The Cry of the Halidon: A Novel

  “Put on your light, please, mon.”

  “Trying to, mon.” No more, thought McAuliff. Nothing.

  The dancing beam reflected off a thousand shining, tiny mirrors in the darkness, splintering the light into hypnotically flickering shafts.

  Closer.

  Alex rolled silently off the path into the mass of wet earth and soft growth, the rifle under him cutting into his thighs.

  The beam of light was nearly above him, its shaft almost clear of interference. In the spill he could see the upper body of the man. Across his chest were two wide straps: one was connected to an encased radio, the other to the stock of a rifle, its thick barrel silhouetted over his shoulder. The flashlight was in the left hand; in the right was a large, ominous-looking pistol.

  The M.I.6 defector was a cautious agent. His instincts had been aroused.

  McAuliff knew he had to get the pistol; he could not allow the man to fire. He did not know how near the others were, how close the other patterns.

  Now!

  He lashed his right hand up, directly onto the barrel of the pistol, jamming his thumb into the curvature of the trigger housing, smashing his shoulder into the man’s head, crashing his left knee up under the man’s leg into his testicles. With the impact, the man buckled and expunged a tortured gasp; his hand went momentarily limp, and Alex ripped the pistol from it, propelling the weapon into the darkness.

  From his crouched agony the Jamaican looked up, his left hand still holding the flashlight, its beam directed nowhere at the earth, his face contorted … about to take the necessary breath to scream.

  McAuliff found himself thrusting his fingers into the man’s mouth, tearing downward with all his strength. The man lurched forward, bringing the hard metal of the flashlight crashing into Alex’s head, breaking the skin. Still McAuliff ripped at his mouth, feeling the teeth puncturing his flesh, sensing the screams.

  They fell, twisting in midair, into the overgrowth. The Jamaican kept smashing the flashlight into McAuliff’s temple; Alex kept tearing grotesquely, viciously, at the mouth that could sound the alarm he could not allow.

  They rolled over into a patch of sheer jungle mud. McAuliff felt a rock, he tore his left hand loose, ripped the rock up from the ground, and brought it crashing into the black mouth, over his own fingers. The man’s teeth shattered; he choked on his own saliva. Alex whipped out his bleeding hand and instantly grabbed the matted hair, twisting the entire head into the soft slime of the mud. There were the muffled sounds of expulsion beneath the surface. A series of miniature filmy domes burst silently out of the soggy earth in the spill of the fallen flashlight.

  And then there was nothing.

  The man was dead.

  And no alarms had been sent.

  Alexander reached over, picked up the light, and looked at the fingers of his right hand. The skin was slashed, there were teeth marks, but the cuts were not deep; he could move his hand freely, and that was all he cared about.

  His left temple was bleeding, and the pain terrible, but not immobilizing. Both would stop … sufficiently.

  He looked over at the dead Jamaican and he felt like being sick. There was no time. He crawled back to the path and started once again the painstaking task of following it. And he tried to focus his eyes into the jungle. Twice, in the not-too-distant denseness, he saw sharp beams of flashlights.

  The Dunstone team was continuing its sweep. It was zeroing in.

  There was not an instant to waste in thought.

  Eight minutes later he reached the clearing. He felt the accelerated pounding in his chest; there was less than a mile to go. The easiest leg of the terrible journey. He looked at his watch. It was exactly four minutes after twelve midnight.

  Twelve was also the house of noon.

  Four was the ritual Arawak unit.

  The Odyssey of death.

  No time for thought.

  He found the path at the opposite side of the small clearing and began to run, gathering speed as he raced toward the banks of the Martha Brae. There was no air left in his lungs now, not breath as he knew it; only the steady explosion of exhaustion from his throat, blood and perspiration falling from his head, rivering down his neck onto his shoulders and chest.

  There was the river. He had reached the river!

  It was only then that he realized the pounding rain had stopped; the jungle storm was over. He swung the flashlight to his left; there were the rocks of the path bordering the final few hundred yards into the campsite.

  He had heard no rifle fire. There had been no shots. There were five experienced killers in the darkness behind him, and the terrible night was not over … but he had a chance.

