Jungle Of Steel And Stone vk-2

by George C. Chesbro

  He waits, crouched behind the stone wall and peering over its edge until the street beyond is momentarily clear of cars. Then, gripping his carrying sling against his chest, he sluggishly climbs over the wall and runs as straight and fast as he can across the street. Fueled by anxiety, he makes it safely across the street and into the shadows cast by a building.

  The effort is exhausting, and now he doubles over as his stomach muscles knot with pain. He waits for the spasms to pass, then turns and moves south along the face of the building, darting from moon shadow to moon shadow.

  Suddenly he sees before him a great street that is even wider than the one he had to cross to get to the river. There are a great many fast-moving cars on this great street, their light-eyes cutting sharp, moving swaths in the darkness. Veil waits, but the great street never seems to be entirely empty of cars.

  He could wait here forever for the street to empty, Veil thinks. Despite the cars, he must go on.

  Veil eases the carrying sling to the ground, lifts the Nal-toon, and allows some of the blood-shilluk to flow into his palm. He sniffs it, but this time the pain does not immediately vanish, as it usually does. He waits for the familiar, warm rush that will wash away his terrible hurt, but it does not come. There is some easing of the pain, but Veil still feels crippled. Recognizing the danger but feeling that he has no choice, he sniffs still more of the blood-shilluk. Finally the rush comes and the pain vanishes. He replaces the Nal-toon in his sling, lifts up the bundle, then walks forward a few steps and crouches down at the very edge of the great street.

  A cluster of cars speed by, leaving in their wake a relatively long stretch of darkness. There are more light-eyes in the distance, bearing down on him, but Veil feels that he must move now, for there might not be another moment of darkness as long.

  He straightens up and runs as fast as he can halfway across the great street to a stone barrier that separates the cars on his side from those on the other, which move in the opposite direction. His lungs ache and his chest heaves as he gasps for air; sweat pours off his naked body and his vision blurs badly, but he knows that he cannot stop to rest. It is too easy for the Newyorkcities to see him in the light-eyes of their cars.

  Everything seems to be spinning around him, but Veil somehow manages to climb over the stone wall. He stumbles into the street, staggers and falls. Despite the fact that he is totally disoriented, he struggles to his feet. He sways, then sits down hard with a jolt that shoots up his spine and sends shock waves of pain through his head.

  Suddenly he sees the light-eyes of a car bearing down on him very fast. Veil wills himself to his knees, then up on his feet as the car emits a wave of screeching, blaring sounds like those he heard when he crossed the street by Centralpark. The light-eyes shoot toward him, then suddenly begin to veer wildly back and forth as the screeching sounds build to a deafening, almost physical thing that batters at his ears. He smells something burning. Then the sound abruptly stops as the light-eyes stop, and Veil feels the cool touch of metal against his stomach.

  Veil sways as he stares, mesmerized, into the right light-eye of the car. Then he falls forward onto the car's metal skin.

  "What the fuck's the matter with you, you crazy son of a bitch? You want to commit suicide, do it with someone else!"

  There is a Newyorkcity warrior standing beside him. The man is shouting and waving his arms, obviously threatening him.

  "Please help me, Nal-toon. I cannot see well enough to fight. I am too weak to fight."

  "What the hell did you say?"

  "Please, Nal-toon. Have mercy one more time."

  "God damn, you smell like a fucking sewer! You're on drugs, aren't you?"

  Yes, Veil thinks—the Nal-toon is causing the warrior to stay his hand. Now it is up to him to summon the necessary will and strength. . . .

  Veil pushes off the car's metal skin. Holding his bundle against his body with both hands, he staggers the rest of the way across the street, stumbles over an embankment, and falls into night on the other side.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Veil awoke with a start, momentarily disoriented by the close proximity of his dream-Toby to their present position and by the fact that his dream-Toby's actions had gone far beyond anything Reyna had told him or that he could reasonably assume to have happened.

