Well, no, he wouldn’t.
He didn’t know, actually, what he would have done. Something. Not this. Told Kershaw, told Dirac. Told London, even, if he had had to. Fleet business was supposed to stay offshore. Fleet business was supposed to be invisible. You weren’t supposed to fucking trip over it. Standards were falling. If he’d known, he could have done . . . almost anything. There were so many ways to administer a gentle nudge: do your laundry on the water, not in my manor, it makes it hard for me to stay blind. And wasn’t that a sorry way to carry on?
But he wouldn’t have done this.
The Ukrainians were still checking the stacks by the door. They had just discovered the wall of gas, and it was disturbing them just as it had him. Pechorin poked at it with his finger, then snatched his hand back from the meniscus as he felt the cool, organic embrace. A tendril of the gas followed him and he shouted, shot it. The bullet zinged away into the tunnel. A moment later the other men were firing too, and Pechorin was yelling at them to stop.
On the stack in front of the Sergeant was a picture of Shola, and there was a loose ring of red felt tip slashed across the image. The boy’s face was bright on the left of the picture, caught by the camera flash. A ridiculous thing to find here, an image from months ago. And that, yes, that sleeve was the Sergeant’s own, just coming into frame.
He put the picture in his pocket. It didn’t belong here.
Pechorin turned, and saw him, and screamed an order, but no one moved. They were staring. They were seeing the demon, the alien thing they had heard about but had not believed in, had chosen to laugh at. For one moment, everything was still.
‘I am Tigerman,’ Lester Ferris said, and saw them flinch at the ugly voice of the mask. ‘I’m here to collect on a debt.’
Without much conviction, Pechorin raised his gun. Lester Ferris sneered through the kazoo.
Paratroopers had told him that jumping from a plane was easy, but doing the same into the still air beneath a hot air balloon was another thing entirely, the difference between flying and falling. He had been in a balloon, but now he was falling.
I am Tigerman.
With one hand he pulled the cord out of the generator, and dropped. The cave was plunged into darkness. Then he unscrewed the fuel cap, jammed the second flashbang into it, pulled the pin, and ran.
The blast lifted him into the air and threw him over the stacks of heroin. He could smell his own charred hair, knew his neck and arms were scalded. His boots were on fire. His hands fended off the ceiling, and he fell down onto something human, felt the man’s ribs crack, rolled forward along the cave floor. The black gas was gone now, for sure, replaced by a thick diesel smoke from the generator. He could hear them coughing behind him, choking, and he hoped like hell they’d have the sense to get out. The heroin was burning, too, and somewhere in there he’d seen a spare drum of fuel and soon that would go up and take the whole place apart. Were they getting high? Would the drug slow them down, even knock them out? He ran, and heard his own breathing distorted by the mask, the evil buzz bouncing off the walls like laughter.
Outside, the boy was gone. That much, at least, was according to plan.
He allowed himself to hope for one moment that he could steal a truck, but they must have taken the keys into the cave. There was a radio handset on the passenger seat and on instinct he grabbed it and clipped it to his belt at the back. Then he ran, infantry style, putting one foot in front of the other with plenty of muscle, accelerating but not sprinting, making for the trees on the downhill slope. It was steep, but that was fine, that made him faster and he was unarmed so he didn’t have to worry about shooting himself as he went along. He heard them come out of the cave, a sudden burst of noise and energy, and then a bright beam of light stabbed out, and another, and he realised they had high-powered torches. A moment later everything around him was daylight and there were shouts. They were chasing him now, and the pursuit was making them brave.
He veered into the deep brush, heading for the river, and heard them behind him. He ran for what seemed like hours, forcing himself to hold his pace, breaking through the wall of fatigue and then finding it again so that he had to break through it once more. He wished they weren’t so young and fit. He worried about helicopters. Satellites might lose coverage because of high cloud, but not helicopters, and helicopters had guns on them. Helicopters could follow you, personally, with infrared imaging. They could give chase.
