Catacombs (50 page)

He made it through the night. His withdrawal was steady but almost unobtrusive. First the galvanized twitchings ceased; he became leaden, unmoving. His breathing was so shallow it was nearly undetectable. Raun lay down with him when she could no longer endure the strain of holding him upright anymore, but she didn't close her eyes through the dark hours.

She talked almost without pause, whispered when she couldn't talk, murmured old songs of childhood. When his breathing seemed to have stopped for good she shook him frantically like a wind-up toy and was rewarded by a long-drawn convulsive breath that somehow got his lungs going again. She frequently put an ear to his chest; the machine ground on. He had a remarkable body; it just wouldn't quit. But she realized in her heart that almost nothing of Matthew Jade
 
remained in the vital areas, the links and circuits of the grossly insulted brain. All this from a head wound he had told her was superficial.

He cooled during the night and stayed cold. No perspiration. She tried to feel a pulse in his throat but her fingers were numb again, receiving no messages.

The morning gush of the hose had no effect on Jade.
 
His eyes were closed. She screamed for a doctor again, and was ignored. She was too stunned to cry anymore.

Despite her best efforts to stay awake she dozed off. It might have been for five minutes, or an hour. When Raun awoke the box was heating up. Her tongue was thick and sluggish in her mouth. Outside the soldiers were drilling, she heard shrill commands in Swahili, the slap of palms against rifle butts. She stared at Matthew Jade's gray face. His body was inert. There was an ant on his forehead. She tried to brush it away but couldn't reach it. Then she made the effort to listen for his heartbeat. There was no heartbeat.

She sat up, struggling for balance as she dragged his body after. It was awhile before she could utter more than primitive, screechy, inconsolable sounds. Then the words burst clear from her throat.

"He's dead

…dead–dead–dead–dead–DEAD!

Maybe now they would come. Too late.

T
he scout helicopter of the jeshi la Wananchi la Tanzania, the People's Defense Force Air Wing, flew north from Chale Point along the shoreline of Lake Tanganyika at an altitude of three hundred feet. Aboard was the pilot, a Libyan named Habib, and a Tanzanian Army corporal, George Asani, who was the lookout. Corporal Asani carried a Kalashnikov and the helicopter, an old Cayuse, was armed with a machine gun and a grenade launcher.

Only a little dust haze from the steppes beyond Makari marred an otherwise perfect day, and visibility was good. At the base of Mount Kungwe, Habib headed inland, rising over the forest; mud-brown elephants fled ponderously, ears flapping, from the shadow of the copter as the noise interrupted their feeding and socializing. The forests of Kungwe, scored by deep defiles and occasional pockets of meadow, teemed with animal life, which Corporal Asani saw without seeing: wildebeest, warthog, baboon, gorilla. Halfway up Kungwe but completely enclosed by forest canopy was what appeared from the air to be the glittering rusty-black pupil of an eye, almost surrounded by a sclera of small pieces of gray-white granite which was too porous to support any but rudimentary types of vegetation. The meteor was a big one; if fully excavated it might have weighed twenty tons. It was one of the recent–in terms of thousands of years–meteors that had fallen on Tanzania, probably about the time the Lords of the Storm conceived FIREKILL.

The whole of the eye, looking like a three-quarter moon with a black hole in it, was perhaps one hundred feet long and sixty feet wide. The exposed part of the meteorite was a ragged irregular mound about eight feet in diameter. They had flown over the eye numerous times on patrol. But today Corporal Asani noticed, near the outer corner, a teardrop: what was unmistakably the facedown body of a man in boots and paramilitary uniform. His blond head was uncovered to the sun. Crooked-neck buzzards were in attendance, already beginning to feast.

The corporal tapped Habib on the shoulder and used sign language to indicate that he wanted him to circle and come in lower, hover at treetop level. He took his binoculars from their case and raised them to his eyes.

"I don't want to get too close," Habib complained loudly. "Who knows what the buzzards will do? They are stupid birds. They have killed too many pilots by flying where they shouldn't."

"Then stay away; just let me have a closer look."

