George Martin - Busted flush

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 Mokele-mbembe 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.