The Age Of Zeus (19 page)

21. OPERATION:
THREE LIONS

A
day passed, two days, three, and nothing from the Pantheon, not a word about the Hydra, no official statement, not a peep.

"They haven't noticed," said Landesman. "They don't care enough about the Hydra to be bothered to check up on it, so they've no clue it's dead and probably won't have for weeks. Just as I'd hoped. A lot of the time they treat their monsters as fire-and-forget missiles. Launch them, let them cause havoc, recall them maybe later, if at all, but maybe not. Hera has her favourites, that much we know. The Lamia, the Gorgons, Typhon. The slightly more sentient ones. Cerberus too. Any of those she'd miss if they were absent for too long. But the rest are, I think it's safe to say, regarded as expendable."

"And it's those ones we're going to continue going after?" said Sam. The two of them were in Landesman's office, an informal strategy meeting. "The expendable monsters."

"For the time being," Landesman said with a nod.

"But if they're unlikely to be missed..."

"...then what's the point? Why waste our time on them? The point, Sam, is that we can't afford to tip our hand just yet. Lower-profile targets first. Once we begin eliminating creatures from the menagerie that the Olympians actually have the time of day for, we run the risk of drawing their fire and our operations become exponentially more hazardous. I'd like to postpone that moment for as long as possible. Moreover the Titans need the practice, the battlefield experience, which the lesser monsters amply provide."

"Agreed. I just -"

"Keen to go after bigger game, eh? Already? Sam, Sam, patience. One victory does not a campaign make. Little by little we'll do this. It's the only way."

"Did you ever consider, when you were planning all this, an all-out assault?" she asked. "Mass-produce the battlesuits, assemble an army and go at the Olympians that way?"

"Besiege Olympus? Attack them in their mountain stronghold? The thought did occur, once, briefly, before I dismissed it out of hand. For a start, it's been tried, hasn't it? Remember the Raffles Syndicate and their paratroopers? What a botch job that was. But also, and more to the point, for me it isn't viable financially. Or logistically, for that matter. A few hundred troops, a regiment's worth - how would I recruit that many? Train, equip, supply, support, house that many warm bodies, all on my own? Not to mention the cost of constructing that many suits."

"Make it an international effort. Get governments covertly involved."

Landesman managed to smile and sneer at once. "Our beloved leaders, you mean? Pusillanimous nitwits like Catesby
Baa
tlett? Engage their help? What do you think are the chances of
that
happening? And how far do you think I'd get, trying to get a bunch of politicians on my side? Since when do politicians ever agree on anything? No, Sam, almost from the outset I understood that, if this was to have any hope of success, I had to think small. Trust me, for a man as ambitious as myself, accustomed to thinking big, big, big, that was a very hard adjustment to make. But also, there was the appeal of making this a project that accorded with classical precedence, which meant keeping the numbers low - to twelve, precisely. Once I'd hit on using the mythical Titans as my template, any other approach seemed clumsy and inelegant. How better to fight the Olympians than with a group inspired by figures from the selfsame mythology? How more apt? I just couldn't help myself.

"As a boy, you see, I loved books about the Ancient Greek gods and heroes. Still do. Hawthorne's
Tanglewood Tales
, Robert Graves, Mary Renault, Leon Garfield's
The God Beneath The Sea
- all terrific stuff. Homer as well, naturally, and Ovid, Aesop, Hesiod, Pindar, Apollonius Rhodius. And later the playwrights, Aeschylus, Euripides, that dirty-minded bugger Aristophanes. Even inane American superhero comics that used characters and motifs from the myths. Those old Technicolor movies too, with the gladiators and the rubbery-looking monsters. I devoured them all. There was such a grandeur about the stories, along with a sense that anything could happen and would.

"And the way the gods behaved - just like human beings but with the bonus of power and immortality. They had unfettered freedom to do as they pleased, which was thrilling to me as an only child growing up in a strict Jewish household and as a boy who knew from a very early age that he was a budding tycoon, destined to earn several fortunes, a Croesus or a Midas in the making. I instilled in my son the same love of classical lore. It was the one thing Xander and I both enjoyed doing together, poring over those old stories. The one thing that truly bound us. He'd badger me to read to him about the adventures of Theseus, Perseus, Hercules, Jason, whoever, any and all of them, and I did, when I could, when I had the time..."

His gaze strayed wistfully to the framed photo on the desk - the beautiful and soon-to-be-dead mother and the four-year-old Alexander already looking aggrieved, as if he knew what lay around the corner, knew that in a few short months he was going to be semi-orphaned, the parent he could count on the most was going to be torn away from him.

"And I didn't often have the time, or thought I didn't. And maybe Xander was only pretending to love those stories simply because he knew how much I loved them and it was a way of getting my undivided attention." Landesman's eyes darkened, and for a moment he looked much older than his fifty-odd years.

"The Olympians must seem like, well, like sacrilege to you then," Sam said.

"Oh yes. Oh yes. Absolutely. In fact I'd go further and say 'blasphemy.' Whoever - whatever - they are, they're corrupted versions of those wonderful, wayward beings that the poets sang about and the priests worshipped and sacrificed to and celebrated in their Mysteries. They're a travesty of the true Hellenic pantheon, that bizarre dysfunctional family with all their feuds and fancies and foibles."

"And you've come up with a way of turning the tables on them that also restores what you cherish so much about the myths."

"Yes, correct. So perceptive. In that respect alone, Titanomachy II is personal to me. In that respect and..."

"And...?" said Sam.

