Serpent's Walk

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Sunday, January 17, 2044

Club Lingahnie’s library stood on a rise. It was a degree or two cooler than Lessing ‘s house down by the beach on Madolenihmw Bay. The building was new, a long, one-room frame cabin with an “office” tacked on the front, and it still smelled of sawdust, paint, and varnish.

Lessing’s watch told him that it was after midnight. He had been unable to sleep and didn’t want to bother Jameela. He had therefore slipped on his pants, shirt, and sneakers and come up here to browse.

It had taken Ponape to prove to Lessing that books could be fun. He had never been much of a reader, a reason for much misery during his brief encounter with college, but the island had a lonely, cut-off, Robinson Crusoe feel to it that made reading more attractive than satellite TV, sex, drugs, alcohol, or other pastimes to which visitors to the South Pacific were sometimes prone.

He had another reason for reading as well, one he was embarrassed to admit to Liese or Borchardt or Jennifer. He had always been interested in military matters, but he found himself outclassed in the long, historical debates with which his comrades whiled away the time. He thus quietly began reading up on World War II. From there it was only a step to other topics: nothing very scholarly, maybe, but a cut above the comic books Wrench included in his shipments from the United States.

He clicked the light switch and was blinded by the raw, white glare of the unshielded bulbs. He almost went for his beeper alarm!

Someone was here, sitting in the darkness in a chair by the one window.

He squinted and was surprised to see Abu Talib, the British-educated “Descendant” from Syria. The Arab and his family had been club guests — refugees, really — for three months now.

“Jesus, you startled me!” Lessing growled. “Thought you were a kikibird!” He took his hand out of his pocket and noticed it was trembling. Constant tension did that, even to an experienced mere!

The Arab arose gracefully. He was tall, with wavy, black hair, a cleft chin, and big, expressive, dark eyes, the kind described as “flashing.” In a friendlier age he might have been a film star. He wore an open-necked, white sports shirt, white duck pants, and thong sandals.

He said, “Terribly sorry, Mr. Lessing.”

“Nobody’s supposed to be in here after hours!” Lessing released his tension in a burst of official pique. “And why not turn on the light?”

“The dark is soothing, and one can look out over the bay from here. We Easterners meditate now and then, y’know.”

The man was apparently joking, though with Britishers it was hard to tell. Lessing glanced around but saw nothing out of order.

Abu Talib seemed disposed to talk. “Bloody humidity! Why Herman chose Ponape is a mystery! This is no Shangri-La.” The wry British accent didn’t match the face; it did provide Wrench with something to mimic at parlies.

“Didn’t mean to disturb you either. After a book.”

“Ah?” Abu Talib trailed a finger along the spines of the volumes on the shelf beside him. “Building up quite a library, eh?”

“I usually stick to novels.” What he really wanted was the newly-arrived history of the armored forces in the Baalbek War. Its bright, red dust cover wasn’t visible on the cataloging desk. Had somebody else already checked it out?

“Interested in some jolly pom tapes? I think I know where Mr. Bauer keeps them… for the edification of the senior members, you understand.”

Was the other still joking? “Not really. I prefer doing to watching. Never got the pom habit.”

The Arab smiled. “Neither did I. Afraid history’s my cuppa.”

“Your…?”

“Oh. Cup of tea. My hobby… my vice.”

“I hear a lot of these books came from your library in Syria.”

“My father’s and grandfather’s, really. They’d get me arrested in Damascus now.”

“In America, too. I’ve been looking at some of ’em.”

“Yes, the ones on twentieth-century history that aren’t ‘politically correct.’”

“The ones that say the ‘Holocaust’ never happened? That Adolf Hitler was a good guy in a white hat?”

“What? Oh, ah, yes… white hat. I see. Not so. The ‘Holocaust’ did happen. But it didn’t happen quite the way and to the extent the Establishment historians claim. Many people did die of typhus, malnutrition, and other diseases, but not the ‘six million’ claimed by the Jews.”

Lessing repressed a snort. “And no atrocities, I suppose?”

“Oh, there were, but not because of a systematic policy. There were sadists and brutal guards, the sort you get in every prison system, particularly when you can’t be choosy because of the war. Some zealous bureaucrats also ‘carried out orders’ in ways calculated to ‘solve problems quickly.’”

“If there were atrocities, why didn’t the Germans do something about them?”

“Oh, they did. In 1943 and 1944 the Germans… the SS… held an investigation into atrocities at the Buchenwald camp. Not only was the camp commandant, Karl Koch, executed, but the inquiry uncovered other crimes as well. Eight hundred cases resulted in some two hundred sentences. This doesn’t relieve Germany of her responsibility for the hardships of the war, of course, but it does put a bit of a different light on things.”

“Wrench says there weren’t any gas chambers either.” He knew this would get a rise out of the man.

“I think he’s right. Some were built after the war just for the tourists: they’re not even airtight. Others were merely storage cellars. Zyklon-B, the cyanide preparation the Germans are supposed to have used, is a delousing agent; it kills fleas and lice in clothing. It’s quite lethal, but it’s not practical to gas rooms full of people with it; you’d have to wait a day or more after every gassing for it to dissipate, and you’d need good protective garments for the ex-ecutioners and their helpers… which nobody seems to have seen in any of the camps. Nor does the story about vans pumped full of carbon monoxide exhaust fumes stand up. Later experiments show it doesn’t work: time-consuming, inefficient, quite impractical.

“The thing to remember when you hear these stories about ‘gas chambers, ‘ Mr. Lessing, is that Allied propaganda mythologized the Nazis: the ‘German beast,’ as Eisenhower called them, had to be exorcised. After the war there was an outcry for justice… and revenge. It’s been useful to the Jews… and to many politicians and others dependent on the Jews… to keep those feelings alive.”

“Most people say justice was the important thing.” “Most people don’t read books. Or they only read the ones the big publishers put out. Have you read that one there… the one about the ‘Malmedy massacre?’ The Germans allegedly slaughtered captured American troops near Malmedy in Belgium in 1944. After the war the Americans tried seventy-three ‘perpetrators’ and sentenced some of them to death. You’d be surprised at the methods used to extract ‘confessions!’ Was that justice? And did you know that in April 1945 American troops murdered more than five hundred German soldiers who had surrendered at the Dachau camp? No trials. They were simply lined up and shot. Justice?”

