“With you by my side, I cannot fail.”
“Don’t count on me, Couleuvre. I am notoriously fickle.”
“Of course, Baron.” But Couleuvre’s voice, so awed and eager, gave the lie to his words.
MEANWHILE, BUCKLER SEEMED to be taking an unusually long time over killing Sampson. Lex realised he wasn’t hearing any of the expected noises. No splintery cracking of bones. No frantic back-of-the-throat gulping and gagging. No drumbeat of heels.
He twisted his head round, and what he saw astonished him.
The zuvembified Team Thirteen leader was surreptitiously releasing Sampson from the restraints.
Sampson looked no less startled than Lex felt. He leapt off the gurney the moment the last cuff was undone. He stared at Buckler, scowling hard.
“LT? You still in there? Jesus, you are, aren’t you?”
“Go,” said Buckler in a slow, creaky voice that sounded as though it was coming from somewhere deep and far away, some inner cavern. “Tartag. Pearce. Free.”
Sampson, in spite of everything, didn’t hesitate. An order was an order.
Buckler turned and began untying Lex.
Lex scanned the SEAL’s face. To all appearances, Buckler was no different from any of the other zuvembies. Yellowed irises. Frozen, statue-like features. Vacant expression. And yet...
“How?” Lex said.
“Don’t... know,” said Buckler, the words hissing out of him like steam. “Don’t... care.”
“You’re resisting Couleuvre’s commands.”
“Somehow... I’m still... in charge of... me. Hard. Like wading... through mud... up to my armpits.”
“But I don’t understand. How come you can do this and no one else?”
“No use... asking. Gift horse. Mouth.”
Unstrapped, Lex pounced to his feet. In Lab 1, Couleuvre was still prostrated before his loa. There were three other zuvembies in there, guarding Wilberforce and Albertine. Lex and the Thirteeners were weaponless. Still, they had to go on the offensive, no question. They at least had the element of surprise on their side.
Buckler led the charge. Lex and Sampson were close on his heels. Tartaglione remained in Lab 2, doing his best to bring Pearce round.
Finisterre was the biggest target in the room and potentially the most dangerous. Buckler barrelled straight into the loa zuvembie, knocking him off his feet. Sampson charged another of the zuvembies, while Lex took a slightly different tack. He snatched up the scalpel Couleuvre had used earlier, than dived over to the cousins and began sawing through their bonds.
A cry from Wilberforce alerted him to a zuvembie—Leroy—rushing towards him. Lex slithered around Leroy’s legs and whipped the scalpel through one of his Achilles tendons then the other. Leroy flipped forwards under his own momentum, his feet staying flat on the floor, sundered at the ankle. He fell prone and Lex scrambled onto his back and dug the scalpel through the very jazzy beach shirt he was wearing, down in between two of his thoracic vertebrae. He levered the blade around. Blood and spinal fluid spurted.
Leroy was in effect quadriplegic now, but to make sure he was fully immobilised Lex tipped a heavy workbench over onto him. Then he finished freeing his friends.
Albertine sprang up and snatched her shoulder bag from the shelf where Couleuvre had placed it.
Lex ran to help Sampson, who was in difficulties. The Thirteener had managed to ram a retort stand part-way down the gullet of the zuvembie he was fighting, but the creature, undaunted, was clawing at his face, pushing his head away with tremendous force. Two of its fingers were inside Sampson’s mouth and tearing at the corner of his lips. Its thumb was perilously close to gouging out an eye.
Lex hacked at one of its hands with the scalpel, slashing tendons. The hand went limp. Sampson, for his part, bit down on the two fingers, clamping his jaws together as hard as he could. His teeth severed the fingers at the first knuckle. He spat the tips out disgustedly and kept working with the retort stand, thrusting it even further inside the zuvembie like a plumber trying to unclog a blocked drain.
Buckler and Finisterre were going at it hammer and tongs, throwing each other back and forth across the laboratory, whaling on each other with whatever implements came to hand. Equipment crashed. Shelves were shattered. Broken glass flew. Finisterre—or was it Baron Samedi?—laughed uproariously, revelling in every second of this.
