Before the plywood splinters settled, Belew was awake and rolling, off the bed. He came up with his Para Ordnance. Explosive entry was not just something you passed around among friends like chlamydia.
He double-tapped the first man through the blown-in door, easily controlling the big handgun’s kick. The intruder uttered a choking squawk, dropped his Kalashnikov, and reeled back into the man behind him.
Belew gave the point man two more in the chest. The 180-grain Hydra-Shok slugs expanded in meat, gouging great channels through him. Skinny as he was, they passed right along through to spoil the day of the man he’d stumbled against.
Compulsive tinkerer that he was, Belew had made a few alterations to his miserable back-alley flat with the dull Asian porno prints of Thai cuties in dowdy fifties bikinis shellacked to the wall. He grabbed his jacket and light pack and dove for the window. The whole assembly blew out into the alley.
It was dark and narrow, defined by shacks with crazily angled corrugated-tin roofs that threatened to slump into the right-of-way at any moment. Belew rolled clear of the debris — a new layer added to the accumulation of years — and came up with his pistol in both hands, drawing down on the window in case his drop-ins were following right behind. Instead another flash and crash and swirl of smoky rubble inside; with at least two punctured they had belatedly decided to play it safe by pitching another grenade.
It was that grimy time of day when enough light has spilled over the horizon to spoil the darkness, but not enough to really illuminate. That time of day beloved of cops and marauders: predawn, as in “predawn raid.” Fully dressed, of course, J. Robert Belew got up and raced between the slouching buildings, raising a bow wave in ankle-deep puddles.
A stutter of gunshots behind him. Holes splintered open in a rude plank wall right in front of his face. He hit a T-junction in the shanty labyrinth and cranked hard right. He was built low to the ground, not much for sprint speed, but still one hell of a broken-field runner. For one thing, though he aged normally in cosmetic terms, his ability to regenerate meant he had seventeen-year-old cartilage in his knees.
Another slow, heavy AK burst chewed the wall, long behind him. Somebody began screaming, whether in terror, pain, or sudden grief he had no way of knowing.
J. Robert Belew was a man who believed in always traveling first-class. It was just that his definition of first-class was skewed from the rest of the world’s, like so much about him. He loved fine wine, Vivaldi, satin sheets, and beautiful, long-legged women to slip between them as much as the next man. When those things fit the mission profile. On a gig like the present one — freelance; high-risk factor; no assets; a quick, clean death one of the more favorable outcomes he could hope for and a warm sense of accomplishment about the optimum — he had different criteria. Here he liked a low profile, incurious neighbors, a lot of traffic in the area to cover his moves, and ready escape routes.
You didn’t find those things in the middleclass neighborhoods that still managed to cling to existence despite the wealth-devouring propensities of socialism. You didn’t even find them in the precincts of the respectable poor, where everybody knew everybody for generations back, and the good people of the Earth stood ready to show their civic spirit by cooperating with the authorities at every chance.
You found them in slums. He found them on the Ben Nghe waterfront of District Four, dingy, dirty, dangerous, ripe with decay, where he wasn’t the only Lien Xo dog on the bum, and nobody asked questions — or ever, ever answered them when the Man asked — and the foul Southeast Asian river that defined the district and gave it its unmistakable ambiance lay handy for comings and goings and disposing of evidence. Such as his own xenovirus Takis-A-positive corpus.
Voices chased him as he exploded out onto a street, or at least a broader alley, a short block from the river. He dodged chicken crates and veggie carts and trussed depressive pigs and bicycles loaded like quarter-ton trucks and the sort of early-morning people who hadn’t waited for the sixth Party Congress to tell them it was okay to become entrepreneurs. Traffic was at low ebb, and it had nothing to do with the hour. There had been antigovernment riots the last two days, and much of Ho-ville was hunkering down in the old familiar wait-and-see mode.
When he hit block’s end, instinctive combat timing made him turn and kneel just as a skinny dude in generic black pajamas came flailing out of the alley-tangle with a stockless AKMS clutched in one hand. Just like the old days, Belew thought with a pleasant rush of nostalgia. He fired twice.
Only in the movies do people never miss, even if they’re combat-pistol experts, which J. Bob happened to be. Neither shot hit the boy in black pajamas, but he promptly fell on his skinny ass anyway. He went scrambling back to the alley on all fours, clattering his Kalashnikov on sporadic pavement, as a second triggerman poked his AK around the bend and started hosing.
The street had suddenly become a wasteland of primetime proportions. A fair share of the pedestrians and cycle-jockeys had been born since ostensible Liberation in ’75, but few of them were hearing full-auto fire for the first time.
Belew went left at the riverfront, jinking around water-warped crates and sampan drivers in rice-straw hats. Whoever his friendly visitors were — and there were any number of stinging-ant hills he could’ve bumped during his several days of discreet inquiry; that nasty Heisenberg principle again — they were being cagey. Most of the government’s watchdogs were running in packs down in downtown District One just to the north, and southwest in Cholon, the two main loci of trouble. They were poorly positioned to intervene in any running gun-battle this far north. Of course that didn’t mean the black-pajama killers weren’t from the government themselves. The Socialist Republic might think it had splendid reasons to off J. Robert Belew without appearing to have done so.
As he ran, his mind paged through options like flash cards. He had scoped out a number of escape routes in advance. But the riverfront was chaos, always flowing; always changing, always coming-going. It was never predictable, which made it such good cover for his shadow games.
He never relied on set plans anyway; only made them as a form of mental discipline. The opportunity that struck his eye was not on his shortlist of preplanned escapes. But his pursuers, half a dozen strong, had younger lungs than he did, if not knees. They were gaining.
A fistful of bullets missed him to the left, crackling with supersonic spite, and shattered a stack of boxes labeled SAIGON EXPORT. The dark reeking fluid that cascaded out sure wasn’t the Nam’s premium beer, nor even formaldehyde-laced Giai Phong. He didn’t stop to give it a taste test.
A fortunate toss of the yarrow sticks had caught his eye, a surreal flash between the rickety buildings that crowded down to the water’s edge. That was the lovely thing about chaos; it was in essence random, but it was random within limits. You had a measure of predictability if you knew the delimiters. This set of circumstances was just the sort of thing to be expected, down by the river.
He dashed between shacks onto a wharf that boomed beneath his feet like a Vachel Lindsay drum. This side of the river was given over to river-people shanties, go-down warehouses, and tiny tin-roof houseboats. The far side was choked with motor sampans with barrel-shaped wood or bamboo roofs, all nosing in toward the shore like Sea World dolphins hitting on a tourist with a bucketful of mackerel. The Ben Nghe was a poor cousin of the at least sporadically well-groomed Saigon River. But its left bank — the triangle formed by the Ben Nghe, the Te Canal, and the Saigon — was somewhat upwardly mobile. The boaters on that side were all running rice up from the fertile Delta to ever-hungry Saigon giai phong. Bowing to the inevitable, i.e. starvation, the government had recently legalized the trade. The boaters still had rumrunner moves, like all the other recently legitimized tu san enterprisers.