Countdown: The Liberators-ARC (25 page)

"What the fock do ye think ye're doin'?" the dealer had asked, belligerently, though he knew exactly what Babcock was doing.

"Ensuring my investments are sound," Sergeant Babcock had answered.

"What do you need so many of these things for?" the proprietor asked.

"Movie props," the black man lied, with a perfectly straight face.

In the end, Babcock's checks and insistences had had three effects. One was to drive the cost of the Ferrets up to roughly the six thousand, five hundred pound point, each, on average. The second had been that all nine were reasonably mechanically sound before delivery was accepted. The third was to delay acceptance by about ten days.

Still, "All's well that ends well, and all that rot." The cars were ready now, loaded in containers, even, and would be leaving this evening for Portsmouth, a roughly two hour drive. From there, they'd be loaded on a freighter within the next two or three days, thence to Georgetown.

Trim and Babcock were to fly out as soon as they'd seen the things loaded. Their friends and families knew nothing but that they'd be gone for quite some time.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

They are lost like slaves that sweat,

and in the skies of morning hung

The stair-ways of the tallest gods

when tyranny was young.

-Gilbert Keith Chesterton, "Lepanto"

D-100, Suakin, Sudan

Adam could feel the armed guards on the other side of the curtain that hung in the coral-framed door. He couldn't see them, generally, nor even hear their bare feet most of the time. They almost never talked when on duty. But the fact of their presence, that he could feel even when no other indicator said so.

The room outside of which the guards kept watch was a cubicle of about three meters on a side. Once, when Suakin was still a busy port, it had had plastered walls. The plaster had long since fallen off, except for a few stubborn little traces here and there. It was also an interior cubicle, windowless. What light there was came from bare bulb, run by a generator Adam could hear whining in the distance. Warmth, when needed, came from a light blanket and the slave girl, Makeda. She and he lay under the blanket, on a foam rubber pad with a sheet. A few times a week the girl took the sheet out and washed it by hand, early in the morning.

Adam couldn't be sure how long it had been since his capture. At least fifty-seven days that I've counted. But he'd spent enough time sedated or-since arrival here-genuinely ill, that it might easily have been seventy-five or even eighty. Labaan, in any case, refused to tell him, and Makeda didn't know.

"It would just upset you, and for no good end," his captor insisted. "Trust me that you will not be going home any time soon. And if you ever are released, what you return to will not be what you think of as home." Not after my chief finishes squeezing. "So try to be happy-as much as you can-in the life you have here, or wherever else you may be brought." The enemy tribesman had seemed to Adam to be almost regretful as he'd said the words.

Adam had to admit that, within certain limits, they'd tried to treat him decently. He credited Labaan for that. Certainly some of the latter's underlings would have been happy enough feeding Adam to the sharks that came in close to the round island's edge on every quadrant. He was well fed, even gaining a little weight back after his descent into some kind of the twitching awfuls a couple of weeks ago. They took him out for exercise twice a day, always being careful to point out a shark's fin, could one be seen. He followed along, in awkward short steps, imagining trying to outswim the fins while manacled.

While the sharks only came to most of the island's edge sometimes, in the east, where the opposite shore was closest, they were always there, their fins clustered thick enough to walk from one to the other. Adam could see land on the other side of the water, a bare thirty meters away. Almost, he felt he could jump such a short span. He knew he couldn't, of course, and with the manacles about his ankles even the less so. The sharks, in any event, were thick at that point of the compass. Perhaps they were fed there by the two guards that likewise seemed always on station there.

The chain they used on his ankles to keep him from running or swimming chafed. And it would ooze red blood if I were to try to swim through the sharks.

A doctor checked in on him every few days, the better to ensure his physical well being. The exclusive use they'd given him of Makeda went a long way to seeing to his other needs, physical and otherwise.

