Carrion Comfort

by Dan Simmons

  “Ich bin Der Meister,” said the Oberst. “Sure,” said Barent. “Why not?” He crossed the six-foot gap of tile and shook hands with the Oberst. Barent looked around the Grand Hall. “It’s late,” he said. “I’ve lost interest in the party. I will contact you tomorrow regarding the details of our next competition.”

  “I will fly home to night,” said the Oberst. “Yes.”

  “You remember,” said the Oberst, “that I have left letters and instructions with certain friends in Eu rope concerning your worldwide enterprises. Safeguards, as it were, for my safe return to Munich.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Barent. “I have not forgotten. Your aircraft is cleared for takeoff and I will be in touch via our usual channels.”

  “Sehr gut,” said the Oberst.

  Barent looked around at the almost empty board. “It was as you predicted months ago,” he said. “A very stimulating evening.”

  “Ja.”

  Barent’s footfalls echoed as he walked briskly to the french doors. A phalanx of security people surrounded him while others moved outside. “Do you want me to take care of Dr. Laski?” asked Barent.

  The Oberst swiveled and looked Saul’s way as if he had forgotten. “Leave him,” he said at last.

  “What about our hero of the evening?” asked Barent, gesturing toward Harod. The producer had sat down in his white square and was cradling his head in his hands.

  “I will deal with Tony,” said the Oberst. “The woman?” said Barent, nodding toward Miss Sewell.

  The Oberst cleared his throat. “Dealing with my dear friend Melanie Fuller must be first on our agenda when we speak tomorrow,” he said. “We must show the proper respect.” He rubbed his nose. “Kill this one now.”

  Barent nodded and an agent stepped forward and unleashed a burst from his Uzi submachine gun. The impact caught Miss Sewell in the chest and stomach and flung her backward as if a giant hand had slapped her off the board. She slid across the slippery floor and came to a stop with her legs flung wide and her only garment torn from her body.

  “Danke,” said the Oberst. “Bitte sehr,” said Barent. “Gute Nacht, Meister.”

  The Oberst nodded. Barent and his entourage left. A moment later the helicopter lifted off and arced out to sea toward the waiting yacht.

  The Grand Hall was empty except for Reynolds, the slumped form of Tony Harod, bodies of the recent dead, the Oberst, and Saul.

  “So,” said the Oberst, putting his hands in his pockets and looking almost mournfully at Saul from fifteen feet away. “It is time to say good night, my little pawn.”

  SEVENTY-TWO

  Melanie

  It was obvious that C. Arnold Barent was not the gentleman I had assumed him to be.

  I had been busy with other things in Charleston and when Mr. Barent murdered poor Miss Sewell it was a shock, to say the least. It is never pleasant to have bullets striking one’s flesh, no matter how vicarious the experience, and because of my temporary distraction the sensation was doubly surprising and disagreeable. Miss Sewell had been common and rather vulgar before coming into my ser vice and her responses were never quite freed from these base beginnings, but she had been a loyal and useful member of my new family and deserved a more dignified departure.

  Miss Sewell ceased to function seconds after she was shot by Barent’s man— at Willi’s suggestion, I was sorry to note— but those few seconds allowed me time to transfer conscious control to the security man I had left near the administrative offices of the underground complex.

  The guard carried some complicated machine pistol. I had no idea how to operate the absurd weapon, but he did. I allowed his reflexes to function while he carried out my commands.

  Five off-duty security people were sitting around a long table, drinking coffee. My guard fired in short bursts, knocking three from their chairs and wounding the fourth as he leaped toward his own weapon lying on a nearby counter. The fifth man escaped. My guard went around the table, stepped over bodies to get to the wounded man who was vainly trying to crawl into a corner, and shot him twice. Somewhere an alarm set up a banshee wailing that filled the maze of tunnels.

