by Неизвестный
“Why not? Where are you?”
“If I get any closer, I’ll get stuck in there myself.”
“Just reach out to me with my staff.”
“I don’t believe I can see your staff,” Miss Sato said, picking it up. “It’s gone. I can’t remember where you left it.”
Zeta One stirred about in the wallow of mud. He removed his straw hat and threw it outside the swimming pool. His skull was curiously scarred and thin gray hair grew in patches.
“This situation is so very much like the sad fate of Mrs. Nagai,” Miss Sato remarked brightly. “For four years, I’ve been promising to release her from that jail. She is an elected official of my government, and I helped to elect her. When I visited her, this time, and she told me about you and how kind you are, well, I swore I wouldn’t leave the island. Not unless I can take her home with me.”
Zeta One muttered in disbelief.
“That was my sacred vow,” Miss Sato said casually.
“Your friends in Nagoya can solve your hostage problem,” Zeta One said. “It’s always foolish for a government to be trapped by sentimental feelings for the innocent. Tell them to bomb the hostage compound. Kill them all, and level the Mechatronic Visionary Centre to the ground.”
“I’m sure there’s some better plan that’s rather less cruel.”
“I don’t make strategic plans.” Zeta One shrugged. “Living from day to day as I do. You should listen when I tell you to destroy my own home. That’s where they put me when they brought me back from Somalia. They stitched me back together in there. They did amazing things to me. They were cruel things, but I volunteered for the cruelty.”
“I volunteered for all this too,” said Miss Sato. “That’s why, unfortunately, you’re not getting free unless Mrs. Nagai also gets free.”
Time passed after this declaration. Zeta One struggled to extricate himself from the clutching mud. He made some small progress, but he had to pause periodically to ward off the mosquitoes. Their fierce, annoying whine seemed to bother him far more than their bites.
Miss Sato shared the bites of the mosquitoes. They were painful and possibly infectious.
“I have another plan,” said Zeta One at last. “Visit the hostage and leave her a metal file. She could saw the chain off her leg. Then, one dark stormy night, a friend throws a rope ladder over the wall. The escaped captive would use standard escape-and-evasion techniques to reach Teppu Point at the southern tip of Tsushima. Then, swim to the Australian navy base on Naiin Island.”
“Mrs. Nagai isn’t a global commando. Mrs. Nagai is a sixty-year-old female socialist politician.”
“It’s a pity my tactics are so inadequate,” said Zeta One as he killed another mosquito. “It seems I’m doomed to drown in mud.”
“It’s bad enough that we have an Australian naval base in Japanese waters!” said Miss Sato, slapping her own mosquito-bitten cheek. “Where is your pride? Where is your decency and honor? All we have to do is liberate one innocent Japanese woman from a terrible situation, and you’re carrying on like that’s the end of the world! Do we all have to blow ourselves up?”
Miss Sato paced back and forth, rapping the rim of the swimming pool with his heavy cane. “When I think of all the money we Japanese wasted on our soldiery, you men who should have been our roof tiles and instead cost us more than jewels. And for what? What safety and security did you soldiers ever bring us? After all your strutting and boasting and shouting through megaphones and waving of your big, striped, fascist flags, we lost our own capital to a sneak attack! Now we’re beset by bandits, and the more we bomb them, the crazier they get!”
“Japan was a pirate island,” rumbled Zeta One. “Tsushima was the biggest pirate island in the world for three hundred years. When the pirates ruled Tsushima, there was no Japan, just warlords who killed each other every spring. Evil men came here to rob Asia from as far away as Portugal.”
“You sound proud of these evil, wandering men.”
“Proud of them? I’m one of them.”
A white terrier leapt over a tumbledown wall and began yapping in frenzy.
“I should have blown up that kid’s stupid newspaper a long time ago,” Zeta One said. “No target is softer than a reporter … But since he was born here on Tsushima, well, none of this was really his fault. Yes, yes, I feel true regret for his native family.”
Miss Sato watched as the terrier scampered back and forth, yapping till it drooled in sharp distress. “I hate all dogs, but there’s something quite wrong with this dog’s behavior. I think he wants us to help his master.”
“Who, us? How?”
