Chapter Forty-eight
For the third time in ten minutes Belew checked his pocket watch. For the third time in ten minutes a whole hour had failed to pass. He grimaced and put the watch away.
I’ve been out of the bush too long, he chided himself. I’m turning into a Nervous Nellie.
From the southwest, where three kilometers away lay the temple in which Moonchild was to meet with Colonel Sobel, came the pop-pop-popping of gunfire, distance-faint. It rose to a crescendo, faded, came back strong, in irregular pulses. The rhythm of a firefight.
“Maybe I’m not so nervous after all,” he said. The jokers and Viet rebels who stood clustered before the main house of the derelict plantation turned nervous faces toward him, then looked back to the noise, as if by sheer concentration they could see through ten thousand feet of trees and brush.
Belew picked up the hand-mike of the radiotelephone resting on the ground by his feet. He spoke into it with the falling inflection of Cambodian.
Nothing. No reply, not even a hum to announce that the Khmer squad he’d sent to shadow Mark to the rendezvous were even on the air. Their radio might have malfunctioned — common enough even in the high-tech nineties, and the radio was more sixties — but his old-soldier’s gut told him they had joined their erstwhile victims in whatever lay Beyond.
“Ave atque vale, boys,” he murmured. They had been good troop and loyal comrades in their way, but he suspected the world would not much miss them. He put them from his mind, turned and walked toward a corner of the great. Peeling-whitewash villa.
There was somebody who could see across three klicks, or at least hear. Crenson insisted he needed isolation so that he could concentrate, so he had stashed himself away in a tool-shed behind the main house. Belew wondered if this incarnations olfactory senses were diminished to nothing as a minor balance to its unprecedented array of powers: a tribe of rock apes had inhabited the shed until the guerrillas had chased them off this afternoon. The stink was enough to stun a goat.
The gunfire was beginning to die away as Belew reached the door of the shed. It stood slightly ajar. I’ll miss the boy, f that was it for him, he realized. Remembering to breathe through his mouth, he stuck his head inside.
“Croyd? Crenson?”
A snore answered him.
“Holy shit!” He jumped inside, bringing up the penlight he carried in a pocket of his trousers.
Croyd the magnificent, in all probability the most multitalented and powerful ace the wild card world had known, lay curled in a ball on a pile of faded-out Playboys that the monkeys had shredded and shat upon, blissfully asleep.
“Hey, bitch! Do you like the taste of joker cock? It’s all-you-can-eat time coming up!”
Desperately Moonchild held her hands before her face, trying to escape the horrible blinding pressure of the flashlight beam. The tiny cage gave her nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. The light seemed to blister her palms.
The sweating jokers pressing in on the cage from all sides hooted and jeered. Their faces were twisted like modeling clay into reifications of hate. Their lusts washed over her unimpeded, like the glare of the flashlight.
Isis Moon was a creature of night, of shadow. To be exposed like this, helpless before a mob of jokers screaming for her body and her blood, was an agony as keen as having her arm dislocated.
“That’s enough, boys.” It was the voice of Colonel Charles Sobel, smooth and solid as hand-rubbed mahogany. “Don’t use her all up. We have to save something for later.”
“Fuck you, nat!” a joker snarled. Moonchild was shocked to see the hate-filled glares the New Brigaders turned upon their commander. But he shed the anger as a duck’s back sheds water. Seemingly unaware of it, he stood beaming by until the jokers fell back.
The cage was bamboo and black iron. Even after her captor, the green-eyed man with the peculiar uneven appearance, had roughly pulled her arm out and slid it back into its socket, she lacked the strength to break free. And the encircling torches kept the shadows well at bay.
She did not find it surprising that the Socialist Republic kept cages at hand.
She became aware of a low rumble like thunder, which seemed to come from all around. She had no idea what it might be. She had more pressing concerns.
Carnifex was pitching a fit just beyond the bars of the cage. “She’s my prisoner,” he raged. “My prisoner, dammit!”
Colonel Sobel showed him a smile, infuriatingly bland. “I appreciate your efforts in apprehending this criminal,” he said, “but our claim to her is senior to yours.”
“Want I should thunder on ’em” Crypt Kicker asked. Moonchild shivered. She remembered his touch with horror. He had held her still while Billy Ray relocated her shoulder. Even without the searing acid he could apparently exude at will, there was a quality to his touch, a hard immobility, like something … dead.
Billy Ray cast his green eyes around the clearing before the temple, taking in Moonchild in her cage, Sobel, and his retinue — Colonel Vo, a couple of PAVN officers in pith helmets, Casaday from the CIA, a big sloppy Aussie journalist with a crumpled linen suit and a drunkard’s nose — and the torches, and the screaming, sweating jokers with guns. Lots of jokers with guns.
“No,” he said. “Fuck it. Rick ’em all.” He turned and stalked off. A beat later Crypt Kicker followed.
“A hostile young man,” Colonel Vo said. “He bears watching.”
Sobel laughed. He was emcee of his own big show now, and feeling grand. “Not to worry Colonel,” he said. “His heart’s in the right place.”
The secret policeman looked dubious. “From the looks of him, it could be anywhere.”
Freddie Whitelaw mopped his brow with a handkerchief. It was already so soaked that all it did was redistribute sweat around his shining expanse of forehead.
“Colonel Sobel,” he said, “what are your intentions now in regard to your, ah, prisoner?”
“I’m having her tortured to death,” he said cheerfully. “Some of my boys are quite ingenious in that line, did you know?”
Freddie’s jaw dropped. “You’re joking, surely?”
The Colonel shook his head. “It will encourage the others, as the old saying goes. The rebels will see the penalty for their treachery firsthand. And of course they’ll see irrefutable proof that this Field Marshal of their counterrevolution is only too human, ace or not. We only await the arrival of the television crews to commence our little lesson.”
“Sir, you — you can’t be serious!” Whitelaw stammered.
Sobel dropped a comradely hand to his shoulder. “Have no fear, my friend. I promised you an exclusive on this story, and you shall have it. The TV news people will just have to wait until you publish to release their footage. Who better to break this story, after all, than a longstanding member of our socialist confraternity?”
He steered the journalist away from the cage. Looking over his shoulder, Whitelaw caught Moonchild’s dark eyes with his wildly rolling ones and gave his head a desperate shake.
She nodded back. No, there is nothing you can do. I understand. This is my karma. She wondered if he knew her for his old drinking buddy from Rick’s. Mark had never come out and blurted his powers to him, but it would not surprise her if he had done his research into the ace called Cap’n Trips.
Sobel and his official hangers-on had drifted over to the front of the temple, where the NJB commander was pointing to things and holding forth in his grand way. The jokers had for the moment grown tired of screaming abuse in her face, since Sobel had decreed death on the spot for anyone who went farther than that, and had mostly fallen away into little clumps to shoot the breeze and gamble and grumble about why the media types were taking so long and keeping the real fun from starting. For the moment she was alone with her misery.