by Andy Maslen
Jardin barked out a hoarse laugh at this thought. “God?” he shouted. “There’s a joke. Do you kill those millions of children with malaria out of compassion? Are paedophile rings your way of saying, ‘Behave yourself or else?’ I send teenagers wrapped in explosives and ball bearings to slaughter innocent people BECAUSE I FEEL LIKE IT, and what do you do about it? Sorry?” He cupped his right palm around his ear. “I missed that. WHAT? Oh, nothing. You’re OK with the slaughter of innocents. Good! Because listen up, old man. I have plans that will curdle your fucking ambrosia. I’m going to test you to the very fucking limits of belief. By the time I’ve finished, they’ll be turning to Satan for a sympathetic hearing. I. Will. BEAT YOU!” Jardin screamed these last words, breaking into a squawking cough as his screeching caught in his throat.
58
Competition
BEATRIZ SIPPED HER CAIPIRINHA, WATCHING Gabriel silently over the rim of the glass. She seemed in no hurry to fill the silence. Which was a shame, as it would have given Gabriel more time to think. In the end, he settled on the truth. Or most of it.
“OK, yes. I belong to the Children of Heaven. But you’re a very pretty girl, and I thought you’d mark me down as a weirdo and leave if I admitted it.”
“Thank you. For the compliment as well as the truth.” She put her tumbler down on the bar. “Here’s the thing. I’m not a student. I’m not even Brazilian. I’m with the DEA. You know what that is?”
“Yes. The Drug Enforcement Agency. Père Christophe says they’re part of the problem.”
“Which is?” Beatriz had stopped smiling now.
“Governments. Their agents of repression. Organized religion. Multinational corporations. The UN. NATO. Banks. The mass media. The Internet companies that control our lives.”
“OK, OK,” she interrupted, holding up both hands in an ‘I surrender’ pose. “I get the picture. Everyone’s in on some evil global conspiracy except your Dear Leader. That about it?”
He nodded, hoping his loyal follower act would be sufficient to keep Beatriz from asking more searching questions.
“Can I ask you a question?” he said.
“You just did. But, sure, why not? Ask away.”
“Is Beatriz your real name? Was Mariana DEA too?”
“That was two questions. Naughty boy.” She wagged a finger at him. “No. It’s not my real name. Which is Alana by the way. Alana Losanto. And yes, Mariana is DEA.” She crinkled her nose. “On which subject, that’s an unusual phrasing, don’t you think?”
“What is?”
“You said, ‘Is Mariana DEA too?’, not, ‘Is Mariana in the DEA?’. Or ‘Does Mariana work for the DEA?’”
“So what?”
“So what? So, civilians don’t say it like that.”
Gabriel took a sip of his drink, realising that this, too, was a giveaway. A bit of business to buy time, which his counterpart would surely notice. Then he had a brainwave. One that would account for his language and his guilty behaviour. “Look,” he said, looking directly at Alana, “I’m not supposed to, but when I come in to get provisions, sometimes I sneak into a movie. I love those action films. Always have. We don’t get much entertainment at Eden. I must have picked it up from one of the films.”
Alana pressed her lips together. Clearly not convinced.
“Suppose I believe you. Suppose I think you really are some brainwashed zombie who thinks the sun shines out of Père Christophe’s ass,” she put air-quotes around the cult leader’s name, “and not some deep-cover British spy.” She paused for a beat, but Gabriel was ready and kept his facial muscles relaxed and still. “Last week he sent one of his followers, an ex-Ivy League dropout called Zack Framingham, to firebomb a film studio in LA. Only the kid failed and got himself taken into custody. He eventually gave us the last piece of intel we needed to nail your leader, Christophe Jardin. So now we’re going to flush that little creep out into the open and deal with him with appropriate severity. We could do with someone we can trust on the inside of his little rainforest paradise.” She took another sip of her drink. “I just thought that might be you.”
Oh, Alana, it would be so helpful to have backup. Added firepower, boots on the ground. But my orders are clear. He’s mine and I won’t let him disappear. Either deep into the forest or deeper into the America legal system.