Pirates arrived. They were mountain pirates, the creatures of the backwoods. There were forty of them, and their mood was evident by the fact that they had the severed heads of the two Russian drivers, Yuri and Leonid, stuck onto two sharp steel poles.
These mountain pirates were mostly teenagers, fearless youth who had never spent a day in school. To judge by their angry, pidgin jabber, they had no language in common either. They had only three great commonalities among them: scars and bad tattoos were two of them.
Fresh, bloody wounds were also common because Yuri and Leonid, being Russians, had battled to their last breath.
A few older pirates lurked among the bloodstained crowd of feral teens, veterans of thirty who looked about sixty. They were jittery, twitchy, red-eyed, heavily armed, and very high on drugs. No pirate gang was a family, so these were not motherly, fatherly, older people. The older pirates had the timeworn look of prison trustees, bad people grimly burdened with the task of keeping even worse people in line.
The Toyota’s antiaircraft gun was their latest trophy, lashed to a shoulder-borne tote pole. The same fate had befallen Yoshida. The captured journalist had been lashed to a pole with leather thongs at his wrists and ankles.
“Don’t you worry, Miss Sato!” Yoshida called out. “I sold all my newspapers!”
Miss Sato picked up Zeta One’s metal staff and threw it to the blind man. This quick gesture made little sense, but she knew they would steal the cane from her, and she didn’t want that to be her fault.
Irritated by this gesture of defiance, the pirates fell upon Miss Sato and beat her up. Miss Sato limply dropped to the damp earth and offered no resistance. They kicked her, punched her, dragged her around by the hair, tore her clothes off, crudely tied her arms and legs, urinated on her, shouted many insults, and threw mud in her face.
Miss Sato shouted with pain at appropriate times and guarded her vital organs from the blows. Being young people, they soon grew bored with the trouble.
The pirates dumped Yoshida next to her, bound hand and foot. Yoshida rolled in the mud to face her. “My newspaper has comic strips,” Yoshida confided. “They can’t read the words, but even illiterates love comics.”
Miss Sato searched with her tongue for any broken teeth.
“Modern global pirates are a simple people at heart,” said Yoshida.
These backwoods Tsushima pirates were studying Zeta One, who was mired in his mud but clutching his cane alertly. They were genuinely puzzled about what to do about him. He was too poor to have anything they wanted to steal, and nobody wanted to jump in the mud and attempt to haul him out. Likely they had noticed his mud-smeared personal belt-bomb.
“What are they going to do to him?” said Miss Sato to Yoshida.
“Well,” said Yoshida, “they could shoot him and leave him there.”
“If they shoot him, he’s going to explode. I’m sure his belt-bomb has a dead-man’s switch. He likely has a hidden second bomb, timed to go off when rescuers come to investigate the first bomb. That is rather standard.”
“You know,” said Yoshida, craning his neck to investigate her bound and naked body, “for a feminist peace campaigner, you’re a lot tougher than you look. Where did you get all those scars on your body? You’ve got more scars than some of these pirates do.”
“These pirates never did any salvage work
in Tokyo. Skyscrapers fell down in Tokyo. Buildings that big, they fall down even long after they fall down.”
“You’ll rebuild your Tokyo someday, I suppose.”
“No, Tokyo is over. But Japan isn’t. Pay attention now. If they shoot him, he will explode. You and I will be deafened and wounded by the blast. But these pirates will all be dead because they’re standing up. They’re in blast range.”
Yoshida’s terrier arrived. It tenderly licked Yoshida’s face as he lay there bound hand and foot. “Stop briefing me about bombs,” Yoshida complained. “I know all about bombs. I wrote a hundred bomb atrocity stories for Truth Dawn, and they’re always just the same.”
The pirates fell silent at the rumble of an approaching jeep. This ex-military American Humvee was a psychedelic wonder of feathers and fronds, all fuchsia, hot pink, magenta, and vermilion. It bore a large and silent uniformed driver and, in the back, a statuesque, very pregnant African woman.
Khadra the Pirate Queen dressed as if a treasure chest had been emptied on her gravid body. She wore necklaces, bangles, rings, hammered gold badges, ropes of pearls, a towering crown of leather and feathers half a meter high, and not much else.