Landesman didn't finish the sentence, peremptorily starting a new one instead. "So we continue as we are, for now. We stay on the course as it is set. I have our next three monsters lined up. This is going to be an exhausting few days for you, Sam. The scheduling is tight. But since you insist on participating in every op, it's your own fault. You're going to be on your knees by the end, probably, but you'll only have yourself to blame."

"I'm my own worst enemy, Mr Landesman."

"Fortunately for us you're also the Olympians.'" Landesman handed her a sheet of paper. "Here's your itinerary. I'm calling this job Operation: Three Lions. You'll see why. Phoebe, Coeus, Oceanus, Mnemosyne and Hyperion will be travelling with you. Feel free to use whichever of them you want on each phase of the op, in whatever permutation you see fit. If all goes well, you should be back within the week - and all will, I have no doubt, go well."

22. THE GRIFFIN

T
he Griffin was loose in Kashmir, prowling that mountainous zone of contention between India and Pakistan. The Olympians had stationed it there to serve as a warning to the subcontinent's two great feuding powers:
we are keeping an eye on you
. The huge lion/eagle hybrid flew among the peaks of the Himalayas and the Karakoram Range, and every so often, when it was hungry, swooped into the nearest valley community and made off with a calf, a goat or, very occasionally, a small child. Inhabitants on both sides of the line of control could have importuned their nations' rulers to do something about the monster, but never bothered. It wasn't that they were fatalistic. It was just that they knew nothing would come of any efforts made in that direction. The governments in New Delhi and Islamabad, although they could agree on little else, were of one mind when it came to the Olympians:
Don't rock the boat
. Thus the Griffin was free to roam and raid and kill with impunity, like some deranged policeman, unconstrained by law. Once, a posse of villagers from the Indian-administered part of the region banded together and went after it, armed with rifles. They were never seen again.

The Griffin was known to have several nests in the area, all of them high up above the snowline. Anyone with any sense shunned the locations of these nests. They were places of ill omen.

On a particular day in March, however, a goatherd from a village near the Burzil Pass, in the Pakistani Northern Areas, was searching for a kid which had gone astray from the flock. He had a feeling that the quest would be fruitless. The Griffin had been sighted not far from that spot only yesterday, and the kid was doubtless even now being digested in the beast's stomach. The goatherd went looking anyway, because he was young and dutiful and it was his father's flock and he wanted to be able to tell the old man, who was sick at home with a fever, that he had at least tried to find the lost animal.

And wonder of wonders, he did. The bleating baby goat came trotting into view along a narrow, stony path that led up to a rocky overhang where the Griffin liked to roost when it was in the vicinity. The kid was covered in blood and seemed distressed, but a quick examination showed that it was unhurt. The goatherd thanked God for this small blessing. Curiosity then impelled him to venture a short way further up the path. If the blood was not the kid's own, where could it have possibly come from?

The goatherd, whose name was Asif Abbasi, got to within 500 metres of the overhang. He was trembling, praying to Allah the Compassionate, Allah the Merciful, with every breath. He unslung the telescopic rifle gunsight that hung around his neck on a piece of string. It had been a gift from his uncle in Karachi, a spice merchant who also ran a lucrative sideline in military-surplus goods. The cash-strapped Pakistani army was unburdening itself of as much equipment as it could spare, in order to make ends meet and keep going. Asif put the gunsight to his eye and zeroed in on the Griffin's nest. The monster was certainly there, but it was not moving. It lay on its side, and Asif knew with sudden, startling certainty that it was dead. He crept a little closer and focused the gunsight again on the monster. The Griffin's wings were spread out flat on the ground. There was a huge hole in its tawny-furred belly. Spilled blue and purple entrails steamed in the high-altitude air.

Asif raced home, breathless, to spread the news. No one in his village believed him at first. Asif had a reputation as something of a fantasist. So adamant was he that he wasn't making things up, however, that at last a deputation of headmen went out to check on his story. They returned grim-faced.

The village went into panic. The Griffin was slain, and none of them had done it but the Olympians would nevertheless assume they were to blame. Vengeance would be swift and terrible. The villagers resolved to keep the monster's death a secret.

But the truth would leak out eventually. Truth always did.

Meanwhile the Blue Eros channel was broadcasting a movie about a horny teenager who repeatedly had sex with his middle-aged but still very beddable mother. It was called
Oedipussy
.

23. THE SPHINX

F
undamentalist terrorist factions in the Middle East had been having a frustrating time of it lately. Every way they turned, their plans were being curtailed and derailed. No longer were they able to recruit fresh young converts at the mosques and madrasas, for fear of the Olympians finding out. Hardline preachers could not publicly condemn Western imperialism, call for
jihad
, or instigate a
fatwa
, for much the same reason. The dream of obtaining a nuclear warhead from some rogue state and detonating it on Israeli soil or mainland America was now further than ever from being realised. Even simple suicide bombings had become trickier to organise and pull off successfully. The Olympians invariably seemed to know when one was imminent and would arrive and neutralise the would-be martyr before he'd had a chance to press the trigger. Hermes could move faster than thought, and the suicide bomber, rather than sending himself to paradise and everyone around him to hell in a single fiery burst, would instead wind up lying in the dirt, watching blood pump from the severed stump of his arm while his hand rested a couple of metres away, still clutching a disconnected detonator. Death would come to him eventually, but the beat of its black wings was slow and heavy with failure, and the seventy-two virgins waiting patiently to greet him in the afterlife would just have to bestow the flowers of their womanhood on some other holy warrior who'd made a better job of his self-immolation.