From the Heart of Darkness (26 page)

“Time for the officers' meeting, sir,” Sloane murmured.

Schaydin continued to sit like a thin, nervous Buddha in a lawn chair.

“Sir,” the driver repeated loudly, “they just buzzed from the TOC. It's already 1500 hours.”

“Oh, right,” muttered the lieutenant dizzily. He shook his head and stood, then ran his fingertips abstractedly over the blackened minican. “Right.”

*   *   *

The Tactical Operations Center was merely a trio of command vehicles around a large tent in the middle of the firebase. Schaydin had forgotten to carry his lawn chair with him. He pulled up a box which had held mortar shells and sat facing the acetate-covered map with its crayoned unit symbols. The afternoon rain started, plunging sheets of water that made the canvas jounce like a drumhead. It sounded like an angry crowd.

The Civil Affairs Officer and the lieutenant from the military intelligence detachment shared a presentation on the results of the Medcap. They proved that zero could be divided in half to fill twenty minutes. Then the Operations Officer described F Troop's morning sweep. It had turned up two old bunkers and some cartridge cases, but no signs of recent occupation. The sector was quiet.

The balding S-3 switched to discussing the operation planned in two days. When he directed a question to Schaydin, the lieutenant continued to rock silently on his box, his eyes open but fixed on nothing in the tent.

“Schaydin!” the squadron commander snarled. “Stop sitting there with your finger up your butt and pay attention!”

“Yes, sir!” Schaydin's face flushed hot and his whole body tingled, as if he had just been roused from a dead faint. “Would you please repeat the question, sir?”

The meeting lasted another ten minutes, until the rain stopped. Schaydin absorbed every pointless detail with febrile acuteness. His flesh still tingled.

*   *   *

After Col Brookings dismissed his officers into the clearing skies, Schaydin wandered toward the far side of the defensive berm instead of going directly to his tent. He followed the path behind one of the self-propelled howitzers, avoiding the pile of white cloth bags stuffed with propellant powder. The charges were packed in segments. For short range shelling, some of the segments were torn off and thrown away as these had been. Soon the powder would be carried outside the perimeter and burned.

Burned. A roaring, sparking column of orange flame, and in it—

Schaydin cursed. He was sweating again.

Three ringing explosions sounded near at hand. The noise had been a facet of the background before the rain as well, Schaydin remembered. He walked toward the source of the sounds, one of First Platoon's tanks. It had been backed carefully away from the berm, shedding its right tread onto the ground, straight as a tow line between the vehicle and the earthen wall. Four men hunched behind a trailer some yards from the tank. One of them, naked to the waist, held a detonator in his hand. The trooper saw Schaydin approaching and called, “Stand back, sir. We're blowing out torsion bars.”

The lieutenant stopped, watching. The trooper nodded and slapped closed the scissors handle of the detonator. Smoke and another clanging explosion sprang from among the tank's road wheels. The enlisted men straightened. “That's got it,” one of them murmured. Schaydin walked to them, trying to remember the name of the tall man with the detonator, the tank commander of this vehicle.

“What's going on, Emmett?” Schaydin asked.

None of the enlisted men saluted. “Emery, sir,” the TC corrected. “Our tank had six torsion bars broke, so she steered and rode like a truck with square wheels. Back in the World they've got machines to drift out torsion bars, but here we're just using a couple ounces of C-4 to crack each one loose.” The tall non-com pointed at the block of explosive dropped on the ground beside him. Its green sandwich backing had been peeled away from both sides, and half the doughy white
plastique
had been pinched off. Several copper blasting caps lay on the ground beside the C-4.

Emery ignored the lieutenant's sudden pallor. He stopped paying attention to Schaydin entirely since it was obvious that the officer was not about to help with the job. “Come on, snakes,” Emery said, “we got a lot to do before sundown.”

The crewmen scrambled to their fifty-ton mount, hulking and rusted and more temperamentally fragile than any but the men responsible for such monsters will ever know. Schaydin's staring eyes followed them as he himself bent at the knees and touched the block of C-4. Its smooth outer wrapper was cool to his fingers. Without looking at the explosive, Schaydin slid it into a side pocket of his fatigue trousers. He walked swiftly back to his tent.

