Tactically there was all still to play for. The Sergeant had his ace in the hole, the fast-dispersal setting on the remaining gas grenade. It would make a thirty-foot ball of darkness, the manual said, pretty much instantly and until the wind dispersed it. Although actual performance in the field did not always match the claims in the documentation. He had his hand on it, ready to use, but he knew he had overreached. The last of Pechorin’s men could take him now, and if he died here he’d have no one but himself to blame.
But they didn’t know that, he realised as the moment held, and they were convinced now that he could do impossible things. He could appear from nowhere, breathe under water, make guns explode and strike down men at a distance. He was bulletproof. They had seen evidence of all these, and they knew, too, that he was the Mancreu demon, the one everyone was talking about, the one who might be a psychopath or an organ hunter or something even more awful. So they stared at him, and did not attack, and waited to see what he would do. Like prey, they hoped that if they did nothing he would depart to eat his kill.
He didn’t do anything. If he ran it might break the spell. If he came forward he might press them into action. So he waited, and they waited.
From somewhere across the valley, he heard the sound of a tiger growling or calling, and a reply. A mated pair.
Behind his back, he flicked the dispersal rate on the grenade to medium, and drew the pin with his thumb. He didn’t move. The darkness boiled up over his back and all around him, and he kept the eyes of the mask on them all the time. When the gas finally shifted to cover him he rolled back and away, then ran for the trees.
Pechorin called for reinforcements.
On the stolen radio handset the Sergeant could hear the chatter, cool and efficient. He had worked with some of them before, here and elsewhere. Could he run towards them? Claim to have been taken hostage and escaped, even fought back? But when and how? At the fish market, or from the house? He shook his head. There might be a way, but he was too addled to see it, to account for the branching possible consequences. He imagined buying his absolution by accidentally selling out the boy. No. Run on. Hostile contact: allied forces in the target zone. Then numbers, coordinates, and yes, there was a helicopter after all. They would close the roads, and with the ’copter they would do so effectively – but where he was going he didn’t need roads. He glanced at the sky and growled: the cloud had lifted again. He should shed this suit somewhere it wouldn’t be found. He couldn’t permit himself to be caught in it, for sure, but his blood was in it and if they were serious about this – and you didn’t put a helicopter in the air if you were just kidding around – they would know that within hours.
He considered options. Brighton House – the phone was ringing there, no doubt – was a few miles away cross-country: over scrub and through banana plantations, for the most part. But there was a line of open ground between the house and the jungle, and in the worst case he would be at a loss to explain how – having left the house on a shopping expedition – he came to be returning on foot from another direction. On the other hand if he returned to the house in the toutou, between obfuscation, retasking and cloud cover he might have nothing to explain at all.
In the meantime, he was already running again, on the half-cleared paths used by hunters and animals both, between the trees. Time became fluid. Running was something he enjoyed. After a certain point, his mind was silent. He ran. He spectated. There was a clean, moonlit purity inside his head. He was exhausted, but it was this or capture and he had no intention of being captured, so exhaustion was irrelevant. He was also high on combat and anger and for as long as the immediacy lasted he would feel like a god. He had about twenty minutes of that left, so – knowing he would walk, after – he ran now.
The jungle was wet and warm. It smelled of vegetation and life and in particular of a species of red-flowering vine. The flowers opened at night and were called something dirty in Moitié; Inoue had told him once that in the dark, to a certain kind of lizard, they looked like meat. The lizard ate them and shat out the seeds somewhere else, spreading the plant. It had no sense of smell to speak of, so no one knew why they smelled good. He wondered if you could eat them. Perhaps they were some sort of healing drug. The Witch would know. Perhaps he should go and see her. A last chance: tonight of all nights he might turn back the clock.
Nonsense.
He growled, in irritation or lust, he wasn’t sure, and ran on. He was following a narrow path, probably a badger run, and yes: he was holding the compass, finding his way. He grinned, then laughed. He wanted to sing and drink and eat. He wanted to sleep for a year, to lie naked in a jacuzzi looking out over the Sahara while someone rubbed his feet, to headline at a rock concert, to tear down walls with his hands. He had won. He was a god.
Adrenalin. Let it go.
But he couldn’t, and anyway it should be over by now, the high should be exhausted and burned out, should have left him hollow. He wondered if inhaling burning heroin could do this. Cocaine, perhaps. Maybe there had been cocaine, too. Or perhaps there was something here, in this jungle. Maybe the red flowers were a stimulant.
Tigerman make famous victory! Hah!
There wasn’t really, in this world, a way in which burning a shitload of heroin and beating up some dealers was a crime.
He ran on to Beauville, and his way home.
His reckoning was good. He came out of the jungle at the old millhouse, checked the sky and saw clouds and no helicopter, trotted over the road into a plantation and jogged on. He felt he still had more in the tank – impossibly – but he wanted to save it in case there was more craziness to deal with before he slept. The rendezvous was another twenty minutes away. Two streets later he stopped, halted by a thought: the Witch. Her house was here, or near here. It must – he had never thought of Beauville like this before, had always stuck religiously to the road system, but in fact it was all closer together than he had realised – it must be just beyond that stand of palms.
He found that he was heading towards it. For what, exactly? Surely not to bang on the door and ask her to harbour a fugitive. To have sex with a fugitive. No. Whatever magic was working on him to vanish his aches and strengthen his legs, he remained himself, and he knew after nearly forty years on Earth that when you showed up at a woman’s door in the middle of the night smelling of blood and diesel and river mud, she did not immediately lose track of her underwear, or even her common sense.
Not to admit all, either. If she was what she appeared to be, she didn’t need the trouble – and if she wasn’t then nor did he.
Not to serenade her, not to seek medical attention, not to steal her car. But since he was passing, and this being the day he was having, he wanted to see her front door and put his hand on the gate, and know that not everything on Mancreu was a mess.
He climbed the fence around the plantation and ran across the spongy sea-grass towards her house. The door was very solid, an old, traditional Mancreu colonial door made of salvaged wood. It looked inviting, and safe. Perhaps he would just call on her, say he had heard a noise, was wondering if she was all right. Perhaps she would ask him in, after all. Perhaps she was so worldly that his attire would hardly seem odd to her.
Don’t be an idiot.
There was a light burning in the window, and to his amazement she was awake, sitting in a high-backed chair. Her hands were stretched out in exhortation or applause. Come on, come on! Did she have a child, then? Was she for some reason teaching her toddler to walk at two a.m.? The Sergeant realised he had no idea. Perhaps that was something some children did, perhaps they sat up in bed and screamed until you put them on the floor and then they took their first steps and you gave them a lollipop. He had not seen a child’s first steps, not ever. Or perhaps he had and hadn’t known. He had seen plenty of small children, shaky waddlers flopping into their mothers’ arms. In Europe, in Africa, in Asia. Perhaps, if he had understood what was happening around him, he would have realised on some of those occasions that he was witnessing a mundane sort of miracle. Perhaps if he had realised it, he might actually have won a single, genuine heart or mind, made a connection which meant more than occupation and cigarettes.