  He looked around for Reyna but could not see her. There was only the sound of the tape recorder playing its loop, and an occasional whoosh of night traffic on the expressway. Alarmed, he leapt to his feet, looked around again, then arbitrarily chose to go to his left—in the direction of the expressway.

  He found Reyna standing just inside a copse of trees, staring out over an empty expressway.

  "Don't be frightened, Reyna," Veil said as he came up behind her. "It's me. What's the matter?"

  Reyna pointed out toward the expressway. "Nothing, I guess. Something happened out there a few minutes ago."

  "What?"

  "It must have been a near accident. There isn't that much traffic, but a dog might have been crossing. All of a sudden there was a lot of honking and a screech of brakes. I was terrified that Toby had gone around us, tried to cross the expressway and been hit by a car. I ran over here, but now I can't see. . . . Veil, what's wrong?"

  "Nothing," he replied tightly.

  "You look very strange."

  "I was just thinking that it could very well have been Toby who spooked that driver."

  "Well, we really have no way of knowing," Reyna said after thinking about it for a few moments. "We can't look for spoor until it gets light, but he couldn't have come through this area without leaving tracks. If we find any, we'll know he's gone on to the next cemetery."

  "He has a few city blocks to cross before he gets there."

  "Yes, but it's dark. It will be dawn in a couple of hours. He knows that, so he'll go to ground at the first opportunity—when he reaches the cemetery. What concerns me is the fact that if Toby has crossed the expressway, it means he's not paying any attention to either me or the totems I left." She paused, shrugged. "There's nothing to be done about it now. You must be hungry."

  "A little," Veil replied distantly, still distracted by the overlap between the near accident in his dream and its real-life counterpart.

  They walked back to their original position. Veil took a sandwich out of the bag, uncapped a container of cold coffee, then sat on the wall and began to eat. He ate in silence for a few minutes, thinking, then slowly became aware that Reyna was staring at him.

  "I talked to my friend again," Reyna said when Veil glanced over at her.

  Veil sipped at his coffee. "What friend?"

  "The one I told you about; the one who's writing a history of the Vietnam War."

  "Oh, that friend. The one who half believes in fairy tales."

  "He says he's now convinced that this story about Archangel—the yellow-haired soldier and CIA agent I told you about—is true, and he's really excited about it." "I thought we weren't going to talk about this subject anymore."

  "As I recall, you asked me not to stalk you. Unless you're Archangel, I can't see what harm it does to talk about him. Does it bother you to have me talk about him?"

  She was getting cute, Veil thought as he took another bite of his sandwich, drank more coffee, and said nothing.

  "Are you?"

  "Am I what, Reyna?"

  "Are you Archangel?"

  "I"m a painter."

  "Were you Archangel twenty years ago?"

  "Now you're stalking me again, Reyna."

  "My friend says this Archangel had developed a reputation as a real crazy man, willing to do anything. He also happened to be the U.S. Army's best martial-arts expert. It seems that the Pentagon wanted to—"

  "Reyna, are you very attached to this friend of yours?"

  "Yes," Reyna answered after a pause. The sly, coquettish tone she had been using was gone, replaced by a note of confusion brought on by the sudden coldness in Veil's voice and eyes. "I like h
im very much."

  "I'm sorry to hear that."

  "Why, Veil?"

  "Because he's going to be dead very soon." Orville Madison would kill anyone he suspected of knowing about Archangel. And then the Director of Operations would kill him. And he would let Sharon die.

  They stared at each other in silence broken only by the sound of the tape loop on the recorder and the faint drone of the small transistor radio in Reyna's pocket. When Reyna finally spoke, her tone was filled with reproach. "Oh, Veil, that's a terrible joke."

  "I'm not joking," Veil responded curtly. From the moment Reyna had again brought up the subject of Archangel, Veil's mind had been working rapidly, sorting through options available to him. He'd decided that the researcher had to be stopped, if possible, and that Reyna was the most likely candidate to stop him. If Reyna were to perform this task, she first had to be convinced of its necessity; she had to be thoroughly shaken, and he could think of nothing more terrifying than the truth.

