Batman and the associated characters are owned by DC. James Bond and the associated characters were created by Ian Fleming. With thanks to Cmar for beta reading this for me and thanks to all the reviewers and readers so far! All reviews welcome.

Golden Bat – Chapter Twenty-Four

The only sign of nervousness Blofeld showed was a slight twitch of his hand. His cat, the only thing he truly loved, hissed at him at this sign of nervousness. The screens in front of him were showing an ever-changing vista of the security cameras outside. His men were dealing with Bond and Batman, or at least he hoped they were.

He knew from bitter experience that Bond was not an easy man to put into his grave. Unbidden, his hand went to the scar down the side of his face that Bond had put there.

He still woke up shaking from the memories of that time.

Bond had been a beaten man. His men were busy torturing information out of him when he had somehow escaped the chamber, killed the guards and damn near killed him. The drugs he had pumped into Bond's system had affected his aim. If it weren't for that, Blofeld would just be another closed case in Bond's file.

A satellite map of America was showing the extent of the nano-droid plague. A blinking orange circle was superimposed above them to show the area of control they had. They were approaching the edge of it.

There was something beautiful about the map and its colours. A man-made contagion spreading fear and death indiscriminately. His cat tried to jump down but he grabbed it by the scruff of the neck to stop it and it glared at him.

Even the pain of the cat's claws digging into his leg could not stop the joy he felt.

"Isn't it wonderful?" he said to his technicians monitoring the plague.

"Yes sir," they said in a monotone voice. They all knew what happened to dissenting voices in his organisation and they were not willing to join them.

There would be people dying because of Blofeld soon, that he knew, but he did not feel anything for them. You might as well feel for an insect you squash beneath your boot or a germ you kill when you clean the kitchen.

To seek an ideal world you always need to scour away the dead wood. According to Blofeld, there were just three kinds of people. People you could use to further the cause, enemies of the cause, and everyone else.

Few people in Blofeld's experience fitted into the first category, a lot of the second category had been killed or converted to the first category, and to be honest Blofeld cared less about the third category than he did about what he had for breakfast yesterday.

Bond and Batman fitted perfectly into the ever-shrinking second category and would soon be killed, slowly. "And they deserve it!" he said out loud. A couple of his men glanced over at this outburst but then immediately looked down.

One of his men looked at him for a millisecond longer than was sensible and was invisibly pushed from the first category to the second category.

He stroked his cat again, who realised he wasn't going anywhere, started to purr loudly. The morning sun pierced through a stone window above him and illuminated him in sunlight.

It was turning into a beautiful day.

The helicopter's engine was emitting a screaming, grinding noise as it fell towards the burning earth like a wounded pterodactyl of old.

The helicopter was spinning wildly. In the gap in the spin Batman could see Bond's helicopter. Bond had had more success than he had in taking over the helicopter and was flying it towards Batman's helicopter.

He grabbed the two thugs he had knocked out and, using his grappling hook, waited for the perfect opportunity to attach to Bond's helicopter.

Damn!

The helicopter lurched to one side as it hit a burning tree, reducing his options to one. He leapt out of the burning helicopter and with awe inspiring skill grabbed a burning branch with one hand.

In his other hand he was holding two tied up thugs by a tensile cord. The thugs were heavy and the cord dug into his hand. The flames on the branch were starting to burn through his protective gloves and the branch would not hold forever.

Beneath him the jungle was a mass of flames and the helicopter was slowly falling into hell. The blades were giving it enough lift for Batman to see exactly where it would fall.

Bond was flying his helicopter towards Batman. With incredible skill he was avoiding the tongues of flame that leapt skywards, threatening to drag his aircraft down.

Would he get to him in time?

Batman's gloves were flameproof but they could not protect against the heat for long, and the branch was creaking and cracking.

Crack.

BOOM!

The branch cracked, spilling him downwards. Below, the helicopter exploded sending a wave of heat, flame and jagged metal up at him. With his one free hand he fired a grappling hook at the door of Bond's helicopter and winched himself up out of the furnace he was in.