“I’m sorry. Père Christophe rescued me. He loves me, and I love him. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go.”
Alana shrugged. “Your funeral. But you might want to take a long walk in the rainforest, day after tomorrow. I saw a weather forecast and it’s going to get very hot out there.”
Gabriel nodded. He left without saying another word, or looking back.
He bought some fried chicken and rice from a street vendor and ate it with the wooden spoon the man gave him as he walked back to the van. He passed a bar and slipped inside to buy a half-bottle of vodka.
He was back at the airfield thirty minutes later, setting up a bed inside the camper. He closed all but one of the blinds, hoping sunrise would wake him.
With his head on the pillow, he closed his eyes and let his mind quiet, helping it along with a breathing exercise taught him by Master Zhao. In for four, hold for one, out for four, hold for one. ‘The ten-second breath,’ he’d called it. As the breath pattern became automatic, his lungs inflating and deflating like a machine-controlled bellows, Gabriel focused his attention on another organ: his heart. It was beating at around sixty-five to the minute. An excellent rate for most people, but Gabriel’s resting pulse was closer to sixty, the high fifties on a good day. He pictured the throbbing, four-chamber pump and willed its movement to slow.
Sixty … fifty-nine … fifty-eight … fifty-seven …
… from its appearance, it’s clear that Oxford Street has hit hard times, maybe from another recession, because how else to account for the vines and lianas hanging from the lampposts and the upper-storey balconies, and the lush vegetation thrusting its way up through cracks in the road and out from the smashed windows of the shops, and those trees, leaning towards each other from either side of the street, their higher branches almost touching overhead like the canted roofs of Elizabethan buildings, and there’s no merchandise left, of course, the looters have seen to that, and up in the tree canopy, monkeys leap from branch to branch in search of fruit, while scarlet-beaked birds of prey hunt them down, pulling their heads off with loud popping sounds as Gabriel walks down the centre of the road, M16 held loosely in the crook of his right arm, keeping well away from the crocs with their burnt-black scales that lurk in the shadows, whispering to each other in Portuguese, while his stomach churns with fear, and the heat makes him sweat even more than the anxiety; he looks around, but the other members of his patrol have disappeared. Troopers “Daisy” Cheaney and “Smudge” Smith and Corporal “Dusty” Rhodes are nowhere to be seen and then a scream pierces the noise of the jungle, and it’s a pleading note riding high on top of the visceral sound of a man in agony as he calls out …
“Boss! Help me!” and Gabriel knows that the voice belongs to Smudge, so he breaks into a run, cocking his M16, head turning left and right, looking for him, but when he next looks ahead, he sees something that brings him to a stop. It’s one of the lampposts that’s out of position, in the centre of the road instead of at the edge. Two dull grey horizontal branches fork away from the main upright about ten feet off the ground, where he sees a lean, brown-skinned figure dressed in tracksuit trousers and an Adidas T-shirt climbing head-down from the crosspiece on long spidery legs, an AK 47 slung over its back, and it’s getting closer. Gabriel sees what the figure has left behind, sees Smudge, crucified on the lamppost, machetes driven through both palms and into the steel crosspiece, so Gabriel tries to run faster, but his knees seem locked and he can only stumble on stiff legs, trying to shout out to Smudge, but his mouth won’t emit any sound at all. He can feel it twisting into a rictus grin, tongue poking out between his teeth, then the spidery creature is s
tanding in front of him, legs apart, arms hanging down by its sides, and its body has the lean, brown, corded look of a People’s Army for the Liberation of Mozambique fighter, but the head is that of a girl, a girl with short blonde hair with closed eyes and a smiling mouth, a mouth filled with row upon row of sharp-pointed, yellow-white teeth and it says,
“Come closer, Captain Wolfe.”
