were people of the bush. Some were kids; they were poking him, touching his arms and legs, checking to see if he was real. The adults stayed back, though, studying him as if he’d just fallen from the stars.
Finally, he turned over to see that he’d been dragged here by a fierce-looking Somali man.
“You are now among the Ekita,” this man boasted to him in broken English, beating his own chest with every word. “Chief Bada has brought you here and you are a very lucky man.”
Somehow Batman managed to unfasten his battle armor and crawl out of it. The chief produced a broken mirror and showed him the four large bruises on his back. They were purple and hideous, but Batman knew, had it not been for the body armor, the bruises would have been bullet holes, and he would be dead.
The chief sat him up.
“You are the first magical warrior to visit Ekita in three hundred years,” he told Batman gravely. “You fly. You defeat bullets. You kill the Shaka and you wear a suit of enchantment. We must know: How do you do all these things?”
Batman was just getting his senses back. He took off his gloves to reveal that his left hand was missing and that a mechanical prosthesis was in its place.
The villagers gasped. The chief was fascinated. “So you’re made of metal?” he asked Batman.
Batman waved his comment away.
“Just this hand,” he said. “The rest of me is bone and muscle.”
The chief translated for his villagers. This animated them further.
“Then we must learn from you,” the chief declared. “We must heat you and consume the result.”
Two women appeared carrying a wooden cup. It contained a blood-red liquid with what looked like tiny tulip bulbs floating in it. The chief urged Batman to drink it in one gulp. It smelled awful, but thinking it was some kind of pain reliever, drink it he did. But he quickly became even woozier than before.
Then he heard the chief say: “Now for the heating, so you will be one with us.”
The crowd of villagers parted to reveal a giant campfire blazing away in the middle of the village. On top of it was a huge steaming pot.
Two men picked up Batman and began carrying him toward the steaming cauldron. The villagers became very excited. But Batman was getting concerned. He could actually see vegetables floating around inside the pot.
“What are you going to do?” he asked the chief anxiously. “Put me in that?”
“Yes—we are,” the chief replied. “It’s part of the process. It will change you … and it will change us.”
“But—it looks too hot for me to go into,” Batman said, becoming very alarmed.
The chief put his finger in the steaming water, tasted it and laughed.
“For our purposes,” he said with a grin. “It is the perfect temperature.”
5
Gulf of Aden
REFUELING WHISKEY’S ATTACK copter took just fifteen minutes. This was lightning quick for the yacht crew, who were not practiced in the art of quick aircraft turnarounds.
In the time the copter was getting serviced, Nolan had a chance to down two amphetamine pills and reset his weapons. Then he took off again, got a bearing via his rudimentary navigation system, turned west and hit the throttles. The mission to retrieve Batman had begun.
Gunner and Twitch were with him. They were the other half remaining of Team Whiskey. Gunner LaPook was a giant of a man from Cajun Country in Louisiana. He was the team’s door breaker; whenever Whiskey assaulted a fortified position, Gunner went in first. His weapon of choice was the Streetsweeper, essentially a machine gun that fired shotgun shells. He was a tall, beefy individual and fierce looking. All tats and muscles, he looked like a WWE wrestler.
Twitch was a Kanaka, a native Hawaiian, and he was as diminutive as Gunner was tall. His nondescript Asian features, as well as a talent for languages, were a great advantage for the team, as he was able to go undercover just about anywhere in the world and blend in. He was a little off kilter, though; “edgy” was a polite description. He’d lost his leg during Whiskey’s ill-fated pursuit of bin Laden in the mountains of Afghanistan. Just as Batman wore a prosthesis on his left arm, Twitch wore one for his right leg.
Both Gunner and Twitch were still wearing their experimental body armor, as was Nolan. It had worked well in their assault against the Shaka camp; though both Gunner and Twitch had been hit by pirate