Tigerman

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 him 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.

Nonsense.

He growled, in irritation or lust, he wasn’t sure, and ran on. He was following a narrow path, probably a badger run, and yes: he was holding the compass, finding his way. He grinned, then laughed. He wanted to sing and drink and eat. He wanted to sleep for a year, to lie naked in a jacuzzi looking out over the Sahara while someone rubbed his feet, to headline at a rock concert, to tear down walls with his hands. He had won. He was a god.

Adrenalin. Let it go.

But he couldn’t, and anyway it should be over by now, the high should be exhausted and burned out, should have left him hollow. He wondered if inhaling burning heroin could do this. Cocaine, perhaps. Maybe there had been cocaine, too. Or perhaps there was something here, in this jungle. Maybe the red flowers were a stimulant.

Tigerman make famous victory! Hah!

There wasn’t really, in this world, a way in which burning a shitload of heroin and beating up some dealers was a crime.

He ran on to Beauville, and his way home.

His reckoning was good. He came out of the jungle at the old millhouse, checked the sky and saw clouds and no helicopter, trotted over the road into a plantation and jogged on. He felt he still had more in the tank – impossibly – but he wanted to save it in case there was more craziness to deal with before he slept. The rendezvous was another twenty minutes away. Two streets later he stopped, halted by a thought: the Witch. Her house was here, or near here. It must – he had never thought of Beauville like this before, had always stuck religiously to the road system, but in fact it was all closer together than he had realised – it must be just beyond that stand of palms.

He found that he was heading towards it. For what, exactly? Surely not to bang on the door and ask her to harbour a fugitive. To have sex with a fugitive. No. Whatever magic was working on him to vanish his aches and strengthen his legs, he remained himself, and he knew after nearly forty years on Earth that when you showed up at a woman’s door in the middle of the night smelling of blood and diesel and river mud, she did not immediately lose track of her underwear, or even her common sense.

Not to admit all, either. If she was what she appeared to be, she didn’t need the trouble – and if she wasn’t then nor did he.

Not to serenade her, not to seek medical attention, not to steal her car. But since he was passing, and this being the day he was having, he wanted to see her front door and put his hand on the gate, and know that not everything on Mancreu was a mess.

He climbed the fence around the plantation and ran across the spongy sea-grass towards her house. The door was very solid, an old, traditional Mancreu colonial door made of salvaged wood. It looked inviting, and safe. Perhaps he would just call on her, say he had heard a noise, was wondering if she was all right. Perhaps she would ask him in, after all. Perhaps she was so worldly that his attire would hardly seem odd to her.

Don’t be an idiot.

There was a light burning in the window, and to his amazement she was awake, sitting in a high-backed chair. Her hands were stretched out in exhortation or applause. Come on, come on! Did she have a child, then? Was she for some reason teaching her toddler to walk at two a.m.? The Sergeant realised he had no idea. Perhaps that was something some children did, perhaps they sat up in bed and screamed until you put them on the floor and then they took their first steps and you gave them a lollipop. He had not seen a child’s first steps, not ever. Or perhaps he had and hadn’t known. He had seen plenty of small children, shaky waddlers flopping into their mothers’ arms. In Europe, in Africa, in Asia. Perhaps, if he had understood what was happening around him, he would have realised on some of those occasions that he was witnessing a mundane sort of miracle. Perhaps if he had realised it, he might actually have won a single, genuine heart or mind, made a connection which meant more than occupation and cigarettes.

‘Your son is walking! Is that the first time?’

‘Yes! It is! Well done, Iskender! Well done!’

‘Here, we’ve got some coffee in the jeep, have a cup with me.’ Because, in some parts of the Caucasus and even elsewhere, to drink a toast in beer was an eternal curse. Coffee, however much he loathed it, was universal.

And thus I make the world safe for democracy! But perhaps children’s steps were private things, not to be shared with a lumbering British sergeant.

