Ian Watson - The Embedding

Charlie hummed, TO cheer himself, as he rode back through the rain from the other side of the dam.

How soon before he would be ‘Ridin’ home to Albuquerque’ like the song said.

He needed cheering. Images of the Nam haunted this landscape more and more these days.

The heat. The waiting. The sense of being trapped.

The café tarts stinking of ether. Girls who really knocked a man out I Anaesthetize was the name of the game…

Jorge was standing waiting at the end of the dam in the wet, waving the jeep down frantically…

“Charlie!” A cry of fear.

The noose round Charlie’s neck tightened a stage further.

“That Captain Paixao is here. With two prisoners. They’re questioning them in the store shed. A man and a woman.”

“Were they coming to—kill me?”

“You selfish sonofabitch! Paixao and his thugs are torturing them for information—a woman too!”

Charlie bit his lip.

“Shit… that’s bad. I guess we’d better—”

“What had we better? Put a stop to it? How do you do that—you tell me!”

“Shit, Jorge, I dunno. But one thing I’ll do right now is see what’s going on.”

Jorge climbed on board the jeep, clothes dripping wet from the rain.

Charlie revved the jeep towards the most distant of the tin sheds.

Graders and bulldozers were parked on the concrete there—and so was Paixao’s helicopter. The pilot sat smoking a cigarette, pointing an automatic rifle idly at the approaching jeep.

The door to the shed was guarded by another of Paixao’s men, with the face of a boxer dog and black bushy sideburns.

He shouted at the jeep as they pulled up.

“What’s he sayin’?”

“To piss off—it’s none of our business.”

“Say I insist on seeing Paixao.”

Jorge translated, then gave Charlie a despairing look.

“Captain will come see you in his own good time, he says.”

“Well that isn’t good enough. Say I need some equipment out of that shed. Urgent—for the dam. Oh fuck it—make something up. How did they get in there anyways—smash the lock?”

“They took the key off me,” flushed Jorge.

“You mean you gave it to them—knowing this would happen?”

“What the hell could I do? They’re the police. They want to do it here, not in the village—too many witnesses there.”

“You’re sure that’s what they are doing? Maybe it’s not so bad.”

“Oh Charlie, Charlie—I heard such screams before I ran off to meet you.”

“See anything through the window?”

“That man said he’d put a bullet through my foot for me if I went anywhere near.”

“Dammit, he won’t dare shoot me! Jorge, you stay with the jeep. If anything happens drive off and raise Santarém on the radio. Don’t try to help.”

Charlie tugged Jorge over into the driver’s seat as he was getting out. The guard shouted something at him as he walked towards the window.

“You speak English?” Charlie shouted back, still walking.

Inside his head a question lit up in bright red lights: Charlie, what the hell are you taking this risk for? To stand up straight and true in Jorge’s eyes? Or to make up in some way for that girl’s suffering eyes and that boy spitted on your bayonet and that blazing hut long ago?

Events spun round him faster and faster like a malicious wheel of fortune. The Huey Slick, the wet heat, these interrogations of prisoners—hide as deep in the Amazon as you can, these things will hunt you down like Furies.

Charlie peered through the dripping bars.

Only one of’ the two lights in the shed was working. It cast giant shadows into the gloom beyond the crated equipment and fuel drums, where a group of figures were. Charlie wondered why they were standing in darkness. Whether the second light bulb had just packed up. Then he made out the cable dangling from the light socket down to the floor.

Charlie ran at the door and tried to push his way past Sideburns.

The guard shoved him back roughly into the rain.

“You bastard, it’s my goddam hut! I got to see Paixao. Understand, Paixao?”

The man nodded and made him a sign to keep his distance. He banged his gun butt a few times on the door behind him. The gun was pointing approximately at Charlie’s groin.

“You stupid shit,” Charlie swore under his breath.

They had to wait a time till the door opened and Orlando’s ratty features thrust out.

The halfcaste heard Charlie’s inept attempts at framing sentences in Portuguese for a while, impassively, then walked away. Charlie couldn’t be sure that he had been understood at all, until the Captain himself came to the door.

Paixao had that antiseptic band-aid smile stuck on his lips.

“Mr Faith. You’ll be glad to hear we have trapped two terrorists on their way here to kill you. They admit as much. Unfortunately we lost one of their group in the jungle. But he will probably die there, without any supplies or transport. We shall not borrow your shed much longer. Another hour then we shall be on our way. You can wait that long?”

“Excuse me, Captain, but I want to know what you’re doing to those people in there!”

Charlie thrust himself past Paixao and stared down the shed.

One figure lay huddled on the floor.

The other figure somehow seemed to be standing on its head. Then Charlie made out the rope round its ankles. The rope looped over the roofbeam, suspending the body. The legs were bare. Maybe the whole body was naked—but Paixao’s men stood in the way.

“What you doing, man!”

“You did your duty in Southeast Asia, Senhor Faith, so you must understand about doing one’s duty. A rat has been caught in a trap. It’s necessary to squeeze the rat. No need to involve yourself. We just need your electric supply for our—recording gear. And a roof over our heads.”

“Is it true one of those people is a woman?”

“ Both are guerrillas, Mr Faith. Both are saboteurs and murderers. Enemies of civilization. And your potential assassins. The question of sex is immaterial.”

Ah, girl with your doe eyes, what did it matter, what happened between us, when anyway you had to die? Was that the thing called rape—that explosion of my own anguish?

To tell the truth, Charlie wasn’t even certain that rape had occurred. He wasn’t certain what had occurred after he felt the sinking home of the bayonet. Charlie reconstructed a probability of rape, that was all. It was an identikit picture of what might have taken place. And he was an identikit soldier performing identikit deeds as per boot camp training.

Then the hanging body swung round and Charlie saw her breasts. And the wires.

He ran down the room.

The Negro Olimpio caught hold of him roughly and pinioned him till the Captain caught up.

Charlie couldn’t believe the scene—a human being hung up like a slaughterhouse animal. Maybe that was why he stood so limply in Olimpio’s grasp. The identikit had taken over once again. As it had taken over for the woman hanging upside down, turning her into a laboratory animal. Only Paixao seemed wholly alert and aware.

The Identikit Charlie Faith could think of nothing particular to do or say. Olimpio propelled him easily back along the room and thrust him out into the rain.

“Mr Faith!” Paixao called after him. “Do remember that it’s your life.”

A scream of animal misery overtook him outside. This—combined with the slap of rain—shocked him back to awareness from his mental haven.

Charlie ran to the jeep.

“Jorge, you idiot, we got to get the key to the generator shed! We got to switch the current off. I hope you didn’t give them that key too?”