Purchased by Labaan's brother, Bahdoon, Makeda was an Ethiopian captured in a slave raid when she was a young child. The girl was about fifteen years old now, as near as she could guess, and virginity was but a distant memory. So, too, distant was the memory of her childhood religion, Christianity. Adam found it both moving and pitiful the way Makeda tried to hang on to barely remembered scraps of her faith. In looks she was much like Maryam, tall and slender, more fine featured than the African norm, and with the high forehead typical of Ethiopians, Eritreans, and some of Adam's own people.

For all her tender years, Makeda was deft in bed in a way Maryam had probably never even dreamed of being. Whether she took any genuine enjoyment of the act Adam had to doubt. The fine scars across her buttocks suggested she was performing only, like any trained animal. And somehow the passion of her throat never seemed to reach her eyes.

Outside of bed, however, and in the day, she was rather a different person, bright and charming and even funny. Nor was she so timid as to prevent her from laying into the guards fastening Adam's chains about him. "Look at the boy! See the raw red meat you've made of his ankles! How do you think your chief will feel if he gets an infection and dies?"

Not that they'd listened to her, at least not until she'd enlisted the doctor's support. After that, while the chains hadn't been loosened much, they'd permitted her to wrap the ankles in soft, clean cloth beforehand. It helped, some. It also increased the amount of free chain by perhaps all of an inch. Adam still had no hope of running or swimming with it on.

And no hope of getting out of this room except with it on. And, since they only give me plastic utensils, no chance of tunneling through these coral blocks.

He'd tried that, of course. His little white plastic spoons had made no impression on the coral whatsoever. Not that the coral blocks, which were basically limestone, were all that hard. They were just harder than cheap plastic spoons and fingernails.

He rolled over and spooned himself to Makeda's warm back, one arm going over her and his hand seeking out a breast to cup. She wriggled backwards against him. Awake or asleep? he wondered.

"I'm awake," the girl answered the unasked question. She might not have much cared for the act of bedding, however carefully trained she'd been to do it well. But she much preferred being the property of one to being in the common pool. If Adam wanted her, he could have her.

"You get out on your own, Makeda," Adam whispered. "Do boats ever come to the island?"

"The only one I've seen is the supply boat that comes from the south," she whispered back. "There are fishing boats, but they tie up along the rim of the bay, or sometimes at the causeway that connects the island with the mainland. The ones that tie up on the causeway do so past the guards. Are you planning an escape?" she asked, a tinge of hope creeping into her voice. "Take me with you; free me, and I'll do anything in my power to help."

"I would take you with me," he answered back. "As far as I'm concerned, you are free and the men holding you here do so illegally."

"I am free, you say," she whispered back. "And if I told you I didn't want you to fuck me anymore?"

Adam shrugged. "Then I wouldn't."

"Really?"

"Yes, really. You are your own person, to choose for yourself. If I've hurt you or angered you so far, I am sorry."

Makeda twisted her head half way around. "And you'll take me with you, if we can escape."

"Yes, of course."

She twisted around inside his enveloping arm. Her own went around him, the left one pushing its way between body and foam mattress. "In that case, pick a hole, any hole."

***

Labaan walked softly, on bare calloused feet, across the smoothly polished blocks that made up the floor. The guards at Adam's door were smiling when they saw him. One lifted a finger to his lips, indicating Labaan should be quiet. The finger then pointed at the portal, through the blanket covering of which emanated sounds of youthful passion. Labaan, likewise, smiled.

Poor children, he thought, go on and make the best you can of the bad situation fate has dealt you. I was certain, he congratulated himself, that I picked the right slavegirl for you, Adam. If you two can find love together, perhaps that will make the fact of your status more tolerable to you both. And don't forget, boy, if you impregnate her and she becomes ‘the mother of a child' that will be a big step up in her status right there. Almost free, in fact. For whatever ‘freedom' might mean to a woman in our world.

Like justice, it doesn't exist except for whatever we can carve out for ourselves and our own.

Makeda was on top, rocking rhythmically as Adam's hands clasped her small breasts almost-but not quite-painfully hard. Without interrupting the motion, she used her own hands to guide the boy's thumbs and fingers to her nipples. "Pinch them," she gasped. "Hard. I like it."

