Carrion Comfort (103 page)

There were at least two small boats out there beyond the line of surf, their powerful searchlights raking the beach with pitching shafts of white light. Lightning silhouetted both craft for a second, and Saul could see that they were less than a hundred meters out. The dark forms of men with rifles were clearly visible.

One of the searchlights slid along the beach and wall of foliage toward Saul and he ran toward the jungle, throwing himself into the ferns and tall sea grass an instant before the light struck. Crouching on all fours behind a low dune, he thought about his position. The helicopter and patrol boats showed that Barent and the others had abandoned their game with surrogates and almost certainly knew who they were chasing. Saul could hope that his presence had spread confusion if not actual dissension in their ranks, but he was not counting on it. Underestimating the intelligence or tenacity of one’s enemies was never profitable. Saul had flown home during the most panicky hours of the Yom Kippur War and knew quite well how complacency often could prove fatal.

Saul plunged ahead, paralleling the beach, thrashing through thick undergrowth and tripping over mangrove roots, unsure even if he was headed in the right direction. Every minute or two he would throw himself flat as the searchlights flashed past or the helicopter roared along the beach. Somehow, he knew, they had narrowed his whereabouts to this tip of the island. He had seen no cameras or sensors during his hours of stumbling flight, but he had no doubt that Barent and the others used every piece of technology available to record their sick games and to reduce the chance that a clever surrogate might hide out for weeks or months on the island.

Saul tripped over an invisible root and sprawled forward, his head striking a thick branch before his face landed in six inches of brackish swamp water. He was just conscious enough to roll to one side, grabbing at sharp-edged grass to pull himself toward the beach. Blood ran down his cheek and into his open mouth; it tasted much like the salty swamp water.

The beach was wider here, although not as wide as the strip where the Cessna had landed. Saul realized that he would never find the tidal inlet and streams if he stayed in the trees. He might already have passed them without noticing it in the nightmare jungle of swamp and branches. If it was any real distance away it would take hours to traverse at this rate. His only hope lay on the beach.

More boats were closing in on the area. Saul could see four from where he lay under the low branches of a cypress and one was moving closer, less than thirty meters out, tossed high by each storm-driven wave. It was beginning to rain now, and Saul prayed for a tropical downpour, a deluge that reduced visibility to zero and drowned his enemies like the Pharaoh’s soldiers. But the rain held steady in a light drizzle that might be only the prelude to the real storm or might pass completely, eventually opening the skies to a tropical sunrise that would seal Saul’s fate.

He waited five minutes under the limbs, crouching behind sea grass and a fallen log when the boats came close with their lights or the he li copter passed over. He felt like laughing, like standing up and throwing stones and curses at them for the few blessed seconds before the bullets struck. Saul crouched and waited, peering out as yet another patrol boat roared by in the rain, its rooster tail adding to the curtain of salt spray already blowing in to the beach.

Explosions ripped through the jungle behind him. For a second Saul thought that the lightning strikes had come closer, but then he heard the whap-whap of rotors and realized that the searchers must be dropping explosive charges from the he li cop ter. The discharges were too powerful to be grenades; Saul could feel the vibration of each explosion through the deep sand and the quivering branches of the cypress. The tremors grew stronger as the explosions grew louder. Saul guessed that they were walking the charges up the beach, perhaps twenty or thirty meters into the jungle, at sixty-or eighty-meter intervals. Despite the drizzle, the smell of smoke drifted to him from down the beach to his right. If the storm was still coming in from the southeast, Saul realized, the direction of the smoke confirmed that he was near the northern tip of the island but still around the northeast point, not yet to the Cessna’s take-off point and more than a quarter of a mile from the tidal inlet.

It would take hours to hack his way through the beach-edge jungle to the inlet and any shortcut through the swamps all but assured his becoming lost again.

An explosion ripped the night not two hundred meters south of him. There came an incredible screeching as a flight of herons broke cover and disappeared into the dark sky, and then a more prolonged and terrible scream as a human being cried out in pain. Saul wondered if a surrogate would do that. Either that or there were ground patrols moving in behind him and someone had been caught in the blast from the helicopter’s bombing.

