A wicked smile carved his chapped lips the instant before he pulled the trigger.
The explosion was deafening. The driver jerked the wheel in time with the recoil and the Land Rover skidded sideways. A simultaneous eruption of red burst beside the speeding vehicle. Thick bright blood splattered the dusty hood and windshield. Chunks of warm kangaroo bits splashed the young driver's bare arms and knees.
Robbie MacGulry grinned delightedly. "Woo-hoo!" he screamed. "Bagged the bugger!" His rugged face was flecked with blood. His shoulder ached where the gun's padded stock had hammered the joint.
As the billionaire media mogul wiped blood on the sleeve of his bush jacket, his driver struggled to keep from vomiting up the poached eggs and Foster's beer he'd had for breakfast.
MacGulry whooped a wicked, snorting laugh as the driver regained control of the Land Rover. They raced back up alongside the thundering mob.
The kangaroos had shifted direction. The panicked animals were tiring. Mouths foamed, noses twitched as the Land Rover pulled abreast.
One doomed animal was so close MacGulry could have reached out and scratched it behind its furry ears.
MacGulry brought the gun barrel within an inch of the kangaroo's gray head and pulled the trigger.
As the latest explosion rang out, Robbie MacGulry whooped with joy.
"Gotcha, ya bastard!" MacGulry screamed.
In the side mirror, the driver glimpsed the dead kangaroo. The animal was suddenly something from another planet-all feet and tail. The head had been shot clean off. A ragged chunk of torso was missing, as well. One limp arm hung in grisly red strips.
Robbie MacGulry grinned at his driver. Flecks of sticky wet blood stained his big white teeth. The smile suddenly collapsed into a scowl.
"Here! What the hell ahh you doing!" MacGulry yelled as his driver puked on the dashboard. "Sorry, sir," the young man gurgled. He was trying to hold in the vomit with one hand while driving with the other.
"What ahh you, some kind of Greenpeace pooftah? It's just blood." MacGulry ran his tongue across his teeth, licking off the sticky red film. "See?"
The man did see. He saw his boss lapping up blood like a ghoul, and he saw thick chunks of furry gray flesh stuck to his own knees and then he saw last night's supper joining breakfast on the dashboard of the Land Rover.
The driver's hands fled the wheel and he slammed on the brakes. Chucking clouds of dust, the Land Rover skidded to a spinning stop.
Sensing salvation, the kangaroos cut off in another direction. In a haze of hot dust and pounding feet, they hopped to freedom across the vast plain.
MacGulry's eyes grew wide with rage. Raw fury knotted his wrinkled face. Baring pink-stained teeth, he was contemplating swinging the barrel of his gun to the driver's head when his dashboard-mounted phone buzzed to life.
The media giant exhaled angrily. "You're fired," he growled, flinging the gun into the back of the truck.
Dropping into his seat, MacGulry snatched up the receiver, flicking off bits of kangaroo flesh. "What?" he demanded.
There was only a handful of people on Earth with access to this private number. The voice on the phone was clipped and obsequious. Very professional and very, very British.
"Mr. MacGulry, sir, I hate to bother you, but it's important."
"What's wrong?" MacGulry pulled the phone away before the caller could answer.
"Stop puking, ya underdaks-wearing bastard! If you're gonna be crook, do it in the dunny!"
The driver looked around for a dunny. The prairie was vast. No outhouses in sight.
"Nature's dunny, idiot," MacGulry snarled.
The driver understood. Climbing from the truck, he went over and puked in the dirt.
"What is it?" MacGulry growled into the phone. The caller picked his words carefully.
"There is someone-that is to say, there's something here you should see, sir. At once."
Like all News Company employees-which was the corporate umbrella under which virtually all of Robbie MacGulry's businesses existed-the caller knew enough not to waste his employer's time. The Englishman was being vague for a reason. MacGulry sighed hotly.
"I'll be back quick as a can," he grumbled. He slammed the receiver back into its cradle.
MacGulry sat there for a long moment, staring at the bleak horizon.
The kangaroos were a distant cloud of hopping dust. He pulled off his glasses, blowing dirt off the thick lenses.
"Bastard," he whispered so softly even the wind failed to hear. Had someone been there to hear, they would have gotten the clear impression MacGulry was talking about neither the Englishman on the phone nor his incompetent driver.
MacGulry glanced to his right. His driver was still doubled over. The young man seemed to be almost finished.
Quietly, MacGulry slid over behind the wheel. When he started the engine and stomped on the gas, his driver had to jump out of the way to avoid the lurching Land Rover.
The media tycoon floored it and cut the wheel. When he zoomed back the way they'd come, he could see his panicked driver waving helplessly from within a cloud of beige dust.
"Teach you for ruining my day off, mate!" Robbie MacGulry yelled.
The vehicle sped across the endless plain, away from the distant looming mountains of the Great Dividing Range.
THREE HOURS LATER-showered, shaved and dressed in an impeccably tailored Bond Street two-piece blueblack suit-Robbie MacGulry stormed into the main production facility of his Wollongong, New South Wales television station.
South of Sydney, the Wollongong station was small compared to others in his globe-straddling television empire, but it was the one closest to his main home. If Robbie MacGulry had a heart, Wollongong would have been the one nearest and dearest to it.
Wollongong was the first TV station he'd ever owned. Although off the beaten path of his global media empire, an uncharacteristic lapse into sentimentality by its owner made it the flagship of his entire entertainment empire.
Banks of television screens lined up like unblinking eyes above dozens of computerized stations all around the production room. A visitor might have mistaken the facility for a space-shuttle control room if not for the images on the screens. On most of the monitors, a yellow-headed cartoon family was sliding around an icy parking lot. The cartoon was one of the most popular shows in the decade-plus history of MacGulry's American television network.
"You better not have called me back here to watch bloody cartoons!" MacGulry roared.
The men in the room wheeled on the booming voice. As the rest resumed working double-time, one hurried over to Robbie MacGulry.
"I'm sorry again for disturbing you, sir. I presumed you'd want to see something we received from America."
Rodney Adler was as English as frigid women and warm beer. It seemed as if the very act of speech pained his perpetually locked jaw.
MacGulry only liked the British as employees, and even then he didn't care for them very much. As a people, he'd always considered them to be condescending nitpickers whose sole joy in life was to piss in the party's punch bowl. His dream was to amass a big enough fortune to buy the British Isles and order the entire population to march off the bloody White Cliffs of Dover.
The billionaire followed Adler to one of the stations. There were two nervous men seated before it. MacGulry dropped into the empty swivel chair between them.
"We have been monitoring the situation in Harlem," Adler said, "per your instructions."
"I don't need to be reminded of my orders," MacGulry growled. "Stop wasting my time and get to the point."
Adler nodded crisply. "Sorry, sir," he said. He had one of the seated men insert a big black videotape into the slot on the face of the monitor station.
"I can't be completely certain at this point, mind you," Adler said. "But I believe we've found what you were looking for. Or, rather, who."