What was true then is true now...

In Which Sarge Must Make an Aside to Peru, Leaving Shanghai and His Beloved Cody

the 13th:

It has been some time,

Sometimes the cold in the mountains feels like a slap to the marrow of my bones, Cpl. I sit here under my poncho, the fire does its slow dance and the local men look at me like I might know something they don't, but they also know things I do not, and they hold them like talismans they will not give up save to protect the life of their firstborns. The night passes this way, strange sounds about us and occasionally a faraway shout. They are tracking us and don't care too much to hide it. Who they are isn't quite clear, and I hesitate to jump to conclusions. Especially when I remember that incident in Mali.

Medicine Man was here, I feel it. I see it in the strange deaths and arrangements of bones I sometimes come across in the remotest villages. The broken tables and shattered vials, the dogs who will not enter the villages but scavenge along the dissipating borders that separate these places from the nature they sprang from God knows how long ago. I am not here to find him. I am no match for him yet, for I know not how he plays this game. The French Separatists love him for his weapons and his cruelty, but he holds them in contempt for their simplistic political designs. Medicine Man, his aesthetics, his hubris – he insists on larger goals: his is the work of changing the human destiny.

Here I will discover something I believe. For I believe it was here he made the discovery that altered the course of his life. Here we see him twenty years ago, and then see nothing of him until he is in Australia, defeated for a moment by a crazy dog and his desperate companion. But we hear the whispers of his shadow crawling across the lonely places. We hear the myths told from outpost to outpost of a man and men who do terrible things. What was it of death he discovered here? What did it mean? There is a village where perhaps this answer might be discovered. At least enough to throw some light on the shadow, and to diminish its reach. I must go now, Panzito is here and tells me I must rest. Of the men, I trust him the most. His daughter is beautiful, at the convent school she leads the daily prayers and the day we left Panzito's village she ran to me and said in a delightful Spanish: "I will say my most beautiful prayer for you!" I leaned down to her and asked her if she remembered my stories about the dog, Cody. "Yes," she nodded her head seriously, "he is a good dog. The best dog."

"Pray for him," I said.

She nodded her head seriously, for I had given her a mission. Panzito laughed. "You and dogs!" he cried. "You are natural brothers!"

Now I must sleep, and hope somewhere I am missed. Somewhere I am prayed for.

Ranger - The Bear

Sarge,

I believed this channel had been compromised. Until last month, I feared the worst for Corporal. I received of all things a telephone message from him. From what I could understand, he was headed in the direction of Georgia. I was not certain what business he had there. I had begin to fear that the stranger he met on the train to Berlin was less than a chance meeting.

I am in Seattle. Close to home, though with the recent American election all hell has broken loose here. One team of operatives has left for Guantanamo Bay to retrieve a few special friends. Another small group is monitoring market changes. A large group of traders seem to be shorting an essential market, resetting it at will. Mercerier's fingerprints are all over it. My group has been hard at work with dive training and cold environment weather amphibious landings. The locks here seemed an ideal place to train. We hope to be able to assist you in the near future.

The Moscow Roll you recommended was brilliant. Reminds me of my grandmother's Farina rolls which I have never been able to successfully replicate. I am told she always left out a key ingredient in the recipe. I have enclosed the information our office here was able to retrieve on Fu Shan - it is sparse, but I have hope you will be able to make some use of it.

If nothing else, remember fondly my first day of training, with your soundless blade at my throat, and Calrissian emerging from the bushes with his words of wisdom for me - "knives never run out of ammunition."

leges barbarorum,

Ranger

March to the Sea

It is cold.

When I inhale, the mucus in my nose freezes, only to thaw again when I exhale, the vapor crystalizing on my beard.

The numbing cold invites me to rest while the gentle pain of inhalation reminds me of the consequences of breaking stride and resting.

The snow gently slopes to the frozen river, and I cross, ears piqued for the telltale sounds of the death that waits below my snowshoes. It is only thirty meters or so to the other side.

Half way across. I smirk as I remember, "To Build a Fire." It is not quite so cold as it was in that story, but it is cold.

Death is the natural result of life, and it gives me great pleasure to deny Death while placing myself just outside his cold grasp. One day, it will be over; there will be a mistake: an unheeded warning, an unheard silence, an unseen emptiness. I only hope to die quickly rather have the gnawing beast within slowly suck the flesh from my bones and leave me sunken eyed in a hospital bed gasping for air while tubes push fluids in and suck fluids out. No, rather the ice should collapse beneath my feet!

The mixture of bravado and stoicism keep my mind focused, and the river is now behind me. Two more hours of daylight. Three more hours before I reach the coast where I will rendezvous with Marshall, who will have our assignment. The isolation of Arctic Norway has been good. Twelve months at a listening post intercepting messages and sending coded messages to Ottawa. Now, someone else will take on this task. I am glad that our Philosopher Kings have seen fit for me to move on; happy that my old tracks have faded; rejoicing that Corporal will once again rise from the dead to strike Canada's enemies.

In Which Sarge Catches Up Corporal on the Action in Shanghai or "Quiet Days and Monkey Scream Nights"

Cpl.,

Thank you for the package of the 29th of last month. You were right, and it was used with great effect during an ambush on a river wharf this last week. Around me men bled life into the river which carried that sacrifice along its unceasing current without sense of time. I screamed into the night when the young Ya Hui fell to a frenzied knife and I made the killer taste the river water with his dying lips. Medicine Man was there, overseeing it all, of course. Directing it like some mad conductor trying to raise a symphony out of the death-sounds of an ambush gone wrong. Finally, I was one step ahead of him. I even got one shot off at him, knowing it would miss, but cracking his veneer of impenetrability just the same.

