Feeling as if he were wrapped in cotton batting, he teetered to the arm of the sofa and sat near her. She lowered herself to perch on the edge of the cushion like a finch ready to fly away at the first hint of danger.
“I know it’s night, and the moon’s up. I can feel myself healing, even if I’m not feeling the pain I should be. That’s weird. When he’s gone through this before it hurt like hell. Anyway, why is he even here? He won’t spend the night the same place twice running, and he’s here in the palace? After trashing the whole peace conference?”
“When Tom got here he was raving, in obvious agony,” she said. “I could hardly believe he was even alive. The medics gave him sedatives and put him on a morphine drip. When his injuries began to heal visibly, I suggested they bring you- him -here.” She shrugged. “Hard to get better in hospital. It’s better in a familiar bed.”
“Yeah.” Mark nodded slowly. “So that’s it. He doesn’t take pain well. Ironic, huh? He’s tried so hard to stay off any kind of drugs for fear I’d take back over.”
“Have you?”
Did she sound eager, or was he wishful-thinking again? “No way. Sorry.”
“What do you want?”
He drew a deep breath to nerve himself. “This is harder than I thought. First, to get it over with: I love you, Sun Hei-lian. I’ve fallen for you hard.”
Her expression didn’t flicker. “Very well.”
“Yeah. I know. Pretty bizarre, right? And what I feel doesn’t put you under any obligation. Which is good, because you need to get away.”
“What do you mean?”
“Away. From here. From Tom. Sooner or later he’ll turn on you. The way he turned on Dolores. She was his lover, too. She worshipped him. And he killed her.”
“That was Butcher Dagon.”
“It was Tom. Dolores was going to tell the world that Dagon was working for Alicia, staging phony atrocities to justify the PPA invasion of Nigeria.”
Hei-lian did not seem too surprised. She studied him. “You say you care about me? About me, not just what I can do for you, with my pussy or my skills or my contacts?”
“Yeah.”
“But nobody’s cared about just me. Not since-since my father disowned me for joining the intelligence service to get him out of prison.”
“You deserve it, Hei-lian. But the truth is, it’s not only about you. Tom’s losing it.”
Her breath caught. “I’ve begun to suspect that, too.”
“You’re scared of him. I’ve seen it in your eyes. Even if Tom can’t.”
“He’s good at not seeing things he doesn’t want to.” She slumped forward, resting arms on thighs. “I’ve tried to warn Beijing. They won’t listen. They can’t see beyond the oil and the coltan and all the other resources they need to try to keep their economic boom alive.”
“He’ll turn on them, too.”
“But I’ve seen another side of him. That’s what’s so strange. He can be so gentle, even kind. To Sprout. Sometimes to me. That’s you, isn’t it?”
He shrugged. “You could kill him, couldn’t you?”
She blinked and drew her head back on her slender neck. “What?”
“You’re a highly trained agent. You could kill him while he slept. You could to it tonight. All I have to do is go back in, lie down, and let go.” Mark shook his head. “I don’t have much longer anyway. He’s starting to come out of it. I can feel him stirring…”
She got up and walked a few paces from him with the green silk tail over her robe brushing the pale backs of her thighs. The television nattered mindlessly on low volume. “You’d let me kill you?”
“I’m asking you to kill me.” He sucked in breath through his teeth. “I know you’ve got a gun. I don’t want to live with what he’s done. What he’s doing. And I really don’t want to ride along for what he’s going to do. The murder, the destruction. And this child ace thing-the utter rape of innocence, man.” He shook his head. “Death’s got to be better than watching it all happen, knowing I was the one who set it all in motion. It’s not like it’s much of a life to lose, anyway. You’ve got a gun and you’re good with it. End it now.”
Sun walked toward him. “I’ve thought of killing him. But I haven’t. I loved him. I thought. I’ve been trying to figure out if there was some way to get him help.” She stopped just short of him. Her body almost touched his. He could feel her warmth and smell her personal scent. It always reminded him of green tea. “And now I know there’s something worth preserving inside him. For Sprout’s sake, if nothing else. I won’t kill him or you. Until I know there’s no other choice.”