“I saw what the Izzies did in Damascus. That doesn’t make every Israeli soldier a monster! Revenge… wartime hatred.”

“Precisely my point! I asked you about justice.” Lessing turned away. “It happened a century ago. It’s like getting worked up over the massacre at Little Big Horn!”

“The Jews say that it must be remembered: ‘Never again! We Descendants want it remembered just as much because we have never received justice. We’ve been persecuted, vilified, imprisoned, and assassinated. No one looks at our evidence. Our arguments are ‘an affront to established history’ and ‘an insult to the memory of the Holocaust.’ Our books are banned in America in spite of the First Amendment to your Constitution. Is freedom of speech only for those who have constituencies and money?”

The boxy, little building was stuffy. Lessing had shut the door, and now he strode over to open it. “I still can’t see Adolf Hitler as Mr. Nice Guy.”

“Don’t be simplistic! Hitler knew what Germany needed, and he did what had to be done. More books have been written about him, I think, than about Jesus Christ, yet ninety-nine percent of them perpetuate the same old nonsense, the same fables and lies, the same speculations… some as far-fetched as the Arabian Nights! History demands proof, Mr. Lessing, not emotion, however well-intentioned. Yet society wants its heroes and villains pure white or pure black. Human beings like being selectively blind: they ignore unpleasant facts, refuse to talk about them, and cover them over, like a cat scuffing sand over its feces! People want stories that make them feel good.”

“As my friend, Charles Wren, says: ‘History’s a whore who knows which side of the bed her butt is bettered on.’”

“Eh? What? Oh… aha, quite! The ‘bettering’ is called ‘money.’ Our opponents have that aplenty!”

“Your people have money, too. The movement’s been hiring ad agencies and p.r. firms. I know.”

“True, we are doing better than before, but we have a long way to go. Our opponents have made it illegal to ‘lie’ about history, to ‘desecrate the memories of the Six Million Who Died’… or even to dispute the ‘established view’ on the most abstract of historical grounds. An agency of your United States government has ruled that ‘the Holocaust cannot be debated.’ Yet it is not we who dishonor the dead. We want the truth… and if it is against our beliefs, then so be it! No, it is our opponents who have made over the past. What else can you call the writing out of a movement, a nation, an era… and the writing in of something else entirely?”

“Um…”

“Do people become enraged when someone argues the rights or wrongs of the Norman Conquest of 1066? Of the Spanish Conquistadores’ massacres in Mexico… over a million Central American Indians slaughtered between 1492 and 1600? Innocents have died throughout history, including Americans in a dozen wars; you can freely debate those conflicts, even if you make the ‘traditional’ historians look silly! And what would a judge say if somebody sued the Flat Earthers for ‘lying’ about geography and astronomy? Or if the Neo-Pagans sued the Christian churches for ‘lying’ about the Emperor Nero? Not such a bad chap, actually! No, what we have now is an Inquisition, a censorship like the Office of the Index of the Catholic Church. It doesn’t need the rack and the stake because its sanctions are more effective!”

The conversation was making Lessing uneasy. These people were right about one thing: the ‘traditional’ view of history was so solidly implanted in every Western child’s head that he felt guilty — almost afraid — even listening to this serious, dry, bookish, Oxford Arab-German. It was like telling your kids that Santa Claus was the Devil. It took considerable balls to question such emotion-laden dogmas as those surrounding the supposed ‘Holocaust.’ He cast about for another subject. “Will you be able to go home soon?”

“To Damascus?” The Arab shrugged. “Probably never. Not under Israeli rule. Perhaps we can go to Oman… my wife has an uncle there. The Izzies never occupied Oman, just ‘protected’ it a little. You haven’t lived, Mr. Lessing, until you’ve been ‘protected’ by the Israelis.”

“They’re tough. I worked for them. I was in Colonel Copley’s mercenary battalion during the Baalbek War. I saw what happened to Damascus, Aleppo, and other places. Not pretty.”

“And you committed no wartime atrocities? Never saw any you could have stopped?”

Lessing said nothing. His involvement, his personal guilt, was a Pandora’s box he never opened. It was better not to look.

Abu Talib went on. “The thing that puzzles us Middle Easterners is America’s continual, cheery, fuzzy-headed willingness to go on paying for Israel! It doesn’t fit with your talk of democracy, freedom, and personal liberty! You know what the Izzies have done: from the Deir Yassin massacre back in 1948 to frighten the Arabs out of Palestine; to the deliberate attack on the U.S. Navy ship Liberty, with the killing of thirty-five of your sailors, back in 1967, in order to keep it from eavesdropping on the Izzies; to the invasion of Lebanon with its ghastly casualties, including the refugee camp massacres that certain high Israeli officers collaborated in; to the killing of Arab prisoners by the Israeli secret police, followed by cover-ups later; to spying against the United States and stealing nuclear weapons materials from you; to the wholesale beatings and shootings of Palestinian children in the Occupied Territories in the 1980s and ’90s; to the terrible atrocities they committed at the Sack of Cairo in 2002… right up to the Baalbek War! Yet you people go on paying for it… while preaching peace and brotherly love to the rest of the world! Before Starak, there was hardly a dissenting voice in your American Congress! You’ve provided tens of billions of dollars and let the Israelis get away with not paying it back… because they make you feel guilty with their century-old stories about the ‘Holocaust’! I doubt if even Outram can stop them.”

“Nothing new. Money and politicians: the honey and the bees, as my dad used to say.”

“The only thing that puzzles me more is Germany’s blind acquiescence to paying ‘war reparations’ to Israel… a country that didn’t even exist at the time of the Second World War! More than 200 billion marks, and still paying! Even with all the guilt the Jews have managed to pile onto Germany, it doesn’t make sense. Germans born after 1935 can no more be guilty than you can because of your ancestors’ treatment of the American Indians! I’m surprised the French aren’t still collecting ‘reparations’ for Caesar’s conquest of Gaul!”

Lessing spotted the book he wanted beneath a stack of journals. He pulled it out and tried another topic: “Your family like the South Pacific?”

The Arab stopped, finger raised to make yet another point. He blinked and said, “Nadia’s adjusting, and Sami and Faisal think the beach was made just for them.”

