Jude looked at her as if he thought she was crazy. “What’s in here?” he asked, taking the book.
She said, “It’s what those men are after.”
“In one little book? What can—?”
“I’m not sure why they want it so desperately, but I know it’s very valuable, to the right people.”
“Seems like it’s more valuable to the wrong people.”
“I mean, to people who would know how to make it work.” Her shoulders dropped. “I don’t know what else to tell you, Jude. It’s complicated and, well, classified.”
“Hey lady,” Jude said brightly, “you a government man?”
She grinned. “In a way.”
He scratched his head trying to integrate this unsavory bit of new information. When he spoke, he seemed to have forgotten it. “Cable, you gonna get yourself killed.”
“Will you take care of the notebook?”
“Ain’t you ’fraid I’ll read it?”
She laughed. “No. I can’t even read it.”
He looked right into her eyes. Then he nodded. “Okay.”
Cable gave him a big hug and slipped over the side into the water. “Be careful,” she warned. “Stay out of sight.”
He watched her climb up the bank onto the peninsula before cautiously poling his skiff toward the mouth of the inlet.
19
By the time it came to a stop, Ferret’s boat had taken on water that soaked the boots of the seven standing passengers. The pilot kept the prop turning lightly to combat the current of the river as the men climbed out. They rocked the boat in the process.
“Hey! Easy!” the pilot shouted. More water was sloshing in. The top edge of the airboat was almost under water.
But the men were too eager to disembark. The airboat listed and suddenly, tail first, went down like a rock. It left the pilot, Bruno, and one other commando treading water.
Arcane, grinning, looked down at the men from the railing of his rescue vessel, a great black hump in the water, a hovercraft-yacht that was itself treading water, floating with its powerful blowers temporarily stationary under its rippling black skirt.
Once on board, the men stripped out of wet clothes and rummaged through the assorted ill-fitting garments that happened to be on board. Too few towels were passed around and tossed onto the deck in a damp pile.
Arcane seemed amused by the discomfort of his men and only slightly annoyed at their complete failure.
Ferret said to a still-dripping Bruno: “Ask Arcane right now, and he’ll tell you a single battle never wins or loses a war.”
Arcane heard him and laughed. “True,” he said, “but you aren’t allowed the luxury of that particular opinion, Ferret. If you accept that lazy rationale we’ll lose every battle—and that will lose us the war.”
Ferret smiled, accepting Arcane’s implicit designation of him as supreme commander of the estate’s armed forces.
“Under way, sir?” asked a sailor in white who had come on deck from the cabin.
“To where?” Arcane asked him. “No, let’s just drift a bit while we think. Don’t let the current take us far from the peninsula of our ignominious defeat, however; I suspect we’ll head back in that direction.” Arcane was seated at a glass table. He spooned breakfast yogurt from a silver chalice.
Bruno wandered out into the sun to let his body dry before attempting to cram his huge thighs into the only trousers that looked remotely big enough. “That thing is smart,” he told Arcane. His tone of voice was that of a subordinate giving his report.
“Very smart,” Arcane agreed.
“Did you see what he did?” Bruno asked.
“No, but I see the results.”
Ferret, his clothes no more oversized than usual, pulled up a chair and sat with Arcane. “That thing planned a trap for the pursuit boats. Planned it. Made them collide at top speed.”
Arcane slurped a dripping spoonful of yogurt. “This thing has considerable native intelligence,” he agreed. “It’s surprising. He played a chess game with you and won.”
Bruno had sat in another chair and had got the pants up over his calves—which was something of an accomplishment. “I don’t get it, Mr. Arcane. Why aren’t you mad at us?” he asked.
Arcane smiled at him. “What would that accomplish?” he asked. “Besides, Bruno, in a strange way it evens the odds a trifle. A strong adversary is like a beautiful, dangerous woman. I’ve never been able to resist either.”
Bruno stood and pulled up the khaki pants. They made it to the top, but the fit was wrong everywhere—too tight in the thighs and crotch, too loose at the waist. Bruno reached for the shirt and said, “Thank you for the clothes, Mr. Arcane.”
