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.
Isra told him.
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 muc
h 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.
“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.
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 he
r 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.