Abu Talib’s Syrian wife, Nadia, had been a beauty in her youth, but now her pulchritude was best described as “ample.” His two teenaged sons were addicted to swimming, sports cars, prodigal allowances, and girls. “Spoiled rotten” was a fair description. The boys had set themselves the task of evaluating the sexual potential of each of the fifty girl students sent out by the Party’s Brazilian branch. This they performed with efficiency and enthusiasm — singly, in pairs, or in squads. Felix Bauer’s new German wife, Helga, was obliged to devote several classes to urgent sex education instead of genetic theory as the curriculum prescribed.

The Arab interrupted Lessing’s thought. “And your wife, Mr. Lessing? She’s teaching Nadia Indian cooking and learning to make baklava in return. Adjusting splendidly, eh?”

Lessing nodded. To be truthful, he didn’t know. Jameela was a mystery. Outwardly she had adapted well. She played tennis with Abu Talib’s sons, learned bridge from Mrs. Delacroix, went for walks and swimming with Helga Bauer, travelled over to Kolonia, Ponape’s one town, to socialize with the Indian merchant families living there, and kept an impeccable household. Yet Lessing sensed an incompleteness: all was not right beneath the surface.

They had discussed having children, but Jameela wanted to wait. What if Pacov were to reoccur? Or the simmering bush wars in Europe to worsen? Or the turmoil in the United States to explode into civil war?

The world was too dangerous now for children, Jameela said. That was no excuse, Lessing had replied: more kids were born during wars than during limes of peace. They grew up, lived and died, and kept the species going somehow. She only smiled. After a while he gave up.

Her problem might be homesickness — culture shock — isolation from her own people. She no longer discussed history and genetics with the Party faithful but concentrated on the daily round. All Lessing could do was to provide love and support. That he did to the best of his awkward ability.

As he started to fill out a loan card for the book, he was astonished to see that the desk was brightly lit by light from the windows.

Light?

From the windows?

At midnight?

He whirled, stunned.

There were five lights out there. Five brilliant, white suns had risen and hung just above the obsidian sea. He heard the racket of helicopter engines.

The suns were combat spotlights, the kind used to illumine ground-targets at night!

He stared at Abu Talib as the hoarse chatter of copter-mounted mini-guns and the shrieking hiss-boom of air-to-ground rockets started paperclips dancing upon the desk.

Wasn’t there anybody up in the watchtower? Who was on duty in the radar and sonar room over in the communications complex?

Lessing rushed out the door. He had to get to his people, organize a defense. Who the hell was attacking them, anyhow?

Another rocket blast dazzled and deafened him. A rose of red flame bloomed over by the darkened dormitories, and blazing rubble pattered down. Screams and yells erupted from behind the communications building, and he heard the lighter yammering of automatic rifles. Somebody on their side was shooting back— though ineffectually.

Where was he going? He let his combat nerves take over and found himself flattened against the pitch-fragrant planks of the south wall of the assembly building, Abu Talib beside him. Out in the leaping orange and scarlet glare of the central parade ground he saw people running, most in nightclothes, one or two nearly naked. There were bodies there, too, tumbled piles upon the grass.

“Where…?” the Arab grated in his ear.

He decided.

“Down toward the shore line… get Jameela… and your wife! Follow me! Do as I do!” He set off at a zig-zag run, Abu Talib at his heels.

A figure bulked up out of the back-lit smoke. It was Wayne Mallon, wearing only boxer shorts, a stitch-gun clutched in both hands. They threw questions at each other, but Mallon knew nothing. He had been up at communications. The trainee on duty had had less than a minute to jabber excitedly at the radar screens before the first big bird soared in from the ocean to spew death. Communications was now a burning shell.

“Come on!” Lessing took off running again, sneakers crunching upon the gravelled path. The helicopter engines still chuffed above their heads, but the rockets and mini-guns had gone silent.

A troop landing was imminent!

They met one of the Brazilian students, a girl of about fifteen. She had found a Riga-71 submachine gun some place, and Lessing paused to wrest it from her. She didn’t know what to do with the weapon, and he needed it. She shrieked at him in Portuguese, but all he could do was point her toward the presumed safety of the trees beyond the club’s perimeter.

It took them five minutes to negotiate the path from the library to the shore. Bewildered people blocked their way, some wounded, others dazed. The propane tanks behind the mess hall began to explode with bright and deadly regularity. Three of the helicopter-mounted spotlights had gone out, but two still circled above the parade ground. Most of the shooting had stopped.

They saw their first opfoes in the lane beside the assembly hall: two men in tight, black jump suits, heavy backpacks giving them the look of creatures from Mars, faces concealed by plastic visors with built-in corn-links. One wore a helmet like a Greek warrior, Lessing saw the dim, red eye that glimmered in its crest: a night-sight. Both carried short-barrelled automatic weapons. He couldn’t tell at this distance, but the guns looked Israeli.

He pulled Mallon and Abu Talib into the shadows behind one of the classrooms. “No use,” he panted. “We can thumb those two, but they’ll have back-up. We go down to the beach, along by the boathouse. I split off there. Head over to my place. Mallon, you stay with Abu Talib and get his family out of the club. Green light?”

Mallon nodded. The Arab would have argued, but Lessing gave him a shove. “Move!”

Gunfire crackled ahead, and they heard more shouts and screaming. A rifle grenade shattered a window and exploded. Boots thudded upon the gravel path. Lessing and Mallon both went prone, hauling Abu Talib down on top of themselves. Black figures lumbered past.

They reached the swimming beach. Lessing ‘s shoes filled with Ponape’s sand and treacle-warm sea water. He halted. An opfo crouched on the seawall ahead, squinting inland, away from them, at the pyrotechnics. Lessing put him down with a neck-snapper grip from behind. Abu Talib scrabbled for the man’s gun, but it skittered over the edge of the wall into the water. They didn’t stop to check whether the opfo was dead.

They raced past the boathouse, their feet splintering the tidal pools into silver needles of moonlight. The shed was dark and silent; the opfoes had smashed the door, found no one inside, and swept on past.

The swimming beach ended beyond the boathouse. Lessing indicated the path that led upslope to Abu Talib’s cottage and squatted to cover Mallon and the Arab. He waited until they disappeared into the trees, then slipped into the underbrush along the shore.

If only he had worn his camouflage fatigues instead of a while shirt and light blue dungarees! Who could have anticipated this!