His shoulder blades were starting to compress together as the force of carrying two thugs and the strain of being pulled up to the helicopter started to tell. He filed away the pain as something to consider later and dropped gratefully inside Bond's helicopter.

He dropped the two unconscious thugs inside the helicopter and immediately took in a few details.

Several bullet holes decorated the inside of the helicopter and patches of blood showed an all too familiar story. He clenched his jaw. This was Bond's way, not his way.

He stalked into the cockpit to where Bond was sitting, flying the helicopter like he was born to it. The gusts of hot air and flame from below would have sent a lesser pilot to the grave by now.

Bond grinned at him as he walked into the cockpit. "Glad to see you could make it."

"And you. Any problems?" he said, looking around at the empty helicopter.

Bond patted his shoulder holster. "Nothing I couldn't handle."

"Did you have to…" Batman struggled to find the words.

"Kill them?" said Bond. "These men were not children. They were soldiers wanting to kill me. Kill us. They knew the risks. I can't afford to play your game out here, Bruce; there are too many lives at stake. If we fail, a city dies."

Batman shook his head. Now was not the time to get into a philosophical debate about the sanctity of life. "Let's get Davies back in and go."

Bond shook his head. "The flames will die down soon. He'll be safer out there than with us, believe me."

"What do you mean?"

Bond chuckled to himself. "Do you think this is the only welcoming committee Blofeld has planned for us?" They were out of the flames, the burning part of the jungle behind them, and skimming so low that Bruce could almost touch the branches below them. "If I know Ernst he'll save his big guns for last." He looked back with distaste at the two tied up thugs. "We'll drop off those men first before we attack."

"Attack with what? What weapons have we got?"

"Us."

A man was flying high above the clouds. Below him, the clouds were rolling like they were on a conveyor belt, but it was not them that was moving, it was him.

Behind him the clouds parted like the wake of a ship on a clear lake. Thousands of feet below him the sonic boom was heard by passing ships in the Atlantic and people wondered what was passing above them.

Since the passing of the Concorde, sonic booms over the Atlantic were a rarity so most people assumed it was the big blue. The Boy Scout. Superman.

They were wrong.

Dead wrong.

Damian Alvey had been given Superman's powers by the nano-droids that even now were busy altering him on the molecular level.

As he flew towards Bond and Batman he was being fed information about Blofeld and the two heroes. He flew past a Pan Am jet and turned back to look through the portholes.

The temperature was near freezing at that altitude and the oxygen content was minimal. It did not bother him. Not now. He was beyond such mortal concerns.

He tailed the jet for a while and then flew next to it. He caught up to a wing and stood on it. The plane was flying at over 600 mph; it should be impossible to stand on it.

Impossible was not a word that Alvey lived by.

Not any more.

He grinned, frost forming on his face as he walked up the wing, each footstep imprinting a step into the metal. People were jostled out of their watching of "The Transporter 2" on the plane's screens and were watching death walking up the wing towards them.

The slipstream was dragging his long coat behind him like a cape.

All these people. And he held their lives in his hand. He eyes warmed as he considered using his heat vision to blast this insolent plane from the sky.

Blofeld was disturbed from his reverie by the insistent voice.

"Sir," the technician said again. One of his hands was hovering above his boss's shoulder to wake him. The man had not dared touch him, though. "Sir," he repeated. "Sorry to disturb you, sir, but you really should take a look at this."

"What is it?" he said irritably. "Have we heard back from the UN yet?"

"No sir," he said. "They have another two hours to agree to your demands. As per your request we have been monitoring air traffic in the area. We've picked up this strange message from Pan Am flight 5524, a scheduled flight from Washington to Cartagena."

A voice crackled over the airwaves. "This is the Pan Am flight from Washington. Our squawk code is 5524 and our ETA is one hour thirty minutes. Please confirm our landing window."