“Stop here,” Khadra told her driver in Japanese. She studied the scene before her. “Well! What a good opportunity to get rid of three trespassers and put their bones in this mud pit.”
“So, what’s new with you, Khadra?” the journalist called out. “Who’s the new father?”
“If I wanted you to know about my lovers,” said the gorgeous Queen of Pirates, “I wouldn’t be living underground. Yoshida, who is this ugly, naked, skinny woman?”
“Miss Sato is a peace activist from the mainland. She is a hostage negotiator.”
“Well, well,” said the pirate queen, “another mainland captive, that’s so nice. Why isn’t she chained in the compound with the others? Take her there right away. Wait—untie her and put some clothes on her first, she looks ugly. Also, pull those severed heads off those poles. Those always look vulgar. Can you talk?”
“Yes,” said Miss Sato, standing up shakily as four or five pirates gripped her bruised limbs. “Yes, I can talk to you.”
“Are you from North Japan, or are you from South Japan?”
“I came here to Tsushima from Nagoya.”
“That’s really too bad for you,” said the pirate queen serenely. “If you’d been one of my dear friends from North Japan, then I would have released you now with all courtesies. And even given you rich gifts of gold and silk and exotic drugs. Whatever you like. But since you’re an aggressive corporate criminal who comes from evil South Japan, then I must charge you with overfishing in Tsushima’s territorial waters. Also, you are guilty of abusing our beautiful island republic as your toxic waste dump. That’s why you’re my hostage. You understand that? All right? Good! Now! How much do you think your family would pay for you? In American dollars.”
“Khadra,” Yoshida protested, “Miss Sato can’t be your hostage. She’s an official hostage negotiator from the Nagoya regime. It’s because of her that the people in South Japan know that we still hold hostages here. See, that’s all been settled. That was all printed in the newspaper.”
Yoshida’s terrier yapped triumphantly.
“Untie that journalist,” Khadra said. “We can’t shoot a journalist. We need his newspaper to publish our demands and communiques. Also, all the foreign intelligence agencies read his newspaper. He’s valuable. That’s a cute dog.”
An obedient teenager sawed through Yoshida’s leather bonds. “Thanks,” Yoshida said, rubbing his skinned wrists.
“Now shoot the cute dog,” Khadra commanded. Her burly driver pulled out a chromed sidearm and put a round through the terrier. Galvanized with a final spastic fit of animal vitality, the dog ran shrieking in a tight circle and died coughing blood.
“Now throw that bloody dead dog into that dirty mud pit. Dead dogs are so disgusting. You there, big dirty blind man, yes, you, stuck in that mud like a hippopotamus. Bury that dog in the mud for me now. I don’t like the way that dog looks.”
“I can’t see any dog,” said Zeta One reasonably. “I’m a blind man.”
“Blind man, what are you doing there, stuck in that mud?”
“Your highness, ma’am, your great and beautiful ladyship, I’m on a pilgrimage to the six sacred shrines of the Goddess of Mercy,” declared Zeta One. “I seek forgiveness for my many past crimes. But I’m so blind, so stupid and clumsy, that I slipped and fell in here. In my pitiful efforts to thrash my way out, I just sank in deeper and deeper, until, well, I almost lost my cane. If you would graciously help me out of this predicament, I would pray for you until my last days.”
“I love this blind man,” Khadra said. “I always loved him, because he has the proper humble attitude. All of you should be more like him. He’s sweet. Jump in there now and pull him out of that muck.”
None of the pirates showed any signs of obeying Khadra on the issue of the mud. They’d been a little startled by the pirate queen’s sudden advent in her jeep festooned with seashells, fake pearls, and rhinestone jewels, but they had rapidly lost interest in her. The pirates were a shell-shocked people by nature. They were up to the things that any very ill-organized crowd would do when lost in the woods. They were swatting mosquitoes, aimlessly gathering firewood, scrounging for edible herbs, crouching pantsless behind trees, and so forth.
Miss Sato realized that she was not going to be immediately killed. Although she had been stripped and beaten, she was neither surprised nor afraid. “I’m proud to meet the Queen of the Pirates,” she called out in a loud, even voice. “Because I’ve asked to meet you many times! People often spoke to me of your good temper, your good sense, and your sincerity, and now I can see why.”