  That’s all he had asked for, all that was between him and his command to a firing squad ending his life.

  Willingly, if he failed. Willingly to end it without Alison.

  He ran the last fifty yards as fast as his exhausted muscles could tolerate. He held the flashlight directly in front of him; the first object caught by its beam was the lean- to at the mouth of the campsite area. He raced into the clearing.

  There were no fires, no signs of life. Only the dripping of a thousand reminders of the jungle storm, the tents silent monuments of recent living.

  He stopped breathing. Cold terror gripped him. The silence was an overpowering portent of horror.

  “Alison. Alison!” he screamed and raced blindly toward the tent. “Sam! Sam!”

  When the words came out of the darkness, he knew what it was to be taken from death and be given life again.

  “Alexander … You damn near got killed, boy,” said Sam Tucker from the black recesses of the jungle’s edge.

  34

  Sam Tucker and the runner called Marcus walked out of the bush. McAuliff stared at the Halidonite, bewildered. The runner saw his expression and spoke.

  “There is no time for lengthy explanations. I have exercised an option, that is all.” The runner pointed to the lapel of his jacket. Alex needed no clarification. Sewn into the cloth were the tablets he had seen in the wash of yellow moonlight on the back road above Lucea Harbour.

  I would not think twice about it, Daniel had said.

  “Where is Alison?”

  “With Lawrence and Whitehall. They’re farther down the river,” answered Sam.

  “What about the Jensens?”

  Tucker paused. “I don’t know, Alexander.”

  “What?”

  “They disappeared. That’s all I can tell you. Yesterday Peter was lost; his carrier returned to camp, he couldn’t find him. Ruth bore up well, poor girl … a lot of guts in her. We sent out a search. Nothing. And then this morning, I can’t tell you why—I don’t know—I went to the Jensen tent. Ruth was gone. She hasn’t been seen since.”

  McAuliff wondered. Had Peter Jensen seen something? Sensed something? And fled with his wife? Escaped past the tribe of Acquaba?

  Questions for another time.

  “The carriers?” asked Alex warily, afraid to hear the answer.

  “Check with our friend here,” replied Tucker, nodding to the Halidonite.

  “They have been sent north, escorted north on the river,” said the man with the usurped name of Marcus. “Jamaicans will not die tonight unless they know why they are dying. Not in this fight.”

  “And you? Why you? Is this your fight?”

  “I know the men who come for you. I have the option to fight.”

  “The limited freedoms of Acquaba?” asked Alex softly.

  Marcus shrugged; his eyes betrayed nothing. “An individual’s freedom of choice, Doctor.”

  There was a barely perceptible cry of a bird, or the muted screech of a bat, from the dense, tropic jungle. Then there followed another. And another. McAuliff would not have noticed … there were so many sounds, so continuously. A never-ending nocturnal sympathy; pleasant to hear, not pleasant to think about.

  But he was compelled to notice now.

  Marcus snapped his head up, reactin
g to the sound. He swiftly reached over and grabbed Alexander’s flashlight and ripped it out of his hand while shouldering Tucker away.

  “Get down!” he cried, as he pushed McAuliff violently, reeling him backward, away from the spot where he was standing.

  Seven rifle shots came out of the darkness, some thumping into trees, others cracking into the jungle distance, two exploding into the dirt of the clearing.

  Alex rolled on the ground, pulling his rifle into position, and aimed in the direction of the firing. He kept his finger on the trigger; a shattering fusillade of twenty bullets sprayed the area. It was over in seconds. The stillness returned.

  He felt a hand grabbing his leg. It was Marcus.

  “Pull back. Down to the river, mon,” he whispered harshly.

  McAuliff scrambled backward in the darkness. More shots were fired from the bush; the bullets screamed above him to the right.

  Suddenly there was a burst of rifle fire from only feet away. Marcus had leaped up to the left and delivered a cross-section barrage that drew the opposing fire away. Alex knew Marcus’s action was his cover. He lurched to the right, to the edge of the clearings. He heard Sam Tucker’s voice.

