by Jack Yeovil
Unslinging his G-Mek Rapide full-automatic machine gun, he sloshed across the swamp towards the island where the first wave would be coming down. It was the only semi-solid footing for a mile or so, and the CAF commandos would naturally strike for it.
There were bursts of flame as the CAF blundered into the booby-traps they had set earlier.
"Whoo-eeee," yelped Soule, punching the air. "Gonna fry us some hoodhead honkie ass tonight!"
The Op signalled to Soule, and the kid passed the order on. The Yazoo Krewe were to move in.
One of the spidercopters was over the island, men on ropes abseiling down from it. They were mainly frozen in mid-air since the first explosions, but a few of the hoodheads on the ground were calling for back-up. The other chopper had withdrawn to a safe height and was laying down more napalm.
People were screaming, trying to get the stuff off them. The Op knew that was hopeless. The best you could hope for with a GenTech napalm product was a quick death from traumatic shock. This new stuff was bio-based and bonded with your tissue on first contact. It burned inside you until there was nothing left to burn. And it burned underwater, so pulling yourself into the swamp was no help. He hoped the Yazoo Krewe hadn't lost too many.
The CAF was laying down conventional fire now, but they hadn't got the range yet. Bullets threw up little splashes twenty feet behind them.
"Pore-ass motherfreakers," Soule yelled. "Ofey ratskaggers, lowbrow cornhole connoisseurs!"
The Op wished the kid would concentrate on the action, rather than taking the time to use his extensive vocabulary.
"Shape up, Soule," he shouted. "This is serious."
"Yes, Colonel," the boy snapped.
The Op sighted on a hoodhead who seemed to be directing the ground troops on the island, and took him apart with a burst. That should throw some confusion into the ranks.
Matthew Croke, the Yazoo City selectman who had visited him in Memphis, floated by, half his head shot away. He rippled through the reflection of the burning cross.
Soule saw the man in the water, and swore again. He lifted his 'gator-baiter rifle and sniped three hoods in a row, bringing them down with precise heartshots.
They still couldn't decide whether to land more gunmen or pull out entirely. The spidercopter was hovering indecisively. Its lase swivelled, and burned a line across the ground. The grass singed, and smoked.
The Op whistled, a pre-arranged signal, and the Yazoo Krewe stormed the beaches like John Wayne hitting Iwo Jima. The Op rapid-fired his weapon, jitterbugging a group of hoodheads.
Soule and three others were assembling a mortar under the cover of a dead tree. The Op gave them some covering fire while they got the thing put together, and took a couple of shots at the copter. A hoodhead fell from his rope, and splashed into the swamp. Someone up there—probably chickenheart Fassett—made a decision to cut the ground troops loose and make a tactical retreat, and the copter shifted in the air, its updrafts humming.
Come on, Soule.
"On line. Colonel," Soule shouted.
"Take the bird down," he ordered.
The kid's grin was a line of white in the night, and he worked the lever.
The shell rose in an arc, and peaked a few feet too low. It came down on the other side of the island, exploding shrapnel into the thick greenery.
The spidercopter was still lifting, not yet up to speed. Its blades rhythmically sliced the air.
"Give it another fifty feet," he judged.
"Sure thing, Colonel," Soule replied.
The adjustment was made, and the next shell exploded in the belly of the copter. The left nacelle, which housed the lase and the napalm squirters, was dislodged and tumbled downwards, flames flickering around it, the stars and bars peeling.
"Down," the Op ordered, throwing himself to the soft, muddy earth and sinking his face into it.
He heard the explosion as the napalm tank burst, and felt scraps of fire on the back of his jacket. He rolled quickly back into the water, and stayed under, holding the air in his lungs.
This wasn't doing his clothes any good.
His eyes open, he realized that above him the surface of the water was a dull orange. The area was on fire. He heard the blood pounding inside his head.
He kicked and swam until there was a cool darkness above him, and, chest bursting, spluttered his way to the surface. He coughed and spat water and shook his thick hair. He had been born with blondish-brown hair. It might be greying now, but he'd been dyeing it black since his early twenties. His years in the army and, then, the Op business, had kept him in trim. But all the regen treatments in the world and the personal attention of Dr Zarathustra couldn't take the years away. His face was unlined, but he was 64 years old.
