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for with the ferocity of his fanaticism.
    He was a Believer, a Muslim jihadist who’d sworn fealty to warrior-imam Mukhtar’s holy crusade to turn Nigeria into an Islamic state governed by the tenets of ultraorthodox sharia law. The purity of his hate for the infidel allowed him to transcend the bodily and psychic discomforts of the marsh.
    As for Ojo, he was a swampman and its hardships were second nature to him. He had no liking, though, for the haughty northerner Rasheed with whom he’d been partnered.
    And even less liking for this grinding hunt for the elusive American…
    Lighting the way forward was the torch, a wandlike length of wood whose knobbed head had been dipped in tarry pitch and set aflame. Its base was wedged into a metal ringbolt at the tip of the prow, securing it in place. It thrust forward at a tilted angle away from the boat.
    It was torchlight that created the illusion of a phantom fireball drifting above the swamp.
    At least a half dozen other such flickering fireballs coursed through the flooded forest this night, each one shed by a torch fixed to the bow of a similar boat coursing the waterways in search of one lone man.
    Man? Devil, more likely, thought Ojo.
    The American was an implacable enemy haunting the swamp, at least in the minds of the Nigerian troops who had been seeking him in vain for three days and nights. No ghost he, but a creature of flesh and blood—of that there could be no doubt.
    The proof was in the ever-mounting toll of bodies of slain comrades found floating facedown in a blackwater channel or sprawled in a heap on solid ground. They had been shot, stabbed, clubbed, and even strangled to death.
    Human prey had become predator, targeting isolated individuals, stragglers, and others who’d become separated from the main body of troops.
    A shot would ring out somewhere in the swamp and when the hunters came to investigate, they’d inevitably find another of their number dead with a bullet in the head or heart.
    A shriek would sound in the night—or in daylight—from behind a patch of brush and a victim would be discovered with his throat cut or his middle ripped open to let his guts out.
    Worse, though, to the living, because so unnerving, was the death that came wrapped in silence.
    A line of soldiers would be filing along a trail when suddenly the next-to-last man in line would glance over his shoulder to pass a remark to a comrade who was bringing up the rear only to find that that man had disappeared.
    A search along the back trail inevitably would reveal the vanished one not too far behind the nearest bend, slain in some singularly unpleasant fashion.
    This slow, steady attrition of their numbers was dispiriting—demoralizing. The troops would have been glad to declare that the American had perished somewhere in the swamp and taken themselves back to the barracks at their home base in Lagos.
    Alas, it was not to be. Their commanding officers would not have it so. They took their orders from two white men, the South African mercenary Krentz and the Yankee spy Ward Thurlow. This pair of outlanders were favored associates of Defense Minister Tayambo, the supreme leader to whom all members of the elite bodyguard corps had sworn unquestioning allegiance.
    Truly the ways of politics—like fate—were strange, thought Ojo, shaking his head. One thing was sure, however: the manhunt had gone sour. It might well be cursed.
    The fierce joy experienced by the hunters on the second day when one of the Americans was slain and the other fled into the flooded forest had long since dissipated, eaten away by the rising body count of their own.
    Surely the other American would soon be taken, if not by the troops then by the swamp itself. The swamp was a mankiller, and this man was a foreigner, an outlander infidel soft with the corruptions and weaknesses of the Great Satan U.S.A.
    So argued the optimists in the ranks. Instead, the reverse had happened. The lone American seemed to