The distant lights at the gate flashed on. Laura winced and lifted her head. The two night guards—she didn’t know their names yet—had come out and were conferring over their belt phones.
She heard a pop overhead. Very quiet, unobtrusive, like a rafter settling. Then another one: a faint metallic bonk, and a rustle. Very quiet, like birds landing.
Something had dropped onto the roof. Something had hit the top of one of the turrets—bonked off its tin roof onto the shingles.
White glare sheeted over the yard, silently. White glare from the top of the mansion. The guards looked up, startled. They flung their arms up in surprise, like bad actors.
The roof began crackling.
Laura stood up and screamed at the top of her lungs.
She dashed through the darkened house to the bedroom. The baby had jerked awake and was howling in fear. David was sitting up in bed, dazed. “We’re on fire,” she told him.
He catapulted out of bed and stumbled into his pants. “Where?”
“The roof. In two places. Fire bombs, I think.”
“Oh, Jesus,” he said. “You grab Loretta and I’ll get the others.”
She strapped Loretta into her tote and tossed their decks into a suitcase. She could smell smoke by the time she’d finished. And there was a steady crackling roar.
She hauled the baby and the suitcase out into the yard. She left Loretta in her tote, behind the fountain, then turned to look. One of the turrets was wrapped in flames. A leaping ulcer of fire spread over the west wing.
Rajiv and Jimmy came out, half carrying a coughing, weeping Rita. Laura ran to them. She sank her nails into Rajiv’s naked arm. “Where’s my husband, you stupid bastard!”
“Very sorry, madam,” Rajiv whimpered. He tugged nervously at his drooping pants. “Sorry, madam, very sorry …”
She shoved him aside so hard that he spun and fell. She vaulted the stairs and rushed back in, ignoring their yells.
David was in the bedroom. He was crouched almost double, with a wet washcloth pressed to his face. He was wearing his videoglasses, and had hers propped on his head. The bedside clock was clamped under his armpit. “Just a sec,” he muttered, fixing her with blank, gold-etched eyes. “Gotta find my toolbox.”
“Fuck it, David, go!” She hauled at his arm. He went reluctantly, stumbling.
Once outside, they had to back away from the heat. One by one, the upper rooms were beginning to explode. David dropped his washcloth, numbly. “Flashover,” he said, staring.
A fist of dirty flame punched out an upstairs window. Shards of glass fountained across the lawn. “The heat builds up,” David muttered clinically. “The whole room ignites at once. And the gas pressure just blows the walls out.”
The soldiers pushed them back, holding their stupid, useless tangle-guns at chest level, like police batons. David went reluctantly, hypnotized by destruction. “I’ve run simulations of this, but I’ve never seen it happen,” he said, to no one in particular. “Jesus, what a sight!”
Laura shoved one of the teenage soldiers as he trampled her bare foot. “Some help you are, asshole! Where in hell is the fire department or whatever you use in this godforsaken place?”
The boy backed off, trembling, and dropped his gun. “Look at the sky!” He pointed northeast.
Low scud of burning clouds on the northern horizon. Lit like dawn with ugly, burning amber. “What the hell,” David said, marveling. “That’s miles away.… Laura, that’s Point Sauteur. It’s the whole fucking complex off there. That’s a refinery fire!”
“Brimstone fire,” the soldier wailed. He started sobbing, dabbing at his face. The other soldier, a bigger man, kicked him hard in the leg. “Pick up you weapon, bloodclot!”
A distant dirty flash lit the clouds. “Man, I hope they haven’t hit the tankers,” David said. “Man, I hope the poor bastards on those rigs have lifeboats.” He tugged at his earpiece. “You getting all this, Atlanta?”
Laura pulled her own rig off his head. She backed away and fetched Loretta in her tote. She pulled the screaming baby free of the thing and cradled her against her chest, rocking her and murmuring.
Then she put the glasses on.
Now she could watch it without hurting so much.
The mansion burned to the ground. It took all night. Their little group huddled together in the guardhouse, listening to tales of disaster on the phones.
Around seven A.M., a spidery military chopper arrived and set down by the fountain.