He paused to evaluate the situation. Except for sporadic firing, the battle was over, an easy victory for the enemy. Communications, the arsenal, headquarters, the watchtower, the dormitories, all were ablaze, roaring funeral pyres above the sable-velvet jungle. Somebody was using a bullhorn to call the survivors to surrender. Brief fusillades of shots followed. Perhaps Club Lingahnie’s younger guests would be spared, but it sounded as though the instructors and senior visitors were being “emphatically deactivated,” to use the current euphemism.

He went on, gliding unseen through the hundred or so meters of undergrowth that separated the swimming beach from his quarters, past angular blacknesses that were garden chairs and tables, to press himself against the cool, white-painted wall.

His living room was brightly lit, not by the Club’s electrical system — that was a bonfire now — but by a single, dazzling beam: a hand-held spotlight.

He slipped around to the side, clambered up onto the South Sea Island-style verandah, dodged potted palms and porch furniture, and slid along the wall by the kitchen. He avoided the back door — there might be a sentry — and peered in through the pantry window. Its inner door was open, and he could see most of the living room. The archway to the kitchen was outside of his field of vision to his right. Directly opposite, beyond the serving bar that divided the front room from the kitchen area, lay the hallway that led back to the three bedrooms. A heavy, battery-powered military lantern squatted like a one-eyed Cyclops atop the blue, plastic surface of the bar.

Jameela leaned against the serving bar facing him, her silken shalwar-qameez sleeping costume silver and ice-blue in the lantern’s stark beam. Behind her, in the semi-darkness of the living room, he recognized Helga Bauer. What was she holding in her hands? A golden pot? No, it looked like Lessing’s Alladin’s lamp! What was going on?

He risked standing up, his light-colored clothing good camouflage against the white wall, and got a clear view of the interior. Somebody — Felix Bauer — knelt there upon Jameela’s Persian carpet, one leg of the overturned coffee table sticking up beside him like a spike. The German was swaying rhythmically to and fro. What was he doing? Using some sort of tool? A military field shovel?

Lessing realized what was happening.

Bauer, Jameela, and Helga were captives. Lessing sensed someone in the kitchen, and there was almost certainly another opfo in the farther shadows of the living room: the shadow of a gun barrel showed there against Jameela’s gay, blue-and-white drapes.

The man in the kitchen came into the living room.

It was Richmond. He halted beside Jameela at the serving counter and said something to Bauer.

The kikibird looked the same as when Lessing had last seen him in New Orleans: the baggy suit limp and impressed, the big hands as bony and pale, the liver spots like blotches of purplish decay upon the balding skull. He bent and took something gingerly from Bauer’s fingers. His expression was no longer morose. He looked positively happy — satisfied — exalted.

He had found Lessing’s stash of Pacov.

Bauer must have told him, willingly or otherwise, and the opfoes had made the German dig it up!

Richmond had what he wanted. He was inspecting the metal box Bauer handed him. He forced the latch open, looked inside, and smiled. Jameela — and Bauer and Helga — were of no further use. Perhaps he wouldn’t harm them.

But then perhaps he might.

Richmond spoke to the invisible man in the living room, at first imperiously and then with angry insistence. Lessing felt rather than heard the vibrations of his voice through the flimsy wooden wall. At last a bearded commando in a black combat tunic appeared to bark a command at the two women. He gestured with the muzzle of his submachine gun toward the hallway leading to the bedrooms.

From the kitchen a louder voice snapped a sentence in a language Lessing recognized as Hebrew. Blackboard halted, indecision mirrored upon his swarthy features.

Richmond arose clutching the plastic envelope containing the two containers of Pacov to his rumpled shirtfront as a preacher holds a Bible. Lessing’s Stik-Ever tape seals came away, and Richmond pulled out first the silvery globe of Pacov-1, then the black cylinder of Pacov-2. He held them up to the light. He said something else. The soldier looked past him at the man in the kitchen.

This third opfo chose this moment to emerge and stand arms akimbo in the kitchen archway. There was no insignia on his battle-dress, but the up-julting chin, the neat pencil of moustache, the cap of close-cropped, curly, black hair, and the arrogant set of his shoulder blades identified him; Lessing had met his like many times during the Baalbek War. Here, almost certainly, was the commanding officer, the one who had supervised the massacre of Club Lingahnie.

The officer appeared upset. Lessing didn’t need to hear the words, which were in Hebrew. Richmond was interfering in the chain of command, and the CO. was having none of it. A camouflage-daubed finger swept up and pointed: outside! Civilians out! Stay the hell out of military business!

Richmond shook his head vehemently and shot a contemptuous remark down at Bauer. The German still squatted in the seeping water in the shallow pithe had dug, head down and arms at his sides. He probably already thought of himself as dead. Neither of the two women had moved.

Richmond held up the envelope, tapped the glassine. It was the officer’s turn to shake his head. The kikibird persisted, anger-ridges on his cheeks gleaming fish-belly white in the spotlight’s beam.

The officer waved a hand in a furious “I-give-up” gesture. He was surrendering to higher authority: political clout over military expertise.

The bearded soldier mouthed an order and raised his gun again. Helga and Jameela both spoke at once, but Lessing couldn’t make out what they said. Blackbeard began to herd them along the hall toward the bedrooms. Helga Bauer turned her face toward Richmond, and Lessing saw that she was weeping, pleading, begging. The soldier thrust her brusquely on into the master bedroom at the end of the short corridor. Jameela followed. Blackbeard banged the door shut after them; then he returned, his snub-nosed submachine gun nonchalantly cradled in one black-sleeved arm.

He halted behind Bauer, bent, and touched the nape of the German’s neck with his weapon’s muzzle. Bauer shut his eyes and opened his mouth in a round “O.”

The soldier backed off a step and fired one round.

Bauer tumbled forward, his life already gone. The walls of the sandy pit started to collapse upon his convulsing limbs, and muddy, red water sloshed up onto the darker red of Jameela’s carpet.

In the bedroom Helga Bauer shrieked. Her anguish was audible even through two walls and over the racket of distant explosions.

Richmond gave another order. The soldier rubbed at his bristly beard, grinned, and turned back to the bedroom door. The officer stalked forward to protest, clenching a fist under the kikibird’s nose. Richmond’s face took on a piously superior expression, the look of a man who quotes directly from the Holy Book: a Supreme Party Directive, an Imperial Edict — whatever the current omnipotent authority happened to be. The officer threw up his hands in disgust and tramped back into the kitchen.

