“You really can be annoying, Ruddy.”
But before Ruddy could respond, Cecil de Morgan burst in. The factor was red-faced, panting and his clothes were dusty. “You must come, you chaps—oh, come and see what they’ve found!”
With a sigh Josh clambered off his bed. Would there be no end to the strangeness of this day?
It was a chimpanzee: that was Josh’s first thought. A chimpanzee, caught in a bit of camouflage netting, lying passively on the floor. A smaller bundle nearby contained another animal, perhaps an infant. The captive animals had been brought back to the camp on poles stuck through the netting. A couple of sepoys were unwrapping the larger bundle.
De Morgan was here, hovering, as if staking a claim. “They caught it to the north—a couple of privates on patrol—only a mile or so away.”
“It’s just a chimp,” Josh said.
Ruddy was pulling at his moustache. “But I never heard of a chimp in this part of the world. Do they have a zoo in Kabul?”
“This is from no zoo,” de Morgan panted. “And it’s no chimpanzee. Careful, lads …”
The sepoys got the net off the animal. Its fur was soaked with its own blood. It was curled into a ball, its legs drawn up to its chest, and its long arms wrapped over its head. The men held sticks that they wielded like clubs, and Josh saw weals on the animal’s back.
The animal seemed to realize that the netting had been taken away. It lowered its hands, and with a sudden, fluid movement it rolled and came up to a squatting position, its knuckles resting lightly on the ground. The men backed off warily, and the animal peered at them.
“It’s a female, by God,” Ruddy breathed.
De Morgan pointed to a sepoy. “Make it stand up.”
Reluctantly the sepoy, a burly man, came forward. He reached out with his stick and prodded at the creature’s rump. She growled and snapped her large teeth. But the sepoy kept at it. At last, with grace—and a certain dignity, Josh thought—the creature unfolded her legs, and stood upright .
Josh heard Ruddy gasp.
She had the body of a chimp, there was no doubt about that, with slack dugs and swollen pudenda and pink buttocks; her limbs had an ape’s proportions too. But she stood straight on long legs, which articulated from her pelvis, Josh saw clearly, like any human’s.
“My God,” Ruddy said. “She is like a caricature of a woman—a monstrosity!”
“Not a monstrosity,” Josh said. “Half human, half ape; I have read that the new biologists talk of such things, of the creatures that lie between us and the animals.”
“You see?” De Morgan was glancing from one to another of them with greed and calculation. “Have you ever, ever seen anything like this?” He walked around the creature.
The burly sepoy said, his accent thick, “Have a care, sahib. She’s only four feet high but she can scratch and kick, I can tell you.”
“Not an ape, but a man-ape … We have to get her back to Peshawar, then to Bombay, and to England. Think what a sensation she will be in the zoos! Or perhaps even the theaters … Nothing like this—even in Africa! Quite the sensation.”
The smaller animal, still in its netting, seemed to wake. It rolled and mumbled, its voice feeble. Immediately the female reacted, as if she had not realized the little one was here. She leapt toward the infant, reaching.
The sepoys clubbed her at once. She whirled and kicked, but she was battered to the ground.
Ruddy waded into the melee, eyebrows bristling.
“For God’s sake, don’t strike her like that! Can’t you see? She’s a mother. And look in her eyes—look! Won’t that expression haunt you forever? …”
But still the man-ape struggled, still the sepoys threw their clubs at her, still de Morgan yelled, fearful of his treasure escaping—or, worse, being killed.
Josh was the first to hear the clattering noise. He turned to the east, to see clouds of dust thrown into the air. “There it is again—I heard it before …”
Ruddy, distracted by the violence, muttered, “What the devil now?”
4. RPG
Casey called, “We’re nearly on station. Going to low cap.”
The chopper dropped like a high-speed elevator. Despite all her training, Bisesa’s stomach clenched.
They were passing close to a village now. Trees, rusty tin roofs, cars, heaps of tires fled through her field of view. The chopper tilted and began circling counterclockwise. “Low cap” meant a sweeping surveillance circle. But given the way Bisesa was crammed onto her little bench, she could now see nothing but sky. More irony, she thought. She sighed, and checked over the small control panel fixed to the wall beside her. Sensors, from cameras to Geigers, heat sensors, radars and even chemical-sensitive “noses,” were trained on the ground from a pod suspended under the chopper’s body.
The Bird was embedded in the world-spanning communi-cations infrastructure of a modern army. Somewhere above Bisesa’s head was a big C2 chopper—C2 for command-and-control—but that was only the tip of a huge inverted pyramid of technology, including high-flying surveillance drones, reconnaissance and patrol planes, even photographic and radar satellites, all their electronic senses focused on this region. The data streams Bisesa gathered were analyzed in real time by smart systems onboard the Bird and on the higher-level vehicles, and in operations control back at the base. Any anomalies would quickly be flagged back to Bisesa for her confirmation by the link she maintained with her control, separate from the pilots’ link to the air commander via the command net.
It was all very sophisticated, but, like the piloting of the chopper itself, the data-gathering side of the mission was mostly automated. With low cap locked in, the mission quickly settled down to routine, and the pilots’ bored banter resumed.
Bisesa knew how they felt. She had been trained as a CCT, a Combat Control Technician, a specialist on coordinating ground-to-air communications during a conflict. Her basic mission was to be dropped into dangerous places and to direct pinpoint air and missile strikes from the ground. She had never yet needed to use that training in anger. Her skills made her ideal for this kind of observational role, but she couldn’t forget that it wasn’t what she was trained for.
She had only been attached to this forward UN observation and peacekeeping post for a week, but it seemed a lot longer. The troops were lodged in barracks that had been converted from aircraft hangars. High, bare, always stinking of jet fuel and oil, too hot during the day and too cold during the night, there was something crushing about those soulless boxes of corrugated metal and plastic. No wonder its occupants mockingly called it Clavius, after the big multinational outpost on the Moon.
The troops had a regime of daily PT, and had to pull guard duty, equipment maintenance, and other mundane details. But that was not enough to fill their time, or satisfy their needs. In their echoing hangars they would play volleyball or table tennis, and there were schools running apparently endless games of poker and rummy. And, though the ratio of women to men was about fifty-fifty, the place was a raging sexual hotbed. Some of the men seemed to be running a competition to achieve a climax in the most unusual or difficult situation possible—such as “knocking one out” when hanging from a parachute harness.
In such an atmosphere, no wonder that men like Casey Othic went slightly crazy, she thought.
Bisesa herself kept out of the fray. She could cope with the likes of Casey easily enough—even now, the British army was hardly a haven of sexual equality and decorum. She had even deflected the polite interest of Abdikadir. After all, she had her daughter: Myra, eight years old, a quiet, serious, very loving little girl, thousands of klicks away under the care of a nanny in Bisesa’s London flat. Bisesa wasn’t interested in games or complicated sexual politics to keep herself sane; she had Myra to do that for her.