“She dealt the play.”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“Make up your mind, Dave. We don’t have much time.”
“If we had the AK—”
“We don’t.”
My throat was dry, my face small and tight in the wind. “Light it up.”
Inside my head, as though watching a movie, I saw a young United States Army second lieutenant talking into a radio, an Asian village and rice paddy in the background, tracer rounds streaking out of the hooches, flying like segments of yellow-and-red neon above the paddy.
“You’re sure?” Clete said.
I lifted a Molotov cocktail from the bag. The bottle felt cold and heavy in my hand. “Give me your Zippo.”
Clete ran his hand down my arm and pulled the bottle from me. “You won’t be able to live with yourself, Streak.”
“Watch,” I said. I took the bottle back.
But my bravado was soon upstaged. I heard a sound behind me and turned around. I did not know where Carroll LeBlanc had come from other than the darkness. But his sudden reappearance was not the issue. His expression was lunatical, inhuman, his eyes devoid of conscience or reason, his clothes slick with blood, one hand clenched on a dripping butcher knife. “I do’ed it, Robo. I mean I piled up those motherfuckers all over the place, with their guts in their laps, like Gideon. It actually gave me a hard-on. What’s happening, Purcel? You don’t look too good.”
Then he laughed until he was hardly able to breathe or stand, his mouth a round black hole, as though he had accidentally swallowed a spirit hidden inside the wind.
I climbed the ladder to the bridge with Clete behind me. I stopped while he flicked the Zippo and held the flame to the cotton pad on the bottom of the wine bottle. Then I tossed it through a side window on the bridge and watched it break on a hard surface and fill the bridge with light. I threw the remaining two bottles into the flames.
I took no pride in what I did. Nor did I want to see the images that danced before my eyes. I had replicated a scene from Dante’s Inferno. The flames looked liquid, the players made of wax, frozen in time and space as though carved out of the heat, the surprise in their faces like that of children. Was I filled with pity? Did I abhor the incubus in me that could set afire his fellow creatures? I cannot answer any of these questions. I wanted to be a million miles away.
“Get down!” Clete said.
“What?”
“Bell!” he said.
As fast as the bottles had exploded, the flames had shrunk into strips of fire that were rapidly dying for want of fuel. Oh, yes, the damage was there. I saw two burned men crawl from the hatch, and one man shivering with pain and shock, his teeth chattering, and Mark Shondell in a corner, his hair curled from the heat, his face misshapen and painted with blisters, part of his lip gone, probably bitten off. I saw Penelope in the background, on the deck, under a raincoat. Adonis was gone. But Bell was not.
He opened up with the AK-47, blowing out glass, whanging rounds all over the superstructure. Clete jerked me back down the ladder, firing blindly at Bell, his eyes wide with adrenalin, as though he were looking into an artic wind.
Bell stopped shooting and ducked below the bridge window, but I knew we were in trouble. He had the high ground and we didn’t. He also possessed the best infantry assault rifle in the world. And Mark Shondell, the brains behind Bell and his fellow troglodytes, was still alive. Curds of black smoke were rising from the stern, and the gallery was burning with such ferocity that the portholes on two adjacent compartments were filled with yellow flame that was as bright as a searchlight.
In the distance I could see the sailboat pitching in the waves, throwing ropes of foam over the deck. The white sails had been taken from the masts and replaced with black ones.
“Look what you did, Mr. Dave,” a voice said behind me.
It was Johnny. He had his arm around Father Julian. Carroll LeBlanc was staring at them with an idiotic grin.
“Shut up, kid,” Clete said.
“Black sails mean she’s dead,” Johnny said. “I can’t believe we’ve done this.”
He had said “we,” not “you.” But that was poor consolation. Clete was right. I would find no solace for my part in what we had done.
Know why war sucks? We usually kill the wrong people.
Chapter Forty-one
Clete pulled me aside. He had taken Carroll’s butcher knife from him. He put a fresh magazine in the semi-auto and pulled and released the slide and clicked on the safety and placed the gun in my hand. “I got to get to Bell. You keep him busy until I can get behind him.”
“That’s a bad idea,” I said.
“No arguments, big mon.”
“Where’s Adonis?” I said.
“Who cares?”
“He’s a survivor,” I said. “He’ll cut a deal. Maybe he can get us some serious weapons.”
“Adonis may also be rallying the troops. I can’t believe I ever stood up for that guy. Come on, we got to put it in gear. Hey, I got one for you.”
“What?”
“Know what Ambrose Bierce called a pacifist?”
“Wrong time for it, Cletus.”
“A dead Quaker.” He hit me on the arm. “Stomp ass and take names, noble mon. The Bobbsey Twins from Homicide are forever.”
Then he was gone.
The only other time I had ever been in such close proximity to a murderous enemy was in Vietnam. We got into night-trail firefights when Sir Charles was no more than five feet from us. Oddly, we had come to respect Sir Charles and his ability to live inside the greenery of a rain forest and suddenly materialize out of the mists, his uniform little more than black pajamas, his sandals cut from an automobile tire, his day’s ration a rice ball tied inside a sash around his hips.
Sir Charles could be incredibly cruel, as the VC demonstrated in the capture of Hué when they buried alive both civilians and prisoners of war. But Sir Charles was brave and had a cause, one that he saw as noble. Mark Shondell could lay no such claim. He sought revenge on others for his own failure, and helped inculcate racial hatred and fear in the electorate to divide us against ourselves. I had known his kind all my life. Except Shondell was not an ordinary man. Marcel LaForchette believed Shondell may have been in league with diabolical powers. I don’t know if there is any such thing. But I do believe there are people in our midst who wish to make a graveyard of the world, and their motivation may be no more complex than that of an angry child flinging scat because he was left with regularity in a dirty diaper.
The ribbon of green light on the southern horizon was creeping higher into the sky, the waves subsiding, the sailboat rising and falling with the rhythm of a rocking horse. I felt a drop of rain on the back of my neck, like a reminder of the earth’s resilience. Then I looked at Father Julian and felt the same sense about him. There are those among us who can walk through cannon smoke and grin about it while everyone else is going insane. That was Father Julian Hebert.
We were in the lee of the superstructure of which the bridge was part, but not at an angle where Bell could fire upon us. “How you doin’, Julian?” I said.
“Not bad,” he replied.
“You’re not a very good liar.”
“I’ll practice.”
“I’ve got to entertain Bell,” I said. “I hope to come back. If I don’t, try to get on board a lifeboat. Penelope is on the bridge. Maybe she can go with you.”
“You still have feelings for her?”
“None that are good.”
“Who’s the liar?” he said. But at least he smiled.
I went up the ladder. The bridge windows were broken, the jagged and burnt frames like empty eye sockets against the watery greenish band of light in the south. I saw no sign of Bell. He had told Clete he was in the First Cav. I suspected he was telling the truth. He didn’t silhouette, he didn’t give away his position; he made no sound at all.