Nick Harkaway - Tigerman

Out above the Bay of the Cupped Hands, a single line of flame, narrow as a wire, was drawn across the water and the sky. For a moment he thought the world had gone mad and the destruction of the island had started, that they were all going to be sacrificed, that they were somehow infected and must be burned away. But there was only one trail, rising leisurely from somewhere in the mist. They watched it plot a bright curve in the darkness and then fall, seeming to increase in certainty and velocity as it neared the land. It was casual, effortless, even elegant. The sound reached them at last, a high wailing roar from the first moments of the launch, and then the impact flash as it reached its target and detonated. The Sergeant wrapped Kaiko Inoue in his arms and dropped to the floor, and the pulled pork sandwich and two glasses of wine flew over them as the shockwave hit. The chairs skittered away along the roof like brushwood in a gale. There was a huge, appalling noise, and then silence.

Half a mile away, the building which had housed Shola’s murderers was ash.

Civilians would have run around, but these people walked. They had procedures, and they’d been down this road before. There were people here, technically, who were not military, but there was no one who didn’t know about crisis. The Sergeant didn’t know where Inoue had seen this before, but he knew that she had, knew it from the way she moved and how she checked the compass points, the sky. Together they went back downstairs.

In the main hall Kershaw was standing on a table shouting into his encrypted cellphone that he needed more information and he needed it about a fucking hour ago before some asshole blew up a part of his city — HIS fucking city — with a fucking (are you kidding me?) fucking (what the fuck ?) Exocet FUCKING missile . In between expletives he was fending off two members of his close-protection team, who were absolutely determined that he should be evacuated but appeared not to know where to — because, the Sergeant suspected, the fallback location if the landside ones were compromised was out in the Fleet, and the Fleet was the source of the problem. But even this little drama was oddly restrained. In a full-on emergency they’d have carried him, knocked him out. They were drily amused to be swatted as they tried to get him to a more secure room, and Kershaw was shouting not because he was frightened but because shouting was what he did. If he’d been quiet the Sergeant would have demanded a side arm from one of the waiter-marines, and he’d have bloody got one. But as long as Jed was being profane and a little ridiculous, things were not at that point. This was an incident, not a war.

Kershaw’s wildly wandering eye fell on the Sergeant. ‘Lester! (I’ll call you back, but get me some — yes, I will call you back and you will take the call or I will — yes — get me some answers because I cannot begin to fucking express — right. Then I won’t fucking express it, just find the fuck out. Yes. I. Will. Call. You. Back.) Lester! I need someone who is not an asshole and you’re it! Jesus Christ,’ Kershaw added to anyone near enough to hear, ‘that has to be one of the most fucked up things I’ve ever said.’

‘Here, Jed.’ The Sergeant let go of Inoue’s arm, glanced an apology. She waved him away. Go. There is work for you here. Also for me . She began gathering the few lost-looking people into one place. He could hear her gently assessing skills and resilience. Disaster-relief 101 . And Japan seemed to attract more than its share of horrors.

‘Do you know what that was?’ Kershaw demanded.

‘One missile, surface-to-surface, maybe laser-guided from the ground, maybe fly-by-wire. Not huge, very deliberate.’

‘What did it hit?’

The Sergeant sucked air between his teeth.

‘The refrigeration plant.’

‘Where the fuck did it come from?’

The Sergeant tutted, apologising in advance. ‘The bay,’ he said. ‘Maybe the Fleet. Couldn’t see. Jed, one more thing: I’ve heard rumours of Fleet people coming shoreside for fun. I wouldn’t have bothered you with it until this.’

Kershaw stared at him for fully a count of ten, then nodded and shut his eyes. His lips moved. For a moment, the Sergeant thought he was praying, then realised he was rehearsing possibilities, seeing politics in his head. It got quiet in the room as the word spread. The Fleet . Because if partying on the shore was a technical transgression, blowing up the shore was something else again.

‘Colonel Arno,’ Kershaw said at last. ‘Consider your investigation expanded to include this matter.’ Arno was still sitting, dark eyes taking in the whole scene. The Sergeant wondered how much he had learned just watching all this, and thought: quite a lot. The Italian inclined his head in acknowledgement. ‘Work with Lester, please,’ Kershaw added.

Shoulder to shoulder with the man he most wanted to avoid, the X-ray Italian and all his myrmidons. Oh, thank you, Jed. On the other hand, he’d wanted to insert himself into the investigation, hadn’t he? And now here he was.

He traced Kershaw’s logic in his head. If Shola’s killers were in turn killed, then whoever killed them was involved in whatever Shola was involved in, and that too-loud action, contemptuous of the norms and whatever laws or conventions remained in place, implied urgency or alarm. Two things had changed on Mancreu in the last twenty-four hours to provoke the response: Inoue’s report and the footage of Tigerman at the cave. Of the two, the news story about drug smugglers and superheroes seemed the more likely to provoke fear in some red-lit covert battlebridge, which meant Arno and the Sergeant were investigating the same case from opposite ends.

‘Lester, I’m formally requesting the assistance of the United Kingdom’s representative, whose expertise and familiarity with local investigations may be of use to NatProMan at this time.’

The Sergeant’s instinct was to say ‘of course’ but this would constitute concluding a foreign alliance, even if only a temporary one, so he said, ‘I’ll talk to London right away,’ and tried to make his personal agreement clear by waggling his eyebrows. At the same time, he continued analysing the moment, because he couldn’t afford to let them get far enough ahead of him that he made a mistake. He was vulnerable because he had more information than they did about Tigerman and the cave. There was another strand of connection joining Pechorin and the heroin with Shola: the photograph, probably for target identification, that he had found last night. But what sort of target? Had Shola been a middleman, a smuggler, or victim as example? The connection was solid, anyway, one way or another. And there was one more possible contributing factor to the missile attack: the Sergeant had himself made it seem that the prisoners were talking about Jack. The marine had overheard that part of the discussion, would have reported it, which meant it was in the military system. He’d told Dirac the same lie, and anyone from Kershaw’s staff might have known about it, and relayed that to a contact in the Fleet.

The Sergeant felt a breath of air at his back. ‘I’m going to the impact site,’ Colonel Arno said. ‘We can talk on the way.’

‘I suppose you’ll need to call in some experts?’ the Sergeant suggested.

Arno shook his head. ‘Not call in. By now they are already there. Something explodes while we are investigating, they will want to know what it is. You mind if I call you Lester?’ He pronounced it ‘Lay-stair’. ‘And you call me Arno. It’s better, between allies in different chains of command. Nobody is confused.’ And no doubt it makes everyone feel relaxed and careless. He could see Inoue ahead of him, escorted by two marines and a mini-squad of co-opted administrators for whom she had found work. She nodded regally as he waved, and then they were in the street and he could smell burning brickdust and the aftermath of high explosive.