The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2) (23 page)

Monsoon had had enough experience of being tied to chairs in dank rooms to realize that he had either not been there very long or the guy who did the tying was not much of a pro, because he could still feel and freely move his hands, which meant his circulation was okay. He looked around the room for other signs for optimism, but they were thin on the ground. The best he could come up with was that he wasn’t dead, which meant whoever had done this to him didn’t want him to be dead, ergo they wanted him alive.

And whatever the dark and nefarious purpose behind the fact that he was not croaked, and whatever it was that they needed him for, or planned to do with him, was better than being dead. At least for the time being. Another mild cause for comfort was that, although the dog was looking at him the way a schoolboy with a pin looks at a balloon, at least it hadn’t ripped his head off yet, which meant either somebody had told it not to or it just wasn’t hungry.

Monsoon couldn’t say that he was even really surprised at the turn of events. Given the tortured, melodramatic, oscillating, gonad-swinging, tragicomic switches of fortune of his life in recent years, it was almost inevitable that the hand of fate, having handed him a T-bone and a brewski, would then punch him in the nuts. If this was going to be the pattern, the trick was going to be to scarf down as much of the gravy as he could when it was flowing, and try not get flushed down the hole when the plug got pulled.

He turned his attention to how he felt. Uncomfortable? It had been worse. Hungry? Not really. Thirsty? As hell. Scared? In all honesty he couldn’t say that he was. As shit as his situation was, for some undefined reason, it didn’t seem as quite as shit as other shit situations that he had been in. It was only when Khuy Zalupa walked into the room that he seriously shit himself.

***

Lucretia Day started out beautiful, and stayed that way all through childhood and into her early twenties. In mind, body, and spirit, beautiful all the way. Smart too, and fit. Graceful and athletic. Until it happened. After that, things changed.

Being the looker that she was, she was on every jock’s radar all the way through college, but she came from a household with solid family values, and she kept her head screwed on, her legs closed, and her eyes open, and graduated with distinction. She could have taken her pick of professions, but she wanted to follow in her daddy’s footsteps, and so she joined the military.

In ’92, she went to Somalia as part of Operation Restore Hope, working psyops as a 25U, attached to the 3rd battalion, 75th Rangers. She was still there when the Battle of Mogadishu kicked off. Although she was not actually present at the epicenter of the battle, she was still subjected to fierce street fighting on the periphery, where evil steel genies shrieked in the smoke, seeking her out to take her life. They did not find her and she came through unscathed. And there was the irony: on her way to the airstrip on her way out of the country, she was hit in the throat by a stone. A stone! Having survived everything that modern state-of-the-art weaponry could throw at her, she was struck down by a projectile fired from a weapon from biblical times. A slingshot.

It was nasty wound, but she got immediate care, and after a few weeks, it looked healed, and she seemed okay. It was only a year later that she started to develop thyroid problems. They had to put her on levothyroxine. It was enough to put her out of uniform and on the street. She went home and secluded herself. She gained weight and her hair started to thin out. Depression set in hard, and it looked like it had moved in to stay.

Lieutenant Colonel Mortimer Day was an honorable man who did not subscribe to nepotism, but he was desperate. He could not stand idly by and watch what was happening to his little girl, and he knew he had to do something. He knew his daughter. He knew that what Lucretia needed was motivation, a challenge, that she could beat the depression rap if she just had a goal she could set herself toward. So he called in a few favors.

Despite the circumstances, he was not entirely comfortable, and could not quite reconcile himself to what he had done, but he knew he had made the right decision, because the day after Lucretia got the call from Langley, she was already a different woman.

***

In life-and-death situations, people feel many conflicting emotions. Ennui is not usually one of them. In the middle of the firefight, Huckleberry Hicks was feeling like a jet fighter pilot on a roller coaster. While everybody around him was screaming and shitting into their Calvin Kleins, Huckleberry was bored shitless. Bang bang, shoot shoot, ho hum.

He had been hired on as a mercenary in some Eastern European shithole where everybody was trying to secede from everybody else, and you couldn’t even pronounce the name of the fucking people you were supposed to waste, never mind the people who were trying to waste you. And it wasn’t much of a war, either. The grub was shit; the beer, when you could get it, was piss; and the women all had armpits like angora sweaters and stank of garlic. Even the fighting was third-rate. After the shit he’d waded through with the Corps, this little soiree was like crowd trouble at a hockey game.

Huckleberry turned to the guy next to him. “Jesus, you call this a fucking battle?”

The guy never said anything. He was slumped over with a fist-sized hole where his eye socket had been.

“
See what I mean?” Huckleberry said to nobody in particular. “Can’t even get a decent conversation. What happened to
esprit de
fucking
corps
? This fucking conflict is nowhere, man. I’m outta here.”

He crawled along the base of the wall until he came to a breach and slipped through it, and then into an alley. There was a tank blocking one end, so he headed east to where the river ran. A guy was busy tying up a motor launch. Huckleberry jumped aboard and nutted him, sending him over the side. He unhitched the rope and slung it into the bilge. He was just about to gun the motor when his cell phone rang. He struggled to tug it out of the pocket of his webbing jacket. The screen was grimed and he couldn’t see the number.