  My guard walked toward the main exit, turned a corner, and was immediately shot by a bearded Mexican-looking security man. I jumped control to the Mexican and had him run up the concrete ramp. A Jeep with three men in it pulled up, the officer in back shouting questions at my Mexican. I shot the officer in the left eye, jumped to the corporal behind the wheel, and watched from the Mexican’s point of view as the Jeep accelerated into the electrified security fence. The two men in the front seats were thrown over the hood of the vehicle into the live wire as the Jeep rolled over twice in a shower of sparks and triggered a land mine in the security zone.

  As my Mexican walked slowly down the paved path across the zone, I jumped to a young lieutenant rushing up with his nine men. Both of my new catspaws laughed at the sight of the guards’ faces as the lieutenant turned his weapon on them.

  Another group was returning from the north with the last of the surrogates who had been rounded up after Jensen Luhar’s escape. I had the Mexican throw a phosphorous grenade in their direction. Nude figures were silhouetted by fire and ran screaming into the darkness. Gunshots rattled all around as small groups of panicked men opened fire on one another. Two patrol boats pulled in closer to the shore to see what was going on and I had the young lieutenant run down to the beach to greet them.

  I would have preferred watching the events then transpiring at the Manse, but Miss Sewell had been my only contact there. Barent’s Neutrals were beyond my reach, and the only player left alive in the Grand Hall whom I might have Used was the Hebrew man, and I sensed something not right about him. He was Nina’s and I wanted nothing to do with her at that moment.

  The one contact I did renew at that moment was not on the island. It was a near thing. During the previous busy hours in Charleston I had all but lost touch with this one. Only the many hours of conditioning at a distance allowed me to reestablish the link at all.

  I had thought Nina truly mad when her Negress had dragged Justin to that park overlooking the river and the navy yards, as day after day we stared through silly binoculars to catch a glimpse of the man. As it was, it took four observations before I made the first, tentative contacts. It was Nina’s Negress who had urged me to exercise more subtlety than ever before . . . as if Nina could teach me anything about subtlety!

  It had been a source of some pride to me that I had maintained the contact for so many weeks without the subject having the faintest understanding of what was happening to him, or his colleagues perceiving a change. It is incredible what one can learn— the technicalities and jargon one can absorb— when passively watching through another’s eyes.

  Until the moment Miss Sewell was cut down, I had not planned to use this resource in spite of Nina’s entreaties and machinations.

  That had all changed now.

  I awoke the man named Mallory, had him rise from his bunk, and walked him down the short corridor and up a ladder into a room lighted by red lamps.

  “Sir,” said the one named Leland. I remembered that Leland was called an XO. I remembered the lonely tic-tac-toe games I had played with myself as a child, moving the X’s and O’s around.

  “Very good, Mr. Leland,” I had Mallory say crisply. “You keep it. I’ll be in CIC.”

  I had Mallory out the door and down the ladder before any of the men there could see his expression change. I was glad that no one was in the red-lit corridor to see Mallory’s face as he passed. It would have been odd, even unnerving, for someone to have seen an anticipatory grin so wide that it pulled the man’s lips back from even the rearmost of his teeth.

  SEVENTY-THREE

  Dolmann Island Tuesday,

  June 16, 1981

  Hang on,” said Meeks. “This is the fun part.”

  A small box of the Cessna’s console had beeped and Meeks immediately had put the plane into a steep dive, leveling of
f five feet above wind-tossed waves. Natalie gripped the edges of the seat as the aircraft raced toward the dark bulk of the island six miles ahead.

  “What’s that?” asked Jackson, gesturing toward the black box that had stopped buzzing and beeping.

  “Fuzzbuster,” said Meeks. “Radar’d started tracking us. Either we’re too low now or I managed to get the island between us.”

  “But they know we’re coming?” said Natalie. She found it difficult to keep her voice calm as the vaguely phosphorescent water whipped by at a hundred miles per hour. She knew that the slightest miscalculation by Meeks would put the landing gear into the wave tops that appeared to be only inches away. Natalie fought the urge to lift her feet into the air.

  “They must know we’re out here,” said Meeks. “But I had us set pretty much on a due easterly course that had us plotted to miss the island to the north by five or six miles. As far as they’re concerned, we just dropped off their scope. Right now we’re comin’ in from the northeast, since I’d guess they keep a better perimeter on the western approaches.”

