The tip of Tony’s sword was forced into the earth, and Stark demonstrated his quick thinking by taking one hand from the pommel and rabbit-punching his opponent in the kidney. If this were a training session, he would have followed the opportunistic move with a quip such as “You like that, Mandy?” but he was in combat mode now. Plus, that particular quip was definitely in the deep end of the lame pool.

  The Mandarin grunted and took a half step sideways but was barely inconvenienced.

  “Good,” he said again. “Very good, Mr. Stark. Some competition at last.”

  Stark used the second he had bought to yank his sword from the earth and strike the Mandarin’s kidney again, this time with the saber’s pommel. He was rewarded with a grunt through his opponent’s teeth, and no fake congratulations this time. He had hurt his enemy.

  The Mandarin recovered quickly, bringing his elbow in tight to guard the bruised kidney and swinging his other arm around with the sword inverted, its blade hissing as it sliced the air—and not just the air; Tony’s shoulder was cut to the bone before he had time to evade the deadly steel.

  “Ha!” said the Mandarin, exulting in first blood. “The end begins.”

  Tony gritted his teeth against the sudden almost overwhelming pain. His shoulder felt like a mass of throbbing raw meat, and blood flowed freely down his arm. Tony knew that this gash alone would be enough to kill him should the blood loss cause him to pass out. He pressed on with his attack, jamming the hilt of his sword into the Mandarin’s jaw. It was a solid contact and the terrorist was knocked off his feet, but no sooner had his rear end grazed the dirt than he was up again, shaking off the effects of the blow like a dog shaking moisture from its fur.

  “That is enough now, I feel,” he said. “Let us be done with this.”

  “Yes,” said Tony. “Let’s.”

  Both men attacked, swords raised then brought down with deadly purpose. Five times the blades clashed. Then a dozen. It was medieval brutality with no hope of mercy.

  But just as suddenly as it had begun, it appeared as though the combat was over. The exchange seemed to have exhausted and disoriented Tony Stark. He staggered unsteadily, and his eyes darted from left to right as though searching for focus.

  The Mandarin noticed and growled low in his throat like a satisfied jungle cat. “Ah, Tony Stark. You are feeling the strain, I think?”

  Stark turned his face to the sound of the terrorist’s voice. “Get back!” he said, and there was a tinge of desperation in his voice. “I’ll kill you.”

  “I think not,” said the Mandarin, massaging his jaw. “You showed some promise, but it is over now.” He circled behind Tony and slapped the billionaire’s backside with the flat of his blade, sending Tony tumbling into the brush.

  “An ignominious end for the great Tony Stark,” noted the Mandarin. “Brought low by a single shallow wound.”

  “I cannot die,” said Tony, and he seemed on the verge of tears. “Please.”

  “And so you beg,” said the Mandarin. “As I predicted.”

  Tony rolled onto his back, limbs flailing as he tried to scramble away from his enemy, but he could find no purchase in the dew-slick undergrowth. He was a sorry sight, pale and bloodied—a very different man from the one who only moments before had launched himself into battle with such fervor. Indeed, he seemed totally incapacitated by terror and injury, and it was all he could do to lie spread-eagled in the dirt, waiting for the Mandarin’s coup de grâce, which, now that the moment had arrived, the Mandarin seemed in no particular hurry to administer. It was almost as if he believed the danger was passed.

  “Look at you,” said the Mandarin. “You can’t even lift your sword.”

  Tony’s only response to this withering observation was to confirm it. His fingers clenched around the weapon’s grip, but he did not seem to have the strength to move it.

  The Mandarin swished his own saber through the air, enjoying the blade’s hiss.

  “I have often wondered how it must feel to see your own death approaching,” he said. “How you must feel right at this moment. How do you feel, Tony Stark? Can you even tell me that?”

  Tony tried to say something, but his mouth flapped pathetically like the gills of a landed fish. Nothing comprehensible emerged.

  The Mandarin cleared the brush from around Tony with deft strokes of his sword and then stuck the blade into the earth.

