“She dealt the play.”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“Make up your mind, Dave. We don’t have much time.”
“If we had the AK—”
“We don’t.”
My throat was dry, my face small and tight in the wind. “Light it up.”
Inside my head, as though watching a movie, I saw a young United States Army second lieutenant talking into a radio, an Asian village and rice paddy in the background, tracer rounds streaking out of the hooches, flying like segments of yellow-and-red neon above the paddy.
“You’re sure?” Clete said.
I lifted a Molotov cocktail from the bag. The bottle felt cold and heavy in my hand. “Give me your Zippo.”
Clete ran his hand down my arm and pulled the bottle from me. “You won’t be able to live with yourself, Streak.”
“Watch,” I said. I took the bottle back.
But my bravado was soon upstaged. I heard a sound behind me and turned around. I did not know where Carroll LeBlanc had come from other than the darkness. But his sudden reappearance was not the issue. His expression was lunatical, inhuman, his eyes devoid of conscience or reason, his clothes slick with blood, one hand clenched on a dripping butcher knife. “I do’ed it, Robo. I mean I piled up those motherfuckers all over the place, with their guts in their laps, like Gideon. It actually gave me a hard-on. What’s happening, Purcel? You don’t look too good.”
Then he laughed until he was hardly able to breathe or stand, his mouth a round black hole, as though he had accidentally swallowed a spirit hidden inside the wind.
* * *
I CLIMBED THE
LADDER to the bridge with Clete behind me. I stopped while he flicked the Zippo and held the flame to the cotton pad on the bottom of the wine bottle. Then I tossed it through a side window on the bridge and watched it break on a hard surface and fill the bridge with light. I threw the remaining two bottles into the flames.
I took no pride in what I did. Nor did I want to see the images that danced before my eyes. I had replicated a scene from Dante’s Inferno. The flames looked liquid, the players made of wax, frozen in time and space as though carved out of the heat, the surprise in their faces like that of children. Was I filled with pity? Did I abhor the incubus in me that could set afire his fellow creatures? I cannot answer any of these questions. I wanted to be a million miles away.
“Get down!” Clete said.
“What?”
“Bell!” he said.
As fast as the bottles had exploded, the flames had shrunk into strips of fire that were rapidly dying for want of fuel. Oh, yes, the damage was there. I saw two burned men crawl from the hatch, and one man shivering with pain and shock, his teeth chattering, and Mark Shondell in a corner, his hair curled from the heat, his face misshapen and painted with blisters, part of his lip gone, probably bitten off. I saw Penelope in the background, on the deck, under a raincoat. Adonis was gone. But Bell was not.
He opened up with the AK-47, blowing out glass, whanging rounds all over the superstructure. Clete jerked me back down the ladder, firing blindly at Bell, his eyes wide with adrenalin, as though he were looking into an artic wind.
Bell stopped shooting and ducked below the bridge window, but I knew we were in trouble. He had the high ground and we didn’t. He also possessed the best infantry assault rifle in the world. And Mark Shondell, the brains behind Bell and his fellow troglodytes, was still alive. Curds of black smoke were rising from the stern, and the gallery was burning with such ferocity that the portholes on two adjacent compartments were filled with yellow flame that was as bright as a searchlight.
In the distance I could see the sailboat pitching in the waves, throwing ropes of foam over the deck. The white sails had been taken from the masts and replaced with black ones.
“Look what you did, Mr. Dave,” a voice said behind me.
It was Johnny. He had his arm around Father Julian. Carroll LeBlanc was staring at them with an idiotic grin.
“Shut up, kid,” Clete said.
“Black sails mean she’s dead,” Johnny said. “I can’t believe we’ve done this.”
He had said “we,” not “you.” But that was poor consolation. Clete was right. I would find no solace for my part in what we had done.
Know why war sucks? We usually kill the wrong people.