“Your soul is still your own,” Samedi said in Finisterre’s bassy tones. “Couleuvre failed to drive it down so far inside you that it was lost from sight. You must be strong in spirit. Or... is it somethin’ else?”
Buckler’s only response was to drive his fists into Finisterre’s solar plexus. The big man flew backwards as though struck by a car, but he recovered and was back in the fray in a flash.
“Yeah,” he said, clobbering Buckler with a computer keyboard. Plastic keys sprayed like handfuls of dice. “You’ve been places, haven’t you? Your soul has travelled and returned, and that’s given it strength—made it harder to shift. It was dislodged once, and it’s learned to cling like a limpet to prevent a repeat of that. You’re a lucky boy, soldier.”
“Always... thought so,” said Buckler, retaliating with an enamel kidney dish, which bent like tinfoil against Finisterre’s skull.
Finisterre kneed him in the thigh, buckling his leg. “Doesn’t make you immortal, though. I destroy this body of yours, you’re done. But you destroy the one I’m usin’, and what do I care? I’m a loa, just hitchin’ a ride. This is rented accommodation, not my own house.”
“You talk... too fucking... much.” Buckler hurled a small trolley at Finisterre. “Giving me... earache.”
Finisterre only laughed again. His exposed eye was lit up with a manic glee. “This is fun. You poundin’ me, me poundin’ you. Shame neither of us can really hurt the other.”
“Won’t... stop me from... trying.”
“That’s what I love about mortals. They don’t give up, no matter how futile it seems. They’re little sparks, burnin’ briefly yet oh-so-brightly.”
Both Lex and Sampson were still attempting to bring down the zuvembie they were grappling with. The last remaining zuvembie in the room had been prevented from reaching them by the savage fight between Buckler and Finisterre. It was stuck in a corner, unable to get past.
But now a gap appeared, and it lunged through...
...only to be confronted by Albertine, who tossed her poudre at it.
The zuvembie reeled and fell.
Albertine swung round and delivered another handful of poudre, this time at the zuvembie who was giving Lex and Sampson so much grief. It, too, fell.
A third handful went Finisterre’s way, but he shrugged it off.
“I’m a loa, Damballah’s girl!” he jeered. “You don’t drive me out with a few herbs and a couple of lines of fancy prayer.”
Panting hard, Lex scanned the room.
Someone was missing.
“Couleuvre,” he said. “Where the hell’s Couleuvre?”
“Bastard sneaked off,” said Wilberforce. “Used the fighting as cover and scrammed.”
“Where to?” asked Sampson.
Lex had a feeling he knew. “Where else? He’s gone for his beloved bomb, hasn’t he?”
“Then go... after him,” said Buckler, injecting as much urgency as he could into his constricted, papery voice. “I’ll... handle... this guy.”
“Oh, you will, will you?” said Finisterre.
“I’ll give it... my best fucking... shot.”
“Wilb,” said Lex. “See those two over there?” He was pointing at Tartaglione and Pearce. The former had managed to rouse the latter from unconsciousness. “Go with them. Pearce’ll need help walking. Get to Puddle Jumper and start her up.”
“What about you, man?”
“Duty calls.”
Lex made for the door, along with Sampson. Albertine joined them, and it didn’t even occur to either man to object or protest. The time when they had regarded her as
a mere civilian noncombatant was long past.
The three of them ran along the passage, heading for Couleuvre’s dig site, where the nuclear bomb lay and where the bokor’s horde of undead slaves was at its densest and most numerous.
FORTY
THE BONDYE BOMB
ALBERTINE’S POUDRE TOOK care of the first two zuvembie guards they encountered, but her supply was almost exhausted.
“Only enough for one more,” she said.
“Then make it him,” said Lex, meaning a zuvembie Marine who was posted at the lip of the pit.
Albertine ran at the creature, ducking under his arm as he raised his gun to fire. A delicate hail of powder and a few muttered words felled him like a lumberjack’s axe.
Lex relieved the Marine of his gun. He launched himself down into the pit, skidding around the worker zuvembies. He was of no interest to them. They had been programmed for a specific purpose. Nothing else mattered.
