by John Shirley
Constantine turned to look after Spoink and saw an old truck with a yellow lightbar pulling up along the road edging the beach. Men were getting out, starting toward Spoink, who was still grabbing his crotch and yelling after the terrified woman in the chador.
“Oh, fuck me!” Constantine burst out. “The Morals Police.”
5
WATCHED AND WATCHED BY CROOKED EYES
Carthaga, off the coast of North Africa
“This here little country’s just big enough to have a war in,” said General Coggins into the headset with a chuckle, as he scanned the morning horizon from the copilot’s seat of the gunship. He was a lean Texan with a pot belly and a drooping lower lip; he had those down-slanted eyes one saw amongst denizens of the Southwest who looked vaguely Asian but more likely had a few drops of Native American blood. He adjusted his binoculars but saw no aircraft out ahead at all, which was good. He didn’t want to run into any Carthaga patrols; Burlington would have to shoot them down. That would spoil the illusion.
The gunship shuddered over the red-tiled rooftops of Poeni, the capital city—the only important city, in truth—on the Mediterranean island of Carthaga, fifty-three miles northeast of Tunis. It was a Blackhawk helicopter, quietly misappropriated by General Coggins, repainted in a secret hangar in the gray and yellow of the Carthaga air force. To complete the camouflage, they were all wearing the cheap dun uniforms of the Carthaga military: Coggins, Alfonse Trevino, Captain Courtney Simpson—the pilot—and General Coggins’s bodyguard and persuader, Burlington, on the 16 mm gun.
They quickly left Poeni behind, heading toward the island’s eastern shore, flying over rolling countryside: dusty beet fields, olive orchards. “Did our man in the Carthaga Aerial Force set up the diversion?” Trevino asked.
The thunder of the chopper made it necessary for them to speak through the headsets, though they were all sitting close by one another. Trevino clutched at the straps holding him in place with one hand, and clutched his stomach with the other when the chopper gave a lurch.
“Sure as hell did,” Coggins said. “We shouldn’t get any hassle from the locals on this here little outing at all.”
The pilot, a tall, blue-eyed fiftyish man with sandy hair, set the autopilot, took off his headset, and leaned over to the American army general. “Best not to discuss such things over the headset, sir. This frequency’s supposed to be restricted to the chopper, but there’s no telling for sure. Funny things happen and transmissions get picked up . . .” He shifted back into position with a grimace—he was almost too big to comfortably fit into the cockpit, having to slump to pull it off.
“That’s an affirmative, there, Courtney,” said the general. The Servants of Transfiguration were fanatics about secrecy and damned good at it. The SOT was only a rumor to the intelligence services—even the Mossad. Of course, the organization included certain CIA agents, but they would never let their ostensible employers know about their true allegiance. And neither the CIA nor the U.S. military had any idea that Coggins was here in Carthaga, nor what he was here for.
Coggins signaled the others to be careful of what they said on the headset. They all nodded except for Burlington. White-blond, florid-faced, and gray-eyed, usually silent anyway, Burlington was absorbed in checking the load on the heavy machine gun, smiling softly to himself. Strapped into the open side door, Burlington was too broad-shouldered to sit anywhere else—and he loved the big gun.
“There it is!” Simpson said, switching off autopilot and nodding at the camp of the Sudanese army battalion at the crossroads below. Date palms lined the roads up to the crossroads. There were two smaller helicopters secured to the ground just outside the camp, Coggins noted, with men loading supplies into them. He switched off his headset and relied on shouting. “Looks like they’re about to pull out!”
Coggins nodded, switching off his own headset. “The dumb bastards think they’re done on this island!”
Trevino was already muttering the invocations, sprinkling the sacred blood onto the small glass ball he held in his right hand. In the glass sphere, no bigger than an apple, was a yellow, swirling mist. He spoke the final words, pressed the glass ball to his heart and his groin, then hurled it out the open door, past the gun, so that it fell into the center of the crossroads below, shattering. The skull they’d buried in the crossroads a fortnight before—a particular skull, not just any skull—responded to the proximity of the bone dust quickened to the invocation, and awaited those emanations that would complete the fatal circuit.
