Tigerman (6 page)

He went to the conservatory door and opened it, brought his sickle down on the nearest plant. The rubbery stuff resisted, and he had to saw at it, nearly cut his own leg with the point of the blade. With some effort, he hollowed out a space to stand, and began to work, and then suddenly he was hacking wildly, screaming at this repulsive snare of organic stuff. He was a whirlwind, a living saw. He struck and struck and struck and he felt it fall around him, and he worked beyond fatigue with an energy he hadn’t felt in years. He toiled and swore and grinned and wept, and he fought. He never once stopped moving, throwing aside pieces of roped plant until he felt the anger in him subside and wondered abruptly and somewhat awkwardly where it had come from. He wasn’t one of those men who went off. He’d never been a bar brawler or – something in him cringed back, it was the worst thing he could imagine being – a wife-beater. He didn’t really have much of a temper. Hadn’t, until this moment. But here he was, alone in a garden, declaring a war of extinction on a field of tomatoes. It was so wasteful. That notion made him stop, bewildered, and he wondered at the idea that it was wasteful to chop down plants, but somehow not so much so to do the same with men.

There was a pain in his back and a warning sense of overstretch in his shoulders. He stared down at his hands – raw and bloody and sliced across the knuckles – and then looked up to see how much desolation he had wrought. He hoped it wouldn’t be too bad. Then he had to look around twice more to make sure he hadn’t lost his way in the fog of soldier’s gardening. But it was true.

He was almost five feet from the door. He had worked for nearly a whole day, in a straight line, and come less than his own height into the forest. He stared out at the vast field with a sense of awe. They should send military planners here, he thought, to learn about insurgency.

During the night, his hands had swelled up, red and harsh, and when he tried to wash them the following morning the warm water felt like fire and he screamed. He couldn’t use the radio because his fingers were too swollen, so he walked to Beauville and showed his hands to the boy, whose eyes grew very wide. The boy reached out and took his wrists, gently turned the big red slabs this way and that, and then removed from his knapsack a very old Swiss Army knife, and unfolded the magnifying glass. He peered at the scrapes and cuts, and showed them to the Sergeant through the lens. Ragged, as if he had burned them on tiny ropes. A bead of clear plasma rose from one of the little holes, a puff of red cells within. The boy sighed like an older brother.

‘Tomatoes,’ he said. ‘You cut tomatoes. With your hands?’

‘Yes.’

‘Next time, with grenades!’ the boy said, and mimed throwing one. ‘Ka-blam! Already cooked.’ He sighed again, then removed from the side pocket of his bag a small pot, and, using his little finger, touched a tiny flake of the wax within to the Sergeant’s hand. The relief was ecstatic, so sudden it almost hurt. He gasped.

‘Good?’ the boy asked.

‘Yes! Where can I get some?’

The boy administered more salve, but sparingly. He looked concerned. ‘You better come with me. See the Witch.’

‘What witch?’

‘She is American, the good kind. Johns Hopkins. That is a very good school.’

In the Mancreu worldview, Americans were people who got up early and ran five kilometres before breakfast and urged you to improve yourself. They seemed to believe that the right mixture of Nike, granola and hard work would turn anyone, anywhere in the world, into a millionaire. And, of course, there were darkside Americans too, the ones where all that virtue and enthusiasm found its outlet in villainy, whether for personal gain or the security of the state. It was tricky, with Americans, because you never knew which you were getting. But the boy was a brand snob. Johns Hopkins was a good school, so the Witch was at least somewhat acceptable.

‘She’s a doctor?’

‘She is a witch,’ the boy said. ‘She has warts. It is very traditional.’

In the event, the Witch had no warts. She was actually rather beautiful, in a distracted way. The Sergeant knew it was a beauty the boy would not be able to see because he was young.

‘Lester,’ the Sergeant said, when she asked his name. ‘Lester Ferris.’ He listened to it, wondering. ‘Lester Ferris.’ It suited someone else.

The Witch was looking at him, and he realised he had been repeating the words in different tones, trying them out. ‘Sorry.’

She nodded. ‘Soldier?’

‘Yes. Well. Not for much longer. Retiring.’

That apparently concluded the smalltalk. ‘Show me,’ she said, then winced when he dutifully extended his arms.

He felt the need to apologise. ‘I wasn’t intending . . .’ To go berserk? To see the red mist and fill up with hate for a yard full of fruit? ‘I didn’t know this could happen,’ he amended firmly.

She turned his hands. He half expected her to say they’d have to come off. She wore a pair of loose trousers and a kind of long shirt with pockets at the hip. It smelled of turpentine, and he wondered if she was an oil painter as well as a witch.