The copter was coming down in a lazy spiral, burning hoodheads bailing out, splashing into the pool of napalm. The cicadas were quiet now, and there was only the sound of human pain to disturb the swamp. Quite a few of the Yazoo Krewe would have been killed by the exploding napalm tank. The Op blamed himself. He should have known what would happen. There was no point in winning the battle if there was no one left at the end to get the benefit.
Guns still chattered as Fassett's hoodheads and Soule's Yazoo Krewe exchanged fire between the hanging curtains of Spanish moss.
A man on fire ran at him, firing wildly, and he put a shot in his head. Camouflage robes tented around him as he sank into the dark waters.
The Op realized he was up to his neck in the swamp now, and that his footing was none too good. The napalm had driven him further away from the island than was advisable.
He struck towards the shore, avoiding the floating patches of fire, shaking the water out of his guaranteed moisture-proof Rapide. Something crashed out of the swamp a few feet away, and he swung around to open fire. The gun squelched as he pulled the trigger, and he swore to get his money back.
The hoodhead was huge, easily six-seven, and built like a professional wrestler. He had IR shades over his cloth face, and was holding up a two-foot-long dagger with a wickedly serrated edge. They sure grew their rats big in Vicksburg.
The Op had his combat knife out of his belt, and held it just under the water. The hoodhead slipped himself onto it, taking the steel up to the hilt in his hard belly, just under the ribcage.
He screamed in rage, and blood darkened his hood over his mouth, but he was still slashing wildly.
The Op got a lock on the hoodhead's wrist, and tried to crush the bones, but they felt durium-laced.
"Nigra-lover," the hoodhead spat.
The Op carved into the man's gut, feeling the entrails uncoiling under the water like anemone tendrils.
His enemy had lost the dagger, but got a surprisingly strong grip on his throat. The Op corded his neck muscles, and kept the air passage open. He had Zarathustra threads in there, and could lock his pipes open. But the hoodhead was more interested in pulling him under the water than throttling him.
The Op struck a couple of karate blows to the hoodhead's neck, and felt the grip relaxing, but only slightly. Out of the water, his karate training would tell and he would be able to use the man's weight against him. Here, they were just a couple of scratching and biting animals.
The 'gator came from somewhere, and latched onto the hoodhead. It must be the intestines trailing in the water, calling to predators, signalling the presence of something mortally wounded and edible. The Op kicked in the water, and swam away from the thrashing mass where the reptile was clamping its jaws into the hoodhead, tearing limbs free, scattering blood in droplets. A hand reached for a frag, and flipped the top.
The Op threw himself under the waters again, as his merciful grenade blew hoodhead and 'gator to pieces. The Shockwave knocked him off balance, and he felt his hand sink into the mud as he tried to steady himself. His Rapide, still slung around his arm, floated on the surface, pulling him up.
He broke the waters, and struggled towards the island. The fighting was dying down.
T
he third spidercopter was gone. The CAF had been stung badly, and were withdrawing.
There were dead and burned people floating thick around the island. With their skins and clothes napalmed off them, they all looked the same colour.
The gunshots weren't so frequent now. The fighting was more or less over. The cross had burned itself out. There was a half-hearted cheer as it toppled hissing into the swamp.
The Op pulled himself out of the swamp, water cascading out of his clothes, and walked across the island. Soule was down on one knee near the crashed chopper, a friend trying to tighten a tourniquet around his leg. His boot was exploded, and three of his toes were gone.
Soule grinned, and gave the Op the thumbs-up.
"We rocked," he said. "We rocked and rolled!"
His leathers heavy with water, his hair over his face, the Op walked towards the wreckage. The Yazoo Krewe were clustered around a few wounded and captured hoodheads, prodding them with rifles, kicking them with steel-toed boots. The CAF were yelping as they took their punishment. Chickenhearts to a man, the Op guessed.
Ellroy Kettle, the Mayor of Yazoo City, was laying into the head of a fat man in a muddy once-white sheet.
"How yo like that, massah?" Kettle shouted, tears running into the brown creases of his face. "That 'nuff cotton plucked fo yo, Mistah Rhett Freakin' Butler? Yo want some iced lemonade on the freakin' verandah, massah?"
Earlier, the Mayor had spoken with a cultivated Harvard accent. Now, he sounded like a cross between Stagger Lee, the badass dude who took his razor to every whitey sheriff who came after him, and Stepin Fetchit, the scaredy-cat pop-eyed slave of all those Hollywood movies.
