Busted Flush

Won’t Get Fooled Again

Victor Milán

A FIGURE APPEARED IN midair beside the open-topped Land Rover Wolf. It floated eight feet off the crappy road and easily paced the vehicle’s twenty-two miles an hour. Which was fast enough on this surface to make John Fortune’s brain feel Shake ’n Baked. “Jesus!” Simone Duplaix yelped. Their Croat peacekeeper escorts jumped and pointed and yelled. The car swerved.

“Tell them to take it easy,” John said over his shoulder to Zvetovar, the shave-headed corporal with ears that stuck out like hairy amphora handles beneath his blue UN beret. “It’s just the Lama.”

“It creeps me out when you do that,” Snowblind said from the backseat beside the corporal. She wore a black T-shirt with the words BITCH GODDESS written on it in gold glitter. John wondered if that was really appropriate for an official UN fact-finding mission.

“I merely manifest myself in astral form,” the Lama said. He smiled in a way he probably thought was benign. John thought of it as a shit-eating grin.

<You should assert your authority over this one,> Isra-who-was-Sekhmet said. <Teach him to fear you.>

Oh, great idea, John thought back. How?

The Lama was a devout coward. Right now his physical form squatted in a tent miles away from potential trouble in the middle of an armored column from the Simba Brigades, the PPA’s regular army, guarded by Brazilian peacekeepers.

“I have discerned a Nigerian roadblock awaiting you around this curve in the road,” the floating figure said.

“Good job,” John said grudgingly. “Thanks.”

“Let us see that asshole Llama do that,” the Lama said. “He lacks the Buddha nature.”

Snowblind said, “You’re a monk. You can’t be supposed to talk like that.”

“You are not the boss of me.”

She flipped him off. He gave her a sardonic namaste and vanished.

How the hell did I ever let DB talk me into changing teams? John Fortune wondered. I should be in Arabia, with Kate. “Tell your guys to look sharp,” he told Zvetovar. “We got Nigerians up ahead past these palm trees.”

Zvetovar grinned and bobbed his head. To say he understood English might be stretching things. More accurately, he occasionally responded to what John said, and even more occasionally said something John could make out. He did pass something along to his men. Probably orders.

“I don’t like this,” Simone said, shaking her head. The streaks were magenta today. The stud in her left nostril looked like a gold Egyptian scarab. It made John Fortune’s own nose twitch to look at.

The day was hot and bright. They always were, here in the Oil Rivers region of the Nigerian coast. Unless they were hot and rainy. “We’re the UN,” John said. “The Committee. We’re legit. What could go wrong?”

“Everything,” she said. “There’s war. I wish the Radical had not been killed. We could use his backup.”

“Yeah,” John said. “Well.” They could have used some of the Committee’s heavy hitters, too. Lohengrin, Earth Witch, Bubbles. Not that any of them could have matched Tom Weathers for sheer power.

He hadn’t much cared for the guy. But getting backshot into a trench full of piss was a hell of a way to go. And Simone was right. It would be comforting to know the world’s most powerful ace had their backs. Instead of what John did have: a redneck who turned into a big toad. A flying Apache with an attitude. An even surlier astral dude. A French-Canadian princess who could make people temporarily blind.

<You do not need him,> the voice said in his head. <We are powerful. You must learn to use your power more.>

Don’t start, he thought back. “Nothing’s going to happen,” he said aloud. He drummed his fingers on the outside of the door, ignoring the way it scorched the tips. We are not here to fight, he reminded himself. This is just a fact-finding mission.

The Wolf rolled around the bend. A Fox armored recon car blocked the road. It’s menagerie-of-war day in the Oil Delta, Fortune thought. The armored car was narrow and precariously tall, like a normal sedan with big tires and a turret stacked on top. Its long-barreled cannon pointed straight at John’s nose. It was only 30mm but looked as if they could drive right up it.

A pair of utility trucks angled into the ditch to either side. Troopers in Nigerian battle dress slouched around. They didn’t point their long FN-FAL rifles at the newcomers. Maybe they thought the autocannon was enough.

A tall man in a maroon beret held up his hand. “Halt,” he commanded. That was one good thing about the Nigerians: English was their official language. Their accents got a bit dense sometimes, but John could talk to them.

Snowblind had to translate with their PPA allies. She could be a bit of a diva, but wasn’t a bad type. And her ace might actually come in handy if things got crosswise.

“What is your business?” the Nigerian demanded.

<The fool! Can he not read?>

Isra had a point. UN PEACEKEEPERS was painted on both sides of their car in four-inch white letters. “We’re the United Nations fact-finding commission,” John said. He kept his voice level despite Sekhmet’s influence stirring in his blood like angry bees. “We’re legally entitled to go wherever we need to.”

The officer looked doubtful. He wore no rank badges: like most modern armies the Nigerians had figured out that officers’ insignia served as wizard sniper aim-points in the field. The Browning Hi-Power in a holster on his web gear in lieu of a broomstick-long assault rifle marked him as head guy even to John Fortune, who wasn’t exactly Gary Brecher the War Nerd. It struck him as kind of a wash.

The officer turned to shout in some tribal dialect to the guy in the helmet and goggles peering at them from the Fox’s cupola. John wasn’t sure that was a good sign. Nigeria usually mashed up its innumerable ethnic groups among its military units, he knew from the briefing dossiers Jayewardene had loaded onto them. Tribal strife had wracked the country since in de pen dence.