Saul could hear rotor blades more clearly now, high and to the south but coming closer. There was the rattle of automatic weapons as someone in a boat moving along the surf line fired randomly into the wall of jungle.

Saul wished he were not naked. Cold rain dripped on him through the leaves, his legs and ankles were in agony, and every time he glanced down the storm light showed him his wrinkled, emaciated belly, bony white legs, and genitals contracted with fear and cold. The sight did not fill him with confidence and make him want to rush out and do battle. Mostly, it made him want to take a hot bath, dress himself in several layers of warm clothes, and find a quiet place to sleep. His body had been tugged by the tidal pull of adrenaline rushes for hours now and was suffering from the ebb tide of aftereffects. He felt cold, lost, and terrified, a husk of humanity devoid of almost all emotion except for fear, and of all motivation except an obsolescent, atavistic urge to survive for reasons he had forgotten. In short, Saul Laski had become exactly the person he had been as he worked in the Pit forty years earlier, except now the stamina and hopefulness of youth were gone.

But that was not the only difference, Saul realized as he raised his face to the increasingly violent storm. “I
choose
to be here!” he shouted in Polish toward the skies, not caring if his pursuers heard him. He raised a fist but did not shake it, merely clenched it on high, whether as a sign of affirmation, triumph, defiance, or resignation, even he did not know.

Saul ran through the screen of cypress, turned left past the last of the sea grass, and sprinted onto the open beach.

“Harod, come in here,” said Jimmy Wayne Sutter.

“Just a minute,” said Harod. He was the only one left in the monitor room. While the ground-based cameras no longer showed anything important, there was a black and white camera on one of the patrol boats off the north point and a color one aboard the chopper that had been dropping shaped charges and napalm canisters into the trees. Harod thought that the camera work was shitty— they needed a Steadicam for the aerial shots and all the pitching and yawing on both monitors was making him nauseated— but he had to admit that the pyrotechnics out-budgeted anything he and Willi had ever done and were getting close to Coppola’s orgasm-by-fire at the end of
Apocalypse Now.
Harod had always thought Coppola was nuts to have cut the napalm scenes out of the next-to-final version, and he had not been mollified much to see them slipped under the credits in the final cut. Harod wished he had a couple of Steadicams and a dolly-mounted Panavision unit preset for this night’s work— he’d use the footage for
something
even if he had to write the fucking film around the fireworks.

“Come on, Tony, we’re waiting,” said Sutter. “In a minute,” said Harod, tossing another handful of peanuts into his mouth and taking a sip of vodka. “According to the radio chatter, they’ve got this poor schmuck cornered at the north end and they’re burning the fucking jungle down to . . .”

“
Now
,” snapped Sutter.

Harod looked at the evangelist. The other four had been in the Game Room for the better part of an hour, talking, and from the look on Sutter’s face, something was very wrong. “Yeah,” said Harod. “I’m coming.” He looked over his shoulder as he left the room in time to see a naked man running along the beach in clear view of both cameras.

The atmosphere in the Game Room conveyed as much tension as had the carnage on the television monitors. Willi was seated directly opposite Barent, and Sutter moved to stand next to the old German. Barent’s arms were folded and he looked very displeased. Joseph Kepler was pacing back and forth in front of the long window The row of drapes was pulled back, rain streaked the glass, and Harod caught glimpses of Live Oak Lane when the lightning rippled. Thunder was audible even through the multilayered glass and thick walls. Harod glanced at his watch; it was 12:45
A.M.
He wondered tiredly if Maria Chen was still in custody or if the aides had been released. He wished to hell that he had never left Beverly Hills.

“We have a problem, Tony,” said C. Arnold Barent. “Sit down.” Harod sat. He expected Barent, or more likely Kepler, to announce that his membership had been terminated and that he would be too. Harod knew that he had no chance at a test of Ability with Barent, or Kepler, or Sutter. He did not expect Willi to lift a finger to help him. Maybe, Harod thought with the sudden epiphany granted to the condemned man, maybe Willi
had
planted the Jew on him so he would be discredited and removed.
Why
? wondered Harod.
How was I a threat to Willi? How does my removal benefit him?
Except for Maria Chen, there was not a woman on the island he might use. The thirty or so security men Barent allowed south of the Security Zone were all highly paid Neutrals securely in the billion-aire’s employ. Barent would not have to use his Ability to eliminate Tony Harod, merely push a button. “Yeah,” said Harod tiredly, “what is it?”

