Cows in Action 5 Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  The C.I.A. Files

  Prof McMoo’s Timeline of Notable Events

  Chapter One: Off to War!

  Chapter Two: Blitz and Pieces

  Chapter Three: The Spy’s Secret

  Chapter Four: A Familiar Face in France

  Chapter Five: The Forest of Fear

  Chapter Six: Encownter at Sea

  Chapter Seven: The Slippery Horror

  Chapter Eight: The F.B.I. Master Plan

  Chapter Nine: Fury in the Farmyard

  Chapter Ten: Terror in the Sky

  Chapter Eleven: Shot Down for the Showdown

  Chapter Twelve: The Final, Buttery Battle

  About the Author

  Also by Steve Cole

  Copyright

  About the Book

  THE WHOLE WORLD IS AT STEAK . . .

  Genius cow Professor McMoo and his trusty sidekicks, Pat and Bo, are star agents of the C.I.A. – short for Cows In Action! They travel through time, fighting evil bulls from the future and keeping history on the right track . . .

  Hot on the time-trail of deeply TER-MOO-NATORS, McMoo and his friends are sooon caught up in the Second World War . . .Why are the sinister robo-bulls KIDNAPPING top scientists and smuggling tons of butter into war-torn France? Hurtling headlong through BOMB-BLASTS, plane CHASES and parachute jumps behind ENEMY LINES, can the C. I. A. agents survive their MADDEST mission yet?

  It’s time for action. Cows In Action.

  For my much missed grandad, Dave Russell, whose tales of World War II adventure I so enjoyed.

  THE C.I.A. FILES

  Cows from the present –

  Fighting in the past to protect the future . . .

  In the year 2550, after thousands of years of being eaten and milked, cows finally live as equals with humans in their own country of Luckyburger. But a group of evil war-loving bulls – the Fed-up Bull Institute – is not satisfied.

  Using time machines and deadly ter-moo-nator agents, the F.B.I. is trying to change Earth’s history. These bulls plan to enslave all humans and put savage cows in charge of the planet. Their actions threaten to plunge all cowkind into cruel and cowardly chaos . . .

  The C.I.A. was set up to stop them.

  However, the best agents come not from 2550 – but from the present. From a time in the early 21st century, when the first clever cows began to appear. A time when a brainy bull named Angus McMoo invented the first time machine, little realizing he would soon become the F.B.I.’s number one enemy . . .

  COWS OF COURAGE – TOP SECRET FILES

  PROFESSOR ANGUS MCMOO

  Security rating: Bravo Moo Zero

  Stand-out features: Large white squares on coat, outstanding horns

  Character: Scatterbrained, inventive, plucky and keen

  Likes: Hot tea, history books, gadgets

  Hates: Injustice, suffering, poor-quality tea bags

  Ambition: To invent the electric sundial

  LITTLE BO VINE

  Security rating: For your cow pies only

  Stand-out features: Luminous udder (colour varies)

  Character: Tough, cheeky, ready-for-anything rebel

  Likes: Fashion, chewing gum, self-defence classes

  Hates: Bessie Barmer, the farmer’s wife

  Ambition: To run her own martial arts club for farmyard animals

  PAT VINE

  Security rating: Licence to fill (stomach with grass)

  Stand-out features: Zigzags on coat

  Character: Brave, loyal and practical

  Likes: Solving problems, anything Professor McMoo does

  Hates: Flies not easily swished by his tail

  Ambition: To find a five-leaf clover – and to survive his dangerous missions!

  Chapter One

  OFF TO WAR!

  The two fighter planes circled in the sky like birds of prey. The drone of heavy engines filled the air. Then the sharp sound of gunfire rattled out. One of the planes dipped sharply to dodge the bullets . . .

  “What an awesome show!” cried Pat Vine, a young bullock with white zigzags on his brown coat. Most of the time, Farmer Barmer’s farmyard was a quiet and sleepy place – but not when the air show was in town, with stunt planes flying overhead! Pat lay down in the field with his hooves behind his head, enjoying the aerial acrobatics. “These displays are brilliant, aren’t they, Bo?”

