Ник Харкуэй - Tigerman

Sandrine.

The Sergeant stared at the images of the Elaine and wondered if it was even possible. How could he invade a ship amid a host of others without detection, find Sandrine, and take her away without being seen? Without being himself detained and exposed? Without drawing down the wrath of his nation on the head of the boy he hoped to bring under its protection?

Or without killing. He was treating this as something for Tigerman, because he could only perform it as Tigerman, in Tigerman’s mask. Lester Ferris must be a million miles away or the whole show was a dud. And Tigerman did not kill, or had not, and did not make his plans with killing in mind. The Sergeant, in the normal run of things, would expect to kill his way into this ship, loudly and messily, leaving no enemies behind him to close off escape. He would treat the whole thing as a building to be cleared, as a standard if dangerous tactical mission of a sort he had carried out countless times in the urban infighting of his other wars. And then being alone was just a matter of a bad ratio of friend to foe: move, clear, hold, repeat. Room by room, with the right equipment, the right ruthlessness and a following wind – and if he made the right guesses about security – he could hollow out the Elaine until it was just him and Sandrine. And then he would bring her home, leaving the ship a floating bloody hulk, in memory of its dishonourable service. The name of Tigerman would take on a sharper edge. Not just a crime fighter, but an avenging angel. He imagined the sticky slipperiness of the metal deck underfoot, and part of him made a mental note to choose the right shoes.

But that would end it all. Even in this pass, the boy would see the shift in him, in the fiction they had created together, from knight to dragon. He would shy away from a red-handed killer even in his gratitude. He had not seen Helmand or Baghdad. It would be new to him, and of all the things he had seen or heard about, it would most resemble Shola’s death, with the Sergeant forever changing sides.

Lester Ferris saw himself gunning down a ship full of cheerful barmen, saw them explode backwards, saw a dozen ridiculous shirts billow and split behind the heart.

He pushed the image away.

Tigerman, then. It had to be Tigerman, doing things Tigerman’s way. A famous victory, the Sergeant sighed to himself, not an infamous one.

He started again. What were the tools of Tigerman’s world? How did one hero take on the hordes of evil? With almost supernatural skill – and he’d have to do without that – and guile. Diversion. Twice, now, in his confrontations, he had relied on explosions to get everyone pointed the wrong way, then come in fast and hit them very hard. Yes, diversion. Then also: reputation. When he had fought Pechorin’s men, he had been let off the hook at that last minute because his enemy was scared of what he was reputed to be: a demon. And last night the rumour of his pursuit had run ahead of him, had somehow turned the mood of the riot until even the Quads had backed down. Reputation, momentum, and allies. He had had allies last night, sudden and unexpected: the crowd themselves, and then the boy’s stooges in their firefighting gear. Could he find allies for this, too, knowing or not?

He looked back at the Fleet, at the tangle of interests and lies, and felt a new understanding take hold of him. I saw the sky rolled up as if a scroll.

The Fleet was one thing, but it was also many things bound in an uneasy union. They were opposed and they distrusted one another, and they were right to do so. Their coexistence was convenient, not perpetual. That fatal missile had scared Kershaw, had done the same to the captains of the Fleet. He could read their dismay and their amazement on the wall by the door, and that dismay was not assuaged by the fact that every single one of them displayed it. One or more of them could be lying, almost certainly were. It was hardly paranoid to wonder about a false-flag operation when you lived in the middle of the largest, most public, most permanent such scheme that had ever existed.

It was not that there were cracks in the alliance. There was no alliance, only a tenuous concert which lasted for as long as each ship held its station and each nation turned its eyes away.

So long as each ship held its station.

Which in turn called one to consider under what circumstances a ship might do otherwise.

Each vessel took orders from its home authority, of course, by whatever devious backchannels had been established. But oper-ational control was passed to the individual captains so that local and immediate matters could be dealt with appropriately. It was bad practice to shackle your commander in the field to the whims and prohibitions of a faraway master.

If those captains were like soldiers on land they would be slow to waken when crisis struck after a long period of quiet, then overcompensate. They would mistrust one another because the likely source of any attack on a vessel of the Fleet was from within the Fleet. However good they were, these were the realities they lived with. They must ask: who is my friend? Who is a threat? and with so many players in the game in such close proximity, the ramifications of any change in the lines of power and alliance multiplied appallingly, possibilities and dangers expanding to every horizon in an instant. Every captain must ultimately accept paranoia, incomplete understanding or paralysis. The best would act decisively but with restraint. The others would dither and lash out, and in doing so they would further cloud the situation around them, each round of response and counter-response becoming more impossible to navigate.

One thing guaranteed a great movement of the ships in the Bay of the Cupped Hands: a storm. And if, during the preparations for such an event, when ties to the land were severed and all the many vessels must move out and around one another in accordance with the instructions of the Portmaster, one were able to inspire mistrust between them, and at the same time cause one or more to act in a manner which might be seen as a threat – say, by persuading the Portmaster to set them on what might appear to be a collision course – well, then, anything was possible.

The Fleet at rest was a glassy ædifice, smooth and unscaleable. The Fleet afraid was a chaos in which a single man with a clear understanding might do much.

If only one knew when a storm was coming, or could create one.

But then, the Mancreu Meteorology Station was an unmanned post a mile up the road, and the key was held in the offices of the former authority – the British Met Office, whose branch director had been a member of the consular staff. In other words, it was down the hall, on a hook.

By the predawn the Sergeant had a plan. Since discovery was inevitable, he would provide the Elaine ’s crew with too much to think about, too many confusing imperatives, splitting their attention in as many directions as possible. First the warning of a sudden storm, then some explosives in a dinghy or two floating among the ships. Everyone would be out on deck and nightblind, seeing patterns in the waves and shadows, seeing other ships moving in unanticipated ways. They would simply have too much to pay attention to. While they were overstretched, he would sneak onto the Elaine and taser anyone he met, flashbang any large groups, until he got Sandrine out and they could escape into the confusion. It would be nice to think that no one would shoot randomly into the water, but he thought they probably would, so he’d need to head away from the main body of the Fleet. Elaine was out on the edge, anyway.

It was a bad plan. It was all he had. He would improvise the rest. He would need to be fresh for that.