The fish was expensive and the boy insisted on haggling, which served them well because just as he was finishing up not one but three toutous came in at once. The Sergeant looked upwards again. Fully half of the sky was covered now in solid cloud. The other part was gauzy. He sighed. ‘Get ready,’ he said. ‘We leave when they do.’
The boy looked at him curiously, and then his mouth opened in a startled O. ‘Satellites!’ he said. ‘You are thinking of satellites! That is hardcore!’
‘Watch the road,’ the Sergeant told him.
The boy brought the car out and around, then across the shanty to a ridge where they could watch the gate of the NatProMan barracks on the north-east side of town.
The Ukrainians left Beauville very fast, driving in convoy and heading for the central mountains. The Sergeant watched them through his lightweight binoculars, while the boy did the same with the enormous antique field glasses. The boy had parked in a drainage ditch on a hillside west of the shanty, and from here they could see Pechorin’s barracks and his likely routes. It was a good lookout point, well hidden but with a broad view. ‘Smuggler post,’ the boy said, when the Sergeant asked. ‘Keeping an eye out for John Revenue!’
The convoy passed two small farms the Sergeant had briefly considered as possible locations for the hideout, and zoomed onward towards the foothills. He had a weird moment of inversion, looking down on them. This must be how the Afghans had seen him all the time: hasty and energetic and ineffectual. He could see, from here, how you could just detonate the road underneath and watch the wreckage slide down into a ravine. It would have a satisfying elegance – a distant, clinical justice, all that busybodying brought to one climactic head and then silenced. He shivered.
In fact, Pechorin was coming this way, heading for the Iron Bridge over the white Lucretia River. The hideout must be in the mountains proper, a hillman’s hut or something like it. The trucks hurtled on, not directly towards their position but off along a spur and through the sparse beginnings of the real jungle to the lower peak. They drove for half an hour, then up into the winding lanes which led over to the south side. Abruptly the lights zagged and juddered up ahead, the trucks bouncing and banging their way across terrain rougher than they were really able to deal with, and then a little later the glow vanished entirely as if covered in a blanket.
‘Cave,’ the boy said at the same moment the Sergeant understood.
‘Give them ten minutes to get settled inside.’
They waited, watching the dashboard clock. The orange plastic hands, styled for cheery city shopping, snicked loudly as each minute passed.
‘Let’s go,’ the Sergeant said. ‘What’s the best way?’
But the boy was already moving the car very slowly along a drainage ditch, over what seemed to be a precipice – the Sergeant’s hands tightened on the door handle, but he forced himself to breathe out and not shout, and his forbearance was rewarded. The noise of the tyres on gravel stopped, and they ducked down between old concrete walls and rolled along on silent wheels. ‘Smugglers,’ the boy said. ‘I told you.’
Indeed, the Sergeant realised, this was not a second route to the entrance, it was the proper one, major pirate engineering using stolen half-pipe segments no doubt intended for some bit of chemical plant back in the day. Arriving at the cave by the public road was for amateurs.
He grinned. This would be fun.
The Sergeant alighted from the car and made sure that the boy went on – just a weary traveller on his way home – then turned and slipped away into the scrub. He felt clumsy at first, and then entirely at home. That stand of bushes was tall enough to hide him, that boulder would make good cover, those trees were an ideal landmark. He felt the terrain around him, not seeing it in his head like a tabletop map but knowing it the way he knew the location of his limbs. He realised he had been committing the island to memory since his arrival. That road went down into the valley, that one to the peaks. That one was hard in monsoons but fine in the dry season – today it would be passable in the Land Rover, tough on foot. Over towards the volcano there was a small village in a valley with a defensible approach, but the headman was old and his sons were fractious. Two miles down that way was the Iron Bridge, and beyond it a strip of dense jungle and then the Beauville shanty. Brighton House was behind the curve of the mountain . . . He knew it all. He shouldn’t be surprised: Always In Combat, after all. He glanced up: some cloud, sporadic patches of sky. If the helicopters came . . .