Richmond grinned at Blackbeard and jabbed a thumb toward the bedrooms. He reached down and patted himself on the crotch of his baggy trousers: an unmistakably soiled, ugly, obscene gesture.

Enough was enough.

Lessing stepped back where he was safe from flying glass, aimed for Blackbeard, and put a half dozen rounds from his Riga-71 through the pantry window. He snapped off a quick shot at Richmond as well but didn’t dare fire a longer burst into the living room.

Jameela and Helga Bauer were in the bedroom behind its far wall; that, he knew, consisted of no more than two sheets of fibreboard. Bullets would go right through it

Blackbeard leaped straight up, then went down, arms windmilling. Slugs from his submachine gun ripped splinters and plaster from the ceiling.

The commander in the kitchen screamed something. His pistol barrel poked out around the comer of the archway. Lessing was prepared: he rolled across to the left side of the pantry window, and the officer’s shots whined harmlessly off into the night. The man now committed the mistake Lessing had almost made: he mistook the flimsy partition for solid cover. Lessing’s gun yammered. The officer came tumbling out from behind the riddled doorjamb, his eyes wide as he gaped at the ruin half a magazine of steel-jacketed lead had made of his natty tunic.

There were times when one had to appreciate substandard building practices.

Noise erupted from the kitchen. Either a second man was already there, or else a sentry had just entered through the back door. Stitch-gun explosions peppered the woodwork beside Lessing’s head. He let off only one shot in return. His magazine must be nearly empty, and he had no more.

The third man began to squall for help. Lessing cast about, found a chunk of wood from the shattered window sash, and lobbed it around the comer into the kitchen. At the same time he yelled as though to friends behind him, “Down, you guys! Grenade’.”

The refrigerator door slammed as his opponent dived behind it. Lessing leaped in through the pantry window, crouched, skidded, and rose up from behind the serving bar. He rattled off his last shots into the figure he glimpsed cowering on the kitchen floor.

“Sorry, no grenade,” Lessing panted at him. “Fresh out!” The man shrieked and jackknifed over.

In a single motion Lessing fell to his knees, twisted, and came up with Blackboard’s pretty, little submachine gun. He performed a land-based barrel roll and ended covering the living room.

Richmond wasn’t there.

The room was empty. The front door hung ajar.

Footsteps pounded along the verandah outside.

Glass crashed at the far end of the house, followed by a crescendo of sharp pistol shots. Lessing heard screams. Women’s screams.

Oh, God….

His thigh muscles cramped as he staggered to his feet. He was getting too old for this kind of thing!

Then he was at the bedroom door. Once, twice, he slammed his shoulder into the panel, unaware of any pain. It sprang open, and he staggered through.

In the spotlight’s reflected glare he saw Helga Bauer crouching by the bed. She was dead, her limbs outflung, her eyes wide open, like china marbles. Her heavy breasts were suffused with dark blood.

On the floor, by the window, lay a sprawl of silver and ice-blue.

Jameela had been struggling to open the sash when Richmond had come running around the comer of the verandah. He must have seen the women through the window and fired at them, out of sheer malice.

Lessing knelt beside his wife, turned her over, cradled her head, felt the seeping wetness among her tangled tresses. There was blood everywhere. He didn’t know how to stanch it, what to do. The Club doctor? Mallon? Abu Talib? Mrs. Delacroix? He even thought of surrendering, yelling for the opfoes to send in a medic.

Useless.

Years of combat experience told him that. He let Jameela down again, as gently as he could.

Shock numbed him. Sour vomit and bitter bile choked in his throat. His fingers trembled and clenched upon his wife’s dark-sticky, silver nightdress.

Blazing rage. Cold fury. Black hatred.

He ought to be feeling those things. But he didn’t.

What he felt was something else, something neither hot nor cold, red nor black, sweet nor bitter: an orgasm, a climax, a rush like a shot of 150-proof Cuban rum, a pop of heroin, and a big snuffle of happy dust, all at once.

Lessing knew the need to murder.

He got to his feet. Shouts sounded from upslope, behind the house, and others answered from the swimming beach. Opfoes were coming. He eased himself out through the bedroom window.

Richmond.

He would find Richmond. He would kill Richmond.

A black spot caught his eye: a smear of glistening blood upon the verandah railing. He must have nicked him — or the bastard had cut himself on the broken glass from the window. Richmond would leave a trail.

Lessing permitted himself a smile.

A landscaped terrace extended out some six meters from this side of the manager’s house. Beyond lay an undergrowth-choked ravine that separated Lcssing’s grounds from the knoll occupied by the communications complex. The latter was an inferno, dying now, and shrouded in a pall of smoke. Man-made lights flickered there, and figures moved like satanic puppets amidst the red-limned smoke. The opfoes were probably using the place as a beacon, a regrouping center for their troops. Lessing thought to hear the whuff-whuff of helicopter blades above the hiss and crackle of the fire.

Richmond would head in that direction. What the kikibird might not know was that the far side of the ravine was steep and the underbrush too dense to penetrate without a machete.

Lessing crossed the terrace and dropped down into the tangled bushes below. The damp vegetation had the claustrophobic feel of a rabbit warren, a troll’s tunnel down to Hell. He noted a second blood smear on the trunk of a sapling. He bared his teeth again; Richmond had passed this way.

When Richmond discovered he couldn’t get up the opposite bank he would turn left, down the ravine, toward the shore. Then he would try to follow the beach around the rocky headland to the communications jetty.

He’d pick his way with extra caution. The two fragile flasks he carried were more deadly than the Serpent’s apple in the Garden of Eden.

Branches rustled and snapped. Somebody ahead was panting, wheezing in fatigue and panic. Lessing froze to check Blackboard’s submachine gun. The magazine still held five cartridges. Wonder of wonders, the weapon was made to hold two magazines at once, and the second one was both present and full!

“Richmond,” he called softly. “Hey, Richmond. I’m coming.”

Patience, the prime virtue for both pursuer and pursued, was hard, but he forced himself to stay still. At last a tiny splash echoed up from below. He could see nothing, black upon black, ebon crepe upon sable. Lessing began to creep on his belly toward the water. Slimy-feeling wet leaves caressed his cheeks, and the stench of warm decay clogged his nostrils. Another time he might have worried about snakes, leeches, and insects; now they didn’t matter.