Below, about five hundred North African Arabs in the uniform of the Sudanese army looked up from packing their gear into the trucks the UN had provided for their pull-out from the island. They looked at one another, wondering what the gunship was about. Just making a show, urging them to leave the country? Pointless! Weren’t they leaving, after all? They had an agreement with the government of the tiny nation that they were no longer going to support the insurgency of the island’s Arab minority, they were going to pull out so the UN could negotiate a settlement . . .
“Now!” Trevino shouted.
Burlington looked over his shoulder at Coggins. He took orders only from Coggins—so definitively was this so, he would have ignored the President of the United States if he’d asked him to pass the salt.
“Go for it!” Coggins shouted.
Burlington grinned, his eyes glistening as he opened fire with the chassis-mounted machine gun, spraying the soldiers below with hundreds of 16 mm rounds in a few seconds. Men were shattered, torn to pieces, flung spinning about. Some of them ran for their weapons, but few made it.
“ATS missiles!” Coggins shouted.
Licking his lips like a man about to penetrate a virgin, Simpson tilted the gunship toward the mass of fleeing men below and fired the missiles. One of them struck a truck, igniting its gas tank, making a glorious red fireball that lit reflections in Simpson’s eyes as he fired the second set of missiles.
“Two missiles away!”
“Send the other two into those choppers on the ground there!” Coggins ordered.
“Yes sir!” Simpson swung the chopper around, as bullets whined from its armored underside, and flew over to hover where he could get an angle down at the choppers. He was just ninety yards above the targets—impossible to miss. Men were still leaping from the helicopters, sprinting away from them in terror, when the missiles launched from either side of the gunship. Both targets were struck, churned into flaming shrapnel that ripped through the camp and whirled human bodies through the air.
Burlington had been firing continuously—he was already on his second belt of ammo, mopping up a line of screaming, running men like an exterminator spraying ants; wherever he struck, the ants fell instantly dead.
“Die, you stupid little crawling bastards!” he shouted.
Trevino glanced at Burlington in irritation. Looking over his shoulder, Coggins didn’t miss the look. He knew that to Trevino this was a Holy Mission. The men dying on the ground were sacrifices to a higher purpose. To Burlington and Simpson, it was just another chance to kill for the general.
It was a Holy Mission to Coggins, too, of course. He knew what was coming. The sword, the fire, the vengeful angels of the Lord. He was just one instrument, one part of the great plan that would call the Transfiguration down upon the world.
Still, he had to keep them all working together until the end—until the time when God would sort them out.
“That’s enough, Burlington!” he shouted. “Got to leave enough alive to take the story back to their people! Courtney—take us out of here!”
“Saw someone with a home video camera point it up at us!” Simpson said.
“Good!” said Coggins. “Very good! They’ll take us for those American mercenaries hired by President Mofi!”
The Blackhawk turned and headed back to the cargo ship the SOT had waiting for them ten miles offshore. Coggins was eager to get there so he could monitor the news and do what he could to enc
ourage the war in Carthaga along. All he’d done today was strike the spark. The brushfire must be fanned to life. From little brushfires great burnings would come.
And he was confident of it; he could feel the thrum of the War Lord in the air. The great conflagration was coming.
~
Watching the gunship depart, coughing from the smoke of burning trucks and helicopters, smelling cooked human flesh, Major Abbide felt a strange energy rising in him. Another time he might’ve felt raped, disillusioned, despairing over what had happened to his battalion.
But today, he felt something else—and it was as if the feeling were rising from the earth at his feet, soaking itself into him. He trembled with it, felt drugged with it, energized by it, and before his mind’s eye floated visions of carnage: the destruction of his enemies. He would take his men and he would punish the sons of whores who ran this country. He would incite the Arab majority on Carthaga to rise up and massacre the Carthagan blacks—who had power, after all, only because President Mofi’s family connections gave him control of the offshore oil rigs. Mofi, in his mad arrogance, had surely sent these mercenaries in their gunship to betray the agreement, to murder Abbide’s men before they left the island, to show he had no respect for the Sudan.