Corporal Asani focused on the body, the gleam of nearly new boots. Too many buzzards had come to the party. One of them had fingers, a hand, in its beak, and was tugging, trying to rip off meat. He couldn't see the dead man's face for the jostling and the feathers. The body seemed small, foreshortened, but that might have been from the distortion of his angle of view.

At any rate, positive identification was called for. He ordered Habib to set the chopper down.

"The rock is no good; too loose."

"Find a level place. You shouldn't have any problems. Do what I say."

Habib landed gingerly but without incident. He cut the engine, and the rotor blades slowly wound down to a stop. A few of the brown buzzards had flapped into nearby trees at the appearance of the helicopter, but now they were hopping down again and running gruesomely toward the body, their heads a little like the heads of reptiles, darting in to snatch at spoiled meat.

Corporal Asani got out of the helicopter and one-handedly fired a burst from his Kalashnikov over the heads of the buzzards. It succeeded in scattering them again. Habib also got out of the chopper for a stretch and a smoke.

The corporal walked around the mound of the meteorite, boots crunching through the sharp pieces of granite, a rock that had to be almost as hard as the meteorite itself to have resisted the soft erosions of time, the rains of millennia. It was a mini-desert in a jungle, able to stop the encroaching power of roots, repress the fertility of seeds in bird droppings. Some toxic chemical leeched from the meteor might have held off the forest. For Corporal Asani the eye of Kungwe was unremarkable in a land where major quirks of nature abounded.

The closer he came to the corpse, the more puzzled he was. The uniform, he could see now, fit very badly, particularly below the waist. The man had had very short legs. But his arms were long, the backs of his hands exceptionally hairy. He was not a black man, not with that garish blond hair, but his complexion was dark brown. He seemed to be bearded. And he had tufted ears. . . .

Grimacing, unable to assimilate what he was seeing, Corporal Asani extended his rifle, caught the gunsight in the blouse collar at the back of the neck, lifted the head and torso, and found himself staring at the fly-covered face of a dead chimpanzee.

Almost beneath his feet there was an explosive upheaval of granite pieces and soupy buzzard shit and feathers, and a hand with a hunter's skinning knife appeared. Just as he glanced down with a flash of horror going off in his belly, the mirror blade lanced into his groin, ripped upward to his belt buckle, stuck there, and was withdrawn as the rocks continued to fly. The naked barrel chest and broad shoulders and finally the dust-gray spooky face of a man with gold-lined teeth rose from the shallow grave.

Asani's assassin plunged the knife into him again just below the breastbone, the blade angled to split the heart in two. Another hand shot up to take possesson of his rifle and then Corporal Asani, spouting blood, was shoved violently backward, head whiplashing, eyes flung open but blinded by the hard dazzle of the sun; he was dead a moment after he hit the ground.

Lem Meztizo the Third rose full length beside the body of the chimp. He wore nothing but underwear shorts and boot socks. He was spotted with the blood of the man he had just killed. His hair had been shorn nearly to the roots by his own hand. His teeth glinted in the light, his eyes were fiery from dust and a fever.

He trained the Kalashnikov on Habib, who was moving with commendable swiftness trying to get back into the helicopter, and nearly blew him apart at the base of his spine, taking care to keep the train of fire low so as not to seriously damage the helicopter.

He paused long enough to retrieve his boots from the chimpanzee, which he had found dead, of fifty-caliber machine-gun fire from a helicopter gunship, on the perimeter of their Kungwe camp the evening of the day the patrol carried off Raun Hardie and Matthew Jade. He put the boots back on. He took Corporal Asani's garrison cap and put that on too. With most of his hair gone it wasn't a bad fit. Then he carried the Kalashnikov rifle to the helicopter, limping heavily on a sprained ankle, pulled Habib from the copter doorway, and climbed aboard.

There was a water bottle under one seat; he drank less than he wanted and put it back. He had never flown a Cayuse, but all helicopter cockpits are alike: A copter is flown by means of a cyclic control stick, rudder pedals, and a collective pitch lever at the pilot's right hand. The radio was squawking; he ignored it and turned the engine over, scanned the gauges. The gas tank was nearly full–they hadn't come far: about thirty miles. They had come in from the shore of the lake. The only thing he didn't know was whether they had traveled north or south to get to Kungwe.