Sharp wedges of light slashed the brush behind him: powerful electric lanterns. Richmond’s friends were here.

Somebody yelled, “This way!” A second voice questioned, “Zay hul” A third snarled, “How the hell should I know?” and launched into a disgruntled diatribe in Hebrew. Branches crunched, twigs rattled, and someone more nervous than the rest let off a shot, followed by a grunted obscenity.

There was little time. The opfoes would thumb him. He had to kill Richmond first. Life held no other purpose.

Soft splashing sounded again farther off to the right. Lessing found himself amidst logs and driftwood, bare and ghostly white, like the bleached skeletons of prehistoric animals. He almost fell headlong into a tidal pool, and little nocturnal sea creatures scuttled away in terror.

The lights above and behind him were closer; the opfoes were descending the slope in a ragged skirmish line.

There: a sable blotch upon the leaden blur of the sea. Lessing writhed down over the lighter grey of a log and slid into the brackish water. He crawled, wriggled, got to his knees, then to a crouch, only his face and his gun above the tepid, lapping waves. The blotch halted; a white oval appeared at its top: Richmond had turned to look back.

Beams of light cut the darkness. A voice bawled a question. Richmond answered with a hoarse bleat for help. It had to be now.

Lessing raised himself just enough to take aim. He let off everything that was left in the first magazine, fumbled the lever that switched to the second one, and added another half-dozen rounds for good measure. The little weapon chattered, sounding like a child’s toy out here in the open. Richmond squealed, a high, thin sound, like a wounded puppy.

Lessing heard a splash, then floundering. He slid back down into the water two meters from his original position. Lights, shouts, and gunfire poured out of the blackness behind him, and a line of slugs raised roiling foam in the place where he had been.

He crawled, dived, and swam, ignoring the scrapes he got from barnacles in the shallow water. Shots spattered behind him. A slug plunked into the water a meter from his face, and he ducked, stopped for breath, and peered around. Dim, shifting forms were visible against the ink-black of the shore: the opfoes were fishing Richmond out of the drink.

What now? He could leap up to empty his gun into Richmond and his rescuers. No, that was stupid. In Lessing’s book suicide wasn’t unthinkable, but it had to have a purpose.

Lessing was a fair swimmer. He could head straight out into Madolenihmw Bay, then travel parallel to the beach until he could come ashore beyond the club perimeter. Suicide might be more attractive then: gather what survivors he could and return to kill as many of these black-clad murderers as he could. Heroism? No, just revenge.

But why? Why bother? Jameela was dead.

Her death hadn’t hit him yet. Better to act now, while he was still sane, before he went berserk.

Lights clustered around Richmond’s limp body. Five or six opfoes were hauling a stretcher down through the undergrowth. Others were looking out to sea, toward Lessing. They couldn’t see him. He was just a ripple or a chunk of flotsam on the water. He could stay that way for at least another hour before the first glimmering of false dawn. He could still escape.

His foot struck against a hard object: a boulder. He cursed under his breath and veered away.

And he saw something that awoke horror all the way down to the roots of his primordial soul!

Floating right beside him, six inches away, was a human face! The eyes were open, pupilless, and white. The mouth hung agape. The lank, wispy hair was like drowned seaweed.

Memories of nightmare! The dead chiefs of old Ponape! Pacov’s myriad bloated victims!

He thrashed, gulped water, choked, and coughed. He couldn’t help it.

He gathered his feet under him, scraping his ankle against the jagged rock, and found that the water was just neck-deep. He lurched up, fear loosening his bowels.

The face was that of Sami Abu Talib. The boy was dead, quite naked, a dark red corsage of a bullet hole in his left breast. Near him Lessing saw a second body: a girl, also nude, her long tresses tangled with leaves and twigs and wrapped around her face, her breasts bobbing gently in the languorous waves. The opfoes had surprised poor Sami with one of his Brazilian popsies, the last date he would ever enjoy.

Lessing had been seen. A soldier shouted, “Hu stoma!” Others echoed him. Somebody called, “There he is!” Shots spattered the waternearby, and the Arab boy’s corpse jerked and writhed as more bullets struck it.

Lessing dived over the half-submerged rock, seeking deeper water on its seaward side. Something spanged off the boulder, and he felt stinging pain above his left ear.

Dazzling light. A bursting rocket of agony in his skull.

His eyesight dimmed.

There! He was on the outer side of the rock. He let himself sink down into the soft, warm, nurturing ocean, out of sight, beyond harm, down where none could see.

He would hide. His mother wouldn’t find him here. She ‘d search the house in vain. His father would eventually come to help, puffing ineffectually at his pipe and grumbling. But Lessing was hidden, down at the bottom of the bathtub, hidden….

Figures loomed over him. His parents? Only one way out! He thrashed and struggled. He would swim right down the drain, down and down, slipping like an eel through the pipes beneath the house until he reached the sewers, then the river, and eventually the safety of the great, endless, all-embracing sea.

Calm.

Eternity.

He knew nothing for a time.

Then he was awake again. Hands held him, and brusque fingers probed at the left side of his head above his ear. Pain danced there, and he tried to pull away. A gutturally accented voice said, “Hold the bastard. One more stitch.”

“Will he live?” someone else questioned in crisper, lighter tones.

“Why not? But am I wasting my time? Are you just going to shoot him when I’m done?” Something soft pressed against Lessing’s temple, and he heard adhesive tape being ripped from its reel. He discovered that he was strapped to a stretcher, his hands manacled in front of him. His wrists hurt

“We won’t. That’s for headquarters to decide. This is Alan Lessing, the manager of this snakepit. He’s on Captain Levi’s list He goes back to Jerusalem with us.”

“What the hell for?” a third, deeper voice snarled. “Isn’t he the one who thumbed the captain? And Ariel? And the tech-sergeant… whatzizname?”

“Yes. And Richmond too,” Crisp-voice added.

“Who cares about that schmuck? Captain Levi, now…”

“Why was Richmond sent along with this mission anyway?” Guttural-voice interrupted. “Trouble! Trouble!” He mumbled on in Hebrew.

“Hey, I don’t speak Hebrew that well,” complained the man Lessing called Crisp-voice. “It still isn’t the official language in the United States!”

“Not yet, anyway!” said the man with the guttural accent, he who seemed to be the medic.

