Tigerman

  Well, next time, eh?

  Lester Ferris took the boat close as fast as he could, not wanting that ladder to retract before he was ready, then waited for the right moment, feeling the rhythm of the waves. The Elaine rose over him, then twisted away until it looked as if he might shortly be able to walk up it and get on board that way, then back – and he jumped.

  His right hand hit the rung hard and he clenched the greasy metal, feeling the crosshatching grate under the rubber grip of his glove. He got one foot on the bottom rung, too, and then a perverse, sideways wave came in and nearly ripped him off in one go. He slammed against the side of the Elaine, fingers protesting as they carried his full weight, wet, with all that extra gear on his belt.

  He wrenched himself back around and began to climb, felt the ladder tug under him, grind upwards. They were drawing it in. He hoped like hell it didn’t automatically stow itself in some sort of flatpack chest. He pumped with his legs, running from rung to rung. Up above, he heard the first flashbang go off and knew it had begun.

  He reached the top and threw himself forward just as the ship lurched and he was flying again, always flying through the air in this outfit, always landing hard. This time there was no one underneath him and he rolled to save his ankles, slithered across a slick deck and kept moving, waiting each second for cries of alarm and the impact of shots. A man appeared in front of him and he used the taser, low and fast like a knife strike. He hadn’t even been aware of taking it from his belt. He glimpsed the man’s eyes, absurdly clear as they rolled up into his head, then pressed himself into an alcove in the metal supports of the bridge. There had been no gunfire since that first explosion. That might mean this was still containable. It might. He looked towards the prow.

  And saw the boy.

  The Elaine’s captain had turned on the main floods for the boy’s boarding and these were now doing duty as TV lights. The boy had brought his own camera, and it was sitting on a tripod with some sort of magnetic clamp which locked it to the deck. A short stubby aerial suggested it was broadcasting live, though whether it could get through the storm the Sergeant was unsure. But the boy would have thought of that, prepared for it. This was his big scene.

  He was wearing ordinary clothes which made him look even more like a child than he usually did. Water flowed from his head down over his face, which was contorted in a desperate plea. In his off-hand, he held a radio remote for the camera which looked like every filmmaker’s standard prop for a terrorist, but his body hid it from the lens.

  There were four crewmen on the deck, woozy from the flashbang, but that might or might not come across on grainy footage of a lightning storm. The boy was shouting at them, bending his knees like any angry child, compressing and then bouncing in his insistence: a school footballer disputing the ref’s decision with all his might. The Sergeant couldn’t hear what he was saying, and quite certainly nor could the crewmen in the aftermath of the flashbang, so the monologue must be for the camera. He said it again, and again, hand pointing, and finally the Sergeant saw his mouth full on and read the words on his lips:

  ‘Give me back my mother!’

  Had he lied, then, earlier? Was Sandrine on board? No: she couldn’t be, because this would not retrieve her. If the boy had been genuinely trying to save his mother from this ship, he would have done things differently. Lester Ferris tried to wrap his head around the bigness of the plan.

  They cannot give him what they do not have. They cannot produce her, ever.

  But when the dust settles, it will be seen that she was the woman who was kidnapped.

  The woman Tigerman had chased.

  A victim of the Discharge Clouds whose body might yield secrets.

  It would seem inevitable that they must have taken her.

  If they found her on the island and produced her, it would simply be proof that they had had her all along. The accusation would persist for ever, the investigations would go on, and the cruelty of killing her son would seem exceptional.

  And when the Sergeant, or Tigerman, or both of them, delivered Inoue’s papers to the wider world, the story would compound, becoming the story of how the Fleet had stolen a child’s mother and then slain him, how even Tigerman could not stop it, how the great powers of the world had conspired to murder a boy in furtherance of their wretched, meaningless agendas.

  Game over.

  If anything could save Mancreu, it would be that scandal at fever pitch, delivered with perfect visuals through the news organisations and the Internet, scouring the world. Leaving the island unburned would seem a meagre enough first act of contrition.