Lem took off and at two hundred feet went straight out over open water, the flaring lake surface. He grabbed for sunglasses in a case on the instrument panel. To his right he saw a crowded lake steamer abeam the Makari headland. He fine tuned the high-frequency direction finder and locked onto a strong signal almost immediately.

Now at least he knew where he was going: south, along the shoreline. It was all he knew, except for one thing: The chances of finding his friends alive were almost nil. The curious buzzing sensation he got at the top of his spine, around the occipital bulge, when Matt Jade was desperate and trying to home in on him, had faded early that morning.

But he had a machine gun, he had an armed grenade launcher, and it could be some consolation, if he located the base from which the airborne raid on Kungwe camp had been launched, to complete an exchange of surprises and tear the bastards up.

T
he sound of a key in the padlock; the metal bar on the outside of the door sliding back.

The sudden burning blast of blue daylight as the door opened almost made Raun sick to her stomach. She turned her face away, eyes tightly shut. Hard-heeled shoes or boots on the concrete; someone stood over them both for nearly a minute. She smelled his high-powered shaving lotion. She opened her eyes as much as she could and saw him leaning over Jade, thumbing back an eyelid. He was a Muslim mercenary in the Tanzanian Air Wing. He had the rank of colonel. He wore a short-sleeved blouse, walking shorts, knee socks, a spotless lime-green turban.

He turned his head slightly and their eyes met. His were like polished brown stones. The whites of his eyes were very white, and there was a rim of sclera beneath the dark irises and darker pupils. His face slanted down to a Van Dyke beard. He looked like the high priest in a grade-Z movie about mummies.

"Heh deh," Raun said, and tried to lick her swollen lips, the cracks of which were filled with dried blood like nail polish.

The colonel didn't reply. He put two fingers where the carotid pulse should be in Jade's throat, just below the jaw-line. He did not feel a pulse, and straightened up again. Still he didn't seem convinced. He took out a clasp knife and opened it, squatted beside the body. With the sharp, three-and-a-half-inch blade he made a slashing incision across Jade's chest. The flesh gaped open, but there was no welling of blood. The colonel grunted, put his knife away,. and didn't look at Jade again.

He had a key ring with him. He found the keys that would unlock the handcuffs, and with them he separated Raun Hardie and Matthew Jade. She felt a small jolt of terror, of unbearable grief. She had buried Andrew Harkness herself, taking two days to dig the grave, sewing him snugly with an awl into an orange-striped awning. Saying her long good-byes in solitude, gaining strength from the self-imposed chores. Now she could only crouch by her man, reduced to the margins of an animal in a cage, helpless and condemned.

The colonel's every move seemed slow and ceremonial to her, freighted with significance. He removed the steel bands from around her wrists. Her hands looked as if someone had forced gloves onto blood-filled balloons. Raun's eyes bulged from the pain. She screamed, or tried to scream, but nothing came out except a high-pitched wheeze.

Four black soldiers were waiting in front of the corrugated metal shed. The colonel stepped outside and spoke to them. Two of the soldiers came in, took hold of Jade's ankles and dragged him out. The body was stiffening, his neck was inflexible. They just left him on the bare ground, naked, faceup in the searing sun.

It was Raun's turn. She tried to get up, to emerge with a show of dignity, but her knees wouldn't support her and her face was contorted from the grisly pain in her hands. They pulled her along on her knees, which were already raw from getting up and down on the rough concrete for fifty-six hours. She also had raw places on her hips, thighs, and elbows.

She was too dazed to take in much of her surroundings. A few low buildings, mountains in the distance, helicopters, landing strip along the water. A military transport truck was backing up to the shed. The truck bed was covered, canvas over metal struts. They picked Jade up again and threw him into the truck, facedown. Two of the soldiers climbed in and reached down for Raun. The colonel rode up front with the driver. The truck started, made a bumping turn.