  Reyna had involuntarily taken a step backward. "Veil," she said in a small voice, "after all you've done for Toby, I'm almost ashamed to tell you this—but I have to. Sometimes you frighten me. You can go through these sudden changes; when you do, something projects out from you that another person can almost feel. This is the second time you've frightened me."

  Veil shifted his position slightly so that the light from a nearby street lamp fell across his face and eyes. He knew very well what was projected there, and he wanted Reyna to feel its full impact; he wanted her frightened. "You don't have to be frightened of me, Reyna," he said in a low, flat voice. "But the story I heard about this Archangel is pretty scary. If it's true, it explains why your friend doesn't have too much longer to live. Would you like to hear the story?"

  "I'm not sure, Veil. I . . . don't think so."

  "Oh, but I think you should. If the story is true, it could be that you're the only person who can save your friend's life. I don't have the slightest idea how you'd get him to stop his research on this Archangel story, because he's obviously hyper about it, but that's what you'd have to do if you want to save his life—and others'."

  "Veil, please stop. Now you're frightening me very much."

  "Once—and only once—this Archangel's company commander gave him what might be considered a compliment; actually it was a half compliment. The man called Archangel the finest warrior he'd ever met, and the worst soldier to ever make it out of boot camp; apparently, Archangel didn't like to take orders. I've heard those stories about him being mad. Who knows? He may have had emotional problems caused by a handicap no one knew about. The rumors were that he was hell on wheels in battle because he was too crazy to fear death, and he loved violence—probably because it freed him from the pain caused by this peculiar handicap. No matter. Because he didn't give a damn about anything but killing the enemy, he managed to amass more honors than any other man fighting in Vietnam. Since he was also CIA—and had been since his days in boot camp—as well as an Army captain, he was chosen by the agency to go into Laos and organize the Hmong tribes that were fighting against the Pathet Lao. Since Archangel's activities were strictly illegal, they were also, of necessity, top-secret; thus the need for a code name.

  "Archangel continued his winning ways—if you can call them that—in Laos. He learned the language. He was very effective, not only as a combat fighter but also as a technician and planner. The people of the Hmong became fiercely, even obsessively, loyal to him, and he to them. In fact, he became so effective that the Pathet Lao put what amounted to a five-thousand-dollar bounty on Archangel's head—a small fortune to any Hmong, not to mention just about any native of Southeast Asia. It was never collected by anyone, although hundreds of people had opportunities. Now, that's how legends grow about madmen.

  "In the meantime, Archangel was having a grand and glorious time. In fact, freed of virtually all constraints imposed by military discipline, free to do nothing but go around killing the enemy, he was—if you'll pardon the crudeness—happy as a pig in shit. And, of course, during the time all this was taking place, it was clear to everyone except a few generals and politicians that we were losing the war.

  "Now, enter the villain of the piece: Archangel's CIA controller. As the story goes, this man could—if one wanted to be excessively charitable—be called a sadistic son of a bitch. He was a controller in every sense of the word; he not only wanted to control his operatives' actions, but he also wanted their souls. He enjoyed gutting people. He and Archangel didn't get on well.

  "Back in the United States, a few generals and politicians had decided that all that was needed to boost public morale and rally support for the war was a bona fide hero—someone like Sergeant York in World War I, or Audie Murphy in World War II. This person's war record would be made public, a tremendous media blitz would be unleashed, and our hero would spend the rest of the war running back and forth across the country making public appearances, talking up the war effort, that sort of thing. Archangel was the man chosen to play this public-relations hero. Understand—he wasn't chosen because he was the best candidate. True, he had the best war record— if one reduces that to counting medals, which is what was done. Also, he was deemed photogenic. But he was indeed crazy and, for the most part, uncontrollable. Archangel was chosen because his controller had done a truly heroic job of lobbying. The controller did this because his own career would be enhanced if one of his men did the job, of course, but the most important reason for the lobbying effort was the controller's knowledge that Archangel would truly detest the part. Archangel belonged in the jungle, not on television, and the thought of putting Archangel on television and the lecture circuit pleased the controller immensely.