But there would be no helicopters, and no need for them.
He passed the truck, very careful in case the Ukrainians had posted a sentry. No: bad practice. Part of him wanted to shake his head and sigh. They were off duty, so they weren’t being soldiers, and never mind that they were deep in a foreign land. A large part of him wanted to give them a stern talking to, a bit of parade-ground beasting. But their lack of good sense was to his advantage, so instead he peered up along the line of the path. There: a shadow in the rockface. The entrance.
The Sergeant removed the mask from its bag and studied it. The boy had taken a gas mask and decorated it with fragments of fur and bone. The long, mournful face was sinister enough, but with these additions it became feral and judgemental. The nose of the respirator hung down to cover his neck – a tongue or a stinger, it wasn’t clear – and in front of his mouth was a strange echo chamber into which the boy had inserted a papery disc like a kazoo’s. He breathed into it and heard a soft burr, like the first grunt of a motorcycle on a cold morning.
There was music playing inside the cave, so they would not hear him speak. He wondered how he had come this far without putting the mask on, and knew he had been avoiding it. Experimentally he raised it to his face and said, ‘I am Tigerman,’ and heard the words came out in a deep, insectoid buzz, as if a wasp’s nest had a voice.
I am Tigerman. It should have been absurd. Here, now, he wasn’t sure he could live up to it.
He looked down at the thing in his hands, lying open like a black rubber flower. There had been a moistness to the inner surface against his cheek, and the shape was fitted to embrace the human head. He wasn’t sure whether it would kiss him or swallow him. He had a nightmarish flash of the shiny interior sticking to his skin for ever, turning him into . . . what? A man with a silly mask on his head; but in comic books it would be something more, something strange and awful and powerful. He rolled his shoulders. The gas mask was to complete the effect and to conceal his identity. The boy had made it while he watched. There were no old, dead gods or mad scientists involved, just tape and glue and scissors.
He ducked his head and put it on, scenting ammonia. He listened for a moment to the sound of his own breathing. Then he picked his way to the cave mouth, and slipped inside.
The passage was narrow at first, with a longish passageway leading in. He could hear the sound of men up ahead, in a larger chamber, and see the flicker of their lights. They were listening to terrible music, a compilation of 80s rock ballads he had been embarrassed by the first time around. In a lot of places, of course, the 80s had never really come to an end. Stone-washed denim and mullets and Freddy Mercury never got old or went away. If Mercury hadn’t died, would the band still be playing concerts like the Rolling Stones, indomitably brash and knowing? Not that this was Queen. This was something handed down, a Polish imitation of a German tribute band, played at top volume on a sound system just a bit too small to handle the job. But baby, oh yes I can rock you, yes, don’t block me, get on top! But the final words vanished into a gargle of distortion.
Laughter rolled down the tunnel. They were early, he gathered, preparing the ground. The guests would arrive later. Girls, he assumed, and maybe some other soldiers. Plenty of people to spread the story of what happened here, to witness the moral caning which was about to be handed out.
At his belt, in true hero style, hung a small selection of oddments: a strange collection of tools the boy had added of his own initiative which must seem useful to a reader of
comics – climbing gear, a compressed-air siren, some fisherman’s glowsticks. What possible use was a compass? Or a device for seeing off predatory fish? Holy Shark Repellent, Batman! As for the siren, it was a civilian thing for summoning aid if you were being mugged. He imagined himself using it to call for help, and trying to explain his outfit. Loony Lester.
Alongside this bric-a-brac, though, were two smoke grenades of a new type, sent from London without explanation six months before. He had dutifully taken delivery and stored them away. At the time, he had been entirely bewildered by them. Yesterday, they had been the first thing he and the boy had both approved for Tigerman’s utility belt. On his other hip, for balance, were two more-familiar flashbangs.
He rested the first grenade on the ground, set it to ‘slow’ and pulled the pin.