He wondered where he was and what he was going to do about getting home. He ran.
By the time he reached the cliff edge they were close enough to stop and fire a few rounds every five or six steps. Bullets whizzed over him, and then something caught him full in the back and he was airborne. He flew, for the second time that night, end over end. Above him he could see the harvest moon, and he thought probably this was what had hit him. He could see how it might have happened: the huge globe spinning out of its orbit and barging into him, smacking him into the air. He tried to breathe, and found vacuum. Yes. This was space. He would die in space. His corpse would go round and round the world amid the junk and clutter of Sputniks and the rest. Somewhere out here there was a dog, too, an early Russian experiment. Laika. He had always felt sorry for her: surely she had been the most alone creature ever, when she died. Now he would join her. Perhaps their ghosts would go for walks. He would throw sticks for her, or moonrocks, and she would bring them back. He wondered if a Soviet dog would associate with him, a filthy capitalist. He hoped so. Dogs were largely apolitical. Had Madame Duclos’s dog had opinions about what was happening to its home? He owed her an explanation, he realised, for its death. Owed her answers.
The moon hit him again, this time from in front. It clanged. Should the moon do that? Or, no. Not the moon. Something metal, something artificial. And not space. He could smell pines and dust and burning. This was still Mancreu, and the Iron Bridge across its gorge, and he was hurtling past it towards the river far, far below.
Lester Ferris, in a home-made demon suit with a magic tiger on his back and chest, spread his arms and fell.
10. Rapids
HE HIT THE water hard, but it felt like lying on a feather bed. Or he imagined it felt like that – he didn’t think he’d ever actually been on a feather bed. On consideration they probably weren’t all that comfortable: not enough back support. But he wasn’t running any more. He had been running for hours. His limbs felt light and tired. He breathed in, and felt the mask suck against his cheeks. Water squirted from the kazoo and splashed his face.
Self-knowledge returned, and fear, gut-wrenching and panicked. He could die here. He would die here. In seconds. The Ukrainians were still firing: he heard shots snip past him; the strange, strangled yelp of bullets in water. White lines, phosphorescent, told him which direction was up. He tried to swim and realised he couldn’t. Too much weight. More bullets yipped past. They were inexperienced with shooting into water, he thought, were not accounting for the deflection. His vision was brown at the edges, brownish-red. He knew in a moment it would turn grey, and that would be the end.
His boot scraped riverbottom. His chest – his lungs, presumably – felt appalling. The belt on his costume was tight, and he reached down to shed it. His gauntleted hand batted vaguely at half a dozen items, couldn’t find the clasp. Knife. Bandages. Sharkpunch. Pitons. Hammer. Siren.
You’re kidding me, he thought. The boy’s magpie instinct, covering the uniform with ridiculous things. Siren. It was a nonsense – almost no one ran towards the sound of a siren, not any more, not with car alarms going off every ten minutes and a very well-publicised chance that any good Samaritan would get stabbed for his trouble – and these days there were electronic ones which were smaller and louder. This one was the old kind. If you were desperate, you might use it to blow out a candle.
Or if you were very desperate you might breathe it.
He jammed the nozzle under the chin of the mask and thumbed the release, felt the rubber stretch around h
im like a balloon and gasped stale air. Thank God, it was proper air, not butane or anything else. The noise was probably very loud but he’d just blown himself up (again) and been shot at in a confined space and it was less bad than either of those things. He let go of the trigger and the sound stopped. The bullets had moved downstream – they were assuming he’d float, which was daft but he’d made the same mistake. How much air was there in the siren? It had to be three minutes, surely? He shook it, felt liquid sloshing around. Half full, maybe, but he’d been profligate in that first, desperate heave. Now he could make it last.
Tentatively, he tried walking against the current. Not possible. He could hold his own, just about, but it was hard work and it hurt. His back was marked, he knew, with a sharp square of bruises where the armour plate had been driven against it. How many shots? Three? Four? How far out into the stream had he fallen?