  “Hmm, not bad, I suppose,” said Little Bo Vine, who was Pat’s older sister. She was sitting beside him, blowing a big gum bubble. “It would be better if the planes fired laser beams and played really cool loud music on their stereos . . .”

  Pat rolled his eyes. “Those are two planes from the Second World War! They didn’t have lasers and stereos back in the 1940s.”

  “Boring!” said Bo.

  Pat sighed. Bo was a rebellious milk-cow who loved fighting, fashion and painting her udder strange colours. Today she had decorated it with a Union Jack.

  “You’d better not let anyone see that,” Pat warned her. “They might work out that you are not an ordinary cow.”

  “They’ll work out that you aren’t if they catch you lounging on your back like that,” Bo retorted.

  “Exactly!” boomed a familiar voice from behind them. “So get up quickly, both of you!”

  “Professor McMoo!” Pat beamed, jumping up onto all fours at once. He turned to greet McMoo, his greatest friend – only to find the professor standing on his hind legs with his hands on his hips, looking up at the stunt planes. “Hey, there’s a Messerschmitt 109 fighting a Hurricane!” said McMoo. “Fantastic! Wonderful flying machines, first built in the 1930s, you know . . .”

  McMoo was a large red bull with white squares on his coat and a twinkle in his eyes. Like Pat and Bo, he belonged to a very rare breed of brainy cattle – but the professor was the cleverest of all of them by far. The three big loves of his life were learning about history, inventing incredible gadgets and drinking tea. Sometimes he tried to do all three at once, but that got a bit messy.

  “Professor!” Bo hissed at him, getting onto all fours like Pat. “Act like a proper bull, then. Here comes Bessie Barmer . . .”

  In a moment, McMoo was grazing innocently on the grass. Pat did the same as Bessie came charging out of the farmhouse in an old stained nightgown. Even the sight of her made Pat’s knees want to knock! Bessie was the farmer’s wife, enormously nasty and fiercely fat. She hated all the farm animals. In fact, she hated most things – including aeroplanes, it seemed.

  “Clear off!” she yelled, shaking her fist at the sky. “You noisy, smoky, silly planes! How can I catch up on my beauty sleep with that racket going on?”

  “Catch up on her beauty sleep?” Bo snorted to Pat. “She’d have to sleep for about a zillion years!”

  “My grandmother was a war hero!” Bessie bellowed. “If she were here now she’d sort you out. You hear?” But the planes kept on zooming noisily through the sky, and in the end Bessie stomped off back inside.

  “Good riddance!” yelled Bo as she jumped up and blew a raspberry. “Miserable spoilsport.”

  Pat nodded. “Those planes are a bit noisy though. Bet they’re a squeeze to get into as well.” He smiled at McMoo. “I think I prefer to travel by shed!”

  McMoo grinned. “Me too. How about a quick trip right now?”

  Pushing past the pair of them, Bo zoomed across the field to the wooden doors. “Last one there sucks a thistle!”

  “First one there puts the kettle on!” McMoo called back. And as the planes droned on overhead, he and Pat ran after her.

  Most cows, no matter how extraordinary, would find it difficult
to travel in a shed. But McMoo had secretly turned his humdrum hay-barn home into a marvellous, magnificent mega-machine. Using his brains, brawn and bits of old techno-junk thrown away by the scientist who lived next door, he had turned his cow shed into a Time Shed!

  The professor’s plan had been to leave the farm with Pat and Bo and go tripping through time. Why settle for reading about history when you could live it? But before they could go anywhere – or anywhen – they had been visited by mysterious cows from the far future . . . Cows who revealed it was Pat, Bo and McMoo’s destiny to become top agents for the C.I.A. – the Cows in Action! This crack squad of time-travelling cow commandoes from the twenty-sixth century needed McMoo’s genius to help them fight the F.B.I. – the Fed-up Bull Institute, enemies of free cows and human beings in all times and places . . .

  No sooner had Pat and the professor followed Bo inside the shed than a loud alarm went off.

  Pat gulped. “Is that the C.I.A. now, Professor?”

