Mountain of Black Glass (96 page)

While Del Ray drove, Joseph gifted him with some of his philosophies and thoughts, and handled the map when the situation called for it, since the trip-reader in the old car had long since given up the ghost. To Del Ray's astonishment, Joseph proved useful with Elephant's map, and he even congratulated the older man once when he guided them through a particularly tricky set of back roads successfully.

Joseph, in his turn, would not have gone so far as to say he
liked
the young man, but he had managed to get past some of his prejudices, both acknowledged and unacknowledged—the former being his distrust of anyone who wore suits and spoke netcasterstyle English, the latter being Joseph's dislike of anyone who would break off with his daughter. Long Joseph might think Renie was a bit of a nag and a know-all, but that was
his
privilege. For anyone else to disapprove of her—well, that seemed little different than disapproving of Joseph himself. She was his daughter, wasn't she? Everything she was, she owed to his hard work and thoughtful care.

So the thaw had been slow, but it had been a thaw nevertheless, and as they wound their way up the mountain roads, the car rocking on inadequate springs, Joseph found himself thinking that perhaps there was hope for this young man after all. Poke a hole in some of his college-boy ideas, rub a little dirt on him—although that part seemed to have happened already—and maybe he and Renie would make a match after all. This fellow was broken up with his wife, and when all this virtual, military-base nonsense was done with, he would be able to get a new suit and a nice new job, wouldn't he? That university degree had to be good for something besides making a man talk funny.

Joseph could not help thinking that it would be nice to see Renie settled. After all, a woman without a man—she couldn't really be happy, could she? She was certainly going to find it hard to give her father proper attention in his declining years if she had to be working all the hours of the day.

“Is this the road?” Del Ray asked, breaking into a sunny reverie in which Joseph was enthroned on the couch of his expensive new flat, with a big Krittapong wallscreen always on, entertaining his grandchildren with stories of how contrary and difficult their mother had been. “It's hardly a road at all.”

Joseph peered out the dusty window. When he saw the brushchoked cut in the road, he didn't need to look at the map. “That is it,” he said. “Looks like we clear it out a bit when we brought that car of Jeremiah's through—it was more tangled up before. But that is the road.”

Del Ray swung onto the narrow track; within moments it widened into a well-maintained road which angled up the mountain in a series of steep switchbacks, hidden from below by the tall brush and trees. The sun was gone now, although the sky was still a thin, pale blue; the mountain's flank was mostly shades of purple and gray, the vegetation more shadow than anything else.

“One thing or two I have to tell you about this place,” Joseph said. “It is very big. And it is a military place, so you don't go touching anything I don't tell you to touch. Whatever your Elephant friend say, it is a secret, and we are going to keep it that way.”

Del Ray made a noise that almost sounded impatient. “Right.”

“The other thing I have to let you know, this man Jeremiah Dako?” Joseph pointed up the mountain in the general direction of the base. “The man who is staying there, helping me with things? Well, he is a homosexual man.” He nodded. He had done his duty.

“And?” said Del Ray after a moment.

“And what?” Joseph raised his hands. “There is no ‘and,' man. I am just telling you, so you don't do something foolish. You have no cause to insult him—he has never done anything to you.”

“Why on Earth would I want to insult him—I haven't even met him!”

“That's fine, then. He and I, we had to work things out. I mean, I had to make him understand how things were. But he is a human being, you see. He has feelings. So I don't want you to say anything foolish—besides, I don't think you his type. He likes mature men. That is why we had to have some conversation, he and I, so I could let him know for certain that I am not that way.”

Del Ray began to laugh.

“What?” Joseph scowled. “You think it is a joke, what I'm telling you?”

“No, no.” Del Ray shook his head, dabbing at the corner of his eye like it itched. “No, I was just thinking that you are a piece of work, Long Joseph Sulaweyo. You should be on the net. You should have your own show.”

“I don't think you mean that for real.” Joseph was displeased. “Think it's supposed to be a joke on me. I'm going to have to stop paying attention to you, you act like that. Leave you on your own, make all the mistakes you want.”