“Maybe not ever. Not with Outram and his putzes getting cuter every day.”

Somebody in the background muttered, “We’ll take care of them too, just like this bunch.”

“We didn’t do all that well here,” the medic complained. “Got none of their top people except the Arab and the old lady. And this guy.”

Deep-voice snorted. “So what do you want? We took out their whole installation! And little piss-holes like Ponape are going to think a long time before letting these fuckers build new ones!”

“Anyway, Richmond was none of our business,” Crisp-voice finished. “Captain Levi was the only one who was briefed about him. Now they’re both dead.”

“Let’s get this Nazi bastard over to the copters,” Deep-voice suggested. “Our wounded and the other prisoners are already gone, and we’re supposed to be off this shit-pile by oh-three-hundred.” Lessing’s stretcher was lifted, then borne outside along uneven pathways, over obstacles, and through unseen, dew-dripping branches. Flashlight beams swung and danced beside him He guessed dizzily that they were heading up across the parade ground and over to what was left of the communications building.

A new voice, a woman’s, spoke in his ear. “You’ll be all right. Your wound is minor… a flap of scalp torn loose by a rock fragment.” He smelled disinfectant and knew without seeing that here was a tired, middle-aged nurse. She sounded sympathetic.

“My wife,” he husked. “My wife? Jameela?” Saying her name was like shovelling dirt upon her coffin. “Jameela? My wife!” He couldn’t bring himself to ask if she were dead.

The nurse was silent. Then: “Your clothes are wet and bloody. I’ve brought you a dry shirt and a pair of pants from your wardrobe back there.”

“My wife, God damn it!”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t told.” She was lying. He knew now for certain.

Only one of the big helicopters still crouched in front of the charred shell that had housed the communications center. Lessing’s bearers lugged him up a clanging, oil-stinking metal ramp into a cargo-bay crammed with web-tied crates and lit by a couple of bluish glow-lamps. He was dumped, stretcher and all, between two other stretchers. A stocky commando sat down facing Lessing, rifle between his knees.

He strained to see who his neighbors were. To his left, Abu Talib’s aquiline features were visible amidst a swirl of blankets. The Arab did not move, and his eyes were closed. He was still alive: the rise and fall of his chest showed that. The Izzies had probably drugged him, either for medical reasons or to keep him quiet

The man on Lessing’s right was Richmond.

He was dead.

The Izzieshad covered his face with a blanket, but it had partially slipped off. His long, pallid features looked slightly less lugubrious in death than in life. Lessing could see no wounds because of the blanket, but sea water and blood stained the grimy, metal deck beneath his stretcher.

The nurse returned and unbuckled the straps holding Lessing to the stretcher. “Sit up. I don’t have the key to the cuffs, but I can get you out of your wet clothes and into something dry. Here, these are yours, aren’t they?”

Who cared about dry clothes? They were irrelevant. Jameela was gone.

“Don’t worry,” the woman said. “I’m a nurse. I’ve seen naked men before.” She sounded as though that were some kind of major personal sacrifice.

Her old-fashioned prudery gave Lessing a glimmer of amusement. She seemed so flustered, so tired, and so sincere. He let her have her way…

The pants were his light grey dungarees. Jameela had ironed them the day before yesterday, back when the world was different. He didn’t recognize the white shirt at first, then realized it was the one he had worn to visit the Black Muslim leader, the Khalifa, in Los Angeles. He hadn’t put it on since.

The nurse got his trousers changed, clucking at the barnacle scratches and abrasions. The handcuffs prevented her from changing his shirt, and she had to be satisfied with draping the dry one over his shoulders. He huddled back down upon the hard stretcher. The feel of the cloth reminded him of Morgan, the Khalifa — and Jameela.

Suddenly he wondered whether the Khalifa’s little zombie pill — what was its name? tetrodotoxin? — was still in the breast pocket of the shirt? He had never removed it. If it were there, he had a way to avoid torture, perhaps to escape! He rolled over so that neither the nurse nor the stolid guard could see, and let his fingers wander over the fabric.

He felt a tiny lump deep within the pocket seam. A bit of tissue… A theater ticket stub? A forgotten aspirin?

It was the zombie pill.

Excitement swept over him. Where could he hide it? The Izzies would certainly strip him, search him head to foot, and issue him their favorite prison garb, a blue jogging suit. They’d find the pill! He thought as hard as the ache in his head would let him. Of course! His head! He raised his hands to the bandage on his temple, groaned, and slumped down. A comer of the cotton pad came free in his fingers, and he poked the little pill into a fold in the cleanest and driest part of it. That would have to do for now. He’d do better once they got him where he was going.

He was minded of Copley’s story about a captured mere who melted a plastic spoon on the light bulb in his cell and used the goo to coat a smuggled cyanide pill so that it was watertight and wouldn’t dissolve. This he swallowed, waited until it reappeared in his stool, cleaned it off, and swallowed it again — and again, and again, over and over, for months. At last, when he could endure no more of his captors’ “discipline,” the mere cracked the plastic coating with his teeth and became history. The funny part, according to Copley, was the guards’ dismay at their captive’s unexpected exit: in that country — Lessing couldn’t recall which it was — whenever a prisoner escaped or succeeded in suicide, his guards were made to draw lots, and the loser faced a firing squad. Hilarious!

The helicopter groaned, shuddered, and lurched up into the pre-dawn sky. The flight did not take long; the Izzies’ ship lay just offshore. It was one of their newer, nuclear-powered destroyers. They had built up quite an impressive navy during their past two decades of conquest in the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean.

Lessing was hustled out onto the gently pitching deck. The cool, damp, salt-smelling air felt good. He looked around to sec black-clad commandos forming up, sailors in tan uniforms hurrying to and fro, and technicians swarming over the locust-like giant helicopters. They were about to get underway. He thought he glimpsed a group of fellow prisoners huddled together against a bulkhead, but a forklift carrying a stack of boxes rumbled in front of them, and when it had passed they were gone. Had that flash of silver been Mrs. Delacroix’ white hair? Farther away he spotted five or six stretchers laid out on the deck surrounded by medics and orderlies. Were the occupants Izzie casualties or his own comrades? He had no way to tell.

All would become clear later. He would probably find that clarification very painful.