There was a gap of a few seconds. "That's a roger, ground control. We are fifteen minutes ahead of schedule. You want us in a holding pattern for fifteen minutes." There was a muffled affirmative from the control tower. "That's a roger, ground control."

There were more crackling sounds. "What the hell?"

More crackling sounds. "Control, this is 5524; we have a man standing on the wing."

More crackling sounds. "No, that's not pilot talk for being out of chicken curry or having to resort to showing golf on the internal televisions, we have a man standing on the wing!"

There was a swearing sound. "Damn it, control, he is walking up the wing!" There was more noise and more swearing from the pilot. "God damn it! He is a meta human of some kind. He's like Superman or something, but he sure don't look like a hero! Jeez, his eyes are glowing red, he's going to kill us all!"

It would be too easy to kill them.

Blow this plane from the sky.

Create more widows and families grieving for their loss.

No.

Not today. Or not this day at any rate. His revenge was against Blofeld, not all the world. He let the slipstream catch him and send him tumbling towards the earth.

He fell a thousand feet and then concentrated as he flew like an avenging angel towards Blofeld's lair.

Blofeld shrugged. "So there is a meta-human out there. Last I heard Colombia had no meta-humans to speak of."

"Look at the radar, sir." There was a green spot approaching his base. "This meta-human is heading straight towards us."

Blofeld jabbed a finger at the radar. "What's that?" A dot flickered for a millisecond and then disappeared.

"What? Nothing, sir. Sometimes the radar picks up stray readings. It is probably a flock of birds or something."

The dot appeared again. Closer this time. "That's no flock of birds." Blofeld jabbed a finger down on the radar screen again, this time cracking the screen. "It's a helicopter trying to fly under the radar." Blofeld grabbed the hapless technician round the neck with one hand and started to squeeze. "It's Bond. Your carelessness will cost you your life."

Blofeld pushed the coughing man over and kicked him viciously in the stomach. "You have not heard the last of this."

"Sir!"

Blofeld span around and glared at the man who was speaking.

"Permission to activate stinger missiles, sir."

"Do it. Now! Destroy that helicopter and blow that damn meta-human from the sky."

"Sir, meta-humans are notoriously difficult to kill, maybe we should use the…"

Blofeld smiled. His face was not improved by the effort. "The nano-droids can eat what the missiles leave behind. Kill them. Kill them all."

Bond and Batman's helicopter was flying through a jungle chasm as far under the radar as they could. The blades of the aircraft were practically scraping against the rock either side. Every now and then the chasm was too narrow even for Bond's prodigious piloting skills and they erupted above the surface of the jungle like a dolphin leaping above the water before they could dive down again.

The last time they surfaced they could see the stone pyramids of Blofeld's lair, tantalisingly close.

'Ping, ping.'

"What's that?" asked Bruce.

"They've got a missile lock on us."

"Do we have any chaff?"

"We don't even have any party balloons." Bond jerked back fiercely on the control stick and pulled the helicopter into a spin.

In the distance could be seen the tell-tale puff of smoke as two missiles hurtled towards them. A further two missiles leapt into the sky and disappeared into the distance.

Bond didn't have the luxury of time to consider what they could be hunting.

The helicopter creaked and groaned as he took the aircraft in back-breaking twists and turns it was not designed for.

He took the helicopter into a jungle clearing and flew it up the narrow gorge.

Behind him the missiles roared up the chasm towards him. In a stomach-lurching manoeuvre he cut the power to the blades and the helicopter dropped twenty feet in a second and nearly crashed into some rocks.

He powered it back up again and the missiles overshot their mark. The missiles tried to turn around but the gorge was too narrow and one of them scraped against the side, sending it exploding against rock face. The chasm was a mass of flying metal splinters for a second and the other missile erupted from the heat and flame of the explosion towards the helicopter.

The engine strained against the pressure Bond was putting against it. He tried to turn it but it was slow.

Too slow.

The missile slammed into the helicopter…