Gabriel takes a few more paces, terror welling in his throat and making him gasp in short, shallow breaths and he knows he doesn’t want to see the fighter up close but he can’t stop moving until, eventually, they are standing face to face, whereupon the fighter’s terrible grin widens until the corners of its mouth tear open with a ripping sound and its lower jaw falls to the jungle floor and then it slowly opens its eyes, which are not brown, nor blue, nor green, nor grey, but silvery and shiny and smeared across their steely corneas with congealed blood, making Gabriel open his mouth to scream but he can’t. It’s jammed full of more of the obscene spheres, splintering his teeth as he tries to spit them out, then the grinning figure draws a machete from its belt and rests the blade against Gabriel’s left cheek before snapping its hand back and bringing it forward again with a swish
59
Now All I Need Is a Red Beret
GABRIEL JERKED AWAKE AS THE sun crept above the roof of the hangar and sent a beam of yellow-white light in through the open blind above his head. Like a caul round a newborn baby, the nightmare still clung about him, making him shudder.
Ten minutes later, he was outside the airfield office. He could see what he wanted hanging from a hook on the wall, beneath a promotional calendar displaying Señorita November, who had forgotten to put her top on before working on her plane. Using a couple of bits of steel wire he’d pulled from the engine bay of the camper van, he picked the lock. It was so simple, a child could have done it. He snagged the bunch of heavy keys then wedged the door ajar with a folded piece of card from the wastepaper basket.
It was far too early for anyone to be around, but Gabriel moved quickly, nonetheless. No sense in being caught by Brazil’s only early-rising aircraft technician. He jogged over to the huge sliding door of the hangar and started trying keys in the lock of the door set into the massive sheet of steel. Master Zhao spoke to him.
Slow down, Wolfe cub. Think first; act second.
He took a deep breath, and examined the lock, looking for a maker’s name. Yes! There it was. A laser-cut logo: La Fonte. He found the matching key and pushed it home. The door opened silently.
Once inside with the door closed and latched behind him, Gabriel felt along the wall for a light switch. His fingertips grazed a block of switches with a cold metal conduit leading from the top. He flicked down the six toggles, one after the other, and the gigantic space was lit by twenty-four industrial pendant lamps suspended way above him from the pitched, corrugated iron roof. The small white planes occupying the centre of the space like a sleeping flock of geese were packed in prop-to-tail, their wheels chocked.
He jogged round the periphery of the hangar, looking for the gear locker. On the third side of the square, he found it. He repeated the process with the keys, taking only a few seconds to find a Yale that fitted the lock. He pulled the door wide and breathed a small sigh of relief. Stacked inside, in their thick black nylon covers, were a dozen parachutes. He pulled one out and rearranged the others to mask the gap. The condition of the cover was immaculate: no rips, scuffs, or tears. It looked brand new. The surface was smooth and even, with no suspicious lumps or bulges to indicate a badly packed chute. The ripcord was shiny and coated in a thin film of light oil. Another tick in the checklist that was headed, “Careful, safety-conscious owner”. Next, he checked the straps and buckles. Again, they were in excellent condition. No fraying on the webbing, no nicks or tears, no scratches on any of the buckle components.
After locking the hangar door and replacing the keys in the office, Gabriel didn’t have too long to wait. He heard the distant clatter of a well-used diesel engine coming from the road. Five minutes later, a battered, red Toyota Hilux pickup rounded the corner of the hangar, crossed the tarmac apron in front and pulled up a few yards away from the camper van.
The man who emerged squinted into the sun as he took in Gabriel’s white-clad form. Then he rubbed his hand over his stubbled chin and scratched his neck. His eyes were reddened, and he had the enlarged, purple nose of the serious drinker. He wore a much-scuffed brown leather flying jacket with a shearling collar over a grubby white T-shirt, and he carried a scruffy canvas bag slung over one shoulder.
Was he a pilot or just the handyman? In some ways, Gabriel hoped he was the latter.
The man lifted his chin by way of greeting. Gabriel pointed at the chute at his feet. Then at the sky.
“How much for a private flight?” he asked. Then, in Portuguese, “Quanto?”
The man looked at the chute then at Gabriel, who was aiming for the image of a jump-gypsy, working his way round the country in return for flights.
He sniffed, then spoke in English. “Three hundred. Dollars.”
