We round a corner and the road becomes a dirt track and it winds up a madly perfect woody hillside—maybe even a mountainside—to a temple-shaped sort of thing with minarets and a long jutting balcony facing west, and I realise that this is where I’m going. I’m having my date in Shangri-La. Leah gasps and yips, and Gonzo throws me a pure puppy grin like “Did I do you proud?” and I nod and laugh out loud at the sheer amazingness of it and smack him on the back, and we wind on up the snaky path.
We park in a forecourt strewn with actual gravel. Leah and I start trying to unload the gear and Gonzo sternly tells us to go get ready and if they’re still fixing the place up when we get back, we can stroll a bit. He actually says “stroll like lovers” and Leah and I look hurriedly away from each other in case one of us is thinking no or maybe in case we’re both thinking yes, because that would be too soon, too much, all crunched up before we’ve had a chance to enjoy courting. Leah nods at me and scurries off breathlessly to “get changed.” The SpecOps waiters abduct my command table and Sally “Eagle” Culpepper vanishes to the top of one of the minarets and unlimbers her long gun and seems to disappear against the stonework. Gonzo draws me off to one side and produces of all things a camouflaged suit-carrier, from which emerges a dark suit in approximately my size and a shirt not stained with dust or blood. He shows me to an empty, dry little room with a cracked mirror and an orchid growing in through the window.
When I return to the long balcony, Leah is standing at the very end in her jumpsuit and I feel a bit awkward in my knock-off Armani, until she turns and her eyes light up and she seems to be sizing me up in a most pleasing manner. Then she reaches for the zipper on her jumpsuit and pulls it all the way down, and it drops off her shoulders and she peels it down over her chest and reveals a shiny, rippling gown which tumbles in a lean curve from white shoulder to well-turned ankle, because from somewhere, no doubt by girl magic, she has located a silk dress. Gonzo, master of all things, obtained for me a civvy suit, but not even he could manage glamour. Without his help, using only the secret communications of women, Leah has contrived to look like an Oscar winner. She wriggles. The creases fall out, and she steps from her jumpsuit, barefoot, and kisses me, then breaks away and whoops into the gathering dusk. A whooping woman in an evening gown is a woman to delight in.
Candlelit dinner for two at Maison Gonzo lasts until one in the morning. It is not actual Italian cuisine, but rather a wild blend of Asia and southern European, moistened with a wine-like drink bought from a friend of Rao Tsur, who makes it out of mango. We look at one another across the table, and our fingers touch when I pass the water jug and it is almost unbearable, and then there is dancing. Annabel (known to me now as Annie) sings jazz and Gonzo accompanies her on paper and comb. Big Jim Hepsobah is percussion, and there’s a ring of steel around us, a one-hundred-metre hard cordon backed up by Eagle and her imaging gear and that scary gun—although Gonzo assures me, as he leads us to our accommodation for the night, that Sally’s night goggles will not be pointed our way from now on. This is private time. He throws wide the door to a prince’s chamber and hugs me, and departs to go do whatever reconnaissance he has promised in exchange for this date. There are two beds, but Leah has no time for my chivalrous notions and we tumble desperately into one. And that is all you need to know about that part. Sleep takes us sometime later, wrapped in rich musk and honeysuckle.
BOOTED FEET on stone, and clattering intensity. Gonzo, at speed and professional, and I wake because some part of me, even post-coital and even after a period of separation, knows the pattern of his urgency. I am standing by the time he reaches the bed, and he tosses me two bundles and Leah wakes smoothly too, because nurses know about crisis. I shake the bundles out as Gonzo vanishes again through the door, and realise that he was wearing a full moonsuit, and that we too are being put into biochem gear, and this means something very bad; it means that they or we have gone non-conventional, and since we don’t have biochem (we have more terrible things, as I know well) it can only be them, and they have made a very serious mistake and this theatre is about to be the testing ground for Professor Derek’s baby. That’s a horrible idea and I want to be appalled by it but that will have to wait, because right now I am zipping Leah into her moonsuit and taping the tag down and she is doing the same for me in turn, and we are trotting, shuffling, galloping out of paradise and back to the convoy, and the suit smells of other people’s armpits and latex and silicon and my own fear, and ever so slightly of Leah’s body and mine.