Arcane smiled. “Tell the captain to draw anchor, Bruno.”
“We going home?” Bruno asked, relieved.
“We are not,” said Arcane. He looked out toward the colorful, sun-brightened marshes. “He has captured our knights, but in the process, he has exposed his queen.”
Bruno scratched his head.
“Tell the captain, Bruno,” Ferret said gesturing toward the cabin with a slight toss of his head.
As Bruno walked away, there were two popping rips—his thighs had burst through seams of the trouser legs.
Ferret and Arcane laughed. Bruno said back to them, with surprising self-possession: “Bet you wish you could do that.”
20
The colossal rat that scurried across her path, Cable mused, was probably a possum; she had never seen one before. It startled her but did not frighten her. The snake she saw was too far away to be a danger; besides, she thought, who can’t outrun a snake? She saw no alligators as she ran through the mangrove swamps, but she felt that if she had seen one she’d have merely wished it good morning. Something had clicked inside her; she was no longer so afraid of the swamp.
There were much more dangerous things to fear.
When she could see patches of sky, she looked for traces of black smoke from the wreckage of the airboats. But the air had calmed, and the smoke hung in scattered, low-lying clouds—it seemed to be everywhere and nowhere. The rising sun offered less help in orientation; the rays were too vertical. Cable slowed her passage through the palms and palmettos and ferns.
She was confused. She expected to break into a clearing and see the water of the lake. She saw only a wall of vegetation.
She retraced her steps, found another path, and tried it. She laughed nervously at her predicament. How stupid, after all that had happened, for her to wind up lost.
Suddenly there was a splash. It could not have come from far away, but still she could see no water. Another splash sounded. It was as if people were jumping in, or throwing in something heavy. She walked cautiously toward the sound. The direction took her into wide-open sunlight, which she did not like, but she felt she had no choice.
Cable pushed aside a mat of shrubs and vines and saw that she was on a rise; below her, down a shallow embankment, was the water of the lake. She followed the slope down, keeping behind tree trunks as much as possible.
She stopped at the water’s edge, confused. Somehow she had managed to travel in a circle. She was not far from the inlet where she had left Jude. And out on the lake was a fat flying-saucer of a vessel—a black hovercraft she had never seen the likes of before. Sleek and stubby at the same time, it had an elaborate, port-holed cabin—roughly rectangular with rounded corners—and a long chromium-railed deck. At the railing stood a tall aristocratic man dressed in black trousers and black sport shirt. He was talking to three other men, who looked like mercenary soldiers.
He gestured out over the swamp and then turned directly toward Cable. She was in deep shadows and hidden from his view, she felt sure. And yet he kept pointing as if he knew exactly where she was.
Cable stayed frozen until the man left the railing. She was then about to move cautiously back up the bank when a movement caught her eye . . . something in the water.
Jude’s boat. It was dr
ifting undirected along the shoreline, spinning in slow motion as it nudged tree trunks in the water.
Jude was lying in the bottom of it, blood covering his skull.
Cable nearly cried out. Tears surged into her eyes, and she started wading toward the drifting skiff.
She heard a sound behind her.
Ferret grabbed her with a shriek of pleasure and locked a terrible hold on her neck. His forearm cut off her scream, almost caused her to faint.
Back at the burned church, the swamp thing waded ashore at the bridge once more. He looked around with mounting anxiety. He tried to call out, and only a roar burst forth. He listened. No one. He ran from one part of the ruin to another. No one. He roared again and listened.
This time he heard the gut-low rumble of a big muffled engine. It was coming from the water. He ran toward it.
He saw a dinghy being hoisted onto a large, black hovercraft. The craft was getting up steam, spewing up a cloud of spray from beneath its air-cushion skirt. When the dinghy was secured over the yacht’s fantail, the cloud of spray increased, and the phantom black mound eased off through the trees and was lost in the countless channels of the swamp.