  "Archangel wasn't in a position to refuse, so he had to accept the assignment. The controller brought in a South Vietnamese colonel to replace Archangel with the Hmong—a very strange choice, Archangel thought at the time—and Archangel was sent off to Hawaii for six weeks of rest, recreation, and intensive drilling on how to become a comic-book hero. In the United States everything was being geared up for our hero's entrance onstage. It was insane, by the way, because Archangel would have lasted about a week on this trip before he broke some talk-show host's neck. But that's neither here nor there."

  "He was never put in place, was he?" Reyna asked, her voice breaking slightly. In the pale light cast by the street lamp her face looked as ashen as it had when Veil had first seen her.

  "Obviously not," he replied dryly. "If he had been put in place, your friend wouldn't have anything to dig for, would he?"

  "What happened, Veil?"

  "The story goes that Archangel—who never slept well— was walking the streets of Saigon a few hours before his early-morning flight back to the United States was scheduled to take off. He was approached by a pimp who offered him a young boy and girl for his sexual pleasure. Archangel knew the children; they were from the Hmong tribe he'd fought with."

  Reyna uttered a tiny gasp, but Veil spoke through it. "When that plane landed in Washington, the entire Washington press corps, the Joint Chiefs, dozens of politicians, and no less than the president of the United States were waiting to greet Archangel. The problem was that Archangel had never boarded the plane. At the time the plane had taken off, he was in a small office in the basement of the United States Embassy in Saigon breaking the bones of his controller.

  "You see, it seems that, two months before, the controller had been approached by the South Vietnamese with a problem they wanted the controller to help them solve. There was this South Vietnamese colonel who'd just about cornered the Saigon markets in drug dealing, racketeering, and pornography. He'd become a considerable embarrassment to the government, but he was from an important family; they couldn't just put him in prison. The controller was asked to find someplace to put him, and the controller thought it would be a great idea to put the colonel in charge of Archangel's Hmong tribe."

  "To gut Archangel," Reyna whispered hoarsely. "To snatch his sou
l."

  "Ah, yes. The controller knew what would happen and didn't care. Within a week this colonel had begun selling Hmong children to pimps in Saigon; within a month the entire village had gone over to the Pathet Lao. Now, in a beautiful stroke of irony, the South Vietnamese—led by the colonel—were about to make their first commando foray over the border. They planned to wipe out the village.

  "After busting up his controller, Archangel stole a heavily armed helicopter and took off for Laos. He intended to warn the village; if necessary to save the village, he intended to fight with the Pathet Lao against the South Vietnamese. He'd turned traitor. Archangel stopped the raid and saved the Hmong, but his helicopter was shot down. Like any legend, he had more lives than a cat; he survived the crash, eluded capture, and a week later came crawling out of the jungle, crossed back over the border, and turned himself in to the Americans—who now had one very large problem. Archangel was thrown into the stockade while everyone put their heads together and tried to figure out what to do with him.

  "You see the problem. Literally overnight, the war hero—for whom a tremendous publicity campaign has been planned—turns up a traitor, not to mention a potential source of considerable embarrassment to the United States if he ever tells what he knows. His real identity officially hasn't been made public, but there are enough people who know it to enable some ambitious reporter to track it down. Naturally Archangel could have been put in the stockade for the rest of his life—or even shot. But then, there would be the danger of some reporter—or some historian, like your friend—taking an interest and starting to ask questions. What everyone really wanted was for Archangel to disappear off the face of the earth. And be forgotten.

  "It was the controller, obviously a man with a silver tongue, who finally came up with a solution that was acceptable to the Pentagon: Simply let Archangel go— with a few strings trailing behind him. All of his military records are drastically altered, and all of his honors taken away. Then he's given a medical discharge as a psycho. His end of the deal involves keeping his mouth shut and thus avoiding summary execution on some street corner. Needless to say, the whole public-relations idea was dropped."