“Chemical,” Gonzo is saying, “sarin base, five kilometres. Wind?”
And Eagle says, “Thirty off,” which means the gas will probably blow past us, because the wind is thirty degrees off true, true being the line between the gas contact and us. And then some bastard says:
“Second contact!” and it’s Gonzo. The gas is on a broad front, and thirty degrees will clip us, test our moonsuit seals, and everyone checks their seams again and Jim Hepsobah in the other RV tosses some silicon to Annie and tells her to come inside, no one’s going to shoot at us right now and if they do we’re just gonna run like hell, and we career away down the road. Sally Culpepper is on the radio warning the units ahead of us and the rest of the SpecOps waiters are alert but basically pretty chilled out, because they maintain their own suits and they know there’s nothing wrong with them. Leah puts her hand in mine and she is shaking, just like me, and she rests her helmet against mine and stares into my eyes and I know, I know, that as long as we look at each other like that, everything will be fine.
Everything is fine.
Until we get to Red Gate and Captain-idiot Ben Carsville.
Captain Carsville is a fantasist who lives war as movies. He’s something between a running joke and a sucking chest wound. He made captain in peacetime, promoted over better soldiers because he looks good on a poster and he walks and talks the way a soldier should. He dodges and ducks under fire, scurries this way and that, panther-crawls and rolls and dummies. For the record, the best way not to get shot when you’re under fire is to run as fast as possible in a moderately straight line towards the nearest cover and stay there. If you have to advance, then you leapfrog one another, each man doing this until you get to the target. Unless you are very, very close indeed to the person shooting at you, zigging and zagging just tires you out and gives him the opportunity to shoot at you for longer.
Ben Carsville is preternaturally beautiful in a profoundly masculine way. Looking at him makes you want to listen, rapt, to his perfect voice and his perfect wisdom as it proceeds from his perfect mouth. Sadly, when he speaks, his perfect tones are the harbingers of the perfect screw-up. Carsville grew up on war porn: films made by guys who had never seen real war, comics about men with names like Private Grit and Big Roy Solid. He was a cadet, and then he was a lieutenant on a police action which never really kicked off beyond a few riots and a car bomb which didn’t go off. His only combat experience comes from some brief forays on the fringes of this war, “fact-finding” with visiting politicians. Ben Carsville thinks war is a sort of manly sport, and casualties are just what happens when you play.
He also thinks this gas attack is some sort of ruse. Gonzo and his guys have been taken in by the Enemy. They have been fed false data somehow, and now they are being used to convince wise and mighty Captain Carsville to abandon his position so that the Enemy can simply wander in, whereupon the Enemy will have some sort of party in which they will throw soft-boiled eggs at pictures of Ben Carsville and mock him with their smiles. He has, in accordance with his moderately weird perception of the situation, not given the order to his soldiers to suit up, and has not told the Katiris in Fudin what is happening. Anticipating an assault on his position, he wants us to hang around to support his troops, and he intends, seriously, to send Gonzo & Co. back along our route to assess the threat. This does not put Gonzo in a cooperative and conciliatory mood. It puts him into a big, angry, SpecOps snit.
“Wind?” Gonzo demands.
>
“Twenty-five off,” Eagle tells him, which is worse than it was.
“Time to contact?”
“Ten minutes.”
“Calling it five hundred and forty seconds . . . mark.”
This means that there’s still plenty of time to get soldiers kitted up and even enough time to evacuate most of the Katiris, although they’ll have to drive very, very fast on some fairly nasty roads. Gonzo is counting as we go through ID checks, counting as we get confirmation, counting as we approach the captain’s position, counting as Ben Carsville still doesn’t issue the order and counting out loud as he storms into the command tent with his rank insignia in one hand and the gas detector badge from his reconnaissance in the other. Gonzo stood in a cloud of gas and watched the chemical film react to the stuff. He knows he has not been misled or hornswaggled. He has no time for this shit. In fact, he knows exactly how little time he has, because he is counting it down out loud.
“(Four hundred and twenty-five seconds), Carsville, you are a fucking arsewart, what the fuck do you think you are doing? Are you (four hundred and twenty) out of your miserable fucking mind? There is a major, for real, treaty-busting, huge goatfuck disaster of a gas attack and you are right in the middle of it and you are wearing your (four hundred and fifteen) forgodsakes dressing gown and where the fuck did you get that, you mad-crazy prick? (Four hundred and ten) you unbelievable idiot!”