  “Allow me to tell you something to make you feel even worse,” he said, kneeling beside Tony to whisper in his ear. “I do not intend to allow this beheading to go to waste, as it were. In some weeks, once the world knows that the American Tony Stark was responsible for the attack on Dublin, I will release a video of myself, the Mandarin, punishing the assassin. I will be a hero to many. To the rest I shall have become more than a terrorist. A righteous vigilante, perhaps. And there is more I would tell you….”

  Tony took a deep labored breath. “Two things,” he said with apparent effort.

  The Mandarin nodded, impressed. “You have some inner strength, Mr. Stark. Though I doubt it shall extend to conveying these two things.”

  Tony coughed, then lifted himself to a sitting position for one more word.

  “I know your type, Mandy,” Tony said, and while the Mandarin was busy being irritated by the nickname, he pressed on. “And I know your type cheats. So I didn’t drink the water.”

  It had occurred to Tony that a trickster like the Mandarin would gain the upper hand any way he could, including drugging his opponent’s precious, life-sustaining water. So Tony had performed a simple pour test on a patch of grass. The grass had turned pale yellow, which should not happen with PH-neutral water, leading him to believe that his bottle was spiked.

  “You didn’t drink…” said the Mandarin. “But that means…”

  “Full sentences, please, Mandy,” said Tony. Then he bashed the Mandarin in the side of the head with his sword—a sword that was not as heavy as Tony had pretended, especially since he had removed the tungsten bar concealed inside the hollow grip. Another of the Mandarin’s sneaky tricks.

  The Mandarin keeled over, the pain in his head sharper than a lightning strike, but even as he fell, he called out:

  “Freddie! Aidez moi!”

  Tony was not surprised. In fact, he had guessed that a showboat like the Mandarin would not pass up the opportunity to record the death of such an iconic American. And who else would he bring along but his lieutenant?

  Tony stepped hard on the Mandarin’s right wrist and twisted his college ring from the terrorist’s finger.

  “That’s mine,” he said, sliding the ring onto his pinky and twisting the crown forty-five degrees before placing his thumb on the crystal. The crown flashed red.

  Darn, thought Tony. I need green.

  The Mandarin was somehow jamming his signal.

  “Freddie!” called the Mandarin, even as his eyes rolled back in his head. “Kill the…”

  Stark punched the Mandarin in the temple before he could complete his order, which Stark figured would probably end with an insult anyway. It was doubtful that the Mandarin’s entire sentence would have been something like “Kill the charming guest to our little terrorist soirée.”

  The Mandarin was stunned, probably concussed, but still he managed a few coherent sentences before he passed out completely. “This changes nothing. Leveque is coming. My trained frog will pounce on you, Stark.”

  From the woodland below came a fierce crash and a string of French expletives.

  “That’s the second thing,” said Tony. “I moved your snare.”

  A man like Freddie Leveque would not stay trussed for long in a simple snare, so Tony stumble-raced across the clearing and down the hillside toward the only spot that had a clear view of the killing ground, where he figured the Mandarin would stash his videographer—the same spot where Tony had rerigged the Mandarin’s hunting snare.

  Vanity, Mandy, thought Tony as he huffed. That’s your soft spot.

  The Mandarin had made such a point of telling Tony that his ancestors were noble hunters that Tony reasoned there must be a hunter’s trick in the mix somewhere. And he found it in the rough border of the clearing: a simple loop feeding back to a log counterweight. If the drugged water and weighted sword had not sufficiently inconvenienced Stark, then the Mandarin would have thrown himself on the ground behind the snare, leading his enemy into the trap. Obviously, Tony could not move the counterweight, but he did manage to rig the snare to a flexible branch that would not provide the snap of a counterweight but should be enough to yank the videographer several feet into the air.

  This is all Friday’s take on game theory, Tony realized. Focus on what is not yet in play. Think two steps ahead.

  It would have been so easy for Tony to drink the water and practice with the sword, but instead he had crawled inside the Mandarin’s mind.

  Thanks, Friday.

  But it wasn’t Friday. It was Saoirse.

  And she was still in danger.

  “One thing at a time,” said Tony, breaking his own rule about talking to himself. “Put on your own oxygen mask before helping children.” Which he thought was a reasonable analogy under the circumstances.