Just as this scene beyond the window was private. He turned to go, and as he did so he saw White Raoul the scrivener, one leg twisted without his cane, claw his way forward. Therapy, surely, of the most human sort. Teach the muscles, lift the spirit. The Sergeant could hear the patient’s joints protest, hear them click and grind. Each step was pain. And yet White Raoul weathered it, welcomed it even, because she was at the far end. Her arms were out to him and her face was a cry of approbation. Brave soldier! Raoul grunted, and the Sergeant could see her weight shift as she prepared to bridge the gap between them, but she held back, held back, and he recovered his balance and his composure. More pain. A mangled hip, the Sergeant thought, and likely a prosthetic kneecap on the other leg: an old, cheap one. A Swiss surgeon had famously used a calf’s kneecap years ago, but he had been a genius and this was not his work. This was patch and repair and don’t worry about it too much because to be honest this man will probably die. Car crash. Gunfire. Falling log. Bones were not strong just because they were the strongest thing a human body had.

Raoul passed the little table and the chairs, and his grin was victory. His doctor – no, more: his reward – lunged at him, and for a moment the Sergeant thought she would knock him down, but together they made a single, upright pillar in the little house. She pressed her mouth on his urgently, and then her dress was gone and beneath it she was quite nude. She stripped away his smock and the shapeless trousers, and then his strange, rainbow arms were around her back, corded muscle locked against tanned skin. The scrivener’s body was a tapestry, tattoos weaving in and out of bands of mottled skin, over old, hard muscles and elegant ribs, and what could only be shrapnel scarring in a spray along one flank. Life must be a constant barrage of greater and lesser pain. But here, now, it all made sense, as if he was a machine made of broken parts which functioned perfectly only in this one action, only for her. They made love standing up, and White Raoul grew less unsteady and more fluid with each moment, and her breath gasped out into the night.

Abruptly, the Sergeant realised that he was spying.

He turned, and picked his way through the shadowed streets into a breeze which was unusually cold.

The car was exactly where it should be, and the boy was gone.

The Sergeant arrived at Brighton House ten minutes later, and closed the door on Mancreu with some finality. In the morning he would love the place again, he knew, but for tonight he had had enough. Enough tomatoes, enough stolen fish, enough local characters and their little ways. Enough tigers, enough trying to do the right thing. He was tired and he was not dead and that was good.

He stripped off the suit and bundled it into a bag. When he awoke he would destroy it, return as many pieces as he could to the armoury, and move on. He reckoned he had a better than even chance of having escaped identification and tracking tonight. If he had, all he needed to do was sit tight and stay clean and let the inevitable blurring of events and the imminent destruction of Mancreu wash the problem away. Dig in and let the shitstorm fly by. He laughed, feeling the euphoria of survival.

Fuck you, he told the world. Not dead, again.

He showered, peering down at himself and seeing the body he recognised, old scars and new bruises. He had some light scalding, some scratches, and in the mirror he could see a bold blue square where the armour had taken bullets. Green mosaic tiling gave his body a slightly fishy sheen.

He walked naked into the galley and drank water straight from the tap, then when his thirst faded he poured a couple of fingers of Scotch and sipped at it slowly, letting himself feel the burn. He did not dilute it. He wanted the fire in it, the bite.

Sensing movement, he peered at his groin, half-amused, half-frustrated. Signs of post-combat arousal: all dressed up and no place to go. He patted his penis in a friendly way. It bounced. After three decades of sharing his life with its weird, unpredictable reactions, he tended to view it as a benign alien presence and treated it accordingly. He had never given it a name, because he privately thought only idiots did that, but it was idle to pretend that he and the organ were always of one mind. He, for example, found nothing erotic in being shot at, but it inevitably produced this reaction. Seeing the Witch naked and having sex would seem much more so, but had elicited none at all. That was imponderable, but curiously appropriate. He wished her well with Raoul, truly. He felt his desire relinquish her, felt his mind remove her to that separate, respected place reserved for things he cherished and wanted to protect, but did not touch.

Not dead, again.