Hellblazer 1 - War Lord by John Shirley Page A

Binsdale was flung nearly straight up in the air, flipping forward to land on his shoulder, breaking it. One of his legs was hanging by a shred. Vintara was instantly killed, a piece of shrapnel taking off the top of his head.
    The Fedayeen guerilla was satisfied. One of them dead, the other desperately wounded. He gestured for the boy to follow and they ran toward the back of the mosque, the Fedayeen slipping the strap of the RPG-7 over his shoulder so he could drop down into the darkness and leave the area before the other soldiers could work out where he was.
    “Will you teach me?” the boy asked, as they ran through the maze of rusted car hulks abandoned behind the mosque. Within the hour he had watched one of the Americans shoot his father down. He was eager to become a Fedayeen.
    “Yes! If you do what I tell you! Starting with be quiet now!”
    There might still be time tonight to get another position, the guerrilla reflected as he ran along, his RPG-7 clanking. He had two more shells. It might still be possible to kill more Americans, or Shi’ite traitors.
    The night was young.
    The shore of the Caspian Sea near Rasht, Iran
    The Caspian was steel gray, under a sun veiled in bluish cloud the way the lights in the Blue Sheikh’s chambers had been veiled by sheer scarves.
    Shouldn’t have started smoking again, Constantine thought, trudging down the beach. Bloody hookah got me craving. Out of cigs for two months, since that kid got me the Turkish leaf; I was almost over it. Wonder who’s got a fag?
    There were only a few people on this stretch of beach, none of them close by. A man and a woman, both in neck-to-ankle robes, walking in opposite directions, careful not to look at one another. The woman was coming toward Constantine, but clearly not looking for him. She angled closer to the road above the beach, to give him a wide berth. She wore a black chador wrapped around her head, one end tucked to veil most of her face.
    Apart from these two figures, the shore at this moment was like any beach on any sea. It seemed to Constantine that he was walking along beside the English Channel; he was walking on the edge of the Indian Ocean; he was walking on a beach in California. It was all the same: the smell of brine, the crunch of sand, the water stretching out to become the signature of endlessness.
    Supposedly he was to meet some unknown person here, but Constantine knew he might’ve come to this beach for no good reason. Not all prophecies came true; in fact, most didn’t, for the average person. Not till of them did even for John Constantine, who knew where to get “the good stuff” in the way of precognition.
    One time, a shining spirit had appeared to him and said, At midnight, a crimson dragon will arise and speak to you, and your life will be transfigured! Midnight came—no dragon. Next day the spirit sheepishly reappeared and said, Sorry. Wrong chap. And then vanished again.
    “It’s like so cool to be alive again, dude!” Constantine turned to see a man running toward him, shouting, forty yards off. “Is this tight or what?” the man shouted.
    The odd thing was, the man was wearing a gray galabiya, an ankle-length gown with a high collar common to pious Muslims, and he had a long black beard and a white turban. Staggering along like a man drunk or stoned, he kept dropping the turban and picking it up and putting it back on his head, crookedly. He had a dark face, eyes too close together, the bridge of his nose quite prominent, his lips hidden in brown-black beard. But he was behaving like an American raver on a new designer drug.
    “Dude!” he shouted, skipping along. He tripped and fell to his hands and knees, crawled around a moment looking for his turban, found it, and shoved it back on all smashed. “You’re Constantine, right?” He struggled to his feet and danced around, waving his hands in the air. “This is so fucking tight!”
    “Right—best to keep your voice down, mate,”