The water pushed him hard against something massive. A boulder. No, of course: a concrete slab, one of the bridge supports. It must be the first span, he couldn’t have gone further than that. He tried to remember if there was anywhere to get out on this side. Two more breaths from the siren – he was worried now that the noise would give him away, but he dared not remove the screamer because it seemed to be part of the trigger mechanism – and he used the concrete to push himself along with his hands. He was moving uphill. He could see the surface about five feet above him. Eddies swirled around his head. He couldn’t see or hear the bullets any more, so he dared to ignite the fisherman’s glowstick, cupped it in his hand to direct the light down and forward. The siren was almost empty now, but he wasn’t going to die. Something new was in him, familiar and predictable but not the less powerful. He had been shot at and chased, and both of these things made you enormously angry. It was just a fact; human nature, human chemistry. When someone tries to kill you, when they hunt you, you hate them. So now he hated, and with that came a confidence. He was getting out of this river. He was a few steps away from breaking the surface, he could see the rocks, the path up to dry land. He took his last breath from the canister and released it, let it wash away. Perhaps they would see it and think it evidence of his death, like a destroyer hunting a submarine.
He felt the crown of his head break the surface, and lifted his chin so that in the next step his eyes were just above the water. There was no one on the bank. Three steps more and he could breathe again, and then he was staggering through the shallows and up and out, and the river was behind him.
A soldier would take this opportunity to retreat. A soldier would call for reinforcements and retrench. But now, out of the water and with air in his lungs again, the ragged, tooth-spitting fury of a brawler was boiling in him, demanding release. Fucking shoot at me? And there was the picture of Shola in his pocket, the picture which said they might have had something to do with that, too. Oh, you fucking think so? Is that right, you Chicken Kiev wankers? DO YOU FUCKING THINK SO? He rolled his shoulders and felt the pain in his back, and that made him even angrier. He snarled. Water spewed from his mask like steam, and the sound which went with it was like the sound of hopeless triage.
He smiled tightly behind the mask, and took a few experimental steps. Nothing wrong with his legs, no shrapnel, no fractures. Ribs might be a problem. Limited mobility in his arms, but they’d loosen. Time to go and put these lads straight. Oh, yes. Time, and more than time. After a moment, he sliced open the glowstick and poured it over his head, glowing green slime. No doubt it was toxic. If he didn’t die tonight, he’d probably have an itchy scalp. He laughed, and the mask made it into something very wrong.
He set off at a run, water falling from his clothes.
He knew where they were because he could hear them shooting at rocks and tree trunks in the water, hear them arguing about it. He circled to put them against the lights of Beauville, and waited until the wind was blowing off the river, carrying his footsteps back behind him into the trees. Then he charged.
Two of them were standing side by side a few steps from the others, and he slammed their heads sharply together, heard gristle and that sickening sound like the ball in an aerosol can which meant concussion. The bruises on his back screamed and he screamed back. A third man turned in shock and looked about to scream too, and then his face disappeared under a crushing elbow. He dropped.
A step further away, Pechorin held an expensive gun. It was an American thing with all sorts of clever engineering and a bottle-opener on the back: very light, very strong. He should have used it already but he hadn’t, seemed to have forgotten about it, or perhaps he just couldn’t believe this was happening. Now he brought it round and the Sergeant whipped the sharkpunch up and forward in a fencer’s lunge. The tip touched the gun and the charge fired. Pechorin went flying back, fragments of next-gen rifle embedded in his face.
The Sergeant dropped and rolled, putting the fallen between himself and the remaining men. As he came up, he saw his nearest enemy sighting along the barrel, looking for a clear shot. He ducked left, then reared back the other way and threw one of the climbing pitons as hard as he could.
It was supposed to be a distraction, or at best a knockout blow. Instead, the steel pin went directly into the man’s open mouth and lodged in the soft part of his throat. He made an appalled sound and sank to his knees, hands outstretched in appeal.
Everything was still.
