‘Weekend warriors against my Tigers? So what? Take a couple apart with a sniper, they won’t come within five miles. Put 200 hostages in front of them, they’ll turn their guns on the Governor.’
‘My officers …’
‘Are dead. And they were pussies when alive. They couldn’t protect you, they can’t protect Los Angeles.’
‘Read the public mood, Azania,’ the Mayor called from the rear. ‘You’ve forgotten we don’t tolerate mad mullahs, whackos, nihilists no more.’
‘Bomb runs on the city from 10,000 feet? I doubt it. Special Forces? There’s nothing special in units that fled an African state – Somalia – after losing eighteen men. This is my African state. Colonialist forces will fare no better.’
‘Hardware beats ego every time.’
A softer tone. ‘I have the hardware. See the helicopter circling, about two o’clock? One of yours, Police Chief?’
‘One of many, Azania.’ Sweat was blistering on the man’s forehead.
The black leader walked away, let him sit ringside. There were moments when generalship demanded showmanship, when the greatest upheaval in American history since the Civil War required grandstanding, declaration with fireworks. He held a cellphone to his ear, was giving instructions. ‘Announce the no-fly zone…’ To the Mayor and Police Chief. ‘And she looked out at a window. Watch closely.’
Twenty seconds of tense silence, extended by anticipation, imagination, a lifetime. Normal politics had been suspended; it was the turn of reality to be withdrawn. An easy shot for advanced, infrared-guided munitions. Jammers, decoys and heat-dissipation shrouds were hardly a standard fit on rotary aircraft used by law enforcement. The shoulder-launched SAM left the tube, flew straight. No warning, no jinxing, no evasion procedure. First and secondary explosion were pressed into a single pupating orb that dropped in a vertical solar plunge. Impact on the street, impression on the audience. The shockwaves travelled.
‘I would hate to be misinterpreted,’ Azania said simply. His words barely punctured the extended stillness in the room.
Finally, from a mouth rigid with emotion, the Police Chief spoke. ‘You have blood on your hands.’
‘Mutual culpability. It’s why none of my men wear masks. They can’t go back, can’t give themselves up. It’s victory or death.’
‘I’ll be doing the wiring.’
‘Sadly not.’ He gestured to guards who had entered from a side office, heavily built men with large hands, empty faces. ‘There are some on my team who wish to express themselves, show affection for you both. I’d say they’re creative rather than merciful.’
Outside, people danced to a party beat around the flaring wreckage of a downed helicopter. Azanianization was underway.
* * *
‘War is hell.’ Ted Bell’s statement staccato-crackled in the headset of his Forrester commander, the words harsh in the vibration hum of the cockpit. ‘And it still gives me a hard-on.’
He held a camcorder to his eye, operating the zoom, craning against the helicopter’s convex bubble window to catch the detail, record events. The police bird was down, marking its own funeral with a geyser-plume funnelling to join the artificial cloud base. Around it, melting away from the built-up density of Downtown, LA’s bland disfiguration groped in two dimensions for distant and more promising horizons. It would never get there. People were lost in the jigsaw swamp, cars and lives hurry-crawling on ribbon freeways and pitted boulevards, insignificance – the unremarkable, the unremembered – dwelling in a hopeless landscape. Low-rise bungalows, high-rise coffins. It was hot in the city today.
‘Cecil. B de fuckin’ Mille, John Ford at Midway, or what?’ Bell commented, ceasing to film, patting the pilot on the shoulder and hand-signalling a new flight plan. A nod, and the helicopter banked lazily into a shallow swoop and changed bearing.
‘It’s Revenge of the Planet of the Apes. Simians all over.’ The Forrester gazed through the transparency, derision and Southern inflection carried on his boom-mike. ‘Azania’s sure as hell nailin’ his coloureds to the mast.’
‘By the time it’s over, we’re sure as hell gonna nail them to every front door in the land.’
There was optimism, intention, in his voice. The stepping stones to criticality were laid, had been used to guide opinion, the populace, along a blood rose path lined with atrocity and incident. It led to this, to a world in which extremism provided hope, intolerance gave answers. On the ground, rule of law was gone, rule of the warlord come, depravity mobilized, reason incapacitated or incinerated. Azania was the rival, the benchmark, the target.
The Forrester proffered a pair of sage-green field-glasses. ‘You needn’t worry about my two boys captured on recon at Playa del Rey.’
‘If I was worried, they’d be thrown back in the sea. Like the one at San Quentin. Happens to red herrings that go off.’ Bell took the binoculars.
Tactical upsets, the odd reversal – the dogface tradition of fubar, fucked-up-beyond-all-recognition – were a fact of any military offensive. That the FBI Special Agent Krista Althouse had prised an incomplete statement from an imprisoned Forrester was incidental. The man himself was incidental, already forgotten, had made a rapid transit from lifer to deceased. Others would be more diffident in opening their mouths. Not that it concerned him. Only he, Ted Bell, had the overview, could see the map unfolded from the summer-crisped hinterland to the Pacific-dyed coast. The first smoke puffs were rising from Venice, a sign the Reverend’s Tigers had arrived in force, by force, were spreading to outflank and encompass. By day-end, there would be more than surfers wallowing in the shallows, more than the occasional patrolman slumped from the open door of a black-and-white. LA was designed for taking, intended for development. All those clean lines, straight roads. A shame the South African had returned to Cape Town before the ceremony, the grand initiation. He would be kept informed, had a right to know the money was well spent, the effort worth expending. Without him, there would have been no vision, no tentative contact or full-blown coordination. This would reach all television screens, begin every newsflash, was going global. Some achievement. As for the FBI, as for feisty, pretty, conquerable Krista … Bell adjusted the focus on the Steiner glasses. Things were looking good, events panning out. Forward velocity, unbreakable momentum.
The Forrester had unscrewed the cap from a plastic pill-bottle, was shaking tablets into his palm. It was standard procedure in the fight-back against HIV and immunodeficiency, a reminder of the prison rapes, of his loathing. ‘Vitamins,’ he said, staring out Bell’s side squint.
‘Need water?’
‘Optional. Like napalm on ghetto blacks.’
‘I call that a high-priority outcome.’ Guffaws, subsiding into chuckling. Bell leant to instruct the pilot. ‘Stay away from the Reverend’s missile boxes. You seen how he likes to reconfigure rotorcraft.’ A thumbs-up in reply.
‘Those four stars at the Pentagon will be fillin’ their pants in the situation room.’
‘Situation doesn’t do justice to it. Ever noticed how the more nervous they get, the more fuckin’ acronyms they use?’
‘They’ll be pushed to find one for this, chief.’
‘Indeed.’ They would be pushed to find anything in either vocabulary or armoury. The field-glasses stayed clamped, their focal plane sweeping a line from Watts Towers westwards. ‘Billions of dollars spent each year – techint, elint, sigint, HUMINT – the world’s most advanced military and spook machinery, TAT – terrorist action teams – from SOD special operations division in their SCIF special classified information facilities. And I wager you, they’ll exclaim “What the fuck …”’
‘I’m sayin’ it myself. Never seen LA look so beautiful.’
‘Flames improve the skyline, draw the eye, don’t they?’
‘They do.’ The two men watched as a molten tower volcano-belched its contents and crumbled to vanish in a bulging quilt of dust. ‘Way to go, Reverend.’
‘And I thought Flash Friday was shock-jocks persuading babes to show their tits to truckers.’
‘Truckers won’ be stoppin’ for no one down there.’
‘People get so tense about township violence.’