“I'll try to muddle through,” Del Ray said, then: “Jesus!” He stomped on the brake and the car skidded a bit on the gravel. Del Ray flicked up the high beams. “I almost didn't see it.”

“That is the gate,” Joseph pointed out, willing to bend his new rule of silence at this crucial juncture.

Del Ray pushed open his door, then leaned back in and set the parking brake. Joseph got out and walked with him to the chainlink fence. “It's locked. I thought you said you had to break it open before.”

“We did. I made Jeremiah step on the gas even though he was frightened, we went through just like that fellow in
Zulu 942,
where they have the armored car. Boom!” He clapped his hands together. The sound died quickly in the thick, damp brush that hemmed the road. “We just knocked it open.”

“Well, it's locked now.” Del Ray shot him an irritated sideways glance. “We're going to have to climb over the top. Let me go turn off the engine, and you go find me a stick to push up the razor wire so we can squeeze underneath without getting our skin peeled off.”

Joseph, although annoyed to be given the go-fetch part of the job, found a piece of broken branch that seemed adequate, then remembered the precious cargo he had left in the car. He put a bottle of Mountain Rose in each of his pants pockets, then the two remaining containers in his shirt.

Del Ray had just slid the toe of his scuffed, once-stylish boot into the wire of the gate, preparing to climb, when Joseph suddenly put a hand on his shoulder.

“What?”

“Just . . . I am just thinking.” He stared at the shiny chain that joined the two halves of the gate, the very formidable-looking lock. “Who put this chain here?”

Del Ray put his foot back on the ground. “I assumed it was your friend Jeremiah.”

“I told you, he isn't my friend, he's just a man who is in the mountain, and I was in the mountain, too.” Joseph shook his head. “But Jeremiah didn't put no lock here, I don't think. Isn't no easy way to get out of that base—it took us most of a day to get in, and we had help from that old man and that French woman.” He rubbed at his beard stubble. “I don't know. Maybe I am thinking too much, but I don't make sense of there being a chain on this gate—it being all locked up tight like this.”

Del Ray looked around. “Maybe there are . . . I don't know, park rangers or something. Isn't this part of one of the nature preserves?”

“Maybe.” Joseph could not help seeing in his mind's eye that shiny black van and its dark windows. He felt a glimmer of regret he had not mentioned it to Del Ray before. “Maybe, but I don't like to see it.”

“Well, if you didn't come out this way, how did you get out?” Del Ray took the stick from Long Joseph and poked at the chain. It made a very solid
clink.

“One of those, what do you call them, air shafts.” He pointed. “It come out on the far side of the hill, round over there.”

Del Ray sighed, but he looked troubled. “So you think—what? That there could be someone who came in after you and Renie did? Who could that be?”

Long Joseph Sulaweyo knew that this was the time to mention the van, but couldn't think of any way to do it that wouldn't give Del Ray the right to yammer at him about what an old fool he was. “I don't know,” he said finally. “But I don't like to see it.”

 

They turned Gilbert's old car around in the open space in front of the gate and drove it a few hundred meters back down the road. Del Ray found a spot where the brush was high along the side, and although the increasingly slippery, bumpy ride and the ugly scraping sounds from the undercarriage suggested that getting it back on the road might be more difficult than getting it off had been, they hid it there before heading back uphill. As the twilight failed the mountain air rapidly became colder, and Joseph shivered as they made their way back across the uneven terrain, wishing he had brought warmer clothes with him. At first, with the squeeze bottles bumping in his shirt, he had felt like a guerrilla fighter with a bandolier of grenades. Now the bottles just felt heavy.

Even though it was getting dark quickly, they picked a spot well away from the road and gate for climbing the fence. Del Ray managed to prop the razor wire well enough that he got over with only a few rips in his already tattered clothes, but the stick popped out just as Joseph was pulling his leg through and he tumbled down the fence to the ground, cursing Del Ray's incompetence. The wounds were painful but not deep, and the polymer bottles had survived the impact handily, so Joseph at last decided it was worth continuing. He put on an expression of not-so-cheerful martyrdom and limped up the hill after Del Ray, heading for the base's huge front door.

