Hellblazer 1 - War Lord (20 page)

The Mediterranean Sea, in the middle of nowhere

“Y
ou wanta hit on this?” the helicopter pilot asked, waving a large blunt under Constantine’s nose.

“No thanks, mate, I’m confused enough already.”

“Ha ha, confused enough . . . !” He paused to suck at the blunt and went on, spewing smoke with the words, giggling, “That’s funny!” The chopper wobbled in the air, seeming on the point of spiraling down into the sea. But somehow he kept it more or less on course.

Norm the pilot, a heavyset guy in uniform, with a pointy little beard, small jolly eyes, and stringy brown hair that couldn’t have pleased his CO, was piloting a big, double-rotored Chinook belonging to the U.S. Army, a transport chopper with its unmanned guns out front.

Constantine was sitting in the copilot’s seat. Spoink was in back strapped into a chair against the inner bulkhead next to Gatewood, Mercury slumped in a harness beside them. All Constantine could see outside the Chinook was ocean, far below them. Way, way below them.

“What’s the range on this thing?” he shouted over the engine noise.

Norm blinked at him. “ ‘What’s a raging ding,’ you say?”

“How far can you
go?
We’ve got to get to France!”

“Don’t have that kinda range! No clearance there anyway, not for this flight! I already gotta make up a big story about getting lost to get away with this shit! Just doing it for my cuz! I’m gonna have to fucking kick in the direction finder and say it went blooey! Hey, you’re not CIA are you? ’Cause if you are I’m gonna have to drop your ass in the Med from here!”

“What? No!” Constantine was taken aback by the sudden change in the conversation’s direction. “People are always asking me if I’m in with that lot. Wouldn’t go near them.”

“Fucking CIA’s everywhere—like the bull in the fucking china shop, dude! Those spooky-ass dicks want you to do shit for them without any accounting for it—you know, off the books—but they’ll turn your ass in if you’re into some shit on your own. Run a little weed into Baghdad for your Gs, and they want to blackmail you or bust you. After all I did for those fucks.”

“What’d you do for ’em, then?”

“Oh, brought in a bunch of ‘detainees’ from a secret base in fucking Kuwait, is all—they put ’em in a special wing at Abu Ghraib, same system as Gitmo. This wing, the ‘detainees’ got no designation, no official status, see, nobody knows they’re there. Red Cross don’t know. So the CIA’s assholes can interrogate ’em any way they want. I took a few dead ones out of there since then . . .”

Constantine glanced at Norm. He might’ve been talking about boosting stereos instead of smuggling hooded human beings for the CIA.

“But I do a lot of ‘extracurricular’ shit, of course; my cuz back there, he knew that. I owed him a favor. He got me some other backdoorsmen. Pays good. See, those guys wanta get out bad.”

“Backdoorsmen?”

“Deserters. They go out the back door, like. More of those than the Pentagon wants you to know. Too much freaky shit going on in Iraq—backdoorsmen can’t deal.” He turned in his seat to Gatewood, held out the blunt. “Hey cuz, you wanta hit this?” Gatewood shook his head and yawned. Spoink only glared. Norm turned back to Constantine. “What’s with that Haji guy? He an Ali Baba?”

“He’s not what he seems, mate. Nothing to worry about.”

But Constantine did worry about Spoink—if he still
was
Spoink. He had seemed reluctant to board the Chinook, hesitating halfway up the rope ladder. He hadn’t said a word since the yacht—and that was unnatural for Spoink. Constantine suspected that the Iranian terrorist who’d originally belonged to the body had returned to it and shoved Spoink out somehow. Or perhaps he was in there, too, but repressed.

Constantine wasn’t clear on what to do about it. If he assumed that a terrorist had taken over the body, he had to turn the guy in somewhere—didn’t he? But it went against Constantine’s nature to turn anyone in. Snitching was antithetical to him. And even though Spoink had said the guy was a terrorism big shot, Spoink might’ve misunderstood something. Maybe he was just a radical Muslim fundamentalist. That didn’t make him a terrorist. And if Constantine did turn him in somewhere, he risked Spoink’s spirit life. Could be a problem in the afterlife if you think you’re in a body all cozy, and then, bam, somebody puts you up against a wall and shoots you. Trauma makes ghosts.

Spoink wasn’t easy to like, but Constantine liked him anyway. And Spoink had come through for him. Ought to try to stand by him.

All Constantine could do right now though was keep an eye on the bearded git.
And hope I know what the bloody hell to do when the time comes . . .