At the bottom, Couleuvre was squeezing himself legs first into a rough-hewn hole in the concrete. It was a tight fit. His shoulders barely got through.
Lex fired, but Couleuvre vanished into the aperture at the same moment. The bullet missed by a whisker.
Lex halted at the hole.
“Couleuvre! Listen to me. You don’t have to do this. You have nothing to prove.”
Below him, dimly, he made out a chamber the size of an upended cargo container. Somewhere at the base of it were two dark silhouettes. One was moving—Couleuvre. The other was static, an object with the dimensions of a refrigerator or a coffin—the nuke.
Lex loosed off two more shots. The reports were deafening in the confines of the chamber, the muzzle flashes blinding. He had no idea if he’d hit Couleuvre.
“That isn’t God,” he shouted down. “It’s something left over from long ago that nobody wants.”
“You have just described Bondye,” Couleuvre replied. His voice sounded taut, with a pained, rasping edge to it. Had Lex winged him? Maybe even, with luck, wounded him fatally? “And what if He does not want us either? What if we are just a joke to Him? Bondye made us, then got bored, and now He just kicks us around. That is, when he can be bothered to remember us.”
“Couleuvre.” Albertine had slithered down to join Lex. “I speak with the authority of Damballah, the compassion of Erzulie Freda and the reason of Loko. As one kanzo initiate to another, I beg you, stop this now. Those who question Bondye’s will always come off worst.”
“I am questioning nothing, mambo. I am standing here daring Bondye to show Himself. If He is stronger than me, if He is so perfect and wonderful, He can prove it by manifesting His power. We will soon see if He really is God or just a weakling and a bully. I am not doing this for myself. Do you not see? It is on behalf of all of us, all mankind.”
Lex’s eyesight was adjusting to the gloom in the chamber. Couleuvre was bent over, fiddling with the bomb. Lex took aim, then realised that the gun was empty.
He tossed it aside. “Right, I’m going down in after him.”
“Lex, you can’t.”
Just then an array of tiny lights winked on below. Their glow illuminated a control panel with a row of switches and knobs.
“Bien,” said Couleuvre. “There you are. I knew it. I knew you would not back away.”
The bokor was limned by the panel lights. His face shone with sweat, avid, mad. A rivulet of blood glistened as it trickled from a wound in his arm.
“Couleuvre, it’s not too late,” said Lex. “Just think for a moment. Think it through. Mightn’t this be what Bondye wants—you calling him out so that He can swat you like a fly? What’s would be the point of it all then? You won’t have achieved anything.”
Couleuvre wasn’t listening. He was busy with the control panel, trying switches, experimenting, figuring out.
All at once a humming filled the chamber—a high-pitched whine that sent a thrill of horror through Lex.
He heard a steady, inexorable ticking that emanated from the bomb. The sound of plastic numerals flipping over. A readout charting the time until detonation. Second after second, passing heavily, remorselessly.
Couleuvre took a step back. He flexed his fingers, limbering up. He began to pray, calling on Baron Samedi, Maman Brigitte, all of the loa, asking them for succour and power. “For Haiti,” he said. “For your people. For justice. I will prevail.”
Lex levered himself away from the hole. “Countdown’s begun. No idea how long we’ve got.”
“Can you shut it down?” Albertine asked.
“How? Nobody ever taught me defusing nukes. This one shouldn’t even be working.”
“Then we have to run.”
“I don’t know what difference it’ll make, but hell yes.”
THEY SCRAMBLED UP out of the pit on all fours. Lex didn’t need to pause and explain to Sampson. One look at their faces and the Thirteener knew the worst.
They made for the stairs, full tilt. On the way they came across Finisterre’s body. It lay half in, half out of the entrance to the laboratories. Finisterre’s head was twisted round on his neck. His tongue bulged between his lips.
“The LT beat his ass,” said Sampson. “Hot damn.”
Then the overhead lights flickered and brightened. The installation seemed to buzz with sudden new life around them. Air conditioning units started up. Static sizzled over a PA system. The low, steady pulse of the geothermal plant could be felt through the soles of their feet.