The Nigerians fought hard and mean to suppress Oil Delta ethnic groups, primarily Ijaw and Ogoni. The UN recognized their right to do so. The issue that had John Fortune and his fellow Committee members driving around through the swamps enjoying bugs and heat and having guns pointed at them was whether the horrorfest the Chinese had shot—currently the world’s hottest viral video, even though YouTube yanked uploads as quickly as they could for graphic violence—was aberration or policy.

The guy in the space helmet spoke into a chin mike. “What’re they doing?” Simone asked.

“Probably bumping us upstairs,” John said. “Must have a radio in the armored car.”

Simone sighed. She flipped open her phone and began texting somebody.

To either side of the road rose dunes of white sand, overgrown with brush and tall grass, all wispy and pale green. It didn’t look healthy. Maybe petroleum seeping from the ubiquitous oil pipelines poisoned it.

John was just feeling grateful they weren’t near a bayou right now, so that the meanest bugs had farther to fly and consequently had less energy to torment them, when a plump figure pushed through the grass on the hillock to his left.

<It is the get of a dog!> Isra said. <Slay him!>

Butcher Dagon grinned at them and gave them the reverse V-sign that was the Brit equivalent of the bird.

<It is a trap!>

Fear blasted through John’s veins. His grip, always tenuous, snapped. He just kept presence of mind to yank open the door and spill himself onto the broken-shell road. Then the beast broke free. Sekhmet seized the ascendant.

The Nigerians opened panic fire at the sight of a giant golden lioness appearing in the road. Sekhmet the Destroyer saw the Croatian corporal stare at her in gap-mouthed shock before a bullet pierced his head and he slumped. The copper-haired girl yelped and dropped from sight.

The Fox’s turret gun erupted in thunder and fire. Like the troopers on the road the gunner fired high. The muzzle blast still blew the Wolf’s windscreen in. The safety glass obediently sugared. The force of the blast shotgunned the particles into the face of the driver, who hadn’t been quick enough to hit the floorboards.

The Destroyer’s ears rang from the horrific noise. It stoked her primal fury.

A flash. Sekhmet’s head swam. Her vision turned all formless white, as if she drowned in a Nile of milk. She understood: the strange-looking girl had used her power, blinding all in the vicinity. Even a Living God was not proof against that, it seemed.

But Sekhmet did not need to see. She had the senses of a beast, as well as the brain of a man.

And the wrath of a god.

Though her sensitive ears rang from the unnatural loudness of guns she smelled the soldiers’ sweat, laced with adrenaline bright as silver. Smelled the hot metal of the great iron beast, the petroleum farts of its diesel exhaust, the strange chemical reeks emitted by its weapon.

She breathed flame. The horrific shrieking that answered it was sweet as the music of ugab flute and lyre, accompanied by the crackle of fire and the smells of burning cloth and hair and man-flesh.

She bunched muscles, leapt. Her mind and body knew where her target lay. She struck the squat metal monster’s turret and clung like a locust. Her claws dug deep into metal that the men inside thought armor to protect them. She roared in amusement as much as triumph.

She heard screaming, smelled man-breath that carried traces of tobacco and a breakfast of gruel, bread, and pulses. She lashed out with a forepaw. The strike of a mortal lioness could break the neck of a wildebeest. Sekhmet the Destroyer was much stronger than that.

She felt the impact of the plastic helmet on her pads. Felt more than heard the skin and tendons and tissue and bone give way as her fury tore the gunner’s head from his neck and spun it toward the ditch.

Hot blood sprayed her face and shoulders. She yanked the headless corpse from the hatch and flung it aside. Then she drew a deep breath, thrust her muzzle into the opening that reeked of sweat and metal and chemicals, and filled the car with fire.

The screams of those trapped within exalted her.

With a bound she reached the crest of the dune from which the foe had shown her—her, Sekhmet!—disrespect. She roared again in triumph and challenge.

But the blindness still fogged her eyes like cataracts. The stinks of burning and the knife-edged clamor of ammunition bursting in the burning vehicle blanketed nose and ears. Yet she knew.

Her enemy had escaped.

She raised her head and roared. In nature lionesses did not roar. But she was Sekhmet the Destroyer. She roared.

We shall meet again, dog-spawn, her roaring said. And when we do, I shall taste your blood.

“Hei-lian!”

Walking through a well-lit corridor on the palace’s ground floor, Sun Hei-lian stopped and turned. Sprout broke from her female handlers and ran to her. She wore shorts and a short-sleeved shirt. Tears streamed down her cheeks. Her blond hair streamed behind her. Hei-lian had a moment to wonder why she was being taken for her usual exercise in the garden. With her father’s fall, why would the Nshombos indulge this unnatural creature?

The creature hit her in a hug so desperate it was almost a tackle. It took all Hei-lian’s taijiquan-honed balance to keep from being bowled over.

Sprout clung to her like a handful of flung muck and wept, drenching Hei-lian’s blouse. “My daddy! They killed my daddy!”

For a moment Hei-lian stood rigid. Her stomach heaved with revulsion at the contact, at the disgraceful display she’d been made a part of. Many times her life depended on fast thinking followed by faster action. Now she had no idea what to do.

I should push her away and go about my business, she thought.

Instead her arms went around the young woman and tentatively returned the hug.

Vision blurred. She felt wet heat on her cheeks. I’m crying!

Holding awkwardly on to Sprout, Hei-lian shook her head. It’s pent-up emotion—fear of what loss of Weathers might do to our hard-won position in the PPA. That’s all.

“Oh, Hei-lian,” Sprout moaned.

He means nothing to me, Hei-lian thought.