"Hold on there, Mr Mayor," the Op said. "The fight's over."
A couple of younger men tried to hold Kettle back, but he was carried away. The last time the CAF flew against Yazoo City, they had harvested a crop of "indentees," young people conscripted to work as cheap labour in the corp-run factories and fields of Alabama and Georgia. Kettle's daughter Rosaria was one of those indenture girls, and she had died from a smacksynth overdose in a whorehouse in the Montgomery NoGo. Some Japcorp honcho had been dissatisfed with the services and shot her up with enough Hero-9 to cardiac-arrest an elephant. The Confederates had managed to bring back at least one of the South's cherished antebellum traditions: indenture was just a gussied-up name for slavery. Old times, they were not forgotten.
Kettle kicked the fat sheet wearer in his hood. There was blood dribbling from the eyeholes.
The Op stepped in, and laid his hands on the Mayor's shoulders. The man stopped kicking, and his face fell. He was crying uncontrollably, now.
"My little girl…my little girl…"
The Op hugged the Mayor, and let the man cry, feeling his chest-heaving sobs run through both their bodies. The Yazoo Krewe stood around, sobered, the exhilaration of battle sapping away. The Op had seen this before, in South and Central America, in the Middle East and in the Good Old U.S. of A. There were lots of people crying, with pain, fear or fatigue. It had all been over in less than twenty minutes, but everyone alive would carry the marks for the rest of their lives. Either the marks on their bodies, or the marks on their souls.
Dr Ali Bales, the nearest thing to a medic in Yazoo City, was going around looking to the wounded. She was passing out squeezers of morph-plus to everyone who showed her blood. Soule took Kettle away from the Op, and the Mayor went along quietly.
The hoodhead on the ground squealed, his flabby fingers clawing at his mask.
"White robes, huh? Must be a Grand High Exalted Something-or-Other," said the Op.
A sixteen-year-old swamp fighter, gangcult scars on his brown cheeks, tore the mask away, and they all saw the battered face of Burtram Fassett. The Confederate spat out teeth and insults. There was drying blood in his white goatee beard.
"Nigra vermin," he choked. Something about the man reminded the Op of the Original Colonel. Maybe it was the beard, maybe it was the fat.
Someone raised a gun, but the Op waved it down.
"Under the Enderby Act, I am obliged to tell you that you have just been made the subject of a legal Sanctioned Op's arrest. You will be charged with crimes against the constitution of the United States…"
"Yankee trash," Fassett spat.
The Op resented that. He had been born in Tupelo, Mississippi.
"You have the right to remain silent while white-hot pokers are shoved up your ass," he shouted. "You have the right to have an attorney present when they snip your fingers with carpetshears, and if you cannot afford an attorney the court will toss you into a plague-pit with fifteen psychopathic killers until it can get around to spitting in your face. Do you understand these rights?"
Fassett wasn't hearing anything. He was breathing, but unconscious. Broken, he looked like a dandified Santa Claus on the night the reindeer rebelled and trampled him into the snow.
Suddenly, the Op felt tired. His back stung from the napalm spots, and his neck ached from the giant hoodhead's killer grip.
"We whipped 'em," Soule was shouting. "We whipped em good, didn't we?"
Bales was searing the open wound on Soule's foot with a lase scalpel, and shooting morph-plus into his ankle. She'd been a Combat Physician with the Voodoo Brotherhood gangcult in Detroit. She was calmly used to this.
The Op nodded at the boy.
"They won't come back to Yazoo City, no more, no way, now how, no sir!"
Soule was flying as the morph-plus hit his system. The Op wondered how the boy would feel tomorrow when he woke up and saw the crutch.
Bales gave the Op a clenched-fist salute, and took the next squeezer out of her mouth to shoot up some other kid.
He yanked Fassett upright, and bent the Confederate's arms back so he could slip on the thumbcuffs. Fassett woke up when the pain hit him, but sagged again.
If he could push the case through the FBI or some independent agency, there was a chance that the CAF's highplaced buddies wouldn't be able to save him. There were still plenty of incitement and extortion beefs against the old IGW in Arizona, and the Op was sure he could scrape up a few extra charges. There might even be some bounties on the bastard's pointy head. The spare change would come in handy. He had been doing too many of these charity cases recently, and the coffers could do with some heavy replenishing.