It was a wildly optimistic price, and Gabriel felt sure the man knew it. Slowly, he pulled the roll of banknotes from his pocket and counted off six hundred Reals. He pushed the handful of crumpled bills towards the man. It was worth a hundred and fifty dollars, a decent enough price for a single flight.
The man, perhaps sensing he had a captive buyer, shook his head.
“Two-fifty.”
Gabriel counted off another four hundred Reals and offered them to the man. He held his gaze and matched his breathing pattern for a few seconds then leaned forward and moved his hand fractionally closer to the man’s right hand.
The man nodded. “OK,” he said, and stuffed the wad of bills into the pocket of his flying jacket.
Gabriel picked up his chute and together they walked over to the landing strip. The pilot led the way to a Cessna 208, its cabin hooded with a fitted blue tarpaulin like a horse wearing a fly mask. He whisked it away and rolled it casually into a sausage shape that he slung over his shoulder while he unlocked the cabin door. In it went, chucked behind the seats to join a wreckage of soft drinks cans and old flying magazines. Gabriel was wondering whether he’d picked the right pilot after all, but he didn’t have the luxury of a buyer’s market. He pushed his parachute over the back of the seat to join the tarp, then climbed up and into the co-pilot’s seat and buckled the harness over his shoulders and lap. He watched as the pilot pulled the chocks out from under the wheels then rounded the front of the plane and climbed in.
This close, Gabriel could smell the booze coming off the man in sickly-sweet waves. A heavy night, then. Just hope you’re OK to fly this thing close enough to Eden for me to jump without killing us both. The pilot ran through a worryingly brief set of pre-flight checks, which mostly consisted of rapping the back of his knuckle against the fuel gauge and altimeter. Then he flicked on the master switch, fuel supply switch, and fuel cutoff valve. With a toothy grin, he stuck his thumb into the aluminium collar of the ignition switch and fired up the engine. It coughed a couple of times and emitted a cloud of dark grey smoke from the exhaust, then with a whine from the starter motor, the prop started turning. It juddered round for a few revolutions, then the engine fired and the whine changed to a buzz-saw rasp as the revolutions built.
The pilot turned to Gabriel and spoke in English.
“Where you going, man?”
“Eden? You know it?”
“The white people?”
For a moment Gabriel tried to remember whether all the Children of Heaven were Caucasian. Then he saw that the pilot was pointing at his clothes.
“Oh! Yes. Sim. The white people.”
“No problem!”
The pilot sniffed, wiped his nose on the sleeve of his flying jacket and eased the throttle lever forward. The Cessna rolled and bumped over the grass towards the end of the runway.
Gabriel had flown in many planes on many missions, from Lockheed
C-130J Super Hercules transports so huge you wondered how they ever got airborne, to helicopters, light planes, even gliders on one memorable occasion when a silent approach over the capital of a central African country was ordered. But there was something about this flight—this pilot, especially—that set a kaleidoscope of butterflies loose to flitter and swirl in his stomach. If the man wasn’t still drunk from the night before, he surely had enough blood-alcohol to seriously impair his judgement.
The plane accelerated towards the end of the runway, and still the pilot kept the flaps neutral. Gabriel stared at the trees that demarcated the end of the airfield. They were now approaching at around fifty miles an hour. He felt his arms and legs bracing involuntarily and realised he’d clenched his jaw. He’d pushed the back of his head hard against the seat back and was breathing shallowly. Now the pilot was singing. A samba tune, something about a girl with brown eyes. Surprisingly melodic, he thought. As the trees rushed closer, he clenched his fists against his thighs and squeezed his eyes shut.
“Vamos!” the pilot shouted and hauled back on the control column.
With a sickening lurch that left Gabriel’s stomach thirty feet below his boots, the Cessna pulled up into a steep climb. Gabriel opened his eyes just in time to see the tops of the trees rush by beneath the plane.
“Good pilot, yes?” the man said, with a laugh, elbowing Gabriel in his bicep.
Not up to a reciprocal laugh, Gabriel contented himself with a tight-lipped smile. “Yes. Very good.”
