‘Your son is walking! Is that the first time?’
‘Yes! It is! Well done, Iskender! Well done!’
‘Here, we’ve got some coffee in the jeep, have a cup with me.’ Because, in some parts of the Caucasus and even elsewhere, to drink a toast in beer was an eternal curse. Coffee, however much he loathed it, was universal.
And thus I make the world safe for democracy! But perhaps children’s steps were private things, not to be shared with a lumbering British sergeant.
Just as this scene beyond the window was private. He turned to go, and as he did so he saw White Raoul the scrivener, one leg twisted without his cane, claw his way forward. Therapy, surely, of the most human sort. Teach the muscles, lift the spirit. The Sergeant could hear the patient’s joints protest, hear them click and grind. Each step was pain. And yet White Raoul weathered it, welcomed it even, because she was at the far end. Her arms were out to him and her face was a cry of approbation. Brave soldier! Raoul grunted, and the Sergeant could see her weight shift as she prepared to bridge the gap between them, but she held back, held back, and he recovered his balance and his composure. More pain. A mangled hip, the Sergeant thought, and likely a prosthetic kneecap on the other leg: an old, cheap one. A Swiss surgeon had famously used a calf’s kneecap years ago, but he had been a genius and this was not his work. This was patch and repair and don’t worry about it too much because to be honest this man will probably die. Car crash. Gunfire. Falling log. Bones were not strong just because they were the strongest thing a human body had.
Raoul passed the little table and the chairs, and his grin was victory. His doctor – no, more: his reward – lunged at him, and for a moment the Sergeant thought she would knock him down, but together they made a single, upright pillar in the little house. She pressed her mouth on his urgently, and then her dress was gone and beneath it she was quite nude. She stripped away his smock and the shapeless trousers, and then his strange, rainbow arms were around her back, corded muscle locked against tanned skin. The scrivener’s body was a tapestry, tattoos weaving in and out of bands of mottled skin, over old, hard muscles and elegant ribs, and what could only be shrapnel scarring in a spray along one flank. Life must be a constant barrage of greater and lesser pain. But here, now, it all made sense, as if he was a machine made of broken parts which functioned perfectly only in this one action, only for her. They made love standing up, and White Raoul grew less unsteady and more fluid with each moment, and her breath gasped out into the night.
Abruptly, the Sergeant realised that he was spying.
He turned, and picked his way through the shadowed streets into a breeze which was unusually cold.
The car was exactly where it should be, and the boy was gone.
The Sergeant arrived at Brighton House ten minutes later, and closed the door on Mancreu with some finality. In the morning he would love the place again, he knew, but for tonight he had had enough. Enough tomatoes, enough stolen fish, enough local characters and their little ways. Enough tigers, enough trying to do the right thing. He was tired and he was not dead and that was good.
He stripped off the suit and bundled it into a bag. When he awoke he would destroy it, return as many pieces as he could to the armoury, and move on. He reckoned he had a better than even chance of having escaped identification and tracking tonight. If he had, all he needed to do was sit tight and stay clean and let the inevitable blurring of events and the imminent destruction of Mancreu wash the problem away. Dig in and let the shitstorm fly by. He laughed, feeling the euphoria of survival.
Fuck you, he told the world. Not dead, again.
He showered, peering down at himself and seeing the body he recognised, old scars and new bruises. He had some light scalding, some scratches, and in the mirror he could see a bold blue square where the armour had taken bullets. Green mosaic tiling gave his body a slightly fishy sheen.
He walked naked into the galley and drank water straight from the tap, then when his thirst faded he poured a couple of fingers of Scotch and sipped at it slowly, letting himself feel the burn. He did not dilute it. He wanted the fire in it, the bite.
Sensing movement, he peered at his groin, half-amused, half-frustrated. Signs of post-combat arousaclass="underline" all dressed up and no place to go. He patted his penis in a friendly way. It bounced. After three decades of sharing his life with its weird, unpredictable reactions, he tended to view it as a benign alien presence and treated it accordingly. He had never given it a name, because he privately thought only idiots did that, but it was idle to pretend that he and the organ were always of one mind. He, for example, found nothing erotic in being shot at, but it inevitably produced this reaction. Seeing the Witch naked and having sex would seem much more so, but had elicited none at all. That was imponderable, but curiously appropriate. He wished her well with Raoul, truly. He felt his desire relinquish her, felt his mind remove her to that separate, respected place reserved for things he cherished and wanted to protect, but did not touch.
Not dead, again.
11. Complications
THE SERGEANT SHOWERED and went into the comms office, found that Kershaw had indeed called, several times. He thought for a while, then lifted the phone and called back.
‘What’s the news, Jed?’ he asked, when the operator connected him. ‘I’ve been hearing helicopters all night.’
‘Your typical batshit insane Mancreu,’ Kershaw snapped. ‘While you were fucking three Bolivian pole-dancers in a hayloft, some jackass hillman went postal on a patrol. Roughed them up pretty good. You okay?’
‘Aside from being roused from my beauty sleep. Big chap, was he, this jackass?’
‘Oh, ha ha.’
‘I was only going to observe, between Bolivians as it were, that we in the British Army give our fellows guns and train them in this thing called combat, and we tend to think of one bloke attacking a full patrol of – what, eight? – as a bit of an error on his part. We tend to expect the patrol to cut such a fucking idiot into thin strips and bring him home to us for close inspection of the parts.’
‘They were a man short.’
‘Oh, well, if it was only seven to one, that explains it.’
‘Yeah, I guess it was a lot like the War of Independence, huh?’
‘Yes, I’ll tell the Queen, she loves your little japes. Here, hang on.’ He yawned loudly. ‘Did you say he roughed them up? As in, with his hands?’
‘Hands and feet. One of them has a heelmark on his ribs.’
I’ll be sure and burn the boots first. The Sergeant let a little more disdain creep into his voice. ‘He was unarmed? Against professional soldiers?’