Busted Flush

His fingers tightened on the back of her skull. They twisted her head viciously clockwise. Dolores actually heard the pop of her cervical vertebrae breaking. A red spark shot through her brain.

Then she wasn’t anymore.

“Oh, sweet Lord,” Alicia Nshombo said from the doorway. “The poor dear! Did it have to be so?”

Gently Tom lowered the dead girl to the floor. “I told you, babe,” he told her softly. “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” He straightened, brushing absently at some wet furry clumps of Dagon she’d left on his blue chambray shirt. “She was going to blow it all,” he told Alicia. “She wasn’t objectively Marxist yet, you see.”

Alicia’s ample face clouded. “But she was heroine of the hour! Kitengi just gave her a medal in front of God and everyone. She’s still wearing it, for sweet Mary’s sake. What am I to tell the media?”

He grinned. “The truth,” he said. “She died a martyr. Raised the alarm when that notorious tool of the British Empire, Butcher Dagon, infiltrated the palace to assassinate Doc Prez.” He shook his head. “Poor kid. She was the Butcher’s last victim.”

“Uh-oh,” said Hong.

They sat in the gloom of one of the suite of rooms they’d been assigned in the palace. Sun Hei-lian sat beside a junior tech named Li, helping edit video of today’s medal ceremony. She hit pause, freezing a quartet of Chengdu Jian-7 fighters her government had provided the PPA in mid-flyover, and swiveled her chair.

She frowned. “Why are you showing me stock footage of a mushroom cloud, Hong?”

“It’s . . . not stock footage.”

The image on the wide-screen television was grainy, shot from ground level. A round head of smoke and dust rolled up a blue sky, a shape unmistakable and chilling. In the foreground white dunes and wisps of pale grass framed the terrible image.

The setting looked familiar. Feeling as if her blood had been replaced with liquid nitrogen, Hei-lian said, “Where?”

“From the Nigerian coast, near Brass. France 24 TV’s sending it real-time.”

Li turned beside her. “Wait, Brass? Isn’t that—?”

Hong nodded. “Ground zero’s the head of the invading PPA army.”

“Still getting no readings,” Tom’s voice said. His voice crackled over the radio. A storm had gathered over the blast site with unnatural speed. Lightning laced the clouds and raked the ground.

“That is not possible,” said Professor Évariste Tiwari, from Kongoville’s Liberation University. An internationally known physicist who had worked with UN antinuclear proliferation teams out of Los Alamos, he was a small, stooped Congolese with a big bald head and a round belly pooching out the front of his rumpled black Western-style suit. “Even if it was an airburst, it must have left a plume of fissile material not converted to energy by the reaction.”

“No joy, Doc. Geiger counter barely registers a peep.”

A dozen people crammed the room where the Committee aces had been debriefed. The smell of nervous sweat almost overpowered the smell of Alicia Nshombo’s violet soap. The wide-screen monitors mostly showed various satellite news feeds endlessly replaying the France 24 video, which had started right after the detonation’s distinctive flash drew the cameraman’s attention. A couple, muted, showed live debate from an emergency session of the UN Security Council, where Russia and China furiously demanded sanctions if not worse be imposed on both Nigeria and its sponsor, the British Empire, for crimes against humanity. It was sheer formality: the Empire held a veto.

Glancing that way occasionally Hei-lian gathered that the U.S. ambassador sat and said nothing to defend Great Britain. Which might mean his own government was none too pleased with its old ally for letting loose the nuclear demon.

Mostly she, like the others—her crew, President Dr. Nshombo, Alicia, Professor Tiwari—focused on the monitor showing the feed from the video camera strapped to Tom’s chest. What it showed horrified even Hei-lian, accustomed as she was to the endless iteration of sorrow and atrocity that comprised modern Central African history.

In this land frost never touched, the green grass had gone winter gray. Skeletal trees smoldered beside the bent and burnt-out wrecks of a Simba Brigade armored column. The chassis of some Russian-made tank cradled upside-down in the branches of a stout tree. It had shed its massive turret somewhere as the blast flipped it through the air like a tiddlywink.

“I see something moving down there,” Tom said. “I’m going down for a look.”

“Be careful,” Nshombo said. It was a measure of the strain he was under that he consented to sit in a chair. His hands grasped the arms so hard Hei-lian half expected he’d leave grooves in the hard wood. Standing beside him, Alicia reached down to pat one hand reassuringly. “Your instruments might be malfunctioning. There might be fallout anyway.”