Hellblazer 1 - War Lord (10 page)

He turned and leered at the woman walking along in the chador with only her eyes visible. She stopped stock-still and crossed her hands over her chest.

“Hey, baby!” Spoink called out. “What’s the haps? Let’s party!” He started toward her. “Take off the veil and kiss me, girl! This is the time for love to reign! Love, reign over me! Wait!”

“Christ on a bike!” Constantine swore.

The woman in the chador turned and ran.

“Waitaminnut, girlfriend!” Spoink shouted, starting after her.

“Right, I’m scarperin’,” Constantine muttered. He turned to go the opposite way, thinking he had five hundred British pounds and a passport sewed into the lining of his coat, he could hire a boat, take it to along the coast of the Caspian to Azerbaijan, make his way to the Russian Caucasus, badger the British consul for a ticket to London . . .

He turned to see the woman screaming as she churned up the sand toward the road along the beach, yelling for help, with Spoink in pursuit.

This thing is spinning out of control,
Constantine thought as he hurried to the north along the beach.
Whoever is behind it is desperate, flailing about . . .

You’re right, John,
said a familiar voice from the surf.

Constantine thought,
I could ignore that voice, I could just keep heading north . . .

No,
the voice responded,
you can’t leave me when I need you, John. I was there for you. And for a while, drunken sot though you might’ve been, you were the closest thing I had to a da of me own . . .

Constantine sighed and turned to look toward the source of the voice that only he could hear: Mercury, rising from the surf almost—not quite—like Venus on the half shell. She was taking shape just beyond the lapping fringe of waves striking the beach, a wave spiraling up, spinning into its shape like a form on a lathe.

It was a slim young woman made out of sea spray, with sea foam for her hair. He hadn’t seen her since she’d been a child, and this version was translucent, made of green water, but he recognized her anyway. It was Mercury, Marj’s daughter, a girl he’d treated as a kind of stepdaughter while his relationship with Marj had continued. But he’d wandered off on a personal quest, and when he’d looked for Marj again he found she’d run off with a “Traveler,” or so he’d heard, a British Gypsy, taking Mercury with her . . .

Being John Constantine, he wasn’t particularly surprised to see an apparition of Mercury arising from the surf. He knew her to be an especially gifted psychic, and he’d been expecting some sort of contact from her. “How you doing, kid? How’s your mum?”

“Mum’s drinking too much, up in Scotland. I’ve gone my own way, John. I sensed something happening in the Middle East, and Zed couldn’t go, and I couldn’t find you, and I kept getting dreams that wouldn’t go away—”

“I know how that is. They just won’t leave you alone.”

“—so I went out to Jerusalem, and some right bastards took me prisoner, hostage like, and I read their minds and it turned out they were hypnotized or something, and now I’m fairly starving in a basement somewhere off the coast of North Africa, a place called Carthaga I think . . .”

“Any notion where in Carthaga, luv?”

“No. I can’t sustain this much longer. You’ve got to let this Spoink person go with you. For some reason they want him along.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“I’m not sure, John, except that they’re on ‘the right side of the ledger.’ I . . .”
The figure of rippling water, constantly renewed from below, turned and looked to the right, as if at something out of view.
“I’ve got to go.”

“Don’t pull a Princess Leia on me, luv—stick around and clue me in. Give me an alternative! I can’t go anywhere with that plonker!”

“Got to show some faith, John! Get him out to sea! There’ll be someone to help you toward Russia . . . Help me, John. I don’t mind dying, but dying like
this
—and knowing that a world war is going to start . . .”

“You wot? World war? Can you be more—”

But he broke off as the misty image collapsed into the surf. She was gone, and so was the contact. He cast his psychic field out like a net into the sea, but all he picked up was a thought from a fish thinking a smaller fish looked tasty.

Constantine turned to look after Spoink and saw an old truck with a yellow lightbar pulling up along the road edging the beach. Men were getting out, starting toward Spoink, who was still grabbing his crotch and yelling after the terrified woman in the chador.

“Oh, fuck me!” Constantine burst out. “The Morals Police.”

