But Miguel Dieterling just smiled and turned away.
Later, much later, after I had set up about half the deadfalls and ambushes (I would rig the others at sunrise; if I did it now there would be too much of a danger of tripping them ourselves), Cahuella invited me into his tent.
‘Yes?’ I said, expecting another order.
Cahuella indicated a chessboard, bathed in the insipid green light of the bubbletent’s glowlamps.
‘I need an opponent.’
The chessboard was set up on a folding card table, with folding, canvas-backed seats stationed either side of it. I shrugged. I played chess, and even played it well, but the game held few enticements for me. I approached the game like any other duty, knowing I could not allow myself to win.
Cahuella leaned over the chessboard. He wore fatigues crossed by webbing; various daggers and throwing implements were attached to his belt, with the dolphin pendant hanging under his neck. When his hands moved across the board, I thought of an oldtime general positioning little penanted tanks and infantry-men on a vast sand- table. All the while, his face remained placid and imperturbable, the green radiance of the glowlamps reflected oddly in his eyes, as if some part of that radiance came from within. And all the while Gitta sat next to us, occasionally pouring her husband another thimble of pisco; seldom speaking.
I played a difficult game — difficult, because of the tactical contortions I forced myself through. I was a superior chess player to Cahuella, but he wasn’t very fond of losing. On the other hand, he was shrewd enough to guess if an opponent was not giving the game his all, so I had to satisfy his ego on both fronts. I played hard, forcing Cahuella into a corner, but incorporated a weakness into my position — something exceedingly subtle, but also potentially fatal. Then, just when it looked like I would put him in check, I arranged for my weakness to reveal itself, like the sudden opening of a hairline fracture. Sometimes, though, he failed to spot my weaknesses, and there was nothing to do but let him lose. The best I could do under those circumstances was contrive to make the margin of my own victory as narrow as possible.
‘You’ve beaten me again, Tanner…’
‘You played well, though. You have to allow me the occasional victory.’
Gitta appeared at her husband’s side and poured another centimetre of pisco into his glass.
‘Tanner always plays well,’ she said, eyeing me. ‘That’s why he’s a worthy opponent for you.’
I shrugged. ‘I do my best.’
Cahuella brushed the pieces from the table, as if in a tantrum, but his voice remained placid. ‘Another game?’
‘Why not,’ I said, knowing with weary certainty that this time I had to fail.
We finished the chess game. Cahuella and I finished a few drops of pisco, then reviewed our plan for the ambush, even though we had already been through it dozens of times and there was nothing we had left uncovered. But it was the kind of ritual we had to endure. Afterwards, we made one final check on the weapons, and then Cahuella took his and spoke quietly in my ear.
‘I’m stepping outside for a moment, Tanner. I want some final practice. I’d rather not be disturbed until I’m done.’
‘Reivich might see the flashes.’
‘There’s bad weather coming in,’ Cahuella said. ‘He’ll just assume it’s lightning.’
I nodded, insisted that I check the settings on the gun for him, then let him slip out into the night. Torchless, with the little miniature laser strapped diagonally across his back, he was quickly lost from sight. It was a dark night and I hoped he knew his way through the part of the jungle immediately surrounding the clearing. Like Dieterling, he was confident of his ability to see well enough in the dark.
A few minutes passed before I heard the pulse of his weapon: regular discharges every few seconds, followed by longer pauses which suggested he was checking his fire pattern or selecting new targets. Each pulse strobed the tree-tops with a sharp flash of light, disturbing wildlife from the canopy; black shadows which cut across the stars. Then I saw that something else — equally black, but far vaster — was obstructing a whole swathe of stars towards the west. It was a storm, as Cahuella had predicted, creeping in from the ocean, ready to engulf the Peninsula in monsoon. As if acknowledging my diagnosis, the night’s previously calm and warm air began to stir, a breeze toying with the tops of the trees. I returned to the tent, found a torch and began to follow the path Cahuella had taken, guided by the intermittent pulses of his gun, like a lighthouse beacon. The undergrowth became treacherous and it took me several minutes to find my way to the patch of ground — a small clearing — where he stood shooting. I doused my torch across his body, announcing my arrival.
Still squeezing off pulses, he said, ‘I told you not to disturb me, Tanner.’
‘I know, but there’s a storm coming in. I was worried you wouldn’t notice until it began to rain, and then you might have trouble finding your way back to the camp.’
‘I’m the one who told you there was a storm coming,’ he said, not turning to face me, still engrossed in his target practice. I could barely see what he was shooting at; his laser pulses knifed into a void of darkness devoid of detail. But I noticed that the pulses followed each other very precisely, even after he adjusted his stance, or unshouldered the rifle to slip in another ammo-cell.
‘It’s late, anyway. We should get some sleep. If Reivich is delayed it could be a long day tomorrow, and we’ll need to be sharp for it.’
‘You’re right, of course,’ he said, after due consideration. ‘I just want to make sure I can maim the bastard, if I choose.’
‘Maim him? I thought we were setting him up for a clean kill.’
‘What would be the point of that?’
I stepped toward him. ‘Killing him’s one thing. You can bet he wants to kill you, so there’s a kind of sense to it. But he hasn’t done anything to earn that kind of hatred, has he?’
He sighted along the gun and squeezed off a pulse. ‘Who said he has to, Tanner?’
Then he snapped the gun’s stock and sight into their stowage modes, slipping the gun on to his back, where it looked like a piece of frail rigging lashed to the side of a whale.
We walked in silence to the camp, the storm rising overhead like a cliff of obsidian, pregnant with lightning. The first drops of rain were falling through the tree-tops when we reached the camp. We checked the guns were protected from the elements, triggered our perimeter infringement detectors and then sealed ourselves into the tents. The rain began to drum against the fabric, like impatient fingers on a tabletop, and thunder roared somewhere to the south. But we were ready, and returned to our bunks to snatch what sleep we could before we had to rise to catch our man.
‘Sleep well tonight,’ Cahuella said, his head peering through the gash in my tent. ‘For tomorrow we fight.’
It was still dark. The storm was still raging. I woke and listened to the rain’s fusillade against the fabric of the bubbletent.
Something had troubled me enough to bring me from sleep. It happened, sometimes. My mind would work away at a problem, which had seemed clear-cut in daylight, until it found a catch. It was how I had filled in some of the more subtle security loopholes at the Reptile House; imagining myself as an intruder and then devising a way to penetrate some screen that I had imagined until then to be absolutely foolproof. That was what it felt like when I woke: that something unobvious had suddenly been revealed to me. And that I had been making a terrible error of assumption. But for a moment I could not quite recall the details of the dream; what had been vouchsafed to me by my own diligent subconscious processes.
And then I realised that we were being attacked.
‘No…’ I started to say.
But it was much too late for that.
One of the most pragmatic truths about war, and the way it affected us, was that many of the cliches were not very far removed from reality. War was about yawning chasms of inactivity, punctuated by brief, screaming interludes of action. And in those brief, screaming interludes, events happened both quickly and with dreamlike slowness, every instant burned into memory. That was how it was, especially during something as compressed and violent as an ambush.