  “McAuliff! Over here!”

  As he raced into the brush, he saw Sam’s outline on the ground. Tucker was crouched on one knee, his rifle raised. “Where? For Christ’s sake, where’s Alison? The others?”

  “Go down to the river, boy! South, about three hundred yards. Tell the others. We’ll hold here.”

  “No, Sam! come with me.… Show me.”

  “I’ll be there, son …” Another volly of shots spat out of the jungle. Marcus answered from the opposite side of the clearing. Tucker continued speaking as he grabbed the cloth in Alex’s field jacket and propelled him beyond. “That black son of a bitch is willing to get his tar ass shot off for us! Maybe he’s given me a little time I don’t deserve. He’s my countryman, boy. My new landsmann. Jesus! I knew I liked this fucking island. Now get the hell down there and watch out for the girl. We’ll join you, don’t you worry about that. The girl, Alexander!”

  “There are five men out there, Sam. I killed one of them a mile back. They must have seen my flashlight when I was running. I’m sorry …” With these words McAuliff plunged into the soaking-wet forest and slashed his way to the river-bank. He tumbled down the short slope, there life clattering against the metal buttons of his jacket, and fell into the water.

  South. Left.

  Three hundred yards. Nine hundred feet … a continent.

  He stayed close to the riverbank, where he could make the best time. As he slopped through the mud and the growth and over fallen rocks, he realized his magazine was empty. Without stopping he reached into his pocket and pulled out a fresh clip, snapping the old one out of its slot and slamming the new one in. He cracked back the insertion bar; the cartridge entered the chamber.

  Gunfire broke his nonthoughts. Behind him men were trying to kill other men.

  There was a bend in the narrow river. He had traveled over a hundred yards; nearer two, he thought.

  My new landsmann … Christ! Sam Tucker, itinerant wanderer of the globe, schooler of primitives, lover of all lands—in search of one to call his own, at this late stage of his life. And he had found it in a violent moment of time in the crudest wilds of Jamaica’s Cock Pit. In a moment of sacrifice.

  Suddenly, in an instant of terror, from out of the darkness above, a huge black form descended. A giant arm fell viselike around his neck; clawing fingers tore at his face; his kidneys were being hammered by a vicious, powerful fist. He slammed the rifle butt into the body behind him, sank his teeth into the flesh below his mouth, and lunged forward into the water.

  “Mon! Jesus, mon!”

  The voice of Lawrence cried as he pummeled McAuliff’s shoulder. Stunned, each man released the other; each held up his hands, Alex’s awkwardly thrusting out the rifle, Lawrence’s holding a long knife.

  “My God!” said McAuliff. “I could have shot you!”

  There was another fusillade of gunfire to the north.

  “I might have put the blade in … not the handle,” said the black giant, waist-deep in water. “We wanted a hostage.”

  Both men recognized there was no time for explanations. “Where are you? Where’s Alison and Whitehall?”

  “Downstream, mon. Not far.”

  “Is she all right?”

  “She is frightened.… But she is a brave woman. For a white English lady. You see, mon?”

  “I saw, mon,” replied Alexander. “Let’s go.”

  Lawrence preceded him, jumping out of the water about thirty yards beyond the point of the near-fatal encounter. McAuliff saw that the revolutionary had tied a cloth around his forearm; Alex spat the blood out of his mouth as he noticed it, and rubbed the area of his kidneys in abstract justification.

  The Jamaican pointed up the slope with his left hand and put his right hand to his mouth at the same time. A whistled treble emerged from his lips. A bird, a bat, an owl.… it made no difference. There was a corresponding sound from the top of the riverbank, beyond in the jungle.

  “Go up, mon, I will wait here,” said Lawrence.

  McAuliff would never know whether it was the panic of the moment or whether his words spoke the truth as he saw it, but he grabbed the black revolutionary by the shoulder and pushed him forward. “There won’t be any more orders given. You don’t know what’s back there. I do! Get your ass up there!”

  An extended barrage of rifle fire came from the river.

  Lawrence blinked. He blinked in the new moonlight that flooded the riverbank of this offshoot of the Martha Brae.