“Your old friend Herr Borden has come up with a surprise for the evening,” Barent said coolly.

Harod blinked and looked at Willi. He thought that the “surprise” would be at his expense but was not sure how Willi figured in it.

“We have merely suggested an amendment to the Island Club agenda,” said Willi. “C. Arnold and Mr. Kepler do not agree with our suggestion.”

“It’s goddamned insane,” snapped Kepler from his place by the window. “Silence!” commanded Willi. Kepler silenced himself. “We?” Harod said stupidly. “Who’s we?”

“The Reverend Sutter and myself,” said Willi. “It turns out that my old friend James has been a friend of Herr Borden’s for some years,” said Barent. “An interesting turn of events.”

Harod shook his head. “Do you guys know what’s going on up on the north end of your fucking island?”

“Yes,” said Barent. He removed from his ear a flesh-colored earphone smaller than a hearing aid and tapped the bead microphone attached to it by a fine filament of wire. “I do. It is of little import compared to this discussion. Absurd as it appears, in your first week on the Steering Committee you seem to have the deciding vote in your hands.”

“I don’t even know what the fuck you’re talking about,” said Harod. Willi said, “We are talking about an amendment to widen the Island Club’s hunting activities to . . . ah . . . a more appropriate scale, Tony.”

“The world,” said Sutter. The evangelist’s face was flushed and filmed with sweat.

“The world?”

Barent showed a sardonic smile. “They wish to use surrogate nations instead of surrogate players,” he said.

“Nations?” repeated Harod. A bolt of lightning struck somewhere beyond Live Oak Lane, darkening the polarized window.

“Goddammit, Harod,” yelled Kepler, “can’t you do anything but stand there and repeat things? These two idiots want to blow it all away. They’re demanding we play with missiles and submarines rather than individuals. Whole countries burned up for points.”

Harod leaned on the table and stared at Willi and Sutter. He could not speak.

“Tony,” said Barent, “is this the first you have heard of this proposal?” Harod nodded. “Mr. Borden never raised the issue with you?”

Harod shook his head. “You see the importance of your vote,” Barent said quietly. “This would change the tenor of our annual entertainment to a significant measure.”

Kepler laughed a strange, broken laugh. “It’d blow up the entire god-damn son-of-a-bitching world,” he said.

“
Ja
,” said Willi. “Perhaps. And perhaps not. But the experience would be fascinating.”

Harod sat down. “You’re shitting me,” he managed to say in a cracked voice he had not used since puberty.

“Not at all,” Willi said smoothly. “I have already demonstrated the ease with which even the highest levels of military security can be circumvented. Mr. Barent and the others have known for decades how simple it is to influence national leaders. We need only to remove the restraints of time and scale to make these competitions infinitely more fascinating. It would mean some travel and a safe place to convene once the competition gets . . . ah . . . heated, but we are sure that C. Arnold can provide these details.
Nicht wahr
, Herr Barent?”

Barent rubbed his cheek. “Undoubtedly. The objection is not resources— nor even the inordinate amount of time such an expanded competition would consume— but the waste of resources, human and otherwise, accumulated over such a lengthy period of time.”

Jimmy Wayne Sutter gave the rich, deep laugh that was familiar to millions who watched him on tele vi sion. “Brother Christian, you don’t think you can take all this with you now, do you?”

“No,” said Barent softly, “but I see no reason to destroy it all simply because I will not be here to enjoy it.”

“
Ja
, but I do,” Willi said flatly. “You entertained new business. The motion is on the floor. Jimmy Wayne and I vote yes. You and that coward Kepler vote no. Tony, vote now.”

Harod jumped. Willi’s voice was not to be resisted. “I abstain,” he said. “Fuck you all.”

Willi slammed his fist into the table. “Harod, goddamn you, you Jew-loving piece of shit.
Vote!
”