  The stunned men were extras, there to absorb the boy’s accusations. The real antagonists in his story must be seconds away, a fire team who would be armed and very frightened, riding the fear with long practice and established orders, and the boy would provoke them, he would die, and it would begin. The Sergeant couldn’t think of any way to deal with that, couldn’t see a path which would get them both out alive, let alone uncaptured.

  He felt footsteps in the decking, the vibration of booted feet.

  His first instinct was to give himself up, explain that the boy was no actual threat – or, not on a physical level – and let the whole thing crash down. He might be able to salvage something from it. The surrender of Tigerman on live TV – by now, he had no doubt, this was on every station – ought to be worth some good ratings, and his notoriety might protect them both.

  But they would not hear him. Keyed up and afraid, in the blinding rain – even assuming that they didn’t shoot him down – they would not credit his assurances regarding the remote. And why should they? Out there somewhere a Fleet ship was taking on water, and there had been columns of fire in the night, and now Tigerman was on their ship, and the boy with him, and the whole operation was fucked up at best.

  Lester Ferris could not prevent the fight. But he could draw fire.

  So when the men barrelled past him towards the bright lights of the foredeck, he waited, then stepped into the middle of them and did all he could to take them down. He fired the taser again, then stamped and used his fists. He dropped two of them and then the remainder swamped him and they fell forward in a seething pile onto the deck, in the midst of the lights.

  He felt a fist rebound off his armour and heard a shriek. He drove his forehead up into a man’s face, rolled away as one of them finally started shooting, threw a gas grenade back the way he’d come. It was useless in this wind but they had no way of knowing what it was. They scattered, and he got to his feet and charged. He lashed out with the sharkpunch and it went wide, struck metal and the cartridge went off, sending shot zinging everywhere. A piece of it pinged into his shoulder and lodged in the meat and he yelled. He saw a man go down clutching at his leg. Then the aluminium tube went spinning away, and he walked into a succession of sharp blows like a drum tattoo, powpowpowpowpowpow, that went on for ever against his sides. Someone was hitting him, and doing it right. He dropped to slip a scything punch and weaved away, breath rasping, making space.

  His opponent skipped after him, whip-lean and fast, and he realised it was a woman with a fine, peaceful face and short brown hair. He tried to circle and her knee moved, faster than he would have imagined possible, shot like a piston into his liver. She snapped away, off-axis, guard up to deflect his counter. She moved with the ship, her back upright and supple as the deck shifted. Naval training, and a lot of it.

  One counter. A single punch in the time she took to land five. She’s better than me. She’s so much better.

  Away towards the front of the ship the boy was playing to the crowd. He was good at it. He kept his face well lit, his body filled with hope, tension and need. Give me back my mother. She is nothing to you. She is my life. Why would you take her? Will you sell her? She is very sick. Sell her to me! I will give you everything. Or take me instead! I am young, I can work, she is sick. Please. Why would you do this thing? Please, please, please.

  Give me ba
ck my mother.

  The Sergeant felt more blows on his body, his legs. The peaceful woman was trying to numb the muscles in his thighs. Already the left one was agony. It would freeze soon, but if she hit the sweet spot he would just fold, and that would be that.

  He was old and clumsy. He just didn’t have the training for this. She was far, far beyond him. He wanted to tell her so, to give due respect to her skill and to buy her a drink. In another place, he would have asked her to teach him, just whatever she would for however long they had. But he was here and now, and the boy needed him, and skill was never the end of it. You could always shoot somebody who outdrew you. You just had to be ready to get shot. And he could see it in her, the faintest hint of frustration. He was armoured, yes, but even so he should have gone down by now. No one could soak this up for ever. Why wouldn’t he go down? He wanted to tell her to take it easy, just wait, she was doing fine.

  Instead he put his hands up like a good boxer, then when she came in he shunted forward stupidly, rode out the punches. When he lunged on his good leg, she was just a little too close. Fumbling, he seized her body beneath her arms, lifted. She was slight. He felt her tense.