Mechanically she stroked the long golden hair. It struck her that for all the many things she knew how to do, she had no idea how to comfort someone. “There,” she said. “There, there.”

Nothing.

Even in the glaring morning sun the tracers from the BO-105 attack helicopter’s strap-on mini-gun made red streaks in the sky. Brave Hawk wove deftly between them, great falcon’s wings spread wide.

“He can’t keep that up long,” Simone said. She had gotten minor scorches and punctures from the autocannon blast and flying glass. Our Lady of Pain had healed her without putting herself out of action for more than an hour. How she did that still made John cringe, and left Simone inclined to guilt up over it.

“Isn’t there something you can do?” he asked. “Blind the chopper dudes?”

“Not without a chance of blinding Tom. So close to the ground he might crash.”

Sitting in a fresh Land Rover, with fresh Croat escorts, John Fortune felt frustration crawl like ants throughout his body—felt the scarab stir beneath the skin of his forehead. Since Butcher Dagon turned a routine highway stop to carnage, the UN mission had been functionally at war, fighting alongside the Simba Brigades.

John couldn’t say that bothered him. The Nigerians and their Brit pals were playing the monster here. The kind of things they were doing were the things the Committee had been formed to stop. But with the Mideast occupation unraveling in sabotage and suicide bombings, he was seriously worried if the Committee would be enough.

<You must not hold back. Strike. Strike!> Sekhmet said.

There’s nothing we can do, he thought. Kate could have brought the chopper down with one well-thrown stone. Michelle could have taken it out with a bubble. But Kate was in Arabia, and Bubbles in New Orleans. This was just supposed to be a fact-finding mission, damn it. He squeezed his eyes shut so hard brief tears came.

Two attack choppers had jumped the small convoy out of a clear blue sky. The flat coastal swampland of green canals and white sand offered nowhere to hide. Diedrich sprang fearlessly into the air. He’d actually managed to wrench a landing skid off one gunship and whack it a few times, causing black smoke to pour from its engine housing and the bird to turn north and run for home.

But then its partner had gotten stuck on the ace’s tail.

John’s eyes opened to see a half-dozen 57mm rockets ripple from the launcher beneath the chopper’s right stub wing. They were unguided ground-attack missiles. The gunner clearly hoped their blasts would swat their pesky prey from the air.

Brave Hawk flew into a red fireball rising from the sand. Snowblind moaned. John felt his nut sac contract.

The ace emerged. Smoke streamed from his wings. Dazed, he flew straight and level. Not a hundred feet behind him the chopper jock steadied for a can’t-miss shot right up his ass.

Something long and pale streaked up out of the weeds and hit the helicopter’s sandy-camouflaged belly. It stuck. The gunship’s nose dipped toward the marshy ground. Its Allison turboshaft engines whined. It gained ten feet of altitude. Twenty.

From the grass appeared a toad the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. The tip of its tongue was glued to the helicopter.

The aircraft wobbled. It dipped, bouncing the toad off the ground. Simone cried out. Engines straining, the helicopter rose and fell twice, slamming the giant toad into the ground each time. The toad vanished behind a dune. It stayed down. Somehow it had caught a grip on the planet.

The helicopter pivoted straight into the ground. It blew up with a series of white flashes, engulfed by an orange fireball when exploding munitions lit off its fuel.

John piled out of the car with the UN flag fluttering from one antenna and the red-and-white checkerboard of Croatia from the other, and raced into the weeds. As he reached the dune crest the grass parted and a tall, rawboned man appeared. He walked as if more disoriented than usual. “Buford,” John said, “what the hell do you call that?” Improbably, he liked the redneck. It was hard not to.

Toad Man smiled that big goofy smile of his. “Leadin’ with my chin, Mr. Fortune,” he said. “Kinda my specialty.”

“Jesus.”

Brave Hawk touched down. His wings vanished. He didn’t look to have any more holes in him than he started out with, it relieved John to note. “You know what they say,” Diedrich called out. “If a frog had wings, it wouldn’t bump its ass a-hoppin’.”

“Toad,” Buford corrected reflexively.

Diedrich flashed a rare grin. “Thanks for the hand, there,” he said. “Tongue. Whatever. For a white-eyes, you ain’t half bad.”

“That’s what I like to think,” Buford said.

Fragrance dense as fog and the buzzing of myriad bees enveloped them as they walked in the rose garden of Mobutu’s old palace, surrounded by high white stone walls that kept the Kongoville traffic noise at bay.

Not that there’s much, with the fuel shortages, thought Hei-lian.

“The Arabian occupation has disrupted Mideast oil shipments, Your Excellency,” she said in her flawless French.

“As the imperialists should have known in advance it would,” President-for-Life Dr. Kitengi Nshombo said. He walked at Hei-lian’s side. He was a head shorter than she.

“These circumstances increase the value of the Niger Delta oil fields.” Nshombo nodded his big head, which shone like hand-rubbed teak in the sun. “As the People’s Republic’s appetite for oil increases daily, Colonel.”

He knew what she was. He seemed to prefer to treat with her over the regular diplomatic delegation when possible. It made them crazy.

“Don’t worry. The oppressed people of Africa, whom I unite under one purpose, one flag, shall not forget those who aid us in our hour of need.”

“That isn’t what worries me, Excellency,” she said. “With Tom Weathers gone”—to her surprise and annoyance, the name caught briefly in her throat—“the war of liberation has slowed.”

“We feel the loss of Mokèlé-mbèmbé most keenly,” Nshombo said.

