Now the body they had snagged was caught on a rock while PaxForce soldiers tugged in vainly at their rope.
‘Free it,’ Colonel Emilio shouted crossly and a conscript ran forward. Leaning out over the foss pool, the boy grabbed the pale arm and then let go hurriedly, shuffling back so fast he almost tripped himself. ‘Sir. . .’
Axl beat Colonel Emilio to the water’s edge. He felt the cold of the water on his legs but ignored it, putting his hands beneath the arms of the corpse to pull the body sideways. It came free from the rocks and Axl pushed the bald man up onto a nearby ledge.
Brown eyes stared at him from an Asiatic face perfectly preserved by the ice cold water. His guts hung free.
‘Who is it?’ Axl asked.
‘I’ve no idea.’ Standing behind him, Kate glanced once at the body and shrugged.
Rinpoche was right about one thing, on their fifth drag of the pool the conscripts had no problems bringing momaDef and Clone up in one go, their big problem was separating them. And it wasn’t just that the huge man had his teeth sunk so far into the small woman’s throat that Sergeant defMoma had to use her own blade to force open his mouth. It was what Clone had done with his thumbs.
One was hooked in under her spectacles through the lieutenant’s pulped right eye, thick fingers locked round the side of her dreadlocked skull to keep his hand in place. As for the other thumb… Kate jerked her face sideways when she realised where Clone had rammed it.
‘Sweet fuck,’ said a voice in Axl’s head, ‘Corn on the fucking cob.’ The silver monkey was right. It looked exactly as if Clone had driven his thumbs into the lieutenant at both ends and started chewing on her throat.
‘Yeah,’ Axl said. ‘And all she did was strip him naked, tie string round his balls and wire him to a generator.’
defMoma exploded right on cue. The crack of a detonating firework, twisted loops. Steely bass gone harder. Rough-cut drums, echoed out.
Party time. Blocking the sergeant’s punch easily, Axl hesitated and shocked himself by not killing her. Slotting her out was as simple as chopping the edge of his right hand to her larynx, but instead Axl grabbed the sergeant’s left wrist and pivoted himself under it, taking the wrist up behind her back as he simultaneously kicked her leg, hard and fast. She went down onto her knees in a crunch of guitar as Axl twisted her arm up behind her.
The woman could stop struggling or she could listen to her own elbow rupture. As choices went it was simple.
‘Drop it.’
Axl heard the words first and then felt the kiss of a cold muzzle against the side of his head. Inside it, the soundtrack went down to a two-drum heart beat.
‘Well hey,’ said the voice in his skull, ‘there’s always a critic’ Axl grinned and grinned again. That was what the Colt always used to say back in the days when it was just some gun with an amorality problem.
The Colonel had his arm outstretched, stubby fingers wrapped round the ivory handle of a tarted up paxForce-issue hiPower. Axl didn’t like anti-environmental posturing used as a position-statement and didn’t like the fact the man probably had a case full of fancy guns, but it wasn’t the ivory that really fucked him off, it was the look in Colonel Emilio’s eyes that said, ‘Nailed you.’
Twisting the fat sergeant’s left arm even harder wasn’t the brightest response but it was satisfying. Pain hissed between the woman’s lips and when Axl tightened his grip again she gave up trying to bite back the pain.
‘Let her go,’ Colonel Emilio ground the Colt muzzle harder into Axl’s left temple. ‘Now.’
‘Do that again,’ Axl said softly, ‘and it’ll be your fucking arm that gets broken.’ He was getting stripped-back bass now, low and skeletal. More space than sound.
‘Release her,’ the Colonel said firmly and Axl heard an abrupt click as he jacked back the slide on his gun. Dust to dust, dross to dross… There had to be worse ways to go than being slotted by some sanctimonious WorldBank arsewipe but Axl couldn’t think of any.
Of course, he could just have stopped twisting the fat woman’s wrist but Axl couldn’t get his head round that, either. And as the bass line kept time over the heartbeat, Axl got that feeling he was missing something obvious, yet again.
‘Hey, shit for brains…’
The monkey wasn’t looking at Axl, he was staring pointedly at Colonel Emilio’s gun. Colt hiPower, ivory handle, .38, single clip, no laser sight and probably only semiAI.
Probably only semi… Sweet Jesus.
Snapping one fist sideways into the Colonel’s groin, Axl flipped his attention back to the sergeant, broke her forearm with an easy twist and ground the jagged ends against each other until she screamed. And he kept grinding broken end against broken end until she pissed herself too.
Colonel Emilio pulled the trigger. Only the pre-sectioned flechette that should have scrambled Axl’s brains stayed exactly where it was, correctly ratcheted into the chamber but untouched by a firing pin as dead as the already-moving Axl should have been.
The gun that Axl rammed under the Colonel’s jaw had no electronics, no little data packets for Rinpoche to scramble, just an old-fashioned arrangement involving trigger, hammer and tempered steel spring.
The slug wouldn’t frag into razor-edged shards designed to pulp his brain, it wasn’t even jacketed with depleted uranium. It would just pass straight through, punching his memories and most of his brain out through a fist-sized hole in the top of his skull. Still, it was enough. And what Axl wanted more than anything was to pull that trigger.
‘Next time,’ Axl promised, stepping back.
‘There won’t be a next time,’ said the Colonel, rubbing his jaw. Then he turned to his troops. ‘Get the lieutenant packed in ice,’ he barked. ‘And you can leave those two here. I’m sure this bitch will want to bury them.’ Not even bothering to watch as the conscripts scrambled fast for ropes and stretchers, the Colonel stalked over to the bitch in question.
‘This man isn’t a real refugee,’ he told Kate coldly. ‘His name isn’t Jack Black, Black Jack or any permutation. He’s a convicted murderer. His name is…’
‘Axl Borja,’ Kate said calmly. ‘Yes, I know.’
Which was probably the one response Colonel Emilio hadn’t been expecting.
Behind the Colonel, conscripts kept on loading momaDef s corpse onto a gurney and Axl watched them tighten the straps. Clone and the bald man with the slit-open stomach sprawled on the rocks, eyes open to the sky. Some medic was tending to the sergeant, though he took his time about it and claimed to be carrying no anaesthetic. Sergeant defMoma didn’t believe him and Axl wasn’t surprised, he didn’t either. But Axl wasn’t really paying attention to any of that. He was busy listening to the exchange between Kate and the Colonel.
‘And I suppose you know he’s here to betray you,’ said Colonel Emilio. ‘This man was sent by the Cardinal to hunt you down… Don’t you understand that?’ His voice was furious.
That was when Kate looked at Axl. A slow gaze through dark eyes that let him see deep into her head and beyond, to a child walking long lonely corridors filled with marble. Kate shook her head.
‘I don’t believe you,’ Kate told the Colonel and turned on her heel, conversation over. Axl had never seen anything quite so magnificent or so unbelievably stupid.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Dubbed-out Dub
Early-morning mist filled Cocheforet valley like froth on coffee, filtering out the village and its stream to leave only the tips of nearby trees and the towering wall of the valley rising out of a vast sea of smoke-like white.