  You silly sod, he thought, vaguely, if I was really your enemy you’d be up the creek now.

  She knew it, too, hammered at him violently, elbows and fists coming down onto his neck and back, but nothing like hard enough, not when a sergeant has put his mind to something. He looked for something to smash her against.

  She reared up.

  Just as the deck did, too.

  She got the strike exactly right, deep into the muscle of one arm.

  A second wave, out of rhythm with the rest of the sea, smashed into the ship and threw her high in the air towards the prow. She twisted, landed hard and rolled, came to her feet in the midst of the boy’s perfect tableau, arms spreading in an arc like a seabird as she caught her balance.

  As she collided with the one thing between her and the abyss.

  And that one thing – small and lighter even than she, still holding the camera remote – staggered backwards and over the edge, and was snatched away by the wind.

  The moment lasted for ever, and after it, nothing else mattered; not when Lester Ferris fell down on his knees and tore the Tiger mask from his face and screamed and screamed; not when they surrounded him and took him into some approximation of custody, marvelling and bewildered at who he was, and what was he doing here, and was this an operation they had somehow not been briefed on? Not even when they realised sickly that the camera had never stopped running, that the boy’s extinguishing and the Sergeant’s revelation had been beamed across the water to the shore and streamed live to a YouTube channel and gone out around the world, the most unrecoverable of security breaches contrived on the boy’s own terms, delivering the best possible iteration of the scenario he had set out to achieve.

  None of it mattered, and the Sergeant doubted it ever would again, because what mattered was down there in the threshing sea, and gone for ever.

  By morning the storm had blown itself out.

  The Sergeant was transferred to the custody of Jed Kershaw, who said ‘Fuck, Lester’ a very great deal. They emptied one of the storage rooms in the old prison and it became his cell. There was still a coffee machine in the corner, but it had no plug.

  Out in the Bay of the Cupped Hands, a line of orange lobster buoys marked the shortest route to the land, and each of them sported a small, kludged-together signal relay by which the Tigerfall signal – it already had a name – had been transmitted to the boy’s computers and onwards to the wider web. The Internet took this technical knowledge as a sign that the boy had belonged to its citizenry, and caught fire.

  People came to visit. There were things they needed to say. Marie, who had been Shola’s girl and his someday-maybe wife, came and said thank you, because at least he had tried to find out something and no one else had. The Sergeant said, ‘Jack did,’ and then felt like a fool. She nodded without saying anything.

  Beneseffe came and brought fruit.

  Kathy Hasp came and talked about what was happening in the world. There was a lot of it, and mostly his fault. But there wasn’t going to be a war with China, so that was good.

  Kershaw came back with a man from the embassy in Sana’a and they said a lot of formal things about lawyers. The Sergeant didn’t listen. Kershaw said ‘Fuck, Lester’ again.

  Dirac came and said nothing at all. When he left, he kissed the Sergeant lightly on the crown, and his cheeks were wet.

  ‘You are kind of the biggest asshole in the world,’ Pechorin suggested.

  ‘Not even close.’

  ‘That’s true.’ Silence. ‘You did kick the shit out of me. And you exploded my nose.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I get over it. You ever find out who killed your barman friend?’

  ‘The Fleet.’

  ‘Sure. Everything is the Fleet. But you know who?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Was Belgians.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Fuck do I know why. Maybe politics. Maybe just being Belgian. Is closure. You feel better now?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  The Sergeant slept and dreamed fitfully about Madame Duclos, sitting alone in her little house without her dog. He pestered the nursing staff to let her know what had happened, but they were evasive. They seemed to believe it must be some sort of code. Finally Arno’s man, Guillaume, came and told him she had been evacuated during the rioting and the house was gone. He agreed that the Sergeant could write her a letter, so long as he, Guillaume, could read and photograph it before it was sealed.

  ‘It won’t be very interesting,’ the Sergeant said.

  Guillaume politely disagreed.