  “Yes!” cried McMoo, kicking aside a bale of hay to reveal a big bronze lever. “And it sounds like a blue-cheese alert.”

  “A blue-cheese alert?” Bo frowned. “What’s that?”

  “It’s one step worse than a red alert and a whole lot smellier,” McMoo explained. “We’d better find out what’s happening!”

  He pulled on the lever, and at once a grinding, clanking noise started up. The bare wooden walls flipped round to reveal sophisticated controls. A large TV screen swung down from the rafters, trailing tangled wires and cables, while a huge, horseshoe-shaped bank of controls rose up from the middle of the muddy floor. Hay flew through the air as a large, battered wardrobe burst into view, crammed full of cow-sized costumes for every occasion in history. In just a few seconds, the grotty shed had become a super-advanced time machine (with fitting room included). The alarm stopped beeping as the image of a burly black bull in dark glasses and a blue sash appeared on the TV screen . . .

  “It’s yummy Yak!” cried Bo. “Director of the C.I.A.!”

  “Hey, team,” said Yak gruffly. “How’s it going?”

  “Not well,” said McMoo. “I haven’t had a cup of tea all day!”

  “Bo forgot to put the kettle on,” said Pat.

  Bo grinned cheekily. “I didn’t think it would suit me!”

  “This is no time for jokes,” said Yak gravely.

  “Especially not jokes as old as that one,” said McMoo. “The electric kettle was invented in 1922, and that joke was invented three seconds later! Then, when the automatic ‘stop-boiling’ version was invented in 1930—”

  “Er, Professor?” said Pat, pulling some hidden tea bags from a pile of straw. “Perhaps we should hear what Yak has to say?”

  “Thank you, Pat,” growled Yak wearily. “As you know, a blue-cheese alert is super-serious. The F.B.I. has been causing us lots of problems lately, stealing huge amounts of butter.”

  “Butter?” McMoo frowned. “I always knew they were slippery customers, but even so . . .”

  “We think they are trying to keep us busy while they commit a big time crime,” Yak went on. “As always, they want to change history by getting rid of humans and putting killer cows in charge of the planet.”

  Bo blew another gum bubble. “But the question is, how will they try it this time?”

  “That’s what you must find out,” Yak told them. “We have traced them to the year 1940.”

  Pat gasped. “The Second World War was happening back then!”

  “You know it, trooper,” said Yak gravely. “And while we try to stop their butter-burgling, you three must pop back to the past and stop them!” He paused. “We have just discovered that three ter-moo-nators have been sent to 1940 already.”

  “Three?” Pat gulped. Ter-moo-nators were the F.B.I.’s deadliest agents – half-bull, half-robot, and sneaky and sly from their horns to their hooves.

  “Don’t worry, bruv,” said Bo cockily. “I’ll smash their metal snouts in, however many there are!”

  “I am beaming over co-ordinates for the last location visited by the F.B.I. in that time,” said Yak. Red lights flashed on the main bank of controls as the Time Shed’s computer received the data. “I am also sending you some things you may find useful in that time.”

  McMoo looked hopeful. “Any tea bags included?”

  “No,” said Yak firmly as a small pile of papers appeared in a flash at the professor’s feet. “Now, get going, gang . . . and good luck!”

  The screen went dark.

  Pat passed a cup of tea to Bo and a bucket of the stuff to McMoo. “Looks like we’re going off to war,” he said nervously.

  “Indeed we are,” murmured McMoo. “To one of the biggest and deadliest wars in the whole of human history . . .” He drained his tea, chucked away the bucket and yanked on the take-off lever. “It seems that this might be our most dangerous mission yet!”

  Chapter Two

  BLITZ AND PIECES

  The Time Shed clanged and shook and hissed and rattled as it hurtled back through time. Soon, with an enormous CLONK! it landed in a dark, deserted yard behind a line of moonlit houses. Pat felt a tingle of excitement in all four parts of his stomach.

  “London, on the evening of September 13th, 1940,” McMoo declared, checking the destination meter. “We have arrived during the Blitz.”

  “What’s the Blitz?” asked Bo. “Who’s fighting who in this war, anyway?”

