Suicide Kings

9

Friday,

December 4

Lake Tanganyika

Tanzania

“Crossing over into the PPA would be very unwise,” Barbara Baden said, line static hissing underneath her voice. “Don’t. Things are getting very dicey there. The war, the Leopard Society, Tom Weathers

…”

“Don’t worry about us,” Jerusha told her, standing on the dock where the boat they’d hired was moored. Mist was rising from the lake, and the jungle around them was noisy with stirring life. “I’m just helping Wally nose around a bit.”

“Good,” Barbara said. “Be very careful, and stay in touch.”

“Sure will,” Jerusha told her and snapped the phone shut.

“Sure will what?” Wally asked. He was scrubbing furiously at his left shoulder with an S.O. S pad. Finch was a few feet away, talking to the boat’s owner. Their kit sat in bundles around them, looking heavy in the dawn light, but Wally seemed barely able to stand still now that they were so close to Lucien.

Jerusha lifted a shoulder. “Nothing important.” She wondered whether she should tell him what Barbara was saying about the PPA, but she was certain it wouldn’t change Wally’s mind. If she refused to go with him, he’d just go alone. Jerusha wasn’t quite sure why, but she knew she couldn’t let him do that. He needs you, and you…

Finch interrupted the thought. “Hamisi here doesn’t much like the idea of going over to the PPA side of the lake,” he said. “He’s saying he needs another hundred dollars. For the risk.”

“You already negotiated the price. We’ve already paid him fifty.”

Finch shrugged. “Now he wants more. Or, he says, he won’t do it. Can’t say I blame the bloke. The PPA’s not a place I want to get too near myself, with the things I’ve been hearing. You’re lucky to have found anyone who’s foolish enough to ferry you across.” He waved at Hamisi, who stood watching them from where the boat was tied up. “You want to talk to him yourself?”

“I’ll pay you back when we get home, Jerusha,” Wally interjected. His foot was tapping on the pier, shaking the wooden planks, which already bowed under his weight.

Jerusha sighed. “Offer him another fifty,” she told Finch. The man shrugged and went back to Hamisi. After a heated exchange, he came back. “Got him to agree to an additional seventy. Best I can do. Or the two of you can try to find someone else, or better yet, stay here. Your call.”

Jerusha looked at Wally. “All right,” she said. “Seventy.”

Ten minutes later, Finch had tossed the rope from the pier into the boat where they were sitting. The boat smelled equally of old fish and grimy diesel oil; the deck was filthy and slick, the bench seats only slightly less so. Hamisi fiddled with the controls in the small cabin; the engine snorted blue exhaust and bubbles churned at the rear of the boat. “Good luck to the both of you,” Finch called as the bow began to cut through the dark water of the lake. “You’re going to bloody need it.”

Jerusha tried to put that last bit out of her mind as she watched Finch’s body dwindle into the distance and mist.

Thirty miles across-that’s what Finch said it was-a trip that would take at least three hours, according to Hamisi, who didn’t understand English but could converse-haltingly-in Jerusha’s French. The Congo had always used French as an official, tribally neutral official language, a practice retained by the PPA, and Hamisi had originally come from the PPA, long ago. Three hours…

The lake water seemed to drift slowly past the hull as the mist lifted in the rising sun, but there was no sign of the other side of the lake. She could see other boats out on the water: schooners with white sails, distant fishing boats with their snarls of nets, pleasure craft lifting bows high out of the water. The horizon ahead of them was unbroken water seeming eternally fixed despite their own movement. The landscape was beautiful, though: the deep lake, the walls of green mountains behind them and parading off into the distance, a rain squall spreading darkness well to the north, and thunderheads looming in the distance. It reminded her of the wild beauty of Conrad’s description of the Congo.

Wally didn’t glance around at the scenery. He sat in the exact middle of the boat, staying very still and looking out at the water apprehensively. “Wally, you okay?”

He gave a shrug and worked his steam-shovel mouth. “All this water,” he said. “Cripes, I used to love swimming, back before my card turned. But now…” He tapped his chest with his fist, a sound like a trash can colliding with a Dumpster. “Can’t swim. Don’t like water.”

“It’ll be over soon. Just hang on.” She rubbed at the back of her neck with her hand, kneading the ache that threatened to become a headache. And then there’s the jungle, and the rains, and the rivers we’ll probably have to cross there, and getting across Lake Tanganyika again afterward…

After a time, Jerusha realized that she could finally see the smudge of the PPA coastline. The blue-hazed humps there crawled toward them, far too slowly for Jerusha’s comfort, but reachable now. The boat puttered steadily forward, and Jerusha was beginning to think that the crossing was, despite Finch’s pessimism, to be uneventful.

“Hey, what’s that?” Wally said.