He could have fooled Hei-lian. The president was renowned for never showing visible emotion. But his utter nonresponse to the loss of his revolutionary comrade, the man whose crazy genius and unmatched powers had put him in this palace, struck even her as cold.

“Now that the UN has joined us,” he said, “I think they and my Simba Brigades, along with help from our LAND brothers, should suffice. Don’t you?”

She wondered. She didn’t care to say so aloud. Her job required selfless courage, not folly. She searched for words to frame her true concern. The PRC had backed Weathers’s guerrilla-style strategy for liberating the Oil Rivers. With him . . . gone, the campaign had shifted to conventional warfare. And the Simba Brigades were largely trained and subsidized by India: China’s bitter geopolitical foe and, more specifically, rival for Nigerian oil.

Shrill, excited barking broke out ahead. They walked from among the high rose-jeweled hedges, across white gravel that crunched beneath their shoes, toward a wire-mesh fence. A white-clad attendant opened the gates to admit the president and his companion.

A horde of mop-headed white Dandie Dinmont terriers yapped ecstatically as they jumped up Nshombo’s trouser legs. The president chuckled and clucked to them in the dialect of his and his sister’s tribe, which apparently had about a dozen living speakers. They didn’t include Hei-lian.

“I know what your interests are, Colonel Sun,” Nshombo said. “You look after them ably. And you have served me well. As Tom did.” He knelt and let the tiny dogs lick his face. He actually smiled, in a manner that reminded her, remarkably, of Sprout in better times. “But I know that in all the world, only Alicia and these dear little creatures truly care for me. Remember that well, Colonel.”

“Thanks,” Tom Diedrich said. “I feel better already.” Which, John Fortune thought, was total macho bullshit. Not even Our Lady of Pain’s super-accelerated healing could take perceptible effect that fast.

“You still look like twenty miles of bad road,” Buford said helpfully.

“We all serve the Revolution as best we can,” the young woman said. Her English was just shy of too thickly accented for John Fortune to follow. She smiled through bloody gashes and the glaring red burn that now covered half her face.

She was already moving slowly when she’d entered the cheery, brightly lit room in the presidential palace. John couldn’t imagine what weight of hurt she carried from wounds she had taken to herself. He didn’t want to try.

Simone Duplaix sat in a chair beside the bed, almost hidden by bursts of roses, red and pink and yellow, Alicia Nshombo had sent from her brother’s garden.

“You sound just like Tom Weathers,” she said. Out of consideration for her fellow Committee members she spoke English, too.

“Do I? He . . . left his mark on me. On all of us.”

“Yet he was a warrior,” the Lama said. He sat in a chair like a normal person, sipping bottled orange Fanta through a straw. “You are a healer. Is it not strange you are being disciple of one such?”

“What I saw in the Delta made me accept that the Revolution won’t be won by good intentions.”

Which, John knew, was another of the Radical’s damned bumper-sticker homilies. He’d seen it on enough Prius bumpers. I guess she spent enough time with Weathers in the few days before he got whacked, he thought. That Chinese TV chick didn’t look too thrilled about it, either. Ah, well. He wasn’t here to sort out the PPA’s domestic affairs.

<You should court this girl,> Isra told him. <Even though she is black. She is strong, and has good hips. She could bear you strong sons.>

Please, he thought. I’m in love with Kate. And this girl has got a self-mutilation thing going that makes the most razor-happy emo girl look a wimp. Plus I get enough from you without putting up with hearing revolutionary slogans twenty-four/seven.

Dolores Michel bent to stroke an uninjured part of Diedrich’s forehead with gentle fingertips. “You will be well soon, well-named Brave Hawk.”

“Thanks, ma’am,” he said.

She left. “Well,” John said, “she seems to be taking the Radical’s demise pretty calmly.”

“Don’t be a dick, John,” Simone said. “She’s trying to hold in so much pain, she can’t give in to sorrow.”

“Poor gal’s carrying the world on her shoulders, that’s sure,” Buford said.

“When the lion lies down with the lamb,” said the Lama, “who knows what issue may come forth?”

“Wait,” Simone said. “Back up. What?”

He smiled.

John Fortune never saw what toasted the lead tank.

He rode in the backseat of a fresh Land Rover with six fresh Croats. Buford Calhoun and Simone followed in a second Wolf. In front and behind rolled a PPA mechanized company, Brit-provided Ferret armored cars and beefy, tracked BMP-2s from Russia, hauling infantry. A quartet of Indian-made Vijayanta main battle tanks flanked front, rear, and sides. The Western aces called them Va-jay-jays.

With all that serious steel and firepower surrounding them, and the Lama scouting ahead in invisible astral form, John felt fairly safe, even deep in enemy territory. Until the Va-jay-jay two hundred yards up the road went up.

The Land Rover’s doors flew open. Blue-helmeted Croats blew out of them like shell splinters. Screw that, John thought. This may be an open car, but some cover’s better than none—

A blast bellowed from the stricken Va-jay-jay. It lifted the heavy turret six inches and dropped it skewed to one side. Blue-white flames gushed up from the hull.

It occurred to John that that was what modern weaponry made of a massively armored, forty-four-ton tank. He wasn’t even sure the Wolf’s body was real metal.

He dove into the weeds to his left.

He found most of his crew huddling in a ditch with four inches of stagnant salt water in the bottom. “That fucking Lama!” he shouted, jumping in with them. “Why didn’t he warn us?”

The radio quacked. No more cell reception. Their buddies in the Liberation Army of the Nile Delta had helpfully blown up all the repeating towers. What he had was an overweight Croat kid squashed beneath a humongous radio pack, red-faced and puffing asthmatically, looking ready to puke from heat stroke and terror.