Abbide heard the other survivors roaring in fury, turned to see them shaking their fists at the now distant gunship, all of them burning with the same martial hatred, a hunger for revenge that was like a fever, a hot singing in their nerves—a fury more powerful than anything they’d ever felt before. It seemed to have a life of its own.
“We will give them war!” Major Abbide shouted. “And with war they will pay the price for what they have done! We will kill them all!”
And his men, as one, cheered with a sound like a hundred missiles shrieking through the air.
The Caspian Sea
“What the bloody hell are you telling them?” Constantine demanded.
“Silence, British cur!” Spoink snarled, slapping Constantine so hard that he staggered and nearly went over the side of the cabin cruiser.
Two of the Morals Police had come along on the peeling white forty-foot cruiser, one of them the coxswain piloting them out into the midst of the Caspian, the other a short man in a robe, sandals, and fez, scraggly of both beard and teeth, which he bared at Constantine as he pointed his submachine gun at his head. He shouted something in Farsi that Constantine—clutching the railing of the cabin cruiser—laboriously translated as You will not speak or you will die!
Awed by the famous face belonging to the body that Spoink inhabited, the captain of the Morals Police had given Spoink his .45 pistol. Spoink now waved the gun with authority, making it glint in the sunlight as, speaking in fluent Farsi, he ordered the robed coxswain to cut the engine. The pilot obeyed and the battered cabin cruiser sputtered to a slow, silent gliding in the low waves.
Constantine looked for the shore and was troubled when he found he could no longer see it. They were in deep water out here. He was in deep water in more ways than one. He figured Spoink to have been taken over by Lucifer or some other diabolic enemy from his past. He’d been set up.
Tired, hungry, and on the verge of sunstroke, Constantine was feeling magically enervated and not sure what good it would do him to use unreliable power on one of these thugs—control one and the other would top him. But he had to try. Maybe he could get the guy with the Uzi to shoot Spoink and the boat’s pilot. He tried to focus his psychic energies . . .
Then Spoink began yelling in Farsi and pointing at the water. The man with the submachine gun went and looked over the edge of the rail. The coxswain looked over the gunman’s shoulder. Spoink caught Constantine’s eye and jerked a thumb at the coxswain, then stepped up behind the gunman, grabbed him by the ankles and flipped him over the railing.
The boat’s pilot turned gaping in astonishment—and Constantine had him over the railing before he could say Iraq Robinson.
Both men lost their weapons in the water, where they thrashed around shouting imprecations in Farsi. Constantine understood some of them.
“And your mum, too, mate!” he shouted back, tossing them a couple of life jackets. “The shore’s that way! Best start swimming! Allah Akhbar!”
Spoink was singing a Red Hot Chili Peppers song as he started the cabin cruiser and headed it north. Something about “gorilla and cuntilla and salmonella.” The shouts of the Iranian Morals Cops got fainter and fainter as Constantine joined him in the shade of the cabin. “God I need to sit down . . . Here, was it necessary to give me that slap with quite so much verve?”
“Got to make it look good, bro.” He scratched his beard. “Know how I got him to look in the water? Told him there was a mine floating out there. Damn I’m good.”
“You’re a fucking lunatic, mate,” Constantine observed matter-of-factly.
“Doesn’t mean I’m not damned good.”
They continued on another nautical mile or two, till Constantine said, “Oi—switch off the engine until we know where we’re going.”
“ ’Kay. Hey, there’s a pack of cigarettes here in the little compartment under the—”
“Give me those!” Constantine snatched the pack from Spoink’s hand, found his lighter and immediately lit a cigarette. He took a deep drag. “Ahh—Turkish imports. Not bad.” The boat was drifting now, the sea calm. “What’d you say to those wankers, anyway, to get us out here?”
“Dude, it’s so tight. I woke up in the hospital—just like ten blocks from where you were on the beach—and I had all this guy’s memories and skills and shit, and none of his personality. I just got up and pulled out the tubes and walked out. I remember how to talk his lingo, I remember all the names of the blokes this chap knows—”
“The what the who knows?”
“You’re English, right? Just tryin’ to talk your talk. I can’t say blokes and chaps too?”
“No. You can’t.”