“And he’s got the power going again. Meaning...”
Lex finished the thought. “The elevator.”
Buckler was waiting for them there. On his zuvembie-blank face there was just a perceptible hint of triumph.
“So we... win.”
“Not quite,” said Lex. “Couleuvre’s about to get his private audience with the Almighty. Couldn’t stop him.”
“Shit. That’s not... going to be... pretty.”
They piled into the elevator and Sampson stabbed the button marked S for Surface. The doors rolled shut, but slowly, so slowly.
Too slowly.
A large hand shot through the opening. It clamped against the rim of one of the doors and began pushing it back. Another hand did the same with the other door.
Finisterre loomed through the gap. His head hung askew, ear touching shoulder. He said nothing—his kinked larynx prevented it—but his intent was clear. No one was escaping, not if he had anything to do with it.
Buckler applied himself to the left-hand door, providing a counterforce. Lex, Sampson and Albertine copied him with the right-hand door. Grunting, shoving, they resisted Finisterre’s efforts. Finisterre silently strained. His head flopped forwards, lolling like a tulip on a broken stem.
Inch by inch, the doors began to creep back together.
Now Finisterre’s knuckles were pressed against his temples. He slid his hands up over his head in an attempt to gain a better purchase.
“Harder,” said Buckler.
One last desperate effort, and...
The doors squeezed Finisterre’s neck. Buckler gave a final, full-zuvembie-strength thrust. They slammed together, decapitating Finisterre.
The head rolled onto the floor of the elevator, landing face up. Blood leaked from its pinched-off stump.
Somehow the sunglasses had stayed fixed in place throughout all of this, and Finisterre’s visible eye glared balefully up at the four passengers as the elevator rose, shuddering and grinding, towards the surface. His mouth moved, as though there was much that he—or Baron Samedi—had to say.
Buckler stamped on the head, smashing it like a Halloween pumpkin.
“That’s quite enough... of that,” he said. “Sport.”
FORTY-ONE
MYSTERIOUS WAYS
THEY RACED ACROSS the beach. Lex and Buckler were bent double, lugging a Zodiac behind them, Buckler doing most of the work. The other Zodiac bobbed out at sea, close to Puddle Jumper. A second seaplane sat an anchor a quarter-mile to the west. It was the one Fini
sterre had charted, a Grumman Albatross, larger than the Turbo Beaver, with a broad flat belly and floats attached to struts beneath the wings.
Everyone scrambled aboard the Zodiac in the shallows. Sampson pulled the starter cord on the outboard. The motor spluttered, died. Sampson tried again. Again no joy.
For Lex, the agony lay in not knowing how long the countdown timer on the nuke was set for. Five minutes? Ten? It would be better if they had a fixed deadline. At least then he might have some idea if they were going to make it. As things stood, the bomb could detonate at any moment. He assumed it had been fitted with a delay fuse long enough to allow for complete evacuation of the installation. But perhaps not. It was possible that, in the days of the Cold War, personnel at Anger Reef were expected to make the ultimate sacrifice if need be—all hands going down as the ship was scuttled.
Sampson cursed the motor after it failed to fire a third time.
Albertine snatched the starter cord out of his hand. “Damballah,” she said, “be with us. Hear my plea.”
She pulled, deftly.
The motor grumbled and then roared.
“All right!” said Sampson, beaming brightly. “Halle-goddamn-luiah.”
He grabbed the tiller and gunned the throttle.
Puddle Jumper’s turboprops were already turning.
“Can’t be finessing this,” Sampson said as the boat neared Anger Reef’s protective ring of coral. “Just going to have to grit our teeth and go for it.”
The tide had ebbed. The coral was closer to the surface. The Zodiac sped across the effervescent white water, scraping, bumping, bouncing. Rending sounds came from the hull as the speed skags were ripped to shreds.
Then a jutting spike of coral snagged one of the main chambers. There was a hiss of escaping air, and the Zodiac began listing precariously to one side.
Sampson’s response was to pour on more speed.
The boat rode lower in the water. The outboard’s blades screeched as they dug into the coral, churning it to bits.
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