The creature looked frantically toward the inlet where he had seen Cable and the black boy hiding, and ran in that direction. Before he reached the place, he saw the boy’s old metal boat caught between trees at the bank, waded to the boat and looked in.
The boy was lying in the bottom of the boat; the bilge-water was crimson. With the greatest gentleness he lifted the light body out and carried it through the water to the land. He smoothed a handful of water over the boy’s wound to cleanse it.
The beast laid the boy on deep moss and rested his big mitt over the wound. A narrow shaft of sunlight struck the back of the giant hand and warmed it with life.
The beast laid his other hand on the boy’s chest. Was there a heartbeat?
Then—perhaps from the touch, perhaps by chance—one of the boy’s eyelids fluttered. It opened. The other eye opened. Nothing in the boy’s face moved except his eyes—which opened very wide.
He looked into the face of the monster of the swamp and said, “Ohhhh, shit. There goes the neighborhood.”
A huge smile of surprise and delight lit the creature’s face. It transformed his fierce visage into something surprisingly, achingly human.
Jude raised up on his elbows and took in the creature from top to bottom. He said, “You the dude saved us back there?”
The monster smiled and nodded shyly.
Jude looked at big pockmarks and rips, where bullets had hammered into the beast’s body, and his eyes grew somber. “Boy, they sure did a number on you,” he said. He pushed himself to a sitting position and then got woozily to his feet.
The monster shrugged off the boy’s concern.
Jude straightened his spine and proudly stuck out his hand. The swamp thing stared at the hand for an instant, amazed and very pleased, then engulfed it in his own huge fist. He tenderly shook it.
Jude temporarily lifted his deadpan façade and grinned from ear to ear. “You’re a friend of that Cable, right?”
The massive creature nodded.
“Then I got somethin’ I think you oughtta have.” He bent forward and reached back into the seat of his pants. “She said I should put this in a safe place,” Jude said, extracting the fifteenth notebook.
The creature’s distorted face could express yet another emotion: a profound and worshipful joy. His mouth parted, his eyes grew moist, and his cheeks tingled with amazement. He knelt to bring himself to the boy’s height and reached out for the book.
The notebook was large and flat in the boy’s two hands; in the creature’s, it vanished in the way a magician palms a card.
“Need anything else, you just sing out,” Jude said, patting the monster’s wrist.
The swamp thing studied the boy’s small metal skiff and gave him a quizzical look.
They made it work. Along the channel that led to the river where the black hovercraft was last seen, Jude braced himself in the prow of the skiff and poled; The monster sat toward the stern like a big dark mountain—the most imposing passenger Jude was ever likely to have. The stern rode very low; the bow was so high out of the water that Jude’s pole barely touched bottom.
Jude’s voice floated back to his smiling passenger: “Mama always tol’ me not to mess in white folk’s troubles. But she never said nothin’ ’bout stayin’ away from green folks.”
21
“Chopper Two reporting, sir, returning to the estate if there are no further instructions,” said the pilot, alone in his droning, thrumming machine.
“That’s the ticket,” Arcane’s voice said in his earphone.
The chopper pilot could see the hovercraft. It looked like a great black horshoe crab in the center of a blue mist on the waterway ahead of him. He could also see, in the clear midday distance, the plantation with its supernumerary turrets and towers and outlying houses; the estate was situated in what looked like a small golf course in the center of a dwarf jungle on an island almost surrounded by a natural moat of mud.
“Success?” the pilot asked. He had not communicated with them since transferring Ferret and Bruno to their airboat.
“We’re not returning empty-handed,” Arcane said, “but we have only half our cargo. There’s more work to be done.”
“I see, sir,” said the pilot.
“I’m sure you do. We’ll have a moderated celebration this evening, those of us returning hemi-victorious, after we’ve mapped out a continuing strategy. You might inform the ladies when you land. On second thought, I’ll call ahead and tell Caramel and Marsha.”
“Strategy, sir?” the pilot asked.