  McMoo turned to the TV screen. “Computer, give us the Second World War file.”

  * * *

  ++World War Two. ++Began 3 September 1939. ++Nazi Germany, led by Adolf Hitler, invaded Poland. ++As a result, Britain declared war. ++Britain and the Allies (including France and later America and Russia) battled the Nazis and later the Axis powers (including Italy and Japan) on land, sea and air. ++Conflict in Europe ended 7 May 1945 when the Nazis gave up. ++Phew!

  * * *

  “Over five years of full-on fighting!” Bo gasped. “That’s amazing.”

  “It’s terrible,” McMoo corrected her sadly. “Computer, give us some Blitz bits!”

  * * *

  ++The Blitz was a series of Nazi bombing raids on cities in Britain from 7 September 1940–10 May 1941. ++Over 1 million houses were blown up. ++London was bombed for 73 nights in a row. ++Even Buckingham Palace was hit!

  * * *

  “Not a very friendly time to land, is it?” said Pat nervously.

  “Good!” Bo declared. “And while we’re waiting for a fight, I’ll find us some 1940s gear so we fit right in.” She charged into the costume cupboard, tossed a pile of clothes across the shed at Pat and the professor, then got changed herself. “Oh, no! Is this all you’ve got?” She came out wearing wrinkly stockings, a brown wool dress with neat little collar and a string of white pearls. “How frumpy. And these flat shoes are rubbish! Can’t I wear high heels?”

  “Sorry, Bo,” said McMoo, struggling into his suit. “The government of 1940 is asking all women to choose flat-heeled shoes because high heels use wood – wood that can be better used making planes and weapons to help fight the war.”

  “Wooden you know it,” said Pat with a smile. “Unlucky, sis!”

  “Lots of other things are being conserved too, like food and clothes,” McMoo went on, warming to his subject. “They’re harder to get hold of when a war is on, and people might run out.”

  “It’s called rationing, isn’t it, Professor?” said Pat brightly, and McMoo nodded.

  “You’re such a geeky know-all, Pat,” Bo complained.

  “I wish you could ration your dumbness!” Pat shot back.

  “Shut up, you two, and stick in your ringblenders,” said McMoo, stepping between them. The shiny metal nose rings were useful C.I.A. inventions that tricked human eyes into thinking the cows who wore them were actually people. They also translated cow-speak into any language in any time. However, other cows would see through the disguise immediately – and so too would any ter-moo-nators . . .

 
They all put on their ringblenders and looked in the special mirror that showed how humans would see them. Bo appeared to be a sensible young lady. Pat could be mistaken for a schoolboy in a white shirt and a grey blazer with long shorts tucked into his socks. And McMoo looked like a big businessman in a dark suit, bow-tie and bowler hat.

  “Now, let’s see what’s out there!” said McMoo, his eyes alight with excitement as he charged over to the doors.

  Outside all was quiet. Until McMoo slipped on his first step and found himself tumbling down a miniature mountain of bricks. “Whoops!” he yelled, rolling over and over until he landed with a noisy CRUMP at the bottom.

  “Professor!” gasped Pat. In a moment, he and Bo were skidding and sliding down the steep brick-pile to reach him. “Are you OK?”

  “Just about,” he said, dusting off his clothes. “Welcome to 1940!”

  “We’ve landed in a rubbish dump,” said Bo, unimpressed.

  McMoo shook his head. “This was once a row of houses. Now it’s rubble. Bombs did this.”

  Suddenly, a strange, lonely wail started up, rising and falling like the howl of some enormous creature. Pat was gripped with fear. “What’s that?”

  “An air-raid siren,” said McMoo grimly. “They were set off to warn people that bombers were on the way.” Even as he spoke, the skies were filling with the noisy throb of powerful aircraft engines. “We must find shelter. Back to the Time Shed, quick!”

  The cows tried to scramble up the pile of bricks. But it was no good – the loose stones kept slipping beneath their hooves and they fell back down. And all the time, the sound of engines grew closer . . .

  “We must find somewhere else,” McMoo yelled.