Jon Grimwood - Effendi

Try mixing that . . . Avatar didn’t doubt that he would, should he ever get back to his decks alive.

Stepping out from behind a pillar, Avatar raised his rifle and aimed at the nearest man. All the soldier had to rely on was equipment. Avatar had emptiness.

He pulled the trigger and felt his rifle buck. A second blip and the man behind tried to step forward on a shattered knee, only to stumble, pitching sideways as the remaining leg slid out from under him.

No prisoners.

Avatar walked forward and sighted along the barrel of his Taurus. The fallen figure shrinking into the deck, shoulders hunching as instinct kicked in and the man’s body curled up to protect its vital organs from attack. Instinct based on millennia of experience. Instinct that hadn’t yet adapted to guns.

Revolver in hand, Avatar crouched down and saw the figure flinch. The buckle at the side of the man’s mask was a simple ceramic affair, tinted black as not to catch the light, the helmet’s strap a fat strip of neoprene stitched to the lining. There were electrodes attached directly to the scalp of the person wearing the mask, though their purpose was uncertain.

Not that Avatar gave them much thought. He was much too busy staring into the pale blue eyes of a girl little older than he. Her broad face was set into something Avatar recognized instantly as acceptance. She still thought he meant to kill her.

As if he’d first bother to remove her mask. Except Avatar wasn’t sure why he’d done that; unless, because it was the kind of thing Raf might have done? Certainly not because Avatar expected to find some blonde Soviet corn-daughter hidden underneath.

And she was Soviet. No other Army in Europe used women in frontline combat. A Soviet Spetsnaz ranger on an ex-Soviet liner come face-to-face with some Delta street bastard.

“Not even full Delta,” muttered Avatar to himself. Maybe half-Abyssinian or Danakil. It was hard to know. If a mug shot did exist of his mother, it was probably in the files of the UN or the Red Cross, along with blood type and a tissue sample.

“What a fucking mess.”

Some flicker of recognition in the blue eyes watching him told Avatar that the wounded girl had logged the meaning, half-recognizing his tone in what passed for consciousness amid all that endocrine stink of hope and fear.

And all the while, unanswered questions, mute but frantic, hissed from within the empty mask Avatar now held in his hand. They spilled out in a language he didn’t understand, from a world he understood even less.

“Give me your rifle . . .” Avatar kept his own words simple. And though she didn’t understand them, she followed his gaze until she saw what he saw and knew what he meant. But her hands remained white at the knuckle where they held her weapon tight to her body, one finger curled around the trigger and less than a shudder away from smashing her other knee, because that’s where the muzzle pointed.

“Come on.”

A bullet to her head would have been Colonel Abad’s solution, Avatar realized that, as he waited impatiently for the girl to process his demand and reach her decision. And in combat terms the Colonel was probably right. Of course, if she did something stupid, then that would be Avatar’s solution too . . . But all the girl did was uncurl slightly and push her gun away from her, leaving it to Avatar to kick the rifle away across the metal floor. Then he smiled apologetically and stamped on her good ankle, to cripple her other leg as well.

Once, just once, Avatar thought he might have seen his mother. Standing at the gates of St. Luke’s and staring intently through the ancient wrought-iron bars at neatly uniformed children who kicked a plastic football across melting tarmac or tried to dunk basketballs through a single hoop screwed to a classroom wall.

She looked old to him, but was probably not. A thin face peering from the folds of her heavy hijab. Her eyes had scanned the playground’s movement, seeking a point of silence. And the gaze she met was his. He was the one she watched, with a hunger so open it sent one of the sisters across the playground to find out who she was and what she wanted . . .

Avatar put a bullet through the head of a soldier standing guard outside the old bank vault. A single shot fired through the slightly open door. The Spetsnaz should have relocked the safe after sending the others through. Except she couldn’t, obviously enough, not with all the ship’s systems down.

In reply, Avatar took a slug through his left arm that ripped up muscle and exited at the back. Only Avatar was so cold he hardly felt the blow and was too busy killing the first guard’s partner to notice the blood that stained the canvas of his makeshift jacket.

Two left, maybe one. Up on deck, where Avatar needed to be.

His mother was gone by the time Avatar brought his thoughts back to the long-forgotten and dusty playground. Gone from his memory and from the tall gates before Sister Carlotta even made it across the sticky tarmac.

Up ahead were more stairs and sunlight.

Flicking out the cylinder of his Taurus, Avatar discarded the dead brass and speed-loaded another seven rounds. His borrowed rifle already had a full clip.

“It’s paradise . . .” Hani’s excitement filled the upper tier of the library, echoing off the inside of the giant pyramid to get lost among the books that lined row after row of shelves.

“Hani!”

“It is,” she insisted. “Paradise. Jannah . . .”

Madame Syria stared up, towards the highest of the mezzanine floors where a small girl who shouldn’t have been in the library in the first place, leant dangerously over a rail, while simultaneously pointing behind herself towards a dark shape on the horizon.

The SS Jannah had the classic profile for a great liner, a stepped ziggurat of cabins and suites rising high above the main deck along both sides, with the captain’s bridge jutting from the ziggurat’s front, like steel-and-glass flukes on a hammerhead shark. At the rear, a glass casino was suspended podlike between tall towers. Everything aboard the ship was white, apart from the main deck, which was planted with a long promenade of palm trees and manicured lawn.

That the huge hull had originally belonged to a Soviet factory ship was a fact remembered only by nautical fanatics, shipping enthusiasts, Koenig Pasha and Hani.

“Look!” The girl practically screamed the word.

“Hani!” Madame Syria was torn between outrage and undisguised fear that the governor’s niece might tumble over the edge to the marble floor far below.

“Look,” insisted Hani.

The chief librarian did what she was told, impressed despite herself. She’d only seen the SS Jannah once before, as a girl, when the trimaran from Iskandryia to Syracuse had throttled back to let its passengers watch as the great liner cruised by.

“We’ve got to tell Uncle Ashraf,” Hani shouted, already halfway down the first flight of stairs. “Really, we must . . .”

“Uncle . . .” No matter how often Madame Syria heard the child refer to the new governor of El Iskandryia by that name, it still seemed disrespectful. But then the child was his niece and a mesdame so . . .

Lady Hana bint-Abdullah al-Mansur, better known as Hani, hit the bottom of the stairs and grabbed the middle-aged woman by the hand, practically dragging her across the pink marble floor towards the exit.

“Paradise,” yelled Hani. “It’s almost here.” She’d shouted her message so often from the back of a calèche that her voice was now raw.

“What?”

“Paradise. The SS Jannah, ” said Hani, her face split in a grin. “It’s true. Go on, tell her,” Hani insisted, turning to Madame Syria. The librarian stared at Zara, then glanced over Zara’s shoulder to a study door opening beyond.