  Arno visited him then, and asked him a series of quiet questions which the Sergeant answered quite frankly. Arno shook his head.

  ‘I should have seen this,’ he said.

  ‘You saw me instead,’ Lester told him.

  Arno sighed and nodded.

  The story all came out. Inoue’s report was headline news. The island did not burn. Not that day, and not that week.

  On the fourth day of the hiatus, a Discharge Cloud wreathed the island in mist, and when it was gone the plants were all in flower.

  A week later the boy’s YouTube channel was hacked, and a new slogan was added:

  Tigerman Make Famous Victory, Full Of Win.

  Because they had never recovered the body, a few people took this as a sign that the boy was alive somewhere.

  The Sergeant was not one of them.

  Some time later, Mancreu was reprieved.

  The ships of the Black Fleet vanished. Even the names turned out never to have been registered in the places they were thought to have come from.

  White Raoul never spoke to the Sergeant again. The Witch came once to see him in his hospital bed. She tried hard to make him smile, but her face was lined and fraught, and he thought he had exceeded the capacity of her compassion.

  He was shipped home.

  He had expected Africa to be cold and official in her anger. He had pictured her as an aloof sort of person, tight lips and steel-grey hair. Instead she shouted, her voice cracking and then descending into a hiss, as if he were an unfaithful husband caught in the sack with a girl from the post office.

  ‘You bastard!’ she began. ‘You stupid bastard! I will ruin you! I will take everything you have, and I will cover it in shit.’

  Beside her sat a man in a suit who had identified himself as being from the Press Office. He didn’t say whose, as if there was only one, and perhaps there was. He seemed to be waiting for his moment, and to be in no doubt that it would come.

  Africa was still talking. ‘You’re a traitor! You’re an actual traitor to the Crown! I’d send you to a court martial but they can’t have you shot any more and I can! I can make you go away for ever. I’ll send you to Morocco and they can cut your tiny fucking balls
off in a hole somewhere and make you crawl on your hands and knees across broken glass.’ She ran down suddenly, because she couldn’t actually hit him and that was almost the only thing she had left. ‘Were you at least sleeping with him?’ she demanded. ‘Was that what this was about?’

  ‘I wanted him to be my son,’ Lester said.

  Africa laughed sharply and turned away. He thought she might be hiding tears, because anyone so angry must surely have them ready. ‘Well, no one will believe that, at least,’ she said. ‘You’re going to prison and everyone will think you’re a pervert.’

  The man from the Press Office cleared his throat. ‘They will believe it,’ he said.

  She stared at him.

  ‘They will believe it,’ the man clarified. ‘They already do. And we will encourage that belief. This may be a pig but right now it’s got lipstick on it and it’s our pig. We will not be pointing out that it stinks. Nor that it is something of a surprise to us to find that we own a pig. We will march it in triumph through the streets of the town, we will detail the painstaking care required to raise such an exemplary animal, and if we’re very lucky by the time it goes back to the wallow everyone will think this was something glorious we did on purpose.’

  ‘What do you mean, “march it through town”? Which town?’

  The mild man frowned. ‘Any fucking town which will take us, Laura, and believe me, we are already fortunate that there is more than one. But specifically: tomorrow at three p.m. at the Royal Society in Carlton House Terrace. The Prime Minister will be attending a talk by a French lepidopterist to emphasise his devotion to science, and he will by complete chance encounter Lester Ferris, sergeant, newly retired and the man of the hour, who has a lifelong fondness for the insects of the British hedgerow. There will be a brief and quite spontaneous greeting, a handshake, and everyone will go home feeling good about themselves. Do I make myself clear, Lester, or do I need to get someone in your chain of command in here with my hand up their arse to puppet some orders?’

  ‘No,’ Lester said.

  ‘And you,’ the man told Africa, ‘don’t piss about. I’m saving your job and the honour of your service, insofar as it still has any in the eyes of the general public at this time. Do not even think about screwing this up or I will fall upon you with great fury and the weight of mountains. I don’t see that I can make myself any clearer.’