He was pointing northward. A black dot was slicing through the water: a patrol boat, with a white wake tracing its path. At about the same time that they noticed it, the boat shifted course toward them. Hamisi, at the wheel, cursed.

“Can’t you beat them to the shore?” Wally asked hopefully. He pointed to where the trees reached the lake. Hamisi scowled. He spat a long, loud harangue in what Jerusha assumed was Kiswahili. “What’d he say?” Wally asked Jerusha. She could only shake her head.

Someone on the patrol gunboat was shouting through a megaphone in French. “Shut off your engine!”

Hamisi looked at Jerusha. She didn’t know what to tell the man. The command was repeated, and this time the machine gun mounted on the craft sent a long white line spattering into the lake just ahead of them. White smoke drifted away from the muzzle, the noise echoing back at them belatedly from the shore. Hamisi slapped at the key; the engine went silent as the waves swayed the boat from side to side.

Wally grabbed at the gunwale for balance as the patrol boat circled them at twenty yards or so. “Jerusha,” he said, “just stay behind me if they start firing, and I’ll… I’ll…”

“You’ll what? Swim over to get to them?” The crestfallen apology on his face made her regret the words even as she said them. Her hands slid over her seed belt, her fingers slipping into the enclosures to touch the seeds there. Out here, there was nowhere to hide. If they wanted them dead, all they need do was pepper their sorry little craft with holes and watch them sink. They could capture them just as easily.

Jerusha had no intention of seeing what a PPA prison might be like. Wally’s strength meant little here, if there was no ground on which to stand. Hamisi was already backing away from the wheel of the boat, his hands up.

“Wally,” Jerusha said. “Hands up.”

He looked surprised at that. “We can’t just give up.”

“ They have to think we will,” she told him, nodding toward the gunboat. She lifted her own hands. “Go on,” she said, and reluctantly Wally raised his own huge arms; there were large orange spots on his underarms.

The gunboat circled once more, then moved in toward them. When it passed in front of Jerusha, only an arm’s length from their boat, she threw the seeds in her hand and opened her mind to her wild card power.

Kudzu vines were already sprouting wildly from the seeds before they even hit the gunboat’s deck and the water near the hull. Some curled rapidly around the crew members as they tried to draw guns, while others fouled the twin propellers of the craft. Jerusha could hear the groan of the patrol boat’s engine as it tried to force the props to turn. Then-with a whine and a cloud of white smoke-the engine cut off entirely.

“Hamisi!” Jerusha shouted in French. “Let’s go! Hate! ”

Hamisi pressed the starter and water gurgled as they started to move, slowly, along the length of the patrol boat. The crew members were shouting, tearing kudzu from around themselves. Jerusha had been unable to toss the small seeds far enough to reach the machine-gun mount-it swung around to follow them and she heard the man ratchet a slide back. She took a baobab seed from her pouch: she wasn’t certain she could toss it that far. “Rusty!” she said. “Here. Throw this onto the boat.”

Wally took the seed from her, tossed it high and long. The seed rang on the deck as the baobab sprouted roots and its strange crown-a dozen years’ growth done in a breath. The deck plates groaned metallically as the thick roots plunged downward seeking water and earth. One branch tipped the machine gun’s barrel up, and tracers laced the sky as it chattered.

Jerusha bent the tree with her mind, tilting it so that the gunboat began to lean. Water suddenly burst around the new baobab’s girth. The gunboat listed over entirely in the space of a few breaths, the half-dozen crew members beginning to scream. Jerusha had the vines fling them overboard, releasing them at the same time.

“Go!” she shouted to Hamisi. “Allez! Au rivage! Rapidement!” She pushed him toward the cabin of their boat as the gunboat crew flailed at the water, grasping for the baobab’s branches even as the gunboat turned entirely on its side, the hull now facing them. The baobab floated low in the water as Hamisi’s engine coughed and roared. They moved away from the men, who were waving their arms and calling out to them.

“Good toss,” Jerusha told Rusty.

He grinned. She thought that if he could have blushed, he would have. “It was nothin’,” Wally said. “But cripes, that was pretty terrific, Jerusha.”

She gave him a quick, fading smile. She could feel the baobab dying in the water, drowning without earth to sustain it. The crew of the gunboat was still shouting, their voices fainter now; the tree would serve as a raft until someone noticed them. I’m sorry, she whispered to it. I’m sorry. “Let’s get to the shore before reinforcements show up.” She stared at the slopes there, pointing to the nearest point of land. “There,” she told Hamisi. “Take us there.

…”

Jackson Square

New Orleans, Louisiana

For once, Michelle isn’t in the pit.

This is a nice looking place. But she’s still afraid. No, Michelle thinks. Adesina is afraid.