Carsville doesn’t pay any attention to the language because Gonzo is special forces and Carsville knows he won’t get anywhere with arguing about a few curses, but he leans back photogenically and demands to know what those numbers are, soldier and what the hell do you know about it, and when Gonzo lunges forward to grab him by the ears and beat him sensible, Carsville pulls a pistol from his dressing gown and flicks his thumb across the safety to release it. The outcomes of close combat with a loaded handgun are also distressingly unpredictable. Not even Gonzo can dodge bullets and while Carsville may be an idiot he’s not a bad shot or even necessarily a bad fighter, so we all stand there like stalagmites while Gonzo mutters, “Four hundred oh oh, arsehole arsehole arsehole!”
Gonzo turns sharply on his heel as if Carsville has ceased to exist, walks out of the command tent and grabs the nearest grunt and tells him there’s a chemical shitstorm coming down and to sound the alarm and tell the Katiris to evac and that he has at best three hundred and fifty-five seconds before this pleasant spot turns into a field of the dead. And Carsville, who has followed him out, points his gun at his own sentry and tells him to belay that order, and here we are again, only this time he’s also telling Gonzo to get out of his moonsuit. Gonzo pulls the mask of the moonsuit up. Carsville shifts his aim and cocks the hammer, and everything is buggered up.
I step sideways, and say something like, “Gonzo, take the goddam suit off, man,” secure in the knowledge that Gonzo is not about to do anything of the kind, because getting shot is one kind of bad, but getting gassed is quite another. Carsville cannot see my eyes, or detect the smooth current of information passing between myself and my oldest friend. He cannot hear the dialogue we do not speak.
Gonzo yells at me to shut up. I call him some unpleasant names. He takes offence, gets in my face and, when I won’t give way, he shoves me. This puts me between him and Carsville, who lowers his gun slightly because I am on his side and he doesn’t want to shoot me. Alas, I am suddenly very clumsy—Oh, my stars and garters, what have I done? I stumble into the captain. He discharges his weapon at the ground and I (with more than moderate satisfaction) smack Captain Ben Carsville’s idiot mouth as hard as I can without breaking my hand, and crack his arm like a whip, so that it comes unstuck in some fundamental way and he drops the gun.
Carsville whimpers and the sentry goggles at me. My military career looks a bit rocky, because this does not even slightly qualify as a legitimate action, but if I am court-martialled I will go out saving a bunch of lives instead of ending them, and this has a certain charm. The military has dealt with this kind of court martial before. People get sternly reprimanded and thrown out with a promotion and a medal, and let that be a lesson! Leah is staring at me with wide eyes which have more than a little approval in them, and she hastens to reassemble Carsville’s arm in what I suspect may be an unnecessarily painful way, because he passes out and therefore cannot give countervailing orders to his men, who snap into action as Gonzo tells them to move out. His tone implies that, having broken one arm today, I may suddenly have developed a taste for arms in general, but also is so honestly urgent that the threat is unnecessary and perhaps even unnoticed. Ben Carsville is bundled into his own staff car and driven away at speed. We get back in our RVs and charge on to Fudin.
The sad truth is that Ben Carsville has probably wasted too much time. Even with the company from Red Gate with us, there’s no chance we can get them all out. It’s going to be first come, first saved, and the rest will shift as best they can. I can’t tell whether Leah has realised. Probably she has; she understands triage. Likely we will see a riot, a living mass of fear and anger composed of people no longer acting as individuals. We may have to shoot a few of them to save the rest. It’s arguable whether we should attempt a rescue at all, but Gonzo has no time for arguable, and the decision is his, and no one here would quibble anyway.
It’s possible that the people of Fudin will refuse our help. They may not believe us. They may choose to think we are lying when the alternative is cataclysm. We may have to leave again, abandon them to death because we are not credible, or the news we bring is too vast to be comprehensible in the time we have. We may fail without being allowed to try.