John snatched the microphone. “Fortune here, over.” They always said that in the movies.

“Brave Hawk,” the radio crackled. “Nigerians are in our base, killing our dudes. Dagon’s beast form’s ripping Brazilians to pieces.”

“What about the Lama?”

“Hiked up his skirts and ran off like a rabbit.”

John dropped the mike without even saying “out.” Instead he said, “Oh, fuck me.”

His half-dozen Croat escorts huddled in the ditch like frightened mice. They all stared at him with pathetically open optimism. They—his bodyguards—plainly expected him, the great American ace and son of aces, to rescue them.

On the dune-line to the right across the road, Nigerian armored vehicles appeared. Zippy little Scorpion tanks with 76mm guns and much bigger Warrior personnel carriers whose long 30mm autocannon quested side to side like monster bug antennae. A Scorpion promptly exploded in a billow of red fire and black smoke.

John’s blue helmets might be a bunch of lovable losers, completely out of their depth here. The Simbas were hard-asses who’d carved a chunk bigger than Argentina from Africa’s bleeding heart. And their mostly Sikh officers were as warm and fuzzy as the daggers they all carried.

A line of explosions stitched the road. Their abandoned Wolf blew up in their faces. “Shit!” John yelled. His Croats all jumped up and raced off over the dunes behind them. He followed.

<You must not run!>

“Shut up,” he shouted.

Facedown in a clump of rough grass he struggled to get a grip on what was happening. War’s like that, he was finding out: if you’re in it, you miss about 99 percent of what goes on.

He smelled gasoline burning. And something else. I think I may be over barbecue for a while, he thought. To his right a vehicle went up with a roar. His heart jumped into his throat. It was Simone and Buford’s Land Rover. “Oh, shit, oh, Jesus, no.”

He felt . . . total helplessness. He was the man in charge. He was an ace again. Or the next best thing, at least. His friends had just gotten fried and he couldn’t do a fucking thing.

<Then let me,> Isra urged.

What? Like you can bring them back? You’re not that kind of god.

He heard a colossal plop. As if . . . as if a one-ton toad had jumped over a dune to land on packed white sand beside him. Exactly like that.

The toad stared at him with those huge eyes. Moss green. Like Buford’s, but bulbous and the size of cantaloupes. But still with that unmistakable goofy good nature.

The mouth opened. And opened. And out upon the sand plopped a whole Québécoise ace.

Simone’s eyes weren’t much smaller than Toad Man’s. Her hair stuck out as if her head had played octagon for a death-match between a weed whacker and a quart jar of mousse. She looked like a kitten fished out of a washing machine. Only more viscous.

She opened her mouth. She closed her mouth. Sounds came from her nose, along with bubbles of toad mouth slime. She squeezed her eyes tight shut. “Eww,” she said.

There was a pop! and Buford stood beside them in all his Florida cracker glory.

“Thanks,” John rasped. His throat felt as if he’d gargled battery acid. “Wasn’t nothing,” Buford said. “My uncle Rayford always said to help a lady when I could.”

From his right John heard a noise like a sheet ripping, times a hundred. He looked around in time to see a machine-gun burst tear into one of his Croats. The guy’s body bucked. He rolled on his back and stared up at a sky whose painful blue was stained with gray smoke.

A quarter mile behind them more Nigerian AFVs rolled out of the scrub. Fire flashed from their guns. “Okay,” John said. “This officially sucks. White ’em out, Simone!”

Snowblind shook her head. Her face had gone pale as her namesake. “Can’t. Too far!”

John sucked in a deep breath and almost choked on fumes and stench. He had mostly been ignoring Sekhmet’s increasingly furious yammer in his brain and blood. It hadn’t been hard: he had things on his mind. But now was the time to hear her. Now was the time to give her what she clamored for.

He let go and exploded in a flash and boom like a shell going off.

Gun flames reached for the huge golden lioness like hungry tongues as she raced toward the line of machines. Lion laughter rippled through her body as she effortlessly eluded their foolish fire. Did they think so easily to stay the wrath of a Living God?

She struck the lead Scorpion tank like a lightning bolt. She leapt to the turret. Her jaws crunched its metal as her rear claws raked the tank’s hull, the way she’d gut a Cape buffalo. The vehicle’s armor was aluminum treated to steel hardness. It yielded like butter to her fangs and talons.

She expected that once she was among the flocks the other vehicles wouldn’t dare fire for fear of hitting their own. She reckoned without the power of panic. With a clang and a bang a main-gun round from a neighboring tank struck the Scorpion she was savaging.

She sent a burst of flame toward the other tank. It was too far to do damage but would confuse and terrify the gunners. She pounced as the machine she had eviscerated exploded.

When she breathed fire the tank’s commander ducked down his turret, slamming the hatch above him. She hooked claws into the hatch and tore it away. Then she blew fire within.

The hideous screams of commander and gunner were drowned as 76mm shells racked inside the turret cooked off. The Destroyer had already turned and leapt onto her next victim. Joyously she rampaged among the Nigerians, tearing and burning. She was vaguely aware of PPA armored vehicles shooting at their enemies with seeming disregard for whether they hit her or not. She paid them no heed.

She was crouched on a Warrior’s front deck, worrying its long gun in her jaws like a bone when something smashed into her right side. Hurtling weight drove her off the personnel carrier. She landed hard on her back with the weight crushing down on her. Teeth plunged into her shoulder.

