This woman was destroying Enkidu, rotting the very fiber of his mind, Gilgamesh realized. But he said only, with the patience of a king, "We will not be allowed into the city, Enkidu, you know That. the caravan must camp on the shore and its people go no farther."
"Ah, but the lord of the city will come to us and then, hearing That you are Gilgamesh, lord of the land, king of Uruk, he will surely invite us there ...
to see what no outsider has ever seen." Enkidu's eyes were shining.
Gilgamesh had never been able to resist that look. He said, "If you will put away this woman--who will not be allowed to travel with us to the city in any case--and separate from the caravan thereafter, Enkidu, I will announce myself to the lord of the city and demand the hospitality due the once king of Uruk - and his friend."
"Done!" cried Enkidu.
High above the caravan, in a helicopter hidden by Hell's ruddy clouds, an agent of Authority named Welch reviewed the background data That had brought him here, on his Diabolical Majesty's most secret service. Welch had become a member of the Devil's Children, Satan's
"personal Agency" among a dizzying proliferation of lesser agencies, without ever meeting Old Nick face to face.
Agency was special, privileged, demanding and unforgiving of failure.
Agency was not, however, infallible, and the briefing material before Welch on the chopper's CRT was no better than what Welch's own spotty memory could provide. Worse, perhaps. Since bureaucracy in Hell functioned but never functioned well.
Tapping irritably at a toggle to clear his screen, Welch mentally recapped the "secret" analysis he'd just read:
Mao Tse-tungs Celestial People's Republic had spread quickly along the tundra of the Outback, stopped only by Prester John's border to the south and the Sea of Sighs to the west. New Kara-Khitai had already been invaded by the collectivizing hordes of the CPB, led by Mao's Minister of War himself, Kublai Khan.
Communist troops in the Outback didn't bother Authority - as Mao had said, revolution wasn't made in silk boxes. the misery Mao's CPR fanatics brought with them like bayonets on the barrels of their ChiCom rifles would have been allowed to spread unchecked, at least until it over-swept Queen Elizabeth's domain and the entire West was Mao's if Mao could have been content with That.
Unfortunately, Chairman Mao had greater ambitions. He sought to export revolution to every socialist crazy who could say Marghiella, and that included Che Guevara (or what was left of his soul since Welch had called in an air strike on Che's main Dissident camp north of New Hell). If the export of revolution had stopped with rhetoric, perhaps AuAority could have looked the other way.
But Mao was using drug money to fund his ideological allies - from Che on the East Coast to the Shi'ite bloc landlocked in the Midwest. Once his revolutionary exports reached New Hell, reached as far as the very Mortuary itself, then something had to be done.
Narco-terrorism wasn't to be tolerated. the poppy fields of the Devil's Triangle reached from Idi Amin's southern frontier to the Persian holdings in the Midwest, and over to Mao's capital, the City of the Fire Dogs. From Dog City, "China White" made its way south sad east by boat and caravan, dulling the sensibilities of the damned.
Communism was one of the Devil's favorite inventions, and that made Welch's assignment harder. Agency couldn't simply nuke the emerging Western ComBtoc back to the stone age -
Authority wouldn't permit it. Welch's assignment was to stop the flow of drugs East, especially into New Hell, where the Dissidents were attracting too much attention. So it was over-flights in this Huey, piloted by a hot-dog Old Dead, Achilles. It was a covert crusade against drug smugglers.
And it was going to take one hell of a long time to show any results.
Welch sat back from the computer bank in the belly of the Huey and reached sideways for his pack of Camels and a swig of beer.
Machiavelli had done this to him: vendetta. More precisely, Machiavelli had done it to Nichols, Welch's one-time ADC-sent Nichols out on a search-and-destroy mission aimed at a specific caravan master who did business out of Pompeii; seat him with an Achaean relic for a pilot and Tamara Burke, whose sympathies in life and afterlife were questionable.
(Whether she'd been KGB or CIA, even Welch wasn't sure.)
Rather than let Nichols spend the rest of Eternity fighting Mao's considerably greater resources, Welch had pulled every string he could think of to secure command of this mission - even called an air strike on Che's base camp to clear his decks in time to board Achillies' Huey.
Welch shouldn't have been here, fighting the Yellow Peril put in the boonies when Agency had bigger fish to fry, not when be had so much unfinished business with Julius Caesar's crew back in New Hell. But he owed Nichols This much and more: Welch's miscalculation on their last mission had gotten Nichols killed.
If Welch had been doing his job right - before and directly after Nichols' death at Troy - he wouldn't have owed the soldier anything. But Welch had come back from the Trojan Campaign with a case of something very like hysterical amnesia. It had been Nichols who found Welch, sloppy drunk with Tanya - Tamara Burke - in a New Hell bar and offered aid and comfort.
Aid and comfort in Hell were hard to find. Aid and comfort coming from a junior officer rankled. Welch had been the case officer on the Trojan Campaign; Nichols had been one of many weapons Welch had employed there.
So it was all backwards, to Welch s way of thinking. He had to get things back into a perspective he could live with. Or die with. In Hell it didn't much matter, but case officers thought in terms of human coin - debts owed, favors done, responsibility and trust.
Trust was a big one: whether betraying it or ratifying it, it was the fulcrum on which all operations turned.
This mission, on the face of it, was simple, if Achilles' assessment was correct: strafe the caravan with the Huey's chain gun until nothing moved; firebomb what was left once they'd made sure that Enkidu and Gilgamesh were among the dead... or the missing. That was a little addendum to the main mission: separate Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and send or bring both Sumerians back to Reassignments.
There was nothing in the orders about how, though, and Achilles was right: death meant the Trip; the Trip ended you at the Mortuary (except, sometimes, if you died on the battle plain of Ilion, a couple of dimensions away from here...) and then at Reassignments.
Even Tamara Burke had voted for the easy way, until Welch had put her down with a carpetbag full of feminine accouterments and detailed her to infiltrate the caravan and seduce one of the Sumerians.
Tanya had a field phone, tracer jewelry, and a chopped Bren Ten that could be heard to New Hell and back if she had to shoot it. She was an experienced field collector, as well as a proven seductress.
But the look she'd shot Welch when they'd let her out a hill away from the caravan had been scathing. Only Achilles was pleased with that.
So now it was Welch and Nichols in the belly of the chopper, alone but for their data collection equipment and each other, bathed in sweat and running lights and trying to keep their equipment cool as they waited for a signal from Tanya that the caravan had picked up its load of drugs and was headed toward the hinterland. The low-shrubbed boonies. The damned no-man's-land of buffer zone that was so undesirable even the commies hadn't claimed it. Yet
"You know, something about this doesn't feel right," Welch said to Nichols.
Arching his back in his ergo chair, Welch put one foot up on the padded bumper of the "mapping" console that could show him how much spare change Enkidu had in his pocket or how much ammo was in one of the caravan guard's Maadi AKs.