Tale of the Thunderbolt (18 page)

“When those babies landed, Patel said it felt like someone picked up the hill and dropped it again. The concussion outside was enough to stop your heart. Well, this corporal starts to lose it — they're in there and it's dark and cold and wet, with the noise and smell of burnt flesh, and as if that isn't bad enough, it seems like any minute they're going to get blown to hell.

“ ‘Get friendly with God!' this corporal starts shouting. ‘The time's coming, and you'd better know him! You gotta know God and be on a first-name basis with him to get into heaven. Hurry up, guys!'

“Of course, some of the men just tell him to shut up, but you've always got a joker or two who thinks a nervous breakdown is entertainment, so they start quizzing him.

“ ‘Praise Jesus!' one hollers, trying to egg him on.

“ ‘I'm talking about God, not Jesus!' the corporal says. He keeps looking at the ceiling of the dugout. ‘Know him. Love him.'

“ ‘Okay, what's God's name, then?'

“The corporal doesn't even think about it — he says
Bud
right away. Some of the guys think this is just too funny to let go.

“ ‘Bud is my shepherd, I shall not want,' one starts to say. They start misquoting stuff like ‘Praise Bud!' and ‘Bud, bless this stewed rat, which I'm about to eat, and probably puke up again.' ”

“Skip the food part,” Ahn-Kha groaned.

“Well, after a couple minutes of humor like that, some old soldier yells, ‘Shut your Bud-damned mouths, for Bud's frickin' sake.'

“The corporal loses it, says he's not going to stay in there with a bunch of blasphemers, and he heads out of the dugout with the shells and rockets still landing all over the hills. Patel thinks the corp is going to get killed, and so he goes out after him. Patel catches up to him thirty yards away and jumps on him, wrestles him to the ground in the trench, when one of those rail-rockets lands right on the dugout. Kills every man in there, either the blast or suffocation did them in. Patel and a bunch of others, even the corporal, tried to dig out the shelter to rescue them, but no luck. Sure enough, some of the bodies are blue, and this corporal starts pointing at the ones who suffocated and saying ‘Bud's mark!' and things like that.

“Patel and this corporal get out of the trenches and are posted with a new unit in western Missouri in the bush-whack ground. This corporal seems sound enough most of the time, but now and then he points out the color blue and says ‘the Hand of Bud,' or something like that. One day they're on patrol on a footpath and he just freezes, with his head cocked like a dog listening to a whistle. He says that ‘Bud's whispering in my ear.' A couple of the guys pass him, maybe they thought he was taking a leak without bothering to use his fly, and go right into a tripwire that fires this harpoon through two men. Patel said he started to think that old expression about God looking out for drunks, children, and idiots might be true.

“After that, this corporal turned into the kind of NCO that stays behind to watch over the sick and the supplies. Until this one day, there's a beautiful blue sky. So he decides to climb a tree and look at Bud's handiwork. He falls asleep up there, no one knows where he is, they figure this time he's really flipped and run off into the woods. They don't even bother looking for him. Which is too bad, because if they had been dispersed, these three Reapers passing through the area wouldn't have caught all that lifesign in the camp. They went in and killed everyone but the corporal, maybe when he was in the tree talking to Bud, he didn't put out much more lifesign than a cuckoo clock. After that, the corporal pulled kitchen duty at an infantry training school by Mountain Home.

“Patel ended up joining some Wolves who were hunting the Reapers, he made himself useful when they caught up to the bastards, and ended up in Zulu Company.

“Funny thing is, every now and then in a tight situation, I'd catch Patel saying, ‘Bud help me' or something like that. I don't think he really believed it, but Patel wasn't taking any chances.”

 

The storm blew itself out overnight. Valentine arose and dressed around the slumbering Ahn-Kha. He checked Post, who slept with his familiar snore in the tiny sick bay.

The indefatigable Carrasca still stood on the bridge. She looked as fresh and alert as when Valentine had last seen her, rocking with the storm.

“That's Haiti, Valentine, dead ahead.”