  Tony crashed through ragged scrub to find Leveque swearing and inverted, his fingers scrabbling at the earth, perhaps five inches from a huge nickel-plated revolver that glinted enticingly just out of reach. Stark knew enough French to understand what the Mandarin’s second-in-command was saying, and the Frenchman’s frustration brought a smile to Stark’s haggard face.

  “Bonjour, Freddie,” he said jauntily. “Ain’t it funny how the world turns?”

  Leveque used his fingers to set himself swinging back and forth. “You are dead, Stark. I will crush you!”

  This seemed entirely possible, as Leveque’s legs were almost as thick as the adjacent tree trunk, and a sprung branch couldn’t hold such a muscle-bound lunk aloft forever. So Tony decided not to waste another second on banter and instead grabbed the Iron Man gauntlet, which Leveque was wearing as a trophy, and spun the man in a dizzying circle until the gauntlet came loose. Unfortunately, just as the gauntlet let go, so did the rope, and Leveque yelped once before his momentum sent him tumbling toward a thicket, into which he disappeared. The gauntlet slipped from Tony’s hands, spinning into the long grass.

  Leveque is unconscious, hopefully, thought Tony. Stunned, at the very least.

  But there was immediate rustling in the thicket and Tony knew the Frenchman’s thick skull had kept him awake.

  Merde, he thought, and scrambled after the gauntlet. He had barely lifted it from the earth when Freddie literally exploded from the bushes, borne aloft by his freakishly developed thighs. His hang time seemed to last forever, and the thought popped into Tony’s head that Leveque could have a heck of a career in the NBA if he ever turned his back on crime.

  Leveque landed with a thump that Tony could’ve sworn he felt vibrate through the soles of his sneakers.

  “I will crush you,” said Leveque again, demonstrating with his spade-like hands.

  “You don’t have to mime it,” said Tony. “I know what crushing is.”

  “And zat gauntlet will not ’elp you. It is nuzzink but junk. It does not function.”

  Leveque pronounced function in the French manner—fong-shee-on—a manner that Tony threw back at him.

  “You’re right, this particular gauntlet doesn’t fong-shee-on. Not without its coded fail-safe power source.”

  This gave Leveque pause. “Power source. Quelle power source?”

  And as he said it, Leveque saw the college ring on Tony’s finger—the ring Tony had wrestled from the Mandarin.

  “Oh, non,” he said.

  “Oh, oui,” said Tony, and he slipped his hand into the gauntlet. The nanosecond the ring’s Vibranium gemstone touched the omnisensor inside the gauntlet, the servomotors hummed to life and Tony Stark was wearing a fully functional Iron Man glove that, though not weaponized, being part of the Party Pack, did feature a repulsor beam that could, when focused, push an object—or in this case, a person.

  Leveque’s expression underwent a lightning transformation from belligerent to desperate, which involved an almost comical elevation of the eyebrows and flaring of the nostrils. His fight-or-flight instincts took hold, and he decided on fight, which, as it turned out, was the wrong decision.

  Leveque hurled himself at Tony just as Stark unleashed a blast from his repulsor node. The irresistible force paradox states that when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object, mutual destruction is assured. However, even though the repulsor rays were verging on unstoppable, Freddie Leveque was certainly not immovable. So he was moved very swiftly through the air to the top of the tree he had recently dangled from.

  “Three points,” said Tony Stark. “And the crowd goes wild, as well they should. This guy was worth every dime.”

  Having satisfied his smart-ass gene, Tony kissed the knuckle of his gauntlet and hurried down the hill toward the ancient fortress. He almost immediately regretted taking that moment to satisfy his smart-ass gene when he heard a whoosh behind him. Looking over his shoulder, he saw the fizzing ascension of a flare from the treetop where he had deposited the charming Mr. Leveque.

  No doubt a call to arms for the rest of M Troop.

  “Now you are truly dead, Stark!” shouted Freddie Leveque.

  People have been telling me that all morning, thought Tony, changing his path and swinging around to the north. He would have to pass the Mandarin again, but Stark felt confident that even if the villain had recovered his senses, he could send him back to the land of nod with a gentle tap from his gauntlet.