Trouble with that plan was said bearded git might just kill him, first chance he got. Best not turn his back.

“Gotta let you guys out right here!” Norm shouted over the booming of the rotors.

Constantine leaned in his seat to look out the window of the chopper. “But—there’s nothing out there, mate! We’re in the middle of the bloody sea! You going to dump us in the ocean?”

“Look over that way! Down at five o’clock!”

“At five o’clock? Oh, right—twelve o’clock high and all that . . . looks like a tanker of some kind.”

“Of some kind is right, man. The sinking kind if you, like, kick a bulkhead or something. A real rust pot called
Medusa’s Revenge.
Greek guy named ‘Papa’ Papandreis is captain. That’s where you’re going next. Don’t sleep facedown on his ship or he’ll, like, sneak in and sodomize you.”

“Here! I’ll not sleep at all on the fucking ship. He expecting us is he?”

“Yeah, I radioed him before I picked you up. You got to pay him something to drop you on the coast of France. Get you there tomorrow I expect. I got a regular thing with him: I drop him deserters and money, pick up dope. He gets me the pretty good shit. Deserters pay him to move them across the Med.”

Fifteen minutes later, Constantine was dropping from the rope ladder to the deck of the creaking old supertanker. He moved to stand protectively by Mercury—Gatewood had stretched her out on the deck, between him and Spoink—and he handed Papa a bundle of cash that’d come from Norm.

“Includes our fare to France,” Constantine said, lying cheerfully. Norm couldn’t hear him over the racket of the chopper.

Papa was a potbellied man in a T-shirt and a pea jacket, a hand-rolled cigarette poking from his beard; its smoke made him squint. He scratched at his groin, then shrugged and stuck the money in his coat. He attached a plastic shopping bag full of pot and hashish to the ladder’s lowest rung and watched as Norm cranked it up into the hovering Chinook.

“See you on the avenue, Cuz!” Norm shouted, before piloting the chopper toward Iraq.

In another minute, Constantine and Gatewood, along with the bearded figure who’d once called himself Spoink, were standing over Mercury on the vast rusty deck, slightly dizzy with oil fumes, looking at the crew gathered to look them over and wondering if they’d get off this tanker alive.

Paris, France

“Oh my Lord,” Coggins said, “I feel strange . . .”

“What did you expect, sir?” Strucken asked. Although supposedly subordinate to him, Strucken always seemed condescending, Coggins noticed. He vaguely remembered Morris remarking on the same thing. “You have had an unsettling experience in that helicopter . . . There is always a time of adjustment, ja?”

The two men sat at a glass table on the gardened roof of an elegant apartment building owned, indirectly, by the SOT. Strucken sipped a pale German wine; Coggins nursed a beer. It was an overcast afternoon, with lowering clouds like muscles rippling under dinosaurian skin, and those dark, restless clouds made Coggins nervous. They were like the ones that the War Lord had come out of to fight the water giant that’d killed Burlington.

Coggins had seen many men die, but they’d died in a way that made sense. Until Burlington. He’d been killed by a thing that shouldn’t exist. And the War Lord—Coggins had never seen it that way before. He’d thought it was just a state of mind that people shared, the kind of archetypal symbol that Professor Peierson had talked about at Yale. He’d thought it was a shared symbol—though a powerful symbol that you could actually see sometimes—that would push people Into accelerating God’s agenda. But he had seen it interacting with the elemental and he knew it was a real, independent being, it had physical form in its own world, and it had come partway into their own.

And then Dyzigi had told him that Morris had gotten away from the British asshole, and it was okay to sink that yacht—only, Coggins doubted Morris had really escaped with his life. He hadn’t come back or been in contact, and after they’d sunk the yacht, Dyzigi had muttered, “If Morris didn’t make it, well—sacrifices are necessary, on many levels.”

“You’re sure their boat sank, sir?” Strucken asked now. “The smaller boat, I mean.”

“I . . . yeah. We strafed it. Anyway as we were leaving we saw a big damn tsunami wave bearing down on . . . on what was left of them.”

Why am I lying to Strucken?
he wondered.
I’ve got no confirmed kill on that mission.

Strucken nodded, but without conviction.

Coggins had been bothered when he’d taken out that first yacht and it turned out to be the wrong one. He’d thought he was indifferent to civilian casualties—hell, there’d been plenty of them on the bombing runs he’d directed in Kosovo and Afghanistan—but somehow when you do it yourself, personally, it was harder to look away. There would be billions of deaths, of course, after the War Lord was unleashed; that’s the way it was supposed to be.