“Come on, man, I love that English shit; yo, you wanta hear me do stuff from Lord of the Rings—I can do Gandalf—”
Constantine cringed. “Christ no! Don’t—”
“ ‘Fool of a Took!’ What you think? I can do Samwise—”
“Leave off that twee shite or I’ll box your ears. Now just tell me, how’d you manage this? They really thought you were him, the big toff in local politics? And you told them you were gonna dump my body out here, then?”
“Soon as I found out they had access to a boat. Seems like serendipity, bro.”
“What became of that girl you were chasing?”
“Came to my senses when I saw the Morals Cops. I told ’em she was showing some ankle, like a dirty damn whore. Said to just chase her from the beach—said the British son of Satan had put her up to it. Am I good or what, dude? Looks like you’re stuck with me!”
“I’ll decide how bloody long I’m stuck with you, mate. Might drop you off at the nearest buoy. You nearly got me arrested. What was all that rubbishy behavior on the beach, then?”
“I was dead a couple of years. I was just all hifey from being back in a body, man! I could feel my feet in the sand, the wind in my beard. I had testicles again!”
“Got it till out of your system, have you?”
“Totally, John, totally! I’m gonna be chilling after this, I so promise!”
Constantine snorted and shook his head. Funny to see the bearded, robed Muslim figure of a man spouting California patois. “What kind of bloody name is Spoink anyway?”
“Oh, you know, I was getting hifey with my boys and I always get to a point where the shit really kicks in and it’s like a brain orgasm, dude, and I would always say, ‘Here it comes, here it comes . . . it’s going to . . . SPOINK!’ I don’t know why it was spoink, that’s just how it was in my brain. So they started calling me Spoink. And I feel all spoink all the time right now, dude. I just feel like—Hey, I wonder if there’s any tunes on this bitch . . .” Spoink turned to the radio on the cabin cruiser control console, fiddled with it till
he found something rhythmic. Turkish dance music, Constantine guessed. Spoink began to hum to himself, rolling his shoulders, snapping his fingers, doing a shuffle across the deck.
“You’re getting carried away again, Spoink.”
“I gotta dance at least once, in this body—tell you what, just one dance, and afterwards I’ll be like the vocational dean at my community college. Like I’ve got a steel rod stuck up my butt. I don’t expect to be able to stay in a body long; I got to get what I get while I can get it. I promise—I’ll be cool after this. I just need to do a thizzle.”
“You what?”
“I got to thizz, man, like Mac Dre. You get a look on your face, like this—” He contorted his face like a guy trying to win a gurning contest and began to fling himself around. “That’s the ‘thizz’—I get a face ‘like thizz.’ Then I get dumb.”
“Can’t get to someplace you’re already at.”
“You get loose, you shake your shit, you get a thizz like thizz and you get dumb, that’s the thizzle dance, bro. It’s the Nation of Thizz-lam. It’s about getting loose, letting go of caring what people think, let your primal impulses out!”
Watching Spoink caper about—the body of a fundamentalist fanatic doing the thizzle dance—Constantine ran his fingers through his hair, baffled. “Why you? That’s what I can’t bloody reckon. Any spirit would’ve had access to the guy’s language, once they were in him. Why’d they send me you?”
“Show you later, man! Come on, Constantine, get dumb!”
“Sod off. Real question is, where do we go now?”
“Azerbaijan, dude!” Spoink said, still dancing. “That’s what they told me before I came here. Don’t know nothing about it except how to pronounce the name—and it’s somewhere up the coast to the north. We can ask around.” He flung himself sideways and almost went over the railing. Recovering, he danced about in his robe and beard and turban like a scarecrow in a whirlwind, as he went on: “Then we trade this boat for a plane ride, maybe, if we can find somebody to fly us out to the Mediterranean. Problem is—whoa, get dumb!—problem is, I was told they were only allowed to give us a little help. And they pretty much gave it to us already. So I don’t know where to go once we get to the Mediterranean.” He stopped dancing as the crackly song stopped and a deep voice in Turkish came on the radio, seeming to offer something for sale. “I don’t know what the hell we supposed to do there either, Johnny Dude. Only that we’re supposed to go there. That Mediterranean’s kind of big, isn’t it? I mean, it’s not like Lake Tahoe?”