The Yazoo Krewe were busy with their wounds, and with mopping up. Later, they'd probably all get drunk and sing songs. The Op remembered the early days, when he'd heard the Mississippi songs. And later caught up with the great bluesmen: Robert Johnson, who some say sold his soul to the Devil to make the music, Arthur Crudup, who wrote "That's All Right (Mama)," Johnny Ace, who shot himself playing Russian Roulette just as "Pledging My Heart" hit the charts in 1954, Kokomo Arnold, who wrote the original "Milkcow Blues Boogie," Junior Parker, B.B. King, Rufus "Bear Cat" Thomas, Big Memphis Ma Rainey, Hardrock Gunter, the Ripley Cotton Choppers, Big Bill Broonzy, Howlin' Wolf…
The music was faint now. It had been a long time. Forty years. But you couldn't ever burn it out of you. If you were born with it, it was always there.
He heaved Burtram Fassett towards the powerboat, and dumped him in. He'd make his way back quietly to Yazoo, and lock the Confederate into the reinforced trunk of his Cadillac convertible. Then, he'd head back to Memphis.
"Hey, Colonel," said a sharp-looking young swampy, tightly curled masses of hair pulled back by a rubber band, "where you goin'?"
Elvis Aron Presley, Op, shrugged, and said, "Home, I guess."
II
The sinking city smelled of dead fish, Paris perfume and easy money. Every time the waters rose, the locals just added another layer to the sidewalks, and shored up all the buildings below the waterline. A few months ago, the wall of The Crab Shell, a famous nightspot, had given way and a roomful of high-rolling gamblers had drowned. The New Orleans canal-rats had been scooping poker chips, jewellery, fancy hats and sodden paper money out of the drainage sluices ever since. Roger Duroc knew Venice we
ll, and recognized the odours of damp and corruption as the encroaching swampwater ate away at the foundations of this city. One day. New Orleans would just collapse like the House of Usher, and disappear under the stagnant waters. He wouldn't be sorry.
Before leaving Salt Lake City, he had had to take a course of innoculation shots that still made his arm itch. New Orleans was the disease capital of the South-East, and he didn't want to bring away any of the wide variety of rots, agues, fevers or plagues endemic to the city. Most people on the canals wore breathing masks. Given the high proportion of criminal elements in the city—it was wide-open, a PZ in name only—Duroc assumed that they were as much for disguise as for protection. Some of the masks were carnival fashion accessories, with tinsel whiskers stuck out of the breather snouts and twirled spangle eyebrows above the eyeplate dominos.
Duroc sat in Fat Pierre's, a fast-food joint, spooning thin hot gumbo into his mouth, and listening to the owner's teevee. Dressed in the black suit and wide hat of a Josephite elder, he was mainly ignored by the hustlers and hookers who made up the rest of the clientele. That was fine by him. A hugely obese chef, presumably Fat Pierre himself, was stirring his bottomless pot of gumbo, dropping in huge slabs of vatgrown Boosted Rooster from time to time and generously sinking okra into the gloop.
On the teevee, Lola Stechkin was hostessing a documentary about the rash of inexplicable phenomena that had been sweeping the world for the past year. They had footage of the ruins of the Monastery of Santa de Nogueira in Arizona, which had last December been the focus of an inexplicable devastation the news people were trying to pass off as a freak meteorological occurrence. A British science-fiction writer wearing a circus-tent sarong was talking to Lola about rains of frogs, the tracks of Bigfoot, and Buick-sized lumps of ice falling in the desert, while a tattooed astrologer was waving an hourglass and trying to get in on the act. There were all sorts of experts on the inexplicable, and they were always on the teevee these days.
Duroc suppressed a shudder. He hadn't been there, but since Santa de Nogueira, his worldview had not been the same. All his life, he had known about the Dark Ones and the powers that had run in his family for centuries. Always, Nguyen Seth, the Elder, had been there, talking of things beyond anyone's comprehension. Seth the Summoner had always been with his family, down through the centuries, ageless and unchanging, stalking the back alleys of history. And, in his dreams, he had been with his ancestors in the dungeons of the Inquisition, Place de la Guillotine, Dien Bien Phu. But only when the thing called the Jibbenainosay squeezed itself into the universe and joined in combat with the woman-shaped fiend Krokodil had Duroc really been forced to accept the reality.