  “Look!” cried Natalie. The green light of the dock was visible and beyond it a fire burned. She swiveled toward Jackson. “Maybe it’s Melanie,” she said excitedly. “Maybe she’s started!”

  Meeks glanced at them. “I hear they have bonfires in a big amphitheater there,” he said. “Probably some sort of show going on.”

  Natalie looked at her watch. “At three o’clock in the morning?” she asked.

  Meeks shrugged.

  “Can we go in over the island?” pressed Natalie. “I want to see the Manse before we land.”

  “Uh-uh,” said Meeks. “Too risky. I’ll take her around the east side and come back in along the south shore like the first time.”

  Natalie nodded. The fire was no longer visible, the dock was out of sight, and the island might have been uninhabited for all they could see as they flew down the east shore of it. Meeks moved another hundred yards out to sea and gained altitude as they came around the cliffs of the southeast point.

  “Jesus Christ!” shouted Meeks and all three of them leaned to the left to get a better view even as Meeks banked the Cessna steeply to the right and dove for the relative safety of the sea.

  To the south, the ocean was ablaze with light as an expanding mushroom of flame billowed skyward while arcing lines of yellow and green licked toward the Cessna itself. As they leveled off six feet above the surf, Natalie watched two bright flares ignite on the ship silhouetted against the flames to the south and grow brighter as they leaped toward their aircraft. One struck the sea and was extinguished, but the second raced past and struck the cliff face a hundred yards behind them. The explosion lifted the Cessna sixty feet, the way a good wave lifts a surfboard, and brought it hurtling back down toward the black surface of the water. Meeks fought the controls, pulled the throttle full out, and let go with something that sounded like a rebel yell.

  Natalie pressed her cheek to the window to see the ball of flame behind them tumbling into a hundred smaller fires as part of the cliff face collapsed into the sea. She snapped her head to the left in time to see three more flashes of light on the silhouetted ship as more missiles leaped their way.

  “Holy shit,” breathed Jackson. “Hang on, kids!” shouted Meeks and banked the aircraft so steeply to the right that she watched palm fronds pass twenty feet directly below her window.

  Natalie hung on.

  C. Arnold Barent had been relieved to get away from the Manse and into the air. The jet turbine of the Bell executive ’copter roared, the rotors changed pitch, and Donald, his pilot, lifted them above the tree line and glare of floodlights on the lawn. To their left, a larger, older Bell UH-1 Iroquois “Huey” chopper shuttled the nine men of Barent’s Special Security Detail— minus Swanson— and to their left rose the sleek and deadly shape of the only privately owned Cobra attack helicopter in the world. The heavily armed Cobra provided their air cover and would stay on station until his yacht, the Antoinette, was well out to sea.

  Barent sat back in the deep leather seat and let out a breath. The showdown with Willi had seemed a safe enough proposition, with his Neutral sharpshooters on the balcony and in the shadows, but Barent was relieved to be away from it. He started to straighten his tie and was amazed to notice that his hand was shaking.

  “Coming in, sir,” said Donald. They had circled the Antoinette once and were settling gently toward the raised helipad on the fantail. Barent was pleased to see that the sea was calming, the three-foot waves posing no problem for the yacht’s efficient stabilizers.

  Barent had considered not letting Willi leave the island, but the inconve niences promised by the old man’s European contacts had proved too great. In a way Barent was glad that the preliminary game was over— old impediments removed— and despite himself he was looking forward to the expanded competition the old Nazi had proposed months earlier. Barent was sure that he could negotiate the old man into something very satisfying but not quite so extreme: the Middle East, perhaps, or something in Africa. It would not be the first time the games had been played on an international scale.

  But the old woman in Charleston was not something that could be negotiated away. Barent made a mental note to have Swanson arrange for her termination in the morning and then he smiled at his own forgetfulness. He was tired. Well, if not Swanson, then the new assistant director, DePriest, and if not him then an infinite set of others.