*   *   *

Tropic sunset is as swift as it is brilliant. It crams all the reds and ochres and magentas of the temperate zones into a few minutes which the night then swallows. But the darkness, though it would be sudden, was hours away; and Schaydin's pulsing memory would not let him wait hours.

Sloane was radio watch this afternoon. The driver sat on the tailgate of the command vehicle with his feet on the frame of his cot. He was talking to the staff sergeant who would take over as CQ at 2000 hours. They fell silent when Schaydin appeared.

“Go ahead, Skip, get yourself some supper,” the lieutenant said stiffly. “I'll take the radio for a while.”

“S'okay, sire, Walsh here spelled me,” Sloane said. He pointed at the paper plate with remnants of beef and creamed potatoes, sitting on his footlocker. “Go ahead and eat yourself.”

“I said I'd take the radio!” Schaydin snapped. He was trembling, though he did not realize it. Sloane glanced very quickly at his commander, then to the startled sergeant. The driver lowered his feet from the cot and squeezed back so that Schaydin could enter the track. The two enlisted men were whispering together at the open end of the tent when their lieutenant drew the poncho shut, closing off the rest of the world.

It was dim in the solid-walled vehicle, dimmer yet when Schaydin unplugged the desk lamp. Radio dials gleamed and reflected from the formica counter, chinks of light seeped in past the curtain. But it would serve, would serve.…

The texture of the C-4 steadied Schaydin's fingers as he molded it. The high sides of the ashtray made it difficult to ignite the pellet. The hot steel of the lighter seared his fingers and he cursed in teary frustration; but just before Schaydin would have had to pull away winked the spark and the orange flare—

—and in it,

the girl dancing.

Her head was flung back, the black, rippling, smokey hair flying out behind her. Schaydin heard the words again, “A Marie! Ici! Viens ici!” The radio was babbling, too, on the command frequency; but whatever it demanded was lost in the roar of the crowd. Passion, as fiercely hot as the explosive that gave it form, flashed from the girl's eyes. “Come to me!”

The flame sputtered out. Schaydin was blind to all but its afterimage.

The compartment was hot and reeking. Sweat beaded at Schaydin's hairline and on his short, black moustache. He stripped the backing away from the rest of the explosive and began to knead the whole chunk, half a pound, into a single ball.

“Battle Six to Battle One-Six,” the radio repeated angrily in Col Brookings' voice. “Goddammit, Schaydin, report!”

The ashtray had shattered in the heat. Schaydin swept the fragments nervously to the floor, then set the lump of explosive on the blood-marked formica. A shard of clear glass winked unnoticed in the heel of his hand. He snapped his lighter to flame and it mounted, and she mounted—

—and she called. Her

hands could not reach out for him but her soul did and her Hell-bright eyes. “Viens ici! Viens!”

The dancer's smooth flesh writhed with no cloak but the flame. Higher, the radio dials melting, the lizard-tongue forks of the blaze beading the aluminum roof—Schaydin stood, his ankles close together like hers. He did not reach for her, not because of the heat but because the motion would be—
wrong.
Instead he put his hands behind his back and crossed his wrists. Outside the curtain, voices snarled but the dragon-hiss of the C-4 would have drowned even a sane man's senses. She twisted, her eyes beckoning, her mouth opening to speak. Schaydin arched, bending his body just so and—

                     “Come!”

                                   —and he went.

The poncho tore from Col Brookings' fingers and a girl plunged out of the fiery radio compartment. She was swarthy but not Vietnamese, naked except for smouldering scraps of a woolen shift. Neither Brookings nor the enlisted men could understand the French she was babbling; but her joy, despite severe burns on her feet and legs, was unmistakeable.

No one else was in the vehicle.

*   *   *

On October 14, 1429, the assembled villagers of Briancon, Province of Dauphine, Kingdom of France, roared in wonderment. The witch Marie de la Barthè, being burned alive at the stake, suddenly took the form of a demon with baggy green skin. The change did not aid the witch, however, for the bonds still held. Despite its writhing and unintelligible cries, the demon-shape burned as well in the fire as a girl would have.