The remaining soldiers stared in abject horror at the choking man. Blood was coming out of his mouth, not arterial spray but a venous welling which would kill him eventually if not treated, although it seemed he might suffocate before that became an issue. The other casualties were regaining consciousness. Pechorin looked as if he might lose part of his nose.
Tactically there was all still to play for. The Sergeant had his ace in the hole, the fast-dispersal setting on the remaining gas grenade. It would make a thirty-foot ball of darkness, the manual said, pretty much instantly and until the wind dispersed it. Although actual performance in the field did not always match the claims in the documentation. He had his hand on it, ready to use, but he knew he had overreached. The last of Pechorin’s men could take him now, and if he died here he’d have no one but himself to blame.
But they didn’t know that, he realised as the moment held, and they were convinced now that he could do impossible things. He could appear from nowhere, breathe under water, make guns explode and strike down men at a distance. He was bulletproof. They had seen evidence of all these, and they knew, too, that he was the Mancreu demon, the one everyone was talking about, the one who might be a psychopath or an organ hunter or something even more awful. So they stared at him, and did not attack, and waited to see what he would do. Like prey, they hoped that if they did nothing he would depart to eat his kill.
He didn’t do anything. If he ran it might break the spell. If he came forward he might press them into action. So he waited, and they waited.
From somewhere across the valley, he heard the sound of a tiger growling or calling, and a reply. A mated pair.
Behind his back, he flicked the dispersal rate on the grenade to medium, and drew the pin with his thumb. He didn’t move. The darkness boiled up over his back and all around him, and he kept the eyes of the mask on them all the time. When the gas finally shifted to cover him he rolled back and away, then ran for the trees.
Pechorin called for reinforcements.
On the stolen radio handset the Sergeant could hear the chatter, cool and efficient. He had worked with some of them before, here and elsewhere. Could he run towards them? Claim to have been taken hostage and escaped, even fought back? But when and how? At the fish market, or from the house? He shook his head. There might be a way, but he was too addled to see it, to account for the branching possible consequences. He imagined buying his absolution by accidentally selling out the boy. No. Run on. Hostile contact: allied forces in the target zone. Then numbers, coordinates, and yes, there was a helicopter after all. They would close the roads, and with the ’copter they would
do so effectively – but where he was going he didn’t need roads. He glanced at the sky and growled: the cloud had lifted again. He should shed this suit somewhere it wouldn’t be found. He couldn’t permit himself to be caught in it, for sure, but his blood was in it and if they were serious about this – and you didn’t put a helicopter in the air if you were just kidding around – they would know that within hours.
He considered options. Brighton House – the phone was ringing there, no doubt – was a few miles away cross-country: over scrub and through banana plantations, for the most part. But there was a line of open ground between the house and the jungle, and in the worst case he would be at a loss to explain how – having left the house on a shopping expedition – he came to be returning on foot from another direction. On the other hand if he returned to the house in the toutou, between obfuscation, retasking and cloud cover he might have nothing to explain at all.
In the meantime, he was already running again, on the half-cleared paths used by hunters and animals both, between the trees. Time became fluid. Running was something he enjoyed. After a certain point, his mind was silent. He ran. He spectated. There was a clean, moonlit purity inside his head. He was exhausted, but it was this or capture and he had no intention of being captured, so exhaustion was irrelevant. He was also high on combat and anger and for as long as the immediacy lasted he would feel like a god. He had about twenty minutes of that left, so – knowing he would walk, after – he ran now.
The jungle was wet and warm. It smelled of vegetation and life and in particular of a species of red-flowering vine. The flowers opened at night and were called something dirty in Moitié; Inoue had told him once that in the dark, to a certain kind of lizard, they looked like meat. The lizard ate them and shat out the seeds somewhere else, spreading the plant. It had no sense of smell to speak of, so no one knew why they smelled good. He wondered if you could eat them. Perhaps they were some sort of healing drug. The Witch would know. Perhaps he should go and see her. A last chance: tonight of all nights he might turn back the clock.
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