  He flexed the gauntlet’s fingers and was comforted by the gentle whir of servomotors.

  Tony’s plan had been to pick a spot overlooking the harbor and keep an eye on Spin Zhuk and her unsavory pals until the help he had already summoned arrived. That wouldn’t work now. He was being hunted.

  I need to keep moving for a few minutes, thought Tony. And find a hole in the Mandarin’s signal shield.

  Things were not working out so well for Tony Stark tactically. He had decided to run away from his pursuers to circumvent being shot in a head to which he was very attached. This would seem like a sound plan, but Stark had failed to take into account the simple facts that (1) he was on an island and (2) it might occur to his enemies to split up, which it indeed had. This meant that, although he was actually running away from some of his enemies, he was running toward others. This grew increasingly obvious with every yard he trudged toward the small island’s northern cliff face. There was a quad bike coming at him from one side, and he could hear the shouts of his pursuers as they closed the gap.

  I can see why this place made such a great prison, Tony thought, changing tack for the umpteenth time. A tiny island with sheer cliffs along eighty percent of its coastline.

  And while Tony was usually a big fan of wildlife in general and birds in specific, he had to admit the cacophonous screeching of Little Saltee’s indigenous gulls was distracting, to say the least.

  “Shut up, gulls!” he said, but softly, in case his voice would give away his position—or in case the gulls would poop on him, which was not how he wanted his body to be found, because the world’s news agencies would undoubtedly run with that photo. He could imagine the headline:

  BILLIONAIRE TONY STARK IS JUST POOPED

  Or maybe:

  IRON MAN IS FOR THE BIRDS

  That was not how he wanted to be remembered.

  The quad bike roared just behind a rocky ridge, and Tony was forced to turn once again. He knew that he was effectively being herded toward the cliffs and that his ring still had not found a signal. Perhaps his technology had malfunctioned.

  Which technology hardly ever does, right?

  Tony had one repulsor at his disposal, but that was not enough to make him fly and certainly not enough to protect his head from bullets. Against a single opponent he might have stood a chance, but against three at least, all armed to the teeth…even Nick Fury couldn’t shoot his way out of this narrow area between a rock and a high place.

  He heard shouts to his left…and was that a dog barking?

  Where did they get a dog? There hadn’t been a dog before. Definitely no fair.

  The quad bike roared to his right, with Spin Zhuk’s voice somehow rising above it.

  “Over here! I see his pointy head.”

  Pointy head. Now they were adding insult to injury, with possibly more injury to follow.

  Tony had no option but to run straight. And straight didn’t go on for very long on a small island.

  As it turned out, straight didn’t even last as long as Tony had thought. After fifty or so yards, he found himself teetering on the edge of a sheer cliff, windmilling his arms to avoid plunging into the churning sea below. The movement was a not-so-kind reminder of his wounded shoulder. Even in that painful and stressful moment, he noticed that the waves were much less surfer-friendly than the breakers in Malibu. These weren’t so much breakers as crushers. Nobody was paddling out of a tube in this water saying, “Dude, that totally rocked. Where’s my wax?”

  Tony also noticed that as his gauntlet hung there, stretched out over the void, it flashed green for a moment. He had found the edge of the Mandarin’s jammer envelope and sent a signal.

  Stark righted himself with a blast from his repulsor and turned to face his pursuers.

  Come on, cavalry! he thought. Hurry it up!

  The two pursuers he faced were no more than ten feet away, showing a little more respect than they had earlier in the day, possibly because of the very obviously active Iron Man gauntlet humming on Tony’s forearm.

  Only two, thought Tony. I could have taken them.

  But he’d had no way of knowing. The Mandarin could have had a dozen more soldiers.

  Spin Zhuk sat hunched behind the handlebars of her quad bike, revving the big machine as though she was going to drive him over the cliff with her front wheels, which she no doubt could if she felt like it. Leveque squatted atop a rock, seeming a mite teed off, which was probably because of the whole treetop thing. There was a guy with something to prove, and Tony knew he would attack the second the order was given.