SMOKIE JOE

It was Saturday night but Tom Mullens' numbers parlor was as still as the morgue Big Tom expected to grace the next day. He was sweating. He pretended not to, thinking that it would be read as fear by the three sets of eyes trained on him across the counting table; but the drops runneled out of his still-dark curls and down his beefy face. He had always bragged that his two knobbly fists made him a match for any cheap gunman. Tullio's boys didn't work cheap, and Big Tom's throat had clogged with the old boast when he saw the cratered offal their Uzis had left of seven of his runners.

Lod Mahoney couldn't have cared less about Mullens' sweat: his eyes were blind and staring with his own fear. Lod was a paunchy, balding fifty-five, the armpits and long sleeves of his white shirt moist but his bow tie still a neat dark band of respectability. He had stayed this final, terrible week with Big Tom not out of loyalty but because he was only the bookkeeper he appeared to be. Criminal in his associations, not his instincts, Lod did not know how to run.

If Big Tom looked a boar at bay, his son Danny had the sulky nervousness of a well-whipped dog. His eyes darted back and forth among the others in the room, excited to be where he had never before been allowed, but pettish to know that it was only because his father did not trust him loose. Danny's adolescent face was an armature for the conflicting emotions his mind threw on it. On Monday gunshots had called him to a window. Memory of what he had seen in the street now dolloped occasional terror onto his expression.

Across from Big Tom, his hands delicate but almost as dark as the scarred maple on which they lay, smiled Smokie Joe. His goatee bobbled in a humor that no one with him in the room could see. “I can find a couple hard boys,” he said in a honey-golden voice, “who can get you out of this yet, Big Tom.”

“What?” Mullens snarled, clenching a fist to wipe away the smirk he was sure underlay the words. But Smokie Joe's calm belied a joke. The black eyes were placid, the perfect features composed beneath the slick black hair. “Iceman,” Big Tom muttered, but aloud he demanded, “All right, what's the hitch? What does anybody out of a funny farm want to get mixed up with me now?”

“Oh, well,” his slim lieutenant said with the same suave ease that had taken him to the top of Mullens' organization in the brief months since he had appeared. He spread his palms upward. “They'll want a piece of the action, sure. Half of anything they generate after things get straightened around.”

“That's nothing!” Big Tom said, astounded.

“Tom, they'll be Syndicate—” blurted Mahoney, a new fear stamping itself across his face.

“Do you think I care?” Mullens shouted. He stood, his eyes flicking to the blinds drawn across windows in which bullet-proof Lexan had replaced the glass. He rolled his arms as if lifting a huge weight to his chest. “I won't look at where help comes from now if it'll take out Tullio,” he said. “My grandmother always said she was a witch, you know? When I saw this coming six months ago I opened her spell-book and prayed to the Devil he should help me. And I meant it, by God.”

“Thought it was that simple?” smiled Smokie Joe as he, too, rose to his feet. “One thing, though,” he added, leaning forward a little so that his knuckles rested on the table. “You've got a choice, Big Tom. But after you choose, there's no going back … Do you understand?”

“I won't go back on my word,” Mullens said. He took a deep breath because Smokie Joe seemed to have grown, to bulk huge in the artificial light. “I swear on my mother's grave.”

“On your soul, Tom Mullens,” demanded the honeyed voice.

“I swear on my soul.”

“What the Hell do you think—” Danny Mullens began, but Smokie Joe's contempt froze him at his father's side.

“Hold your tongue when men talk, boy,” Joe sneered. Then, to the entranceway door that should have been guarded by slack-faced Rudy Luscher, he called, “Come on in, boys.”

The door opened. Both the figures standing there were tall and dressed with the greasy casualness of back-yard mechanics. One was thin and pale, the other a squat giant whose stumpy legs gave him the build of a dwarf twice magnified. “Nick, Angelo; meet Big Tom Mullens, your new employer,” said Joe, his hand indicating the newcomers with the grace of an emcee bringing on the star turn.

“Where the fuck is Rudy?” Big Tom asked.

“Drunk, asleep…,” the giant shrugged. “If your people were any good, you wouldn't need us.” His voice was incongruously as sweet as a chapel bell. “You want us to take out Tullio, Mr Mullens?”