'Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock…'
IX
PERSEUS: SOURMASH.
KINGMAKER: ADAGGIO.
PICADILLY: YELLOWSTONE.
TIN LIZZY: COPPICE.
PETREL: CLAW HAMMER.
CURLY JOE: VIGILANCE.
Stealth was not one of Raimundo Rex's strong points. They switched off the motors of their swamp-skimmers once they hit the Indian River, which put them within earshot of the Cape, and fell back on paddles. Raimundo kept bumping his head on low cypresses, and his bulk made the skimmer sit dangerously low in the water. Elvis was sure the saurian had been doping before the mission. It was hard to tell what with his independently-floating reptile eyes, but the Op thought Raimundo had hopped himself up on some zooper-blast.
A lot of other Ops used drugs to get them through the combats, but Elvis thought they were stone crazy. Back in the music days, he had popped his share of pills to keep him going eight gigs a week, and in the army he had been shot full of morph-plus several times, when he was badly wounded, and he had found the dissociation from his body deeply disturbing. Since then, he had been down hard on recreational or professional drugs. He had first earned the enmity of the Good Ole Boys by turning over to the cops a couple of Memphis dealers who had paid off plenty to stay in business. The smacksynth salesmen had gone in one side of the revolving door and come out the other, protected by a court order and the word of Judgement Q. Harbottle. Drugs were a poison, seeping through the cities of America, turning everything sour…
In Cuba, when he had been shot in the chest and had been in surgery for twelve hours, they had given him enough morph-plus to deaden the pain of torture by flaying. He had had bad dreams, and never really been able to shake them off. He would find himself standing alone in a beam of bright white light like police interrogators use, uncomfortably strapped into a white, fringed, spangled clown outfit. He was sweating like a pig, and his clothes were sticky, and he was mumbling his way through a song he could barely remember, trying to do his old act despite the pains shooting through his legs and arms. The lyric of 'Are You Lonesome Tonight?' hovered just beyond his mental grasp, and he was repeating the title over and over again like a mantra, gabbling 'are you lonesome tonight, are you lonesome toniiiiight, are you lonesome toniiiiiiiight?' The worst of it was that he was weighed down by heavy pads on his stomach, his buttocks, his thighs, his arms, his legs and under his chin. No matter how he fought, he couldn't get free of the weights. They weren't just fixed to him by tape or wire, they were growing out of him as if he had spent twenty years guzzling brews and downing cheeseburgers by the faceful. There were drugs in him too, not just the medical anaesthetics, but a potent mixture of everything illegal that could be injected, snorted, inhaled, infused, swallowed, skin-popped or poured into his ears. Since Cuba, that nightmare had come back to him too often.
Raimundo was weaving about on his skimmer, paddling with his huge foot like a kid on a push-bike. Elvis hoped the dinosaur would be okay in the fight. He'd seen too many gung-ho junkies get death rather than glory.
The dawn was breaking over the Cape. Working with Captain Marcus, Elvis had formulated a plan of attack, trusting that the Josephites were too stretched to maintain a proper defence perimeter around the Cape. The base was too large to be kept secure by anything less than a regiment, and the NASA fences were in a state of severe disrepair. Marcus's intelligence showed that most of the old observation posts weren't even manned most of the time.
The Captain was leading the bulk of their forces, using the captured armoured transport as a Wooden Horse- cum-command centre. They would attack the main gates. Those Suitcase People best adapted to swimming were circling around to come at the Cape from out of the sea, striking up at the sea wall from the almost unpatrolled beach. And Elvis was to lead a spearhead force up the Indian River whose main task was to draw fire away from Marcus's column.
There were docks on Merritt Island and the instep of the Cape, and the river ran between them. Actually, the river had swollen to such an extent that the narrow causeway separating it from the sea was more or less permanently underwater, a swirling mass of long grass just breaking the surface, and Merritt Island was just another lump in the swamp, but the docks still rose out of the salt marsh. They would provide good cover, and a fine fall-back point.
Aside from Raimundo and a few of his Suitcase People, most of Elvis's team were indentees from the compound, transplanted blacks and Cajuns, rallying behind Shiba. Some bore the marks of the change, but they were less far along than Raimundo, Marcus or the bestial swamp creatures that had responded to their call.
Raimundo was still fidgeting, eager to get into the scrap. The saurian had crossed bullet bandoliers on his chest, and was packing a rocketlauncher and a chaingun, both specially adapted so he could work them with his thick, clawed fingers. Stoned or not, he wasn't what Elvis would have most liked to have come angrily after him.
The indentees were another matter. Elvis couldn't work them out. He wondered why they hadn't scattered into the swamps when Marcus overran the compound. He wondered why they were so quietly acquiescent to the mutations that were overtaking them. He also noticed that they looked at him much as Ti-Mouche had done, with a strange combination of awe, reverence and fear.
He didn't feel magical this morning, although for some reason he had packed the battered guitar into the skimmer's lockers. It was like a totem. Other guys wore lucky medals or carried two-headed coins, he knew. He had never been battle-superstitious before—after all plenty of two-headed coins had to be prised out of the stiff, dead fists of lucky soldiers—but this wasn't like the other actions he had seen.
There was a warning buoy up ahead, bobbing in the water. Elvis signalled to Raimundo to halt, and the dinosaur just managed it, their small force settling behind him, back-paddling to keep themselves out of the marker's range.
Elvis watched the buoy's flashing lights. It sent out an all-clear every thirty seconds. He could shoot the thing, but that would shut it off, giving just as clear a warning as its alert signal would. There was nothing for it, they would have to trip the thing. After all, the whole point of the Indian River thrust was to make the Josephites think this was the main attack, and to have them concentrate their defences on the South perimeter.
He drew his Colt and took a sight at the buoy. He thought he could blow out the blinking red LED.
Elvis looked around. Raimundo and the others understood. Once this shot was fired, the attack would be on. There would be no way out except victory.
He cocked the pistol.
There was a mass of clicks as safety catches were flicked. Raimundo heaved his shoulders and hefted the rocket tube. A couple of 'gator men slipped off their skimmers and into the water, their weapons floating above their backs in sealed polythene bags.
The disc of the Sun was entirely above the horizon now, staining red the waters beyond the Cape. Insects buzzed above the marshland. In the distance, Elvis could see the remnant of a rocket gantry, and barely make out a dark shape beside it
The LED flashed. Thirty seconds. It flashed again. If he took it out the instant it winked off, they would have an
