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across the channel as the light-bearer was tagged. The flashlight dropped, falling to his feet. It did not break but remained lit, rolling on its side back and forth in a small, tight arc.
    Gunfire erupted from the riflemen grouped nearby as they sprayed the woods in Kilroy’s direction.
    The Nigerian troops pouring into the valley from the west began shooting, too. Many guns fired, yellow spear blades of light stabbing from rifle muzzles. Bursts of automatic fire crackled, tearing into tree trunks and branches. The attackers couldn’t see what they were shooting at but that didn’t stop them.
    The valley was an arena of mass chaos. Soldiers shot without looking. Some of them shot at each other.
    A nasty little firefight broke out between skirmishers from the main body of troops and the handful of the ambushers still left alive in the east. Bodies piled up before the combatants realized they were trading shots with their comrades in arms.
    The confusion suited Kilroy just fine. It turned what could have been a death trap into a first-class clusterfuck. Noise, gunfire, squads of troops running this way and that—all combined to hide him from his pursuers.
    As silent as smoke Kilroy faded back into the brush, slipping away from the hunters. The deepening darkness of oncoming night was his ally, cloaking him with its sheltering shadows.
    Raynor? Nothing to be done for him. No man could have survived the merciless final fusillade that had all but shot him into pieces.
    Kilroy was alone now. The western end of the valley was filled with troops. He went northeast across the basin’s outer slope, swinging a wide detour around the few ambushers still alive in that area. Unaware of his passage and concentrating on not being shot by their fellow troops, they were easily evaded.
    Leaving them far behind, Kilroy crossed the creek, wading through listless, waist-high waters that were as warm as blood. After climbing up onto the south bank, he followed its winding course due east, into the recesses of the flooded forest.
    In the distance, bursts of gunfire still sounded.
     
    “Joseph Kilroy” was a war name assumed by he whose birth name was Sam Chambers. He’d never known his real father but he knew of him.
    He was the bastard son of Terry Kovack, the supreme warrior in the Vietnam-era Dog Team. That particular cadre of elite Army assassins had been disbanded in the war’s sorry aftermath of national defeatism and antimilitary agitation.
    Terry Kovack had soldiered on to fight without banners or bugles for lost causes he considered right in a succession of conflicts in global hot spots, ultimately making the supreme sacrifice in a bloody last stand in a dirty brushfire war here on the African continent.
    Would history repeat itself and doom his son to a similar fate?
    “Not if I can help it,” the man called Kilroy vowed to himself.

TWO
    The swamp was thick with green mist; the mist was thickest in the flooded forest. Banks of greenish haze drifted through clusters of dripping trees.
    The swamp by night was a noisy environment. It rang with shrill cries of animals and birds, growls, grunts, hisses, and bloodcurdling shrieks. Adding to the unrest was a constant counterpoint of splashes, drippings, creaks, and groans. All sounding against a steady background of the insect chorus: buzzing, chirping, humming, droning.
    It was night of the third day. The hunt was still on.
    East of the Rada River the flooded forest was fitfully lit by a number of flickering phantom lights. The ragged globes were beads of brightness widely scattered through the sprawling vastness of the morass. Fireballs that hovered over the watery avenues honeycombing the area.
    One such light appeared in a winding channel at the southeast corner of the drowned jungle, floating about four feet above the surface of sluggish black water.
    The channel snaked its way through the marsh, twisting and looping, filled with blind curves and sudden turnings. It was never