Andrei, the Polish emigré, hopped out. He took a large box from the pilot and joined them at the gates.
Andrei’s left arm was wrapped in medicinal gauze, and he stank of chemical soot. “I have brought shoes and uniforms for all survivors,” he announced. The box was full of flat, plastic-wrapped packs: the standard cadre’s jeans and short-sleeved shirts. “Very sorry to be such bad hosts,” Andrei told them somberly. “The Grenadian People apologize to you.”
“At least we survived,” Laura told him. She slipped her bare feet gratefully into the soft deck shoes. “Who took credit?”
“The malefactors of the F.A.C.T. have broken all civilized bounds.”
“I figured,” Laura said, taking the box. “We’ll take turns changing inside the guardhouse. David and I will go first.” Inside, she shucked out of her flimsy nightrobe and buttoned on the stiff, fresh shirt and heavy jeans. David put on a shirt and shoes.
They stepped out and Rita went in, shivering. “Now, you will please join me in the helicopter,” Andrei said. “The world must know of this atrocity.…”
“All right,” Laura said. “Who’s online?”
[“Practically everybody,”] Emily told her. [“We got you on a live feed throughout the company, and to a couple of news services. Vienna’s gonna have a hard time holding this one.… It’s just too big.”]
Andrei paused at the chopper’s hatchway. “Can you leave the baby?”
“No way,” David said flatly. They climbed into two crash couches in the back, and David held Loretta’s tote in his lap. Andrei took the copilot’s seat and they buckled in.
Up and away in a quiet hiss of rotor blades.
David glanced out the bulletproof window at the mansion’s black wreckage. “Any idea what hit our house?”
“Yes. There were many of them. Very small, cheap planes—paper and bamboo, like children’s kites. Radar-transparent. Many have crashed now, but not before they dropped their many bombs. Little thermite sticks with flaming jelly.”
“Were they hitting us in particular? Rizome, I mean?”
Andrei shrugged in his shoulder harness. “It is hard to say. Many such houses have burned. The communiqué does mention you.… I have it here.” He passed them a printout. Laura glanced at it: date and tag line, and block after block of the usual Stalinist garbage. “Do you have a casualty count?”
“Seven hundred so far. It is rising. They are still pulling bodies from the offshore rigs. They hit us with antiship missiles.”
“Good God,” David said.
“Those were heavy armaments. We have choppers out looking for ships. There may have been several. But there are many ships in the Caribbean, and missiles have a long range.” He reached into his shirt pocket. “Have you see these before?”
Laura took the object from his fingers. It looked like a big plastic paper clip. It was speckled camo-green and brown, and weighed almost nothing. “No.”
“This one is defused—it is plastic explosive. A mine. It can blow the tire off a truck. Or the leg off a woman or child.” His voice was cold. “The small planes scattered many, many hundreds of them. You will not be traveling by the road anymore. And we will not set foot around the complex.”
“What kind of crazy bastard—” David said.
“They mean to deny us our own country,” Andrei said. “These devices will shed our blood for months to come.”
Land slid below them; suddenly they were over the Caribbean. The chopper wheeled. “Do not f
ly into the smoke,” Andrei told the pilot. “It is toxic.”
Smoke still billowed from two of the offshore rigs. They resembled giant tabletops piled high with burning cars. A pair of fire barges spewed long, feathered plumes of chemical foam over them.
The jackleg rigs had cranked themselves down to the surface; their ornate hydraulics were awash with saltwater. The water was full of blackened flotsam—blobs of fabric, writhing plastic snakes of cable. And stiff-armed floating things that looked like dummies. Laura looked away with a gasp of pain.
“No, look very well,” Andrei told her. “They never even showed us a face.… Let these people have faces, at least.”
“I can’t look,” she said tightly.
“Then close your eyes behind the glasses.”
“All right.” She pressed her blind face to the window. “Andrei. What are you going to do?”
“You are leaving this afternoon,” he said. “As you see, we can no longer guarantee your safety. You will leave as soon as the airport is swept for mines.” He paused. “These will be the last flights out. We want no more foreigners. No prying journalists. And none of the vermin from the Vienna Convention. We are sealing our borders.”
