‘How ’bout the lieutenant?’ Mingolla asked distractedly, trying to gain a purchase in Coffee’s mind. ‘He learn all that?’
‘Y’know how it is with lieutenants, David. Sometimes they just don’t work out.’
The mosquito netting was flung back, and he was hauled from the hammock, forced to his knees, a rope cinched about his wrists. He saw the shadowy cocoon of Garrido’s hammock in the indirect glow from the flashlight: it looked to be bulged down lower than before, as if death had weighed out heavier than life. He was yanked upright, spun around to face a gaunt rack of a man with rotting teeth and blown-away pupils; an unkempt beard bibbed his chest, and dark hair fell in snarls to his shoulders. He was holding the flashlight under his chin so that Mingolla could see his grin. Behind him stood his men, all of a cut, bearded and thin, smaller than their leader. Their fatigues holed, rifles outmoded.
‘Pleased to meetcha, David,’ said Coffee, lowering the flashlight. ‘You up for a little night march?’
‘Maybe he should pop a couple?’ said one of the others.
‘Yeah, maybe.’ Coffee dug into his pocket, then shone the flashlight into his palm, illuminating two silver foil bullets. ‘Ever do Sammy?’
‘Listen,’ said Mingolla. ‘I’ve got—’
Coffee drove a fist into his stomach, bending him double. Only the fact that someone was holding the rope around his wrists prevented him from falling. He couldn’t breathe for several seconds, and when he had recovered sufficiently to breathe through his mouth, Coffee grabbed his chin and straightened him. ‘That’s the first lesson,’ he said. ‘Y’answer when you spoke to. Now y’ever done Sammy?’
‘No.’
‘Well, don’t get all anxious… it’s purely a joy and a triumph.’ Coffee held up one of the ampules. ‘Just breathe in deep when I pop it, y’hear. Or else I’m gonna give ya ’nother lesson.’ He crushed an ampule between his thumb and forefinger, and Mingolla inhaled the stinging mist. ‘Here comes number two,’ said Coffee cheerfully.
The world was sharpening, coming closer. Mingolla could see the spidery shapes of monkeys high in the canopy, backed by rips of moonlight, framed in filigrees of black leaves; he heard a hundred new sounds, and heard, too, how they knitted the darkness into a comprehensible geography of rustling ferns and scraping branches. The wind was cool, its separate breezes licking at him, feathering his hair.
‘I love to watch the first time,’ said Coffee. ‘God, I love it!’
Mingolla felt disdain for Coffee, and his disdain manifested in a rich, nutsy laugh.
‘Feel like you lookin’ down from the mountaintop, don’tcha? Don’t you trust that feelin’, David. Don’t figger on runnin’ off or takin’ me out.’ Coffee grabbed Mingolla’s shirt, pulled him face to face. ‘I been up in Emerald for two years now, and I can tell when a fly takes a shit. Far as you concerned, I’m lord of the fuckin’ jungle!’ He released Mingolla with a shove. ‘Awright, let’s go.’
‘Where we going?’ Mingolla asked.
‘Questions?’ Coffee went face to face with him again, and madness seemed to be flying out of his enlarged pupils, a vibration beating around Mingolla’s head. ‘Y’don’t ask questions, y’do what ya told.’ Coffee relaxed, grinned. ‘But since you new, I’ll tell ya. We goin’ to the light of judgment, gonna decide whether or not y’run with the pack.’ He shouldered his rifle. ‘Hope that eases your mind.’
The man holding Mingolla’s rope gave it a jerk, and he fetched up against Garrido’s hammock; he recoiled from it, and the man said, ‘Ain’tcha never seen a dead beaner?’
A chemical fury was building in Mingolla, a furious perception of new involvements of honor and character. He wrenched the rope loose from the man’s grip, and when the man jabbed at him with his rifle, he brushed the rifle aside and, moving with uncommon swiftness, kicked the man’s legs out from under him. ‘I’ll kill your ass!’ he said. ‘Touch me again, I’ll kill your ass quick!’
‘My, my,’ said Coffee from behind him. ‘’Pears we gotta tiger by the tail.’ His tone was mirthful, sardonic, but when Mingolla turned, he saw in the configuration of Coffee’s grin a kind of harsh appraisal, and realized he had made a mistake.
Every half-hour as they walked, the men beside Mingolla would pop ampules under his nose, and the inside of his head came to feel heavy with violent urges, as if his thoughts had congealed into a lump of mental plastique. He tried to influence the men, using all his power, but without success. Even had influence been an ordinary problem, his concentration was not what it should have been. The roughness of the terrain commanded a measure of his attention, and the generic mystic-warrior personality supplied by the drug tended to decry the concept of influence as lacking in honor. Rather than continuing his efforts, he concocted intricate escape plans with bloody resolutions. The sharpness of his senses was confusing—he spent a good deal of time identifying odors and sounds—and the initial burn of the drug was of such intensity, he became convinced that many of his perceptions were hallucinations. He had trouble believing, for instance, that the drumbeat issuing from his chest was his heartbeat; nor could he accept that the high-pitched whistlings in his ears were the cries of the bats that flashed like Halloween cutouts through the moonbeams. And so when he first sensed Debora’s presence, he disregarded it. But the impression remained strong, and once, straining toward the darkness from which the impression seemed to derive, he was positive that he had brushed the borders of her mind, feeling the telltale arousal of electrical contact, and feeling also a mental coloration that—though he’d had no previous experience of it, at least on a conscious level—he recognized as hers. After that one contact she either blocked or moved beyond range. What was she doing? he asked himself. Tracking him? If so, did she know his assignment? Then why hadn’t she ambushed him? Maybe, he thought, she had never been there at all.
They came to a large circular clearing overgrown with ferns, ringed by giant figs and mahogany trees: the canopy here was less dense, and the clearing had the look of an aquarium bowl filled with pale milky fluid at the bottom of which strange feathered creatures were stirring in a feeble current. Man-shaped objects were affixed to the tree trunks, but the dimness masked their exact nature. Mingolla was thrown onto the ground and left in the care of a single guard, while the rest—fifteen in all—sat down in the middle of the clearing. The guard forced two more ampules on Mingolla, and he lay on his back in a silent fury, working at the ropes. The subdued voices of the men, the insects, and the soft wind fused into a hushed clutter of sound, and it increased his fury to think that he should be subject to any judgment conceived in this muddled place.
‘Ain’t gon’ do ya no good to slip them ropes,’ said the guard. ‘We just run ya down.’ He was a balding man with a full reddish brown beard and a triangular piece of mirror hung around his neck. ‘Naw, ol’ Sarge ain’t gon’ let ya ’scape. He been waitin’ onna sign for a long time, and ’pears to me you it.’
Mingolla redoubled his efforts. ‘Maybe I ain’t the sign he’s been expecting.’
The guard laughed derisively. ‘Sarge don’t ’spect nothin’. He just reads ’em when they come. Ain’t nobody better’n Sarge at readin’ sign.’