Yaotl, meanwhile, pulled his blood-dripping hand from Maksim’s chest and smiled.
‘My warrior has returned from the darkness.’
‘I…’ Sigurd gasped.
‘Quiet, Ice Bear. It will take time, and more blood – a lot more blood than just one mortal can offer – to restore you fully. But do not worry about that; for now you are alive, if only just. Our plan will continue. Yes, yes … it must continue.’
Sigurd lay back, his hair matting in the stickiness of the pool of blood that was spreading beneath him. He closed his eyes, smiled, and began to laugh.
And a few floors below, unbeknown to either Yaotl or Sigurd, Daekwon’s not-quite-dead body began to stir, and through his dark-clouded mind, fever-dreams of some massive and mysterious beast started to swirl.
PART SEVENTEEN
56
COLONEL RUDD
5th October 2020. CZ-17H2 Coltan Mine, in the southeast of the Democratic Republic of the Congo
Colonel Rudd chewed on a wad of tobacco as the combat helicopter he was in circled the jungle, and as he masticated on the bitter lump, he stared through his aviator shades at the unending morass of green below him. As the chopper began its descent towards the coltan mine – a broad grey-brown scar gouged from the endless broccoli green – he leaned out of the side of the aircraft and spat, watching the brown slick of liquid whirling, splitting up and disintegrating as it hurtled earthwards. Shifting over to where the GE-M134 Minigun was mounted, he slipped his hands over the grips and closed his eyes. Jungle, jungle, a bulbous ocean of trees and lush foliage … this was bringing back all sorts of memories.
A young man, all those decades ago, and green myself, but not for long. It was a minigun just like this one, that’s what was in these hands a’ mine. There’d been flames, a fuckin’ inferno; napalm fire. Rockets streaking like avengin’ angels through the air.
And them. They’d been all over the ground. So many of ‘em. Running blindly from their burning village. Enemies, all. Enemies. Lil’ yellow people, stick-thin. Uneducated peasants, more animal than human. Couldn’t speak a lick a’ English, not one of ‘em. Weak. Thin and weak. God, how I despise weakness. Weakness, vulnerability … them things make me fuckin’ sick, make me want to puke my goddamn guts out. And them thin lil’ yellow folk, them pathetic, primitive subsistence farmers with their indecipherable tongue, they represented the fuckin’ epitome of weakness. Hard targets with their spindly limbs and insubstantial torsos, for sure, but not when you’re firing 7.62-millimetre slugs at a rate of a few thousand rounds per minute. You’re a god, up in the clouds in this metal falcon. And you’re a wrathful god. A god of no mercy. A god of war. A god of vengeance.
They tried to run. They had had hogs with ‘em too. Fucking pigs; them stupid peasants tried to take ‘em with in their desperate flight from our choppers. Hadn’t mattered. Rockets. Napalm. My fingertips unleashing death from above. So many dead, sprawled out, dying, screaming, bleeding out. Peasants indistinguishable from hogs. Weak, unable to offer any resistance. Disgusting. Pathetic. Wastes of skin.
And me? No more a boy. A man, and by God and Jesus and the fuckin’ Virgin Mary, what a man. No, not just a man. Not with that kind of power. Like I said: a god. A god, with godlike power.
Colonel Rudd opened his eyes and the memory faded, and here he was, back in the present. Down below on the ground a rake-thin, shirtless African youth was gesticulating with two brightly burning signal flares in each hand, giving the attack helicopter the signal to land.
With his square jaw jutting purposefully and his thin crimson lips rolled into a snarl of menace, Colonel Rudd prepared to make his entrance. First impressions were key; he had learned this over many decades of conflict situations, both military and non-military.
Intimidate from the start and you already have the upper hand in any situation. Establish dominance immediately, and maintain it.
He unclipped the strap on his hip holster as the chopper hovered just above the ground, giving easy access to his HK45C semi-automatic pistol, a gesture which was as much for ritual and for show as for practicality.
The chopper touched down, and from both sides of the aircraft marines armed to the teeth and clad in combat armour poured out, and with clockwork precision formed up in a defensive position.
‘All part a’ the fuckin’ show,’ Rudd whispered as he got ready to make his exit from the chopper. ‘Establish dominance from the start, definitively, an’ by whatever means necessary.’
The Colonel stepped out onto the crumbly soil, his muscular bulk – still toned and firm, despite his sixty-six years of life – perfectly balanced, with his weight fused to the earth via spotlessly gleaming combat boots. He took a long, slow look around him, with his thick arms folded in a gesture of arrogant defiance across his barrel chest. He nodded subtly, pulled a cigarette from the black steel case in the left chest pocket of his flak jacket, flicked it into his mouth and lit it up.
All around him emaciated, haggard-looking Congolese were hobbling across the denuded earth, struggling beneath loads of ore and soil that looked, in many cases, larger than their skeletal bodies. Clumps of scraggly banana and palm trees growing in seemingly random spots, haphazardly arranged like everything else in this place, swayed tiredly in a weak breeze that brought no relief from the stifling heat and humidity.
From out of the scattered throng of listless workers, who were limping about their duties with all the reluctant strain of rusty automatons, strode an altogether different figure. A diminutive redhead with pale skin, sprayed liberally with freckles, she was dressed in a beige business suit that was impeccably clean despite the muddiness of these surroundings. While on closer inspection it became clear that she was in her late thirties or early forties,
