A Time to Die - Smith Wilbur - Страница 141

"Sean!" she blurted when she saw him. She pulled against the hands of the two bodyguards who held her, trying to reach him.

They jerked her back and threw her against the side wall of the dugout.

"Tell your baboons to knock that off," Sean snarled. When they glowered at him, China restrained them with a sharp order.

"]?ut that woman in the chair!"

They forced her into the solid mahogany seat and at another order from China used the manacles to chain her wrists securely to the heavy arms of the chair.

"I have something of yours, Colonel, and you have something of mine. Shall we workout a deal?" General China suggested.

text us go, Sean aid promptly. "At the border, I'll hand over the cassettes." China shook his head regretfully.

"Not acceptable. Here is my counteroffer. You lead the attack on the Hind laager. When it is completed successfully, Alphonso will escort you to the border."

Sean raised the booby-trapped case head high, and China smiled. In retaliation he drew the trench knife from its sheath on his belt. It was ivory-handled with a five-inch blade.

Still smiling, he lifted a single hair from Claudia's scalp and with a sharp jerk pulled it out. He held it up between thumb and forefinger and touched the hair with the blade. Half of the dark strand fell away and floated down to the earthen floor of the dugout. mat is how sharp it is," China said softly.

"If you kill her you haven't got anything to bargain with."

Sean's voice was harsh with strain, and he was sweating.

"I have this to bargain with," China replied. He nodded to his j guards at the doorway.

They led in someone Sean had never seen before, an apparition with an ancient skull-like head. The hair had fallen out in tufts, A leaving shiny black patches on the scalp. The lips had shrunk and peeled back to expose teeth that were too large and white for that ruined head.

At a word from China the guards stripped away the single filthy ragged shift that covered the body, leaving it entirely naked, and for the first time Sean realized that it was a woman.

Her body reminded him of the horror pictures he had seen of the survivors of Dachau and Belsen. She was a skeleton covered with baggy skin, her empty dugs dangled over the rack of her ribs, her stomach was drawn in so her pelvic girdle was an empty bony basin. Her arms and legs were fleshless, the bony elbows and knees grotesquely enlarged.

Sean and Claudia stared at her with horror, unable to speak with the shock of it.

"Look at the lesions on her abdomen," China invited in a pleasant voice. Numbly they obeyed.

They were blind boils, hard and shiny as ripe black grapes beneath the skin, covering her lower belly and disappearing into the wiry mop of pubic hair.

While their attention was on this pathetic figure, China reached down quickly with the knife and touched the back of Claudia's hand with the point of the blade. Claudia gasped and tried to jerk her hand away, but it came up short against the manacle chain and she stared down as a thin snake of bright blood trickled down her forefinger and dripped onto the floor.

"What did you do that for, you snot-gobbling bastard?" Sean demanded.

China smiled. "It's only a scratch."

Slowly he reached out toward the naked skeletal figure of the black woman, pointing with the knife at her shrunken belly.

"The extreme emaciation and those characteristic lesions are diagnostic," he explained. "The woman is suffering from what we in Africa call the "slim sickness.""

"AIDS," Claudia whispered, and her voice was filled with the dread that single word conjured up.

Despite himself, Sean took a step back from the dreadful figure before him.

"Yes, Miss Monterro," China agreed. "AIDS in its terminal stage."

He touched one of the marble-hard chancres on the woman's belly with the point of the blade, and she gave no reaction as it split open and a mixture of pus and dark tarry blood oozed from the wound and trickled down into the matted bush of her pubic hair.

"Blood," whispered China, and gently scooped it up onto the bright silver blade. "Warm, living blood, swarming with the virus."

He proffered the blade for Sean's inspection. Involuntarily Sean pulled back further as blood dripped from the point.

"Yes," China nodded. "Something that even the bravest have reason to fear, the most certain, the most lingering, the most loathsome death of all the ages."

With his free hand he took hold of Claudia's wrist. "Consider this other blood. The sweet bright blood of a vibrant, beautiful young woman." The scratch on the back of Claudia's hand was vivid, but the tiny flow of blood from it almost quenched it.

"Blood to blood," China whispered. "Sick blood to healthy blood."

He brought the filthy blade closer to Claudia's hand, and she stiffened in the chair, straining silently against the manacle, her the knife.

face white with horror as she stared at "Blood to blood," China repeated. "Shall we let them mingle?"

Sean found he could not speak. He shook his head dumbly, staring at the knife.