Nick Harkaway - Tigerman

Two of them were standing side by side a few steps from the others, and he slammed their heads sharply together, heard gristle and that sickening sound like the ball in an aerosol can which meant concussion. The bruises on his back screamed and he screamed back. A third man turned in shock and looked about to scream too, and then his face disappeared under a crushing elbow. He dropped.

A step further away, Pechorin held an expensive gun. It was an American thing with all sorts of clever engineering and a bottle-opener on the back: very light, very strong. He should have used it already but he hadn’t, seemed to have forgotten about it, or perhaps he just couldn’t believe this was happening. Now he brought it round and the Sergeant whipped the sharkpunch up and forward in a fencer’s lunge. The tip touched the gun and the charge fired. Pechorin went flying back, fragments of next-gen rifle embedded in his face.

The Sergeant dropped and rolled, putting the fallen between himself and the remaining men. As he came up, he saw his nearest enemy sighting along the barrel, looking for a clear shot. He ducked left, then reared back the other way and threw one of the climbing pitons as hard as he could.

It was supposed to be a distraction, or at best a knockout blow. Instead, the steel pin went directly into the man’s open mouth and lodged in the soft part of his throat. He made an appalled sound and sank to his knees, hands outstretched in appeal.

Everything was still.

The remaining soldiers stared in abject horror at the choking man. Blood was coming out of his mouth, not arterial spray but a venous welling which would kill him eventually if not treated, although it seemed he might suffocate before that became an issue. The other casualties were regaining consciousness. Pechorin looked as if he might lose part of his nose.

Tactically there was all still to play for. The Sergeant had his ace in the hole, the fast-dispersal setting on the remaining gas grenade. It would make a thirty-foot ball of darkness, the manual said, pretty much instantly and until the wind dispersed it. Although actual performance in the field did not always match the claims in the documentation. He had his hand on it, ready to use, but he knew he had overreached. The last of Pechorin’s men could take him now, and if he died here he’d have no one but himself to blame.

But they didn’t know that, he realised as the moment held, and they were convinced now that he could do impossible things. He could appear from nowhere, breathe under water, make guns explode and strike down men at a distance. He was bulletproof. They had seen evidence of all these, and they knew, too, that he was the Mancreu demon, the one everyone was talking about, the one who might be a psychopath or an organ hunter or something even more awful. So they stared at him, and did not attack, and waited to see what he would do. Like prey, they hoped that if they did nothing he would depart to eat his kill.

He didn’t do anything. If he ran it might break the spell. If he came forward he might press them into action. So he waited, and they waited.

From somewhere across the valley, he heard the sound of a tiger growling or calling, and a reply. A mated pair.

Behind his back, he flicked the dispersal rate on the grenade to medium, and drew the pin with his thumb. He didn’t move. The darkness boiled up over his back and all around him, and he kept the eyes of the mask on them all the time. When the gas finally shifted to cover him he rolled back and away, then ran for the trees.

Pechorin called for reinforcements.

On the stolen radio handset the Sergeant could hear the chatter, cool and efficient. He had worked with some of them before, here and elsewhere. Could he run towards them? Claim to have been taken hostage and escaped, even fought back? But when and how? At the fish market, or from the house? He shook his head. There might be a way, but he was too addled to see it, to account for the branching possible consequences. He imagined buying his absolution by accidentally selling out the boy. No. Run on. Hostile contact: allied forces in the target zone. Then numbers, coordinates, and yes, there was a helicopter after all. They would close the roads, and with the ’copter they would do so effectively — but where he was going he didn’t need roads. He glanced at the sky and growled: the cloud had lifted again. He should shed this suit somewhere it wouldn’t be found. He couldn’t permit himself to be caught in it, for sure, but his blood was in it and if they were serious about this — and you didn’t put a helicopter in the air if you were just kidding around — they would know that within hours.

He considered options. Brighton House — the phone was ringing there, no doubt — was a few miles away cross-country: over scrub and through banana plantations, for the most part. But there was a line of open ground between the house and the jungle, and in the worst case he would be at a loss to explain how — having left the house on a shopping expedition — he came to be returning on foot from another direction. On the other hand if he returned to the house in the toutou , between obfuscation, retasking and cloud cover he might have nothing to explain at all.

In the meantime, he was already running again, on the half-cleared paths used by hunters and animals both, between the trees. Time became fluid. Running was something he enjoyed. After a certain point, his mind was silent. He ran. He spectated. There was a clean, moonlit purity inside his head. He was exhausted, but it was this or capture and he had no intention of being captured, so exhaustion was irrelevant. He was also high on combat and anger and for as long as the immediacy lasted he would feel like a god. He had about twenty minutes of that left, so — knowing he would walk, after — he ran now.

The jungle was wet and warm. It smelled of vegetation and life and in particular of a species of red-flowering vine. The flowers opened at night and were called something dirty in Moitié; Inoue had told him once that in the dark, to a certain kind of lizard, they looked like meat. The lizard ate them and shat out the seeds somewhere else, spreading the plant. It had no sense of smell to speak of, so no one knew why they smelled good. He wondered if you could eat them. Perhaps they were some sort of healing drug. The Witch would know. Perhaps he should go and see her. A last chance: tonight of all nights he might turn back the clock.

Nonsense.

He growled, in irritation or lust, he wasn’t sure, and ran on. He was following a narrow path, probably a badger run, and yes: he was holding the compass, finding his way. He grinned, then laughed. He wanted to sing and drink and eat. He wanted to sleep for a year, to lie naked in a jacuzzi looking out over the Sahara while someone rubbed his feet, to headline at a rock concert, to tear down walls with his hands. He had won. He was a god.

Adrenalin. Let it go.

But he couldn’t, and anyway it should be over by now, the high should be exhausted and burned out, should have left him hollow. He wondered if inhaling burning heroin could do this. Cocaine, perhaps. Maybe there had been cocaine, too. Or perhaps there was something here, in this jungle. Maybe the red flowers were a stimulant.

Tigerman make famous victory! Hah!

There wasn’t really, in this world, a way in which burning a shitload of heroin and beating up some dealers was a crime.

He ran on to Beauville, and his way home.

His reckoning was good. He came out of the jungle at the old millhouse, checked the sky and saw clouds and no helicopter, trotted over the road into a plantation and jogged on. He felt he still had more in the tank — impossibly — but he wanted to save it in case there was more craziness to deal with before he slept. The rendezvous was another twenty minutes away. Two streets later he stopped, halted by a thought: the Witch. Her house was here, or near here. It must — he had never thought of Beauville like this before, had always stuck religiously to the road system, but in fact it was all closer together than he had realised — it must be just beyond that stand of palms.