Squalling outrage, she kicked with her rear legs. Her new opponent bellowed in pain as she threw it away from her.

She rolled to her feet. Her right shoulder bled. It meant nothing. It was nothing, next to the punishment she would inflict in return.

Eight meters away her enemy faced her. A huge, hairy beast whose muscle-mountainous body narrowed to a pointed snout. A naked pink tail lashed behind it. It reminded the lion-goddess of nothing so much as a gigantic rat.

She drew breath and sent it forth in flame.

The rat wasn’t expecting that. Yellow fire briefly obscured it. It rolled away, shrieking. Unfortunately distance had attenuated the blast. Sekhmet had done no more than singe the beast. It jumped back on its four legs with a score of smoke-tentacles waving from muzzle and shoulders.

The Destroyer was already flying at it. The rat-monster reared back to grapple her with what more closely resembled arms than an animal’s forelimbs. She struck.

Over and over the two monsters rolled, snarling, clawing, and snapping. Their blood dyed the sand pink. To the Destroyer’s fury the rat-thing’s bristles and thick hide resisted her talons and fangs better than Nigerian armor plate had. She felt chisel-like teeth and claws dig deep into her own golden-glowing skin.

But she was Sekhmet the Destroyer. A Living God was not to be defeated by an outsized rodent. With the strength of righteous rage she snapped her jaws. Her opponent squealed. By the luck of the Gods of the Nile she had bitten its neck.

But she had muscle, neither windpipe nor spine. It gave her leverage. From her back she threw the rat from her with a spasm of mighty neck and shoulder muscles.

It landed three meters away. Huge rents showed red-raw on its body. Its fur was dark-matted with their mingled blood. Yet it instantly began to roll upright to counterattack.

The Destroyer stretched her head back and enveloped it with fire.

Screaming like a ship’s whistle, the rat-creature reared up. Its fur burned with blue flames and a stinking smoke that filled her nose like burrs and clawed her throat and lungs.

She came up rampant. With a swipe of her forepaw she knocked the huge beast through the air. It struck, rolled over and over in the sand, extinguishing the flames. It landed in a bush and lay still.

Its outline writhed. Blown sand and steam swirled up to hide it momentarily from her sight. Then it cleared.

A man lay in the bush on his back. His fat, nude, blue-white body was gashed and torn and washed with gore. His limbs stirred feebly.

Dismissing him instantly from her mind, the Destroyer turned away. Grievously wounded she might be, but she had better prey than a mere man.

But instead of the armored cars and little tanks among which she had rampaged as if they were baby gazelles, she faced a crescent of full-sized tanks. Their cannons were trained upon her.

Even if she had all her strength she could not prevail against such monstrous power. And she felt her strength draining through a hundred wounds. Within, John was silent, stunned. <We are only half of what we were meant to be, Isra thought sadly. He was meant to be Ra, with all the powers of the sun, and me but his handmaiden.>

She was Sekhmet the Destroyer; but she was also a protector. She felt duty to her comrades, puny though they were. She turned and loped back to where they huddled against the white flank of a dune. She could at least shield them with her body as she fell. She turned back to snarl at the tanks where they squatted like vast impervious turtles. Her grip began to slip. Exhaustion and injury—and despair—had sapped even the will of a goddess.

She raised her muzzle and roared defiant denial: No!

It did no good. She whirled down and down, away from being.

In an ecstasy of fearful frustration Sun Hei-lian paced the palace terrace, hugging herself tightly beneath her breasts.

Since Tom’s murder Nshombo had refused to let her and her team leave the capital. Hong monitored radio traffic from the front in real time. Even when it was encrypted his specialized Guoanbu equipment and training easily cracked it.

The war went badly. That morning Simba armor had thrust triumphantly along the Niger Delta coast toward Lagos. Abuja, well inland, was the national capital. But capturing the huge seaport would seal the conquest—strike that: liberation—of the country. Or at least its coastal oil fields.

Then Nigeria mounted a massive counterattack. Taken by surprise, the PPA spearhead was cut off. Now half-coherent reports claimed a terrible monster was ravaging the Simbas. A giant golden lioness—appropriately enough, she supposed, given “Simba” meant “lion”—had miraculously appeared to fight it.

John Fortune and Butcher Dagon were going at it in their alternate forms. But Nigerian traffic revealed an armored battalion closing in to deliver the killing blow. Not even the Destroyer could deal with that.

Hei-lian shook her head. The other Committee aces were useless in an armored battle. Toad Man, the Lama, Snowblind, Brave Hawk . . . the Committee sent us its B team, not the powerful aces who broke the Caliphate’s army at Aswan last year. Whether John Fortune had simply misjudged, or had regarded Africa as unimportant, his parsimony was about to lose it all. If only Tom still lived.

“Hei-lian?”

She stopped and spun and glared. Sprout had emerged from the French doors of the palace onto the terrace. She wore jeans and a T-shirt. She clutched a slim picture book to her chest. “I’m sad,” she said. She held out the book. “Will you read to me?”

No! Hei-lian’s mind raged. Get away from me, you unnatural thing! Why do they suffer you to wander the palace still, without your father to protect you?

Her eyes welled. “Yes,” she heard herself say, as from the depths of a pit of sadness. She took the book. Charlie and the Mouse Ace, the cover read. “Let’s sit here in the shade.”

They sat on white-enameled metal chairs beneath an awning. Hei-lian’s fingers trembled as she opened the brightly colored cover.