Arcane said, “I rather expect our second guest to crash the party.”
“I don’t see the airboats. Are they staying behind?”
“Quite permanently. Did you see a plume of black petroleum smoke earlier?”
“Yes, I did. Was that—?”
Arcane said, chattily, “The third boat sank out of loneliness. Be sure the estate is amply stocked with our various fuels, won’t you, Chopper Two? We may have to act quickly in the near future.”
“I’ll do that, sir,” the pilot said, his mind distracted: What in God’s name could have destroyed those boats?
“Fine, Chopper Two. Over and out.”
The pilot absently switched off the radio. He was becoming anxious. Clearly there was a powerful danger confronting Arcane about which he had not been adequately briefed.
The hovercraft was directly below. The pilot took a last glance at it—saw Ferret talking to someone on the open deck—and flew on ahead.
While Arcane was below in the radio room, Ferret—out in the sunlight—poured himself a congratulatory drink. As he was about to sip from it, he offered it to Cable instead.
She shook her head slowly, contemptuously.
Ferret said, “You would have gotten away today if you hadn’t come back and walked right into our hands.”
She said, “Thank you. I assumed it had nothing to do with your intelligence.”
Ferret smiled crookedly and sipped his bourbon. “What possessed you to do it? I’d genuinely like to know. I suspect you’re not susceptible to whims and impulses.”
She ignored him. He watched her eyes size him up: his angular, forceful face; the pirate’s earring, his symbol of freedom; his fresh uniform—he was glad he had taken the time to change—the razor-sharp machete on his belt. Ferret assumed that what she saw impressed her, but that she would deny it—perhaps even to her overscrupulous self. There was nothing Ferret was obliged to deny; he found her exciting, arousing even now. Like Arcane, Ferret could never resist a beautiful, dangerous woman. He longed to have her under his power, to have her praying for his control over her, begging him.
He took a step closer. “You could do worse than drink with me,” he said, his meaning transparent.
“How?” she asked, dully.
His oily smile faltered.
Bruno stepped to the deck bar. “Can I have a cigarette?” he asked Ferret. He had torn the damaged legs off the trousers and wore them as cut-offs.
Ferret fished him one out of a drawer in the bar; he said to Cable: “Bruno allows himself one cigarette a day. Can you imagine such childish self-discipline. He keeps reminding us all that he’s in training. For the Idiot’s Olympics, we assume.”
Bruno smiled faintly at Cable. She remembered him. He was the one who had wanted Linda Holland’s locket. There was a surprising innocence in his face—surprising because Cable assumed he had participated in countless violent crimes. Her assumption kept her from smiling back at him.
The big man turned away shyly, as if he understood her reasoning.
“Where’s Arcane?” Cable asked.
“Below,” said Ferret. “Busy. See there, in two words I have confirmed your suspicion that Arcane is alive and well, that he is in charge of this affair, that this is his boat, that we are going to his estate, and that he is on board. I’ll answer another: he wants that notebook.”
Cable regarded the ridiculous man in front of her with fear, interest and overwhelming contempt. “Thanks for the information,” she said.
“You see how this works, don’t you. Cable? We ask questions and we get answers. I asked you indirectly if you knew about the notebook, and you did not ask, ‘What notebook, Mr. Ferret?’ What do you suppose that tells me?”
“That I know it exists and what’s so important about it,” Cable said. She was thinking fast. Ferret did not have the notebook; somehow Jude had managed to hide it before they got to him. If they knew where the notebook was, she supposed, she would be dead by now. Fortunately, Cable herself did not know the exact whereabouts of it; that fact might keep her alive for a while, even if she were drugged or tortured. “Any more questions?” she taunted, her spirits a bit higher.
Ferret chuckled unpleasantly. “Now, that encourages me,” he said. “I like a dare. You seem convinced that your willpower is a match for my powers of persuasion. A game ploy, Cable. A match. A challenge for me: how to make you tell me where the notebook is while keeping your body intact for other purposes.”
Swamp Thing 1 Page 14