She opened her eyes. They were hovering over the shoreline. Half-naked Rastas were pulling corpses up onto the docks. A dead little girl, limp clothes sheeting water. Laura bit back a shriek, grabbing David’s arm. Her gorge rose. She slumped back into the seat, fighting her stomach.
“Can’t you see my wife is sick?” David said sharply. “This is enough.”
“No,” Laura said shakily. “Andrei’s right.… Andrei, listen. There’s no way that Singapore could have done this. That’s not gang war. This is atrocity.”
“They tell us the same,” Andrei admitted. “I think they are afraid. This morning, we captured their agents in Trinidad. It seems they have been playing with toy planes and matches.”
“You can’t attack Singapore!” Laura said. “More killing can’t help you!”
“We are not Christs or Gandhis,” Andrei said. He spoke slowly, carefully. “This is terrorism. But there is a deeper kind of terror than this … a fear far older and darker. You could tell Singapore about that terror. You know something about it, Laura, I think.”
“You want me to go to Singapore?” Laura said. “Yes. I’ll go there. If it’ll stop this.”
“They need not fear little toy planes,” Andrei said. “But you can tell them to be afraid of the dark. To be afraid of food—and air—and water—and their own shadows.”
David looked at Andrei, his jaw dropping.
Andrei sighed. “If they are innocent of this, then they must prove it and join us immediately.”
“Yes, of course,” Laura said quickly. “You have to make common cause. Together. Rizome can help.”
“Otherwise I pity Singapore,” Andrei said. He had a look in his eyes that she had never seen in a human face. It was the farthest thing from pity.
Andrei left them at the little military airstrip at Pearls. But the evacuation flight he’d promised never showed—some kind of foulup. Eventually, after dark, a cargo chopper ferried Laura and David to the civilian airport at Point Salines.
The night was pierced with headlights and the airport road was snarled with traffic. A company of mechanized infantry had seized the airport gates. A blasted truck on the roadside smoldered gently—it had wandered through a scattering of paper-clip mines.
Their chopper carried them smoothly over the fence. Inside, the airport was a jumble of luxury saloons and limos.
Militia in flak jackets and riot helmets were beating the airport bounds with long bamboo poles. Minesweepers. As the chopper settled to the weedy tarmac, Laura heard a sharp crack and flash as a pole connected.
“Watch you step,” the pilot said cheerily, flinging open the hatch. A militia kid in camo, about nineteen—he looked excited by the night’s action. Any kind of destruction was thrilling—it didn’t seem to matter that it was his own people. Laura and David decamped onto the tarmac, carrying the sleeping baby in her tote.
The chopper lifted silently. A little baggage cart scurried past them in the darkness. Someone had crudely wired a pair of push brooms to the cart’s front. Laura and David shuffled carefully toward the lights of the terminal. It was only thirty yards away. Surely somebody had swept it for mines already.… They eased their way around a mauve sports car. Two fat men, wearing elaborate video makeup, were asleep or drunk in the car’s plush bucket seats.
Soldiers yelled at them, beckoning. “‘Ey! Get away! You people! No robbin’, no lootin’!”
They stepped into the long floodlit portico of the terminal. Some of the glass frontage had been smashed or blown out; inside, the place was crammed. Excited crowd noise, waft of body heat, popping, scuffling. A Cuban airliner lifted off, its graceful hiss of takeoff drowned by the crowd.
A soldier in shoulder bars grabbed David’s arm. “Papers. Passport card.”
“Don’t have ’em,” David said. “We were burned out.”
“No reservation, no tickets?” the colonel said. “Can nah come in without tickets.” He examined their cadre’s uniforms, puzzled. “Where you get those telly-glasses?”
“Gould and Castleman sent us,” Laura lied smoothly. She touched her glasses. “Havana’s just a stopover for us. We’re witnesses. Outside contacts. You understand.”
“Yah,” the colonel said, flinching. He waved them inside.
They filtered quickly into the crowd. “That was brilliant!” David told her. “But we still got no tickets.”
[“We can handle that,”] Emerson said. [“We have the Cuban airline online now. They’re running the evacuation—we can get you the next flight.”]
“Great.”
[“You’re almost back—try not to worry.”]