“ ‘Charlie was a little boy with a big secret,’ ” she read. “ ‘He had a friend who was a mouse. And more than that—’ ”

“So when I was little,” Buford was saying when John Fortune opened his eyes, “Uncle Rayford, he had him these naughty magazines.”

John raised his head from the sand. “Oh, shit,” he said with a groan. His head dropped back. His neck felt like boiled pasta. “Am I naked?”

“I don’t think it matters much now, John,” said Simone. She knelt beside him. “Just try to rest.”

“Did I see like half a dozen tanks pointing their guns at us?”

“Eight tanks, yes,” Snowblind said. “Nigerian ones. Look just like Vijayantas.”

“Anyways,” said Buford, who sat beside them with his legs drawn up, “I never saw no bad pictures nor wanted to. But Uncle Rayford, he showed me the funnies. I liked them.”

“How badly am I hurt, Simone?” John asked.

She flicked a glance along his body. Then she turned her head. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Now, he showed me this one I still remember. It had like this big hero guy with a big old mace, and a couple little scrawny guys with a pitchfork and a club.”

“Why aren’t they killing us?” John asked.

“I think they wait to see if we have any more surprises. Then again, they may just be toying with us.”

“All around them, see, there was thousands and thousands of these knights on horses. And they all had spears pointed at them three fellas.”

John’s sense of detachment from reality was beginning to fade. Which really sucked. Even Isra’s voice was stilled. Exhaustion had overcome her. For the first time since that dramatic evening in his mother’s L.A. home, he was alone. I should be with Kate, he thought, picturing her face, her smile. I never had a chance to say good-bye. “Snowblind,” he croaked. “You couldn’t, like—”

He had his eyes closed but somehow felt her headshake. “What’s the military term for lots and lots of vehicles?”

He sighed. “A shitload.”

“There’s a shitload of Nigerians, John. They are all around us.”

“So anyway,” Buford said, “this fella with the big chest and big old shoulders, he’s saying to his pals, ‘Don’t worry, boys. They can’t stop men who want to be free!’ ”

He laughed and laughed. “Kill me now,” John said.

“Be careful what you ask for,” Simone said. “Their gun barrels are zeroing in on us.”

John wondered if their deaths would make the evening news. Back home, the second season of American Hero was the most watched show in America. The fighting in Nigeria made page six in the Times, maybe. The only news crew on the scene was the one from China. It’s just Africa, he thought bitterly. No one cares. “Help me,” he said. Simone lifted his head and scooted a knee under it to support it. Which he needed; it weighed at least a ton. No question the gunners in the tanks were tuning up their aim. “I guess the douche bags’re just gonna smoke us—”

Down from the sky speared a shaft of white light. It transfixed the middle MBT like a pin through a bug. It was so bright it cast shadows on the dunes.

The tank erupted in blue-white fire.

Another sunbeam stabbed down, another.

Another.

Each left a pyre blazing on the sand.

Big diesel engines growled. The Nigerian armor began to mill. Main guns probed the air, seeking targets.

A man landed on a tank’s front glacis. A white man with shaggy golden hair. A man who laughed. He grabbed the main gun, heaved. The whole multiton turret came right up out of the well. Grunting, he threw it end over end through the air. It smashed down on top of another tank, dented in its turret. Yellow fire enveloped both as their ammo stowage went up.

From twenty meters away another tank fired at him. It couldn’t miss. Yet somehow he still stood, laughing.

“Shell went right through him,” Buford said. “Pretty fine trick, you ask me.”

The man stretched out his hand. Red flame lanced from the palm. It shot down the gun barrel and gushed out of the breech, which the loader had opened to receive a fresh shell.

The shell blew up. So did all the others.

Just like fucking that, one tank remained. It churned away as fast as its treads would carry it, throwing up a great bow wave of sand. The infantry and lesser vehicles had already fled. Simba armored vehicles fired after them, over the heads of the three Committee aces. They didn’t try to pursue.

“You have got to be shitting me,” John Fortune said. “Tell me I’m hallucinating.” Maybe they would live to see another day after all. Kate, he thought.

Somehow his companions heard his feeble croak above all the explosions. “It’s the Radical,” Snowblind said. “Ce n’est pas possible. But it is him.”

Tom Weathers vanished. Reappeared at once, ten feet from John and a yard in the air. He landed a little unsteadily, walked forward a couple steps.

“Whew,” he said. “Takes it right out of you. But I’ll get my second wind in a minute. Then we’ll get it on.”

Somehow John remembered his duty. “Leave it, Weathers,” he said. “It’s good to have you back. But you’re part of a team, now. Just chill with us. We’ll sort things out.”

Smiling, Weathers shook his head. “That’s a big no-can-do, Mr. Establishment Man. It’s time to deal out some revolutionary justice.”

He vanished.

“How does he do that?” John asked the air.

A Simba infantry squad came down the dune. Their tall, turbaned Sikh officer shouted for medics. Dark hands propped John to a sitting position and held a canteen to his torn lips. Simone got up and went to stand next to Buford.

Away across the dunes, white light flashed against the sky like distant lightning. A black smoke stalk sprang up in response. A moment later, a rumble reached John’s ears. Another flare lit the sky. “I got me a bad feelin’ about this,” Buford says. “Never seen a feller look so crazy.”

Snowblind crossed her arms and leaned against him. “What he said,” she said.

Tom burned through energy like a drunk playboy’s bankroll in a Monte Carlo casino. But all he had to do was land and breathe for a few minutes. Then he was good to go again.

It was as if killing these running-dog colonial lackeys recharged him.