5

WATCHED AND WATCHED BY CROOKED EYES

Carthaga, off the coast of North Africa

“T
his here little country’s just big enough to have a war in,” said General Coggins into the headset with a chuckle, as he scanned the morning horizon from the copilot’s seat of the gunship. He was a lean Texan with a pot belly and a drooping lower lip; he had those down-slanted eyes one saw amongst denizens of the Southwest who looked vaguely Asian but more likely had a few drops of Native American blood. He adjusted his binoculars but saw no aircraft out ahead at all, which was good. He didn’t want to run into any Carthaga patrols; Burlington would have to shoot them down. That would spoil the illusion.

The gunship shuddered over the red-tiled rooftops of Poeni, the capital city—the only important city, in truth—on the Mediterranean island of Carthaga, fifty-three miles northeast of Tunis. It was a Blackhawk helicopter, quietly misappropriated by General Coggins, repainted in a secret hangar in the gray and yellow of the Carthaga air force. To complete the camouflage, they were all wearing the cheap dun uniforms of the Carthaga military: Coggins, Alfonse Trevino, Captain Courtney Simpson—the pilot—and General Coggins’s bodyguard and persuader, Burlington, on the 16 mm gun.

They quickly left Poeni behind, heading toward the island’s eastern shore, flying over rolling countryside: dusty beet fields, olive orchards. “Did our man in the Carthaga Aerial Force set up the diversion?” Trevino asked.

The thunder of the chopper made it necessary for them to speak through the headsets, though they were all sitting close by one another. Trevino clutched at the straps holding him in place with one hand, and clutched his stomach with the other when the chopper gave a lurch.

“Sure as hell did,” Coggins said. “We shouldn’t get any hassle from the locals on this here little outing at all.”

The pilot, a tall, blue-eyed fiftyish man with sandy hair, set the autopilot, took off his headset, and leaned over to the American army general. “Best not to discuss such things over the headset, sir. This frequency’s supposed to be restricted to the chopper, but there’s no telling for sure. Funny things happen and transmissions get picked up . . .” He shifted back into position with a grimace—he was almost too big to comfortably fit into the cockpit, having to slump to pull it off.

“That’s an affirmative, there, Courtney,” said the general. The Servants of Transfiguration were fanatics about secrecy and damned good at it. The SOT was only a rumor to the intelligence services—even the Mossad. Of course, the organization included certain CIA agents, but they would never let their ostensible employers know about their true allegiance. And neither the CIA nor the U.S. military had any idea that Coggins was here in Carthaga, nor what he was here for.

Coggins signaled the others to be careful of what they said on the headset. They all nodded except for Burlington. White-blond, florid-faced, and gray-eyed, usually silent anyway, Burlington was absorbed in checking the load on the heavy machine gun, smiling softly to himself. Strapped into the open side door, Burlington was too broad-shouldered to sit anywhere else—and he loved the big gun.

“There it is!” Simpson said, switching off autopilot and nodding at the camp of the Sudanese army battalion at the crossroads below. Date palms lined the roads up to the crossroads. There were two smaller helicopters secured to the ground just outside the camp, Coggins noted, with men loading supplies into them. He switched off his headset and relied on shouting. “Looks like they’re about to pull out!”

Coggins nodded, switching off his own headset. “The dumb bastards think they’re done on this island!”

Trevino was already muttering the invocations, sprinkling the sacred blood onto the small glass ball he held in his right hand. In the glass sphere, no bigger than an apple, was a yellow, swirling mist. He spoke the final words, pressed the glass ball to his heart and his groin, then hurled it out the open door, past the gun, so that it fell into the center of the crossroads below, shattering. The skull they’d buried in the crossroads a fortnight before—a particular skull, not just any skull—responded to the proximity of the bone dust quickened to the invocation, and awaited those emanations that would complete the fatal circuit.

Below, about five hundred North African Arabs in the uniform of the Sudanese army looked up from packing their gear into the trucks the UN had provided for their pull-out from the island. They looked at one another, wondering what the gunship was about. Just making a show, urging them to leave the country? Pointless! Weren’t they leaving, after all? They had an agreement with the government of the tiny nation that they were no longer going to support the insurgency of the island’s Arab minority, they were going to pull out so the UN could negotiate a settlement . . .