I’ve known this whole un-war business was stupid for a while. I’ve never liked it, but I haven’t hated it until now. I am wondering whether Rao Tsur and his wife will greet annihilation with the same wit they showed in the marketplace; whether Mrs. Tsur will beg Jim Hepsobah to take her youngest son on his lap when there is no more space; whether she will stand like a pillar and hold her children while we depart; whether she will fling herself on us in a rage, or watch us struggle to save who we can with the eerie, patient understanding of imminent death; whether Rao will seek to reach an accommodation for the safety of his family, or whether we will see something darker and more horrible as he abandons them. Perhaps his love is a weak thing. Perhaps he does mean to exchange her for a younger model, or perhaps he simply values his own life over hers. Perhaps he will default, demand passage for himself alone, even try to bribe us. I think, if he does that, that I will kill him.
All these things and more I am prepared for in Fudin. I am not prepared for a stock car rally. But that is what I get.
Jim Hepsobah spins the wheel and brings us around the last bend into Fudin, and there are forty particoloured street-racers in a neat grid pattern, with families piling into them: goats and suitcases and children being loaded onto roofracks, and slender Katiri wives and tubby patriarchs and serious teenagers climbing aboard without hesitation or mishap. As soon as each car is filled it takes off, from the front of the grid, as if this were a Swiss taxi rank. Fudin is almost empty, which means that over a hundred cars have already left.
Each motor is driven by an energetic young person in a very expensive, personalised version of the suits we are wearing. Expensive, because tailored and cut to fit, and therefore figure-hugging and distinctly stylish. Their crash helmets are fitted onto the necks of their suits, so they look like science-fiction heroes or very rich technobikers from Silicon Valley, but each of them has a different pattern painted onto his or her back; they are a forest of dragons and courtesans and pirates. The word zings around inside my head: piratespiratespirates. Although there is more to them than yo-ho-ho. There is a deliberateness and a quiet centre. Pirate-monks, maybe.
They carry bags for their passengers, hold open doors for older ladies, and run around and zoom away, and they are managing this magic, this impossibly competent evacuation, with music. They clap, sing and stamp. Humanitarianism in four four ti
me. The people of Fudin move with the beat (it’s almost impossible not to) so no one trips and no one gets in anyone’s way. Load-the-roof two three four, get-in-the-car two three four, all-here? two three four, vavavoom two three four, and another row of rescue wagons roars off the grid and now there are only thirty-two.
Standing in the middle of all this smoothly functioning chaos is a little bearded geezer with a round head and a glinting, challenging smile which would stand him in good stead in a toothpaste commercial aimed at moderately wealthy, moderately devout (moderately scandalous in youth but now moderately reformed) Asian gentlemen of good family. He is dressed in a pair of linen trousers and an open-necked shirt, over which he wears a leather jerkin. Around his middle is a red sash or cummerbund, from which depends a small collection of utilities and two items I can describe only as cutlasses. He is oddly and acutely familiar, but as he is at one and the same time directing refugee traffic, conducting an impromptu rhythm collective and speaking waspishly with a village elder who has taken it into her head that she will remain here, and since while he manages these small matters he is also fighting off the efforts of a scrawny, nervous grand-vizier-looking bloke who’s trying to get him into a moonsuit, it’s not easy to compare him with other memories.
Finally, he turns to the scrawny cohort and shoos him away, grabs the matron by one bony hand and, in the face of her delighted protests, sweeps her bodily from her feet. This bundle of femininity impedes him not at all as he bolts (fifteen seconds remaining by Gonzo’s original count and at most sixty-five by the new one) for the hindmost car in the grid, which stands out from the others like a falcon among sparrows.
The car is not a street-racer. None of them, of course, started out that way, but this one even less so. Unlike its gaudy brethren, it is not a Honda Civic bursting with nitrous oxide systems and warranty-voiding gearbox enhancements or a roaring Focus tooled to go like a rocketship. It is not even a frog-green Subaru with a turbo and wide wheels like a sealion’s arse. It is a muted maroon colour, and it is as dignified as it is powerful. It looks distinctly bulletproof and the glass windows are smoked, but even so it’s possible to see that this car has curtains. It also has a silver angel on the front end and the kind of engine they used to put in small planes. Quite possibly it will catch up with the front runners before it has to change gear. It is unmistakably a Rolls-Royce, but it is a Rolls-Royce the way Koh-i-noor is a diamond.