“
Hello,” he said.

Just then an M16 opened up and a mortar round dropped onto the bank next to him. A shower of wet earth landed in the boat. He scrunched down.

“
Shit,” he said. “How the fuck are you supposed to have a phone call with all this shit going on?”

The voice in the other end said something unintelligible.

“
I’m sorry,” Huckleberry said, “I can’t hear you. Some asshole is firing a…”

A grenade landed in the launch. The boatman had thrown it. Huckleberry grabbed it and threw it back.

“
Fuck off,” he said.

The boatman fucked off in a spectacular manner. Huckleberry jammed the phone against his ear.

“
Hello?”

“
Huckleberry, is that you?”

“
Yeah. Who’s this? I can’t hear so good.”

“
It’s Lee.”

“
Goddamn, boy. What’s up?”

“
Where are you?”

“
I’m in Fuckknowswhereistan.”

“
Well, how soon can you get home? I’m onto something big. I need some backup.”

“
Is it dangerous?”

“
Fuck yeah!”

“
I’m on it, bro.”

***

The phenomenon known colloquially as “Sod’s Law,” or “Murphy’s Law,” which dictates that if something can possibly go wrong, it will, has a counterpart in the actual laws governing relativity theory and quantum mechanics which states that, within a timeframe of eternity, if it is possible for something to physically occur, then, sooner or later, it will. There is also some bizarre corollary law at work in the universe whereby certain things are so improbable that they become virtually inevitable. Which is what happened to Weeble.

Deli and Ritchie were high school sweethearts. Deli was chaste when they were married, and old Ritchie wasn’t exactly Lothario, and wasn’t too sure what to do on the first night. He had to make a couple of phone calls before he found out that the missionary position was not a point of view. They became teachers together. She taught the history of the civil rights movement, and he taught sociology. They decided to wait a few years and see a bit of the world before starting a family.

Their first overseas posting was a school in the jungles of Mexico. They loved it. The climate, the flowers and the trees…they even had a pet parrot called Liberty. When the offer of the job in Moscow came, they were reluctant at first. But the salary was more than three times what they were getting in Mexico, so they decided to be sensible. At first they hated it. The cold, the snow. The traffic. But gradually they got used to it, and they were saving money for the future, and they got a nice little apartment and made themselves as comfortable they could.

It was Ritchie’s idea to get the bird. He said it would brighten the place up, and make them feel more like they were back in Mexico and the jungle. So he ordered a Yellow Headed Amazon from www.endangeredspecies.com. They were going to call it Bell, but they ended up calling it Weeble. The reason that they ended up calling it Weeble was that it was either mentally defective or had some kind of speech impediment, because all it could say was
weeble weeble
. But they loved him anyway, and he became a kind of surrogate for the son they hoped to have one day.

Deli would have loved to have a dog, but the apartment was so small, and the nearest park so far away, that it wouldn’t have been fair. She actually said to Ritchie, “I just can’t see a dog in this little apartment.”

That’s why she was so surprised when she came home from work one day to find a dog the size of a small walrus with its head stuck in her fridge. She was even more surprised to see Ritchie lying on the floor with his head stuck in the oven. But the most surprising thing of all was the most vicious-looking man she had ever seen, with a face like a stepped-on salami, pointing a big nasty gun at her. She searched her mind for the right thing to say, but “Who are you and what do you want?” or “How did you get into our house?” or “Why does my husband have his head in the oven?” or “Why are you pointing that gun at me?” didn’t seem appropriate. So she just screamed. Really loud. Bolshoi took his head out of the fridge to see what was going on, but it wasn’t as interesting as the potato salad with anchovies, so he carried on.

“
Weeble weeble,” Weeble commented from his cage over by the window.

Oleg walked up to Deli and smacked her across the face. Then he cursed. He cursed because he slapped her so hard that he’d knocked her out. He was going to have to wait for one of them to wake up to find out where the ball was.

They had believed the one who looked like the golfer when he told them what had happened. People with their cock and balls in Bolshoi’s mouth usually told the truth. The recording from the surveillance camera at the airport confirmed the story, and after that, finding out who the couple was and where they lived was a piece of pirozhki. But now he had to wait. And worst of all, there was nothing to drink. Herbal tea and Evian were not at the top of his shopping list. So he told Bolshoi to stay, and he went out to find a bottle.

Ritchie woke up with a start and banged his head on the top of the oven. For a second he didn’t remember where he was or what had happened. Then it came flooding back. Panic overtook him. He backed out and saw Deli stretched out on the floor. He screamed her name. There was a weird whistling noise. He put his hand to his mouth and found the place where his teeth had been. He started to look around for his teeth. Bolshoi looked around the fridge door to see what was going on, but it couldn’t compete with the pickled herrings that he had just managed to open.

“
Weeble weeble,” Weeble said.

Deli moaned and stirred. Ritchie abandoned his search for his missing dentistry and rushed to her side. He held her.

“
What happened?” she said.

“
That man must have hit you. The same one that hit me. He sucker-punched me when I wasn’t ready.”

“
Is he gone?”

“
Yes. But the dog is still here.”

“
What shall we do?”

“
I’ll go and get help.”