  “Okay, mon! Don’t push.”

  They crawled to the top of the slope and started into the overgrowth.

  The figure came rushing out of the tangled darkness, a darker racing object out of a void of black. It was Alison. Lawrence reached back to McAuliff and took the flashlight out of Alex’s hand. A gesture of infinite understanding.

  She ran into his arms. The world … the universe stopped its insanity for an instant, and there was stillness. And peace and comfort. But for only an instant.

  There was not time for thought. Or reflection.

  Or words.

  Neither spoke.

  They held each other, and then looked at each other in the dim spill of the new moonlight in the isolated space that was their own on the banks of the Martha Brae.

  In a terrible, violent moment of time. And sacrifice.

  Charles Whitehall intruded, as Charley-mon was wont to do. He approached, his safari outfit still creased, his face an immobile mask, his eyes penetrating.

  “Lawrence and I agreed he would stay down at the river. Why have you changed that?”

  “You blow my mind, Charley …”

  “You bore me, McAuliff!” replied Whitehall. “There was gunfire up there!”

  “I was in the middle of it, you black son of a bitch!” Jesus, why did he have to say that? “And you’re going to learn what the problem is. Do you understand that?”

  Whitehall smiled. “Do tell … whitey.”

  Alison slapped her hands off McAuliff and looked at both men. “Stop it!”

  “I’m sorry,” said Alex quickly.

  “I’m not,” replied Whitehall. “This is his moment of truth. Can’t you see that, Miss Alison?”

  Lawrence’s great hands interfered. They touched both men, and his voice was that of a thundering child-man. “Neither no more, mon! McAuliff, mon, you say what you know! Now!”

  Alexander did. He spoke of the grasslands, the plane—a plane, not the Halidon’s—the redneck ganja pilot who had brought six men into the Cock Pit to massacre the survey, the race to the campsite, the violent encounter in the jungle that ended in death in a small patch of jungle mud. Finally, those minutes ago when the runner called Marcus saved their lives by hearing a cry in the tropic bush.

  “Five men, mon,” said Lawrence, interrupted by a new b
urst of gunfire, closer now but still in the near-distance to the north. He turned to Charles Whitehall. “How many do you want, fascisti?”

  “Give me a figure, agricula.”

  “Goddammit!” yelled McAuliff. “Cut it out. Your games don’t count anymore.”

  “You do not understand,” said Whitehall. “It is the only thing that does count. We are prepared. We are the viable contestants. Is this not what the fictions create? One on one, the victor sets the course?”

  The charismatic leaders are not the foot soldiers.… They change or are replaced.… the words of Daniel, Minister of the Tribe of Acquaba.

  “You’re both insane,” said Alex, more rationally than he thought was conceivable. “You make me sick, and goddamn you—”

  “Alexander! Alexander!” The cry came from the river-bank less than twenty yards away. Sam Tucker was yelling.

  McAuliff began running to the edge of the jungle. Lawrence raced ahead, his huge body crashing through the foliage, his hands pulverizing into sudden diagonals everything in their path.

  The black giant jumped to the water’s edge; Alex started down the short slope and stopped.

  Sam Tucker was cradling the body of Marcus the runner in his arms. The head protruding out of the water was a mass of blood, sections of the skull were shot off.

  Still, Sam Tucker would not let go.

  “One of them circled and caught us at the bank. Caught me at the bank … Marcus jumped out between us and took the fire. He killed the son of a bitch; he kept walking right up to him. Into the gun.”

  Tucker lowered the body into the mud of the river-bank.

  McAuliff thought. Four men remained, four killers left of the Dunstone team.

  They were five. But Alison could not be counted now.

  They were four, too.

  Killers.

  Four. The Arawak four.

  The death Odyssey.

  Alex felt the woman’s hands on his shoulders, her face pressed against his back in the moonlight.

  The grasslands.

  Escape was in the grasslands and the two aircraft that could fly them out of the Cock Pit.

  Yet Marcus had implied that there was no other discernible route but the narrow, twisting jungle path—a danger in itself.