Even so, he was surprised by how taking out those yachts had affected him. Then there was Burlington’s death . . .

Am I getting soft?

General Coggins looked at the sky and shuddered. “Burlington was a . . . well, maybe ‘good man’ ain’t the right term. He was a reliable man—he could get a job done. He was loyal. Qualities hard to find.”

“You let your pilot fly too close to the manifestation.” Strucken shrugged dismissively.

“Look, what the hell
was
that thing? The water giant . . . thing. Do you know? I mean, sure, I was told water elemental. Okay, there are nature spirits. But that thing was . . . if that was up against us, what
else
is? You know what I mean? Any other fucking giants I ought to know about?”

“You ask me? I am but an assistant.”

Coggins snorted, but said nothing more. He wanted to talk to Trevino. But he was sure about one thing—the way the world was now just couldn’t stand. The Muslims were reproducing like rabbits. The Chinese and Hindus were reproducing like rabbits getting fertility treatments. The sword of God would have to come down and soon and cut them all away, and the world would start over again. He couldn’t turn his back on this project just because it freaked him out a bit. Hell, he got used to cooking people with napalm in Vietnam.

He’d get used to the War Lord.

Coggins’s cellphone chimed. He flipped it open. “Coggins. Yeah. So The Blossom has been cut?” He exchanged a significant look with Strucken. “Right.” He closed the cellphone. “They’re close,” he told Strucken. “But there’s still prep to do: the seed heads, and you know, what we have to do at the second target. Getting the altar in place—. They want to coordinate everything.”

“Naturally,” Strucken said, nodding to himself. Just as if he understood exactly what would be entailed.

Who the fuck am I in bed with?
Coggins wondered. Morris had had his own doubts toward the end, Coggins knew. Could it be that Morris’s doubts had marked him for death? That the SOT had
let
things get out of hand so they could dispose of him, without any unrest in the ranks?

Had they used Coggins to get rid of Morris—so that Coggins would get the message himself?

Coggins gazed up at the lowering clouds and thought, for a moment, he saw a face in them. A brutish face, gigantic, glowering down at him, its eyes like holes in reality . . .

But only for a moment. Then it was gone.

“I think,” Coggins said, “I’m going to have a shot of bourbon in my beer.”

Off the coast of France, near Marseilles

Constantine didn’t want to sleep on the
Medusa’s Revenge.
They were within sight of the French coast, but Papa claimed it wasn’t safe to let them disembark until about an hour before first light. So Constantine had sat up into the night, watching over Mercury and keeping an eye on Spoink, who dozed on a bunk across from his own in the rank, mildewy little cabin they shared with Gatewood; and he kept an eye on the cabin’s door, too. Mostly for Gatewood and Mercury’s sake—the captain had been ogling Gatewood and the crew had been ogling Mercury.

“Ya’ll dope her, huh, chief?” the guy with the tattoos on his shaved head had asked, when they’d first moved Mercury into the cabin. He had an accent from the American south and his left eye, probably glass, stared off to left field no matter where his other eye looked. It had mostly looked at Mercury’s ass.

“No, I didn’t bloody dope her. She’s ill, is all. I’m taking her to a doctor.”

“ ’Cause you know, we get ’em sometimes, through here—women being, you know, shipped, to them sex factories over to Marseilles, and on to the Balkans. Asian chicks, ’specially Filipino broads thought they were going to get a cushy housekeeper job, and whuh-oh, lookie here, they get chained up to a bed in some dump. I mean, you know, whatever, I just want mine, chief. I mean I figure if she’s doped up and gonna get screwed anyway and since I’m the second mate on the ship I ought to get some goddamned pussy.”

“What’s your name, mate—or should I say second mate?”

“My name? Harl.”

“Right. Harl, if you touch that girl, if you come within ten feet of her, if you even turn either of those barmy eyes of yours her way, they’re gonna say, ‘Hullo, where’s Harl? is that ’im, a-bobbin’ in the wake back there? Someone pitch ’is useless arse overboard, did they? What’s for lunch, then?’ I doubt they’d go back for you. You understand me, Harl?”

“You threatening me, you Brit fag?”

“He might be, but he doesn’t have to,” Gatewood had said. “I’ll fucking kill you myself.” He’d reached into his waistband, behind, and pulled out a small .45 automatic pistol. Just to give it a little more juice, he added a lie: “That girl’s my goddamned sister.”