It would be incorrect to say that the girl had never taken any pleasure in sex before. But, if she had, it had always been tempered by the knowledge that she was legally not much more than an animal; that, and the feeling of being worthless dirt that always came afterwards. This, though? He said I was free! she thought as she changed her pattern of movement from rocking her hips to spiraling them. He said I had a choice! That must be why this feels as it never has before.

She reverted from spiraling back to rocking, at the same time lowering her torso down almost to rest on Adam's. He was mindless now, thrusting upwards hard, bouncing her toward the ceiling. His fingers, too, of their own accord, pinched her nipples fiercely enough to cause pain, though even that, mixed with the sensations coming from between her legs, was pleasurable.

She began to moan, then, a mindless animal sound. Her rocking ceased, changing to a reverse thrusting to meet Adam's own. She began to see little specks of light dancing before her eyes. Her moan changed to a long scream, then to a coral-shaking shriek, and finally to a loud, repetitive, "guh . . . guh . . . . guh . . ." which grew softer as she collapsed onto him, shuddering and quaking.

One guard, his rifle placed against the wall, had both hands cupped over his mouth and nose, trying to stifle a laugh. The other, Delmar, was of sterner stuff. He suppressed his own laughter by a sheer act of will. He did say to Labaan, face all smiles, "I grow to like that boy more and more as time passes."

"I know," Labaan agreed. "He's a good boy. Pity he's not one of us."

"Then it would be somebody else's son we'd have taken, since without an heir Khalid couldn't have been chief. And that son or heir would probably be no different from this one. No, Labaan, it's just the world in which we live. We didn't make it. We don't even have to approve of it. We just have to do the best we can in it, for our own."

I hate being owned, Makeda thought, as she lay, still awake, and staring at the ceiling. It's why I've always faked pleasure, and never let myself feel any of it I could avoid feeling. At least then, inside myself, I had control over myself, I owned that one small part of me.

So why let myself go this one time? Maybe I'm a foolish girl, but when Adam said he would free me if he could, and that it was my choice if we were to continue to bed . . . well . . . I suppose I believed him. No, I know
I believe him. He's a good boy, a decent boy, a kind boy.

And he's also my only chance.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Like myself, they have mixed the worship of

the God of love and the God of battles.

But unlike myself, they have adequate symbols

of this double devotion. The little cross on the

shoulder is the symbol of their Christian faith.

The uniform itself is the symbol of their devotion

to the God of battles. It is the uniform and not

the cross which impresses me and others.

-Reinhold Niebuhr,

"Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic"

D-99, Airfield, Assembly Area Alpha-Base Camp,

Amazonia, Brazil

Recruiting had been done in a rough pyramid, so to speak, with Stauer calling in a score of his own friends, for commanders and staff, and these each bringing in anything from a few to half a dozen to a couple of score, and these bringing in one or two or three or four each. A certain number, too, had been recruited by ransacking the databases of such corporations as Triple Canopy and MPRI, once Lox hacked into those.

Picking the chaplain Stauer had taken on as a personal job. Most chaplains he thought worthless, but there had been a couple . . .

The flight hadn't been that long, really, from Georgetown to an unknown and unnamed strip in Brazil's Amazon, just a few hours of mile after mile of green jungle and brown water.

On the other hand, flying in a tightly cramped aircraft with an unknown pilot, surrounded by nine big, burly and surly bastards that Chaplain (retired) James Wilson just knew had to be special operations types, was, at best, awkward and uncomfortable. There just wasn't a lot in common between green beanie and clerical collar, despite both having served in the same Army. They were almost all taller than his modest five feet, eight inches. They were all, even the ones he pegged as senior non-coms, much younger than his fifty-eight years. He had more hair than a couple of them, but his was steel gray while the eldest of theirs was at worst salt and pepper. They all looked like trained killers while he . . . Well . . . I look like a man of the cloth. Even without the collar I would.

Point of fact, really, they're a different army, Wilson thought. We just got paid, mostly, from the same accounts and wore, mostly, the same uniforms and answered, mostly, to the same legal system. Mostly.