Wild Country

great animal loved Sandy and, especially, Childe; but Quantrill's odor was the hated mansmell, and the two males had never faced each other without a soothing female presence.

If Ba'al loathed anything more than man, it was a live snake. A recently dead snake was something else again. His forelegs and snout were scarred from rattler punctures, and the boar dined as often from rattler nests as from wild goat, tender shoots, or stray animals from the nearby preserves of Wild Country Safari. Quantrill hoped that this quivering rattler carcass would be the equivalent of a sherbet for Sandy or a praline for Childe. If not — well, whatthehell, he'd tried to pacify the surly bastard…

Less than an hour later, a few kilometers from Rocksprings, Quantrill topped a rise in view of Sandy Grange's soddy. He tried to deny the sense of relief spying the long, semisubmerged dwelling with its grassy sod roof and spiky agarita shrubs planted on the earth berm. Too many times he had seen roofs caved in by concussion grenades, smoke curling from burnt hulks, well-tended gardens ribboned to mulch by cimarron gangs hostile to settlers.

But Sandy's corn stood high and golden, now with a deeper glow from the saffron sun far to the west. Over the years, sunsets were beginning to lose the psychedelic glows brought on by thousands of nuclear blasts during the war years. Atmospheric dust and smoke had brought depressed temperatures and poor crop yields until recently. Quantrill tried once more with his VHP unit, and this time Sandy heard the beeper, complaining that she would not have time to freshen up before he arrived. He thought it better to avoid mentioning his cargo; Sandy tended to get squeamish about such things.

Chapter Four

Between two and three hundred klicks southwest of Rocksprings, Texas, lay La Mariposa — the butterfly — a sun-splashed village in the state of Coahuila. In the same way that Kerrville and Junction, Texas, marked the northern boundaries of Wild Country, La Mariposa marked its southern reach. North of La Mariposa lay a parched wilderness of jumbled mountains, Serranias del Burro. Beyond that ran El Rio Bravo, which yanquis called the Rio Grande. Contraband flowed between Mexico and Reconstruction America by the routes least likely to be discovered; and if you didn't have guaranteed passage through the Serranias, your most likely discovery was death. You would probably not discover the ruined dude ranch from which the contraband flowed.

The man who could guarantee passage, or oblivion, dismounted at almost the same moment when Ted Quantrill stepped from his hovercycle. In well-bred Spanish he said to his wrangler, 'Let him cool off slowly,' and bestowed a pat on the neck of his lathered polo pony. The little stallion was an unmarked golden brown; a sorrel. His owner took great pleasure in surrounding himself with variations on the sorrel theme, for he, Felix Sorel, enjoyed a golden lifestyle. When Anglos called him Sorrel, he enjoyed that as well.

Born to wealthy Marxists in Guadalajara, Felix Sorel grew from a handsome athletic child into a golden opportunity for Mexico's soccer hopes — an opportunity that country lost when Sorel's father arranged his education in Cuba. Felix Sorel put Cuba in the World Cup semifinals in 1996, then toured several countries as an honored guest. No one doubted that Sorel would become a millionaire forward on whatever team he chose, until the Sinolnd War flared. World War IV embittered young Sorel chiefly because it interfered with his career. Naturally, he blamed the US/RUS allies for the war.

Sorel vanished during the Cuban-based invasion of Florida; was reported dead twice; then reappeared in Cartagena at the war's end as the guest of a Frenchman from Marseilles. Sorel could not have been an honored guest in that context: it is hard to honor a man by entertaining him on the profits from heroin sales.

Yet Mexico, little damaged by the war and enriched by its oil sales to desperate North America, was anxious to honor Sorel. The media reported that he had put on too much weight, and Sorel proved critically sensitive about it when giving interviews. Felix Sorel returned to Mexico and his adoring fans by executive jet, and promised that he would'be down to a decent weight in the near future. He shed ten kilos of that weight soon after he breezed through Mexican customs, simply by removing the bags of pure heroin, twenty million pesos' worth of it, from around his waist. His gut pads, and the media hype surrounding them, had provided the perfect cover.

