Ник Харкуэй: Tigerman

He was old and clumsy. He just didn’t have the training for this. She was far, far beyond him. He wanted to tell her so, to give due respect to her skill and to buy her a drink. In another place, he would have asked her to teach him, just whatever she would for however long they had. But he was here and now, and the boy needed him, and skill was never the end of it. You could always shoot somebody who outdrew you. You just had to be ready to get shot. And he could see it in her, the faintest hint of frustration. He was armoured, yes, but even so he should have gone down by now. No one could soak this up for ever. Why wouldn’t he go down? He wanted to tell her to take it easy, just wait, she was doing fine.

Instead he put his hands up like a good boxer, then when she came in he shunted forward stupidly, rode out the punches. When he lunged on his good leg, she was just a little too close. Fumbling, he seized her body beneath her arms, lifted. She was slight. He felt her tense.

You silly sod, he thought, vaguely, if I was really your enemy you’d be up the creek now.

She knew it, too, hammered at him violently, elbows and fists coming down onto his neck and back, but nothing like hard enough, not when a sergeant has put his mind to something. He looked for something to smash her against.

She reared up.

Just as the deck did, too.

She got the strike exactly right, deep into the muscle of one arm.

A second wave, out of rhythm with the rest of the sea, smashed into the ship and threw her high in the air towards the prow. She twisted, landed hard and rolled, came to her feet in the midst of the boy’s perfect tableau, arms spreading in an arc like a seabird as she caught her balance.

As she collided with the one thing between her and the abyss.

And that one thing – small and lighter even than she, still holding the camera remote – staggered backwards and over the edge, and was snatched away by the wind.

The moment lasted for ever, and after it, nothing else mattered; not when Lester Ferris fell down on his knees and tore the Tiger mask from his face and screamed and screamed; not when they surrounded him and took him into some approximation of custody, marvelling and bewildered at who he was, and what was he doing here, and was this an operation they had somehow not been briefed on? Not even when they realised sickly that the camera had never stopped running, that the boy’s extinguishing and the Sergeant’s revelation had been beamed across the water to the shore and streamed live to a YouTube channel and gone out around the world, the most unrecoverable of security breaches contrived on the boy’s own terms, delivering the best possible iteration of the scenario he had set out to achieve.

None of it mattered, and the Sergeant doubted it ever would again, because what mattered was down there in the threshing sea, and gone for ever.

By morning the storm had blown itself out.

The Sergeant was transferred to the custody of Jed Kershaw, who said ‘Fuck, Lester’ a very great deal. They emptied one of the storage rooms in the old prison and it became his cell. There was still a coffee machine in the corner, but it had no plug.

Out in the Bay of the Cupped Hands, a line of orange lobster buoys marked the shortest route to the land, and each of them sported a small, kludged-together signal relay by which the Tigerfall signal – it already had a name – had been transmitted to the boy’s computers and onwards to the wider web. The Internet took this technical knowledge as a sign that the boy had belonged to its citizenry, and caught fire.

People came to visit. There were things they needed to say. Marie, who had been Shola’s girl and his someday-maybe wife, came and said thank you, because at least he had tried to find out something and no one else had. The Sergeant said, ‘Jack did,’ and then felt like a fool. She nodded without saying anything.

Beneseffe came and brought fruit.

Kathy Hasp came and talked about what was happening in the world. There was a lot of it, and mostly his fault. But there wasn’t going to be a war with China, so that was good.

Kershaw came back with a man from the embassy in Sana’a and they said a lot of formal things about lawyers. The Sergeant didn’t listen. Kershaw said ‘Fuck, Lester’ again.

Dirac came and said nothing at all. When he left, he kissed the Sergeant lightly on the crown, and his cheeks were wet.

‘You are kind of the biggest asshole in the world,’ Pechorin suggested.

‘Not even close.’

‘That’s true.’ Silence. ‘You did kick the shit out of me. And you exploded my nose.’

‘Sorry.’

‘I get over it. You ever find out who killed your barman friend?’

‘The Fleet.’

‘Sure. Everything is the Fleet. But you know who?’

‘No.’

‘Was Belgians.’

‘Why?’

‘Fuck do I know why. Maybe politics. Maybe just being Belgian. Is closure. You feel better now?’

‘No.’

‘Me neither.’

The Sergeant slept and dreamed fitfully about Madame Duclos, sitting alone in her little house without her dog. He pestered the nursing staff to let her know what had happened, but they were evasive. They seemed to believe it must be some sort of code. Finally Arno’s man, Guillaume, came and told him she had been evacuated during the rioting and the house was gone. He agreed that the Sergeant could write her a letter, so long as he, Guillaume, could read and photograph it before it was sealed.

‘It won’t be very interesting,’ the Sergeant said.

Guillaume politely disagreed.

Arno visited him then, and asked him a series of quiet questions which the Sergeant answered quite frankly. Arno shook his head.

‘I should have seen this,’ he said.

‘You saw me instead,’ Lester told him.

Arno sighed and nodded.

The story all came out. Inoue’s report was headline news. The island did not burn. Not that day, and not that week.

On the fourth day of the hiatus, a Discharge Cloud wreathed the island in mist, and when it was gone the plants were all in flower.

A week later the boy’s YouTube channel was hacked, and a new slogan was added:

Tigerman Make Famous Victory, Full Of Win.

Because they had never recovered the body, a few people took this as a sign that the boy was alive somewhere.

The Sergeant was not one of them.

Some time later, Mancreu was reprieved.

The ships of the Black Fleet vanished. Even the names turned out never to have been registered in the places they were thought to have come from.

White Raoul never spoke to the Sergeant again. The Witch came once to see him in his hospital bed. She tried hard to make him smile, but her face was lined and fraught, and he thought he had exceeded the capacity of her compassion.

He was shipped home.

He had expected Africa to be cold and official in her anger. He had pictured her as an aloof sort of person, tight lips and steel-grey hair. Instead she shouted, her voice cracking and then descending into a hiss, as if he were an unfaithful husband caught in the sack with a girl from the post office.

‘You bastard!’ she began. ‘You stupid bastard! I will ruin you! I will take everything you have, and I will cover it in shit.’

Beside her sat a man in a suit who had identified himself as being from the Press Office. He didn’t say whose, as if there was only one, and perhaps there was. He seemed to be waiting for his moment, and to be in no doubt that it would come.

Africa was still talking. ‘You’re a traitor! You’re an actual traitor to the Crown! I’d send you to a court martial but they can’t have you shot any more and I can! I can make you go away for ever. I’ll send you to Morocco and they can cut your tiny fucking balls off in a hole somewhere and make you crawl on your hands and knees across broken glass.’ She ran down suddenly, because she couldn’t actually hit him and that was almost the only thing she had left. ‘Were you at least sleeping with him?’ she demanded. ‘Was that what this was about?’