“Get a move on!” he shouted. “Bogie vehicle approaching at speed!”

Whitman handed Sandofur up to him, and he began to climb back up into the helo. Flix winced as he dragged himself onto the ladder. Whitman launched him upward, then followed. A livid glow in the darkness of the night began to grow in both size and clarity. The armored vehicle was almost upon them.

Whitman pushed Flix, but his wounded shoulder had stalled his ascent. Clambering over him, Whitman reached back, clasped his left hand, and hauled him upward.

Below them, the armored car appeared out of the gloom, hulking and huge. Its machine guns swiveled around. A burst cut through the bottom of the rope ladder, pieces of it flying everywhere. Then return fire started up from the helo. Whitman at last gained the aircraft. The instant he hauled Flix inside, the helo shot upward like an arrow piercing the blackness of the heavens as it vanished from view.

PART ONE

FULL ASSEMBLY REQUIRED

Modern science is an incredibly demonic enterprise.

—Terence McKenna
on alchemy and Renaissance magic

1

“A mess,” King Cutler was saying.

“A mess?” Whitman echoed. “It’s a goddamned clusterfuck, is what it is.”

Cutler watched Whitman with the eyes of a tiger, green and glittering. His torso, tense and leaning slightly forward, gave him the aspect of someone about to rend anyone who opposed him limb from limb. “Seiran el-Habib was an extremely high-risk target, even for you guys.”

“And that’s another thing,” Whitman said, heatedly. “There are no ‘you guys,’ not anymore. Sandy is dead and Flix just got out of surgery. Red Rover is dead, gone, finished, kaput.”

“Flix will be fine.” Cutler struggled to maintain an even tone in the face of Whitman’s rage and pessimism. “They got the bullet without any difficulty. No bones involved. With our accelerated PT program he’ll be as good as new in a week, ten days at the outside.”

“And what about Sandy? Will he be good as new? Are you going to resurrect him?”

Cutler made a disgusted noise in the back of his throat. They were seated opposite each other in Cutler’s office, which had the look of a room in a gentleman’s club rather than an office. Paneled in gleaming mahogany, its myriad shelves were filled with books on military history and biographies of great generals and admirals going all the way back to Alexander the Great. Only one anomaly appeared in the room, and it was a doozy: an enormous flat-screen TV set into the wall opposite a massive tiger-oak desk, on which played an endless rotation of scenes of battle zones from across the globe, images from closed-circuit and drone cameras, exclusive to Universal Security Associates.

“I know you’ve got your team to consider, Gregory, but I have to take in the big picture.”

“Which is what? What’s more important than one of your men being shot dead?”

“The president.” Cutler stared at his flat-panel computer screen. “This fucking president is going to be the death of us all. He’s just not that into war. On every front he’s dragging his feet. This crap with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria had breathed some new life into our business, but for how long? That’s the question that keeps me up at night. We need wars, no matter the size. No American military presence, no business for us.” He shook his head in consternation. “It’s a new day, Gregory. Our world is becoming smaller and smaller. I’m lucky I have my contacts in NSA, otherwise the company’s bottom line would be bottoming out.”