He started to say something. She stretched up on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. “You’re a good man, Mark. I haven’t known many of those. Go back to bed. And relax: if I can’t find some way to help you, then I will find a way to kill you. And that’s a promise.”
25
Sunday,
December 20
Kongoville, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
“Tom, no!”
Hopping furiously, he tried to pull on a pair of jeans. Outside, it was still night in K-ville.
That bastard Meadows, Tom thought. He actually stole my body for a joyride. His memory was a blank for what the hippie puke had done. But he knew it had happened.
“You’re not strong enough,” she said. “You’re still healing. I saw you when you came in. You looked… you looked as if you couldn’t possibly survive.”
And the fuckers dosed me with drugs. I told them never to do that! “Yeah, well, I’m better now,” he said. “I found out who shot me and kidnapped my daughter. And now I’m going to make the motherfucker pay.”
“What about the Nshombos?” she asked. “They weren’t happy about what happened in Paris. They won’t want you setting out on your own selfish vendetta.”
“The little bastard’s their enemy, too,” he said. “He committed crimes against the People’s Paradise. If they can’t see that, fuck ’em.”
On the Lualaba River, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
After catching up on his sleep, Wally spent a lot of time checking himself for rust spots. He’d let the problem slide while he was too exhausted to do anything about it. He managed to get the worst of it, but there were places he couldn’t reach. And he only had the single damp towel to work with. It never dried out.
He’d been completely submerged during his fight with the crocodile, and had been out in the rain a few times since then, but until now he hadn’t had much chance to do anything about it on account of Ghost. She still followed him. But without her knife, that was pretty much all she could do. He tried talking to her every time he caught a glimpse, but inevitably she backed off.
He landed his boat at river’s edge after a particularly hard rain. Rainwater sloshed around the bottom of the boat, soaking his pack, not to mention his feet. He hoped to find suitable leaves in the jungle, something that would help him wipe everything down. Also, he had to pee.
Everything reminded him of Jerusha. She would have been able to tell him which plants to look for, which leaves to use. Right off the bat. She wouldn’t have laughed at his clumsy attempt to build a rain shield for the boat out of leaves and limbs. Well, she might have laughed, but not unkindly. She had a nice laugh.
Wally lost track of the time. He spent more time than he had intended on his ultimately unsuccessful side trip.
On the way back to his boat, he heard voices coming from the river.
He crept back to his landing site. Leaves rustled. Undergrowth crackled. And his joints-still sore from the fight with the croc-groaned like the hinges of an old door. Wally wasn’t built for stealth.
But the newcomers didn’t seem to notice. Whatever they were talking about (another pang of loneliness, another memory of Jerusha), their conversation indicated no sign of alarm. He peeked through the long leaves of a bushy fern.
“Wow,” he whispered.
A
hospital barge had moored itself at the center of the river. It looked to be thirty or forty feet long, perhaps a little more than half as wide, with a flat hull. Most of the deck was taken up with a narrow cabin, built of sturdy timber with a pitched roof of corrugated aluminum. Clean white paint blazed in the sun, bright enough to make Wally squint. The walls and roof were marked with red crosses.
A long, sleek whip antenna arced over the roof; it bobbed gently when the barge swayed on its anchor line. The space inside was probably divided into multiple rooms; Wally counted two doors on the near side. The guy on the roof wore the uniform of a Leopard Man. Regular soldiers patrolled a narrow walkway around the cabin. A handful stood on the side facing the riverbank, where Wally had gone. It seemed pretty obvious they were discussing the stolen PPA boat.
These were the men who’d delivered the virus to Nyunzu. The virus that had killed Lucien, and all the other kids Wally had buried with his bare hands.
He clenched his fists. Well, I’ve found it. Now what?