‘The tomatoes retain some of the chemicals in the Discharge Clouds,’ she said. ‘Not in the fruit,’ as he stared at her aghast, ‘but in the leaves and stems. They break down into . . . well. You washed yourself in all kinds of puke.’

He twitched. The word ‘puke’ sounded wrong from her, like a duchess with only one ear.

‘I’ll make a salve up for you. Do you want something for the stress, as well?’

He wasn’t sure what that meant.

‘Right,’ she muttered. ‘My mistake.’ She looked at his right hand more closely, and growled. ‘Damn.’ She tugged on his right ring finger. ‘What’s this?’

The finger was crooked, price of a scuffle a million years ago. Was it in the line, or in a barracks somewhere? The Sergeant couldn’t remember. He couldn’t feel anything in it at all. He explained. She left him there, rummaged, came back. He was expecting the salve, but instead she carried a roll of twine and a wicked little hooked knife, the kind used by fishermen for nets and by farmers for gelding. He devoutly hoped she proposed to fish, but she did not. She reached over, back, and pasted something onto his finger, then cut a short loop of twine and tied it tightly around the base. ‘Look away,’ she said, and when he didn’t she sighed again and said, ‘All right.’

Something wriggled in his hand, a muscle in spasm. A tired finger. That finger. Dead, but now it wriggled.

She took the hook knife, and he reached over with his other hand to pass her the string, but suddenly she was cutting open the pad of his red, sausage finger along the line of one of his grazes, a deft, deep aperture welling blood and pus and something else, a grey-blue thing with a leech mouth, and then the grey-blue thing was a vein and the leech mouth belonged to a black worm which she nailed to the table with the point of the hook knife, and she slammed his hand deep into a jar of clear water which smelled wrong and it bubbled – cauldron! – and he recognised the smell, a kind of disinfectant he hadn’t seen since Bosnia. The worm writhed on the table, bleeding. Probably bleeding his blood as well as its own.

‘Hate those little fuckers,’ she said. ‘After a few months they can get into your brain. Disgusting way to die. I told you to look away,’ she added unsympathetically as he retched. ‘Don’t you dare spew on my carpet.’ But then she relented and agreed that it must be quite a shock, and gave him a dozen tablets, once a day with food, to make sure he didn’t get infected.

‘Thank you,’ he said.

‘Breanne,’ she replied.

‘What?’

‘Breanne. My name. Not Brian or Briony. Breanne.’

‘Thank you, Breanne.’

‘What are you doing in Mancreu, Lester?’

‘I honestly have no idea.’

‘You’re with NatProMan?’

‘No, I’m at Brighton House.’

She stared at him for a second, as if he’d claimed to have come from another world, and then blinked. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘You’re him.’

‘Yes.’ But if that meant anything to her, good or bad, she evidently felt no need to pass it on.

He dawdled, inventing twinges and concerns, until she smiled and very politely kicked him out.

After that, the boy determined his friend needed to spend more time relaxing. ‘You come and meet people,’ he ordered. ‘Learn Moitié!’ The word was short for ‘moitié-moitié’, literally ‘half and half’, the Swiss name for a fondue made with a mix of cheeses and the Mancreu name for the mishmash French-Arabic they spoke when they couldn’t be bothered with English.

The Sergeant had tried to tell him he was tired, or that he couldn’t for official reasons, but there was, he discovered, nothing more persistent than a small boy of uncertain parentage and various talents who has decided he wants to show off his expertise in haggling to his big, slow friend. The boy crouched on the passenger seat of the Land Rover and pointed: ‘There! Left! No, totally the other left! Hashtag: SATNAVFAIL! Zomg!’ And then they would arrive in a side street or at a corner shop with a faded board outside advertising something as unhelpful as ‘fish’, and the boy would be welcomed, greeted like a prince, and there was a special price, yes, of course.

The Sergeant made a note of the Leavings, the times and places, and took himself for a run, letting the inner sadist ride him until he was sweating and weary. Then he showered and went out to the car.

THE SERGEANT TURNED
the Land Rover slowly around a narrow bend, using the horn. The tyres complained on the surface of the road. Mancreu high heat was ghastly, made hard by the flatiron rocks and the merciless reflected light from the ocean all around. The salt dried the air and the dust coated the skin and mouth, and you could feel you were dying of thirst even when you were drinking. When the cold came it was carried on sea winds from the south, but the warm heart of the mountains and the shelter of the Cupped Hands broke the force of the gale on the lee side. The south side was stripped and gnarled by storms and then battered by rain which fell in continuous streams from the thunderheads. This day was in between, the tail end of a bread-oven month, white caps on the water to the ocean side a warning that the rainy days were coming.