He leapt into the sky, seeking more lives to take. A mile ahead he saw a sizable village. As he approached, climbing for a clearer look, he saw fleeing Nigerian armor had locked the narrow streets up tight.

He smiled like the Angel of Death. And swept downward like a scythe.

Noisily Simone barfed over the side of the Land Rover.

Around them smoldered the ruins of a murdered town. The stench was as thick as the flies. The flies were thick as monsoon rain.

“There must be hundreds dead here,” John Fortune said. He wasn’t feeling so good himself.

The Lama floated by the car. “One thousand,” he said.

A reserve Simba column had routed the Nigerians raiding the base camp where the Lama’s body had sat in lotus while his spirit did its astral scout thing. Without Butcher Dagon to back them they didn’t put up much fight. Another Wolf and some intact Brazilian peacekeepers had been found. They drove the Lama up with Brave Hawk flying top cover to pick up their comrades.

The team followed Tom Weathers’s wake of massacre. To his crowning horror.

Simone had quit puking. Now she sobbed. “How could he do this?”

“His power,” John Fortune said. He shook his head. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. Like nothing I could’ve imagined.”

“I didn’t mean that,” the young woman said. “I meant, how could he do so horrible a thing? It’s worse than what happened in that village. A hundred times worse.”

John could only shake his head some more. He had no words. In the seat behind him Buford muttered under his breath. John could only make out the words “terrible bad.”

“Why the long faces, children?”

They all looked up. The taunting voice came from ahead and above.

Tom Weathers hung thirty feet in the air. He descended slowly to stand before them with hands on jeans-clad hips.

Anger boiled up inside John. “What the hell did you think you were doing here?” he shouted.

“I told you. Dealing out revolutionary justice.”

“But these poor villagers,” Simone said. “You killed them. You killed civilians.”

He shrugged. “They were collaborators anyway. They had it coming.”

John almost released Sekhmet again. But he was held together by duct tape as it was. And more than for himself, he feared that if he let the Destroyer out now, she’d prove no more discriminating than Tom Weathers had. “You’re a war criminal, Weathers,” he said. “That’s the only way to say it.”

“What? When colonialists bomb or shell neighborhoods full of indigenous people you call it ‘collateral damage.’ What makes this worse?”

“Just because others do it doesn’t make it right,” Simone said.

“I cannot believe what a bunch of posers you are!” Weathers yelled. “Bourgeois phonies. You come here saying, ‘Long live the Revolution,’ all that dorm-room shit. But when it comes down to hitting the barricades, man, when it all gets real, you can’t fucking take it.”

“This wasn’t revolution,” Simone told her fallen idol. There was no heat in her voice. No life at all. Verbal flatline. “It was murder.”

Weathers sneered. “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

Buford gripped John’s arm. “It’s all over here, Mr. Fortune,” he said. “This is a bad place. Let’s go home.”

“Yeah,” John said. “It is over. We’re not part of this.”

“Yeah!” Tom flared at them with wild hateful laughter. “Your work here is done, right? And I did it for you. Now you want to run on home. Run, then.

“You’re all fucking fascists. Just like the rest of them.”

Standing amid the devastation he had created, the Radical watched them drive away. His chest pumped like bellows. His stomach was a surging chaos of nausea. He had spent himself unimaginably. Soon his body would pay the price.

He gave it no thought. What he thought was, There, Meadows, you simpering hippie fuck. That’s what I think of your peace-and-love horse shit.

“This is all for you, man,” he said aloud. “All for you.

“I hope you fucking like it.”

“Why are we here?” Chen asked. He clutched his heavy camera to his chest like a teddy bear.

“No idea.”

Hei-lian glanced around the helipad next to the palace. A crowd had gathered. Wide-eyed, Sprout stuck close to her. She had panicked when Leopard Men came to escort them brusquely here.

So had Hei-lian, almost.

“Look,” Hong said. “It’s Nshombo. And his sister.”

“Are they going to shoot us?” Chen asked in Mandarin.

“I don’t think they’d have had you bring your gear,” Hei-lian said. “Since they did, you’d best start shooting. Something’s going on.”

“Hei-lian?” Sprout asked in a small voice.

Quick headshake. “No idea, honey,” she said. “Just stay close.”

She saw the young healer-ace, Dolores. She stood between Nshombo and Alicia, dressed in gleaming white. Her face shone as if with inner radiance.

Someone shouted. Pointed to the sky. Everyone looked up.

A hundred voices gasped. A pale-skinned, golden-haired man floated above their heads. He raised a fist.

“Vive la Révolution!” shouted Tom Weathers. “Vive Dr. Kitengi Nshombo!”

“Long live Mokèlé-mbèmbé,” roared a claque of Leopard Men.

To mad cheering, Tom descended from the sky. Palace guards in powder-blue uniforms held the mob at bay as he swapped handshakes with Nshombo and an embrace with his sister.

Sprout hit him at a run. He laughed and kissed away her tears.

He turned to give Hei-lian a big grin as she approached. She was too stunned to talk for the benefit of the microphone she’d clipped to her shirt collar moments before.

“Sorry to scare you like that,” he said. “But we had to keep things secret. We wanted to spring a little surprise on the imperialists.”

She flung arms around his neck and kissed him deeply. Then she stepped back.

“Why are you still alive?”

Dolores was suddenly by his side. Still holding Sprout in one arm he slipped the other around the Congolese girl.

“She healed me,” he said. “She’s the real heroine.”

He turned and kissed her on the forehead as camera flashes flickered.

Hei-lian wondered why she felt so hollow.