Caliphate (41 page)

"No surprise there," Bongo said. "But where did you pick up the language?"

"Mil attaché in Washington for a few years," Lee answered. "Masters at UC San Francisco before that. Fun times. The powers that be figured I'd be a good fit for this purpose, Lieutenant Colonel Bernard Matheson."

"Man, I am
so
going to push to clean out the infiltrators when I get home," Bongo said.

Ling's shoulders shrugged. "Push all you want. They don't all look like me or like this"—Ling's own finger pointed at her breast—"vessel. Besides, didn't it ever occur to you that you
want
a certain number of infiltrators, in case you need to send us a message you want us to believe? One of our problems is we
don't
have any of your people in our system, which means we have to be really unsubtle sometimes to get you people to pay attention. Unsubtle is not something my people are good at doing or being."

"Maybe so," Bongo conceded. "Whatever the case—"

He was interrupted by a steady
ding-ding-ding
and the announcement, "All passengers and crew, this is the captain. Lift off in ninety minutes. I say again, Flight Seven Nine Three, am-Munch to Slo, lift off in ninety minutes."

Uniquely, the janissaries' weapons were left behind, locked in their barracks room. The men were going on an all-expense-paid night to paradise and, as Hans had announced, "There's no need to upset the houris."

Preceded by the first sergeant, who announced the name of each soldier before Hans inspected, Hans walked the lines checking uniforms. There was little to object to, predictably, as the janissaries were so eager to get out from under Hans' heavy thumb. They were even more eager to get at the houris, so eager, in fact, that they'd taken extra care to look perfect.

Hans stopped in front of one man and accused, "You've been over- trimming your mustache, soldier."

The accused soldier answered, "Sorry, sir. It's that we've been in the field so much lately, dirty and sweaty so much, that my skin underneath was starting to get inflamed."

Hans pursed his lips and seemed to think about it. "Well," he said, at length, "I won't pull your pass and send you back until the thing grows back properly. But I will hold you to letting it grow back."

Breathing a sigh of relief, the janissary answered, "Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. I promise I will."

Now there's a fair officer
, thought Sig, the armorer, standing at the far end of the first rank.
And everyone was bitching about what a hard ass he was. I
told
them he was a good man.

The airship's charter called for it to proceed north for a bit under seven hundred and fifty miles to Slo, in the Caliphate's northern provinces, there to receive a mixed cargo of high grade lumber and blond, blue-eyed female slaves to stock the higher class brothels of

Cape Town and Jo'burg. Flight time, so the captain announced, would be approximately five and a half hours. Loading? Well, who could say about loading when picking up a cargo in a city of the Caliphate? If Allah wanted it to proceed swiftly, it would. If not, then not.

"Not that it makes a shit," muttered Lee with Ling's mouth, "what the flight time is, since we aren't going there."

The ship around them shuddered as mooring locks were undone. There came a rising, high-pitched whine as downward pointing, vertically mounted turbofans kicked in, raising the airship upwards on an even keel. Ascent under power was slow; the ship got about two thirds of its lift from the helium it contained.

Bongo checked the time. "Still a while to go." He reached into one of the bags dropped off by the airship's crew of slaves and withdrew a small earpiece which he mounted to one ear. "Hamilton, this is Bongo. Come in Hamilton."

Hamilton and Hans dug frantically in the deep shadows of the woods south of the 310 road to unearth the directional mines Hans had buried there before. There wasn't room for three to dig; Petra stood nervously watching.

"A little . . . fucking . . . close . . . to the fucking . . . road . . . isn't it?" Hamilton grunted.

"I needed . . . a sheltered place . . . where . . . Petra could see . . . the road . . . and . . . still be . . . protected . . . from the blast," Hans answered.

"All right . . . makes sense."

Hamilton's shovel scraped along something that didn't feel remotely like a mine. It was the protective cloth Hans had draped over the cache against the dirt and the weather. "I think . . . we're there," he announced.

In Hamilton's ear there was a beep, followed by, "Hamilton, this is Bongo. Come in Hamilton."

"Hamilton here, Bernie. We've just uncovered the mines. Fucking things look heavy. It's going to be a while."

"Right. We're just getting ready here."

Watching Lee apply makeup to Ling's face struck Bongo as both odd and unsettling. "What the fuck are you doing?"

"Getting ready to seduce a member of the crew, to take him out of play," Lee answered through Ling's mouth. "It will work a little better, you'll agree, if I look seductive."

"Did they give you a female makeup course for this mission?"

The Chinese laughed. "No." He laughed some more. "Dude, you haven't figured it out yet, have you?"

"Figured what out?"

"I'm gay. When I say 'seduce,' I mean
seduce
."

"Fuck."

"Only if necessary." The Chinese reached into Ling's small handbag and, smiling, produced a tube of lubricant. "But if necessary . . . "

Petra stood over Hans, her submachine gun held in both hands. Not knowing any way to help, she felt both useless and frustrated. She said as much.