He worried about the boy as he drove, and about what would happen to the remaining civilians when the island was eventually purged. It had bothered him from the beginning, but more and more as time went by and the inevitable end drew closer. He had seen refugee columns and resettlement camps around the world, and he did not care to imagine what the boy would become by living in one. A warlord, in the end, or a corpse. Such places did not admit of middle ways. The joy would be cut from him, for sure.

The Sergeant had a plan to deal with that crisis if – when – it arrived, but he was still working out the detail. There were preparations he had to make, investigations he had been conducting quietly for some time. But he had not actually put the plan into action, and he had not spoken to the boy about it. There were good reasons. Sound reasons.

He braked again to go around another impossible bend, avoiding his own eyes in the mirror. None of these reasons was a lack of resolve on his part, or a lack of personal courage. He was almost sure.

The town and the port spread out below him, the invisible ships surprisingly close to the land. He felt his eyes flick away. Everyone found ways not to see what was in the bays. The Fleet could have painted itself pink or burned to the waterline, and no one would have remarked upon it. People saw the harbour and the horizon and nothing in between. Even the fishermen who went out and zipped in between the big vessels, selling fresh fish and crab, and the traders on junkboats who bought and sold DVDs and Coca-Cola and fresh meat and anything else they could lay hands on – even they had a strange amnesia about which ships they visited. It wasn’t feigned. It was a habit so totally ingrained as to have become part of reality. The enormous ships were a fact of life, and it was a fact that you couldn’t see them.

As with everything else, the boy was an exception. He bartered with the ship captains, argued with them loudly and crudely, demanded – and received – favours, tours, T-shirts, and team hats. He had a Delta Force hat, and a Real Madrid jacket, and a signed copy of something called
Transmetropolitan
which the Sergeant understood by the jubilation it had entailed to be a major coup. The boy had won them at dice or paid for them with gossip or simply asked for and received them. It seemed the captains admired his cheek, or maybe they were just desperately grateful for someone who acknowledged their existence. It didn’t matter how tough you were, how psychologically motivated. It hurt to be invisible, even if that was the whole point.

Like Diego Garcia, of rendition infamy, Mancreu had been found new uses by democratic governments wishing to avoid the consequences of their own inconvenient liberties, and by corporations seeking relief from the onerous duties of civilisation. The border on the map had been softened and in places entirely cut away, so that a strange zone of legal limbo was created between the breakers and the three-mile limit. In this maritime twilight it was often hard to tell where nations ended and other entities began; where corporate activity shaded into organised crime, spying into a trade in unlawful commodities. Clustered across the Cupped Hands lay a mass of unaffiliated shipping: prisons for deniable detainees and hospitals for unethical procedures; data havens, grey banks, untaxed subsidiaries; floating harems and forced-labour factories, auction houses for contraband goods; torture facilities for hire. So long as it never touched the shore, the business of the Fleet was invisible.

When the storms came in above the southern mountains, the ships drew apart from one another so that covert prows didn’t gouge holes in unacknowledged hulls; so that secret masts didn’t scythe across false-flag decks. When the weather abated, they huddled, so they could share cable television connections to the land and shout news to one another from deck to deck. American intelligence officers and their corporate-side cousins traded Sara Lee brownies with Poles for vodka and Frenchmen for cigarettes. Brits gave up HumInt and
lapsang souchong
and bought red wine and fresh milk, and sometimes played cricket on a long, lean supertanker moored forever at the northernmost limit of the zone. And all of them traded snippets of information to the Mafia and the Triads in exchange for occasional housekeeping jobs,
ex gratia
hookers and something to read. And the crooks were good for vanishings, when an interrogation grew heated and a subject expired from his own ignorance. On other deployments the Sergeant had occasionally seen that sort of thing written up by contractors as
self-injurious passive psychological attack culminating in asset compromise
. But here, on the ships of the Black Fleet, those terms of art were unnecessary. So long as the Fleet kept its activities to the waters of Mancreu, no reports were ever written. Intelligence was sourceless, all analysis was done on site and only the pure information ever emerged. The Rule of Law within the territory of the western democracies was preserved, and the conscience of ministers was notionally clean. Mancreu was a tapestry of questions unasked, because the answers were obvious. It had been going on for so long now that, at least to a global press whose owners sipped Chardonnay with prime ministers, it was no longer distressing.