Darkness welled up from it, oily and thick. The new gas had a very high surface tension. It rose in a plume and hung, clinging to the edges of the tunnel. You could almost feel it, shape it with your hands. Standing in the cloud was like having your eyes shut tight, or wearing a hood, and it seemed to pluck at his sleeves. It was blank. Flat. It made things feel dull, like a layer of mud. It blended smoothly into the darkness outside, had the same impenetrable depthlessness as natural night.
He judged that when he stepped through it into the cave proper he would appear to come from nowhere, from another world.
So long as he could get there, through the cloud. So long as he could make himself walk through the tunnel. From inside, it was hard to imagine there would ever be an end to the stuff. Despite the filtering mask, he imagined it in his lungs, polymeric invader in a wide blue space policed by antibodies like seaweed. He realised that the images came from that film with Raquel Welch in which she – and the submarine in which she travelled – were shrunk to microscopic size to save a diplomat from an assassin’s bullet. Ridiculous Technicolor images from the 60s, spacesuits with short hems. He could not recall the title, because the other film about the lost dogs trying to rejoin their family kept getting in the way. There was a moment in the film in which a man was consumed by a white blood cell. It slid down over his head and ate him. In his mind, the black smoke was the same: a purposeful, alien presence.
It could not be more than twenty feet from one end of the cloud to another. He walked carefully, picking up his feet and putting them down from the outside of the toe so as to be silent. Demons do not clump.
The music was very close now. He must be all but there. It occurred to him that this gas was supposed to be used with infrared goggles or some sort of computer linkup, something to let him see where the enemy could not. Too late to worry about that now. But how could he know when he was nearing the edge of the cloud?
A dazzling white light shone on his face, and the Sergeant ducked back. He heard a cry of disgust and alarm, and lay flat on the ground. His mind caught up. His head had pierced the limit of the cloud just as someone swept a torch across it. They had seen his mask only, hanging in thin air: a monster face which vanished into an impossible shadow. And he had seen, briefly, something which changed the game completely and meant he was deep in the shit. Bullets came, eighteen, nineteen inches over his head.
The cave was not a place for soldiers to relax. Not a den. It was bigger than he had expected, the size of a basketball court rather than a treehouse. He had anticipated some sort of makeshift bar and brothel, with soft furnishings looted from abandoned houses, maybe even curtains for privacy. Instead, the interior felt like a forward reconnaissance base, neat and businesslike and impersonal. The lighting came from vertical fluorescents which stood at regular intervals along the walls and appeared to run off a small generator vented into a natural chimney. The floor was smooth and had been swept, perhaps even bleached. There were a few chairs, but they were spindly office stools, good for taking your weight while you worked but not for relaxing. The music was the only personal touch, a medium-sized portable player sitting on what he had first thought was a desk, but which was something else entirely, one of many such somethings, and all of them bad news.
Stacked around the room in neat piles were towers of brown bricks, each about the size and shape of a shoe, glossy with poly-urethane wrapping and tape. He was reasonably confident, having seen the stuff before, that these bricks were made of heroin. Heroin in this quantity was a major operation, and heroin in this quantity here, on Mancreu, implied almost incontrovertibly the extremely deniable operation of a national government. Perhaps even of NatProMan itself. That Pechorin and his men were Ukrainian soldiers meant nothing. At this level flags and allegiances were negotiable. Passports were currency. Heroin was money was information was arms was a vote in the Security Council, and all of it was power, and power was what nations ate to stay alive.
Or, Christ, it might be plastic explosive. The same truths would apply. He’d never seen plastic explosive that colour, but there were lots of different kinds. That would explain the fluorescents: you didn’t want that stuff to get hot, because it sweated, and the sweat was unstable. He tried to remember if the wrapping had looked breathable.
A bullet ricocheted off the wall and down onto the plate on his back, bounced away. He realised he had been still for much too long.
