“Maybe it was—how should I know?” Muffa said. “Let’s face it, there are hundreds of thousands of songs that have been done throughout the years and I can’t know them all, right? But I didn’t steal my songs. The music is my own creation.”
The reporter steered around the subject of the borrowed music samples. It was widely known that one hundred percent of the music used by Muffa was electronically appropriated and altered enough to make it legally “new.” Until Muffa fell out of favor, the subject was out-of-bounds.
Muffa, amazingly, stayed in favor for almost eighteen months. Even more amazingly, he was given a knighthood.
Filling A Quota? asked a prominent British newspaper, which implied that the reggae star had simply been the only potential black candidate in the year’s crop of potential knights. Was Muffa Knighted Because He’s Black? the paper wondered.
Cicilia Garen took a different course in life, joining radical groups without finding a cause worth fighting for. She gained an education in street fighting and changed her name to Sissy Gard. When she was paired up with Muffa, she changed her name to Sissy Muh. Muffa was flattered.
She was trying to take the measure of this man. The man who hired her for the job wanted to know if Muffa had the guts to do what needed doing. “He was humiliated in Jamaica,” she reported. “He’ll do it for the sake of vengeance.”
“Oh, very good!” replied her employer, who sounded like one of those wealthy snits with old British titles.
The British snit had come through with mercenaries and equipment, enough for eight Jamaican tour buses. Within minutes of the start of the battle, the first report of casualties had come in. Strike Force A was gone.
“I don’t know wha’ tah tell ya. One American guy goes charging into the bus before ya guys even starts comin’ out,” reported the shopkeeper who was being paid to watch the situation in front of Jamaica House. “He drags out the driver and goes in, and the windshield goes flyin’ all over from guns. Then, whatchoo know? The American guy comes out again. Everybody be dead on the bus.”
“There were twenty-two men on that bus!”
“Now theh be twenty-two corpses.”
“He must be wrong,” Sissy said.
“Maybe. I’m not taking a chance. The PM’s gotta go. Sis, or this all’s for nothin’.” Muffa looked grim. “I want all them to come to the PM’s house and we’ll take it together for sure.”
“But that means we’ll get none of the other targets. It won’t be enough to take just the PM, Muffa.”
“We’ll take the rest. We’ll just take the PM first. Then we start goin’ door tah door.”
Muffa cut her off when she tried to press her point and Sissy felt a dismal sense of failure. There was a reason the attacks were planned the way they were. Hit the Jamaican government targets quick and all at once. Don’t give them time to muster a defense.
Sir Muffa Muh Mutha’s bus began moving toward the city center and Hope Road, where it would converge with all of Muffa’s attack buses.
“It will work, Sis,” Muffa assured her. “We’ll have a human shield. Once we have the PM, we can strike at them and they won’t strike back.”
Sissy Muh smiled. “Sounds lovely.” But in her heart she had serious doubts.
The first of the buses halted on squeaking brakes before the cordon around Jamaica House, then quickly swerved in a half circle. The side windows dropped open and gunfire exploded from inside, mowing down security soldiers as they ran for cover.
Remo sprinted alongside the bus and slapped at the guns, bending and breaking them. Some of the hands holding them broke, too. A man in a body armor leaped from the door and opened fire, his rounds peppering the side of the bus until Remo turned and ran back to him, removing the gun from his grasp before the man fell dead with a finger-sized hole in his skull.
Another bus screeched to halt nearby, and something large protruded from the emergency exit. Behind him, Remo heard the frantic snaps of windows being closed and the thumps of men diving for cover inside.
Something big whumped out of the barrel from the second bus. Remo watched a bulbous, gray, round object arc through the air and hurtle down on him. He stepped aside, using the front of his own bus for cover from the blast, which rocked the vehicle from side to side. When he looked again, his bus was blackened but undamaged.
They were lining up for a second shot when Remo jumped onto the hood, looked back over his shoulder in what appeared to be abject panic and scrambled onto the roof.
They were laughing at him in the second bus. He could hear it all the way over here, even over the whoof of the second round.
The slow-moving projectile was going to come down right on top of Remo Williams. He wondered if he had enough time to do what needed doing.
