The boys he'd hired to watch his motorcycle sprang to their feet at his approach. "We guard good," announced Tut. His brother Gamel just held out a hand. Klaus dug a euro from his jeans. It was too much, but he felt sorry for the boys who had lost their mother to the knives of Ikhlas al-Din.
When he kicked the stand back and fired the ignition, the engine coughed and smoked before it caught. The bike was a fifty-year-old Royal Enfield that Sobek had sold him for seven times its worth. Every time he rode it, Klaus found himself pining for the R1200S sports bike that his sponsors at BMW had presented to him when he had signed to be their spokesman. He loved the deep, throaty growl the Boxer engine made when he gunned it down the autobahn in the fast lane.
His BMW was in Munich though, and so he sat astride this relic with its bald tires, flaking green paint, and an exhaust pipe that looked to be made of solid rust. The bike's gas gauge was broken, too, stuck somewhere just above empty even when the tank was freshly filled. I am running on fumes, he thought. Klaus prayed that it would be enough to take him through the hills, and down into the Valley of the Queens.
"You get them, Lohengrin!" Tut shouted, as Klaus fed some fumes to the engine. "You kill them good!"
Over ground like this, he dare not push the Royal Enfield too hard. Even at a sprinter's pace it rattled so badly that he feared it might shake itself to pieces before he reached John Fortune. A nimbus of white light played about his head, took form, became a warhelm with a narrow eye slit and swan's wings sprouting from the temples. A motorcyle helmet it was not, but Klaus had faith that the ghost steel would protect him in a spill.
Turning west and south, he wove a crooked path through the squalor of the camp, bouncing past the hulk of an abandoned school bus where a dozen families now were living. Behind the bus, the carcass of a dog was turning over a cookfire that stank of burning camel dung. A cloud of wasps trailed after Klaus, glimmering and winking in the sunlight. A joker whose face had sprouted dozens of small heads threw a rock at them as they went by, and a dark-eyed woman with a child at her breast gave Klaus a lingering look, as if to say, You are not one of us. What are you doing here?
Some nights Klaus would ask that selfsame question as he twisted in his sleeping bag on the hard ground, wondering if that was a scorpion crawling up his leg or just another of Jonathan's wasps. Barbarossa would mock at him for coming here, he knew, and most of the other aces of the Reichsbanner would consider him a fool. He had thought to find in them a modern Round Table, where heroes broke bread together and talked of righting wrong, but the only wrong they wished to right involved their tax rates. "You expected more, ja?" Barbarossa said afterward, when he and Klaus escaped the feast for a beer garden in Heidelberg's student quarter. "You are young. You will learn. It is all cartels and sponsors now. Mighty Euro and Mighty Dollar are more powerful than any ace on earth. They own us, ja."
"Not me," Klaus had insisted. "My honor is not for sale."
Barbarossa pinched his cheek. "Keep your honor. It's your smile they will buy, your big blue eyes and pale blond hair, and these apple cheeks of yours."
He was right, and I was wrong. His first endorsement had been a local dairy that offered him five hundred euros to say their milk helped him grow up big and strong. Klaus had resisted at first, but his mother said he should do it for the children, that milk was good for children, and maybe they could go as high as a thousand euros. That was a lot of money, so Klaus drank the milk and smiled for the cameras. Other endorsements followed, until finally he signed with an agent and she brought him BMW. He loved his motorcycle, and loved the freedom that fame and money brought him, but sometimes at night he still felt like a fraud, no different from the hollow heroes of the Reichsbanner, who took adulation as their due but never did a thing to earn it. Yet, what had he done since Neuschwanstein? Nothing but smile and sign "Lohengrin" on pictures of himself. That was no life for an ace, or for a knight. There was no honor in it.
The road wound back and forth as it made its way through the hills down into the valley known as Biban al-Harim, where the tombs of eighty ancient Egyptian queens were sunk into the dry and stony soil. Klaus was banking round a curve and wondering how long his fuel would last when he heard the sound of gunfire ahead.
Jackals, was his first and only thought. That was the name that Jonathan had given to the rabble of Ikhlas al-Din, the Muslim fundamentalists who had been swept to victory in Egypt's last election. It was not enough for them to drive the Living Gods and their worshippers from their homes. All the long way south, they had continued to hound the refugees, raiding their camps, picking off stragglers, even burning villages and poisoning wells along the way to deny them water, food, and fuel.
Even here, Klaus thought grimly, even now. Pale light danced around him, hardened, became breastplate, greaves, gorget, gauntlets. He leaned into a turn and accelerated, pushing the old motorbike as fast as it would go, and leaving Jonathan's wasps well behind. A little farther on, he came upon a woman clutching her child by the hand as blood streamed down her face. She flinched at his approach, and Klaus did not have the time to set her fears at ease. He screamed past her, his armor shining. The gunfire grew louder, staccato bursts that echoed off the hills. He could hear other sounds as well, shouts and screams, the roar of some great beast and the chudder of a helicopter's rotors.
The jackals had no helicopters. The army, Klaus thought, the army has moved in to stop them. For a moment he was relieved.
When the valley opened up before him, Klaus hit his brakes and swerved to a sudden halt in a spray of dust and pebbles. He let his helm dissolve for a moment to give himself a better view, but even so, it took him a long moment to understand what he was seeing. The camp down there was much smaller than the one by the colossi, and half of it was in flames, rag tents and cardboard shacks alike sending up greasy pillars of smoke into the sky. A truck was burning, too, a large flatbed with a green canvas awning. Corpses littered the ground. Through the smoke he saw armed men moving, dim shapes with automatic rifles in their hands. He heard rifles chattering, a woman wailing. Above it all the helicoper moved, firing at something on the ground.
Some of the wounded had rushed toward the nearest of the ancient tombs and were trying to tear down its steel scissors gate to seek refuge inside. Klaus saw three men appear behind them and open up, raking the refugees with bullets. Their bodies danced and jerked under the impacts, like marionettes gone mad.
And then the lioness appeared. Even from a distance she was huge, larger than a pony, almost as big as the draft horses that pulled his father's wagon up the mountain. Flame swirled from her jaws as she leapt onto the soldiers. Two fell screaming, wreathed in fire. The third she opened from throat to crotch, tearing at his intestines until the helicopter's shadow fell across them. Then she whirled to leap, but the copter was beyond her reach. Klaus saw her hammered to the ground by a stream of machine gun fire, heard her roar of pain, saw the bullets kicking up dust all around her as she turned and raced away.
Jackals do not have helicopters. Through the smoke and dust, Klaus could see the uniforms, patterned in the tan-and-dun of desert camouflage. Not jackals. Those are soldiers. It is the Egyptian army doing this. This time he would not be facing paint-ball guns, or the cheap Czech pistols of the Bavarian Freedom Front. The jackals had always fled before him after a perfunctory shot or two, but these men were trained and disciplined, and there looked to be a lot of them. But none with my armor.
At Peenemunde, the scientists had argued for months about the nature of that armor. Doktor Fuchs theorized that it was made of coherent light, Doktor Alpers suspected quantum particles, and Doktor Hahn coined the term "hardened ectoplasm." Klaus did not understand half of what they said, so he went on calling it ghost steel. Even after six months of study, the scientists still could not say with certainty whether it was made of energy or matter, but their tests did show that it was impervious to knives, axes, bullets, flamethrowers, acid, shrapnel, lightning bolts, and everything else that they could find to throw at him. The Egyptian soldiers were not nearly as well-armed as the good doktors. There was nothing they could do to harm him.