He should go backwards, but he couldn’t turn around without standing. The lip of the passage protected him so long as he lay here, but the moment he got up he would be in the line of fire. He could shuffle back, but that could ultimately mean being a target for longer. He had some tenuous advantages: the smoke was confusing them, the mask had rattled their composure. They genuinely had no idea what they were dealing with, and were afraid. They had not been expecting an attack, and now – his hesitation served this much, at least – they weren’t sure they were being attacked. Come to that, the Sergeant wasn’t sure that they were, either. Except that if he led them out into the road now, and if the boy had not followed his instructions and fled, they would see a car, and an accomplice, and that would be that. The runabout would cease to exist. Bullets would tear into the metal and plastic, twist and deform it in the unpredictable ways they had. Perhaps the car would be unravelled as if by a giant tin-opener, or perhaps it would fold down and in under its own weight. Perhaps a bullet would ignite something and it would burn, shrivel and contract, or perhaps it would explode. He had seen all these things happen, in the past. But whatever happened, the nameless driver would be rendered into meat and bone, would cease to be a person and become the other thing, the empty thing just waiting for fire or rot to make it disappear. He could not picture the boy dead. But he could see the moment of his death, the appalling havoc of the shooting, could see him understand in that instant that he was about to be dead and that his body was finished with, and that was awful.
So he did what sergeants do. He advanced to meet the enemy. On his belly, pushing with his toes so as not to abrade his knees.
He slid forward and felt the ground drop away, ducked his head and rolled close behind the nearest stack of heroin. It was heroin, thank God; someone had been kind enough to label it in neat black print, and ‘thank God’ because that meant it wasn’t important that it was sweating and he wasn’t about to be vaporised. And he could do this.
He pulled a conventional flashbang from his belt and tossed it to his right, waited a moment and then went left because ninety-five per cent of the population is right-handed and prefers to shoot, as it were, on the forehand. In the enclosed space of the cave, the blast was even more intense, and he expected it to drive the shadow gas away down the tunnel. Instead the cloud seemed to bow and ripple, passing the force through itself and shuddering before rolling back along the walls and resuming its position with a jellied shiver which looked altogether too much like a wink. He moved while they were deaf and blind, staying low. Overwhelming enemy forces, stated objectives impossible. Sitrep: total goatfuck.
He let the moment teach him its logic, felt the world fall into shapes in his head.
A moment later they came forward to where h
e had been. They used a classic fire-and-movement line, each man halting to provide cover for the next. It looked pretty enough, but they were all still too fuzzy from the impact of the flashbang to aim well, and while you could get away with firing into the tunnel, firing those weapons into the walls of this room would be unpredictable and dangerous. They could easily end up shooting one another. In fact, the odds greatly favoured it, because there were so many more of them than there were of him. That should make them unwilling to fire, make them hesitate, but only if they were good enough to realise it. He didn’t know whether they were that good, to hold to common sense here, now, with a king’s ransom in heroin and a demon in the room. He thought probably not. He left them to it, his mind clear and swift.
Old objectives: crash the party, induce urination in the enemy, depart. Job done, to a great extent, and the whole thing would have been hilarious without the drug stash or the weapons fire. Leave it behind. It’s irrelevant now.
New objectives: secure the boy’s departure, avoid capture, escape. He had probably managed the first already, although he had to make room for a scenario in which his friend was hovering with the door open like a getaway driver. Factor it in. This is the landscape. The best plan will flow downhill. The last one was the problem. It was not enough to get back to Brighton House in one piece. A brief survey of the armoury records would expose him. A probe of the boy’s costume purchases would do the same. Forensics, probably, would confirm it all, and if this was a government-level operation none of that was off the table. He could only survive if the question was simply never asked. He had a small advantage there in that attacking a fortified drug hideout by himself was very much not a Lester Ferris thing to do. As evidenced by the fact that he hadn’t done it, not intentionally. He had done something else and it had turned into that. Even he himself had not known he was going to do it. If he’d known what Pechorin and the others were up to in here, he would have left well alone.
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