Valentine stepped out onto the wing of the bridge. Something loomed ahead, a heavy presence in the darkness. As the light grew, he could make out mountains coated in green.

“Why the white knuckles?” Carrasca asked, joining him in the open air.

Her words weren't in the cool captain's voice with its self-assured intonation. They tickled his ear like a playful finger.

Valentine looked down at the decorative wood top to the rail where his hands gripped the painted metal. He breathed out, half-laugh and half-sigh. “For over a year, I've been trying to get here in the right kind of ship.”

“Worth it, I hope. The commodore thinks you're chasing a rumor. Said it reminded him of the years after the Kurians first came, where ships and men were lost looking for remnants of the old society.”

“That's what my father was doing when he ran into a Lifeweaver. This chase is something the Lifeweavers put me on.”

She put binoculars to her eyes and searched the coast ahead. “How much do you know?”

“There's something on that island the Cause needs.”

She frowned. “The Cause. You sound like Hawthorne of the hasty retreat.”

Valentine involuntarily stiffened. Now a row of ghostly bodies lay between them, friends Valentine had lost, talents the world had lost, in the sake of “the Cause.”

“I'm sorry,” she said, looking away. “You've proved yourself to Jamaica.”

“But not to you?” Valentine asked.

“It's the same thing.”

Valentine stifled a laugh. He might have said those exact words. Jensen and Carrasca had proved themselves to the Cause by letting him use the ship, the same thing as proving themselves to him. He took his hands from the rail and rubbed life back into them.

Carrasca broke the silence: “Why is it nobody's thought to go get this whatever-it-is until now?”

“We didn't know it was there. It was put there hundreds of years ago by a Lifeweaver. He lived in secret among us, with a few followers. He guessed what the Kurians were planning, but he only knew about the one door. He and his people were ready for what was coming on Haiti, but something happened, they were betrayed, and I don't think anyone survived. One of the followers kept a journal of some kind, more as a record of that Lifeweaver's teachings, but in it was a section about this weapon against them.

“Like a lot of places, there's a resistance against the Kurians. These Haitians are fighting without really knowing what they're fighting. They just know it's evil, and they're doing what they can to protect their own people. They found a cache of weapons in a cave, along with this diary. They made sense of it and somehow word got passed to us. I never knew about it — I just got orders to join up with the Quislings on the Gulf Coast with fake papers and background. I think they chose me because I speak a little Spanish and French. My mother was from the French part of Canada, and I was raised by a priest from Puerto Rico. It took me a year, but I got into the Coastal Marines and managed to get myself posted to the right kind of ship to bring it back. It's a year I wouldn't care to repeat. Now it's like life in the Ozarks is something out of my childhood.”

“Is there snow there?”

“Sometimes, in winter. The mountains aren't big enough to be snowcapped year-round. Why?”

“There's a story the people here tell. They think if you go somewhere there's snow all the time, like the north pole, the Kurians can't get you. It's all mixed up with stories about Christmas now, that there's this place everyone is safe from them with plenty of food and electronic toys and no fighting.”

Valentine watched a frigate bird float above, drifting on the air currents with only the tiniest alterations to its wing.

“If only. I grew up almost in Canada. It gets colder in the winter than you can probably imagine, and the Reapers still made it up there. They don't come in winter, but we're still not out of it. You go much farther north from there, and the land can't support many people year-round away from the coasts. Just not enough to eat. And the old-timers say the climate is strange now, summers are longer and hotter, but somehow winter is even worse. God knows how the Kurians managed it. There's no safe place, or if there is, they're keeping it to themselves.”

She nodded. “Cape Haitian is ahead. What is the plan?”

“The plan is to sail into the port as bold as if we have the proverbial balls of the brass monkey. We have a contact in town who'll get in touch with me. He's on the lookout for a ship from the north. Not sure what happens after that. Maybe we pull out and land somewhere nearby on the coast, and he gets us in touch with the resistance. They load us up, and back we go.”

