A globe of yellow flame obscured Monster’s stomach. The under-lighting flare would have made his features demonic if they hadn’t already been. He stopped.

Then he smiled. And grew a foot.

“Shit,” Carnifex said.

“Fuck,” said Crypt Kicker, who wasn’t impressed by much.

“Shitfuck,” Carnifex added.

The impact had at least rocked Monster back on his heels. He took a step back, braced. “Bastard sure is hung, isn’t he?” Casaday remarked to no one in particular.

The tank commander stood his ground. He was no candy-ass Annamese or Cochin Chinese. He was a Northerner, proud, tough and hard as socialist steel. He grabbed the handles of the heavy 12.7mm roof gun and sent a stream of green tracers arcing at the giant beast, aiming for the eyes.

The thumb-sized bullets bothered Monster no more than a swarm of gnats. He held out his clawed hands, made fists. Lightning squeezed out between his fingers and struck the tank.

Wreathed in sparks, the tank commander threw his arms in the air as the enormous current fired his neurons for him. Then the remaining thirty-eight rounds of main-gun ammo cooked off at once. The turret flew into the air on a column of blue-white flame. The men on the temple steps cringed as it crashed smoking to the ground beside the building.

The Monster threw back his head and laughed.

J. Robert Belew sat with his arms crossed on the wheel of his blacked-out GAZ jeep and stared. “Well, I’ll be dipped,” he said softly.

The PAVN infantryman the FULRO patrol had picked up while trying to work its way to the temple had told the truth. A rotary-wing squadron had set up an impromptu base in a bean-field seven klicks from the ambush site. Four shark-like Mi-28 Havoc attack choppers sat in the hard shine of generator-powered spots, their motors turning over, their rotors sweeping lazy circles. Soviet-bloc doctrine notwithstanding, this band was tuning up for a little night music.

There had been no way to reach the temple, especially when the tanks put in their appearance. Mark would have to fend for himself, if he still happened to be alive. The priority now was to try to keep the core of the rebel army intact under attack by at least a division of PAVN armor.

Belew had ordered the men to scatter in the woods. The rebels were probably outnumbered, certainly outgunned. Evasion was their best defense, as it always was. Because the People’s Army was well equipped with antitank rockets in various shapes and sizes, the rebels were too – they stole them, bought them, or received them from deserters, the way God intended guerrillas should be armed. If they could just melt into the woods and fields, the rebels could not only survive, they might even lay some hurt on their enemies. The key was having enough time to break into cover.

Belew was looking to help buy them that time.

The eagle-headed joker Osprey and the other NJB deserters had given Belew grief. Mark was one of their own. They were determined to wade through however many of their former comrades and PAVN troopies lay between them and him.

The unmistakable sounds of tanks on the prod had changed their minds for them. To the untrained, tanks are totally terrifying, vast prehistoric beasts, deadly and invulnerable.

As a matter of fact a man afoot, in the dark, in vegetation, had it all over a tank; the beast couldn’t see him. If he were cunning – or had a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, or even your clichйd pop-bottle-o’-gas, he could take the offensive. Belew just didn’t tell them that. Shuffling their feet with the guilt of their self-assumed cowardice, the erstwhile New Joker Brigaders joined the exodus from the derelict plantation.

The engine whine’s timbre changed, rising, becoming more insistent. The squad had gotten the word to move.

There are two ways to get someplace where you don’t belong. You can sneak. Or you can just cruise on in as if you had all the business in the world there.

Belew let out the clutch and drove, fast enough to come on like a Man in a Hurry, not fast enough to look like a charging foe.

As the armorers checked the weaponry slung beneath the Havocs’ stub wings, Belew drove up right alongside the nearest ship. The hustling ground crew barely spared him a glance; they recognized the Gestalt of one of their own jeeps, and they had more important things on their mind than brass coming out to kiss the brave People’s Flyboys ’bye.

The pilot looked out his still-open side hatch and saw a pale, square face. His thick-gauntleted hand fumbled for his sidearm.

Belew quick-drew his Para Ordnance and shot the pilot twice in the chest. The ground crew fled as he vaulted out of the jeep, ran to the chopper to drag the dying pilot out.

The gunner turned a blank visor toward Belew from his station in the nose. Belew gestured with the handgun. The gunner was brave but not stupid. He climbed on out and ran. Sensing what was about to happen, he ran hard.

Holstering his 10mm, Belew slid into the pilot’s seat. He tore the bandages off his left hand, pressed it palm down onto the helicopter’s console, and slashed off his budding new fingers. Then he pressed the spurting stumps against the cool metal.

“Ahh,” he said, as his soul entered the metal. There was nothing better than the feel of fusion with a fine machine. It was better than sex.

Well, almost.

J. Robert Belew was a pronounced polymath. But piloting was not among his many skills. With his hands on the controls he could no more fly the Havoc than he could fly by flapping his arms.

But he wasn’t the pilot now. He was the helicopter.

He sped the spinning of his rotor and leapt lightly into the air. Changing the pitch of his blades, he tipped his nose forward, began to slide slowly forward.

Suspecting nothing, the ship to his right touched off. He swung his chin gun right and blew him from the sky with a burst of 12.7, Magnanimous in his exaltation, he hovered then, permitting the crews of the two craft still on the ground to bail out and escape. Then he destroyed the choppers.

He rose up in the sky, then, a circle-winged hawk of plastic and steel and incipient fire, hungering for prey.

Chapter Fifty

Monster stood above his opponent’s pyre, raising triumphant arms to the sky.

Crypt Kicker stood for a moment, seeming to contemplate the creature. Then he put his head down and charged.

He struck the being’s shin and bounced. He didn’t have the mass to cut its leg from beneath it. Monster stopped his joyous bellowing and gazed curiously down.

Crypt Kicker braced his legs and heaved. With a squall of surprised fury the Monster toppled backward into the trees.

The earth shook. Crypt Kicker turned back to face the temple, dusting his hands together as if to say, “Now, that wasn’t so hard.”

“Don’t get carried away, you dumb son of a bitch!” Carnifex shouted. He pointed.

Monster was rising, vengeful, from the woods. His eyes blazed like yellow spotlights.

Crypt Kicker turned. A giant clawed foot was poised above him.

The foot came down. It slammed on the ground with jarring finality.

“Sweet Mother Mary,” Whitelaw breathed. “The poor sod.”

“What’s it matter?” Carnifex said. “He was dead anyway.” Whitelaw gaped at him in dismay.

Monster turned his blazing eyes toward the temple. The little group turned and bolted into the building, ricocheting off one another. Except Carnifex, who ran around the side.

Monster shrieked. It was a sound like the sky being split in two. He jumped aside, clutching the foot he’d dropped on Crypt Kicker. The sole was smoking.

Crypt Kicker rose from the redneck-shaped impression he had made in the earth. By the woods the soil was spongy with mulch.