Sullivan's Revenge by John Cutter

Author:John Cutter [Cutter, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lume Books
Published: 2015-06-07T23:00:00+00:00

8 - A Devil Among Us

“What’s wrong with the Blue Man?” Sullivan asked softly.

“He’s a junkie,” Morgan said, “and I think he mixes cocaine in with it. It’s makin’ him worse and worse — more paranoid all the time. But don’t quote me on that. Anyway, sometimes we don’t see him for a week at a time, and Captain Bronnard gives the orders. Bronnard ain’t bad — at least you know what he’s going to do. This damn test is a waste of time. Anybody could see you’re…Shit, here comes Bronnard.”

It was noon. They were standing at the base of a steep hill. The hill was warted with boulders and steaming with boiling hot springs. A goat path ziggzagged up the slope through moraines of gravel and between boulders to the crown of the hill, at the foot of Mount Chemwa. It was hot, that autumn noon; there was a smell of sulfur in the air, which combined with the glare of sunlight off naked boulders to give the place a hellish aspect.

Bronnard was a gangly American without a nose — his nose had been shot away in some engagement somewhere. He kept himself pig-shaved and immaculately uniformed, and now he wore mirror sunglasses. He was coming down the hill with an Arab at his side. The Arab, a trainee, wore fatigues, looked like he’d have preferred a burnoose, and carried an AK47. He glared at Sullivan with unadulterated hatred, and Sullivan guessed that the Arab he’d killed in that morning’s test had been this one’s friend — or lover.

Bronnard pointed at a backpack lying in the shadow of a boulder. “It’s two miles to the top of that hill,” he said, “if you follow that path. It zigs all over the damn hill. It’s hot and it’s steep. That pack weighs one hundred pounds. You got to get it up to the top — and there’s gonna be some men try to stop you. Now, Birdwell says you’re a top man on hand-to-hand. So if what he says is true, you should get through — these men aren’t specialists that way.”

But looking at the Arab, Sullivan suspected that the deck was once more stacked against him.

The guy had friends here, and the guy wanted to kill him.

Sullivan smiled grimly. “I’m ready for it,” he said.

He went to the pack, and grunting slightly, slung it over his shoulders, closed the belt across his waist. This time he was not given a bayonet.

“Double-time it!” Bronnard shouted. “Go!”

Breathing deeply, Sullivan chugged up the hillside. He willed himself into the semitrance state that comes with regular rhythmic exercise; you become a machine, you recognize the pain of the heavy exertion only as a signal for the computer that runs the body, you ignore it and simply keep functioning, breathing regularly, fixing the eyes hypnotically on some goal ahead — a boulder, a bush, the shadow of a man…

The shadow of a man?

The man shadow stretched beyond a boulder’s shadow where the path hooked back — someone hiding behind the boulder, twenty feet ahead.

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