The scrub was low, so Del Ray said they should get down and crawl. Joseph thought this was the kind of foolishness that came from too much time watching netflicks, but the younger man insisted. It was cold, uncomfortable work, and since Del Ray refused to turn on the flashlight he had brought with him, they spent almost as much time climbing out of thorny ditches or struggling back around unclimbable rocks as they did moving forward. When they finally reached a spot where they could see the entrance, they were both scratched and breathing hard. Joseph's urge to knuckle the back of Del Ray's stubborn head was cooled by the broad smear of light along the mountain stone and the sound of voices.

His first feeling when he saw the vehicle parked in front of the massive door was actually relief that it wasn't a black van. The truck standing with its back gate down was something larger and more primitive-looking, almost like a safari wagon, covered with thick gray plating. A spotlight on top of the cab illuminated the concrete slab that barred entrance to the mountain retreat. Three men, their shadows thrown in stretching black along the stone, were huddled in front of the code-box. Another pair sat on the gate of the truck, smoking. The faces of these two were hard to see, but one of them had a large, ugly-looking automatic rifle across his lap.

Joseph looked to Del Ray, hoping in a strangely dreamlike way that the other man would say something to make everything normal and acceptable, but Del Ray's eyes were wide with fear. He reached out and grabbed at Joseph's arm so hard it hurt, then pulled him back and away from the immediate vicinity of the squat, gray truck.

They stopped fifty yards down the hillside, now panting even harder.

“It's them!” Del Ray whispered when he had caught his breath. “Oh, Christ! It's that Boer bastard, the one that burned my house down!”

Joseph sat on the ground, filling his lungs. He couldn't think of anything to say, so he didn't bother. He pulled the open bottle of wine out of his shirt and had a long drink. Strangely, it didn't make him feel any better.

“We have to get out of here! They're murderers. They'll rip our heads off just for fun.”

“Can't do it,” Joseph said. It didn't even sound like his own voice.

“What are you talking about?”

“They trying to get in the mountain. You said these people, they are angry at Renie. You think I can just go off and leave my daughter in there? You don't understand what I said before, do you? She in a big old machine. She . . . she is helpless.”

“So what are we going to do? Walk up to them and say, ‘Excuse us, we just want to go inside, but we hope you don't mind waiting out here?' Is that what we're going to do?” Sarcasm and terror made an unpleasant combination. “I've dealt with these people, old man. These are not some local bad men—these are killers. Professionals.”

Joseph could hardly make sense out of anything, but he had a picture in his brain of Stephen lying in that terrible hospital bed, covered in plastic like some piece of meat in a store, and it filled him with shame. Everything else in his head was in shadow except that picture. Stephen and now Renie, too, both caught like animals in traps. His own children. How could he walk away again?

“Why don't we go in the way I come out?” Joseph said suddenly.

Del Ray stared at him as though he had lost his mind. “Then what? Hide in the mountain and wait for them to break in?”

Joseph shrugged. He had another drink of wine, then put the cap back on and slid the bottle into his shirt. “It is a military place. Maybe there are some guns in there, we can shoot the bastards. But you don't have to go—I suppose it is not a place for a fellow like you.” He stood up. “Me, I'm going.”

Del Ray was staring at him as though faced with an entirely new kind of animal species. “You're crazy. How much of that wine have you drunk?”

Joseph knew that the other man was right about how foolish this was, but no matter how he tried, he could not lose the picture of Stephen in the bed. He tried to make another picture, a sensible one of himself getting in the car with Del Ray and driving away down the mountain, but he just could not imagine it. Sometimes there were things you had to do. Wife died, leaving you alone with two children? What could you do? You went on, even if you had to stay drunk most of the time to manage it.