There are small buildings in a circular layout. They’re nicer than any of the houses in Adesina’s village. These are sturdy, built from concrete blocks and are painted in bright primary colors and all the roofs are brick red. They have glass in the windows and she sees power lines running from generators to each building. There’s gravel laid out on the ground so the walkways won’t turn to mud when it rains. There’s even a pretty painted sign: Kisa… something Hospital for Children. Michelle can’t quite make it out.

Even though she’s frightened, Adesina is awed by this place. She’s never been anywhere so nice before. A woman comes out of the red building. She wears a white coat and carries a clipboard. Something about her frightens Adesina and she cowers with the other children. The woman walks by each child, pointing at each one, then gesturing to one side of the path or the other.

After the children are divided, they’re taken to different buildings. Adesina goes into the green building. She likes the color green, but not today. Today she hates it. She’s crying and she wants her mother and father. One of the other children pinches her and tells her to stop being such a baby. But Adesina doesn’t care. She doesn’t mind being a baby now.

Another woman in a white coat comes into the room. She carries a tray covered by a white cloth. Adesina cries harder, and soon all the children are crying. The woman ignores their tears.

The woman opens the door to another room and then steps inside. Before she closes the door, she makes a quick gesture to one of the children’s captors. He grabs the boy who pinched Adesina and drags him inside.

One by one, the children are taken into the small back room. The children don’t come out again. When Adesina’s turn finally comes, she sees why. There’s a door leading out the back of the building.

The woman in the white coat speaks sharply to Adesina. Michelle doesn’t understand the words, but she grasps the intent. Adesina stops crying, but snuffles as she tries to contain herself.

The woman pulls the cloth back from the silver tray. There’s a row of needles. Adesina doesn’t know what they’re for, but they look sharp and hurty. She starts crying again. The woman grabs her arm and before Adesina can squirm away, the needle sinks into her flesh.

For a moment, nothing happens. Adesina’s so surprised she stops crying. Then the fire roars through her. It tears at her mind and pulls her apart. She looks down at her hands and sees that they’re changing. And that’s when she begins to scream. Then the world goes dark.

Khartoum, Sudan

The Caliphate of Arabia

The little girl was unnaturally still in his arms as they hung for a breathless instant in orbit. The bandages wrapped around her wizened little body felt rough. Tom took quick stock: for once his objective was marked by a terrain feature-the confluence of the Blue Nile from Ethiopia and the White Nile from Uganda, becoming then just the plain old Nile everybody knew. Supposedly the ancients thought it looked like an elephant’s trunk. How they could tell, given that the country here was every bit as stomped-down flat as the Sudd not so far south, he had no clue. But the alleged resemblance had given the place its name: al-Khartum, the Elephant’s Trunk.

Khartoum. Capital of the former Republic of Sudan. Now just the capital of the newest province of the Caliphate.

They called the girl the Mummy, for the bandages that covered her whole little body and big head to protect her sensitive skin from the blistering African sun. The docs said she was eleven, though she was the size of a four-year-old, and a none too healthy one at that. The Simbas had found her wandering in drought-stricken northeast Uganda during that country’s recent liberation.

Downward like a beam of light -

And here, see, was where the plans ran a bit off-rail. Tom and his charge found themselves on a dais decked with festive bunting in the Sudanese colors of red and black and white and the obligatory Muslim green. It stood in the courtyard of the Defense Ministry: a blinding white colonial-era wedding cake, like a smaller version of the nearby Presidential Palace, almost on the Blue Nile bank.

The courtyard, partially shaded by trees planted by those same long-gone English colonialists, was packed with martyrs of the Sudan’s wars. The living ones, of course: the merely wounded, who could look forward to life on the leavings of a rat-poor state, propped on a wheeled platform that kind of replaced your legs, and in constant pain that even the rare morphine dose could never really ease.

A mustached man in an extravagantly medaled blue uniform stood behind the podium, staring at the impossible apparition of a tall Western man and a tiny girl completely swathed in bandages right beside him. But he wasn’t the Sudanese president, Omar Hasan Ahmad al-Bashir. And he was supposed to be.

Hell knew where Bashir was. Maybe he was held up taking a call from one of his wives (he had two). Or maybe he had just shone the vets on. They weren’t any more use to him except for PR, after all. Instead, the dude in blue was Major General Abdel Rahim Mohammad Hussein, Sudan’s Minister of Defense. He’d been accused of assorted lurid war crimes in Darfur and South Sudan.

He’ll do just fine. Tom pointed at him. “Do your thing, honey,” he said.

The Mummy never spoke. Probably she only understood a little English. But she went where she was pointed and did what she was told. Which was all Tom needed now.

Beyond the minister was a fat man with a blue scholar’s gown and a bunch of bristling grey beard whose extravagant eyebrows were trying to crawl up under his sacklike hat to hide. He was another prize target, the Sunni Imam al-Bushehri of Iraq, the Caliph’s advisor to the Sudanese. He promptly hitched up his robe and ran with surprising hippo speed for the Ministry’s portico.

