and am shortly afterwards taken to the Radcliffe Hospital, where I spend the night under armed guard in what the papers call
a serious but stable condition
and which, in my own memory, stands out as a timeless little holiday of beatific, opiate happiness.

No one was ever arrested for my shooting.

There was briefly a public appeal to locate a particular car which had been CCTVed near the scene carrying what turned out to be false number plates, but the lead came to nothing.

Two days later, the Caliphate Committee staged a just-failed attempt (using, it was soon established, the very weapon which had been fired at me) to shoot what's his face as well. You know, what's his face, the lecturer who'd actually started the email campaign against the boycotting of Israeli academics. Two bullets missed his head by less than a foot.
Tuck-tuck
. What's his face did try, understandably, to make a bit of a fuss about it. But you see, you've quite forgotten about
him
, haven't you? Of course. Everyone has.
What's his face
is all
he
will ever be. We all know the name Bobby Sands, but who were the other saps who laid down their little long-haired lives so that Mr Adams could one day josh happily with Dr Paisley? No, I got my (near) martyrdom in first and I got it in
live on TV
. And so up I sucked it without even trying, every last drop of that sweet oxygen, publicity.

The TV images flew around the worlds real and virtual. My stoical acceptance of the fact that I would probably never be able to move my left shoulder much again was impressive. My absolute forgiveness for, and understanding of, those who had tried to kill me was saintly. My absolute refusal, once I had recovered consciousness, to accept any security precautions at all
in hospital was heroic. And I had the required bomb-shell to drop whilst everyone was briefly looking my way.

Upon leaving hospital, I told my press conference that I had dark suspicions. I had been about to denounce the ex-KGB man Panke's DEBB as a neo-Nazi party (I waved my notes at them like a second Churchill). Few hacks could resist the idea of a conspiracy linking those three epochal foes, Muslim extremists, Russian agents and German Nazis. The resultant speculation ensured that having got into the media, I continued, for those vital follow-up few weeks, to be chatted about in ye olde saloon bar of the global village.

I had broken with Panke at last. I was no one's little doctor any more. I was in the media, therefore I was me.

Eamon was the first to see what this meant and to call with his congratulations:

—Jaysus, Johnnyboy, talk about putting away a smash! Advantage you, and championship point, my man! Just don't fucking choke now!

—Does that mean I'm back in your phone book, Eamon?

—Straight back in at speed-dial number one, Johnny the Goode. Now, go make hay!

The hay pretty well made itself, actually. There was no need to employ researchers to seek out further information about me. It provided itself, drawn by the irresistible magnet of airtime. Past and present colleagues queued up to confirm my unimpeachably left-liberal credentials by quoting our long-standing email exchanges on the evils of Bush, Blair and suchlike. Middle-aged veterans of the Miners' Strike dredged themselves up from the slag heap of history to describe how I had, in my youth,
stood boldly up for the rights of the working man. Hairily Gaelic folk with fiddles popped out from pubs around the Holloway Road to relate, watery-eyed, my staunch championing, Englishman that I was, of Irish freedom. A stout, salt-of-the-earth type from my own street in SE11 was interviewed, describing how
We calls him Einstein down the pub, see, on account of his brain, but there's no side to Prof John, mate; he buys his wheels in the Free Ads, he knows his footie and he loves a few pints watching an England game, just like the rest of us. Doesn't mind a scrap either, and he looks after his old mum
. A poor-quality phone video, recorded in a sports hall in Dresden, showed me making unmistakable homage to the great Dr Martin Luther King and lambasting globalisation.

Some people feared that the hatred of the Caliphate Committee (a small breakaway group, it was thought) might be replaced by a full-on fatwa as my fame grew. Speculation about whether (or why, exactly) one might be pronounced kept the opinion columns bubbling away. I maintained, of course, a flawlessly liberal position on the whole business, absolutely deprecating violence of any kind but perfectly willing to cede the right of a minority community feeling itself under attack to defend itself on issues central to its cultural values. When
The Paper
(acting on an anonymous tip-off) obtained and published police photographs of me marching amidst young and serious Muslims two years before, on the vast anti-Iraq War demonstration, pregnant wife, sons, home-made NOT IN MY NAME banners and all, several of the more liberal radical imams in Britain went so far as to almost unreservedly condemn the notion of killing me.

The timing was happy.

Up was coming the twentieth anniversary of the Warsaw Pact's collapse, that sea change which had caused
my career such inconvenience. Those mysterious, omnipotent
telly people
at the BBC needed a plug-worthy person to front the requisite HBO co-production on this weighty subject. They felt obliged to use someone who was actually qualified. Say what you will, poor old Auntie is the last bastion. Who else, then, but the liberal champion of truth who was undoubtedly an expert and now had a Unique Selling Point as
You Know, That History Bloke Who Got Shot by al-Qaeda or Was It the Nazis or the KGB?

Nor do I let people forget it. In my first series,
Europe Chained
(a history of the Warsaw Pact countries 1945–89), I never failed to heft, load or mount whatever weapons were in question (a
Panzerfaust
from Berlin, 1945; a petrol bomb from Budapest, 1956; a Soviet tank from Prague, 1968; a border guard's AK-47 from the Berlin Wall, 1989) with manly yet sorrowful asides about my own personal encounter with ballistics.

Since I was now on the telly, I came under increasing pressure to at least allow my family to be placed under armed protection for a while. I agreed with great (and public) reluctance to put my children before my principle. During the
Newsnight
debate on the subject, I came up with the rather brilliant idea, though I say it myself, that on grounds of liberalism and multiculturalism my loved ones' weapons-trained police minder should himself be a practising Muslim.

This caused some problems, there being no such officer available in the UK. The Home Office, however, so liked the idea that when, coincidentally,
The Paper
picked up on and featured a Bosnian Muslim (agreeably European and highly photogenic) who had trained with the British Army as well as the American Marines, and who was now seeking to join the SAS under the new US-style Service for Citizenship scheme (introduced
to stem the impossible haemorrhage of home-grown soldiers due to Iraq), it was very easy for me to have somebody else suggest that this might well be the ideal man for the job.