The barge towed a small rowboat. Three soldiers climbed in, threw off the ropes, and rowed over for a closer look at Wally’s stolen boat. One shouted something to his colleagues. He pointed at the rusted orange stump where the forward gun mount had been.
In response, the men on the rowboat unslung their rifles and started peering nervously into the jungle. So did those watching from the safety of the barge. It seemed they’d heard about Wally. Good.
The easy part was that he didn’t have to take them by surprise. Better if he didn’t, in fact: the barge had a radio. If the barge reported an attack here, that could only help Jerusha’s chances of escaping with the children.
The hard part was figuring out how to get to the barge without getting soaked again. He also didn’t want to lose his own boat. What would Tarzan do? Wally thought for a few seconds. Heck, yeah! He’d swing onto the barge.
Wally craned his neck, looking for overhead vines. There weren’t any. Nuts. Wally sighed. The vine thing would have been neat. He watched the rowboat, the barge, the ripples on the water… Huh?
Wally looked again: ripples on the river. Tiny inverted “V”s, glistening chevrons pointing at a barely visible snout, two eyes, and the back ridges of a river croc. The PPA men hadn’t seen it.
If he waited for the men to come ashore, he could take care of them pretty quickly. But others might take his motorboat while he was busy. He’d lose his chance to destroy the barge, plus he’d have to walk all the way to Bunia.
Wally resigned himself to getting wet again. Rats.
He leaped out of his hiding spot, ululating like Johnny Weissmuller. Ignoring the pain in his legs and hips, he charged down to the river, pulping the underbrush beneath his feet. With the running start, he cleared the final twenty feet with a single jump. He cannonballed into the river, a few feet behind the crocodile, before the landing party had time to react. Their colleagues on the barge shouted warnings. Somebody managed to squeeze off a burst from his rifle. The rounds pattered harmlessly into the river.
Wally grabbed the croc’s tail with both hands. It twisted around, angry as it was ugly. It tried to snap at him. But he heaved, swung the hissing reptile in a few wide circles overhead until it made a nice whistling sound, and released it.
The croc’s snout hit the middle guy right in the gut, knocking him clear off the boat. Its thrashing tail clotheslined the guy on the left. The rowboat flipped, tossing soldier number three into the river.
Heh. Bet Kate’s never done that.
The barge men opened fire while he slogged his way to the rowboat. A hail of bullets pinged and whanged from Wally’s chest, sliced into the water on either side of him, and tore through the jungle behind him. A row of bullet holes perforated the rowboat, but they were too small to sink it before he paddled over to the barge.
Over the crackle of gunfire, Wally heard the whir of machinery. A soldier on the barge cranked a hand winch, nervously winding up the anchor line while peering over his shoulder at Wally’s advance.
“Oh, no you don’t, pal.” Wally reached the barge. Two soldiers stood over him. They fired on his head, shoulders, and arms from a few feet away.
It hurt. In spite of his best efforts, rust had pitted his skin everywhere. He felt new trickles of warm blood on his back and neck.
Wally snapped off a length of wooden guardrail. He swung it like a bat, sweeping the soldier’s legs out from under them. They thudded to the deck. Wally heaved himself onto the barge, then stomped them both. They didn’t get up.
That’s for Lucien.
A low snarl sounded above and behind him. Before Wally could turn, the leopard tackled him. It landed on his back, raking its claws through vulnerable rust spots.
Wally screamed in pain. He reached backward, grabbed the giant cat by the scruff of the neck, and tore chucks out of his own back when he pulled it off him. He swung the leopard through a full two-seventy, smashing it upside down on the deck with tooth-rattling impact. Wally brought the segment of rail down on its throat, hard enough to puncture the deck, fixing the transformed Leopard Man in place.
That’s for everyone else.
Time to end this, before the PPA folks realized they could hurt him. He needed to clean his wounds. Wally hoped they’d had enough time to send an SOS.
The rest of the crew abandoned ship when he tore his way into the cabin. He smashed everything that looked even vaguely scientific, especially all the glassware.
