Chapter 1

"Good looking, ain't she?" said Louie, nodding toward the dark-haired young woman lying spread-eagle in the jungle clearing.

"Yes, quite," said the Brit. "But forgettable. Sheena is different. I can assure you that once you've seen her, you'll never forget her." He wiped his round, flabby face with a large white handkerchief. The heat was unbearable. He wondered how his grandfather, who had been in Central Africa with the Colonial Service in the '30s, could have stood it.

The woman moaned and tugged at the bonds that secured her wrists and ankles. A small, untidy man had been looking down at her intently. Now he used her return to consciousness as an excuse to kick her in the side. She groaned and flinched. He prepared to kick her again, but the Brit called out, "Enough of that, Dooley. We want her in reasonably good shape. When you go after a jungle goddess, you need live bait."

"Dooley's a good man with electronics, but he's hell on women," said Louie, a big man with a soft North Carolina drawl. "Last night, he and a couple of the others raped that poor girl ragged. If our little Miss Rosie really is Sheena's girlfriend, we're going to have one highly pissed blonde superheroine on our hands."

"Yes, Sheena will be 'pissed, ' as you put it," said the Brit. "But it really won't make any difference. She is extraordinary, but 'superheroine' is a bit of a stretch. A dose of K24 will do to her what it would do to you or to any of us — knock her out cold for at least half an hour. After that, there will be seven of us and only one of her. And finally, though I pray it doesn't come to this, she is as vulnerable to bullets as any creature of flesh and blood."

Louie scratched his balls and thought as deeply as he was capable of thinking.

"If she's as smart as you say, why should she walk into our trap?"

"Because we're smarter," said the Brit, with a skeptical glance at his huge young partner. "I've left just enough clues to lead her here, but they're not so obvious that she'll suspect an ambush." He looked at his watch, then added, "You're in charge, Louie. I'm going back to camp for tea."

He disappeared into the bush, and the woman on the ground started moaning again.

"His Majesty's gone," said Dooley. "Can I pop her again?"

Louie knelt over the woman and slipped a beefy hand beneath her khaki shorts. Her eyes fluttered open as he massaged her vulva.

"She likes it," said Dooley, with a crooked grin. "I think she liked it last night, too."

"Yeah, right," said Louie, removing his hand and licking his fingers. "She liked it so much you had to gag her to stifle the screams."

Dooley was hurt. "Her trying to scream didn't mean she didn't like what we was doing. We just didn't want to wake up the goddamn Brit."

Louie rubbed his chin. "Okay, you've got forty minutes. Do whatever you want, but don't leave any marks."

As he rose, he looked down. The woman was awake, her eyes filled with fear.

"Sorry, Rosie," he said softly, "but these boys are lonely and far, far from home. And besides, you ain't got long to live. Pretty soon, it'll all be over."

Ten hours later, at two o'clock in the morning, it was Louie's watch. He wore earphones and sat hunched over a pair tiny TV screens. Two miles away, where Rosie lay stretched out in the moonlight, cameras mounted in the trees and microphones hidden in the bushes were silent sentinels.

The Brit seemed to have a pretty smart plan, Louie admitted to himself. Sheena would see and hear no sign of an ambush when she showed up.

If she showed up. Louie was doubtful. His experience with good-looking blondes, though limited, didn't jibe with the Brit's assessment of Sheena's intelligence. She could be wandering hopelessly upriver in the jungle. Hell, she might still be back in Basoko, wondering if Rosie had simply ditched her and taken a bus to Kisangani. Lawton's trail of "clues" looked awfully hard to follow — an empty canteen dropped here, a pair of bloody panties left there, no two clues any closer than a mile apart.

His musings were interrupted by a sound. Did it come through the earphones, or was it something here in camp? He looked around. Nothing. Everyone was asleep. Then he heard it again. It sounded like twigs breaking. His eyes darted back to the TV monitors. There it was: a shadowy form emerging from the brush at the edge of the clearing. But it wasn't Sheena.

It wasn't anything human.

"Mr. Lawton," Louie called out. "we got a problem."

Within seconds, the Brit was peering over Louie's shoulder. Dooley quickly joined him.

"What is it?" Dooley asked.

"A panther," Lawton said quietly. "A black leopard."

"Is it going to eat her?" Dooley asked hopefully.

"It had damned well better not," said the Brit. "Or I'll hunt down the bloody beast and skin it for a rug."

On the TV screens, they could watch, from two different angles, as the dark cat sniffed the woman's right foot, then worked its way up her leg to her crotch.

"Yeah, kittycat," said Dooley, "I'd like a whiff of that, too."

"Shut up, you bloody fool," snapped Lawton. "Louie, you stay here."

He turned and called out, "Michael, Gene, Akbar, get the BXP's and come with me. Tremain, keep watch over the gear."

"What about me?" asked Dooley.

"Stay here and be ready to use the hot button," said the Brit. "But only if the beast actually attacks her. You understand?"

"Sure," said Dooley.

He and Louie resumed watching the TV screens.

"Christ, I wish we had this on tape," said Dooley. "A fuckin' panther eatin' a girl. How much you think people would pay for that?"

But the panther, though hungry and clearly interested in this immobilized, 122-pound piece of fresh meat, did not begin eating Rosie. It explored her body with its nose and its tongue. Something wasn't right. The cat sniffed the metal locket at the end of a leather cord around the woman's neck. It had a peculiar odor. Then, in the woman's hair, and on her lips, there was another scent — faint and old, but familiar. The panther had encountered it a few months ago. It belonged to another animal like this one, a human female. But she hadn't been helpless like this one. Far from it.

Suddenly, the cat realized it wasn't alone. Something was observing it from beneath the trees. The panther crouched and prepared to defend its prey.

"We meet again, Black One," said Sheena, as she stepped into the moonlight. "You were wise not to harm her. Now, you must return to the forest. This is no meal for you."

The big cat hesitated, growled — and retreated. It wanted no fight with this creature who carried a long metal tooth at her side.

Sheena knelt beside Rosie and softly caressed her cheek.

"Your ordeal is over, my love," she whispered. "The men who did this to you will pay with their lives."

Louie and Dooley watched with mouths agape. Sheena, the semi-mythical jungle queen, had appeared, after all. The blonde hair, the long legs, the leopard-skin bikini — here was everything Lawton had led them to expect. And even in the dim light of a half moon, they could see that she was spectacularly beautiful.

Dooley broke their reverie. "She's talkin'. What's she sayin'?"

"She's telling Rosie that she's going to kick some serious ass when she catches up with us. Which should be soon, since Lawton and the others are on the way there. What about the button?"

"I got it," said Dooley.

"Well, push the fucking thing."

"Not yet," said Dooley. "Not til she's closer to the locket. We want to be damn sure we nail her."

"Hell," said Louie. "She's moving away. We're going to miss our chance."

Sheena was standing now, and seemed to be listening. She must have heard the men crashing through the jungle in a rush to rescue Rosie from the panther.

"What should we do?" Louie asked, a note of desperation in his voice.