“Thanks, Atlanta. Solidarity.” David scanned the crowd. At least three hundred of them. “Man, it’s a mad doctor’s convention.…”
Like kicking over a rotten log, Laura thought. The airport was crawling with tight-faced Anglos and Europeans—they seemed split pretty evenly between well-dressed gangster exiles and vice-dazzled techies gone native. Dozens of refugees sprawled on the floor, nervously clutching their loot. Laura stepped over the feet of a slim black woman passed out on a heap of designer luggage, a dope sticker glued to her neck. Half a dozen hustlers in Trinidadian shirts were shooting craps on the floor, shouting excitedly in some East European language. Two screaming ten-year-olds chased each other through a group of men methodically smashing tape cassettes.
“Look,” David said, pointing. A group of white-clad women stood at the edge of the crowd. Faint looks of disdain on their faces. Nurses, Laura thought. Or nuns.
“Church hookers!” David said. “Look, that’s Carlotta!”
They shouldered their way through, skidding on trash. Suddenly a scream erupted to their left. “What do you mean, you can’t change it?” The shouter was waving a Grenadian credit card in the face of a militia captain. “There’s fucking millions on this card, asshole!” A portly Anglo in a suit and jogging shoes—the shoes flickered with readouts. “You’d better call your fucking boss, Jack!”
“Sit down,” the captain ordered. He gave the man a shove.
“Okay,” the man said, not sitting. He stuffed the card inside his lapel. “Okay. I changed my mind. I’m choosing the tunnels instead. Take me back to the tunnels, pal.” No response. “Don’t you know who you’re fucking talking to?” He grabbed the captain’s sleeve.
The captain knocked the grasping hand loose with a quick chop to the arm. Then he kicked the man’s feet out from under him. The complainer fell heavily on his ass. He lurched back to his feet, his fists clenching.
The captain shrugged his tangle-gun free and shot the man point-blank. A high-speed splattering punch of wet plastic. A serpent’s nest of stinking ribbon flew over the Anglo’s chest, trapping his arms, his neck, his face, and a nearby piece of luggage. He hit the floor
squalling.
A roar of alarm from the crowd. Three militia privates rushed to their captain’s aid, guns drawn. “Sit down!” the captain shouted, pumping another round into the chamber. “Everyone! Down, now!” The tangle-victim started to choke.
People sat. Laura and David, too. People sat in a spreading wave, like a sporting event. Some laced their hands behind their heads, as if by reflex. The captain grinned and brandished his gun over them. “Better.” He kicked the man, casually.
Suddenly the nuns approached in a body. Their leader was a black woman; she pulled back her wimple, revealing gray hair, a lined face. “Captain,” she said calmly. “This man is choking.”
“He a t’ief, Sister,” the captain said.
“That may be, Captain, but he still needs to breathe.” Three of the Church women knelt by the victim, tugging at the strands around his throat. The old woman—an Abbess, Laura thought unwillingly—turned to the crowd and spread her hands in the crook-fingered Church blessing. “Violence serves no one,” she said. “Please be silent.”
She walked away, her sisters following without a word. They left the tangle-victim where he lay, wheezing quietly. The captain shrugged, and slung his gun again, and turned away, gesturing to his men. After a moment people began to stand up.
[“That was well done,”] Emerson said.
David helped Laura to her feet and picked up the baby’s tote. “Hey! Carlotta!” They followed her.
Carlotta spoke briefly to the Abbess, pulled her wimple back, and stepped away from her sisters.
“Hello,” she said. Her frizzy mane of hair was pulled back. Her sharp-cheeked face looked naked and bleak. It was the first time they’d ever seen Carlotta without makeup.
“I’m surprised to see you leaving,” Laura told her.
Carlotta shook her head. “They hit our temple. A temporary setback.”
“Sorry,” David said. “We were burned out, too.”
“We’ll be back,” Carlotta shrugged. “Where there’s war, there’s whores.”
The speakers crackled into life—a Cuban stewardess speaking Spanish. “Hey, that’s us,” David said suddenly. “They want us at the desk.” He paused. “You hold Loretta, I’ll go.” He hurried off.
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