  “Down, sir,” said the pilot. “Thank you, Donald. Please radio Captain Shires and let him know that I will be dropping by the bridge before turning in. We may get under way as soon as the aircraft is secured.”

  Barent made the two-hundred-foot walk to the bridge with four members of his Special Security Detail in the usual formation, the other helicopter having dropped them off first. Second to his custom 747, the Antoinette was Barent’s most secure environment. Manned by a select crew of only twenty-three superbly conditioned Neutrals and his security detail, the yacht was even better than an island— swift, secretly armed, surrounded by fast perimeter patrol boats when close to land as it was tonight, and private.

  The captain and two officers on the bridge nodded respectfully when Barent entered. “Course set for Bermuda, sir,” reported Captain Shires. “We’ll be under way as soon as we recover the Cobra and get it under the hard tarp.”

  “Very good,” said Barent. “Has island security reported the take-off of Mr. Borden’s aircraft yet?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Please let me know as soon as his jet is airborne, would you, Jordan?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The second officer cleared his throat and addressed the captain. “Sir, radar reports a large ship rounding the southeast point. Bearing one-six-nine, sir. Distance four miles and closing.”

  “Closing?” said Captain Shires. “What does Picket One say?”

  “Picket One does not respond to calls, sir. Stanley reports the contact is now three-point-five miles out and doing twenty-five knots.”

  “Twenty-five knots?” said the captain. He took a large pair of night vision binoculars and joined the first mate at the starboard windows. The soft, red glow of instrument lights on the computerized, automated bridge did not impair night vision.

  “Identify it at once,” snapped Barent. “I have it, sir,” said Shires. “It’s the Edwards.” There was relief in his voice. The Richard S. Edwards was the Forrest Sherman-class destroyer that had been assigned to picket duty around Dolmann Island during Summer Camp Week. Lyndon Baines Johnson had been the first president to “loan” the Edwards and each president since had followed the custom.

  “What’s the Edwards doing back?” demanded Barent. He was not relieved at all. “It was supposed to have left these waters two days ago. Get its captain on the radio immediately.”

  “Range two-point-six miles,” said the second officer. “Radar profile confirms it’s the Edwards. No response to radio queries, sir. Shall we go to semaphore
?”

  Barent walked to the window as if in a dream. He could see nothing but night outside the glass.

  “Coming off his sprint at two miles, Captain,” said the second officer. “Swinging broadside to us. Still no response to our calls.”

  “Perhaps Captain Mallory thought there was a problem,” said Captain Shires.

  Barent snapped out of his dream-walking state. “Get us out of here!” he screamed. “Tell the Cobra to attack it! No, wait! Tell Donald to get the Bell ready, I’m going aft. Hurry, goddamn you, Shires!”

  While the three officers stared, Barent ran through the door, scattering his waiting security detail, and clattered down the bridge staircase to the main deck. He lost a polished loafer on the steps but did not pause to retrieve it. Approaching the lighted helipad, Barent tripped over a coiled line and tore his blazer as he rolled on the deck. He was up and running again before his panting security people could catch up.

  “Donald, goddamn you!” screamed Barent. The pilot and two crewmen had torn off the skid lines they had just attached and were wrestling with the rotor tie-downs.

  The Cobra gunship, armed with mini-guns and two heat-seeking missiles, roared by thirty feet above the Antoinette, putting itself between the yacht and its erstwhile protector. The sea was temporarily illuminated by flashes that reminded Barent giddily of fireflies along the forest’s edge in his Connecticut childhood. He saw the outline of the destroyer for the first time, and the Cobra exploded in midair. One of its missiles ignited and scrawled an aimless scribble of smoke across the night sky before splashing harmlessly into the ocean.

  Barent turned away from the helicopter and staggered to the starboard railing. He saw the flash of the forward five-inch-gun a fraction of a second before he heard the report and the freight train rush of the incoming shell.

  The first shot missed the Antoinette by ten yards, rocking the ship with its shock wave and throwing enough water on the fantail to knock Donald and three of the security men off their feet. The flash of the second shot came even before the water of the first one quit falling.