Lessing watched as two sailors carried Abu Talib’s stretcher past him. Two more wrestled Richmond’s stiffening corpse into a brown plastic body-bag and zipped it shut. As they did so, Lessing noticed something on the damp, dark-stained cloth of the stretcher where the kikibird had lain. Lessing looked. A bit of glass? A sliver of mirror? Something glittered there in the misty morning light.

He knew what it was.

A shard of Pacov-1’s silvery globe.

The open flap of Lessing’s glassine envelope had been sticking out of Richmond’s pocket when the sailors lifted his body.

Sea water. Richmond’s swim in Madolenihmw Bay must have done it!

The containers were half a century old, fragile, and probably designed to be water soluble. What better way to deliver their contents? They must have started to decompose the moment they got wet.

What of the black cylinder — Pacov-2? That wasn’t likely to be in any better condition.

Everybody here, Lessing included, was certainly infected with Pacov-1. If Pacov-2 were free as well, it was over for everybody on this ship — possibly on Ponape itself.

Only Captain Levi, the man Lessing had killed, knew what Richmond’s mission was. The other Izzies had no reason to search the kikibird’s body. They wouldn’t have recognized Pacov even if they had found it!

What to do?

The Khalifa’s pill might save him, of course. It wasn’t likely, but it might. But when to swallow it? Too soon, and his captors would toss his “dead” body into the sea! Worse, they might wail until they reached home and then bury him alive; waking up in a coffin held no appeal! Too late, and Lessing would die from Pacov! He racked his brain but could only recall Mulder saying something about waiting a couple of weeks— or was it months? — after Pacov-1 before sending in Pacov-2. As imprecise as you could get. Would it make any difference if both viruses were introduced at once?

With a shudder he realized he was being himself as usual: abstract and objective. What of Alan Lessing? It was his death, too!

He could tell the Izzies. They might believe him, in which case they would probably shoot him anyway. Furthermore, he could tell them about the Khalifa’s pill; they’d take it away for testing, but they could never manufacture the stuff in time to save the people on this destroyer.

He could be really noble and wait until Israel itself was infected, and then tell them. Benefactor of Israel? He suspected the Izzies would never award him any medals.

Did he care? Let them all die!

Jameela. Every Izzie was not responsible for her death. Of course, not directly— but as much as the collective population of any nation is responsible for the acts of its soldiers. Richmond had killed— he managed to think the word— her.

Richmond was dead. Lessing found that he took no pleasure from that Every country had psychopaths and sadists like Richmond.

Did he care, then, about the Izzies? The commandos who had slaughtered his companions on Ponape? The sailors on this ship? The people of Israel itself?

The Izzies had always struck him as being tougher, harder, and less sympathetic to those who were not Jewish. They set their goals and then did what was necessary to achieve them. They’d go on this way until no one dared to oppose or even criticize them. The Israelis played to win. Mulder said that one day the Jews would rule the world if the rest of humanity was lazy enough to let them.

Were they so different from the Romans, the Mongols, the Russians — or, for that matter, the Nazis?

He doubted whether the Izzies would provide zombie pills to save their few remaining Arab “citizens,” even if they had a mountain of the stuff!

He temporized by asking the nurse, “How long will it take to get

to Jerusalem?”

His guard answered him instead. “In a hurry, Hcrr Hitler? They get you there, you wish you were some place else.”

“We’ll be around the island to Kolonia in an hour,” the nurse added. “The local government has given us permission to bring in cargo planes. We’ll reach Israel within twenty-four hours.” She sounded almost apologetic.

“The Ponapeans gave you permission to land?”

The guard chuckled. “Either we land or we turn Ponape into graveyard. They say, ‘No problem’”

Intimidation again.

“That man.“Lessing lifted his chin toward Richmond. “Do Ihave to travel with his ugly corpse? He killed my wife in cold blood!”

“Good.” The guard sneered. “Fuck your Nazi bitch. That man was good. We send him, you, others, by air. To Jerusalem. He get hero’s funeral. You, you just get funeral!”

So Richmond’s body bag would be opened in Israel and not shipped back to the United States. Lessing had to know whether the black cylinder was intact.

He fell to his knees beside Richmond, slammed his fists down upon the corpse’s plastic-draped chest, and went into a pretended paroxysm of grief and fury. “Bastard!” he choked. “Bastard!” He discovered that he wasn’t entirely pretending. “Murderer! You killed my wife!” He probed cautiously with one hand at the dead man’s side.

Inside the body-bag he felt the lump that must be the black cylinder of Pacov-2 in Richmond’s coat pocket. It still seemed solid, but the rounded, crumbling comers told him that it, too, was disintegrating. It wouldn’t be long.

Even if he started hollering right now, they were almost certain to die. He had expected it, but his stomach cramped up nevertheless. He fought to keep his sphincter muscles from letting go.

To tell the Izzies or not?

They weren’t all like Richmond.

Jameela. Bauer. Helga. Sami Abu Talib and his pretty, vapid Brazilian girlfriend. Possibly Mrs. Delacroix. Shrivelled, eyeless Arab faces crushed by tank-treads into the baking dust of Aleppo. The grey, still hand of a child protruding from under a fallen wall in Damascus. An old woman in rags hunched over the blackened corpse of a little girl in some nameless town in Syria.

Heretofore Lessing had been the ‘Empty Man. ‘ Now he was full. To the brim.

He realized that his mind was made up.

Death followed the Israelis wherever they went; now let Him catch up with them.

He wouldn’t tell them about Pacov. To hell with them. Literally!

“Gel up!” the guard commanded from behind him. “Up! Up!” He snatched at Lcssing’s shoulder and slapped at the back of his head with an open palm. The blow was a light one, yet Lessing’s wound made the pain blinding. Darkness swooped in.

“No! Stop that!” the nurse cried. She added more words in Hebrew.

Lessing saw the guard’s foot coming. He waited, caught it in his bound hands, and jerked. Off balance, the soldier stumbled and fell forward. Lessing used the man’s own momentum to break his ankle. For one glorious moment he had a grip on the guard’s rifle; then sailors and other guards wrested it away again. Fists, feet, and rifle butts pounded at him, and he went down, elbows up to protect his head.

It took two commandoes and three sailors a good two minutes to subdue him. Then they beat him for perhaps another three minutes while the nurse shrilled futile protests.

Lessing didn’t care. He hardly felt the blows.

At last they shackled him hand and foot to await transport to Jerusalem.

He was still smiling, faintly, when they arrived.