“Will it be that easy?”

Valentine found a smile. “Somehow I doubt it.”

The
Thunderbolt
rounded Cape Haitian and turned her prow to the town, a cluster of white and gray snuggled into a stretch of flat land with mountains towering behind. The vivid colors of the Caribbean struck Valentine once more: deep blues of the ocean; brilliant blues and whites above; and behind stretches of white sand a green so lush, it hypnotized.

Fishing boats, hardly more than canoes, rocked in the gentle swell. Tall, lean black men threw nets into the water and gathered them again. If they noticed the
Thunderbolt
, they showed no sign of it. As the ship approached, Valentine observed that the fishermen were either naked or wearing stringy loincloths. Wiry muscle glistened under the sun.

A boat with four oarsmen put out from the docks. Its splashing approach scattered seabirds bobbing on the calm surface of the bay.

“Dead slow,” Carrasca called into the bridge.

“Dead slow, aye aye,” the junior officer there answered.

The bulky ship coasted to a crawl. The small boat cut across the prow, as if blocking the larger vessel's entry. A man in a simple gray uniform stood and put a speaking trumpet to his mouth.

“Que bâteau?”
Valentine thought he heard.

“What did he say?”

“What ship is that?” Valentine translated.

“I thought they spoke Spanish here.”

“Creole French, mostly. Or a form of it. But you can get along in Spanish, too.”

Valentine inflated his lungs. “
Thunderbolt
, New Orleans. May we anchor here tonight? We will buy food,” he bellowed, hoping his French would be understood.

“What do you do here?”

“We chase pirates. Have any sailing ships passed?”

“No, not close. Not since before the last hurricane season.”

“May we drop anchor?”

The man lowered his speaking trumpet for a moment, then raised it again. “For now. Our officer will come. Do not lower your boat until then.”

“Thank you!” Valentine yelled back.

 

The same four-oared boat brought out the “officer.” Valentine watched him make the transition to the
Thunderbolt
with a fair amount of agility. He wore a similar uniform to his underling, though with gold buttons and a brilliant scarlet sash beneath his pistol belt.

Valentine went to greet him.

“Monsieur speaks French?” the man asked. His features were exaggerated: strong cheekbones, a pointed chin, knife-like nose, wide eyes, and handsome in a sensual, full-lipped way. Unlike most of the Hispaniolans Valentine had observed in the boats, who either had a full beard or were clean-shaved, he wore a mustache.

“And some Spanish,” Valentine said, then realized, as visitor, it would be best if he began the introductions. “My captain is more comfortable in Spanish. I am Lieutenant Rowan, of the Coastal Marines,” Valentine said, turning to introduce Carrasca. She wore a combination of her own Jamaican attire and a coat liberated from Captain Saunders's chest.

“Sí, bueno. Muy encantado,”
he agreed, then touched his chest. “El Capitán Boul.”

 

“I understand you wish to make use of our market?” Boul asked, seated in the captain's cabin. Even with a table fan blowing, the air settled wet and thick on the three people gathered in the small space. “We have only a few liters of diesel oil, I am sorry to say.”

“My captain has ample fuel, but some fresh food and, of course, water would be most appreciated. We can barter or pay in gold.”

“Ours is a poor market, unless you count fish. Though once word got around that you wished to buy, the people would bring in chickens, eggs, pigs, fresh fruit, and vegetables. It would take only a day or two more, and your ship would be fully provisioned.”

Carrasca exchanged a look with Valentine and shook her head.

“I must be at sea again. The damned pirates have too long a lead even now.”

“In our mutual interest, I will ask the fishermen as they come in. They see ships, especially in the waters between here and Cuba.”

“If you hear any news between now and when we leave tomorrow, we would be most obliged. A few hours are all we need to replenish our fresh water supply.”

Boul put up his hands placatingly. “My friends, if you choose to stay, I can guarantee most advantageous terms for your barter in the market. Our people would have little use for gold. But tools, trinkets, even pencils and paper will get you much good food.”