Nick Harkaway - Tigerman

Well, next time, eh?

Lester Ferris took the boat close as fast as he could, not wanting that ladder to retract before he was ready, then waited for the right moment, feeling the rhythm of the waves. The Elaine rose over him, then twisted away until it looked as if he might shortly be able to walk up it and get on board that way, then back — and he jumped.

His right hand hit the rung hard and he clenched the greasy metal, feeling the crosshatching grate under the rubber grip of his glove. He got one foot on the bottom rung, too, and then a perverse, sideways wave came in and nearly ripped him off in one go. He slammed against the side of the Elaine , fingers protesting as they carried his full weight, wet, with all that extra gear on his belt.

He wrenched himself back around and began to climb, felt the ladder tug under him, grind upwards. They were drawing it in. He hoped like hell it didn’t automatically stow itself in some sort of flatpack chest. He pumped with his legs, running from rung to rung. Up above, he heard the first flashbang go off and knew it had begun.

He reached the top and threw himself forward just as the ship lurched and he was flying again, always flying through the air in this outfit, always landing hard. This time there was no one underneath him and he rolled to save his ankles, slithered across a slick deck and kept moving, waiting each second for cries of alarm and the impact of shots. A man appeared in front of him and he used the taser, low and fast like a knife strike. He hadn’t even been aware of taking it from his belt. He glimpsed the man’s eyes, absurdly clear as they rolled up into his head, then pressed himself into an alcove in the metal supports of the bridge. There had been no gunfire since that first explosion. That might mean this was still containable. It might. He looked towards the prow.

And saw the boy.

The Elaine ’s captain had turned on the main floods for the boy’s boarding and these were now doing duty as TV lights. The boy had brought his own camera, and it was sitting on a tripod with some sort of magnetic clamp which locked it to the deck. A short stubby aerial suggested it was broadcasting live, though whether it could get through the storm the Sergeant was unsure. But the boy would have thought of that, prepared for it. This was his big scene.

He was wearing ordinary clothes which made him look even more like a child than he usually did. Water flowed from his head down over his face, which was contorted in a desperate plea. In his off-hand, he held a radio remote for the camera which looked like every filmmaker’s standard prop for a terrorist, but his body hid it from the lens.

There were four crewmen on the deck, woozy from the flashbang, but that might or might not come across on grainy footage of a lightning storm. The boy was shouting at them, bending his knees like any angry child, compressing and then bouncing in his insistence: a school footballer disputing the ref’s decision with all his might. The Sergeant couldn’t hear what he was saying, and quite certainly nor could the crewmen in the aftermath of the flashbang, so the monologue must be for the camera. He said it again, and again, hand pointing, and finally the Sergeant saw his mouth full on and read the words on his lips:

‘Give me back my mother!’

Had he lied, then, earlier? Was Sandrine on board? No: she couldn’t be, because this would not retrieve her. If the boy had been genuinely trying to save his mother from this ship, he would have done things differently. Lester Ferris tried to wrap his head around the bigness of the plan.

They cannot give him what they do not have. They cannot produce her, ever.

But when the dust settles, it will be seen that she was the woman who was kidnapped.

The woman Tigerman had chased.

A victim of the Discharge Clouds whose body might yield secrets.

It would seem inevitable that they must have taken her.

If they found her on the island and produced her, it would simply be proof that they had had her all along. The accusation would persist for ever, the investigations would go on, and the cruelty of killing her son would seem exceptional.

And when the Sergeant, or Tigerman, or both of them, delivered Inoue’s papers to the wider world, the story would compound, becoming the story of how the Fleet had stolen a child’s mother and then slain him, how even Tigerman could not stop it, how the great powers of the world had conspired to murder a boy in furtherance of their wretched, meaningless agendas.

Game over.

If anything could save Mancreu, it would be that scandal at fever pitch, delivered with perfect visuals through the news organisations and the Internet, scouring the world. Leaving the island unburned would seem a meagre enough first act of contrition.

The stunned men were extras, there to absorb the boy’s accusations. The real antagonists in his story must be seconds away, a fire team who would be armed and very frightened, riding the fear with long practice and established orders, and the boy would provoke them, he would die, and it would begin. The Sergeant couldn’t think of any way to deal with that, couldn’t see a path which would get them both out alive, let alone uncaptured.

He felt footsteps in the decking, the vibration of booted feet.

His first instinct was to give himself up, explain that the boy was no actual threat — or, not on a physical level — and let the whole thing crash down. He might be able to salvage something from it. The surrender of Tigerman on live TV — by now, he had no doubt, this was on every station — ought to be worth some good ratings, and his notoriety might protect them both.

But they would not hear him. Keyed up and afraid, in the blinding rain — even assuming that they didn’t shoot him down — they would not credit his assurances regarding the remote. And why should they? Out there somewhere a Fleet ship was taking on water, and there had been columns of fire in the night, and now Tigerman was on their ship, and the boy with him, and the whole operation was fucked up at best.

Lester Ferris could not prevent the fight. But he could draw fire.

So when the men barrelled past him towards the bright lights of the foredeck, he waited, then stepped into the middle of them and did all he could to take them down. He fired the taser again, then stamped and used his fists. He dropped two of them and then the remainder swamped him and they fell forward in a seething pile onto the deck, in the midst of the lights.

He felt a fist rebound off his armour and heard a shriek. He drove his forehead up into a man’s face, rolled away as one of them finally started shooting, threw a gas grenade back the way he’d come. It was useless in this wind but they had no way of knowing what it was. They scattered, and he got to his feet and charged. He lashed out with the sharkpunch and it went wide, struck metal and the cartridge went off, sending shot zinging everywhere. A piece of it pinged into his shoulder and lodged in the meat and he yelled. He saw a man go down clutching at his leg. Then the aluminium tube went spinning away, and he walked into a succession of sharp blows like a drum tattoo, powpowpowpowpowpow, that went on for ever against his sides. Someone was hitting him, and doing it right. He dropped to slip a scything punch and weaved away, breath rasping, making space.

His opponent skipped after him, whip-lean and fast, and he realised it was a woman with a fine, peaceful face and short brown hair. He tried to circle and her knee moved, faster than he would have imagined possible, shot like a piston into his liver. She snapped away, off-axis, guard up to deflect his counter. She moved with the ship, her back upright and supple as the deck shifted. Naval training, and a lot of it.