Then he punched through the planking and dropped into the hold beneath the deck. The hull itself was wood, but a series of riblike spars ran the length of the barge to give the hull its shape. And those were metal. Wally disintegrated them two at a time, one in each hand.
The hull pulled apart. Water gushed up through the seams. The barge listed to port, then crumpled, then sank. But not before Wally salvaged two fuel canisters.
When he lugged them back to his motorboat, he found Ghost standing on the riverbank. Openly staring at him with a strange expression on her face. She didn’t back away as he approached, and she didn’t threaten him with the knife handle. Wally paused. They stared at each other.
“My name’s Wally,” he said.
Ghost hesitated before she receded into the jungle.
On the Congo River, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
“We could take you all the way there,” Gaetan said. “But it will take much more time. And the closer we get to Kisangani the more dangerous the river is.”
“You were paid a ridiculous amount of money for our passage,” Michelle said.
It was raining and she, Kengo, and Gaetan were hunkered down in the cabin. Joey was huddled under the poncho on the back bench of the boat.
“It would take many more days to reach Kisangani on the river,” Gaetan replied. “I have a friend who is a pilot. He flies out of a small airstrip not far from here. He owes me a favor and I am certain he will give you a good price to take you there.”
Faster was better. Her dreams were now filled only with the urgent need to get to Adesina. And the feeling didn’t fade when she woke up. It itched and burned in her mind. It was almost as bad as the fire in her veins after her coma. The farther upriver north they went, the worse the sensation. They were going in the right direction.
“Fine,” she said. “But we better get a decent deal.”
In the Jungle, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
The landscape was steep and furrowed; Jerusha often felt they were making more progress vertically than horizontally. It rained at least once a day, but the rain never seemed to reach them. The canopy of the jungle merely dripped continuously, and the air below was ferociously hot, humid, and still. They forded a few more creeks and small rivers rushing through the valleys, though thankfully none of them were as wide or deep as the one they’d crossed before. The rest breaks became more frequent-the exhaustion of scrambling up the verdant slopes and helping the children who couldn’t help themselves t
ook much from all of them. The children were increasingly hungry and the fruit and vegetable seeds in her pouch were nearly exhausted.
She worried that the pursuit of them might mean that Rusty… no. She wouldn’t think that. She wouldn’t.
Waikili seemed nervous. His blind, blank face seemed to survey the jungle around them. “Those two children?” Jerusha whispered to him, so that none of the others would hear.
Waikili nodded. “They’re out there,” he whispered back. “And the one moves so fast… Leucrotta is his name.”
“How can you know that?”
“I know. He wants to eat us.”
Jerusha kept them moving all through the day, and pushed them even through the twilight. The sun was already down, the trees little more than darker lines in a grey murk. The kids were strung out in a long column as they clambered along a ridge. Jerusha was already looking for a spot to halt for the night, some small shelter.
A wailing cry came from the rear of the line, a shrill of terror too abruptly cut off and followed by shrieks and shouts from the other children. “Cesar!” Jerusha shouted and the boy unshouldered his weapon as they ran back toward the sound, Jerusha unsnapping the covers of her seed-belt pouches.
Naadir, the child with glowing skin, was there as well, the shadows of the other children streaming away from her, near the stretcher that carried Eason. But it wasn’t Eason that was the problem. He gaped like the others from the stretcher, pointing with a trembling finger. “Bibbi Jerusha,” he said. “It was awful…”
She pushed through the children. In the greenish illumination of Naadir’s skin, she could see one of the older boys, Hafiz, lying on the ground in spatters of blood blacker than the twilight. Jerusha’s breath hissed in. Something had torn away the boy’s face, ripped it from his skull so that all that was left were black-red furrows through which bone gleamed sickeningly. Another quadruple line of furrows had been carved over his chest; more across his abdomen, so deep that his intestines had spilled out.
“Go up to the others,” she shouted to the children. “Go on. Did someone see this?”
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