The light was dim and the air was full of smoke. There was a lot
of noise. Then people saw me and went quiet. I moved onward.
People stood where they were. Stock still. Then they turned to
face me. I pushed past them, one by one. Through the crowd.
Nobody moved out of my way. They bumped me with their
shoulders, left and right. I bunped back, in the silence. I stand
six feet five inches tall and I weigh two hundred thirty pounds. I
can hold my own in a shoving competition.
I made it through the lobby and moved into the bar. Same
thing happened. The noise died fast. People turned towards
me. Stared at me. I pushed and shoved and bumped my way
through the room. There was nothing to hear except tense
breathing and the scrape of feet on the floor and the soft thump
of shoulder on shoulder. I kept my eyes on the far wall. The
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young guy with the beard and the tan stepped out into my path.
He had a glass of beer in his hand. I kept going straight and he
leaned to his right and we collided and his glass slopped half its
contents on the linoleum tile.
‘You spilled my drink,’ he said.
I stopped. Looked down at the floor. Then I looked into his
eyes.
‘Lick it up,’ I said.
We stood face to face for a second. Then I moved on past
him. I felt an itch in my back. I knew he was staring at me. But
I wasn’t about to turn around. No way. Not unless I heard a
bottle shatter against a table behind me.
I didn’t hear a bottle. I made it all the way to the far
wall. Touched it like a swimmer at the end of a lap. Turned
around and started back. The return journey was no different.
The room was silent. I picked up the pace a little. Drove faster
through the crowd. Bumped harder. Momentum has its
advantages. By the time I was ten paces from the lobby people
were starting to move out of my way. They were backing off a
little.
I figured we had communicated effectively. So in the lobby I
started to deviate slightly from a purely straight path. Other
people returned the compliment. I made it back to the entrance
like any other civilized person in a crowded situation. I stopped
at the door. Turned around. Scanned the faces in the room,
slowly, one group at a time, one thousand, two thousand, three
thousand, four thousand. Then I turned my back on them all and
stepped out into the cold fresh air.
Summer wasn’t there.
I looked around and a second later saw her slip out of a
service entrance ten feet away. It had gotten her in behind the
bar. I figured she had been watching my back.
She looked at me.
‘Now you know,’ she said.
‘Know what?’
‘How the first black soldier felt. And the first woman.’
She showed me the way to the old airplane hangar where their
armoury was. We walked across twenty feet of swept concrete
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and went in through a personnel door set in the side. She hadn’t
been kidding about equipping an African dictatorship. There
were arc lights blazing high in the roof of the hangar and
they showed a small fleet of specialist vehicles and vast stacks
of every kind of man-portable weapon you could imagine. I
guessed David Brubaker had done a very effective lobbying job,
up at the Pentagon.
‘Over here,’ Summer said.
She led me to a wire pen. It was about fifteen feet square. It
had three walls and a roof made out of some kind of hurricane
fencing. Like a dog run. There was a wire door standing open
with an open padlock hung on the chain-link by its tongue.
Behind the door was a stand-up writing table. Behind the
writing table was a man in BDUs. He didn’t salute. Didn’t come
to attention. But he didn’t turn away, either. He just stood there
and looked at me neutrally, which was as close to proper
etiquette as Delta ever got.