Felix Sorel moved in very fast company. Sorel, in fact, was fast company, still in his physical prime at thirty-two. He took good care of his yellow hair, golden tan, blue eyes, and a grin that could scarcely be viewed without sunglasses. Sorel had every reason to grin a lot; his father had taught him that it was eminently proper to grow rich and powerful through flooding the yanqui domains with hard drugs — so long as he did not become a user of his own shit.

A dutiful son, Felix Sorel kept his body finely tuned and free of drugs. His addictions could be guessed from his medical records. Urethritis from his gonorrhea; gonococcal pharyngitis; herpes simplex II; and trichomoniasis. The first two of these diseases Sorel got from male friends; the last two from female friends. In the celebration of self, Sorel was willing to share, and as a world-class soccer player he scored as often as he liked in sexual games.

Today, Sorel's exercise on the polo pony was chiefly for show in a Latin culture that valued horsemanship. His private exercises featured loose clothing, mats, and sharp implements; skills he had learned in Cuban commando training and honed with his own lively intelligence. Ambushed once by Corsican rivals in the drug trade and once by kidnappers, Sorel had yet to be taken.

Cat-sleek, careful in his habits, Sorel ate well, slept well, and split his time prosperously. He spent ten percent of his time among celebrities and ninety percent of it among his own picked staff, who shunned public places.

At the moment he was baring those famous teeth of his, waving to the Brazilian nymph who sunned herself beside the natural-seeming, artificial sweep of his pool. Even from a satellite camera, the old spa appeared far gone in romantic shambles. Sorel's excellent comm set was line-of-sight laser, which defied intercept and was relayed through an automatic translator station near La Mariposa. Sorel's staff was kept small, composed of men who would rather be dead than imprisoned, and who used nothing more mind-sapping than mezcal and an occasional joint. Sorel abandoned his smile as he saw the lounge shutters thrown open. It was a signal that demanded his attention.

'Wait there,' he called to the girl in too perfect English. 'I shall obtain something to tempt you.' He took the ramshackle steps in a springing lope, removed the neckerchief of bronze silk from his throat, dabbed perspiration away as the heels of his polished riding boots echoed down the parquetry of an inner corridor.

He continued past the lounge to a door the girl had always found locked, waited for the voiceprinter to unlock the carved oak door, strode in. In Spanish, he said with deceptive mildness to the two waiting men, 'I assume this is worth interrupting me.'

One of the men was trained to operate the laser comm set; the other to encode and decode messages. Both had the straight hair and liquid obsidian eyes of Indios, and the look of men in the presence of their demigod.

The tall man with the coder key around his neck ducked his head in respect. 'Such is my belief,' he said formally, and handed Sorel a folded scrap of paper. The other man, thick and silent, sat waiting for orders. A Yucatecan whose primary language was Maya, he sat as though prepared to wait through a geologic era.

Sorel glanced at the scrap, let his hand drop in disgust, scanned it again, then glanced toward the ceiling as if instructions were printed there. For an instant he stood still, the blue eyes staring at nothing. Then he said to the seated man, 'Please go to the kitchen, Kaiyi, and prepare sangarees for me and the woman. Serve them by the pool. Tell her I shall be with her presently.'

Kaiyi — a Maya nickname, for the sturdy fellow swam like a fish — arose without comment and left the room.

'Give thanks, Cipriano.' Sorel growled then. 'You will share no more bad blood with Rawson.'

'I never thought you could trust him, senor.'

'And I never did; except where his own interests were served. Now it seems the trigger-happy fool has finally caught a fatal case of lead poisoning, if San Antonio Rose is right. He has not misinformed us yet.'

'Not that you know of,' Cipriano replied impassively.

Sorel studied the mestizo while abrading the scrap of polypaper under his thumb. He peeled its two layers apart; watched them degrade into loose fibers as he spoke: 'You have kept something from me?'