"Sis, you don't have to help," Hans assured her, as he lay behind one of the cylindrical mines aiming it precisely at a point in the road. "These things have to be set just right. Even Hamilton—and he's used to weapons—doesn't know how to aim them. He's doing the most he can just by lugging them to the firing positions."

"If you say so," Petra said dubiously. "But I'd feel a lot better if I could help."

"Fair enough," Hans agreed. "So tell me again how it's going to happen."

"Okay," Petra agreed. "One: once they're all set up and wired together, with the detonators in the hole, I go to the hole and wait. If I get tired, I take one of the pills Bernie gave each of us. Two: after you tell me the assault on the castle and lab is underway, I wait some more until . . . Three: when the column comes from af-Fridhav I wait until the lead truck is right there"—her finger pointed at a boulder on the other side of the road—"and squeeze the first detonator. Four: even if that works, I press the second one anyway. I do it until the explosions begin. Five: I don't stick around, but crawl and then run toward an- Nessang. Six: there'll be a sedan waiting for me by the place John showed me. I get in back, lie on the floor, hold the bolt cutters to my chest, and cover myself with a blanket. Seven: you or John will come for me."

"Good girl! There's something else you can do, too."

"What's that?"

Hans handed her a reel of electrical field wire and said, "Run this back to your hole."

The city lights of an-Nurber, fewer and fainter now than they'd been a century prior, spread out below the ship to the port side. The crewman being blown by Lee in Ling's body barely noticed. Arching his back and groaning with the orgasm, he held the woman's head and pumped into her mouth like a bull.

You son of a bitch
, Ling's consciousness thought at Lee.
I'm a houri; I'm not a slut.

Quiet
, Lee answered.
This is for the mission.

My ass . . . and thank the ancestors you haven't given one of the crewman
that
yet . . .

Yet . . .

The crewman stopped pumping, then half stumbled back onto the narrow bed in Ling's cabin. "Whew," he gasped. "That was
great
!"

"Lie down," Lee said. "Relax. I'm not done with you yet."

Obediently—who knew what delights this trim exotic body might hold—the crewman did, closing his eyes as he stretched out on the cot. Lee, meanwhile, rifled through Ling's bag as if for a condom, muttering, "Now where did I put that?"

What Lee withdrew, however, was not a condom but a syringe, an autoinjector containing a
serious
muscle relaxer. Removing the cap and placing it on the upper part of the syringe to arm it, he struck the thing into the crewman's thigh. The crewman barely got a yelp out, and that a yelp not inconsistent with sex, before relaxing completely.

"One down," Lee said aloud.

Slut,
Ling thought.

Nothing wrong with mixing pleasure and business.

Deftly, Lee flipped the crewman over on his belly, then took a roll of high strength tape from the bag. With this he taped the crewman's hands together and behind him, taped the feet together, and then taped the mouth shut. Lastly, Lee ran the tape around the crewman's neck, then to the head of the bed.

"That should hold you."

Before leaving, Lee took the trouble to reapply Ling's smeared lipstick. She knocked on Bongo's door and, when it was opened, said, "Cockpit next."

Lee scratched at the cockpit door like a cat asking to be let in. Retief opened the door.

"May I help you, miss?"

"You may," Ling's sultry, breathy, desperate-sounding voice answered. "I haven't seen my master in two days. He'd kill me if I had sex with a
kaffir
. And the
kaffir
is too loyal, he'd report me if I tried. But I'm one of those with the kind of chip that makes me want to have it, to
need
to have it, every day. Won't one of you or . . . better still
all
of you, please, please help me?"

"Let the poor girl in, Retief," the unseen captain said. "We can surely help her in her hour of need."

God,
Retief thought,
what a shitty world when we do things like this to beautiful women. Hell, what a shitty world when things like this are done to anybody.

Bongo looked in on Ling's cabin to make sure the crewman was still alive. Force of habit and training had made Lee hook the needle of the autoinjector through the crewman's shirt.

One won't kill him,
the agent thought.
Probably. That was the only guard on this deck, too. Time to go down and check on the ship's own loading crew. Better said, time to go recruit.

The loading crew were colored slaves. As such, they didn't automatically rise and bow with deference when Bongo made his appearance in their cramped cabin. They seemed startled, though, when he spoke to them not with the pidgin such people usually learned, but with as clear a diction as any
baas
. That surprise was as nothing, though, beside what they felt when they noticed the silenced submachine gun in his hand and the pistol strapped to his hip.

"Gentlemen," Bongo began, "please sit and listen. I'd like to tell you a story about a man who died several hundred miles to the south of here, not quite two thousand and two hundred years ago.

"His name was Spartacus . . ."

Lee heard a mental laugh from Ling.
Okay, you're a slut. But it just occurred to me that if these Boers knew what the sex was of the mind controlling my body, they'd all try to crawl out of their own skins with disgust.

That's half the fun of it,
Lee sent back.
I wonder how is Matheson doing down below?