Tom grinned and blinked out. He was just as happy to miss the rest of the strangled squawks and squelching sounds that had begun to emerge from the Defense Minister.

Up; then back down to the camp in the Sudd.

His next passenger was a small boy, underfed-looking but otherwise a lot more normal than the Mummy. But his eyes were spooky. Tom didn’t know his story and wasn’t sure he wanted to. And he made sure to keep his parts well clear of his mouth. Just, y’know, in case.

He landed on the podium again. It was the one spot in the courtyard the guards were unlikely to spray with frantic fire from their Kalashnikovs, packed as it was with Sudanese brass. The Minister of Defense had shrunk, although still upright and clinging to the podium with sticklike fingers. The Mummy had ballooned way out. Fortunately they had learned to wrap her in elastic bandages, loose and with lots of give.

The imam, now-his fat ass and billowing robes were just vanishing through the front door between two astonished-looking guards. Still clutching the boy, Tom flew right through the open doors. Fastball fast, not photon fast. But faster than the guards could react.

The imam’s slippers made soft thumping sounds on immaculately polished hardwood floors. Smelling whole generations of varnish Tom flashed past the wheezing man. Ten feet ahead of al-Bushehri he set the boy down.

The bearded cleric labored to a stop. “Here,” Tom said in English. “There’s someone I’d like you to meet. Wanjala, Imam. Imam, Wanjala.”

“Go ahead and kill me, Mokele-mbembe,” al-Bushehri said. “I die a martyr.”

The Iraqi had balls of brass. Tom had to give him that. Not like it mattered. “I’m not going to kill you,” Tom said as the skinny boy fixed the huge man with a feral stare, then darted toward him. “The Hunger will.”

“A child? What’s- ow! He bit me!”

“Shit happens, effendi. Gotta book.” He grabbed Wanjala up by the back of his camouflage T-shirt-fuck knew he didn’t want the kid biting him -and dashed past the fat man, who was clutching his soft brown hand and staring at the blood welling up from the tooth marks on the back of it.

The guards at the entrance had wheeled to aim their rifles down the echoing hall. They hesitated to shoot for fear of hitting the imam. Tom didn’t hesitate. Crimson plasma jetted twice from his palm. The two guards reeled away as torches, falling in flames on the Ministry steps. Both were dead on the instant; but superheated air venting from their lungs made them scream as if they felt the fire that consumed them.

Even before Tom cleared the door he saw that confusion still reigned outside. The Mummy was almost globular now. General Hussein lay beside her like a bundle of brown sticks in a gaudy blue sack. The other Sudanese war pigs stood gaping, too confused and horror-stricken even to run the fuck away. Tom reckoned the girl had at least a few seconds’ grace before anyone thought to shoot her. As soon as he got clear sky Tom was gone to orbit, swapping Wanjala for Charlie Abidemi in a single drop and grab.

This time Tom lit on the edge of the Ministry roof overlooking the courtyard o’ chaos. He let Charlie drop to the hot tarred gravel beside him, then gave a quick pulse of sunbeam to the grass right in front of the first rank of martyrs, who fell out of their wheelchairs. That was tough luck; he didn’t have anything against them. But he didn’t hurt them, either.

Fact was, he couldn’t afford to fry too many guards: all this rapid hyper-tripping and flying had about worn him out. He just wanted to make the guys with guns flinch.

They did. He turned to the boy he’d just deposited on the roof. “All right, Wrecker, start wrecking. You got two minutes. Have fun.”

As a guard lined his sights up on the Mummy his Kalashnikov’s receiver exploded in his face. He shrieked. There was no flash, no flame, no fragments larger than dissociated molecules. But the shock of the bonds that held all those molecules together simultaneously bursting- that stripped cloth, skin, and muscle from torso and arm and the front of his skull. Howling out of a red mask the guard fell over backward.

Other similar cracks rang out around the courtyard, each followed by fresh screams. Charlie Abidemi’s ace only worked on inorganic matter, and had a range of only about fifty feet. But all he had to do was look at something made of stone or metal and snap his fingers, and about two pounds of it went poof.

Tom jumped down beside the Mummy. Smiling down at the obsidian eyes that glittered impassively from the stretched-out bandages, and trying his best to ignore the yellow pool around her feet as her kidneys desperately processed the extravagant overload of water she’d sucked into her tissues, he put an arm around her. “No offense, honey,” he said, “but you’re gonna be a load.”

Around the corner of the building, invisible to Tom, past high white walls but clearly not from the roof, something big blew up. Like a Russian-made BTR armored car. Wrecker was definitely living up to his name.

Tom grinned. Was gone.