“Now!” Trevino shouted.

Burlington looked over his shoulder at Coggins. He took orders only from Coggins—so definitively was this so, he would have ignored the President of the United States if he’d asked him to pass the salt.

“Go for it!” Coggins shouted.

Burlington grinned, his eyes glistening as he opened fire with the chassis-mounted machine gun, spraying the soldiers below with hundreds of 16 mm rounds in a few seconds. Men were shattered, torn to pieces, flung spinning about. Some of them ran for their weapons, but few made it.

“ATS missiles!” Coggins shouted.

Licking his lips like a man about to penetrate a virgin, Simpson tilted the gunship toward the mass of fleeing men below and fired the missiles. One of them struck a truck, igniting its gas tank, making a glorious red fireball that lit reflections in Simpson’s eyes as he fired the second set of missiles.

“Two missiles away!”

“Send the other two into those choppers on the ground there!” Coggins ordered.

“Yes sir!” Simpson swung the chopper around, as bullets whined from its armored underside, and flew over to hover where he could get an angle down at the choppers. He was just ninety yards above the targets—impossible to miss. Men were still leaping from the helicopters, sprinting away from them in terror, when the missiles launched from either side of the gunship. Both targets were struck, churned into flaming shrapnel that ripped through the camp and whirled human bodies through the air.

Burlington had been firing continuously—he was already on his second belt of ammo, mopping up a line of screaming, running men like an exterminator spraying ants; wherever he struck, the ants fell instantly dead.

“Die, you stupid little crawling bastards!” he shouted.

Trevino glanced at Burlington in irritation. Looking over his shoulder, Coggins didn’t miss the look. He knew that to Trevino this was a Holy Mission. The men dying on the ground were sacrifices to a higher purpose. To Burlington and Simpson, it was just another chance to kill for the general.

It was a Holy Mission to Coggins, too, of course. He knew what was coming. The sword, the fire, the vengeful angels of the Lord. He was just one instrument, one part of the great plan that would call the Transfiguration down upon the world.

Still, he had to keep them all working together until the end—until the time when God would sort them out.

“That’s enough, Burlington!” he shouted. “Got to leave enough alive to take the story back to their people! Courtney—take us out of here!”

“Saw someone with a home video camera point it up at us!” Simpson said.

“Good!” said Coggins. “Very good! They’ll take us for those American mercenaries hired by President Mofi!”

The Blackhawk turned and headed back to the cargo ship the SOT had waiting for them ten miles offshore. Coggins was eager to get there so he could monitor the news and do what he could to encourage the war in Carthaga along. All he’d done today was strike the spark. The brushfire must be fanned to life. From little brushfires great burnings would come.

And he was confident of it; he could feel the thrum of the War Lord in the air. The great conflagration was coming.

~

Watching the gunship depart, coughing from the smoke of burning trucks and helicopters, smelling cooked human flesh, Major Abbide felt a strange energy rising in him. Another time he might’ve felt raped, disillusioned, despairing over what had happened to his battalion.

But today, he felt something else—and it was as if the feeling were rising from the earth at his feet, soaking itself into him. He trembled with it, felt drugged with it, energized by it, and before his mind’s eye floated visions of carnage: the destruction of his enemies. He would take his men and he would punish the sons of whores who ran this country. He would incite the Arab majority on Carthaga to rise up and massacre the Carthagan blacks—who had power, after all, only because President Mofi’s family connections gave him control of the offshore oil rigs. Mofi, in his mad arrogance, had surely sent these mercenaries in their gunship to betray the agreement, to murder Abbide’s men before they left the island, to show he had no respect for the Sudan.

Abbide heard the other survivors roaring in fury, turned to see them shaking their fists at the now distant gunship, all of them burning with the same martial hatred, a hunger for revenge that was like a fever, a hot singing in their nerves—a fury more powerful than anything they’d ever felt before. It seemed to have a life of its own.

“We will give them war!” Major Abbide shouted. “And with war they will pay the price for what they have done! We will kill them all!”