“Are you talking to me now, you ugly, skinny old woman?”
“Of course! I want to ask you a favor.”
“Well, you’re not allowed to talk to me in your disgusting condition! Somebody put some clothes on the ugly peacenik witch there. You there, yes, you, the girl with bones in your dreadlocks. Take all your clothes off, put them on the hostage, you’re the right size. Yes, your shoes too, especially your shoes, and the rest of you, stop fooling around! It’s important when the Queen of the Pirates negotiates with organized governments! You should pay attention to my maneuvers—you’ll learn something. Now, hostage, or hostage negotiator, whatever, how many hostages do you want to buy from me? What treasure did you bring me? You didn’t bring me very much, unless someone else already robbed you.”
Miss Sato knotted a dirty straw skirt around her waist. Then she slipped her bare arms into the girl-pirate’s rough canvas coat. “I’d hoped,” she said, “that a leader of your great qualities would release one innocent woman for me as an important moral gesture.”
“Oh, right, you’re one of those, are you?” said the Queen of the Pirates. “You think I’ve never met your kind before? I know all about you people and your ‘moral gestures.’ Well, listen to this, bitch: I didn’t capture those hostages. I didn’t grab them any more than I blew out the eyes of this poor blind man here. It’s not my fault that they have to be kept there so that you won’t destroy our precious high-tech cultural compound.”
“The Federation of Nine Relief Societies never blows up anyone.”
“Yes you do. You are dropping bombs on innocent women and children here just like that man Guernica and his painting of Picasso. I should have that beautiful painting tattooed on your ugly, skinny back, you penniless hypocrite. If you want this woman released, why don’t you agree to take her place yourself ? Ha!”
“I already agreed to take the place of Mrs. Nagai,” said Miss Sato. “I agreed to that condition four years ago. Let’s do that right now. Let Mrs. Nagai go home, and I will stay in her place.”
“Oh my God how boring!” protested the Queen of Pirates. “What a bother to have to put up with this crazy, ugly woman when that poor blind man there is almost drowning in his
mud! Every week I’m harassed by arrogant demands from you stinking mainland bureaucrats, when the loyal subjects of my island, like the blind man there, suffer your oppression.” She turned to her enormous, mute brute of a driver. “I want him out of there. Get the big towing chain.”
Miss Sato turned her attention to Yoshida. “Well,” she began, “we’re making some good progress here,” and then she broke off because, to her surprise, Yoshida was racked with silent sobs.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“The pirate queen killed my dog,” Yoshida choked out.
“What? But you’re a journalist in a conflict zone. You see bodies every week!”
“He was my best friend,” said Yoshida, writhing with woe and shaking like a leaf.
A pirate approached and slapped Yoshida on the back. “Don’t take that so hard,” he urged in English. Miss Sato hadn’t spotted this English-speaking pirate among the group before—he was dressed with particular oddity.
This new interloper was dressed in land mine-removal armor. He wore the big ceramic helmet with its platelike tinted blast shield, which gave his hidden head an angular, turtleish appearance. He also wore big blast-sloping epaulets that guarded his neck and shoulders, samurai-style. Ridged overlapping plates nestled around his back and belly, but this peculiar gear simply ended at his skinny ass. He wore ragged shorts and rubber wading boots.
“Where’s the damn robot gun?” he demanded from Yoshida in English. “You were supposed to fetch down that machine gun for me today.”
“I can’t talk English to you,” Yoshida said in Japanese. “I’m too upset!”
“What the hell good are you, then?” said the faceless man in the armor. “I gave you this important news leak on a plate! All you had to do was dig that circuitry out of its hole and bring it back to me.”
“I don’t know where your robot gun is,” said Yoshida in anguish. “Leave me alone.”
Everyone was leaving the interloper alone. This seemed odd for a group of aggressive pirates. Then Miss Sato noticed that, along with his de-mining gear, the stranger was carrying a muddy satchel full of freshly grubbed-up land mines. He had disinterred these treasures somehow and now carried them around like so many daikon radishes.