I screamed to him something I cannot remember. Something of death and Canada. He only smiled and directed a sniper's bullet which missed me by a hair as I wheeled behind three barrels which were soon shot into shards as I doubled back to destroy the shipment of "pearls" Medicine Man had so dearly wanted.

Han and Willoughby fought with aplomb, Han's matter of fact ways with a knife belie an expert and steady hand, and perhaps the one bit of comedy in the midst of the chaos was the odd vision of Willoughby behind an old English Maxim gun firing at Medicine Man's henchmen who attempted to flee on along a path near the river. I see Medicine Man's game though and know I must go to Fu Shan again.

I asked later Willoughby where he had found the Maxim and he laughed.

"These warehouses," he said, "are odd jumbles of history and patient investment."

I think it is more complicated than that, but whatever it was, it kept them from any ideas of doubling back. There were riots in the Yangpu District last night, the night was filled with burning things and the police, oddly, were content to let it play out. Perhaps they were bribed and I wonder what went hidden then, under the generic chants of undirected discontent that quite conveniently broke up just as two o'clock was struck? Cody was restless all night.

We are closer though, than we have been. The months of planning have led, as late, to quick spars that are like the wild punches of two careful boxers, who know now that they must fight all night. Han told me that Nwargo had sent a communique, he had found a dried hand, cut off and covered in a film of dirt along a garden path he is in the habit of walking as of late. Han then held up a sculpture that had been brought to him in the Putuo District by several boys as he made his way to a meet-up: it was of a withered hand.

There are more disappearances and I have heard from someone who knew once, the true measure of pain I felt that night in Fu Shan.

with warmest hopes that we again know each other by sight!

Sarge

Ranger - The Return

Corporal,

It has been too long.

I have been in London for quite some time. Menial work. The people at the Schengen Office are sometimes clueless, which is fine. I hear stories from old men about the "good times" at the height of the cold war when movies glorified our work and anecdotes about pulling concealed messages out of the carcasses of dead rats. Their stories about the local girls only hold my interest temporarily. But I prefer their stories about the hot war. If only the world could still open up for me like that.

I found myself in a toy store of all places the other day and saw a model of a Me 262 Schwalbe and thought of you.

Write when you can. I can only hope that one of us has accomplished something in these last few months.

- Ranger

In Which Sarge and Cody are Reunited and The Sea is Remembered, Filled with Screams as it Was...

Cpl.,

By now I imagine you have heard of our adventure in the "Country of the Blacks." Such history there, where once the Egyptians were afraid to adventure, where the war and peace of empire play like a tug of war over centuries. From this history we adapted our own program, graphically reminding at least one official of that lesson that tyranny is always visited on tyrants. It is a lesson that would be well-heeded by our neighbors to the south, but I digress.

My bullet wound heals, though I am often troubled by it and irritable. For days after deploying that horrible chemical scar to the decimated village I wandered, missing Cody. Medicine Man's trail had gone cold but on a satellite transmission I followed a hunch and made contact with our Asian Sector, it was Willoughby who responded.

"Yes," he said, "we might have something for you. I was hoping you weren't dead!"
We laughed.
"In Africa to be dead is to be too many things, it is a word like 'interesting,'" I responded. "What have you heard?"
"A man being called, well, in the dialect it makes sense, but, well," Willoughby hesitated, "you speak some Northern Wu don't you?"
"Enough in a pinch."
"Well, in a village in the Jinshan District of Shanghai, as a matter of fact, you'll know this," he said brightly, "on Fu Shan..."
I barely heard him as he continued, instead I remembered the burning cries of an overcrowded rowboat, the semi-automatic fire. Devenuelle's reputation made that night on the swells of that East China Sea. I remembered those screams little over a year ago too, when I heard Nwargo's yell of triumph as he stuck a knife deep into Devenuelle's neck, through arteries and veins that pumped the venomous blood of the man. His blood spilling onto the sand, falling all over his clothes, his face uncomprehending to the last. Strange that his death should be so silent. I remembered a woman who had died that night on the sea. Before Tallinn that was. I remembered the weeks of opium that followed, the heroin and the hookahs, waving the prostitutes away. It was you, wasn't it? Who dragged me out of that truck stop after I had cut the pimp up and left him dead outside the locked stall where I intended to fill myself with enough heroin to kill a mule? It was the one time Cpl., the one time the emptiness of my heart would not fill. The tide had gone out and never returned. How you knew where I was puzzles me to this day. I remember stealing three cars on my way...

I heard nothing of what Willoughby said after "Fu Shan."
"Copy, Willoughby," I said, "I think the satellite hit a sun spot, you want to repeat from 'Fu Shan,'" I stumbled over the word.
"Right Sarge, right, on Fu Shan animals and some children have disappeared. They're pestering the government about it, but it's being dismissed as runaways and perhaps a thieving ring, but it sounded odd based on your last few communiques and on a heads up we got from Ranger, so I sent Han Zhecun there, he's from Vancouver but his grandparents are from Da Jinshan. He said the villagers talked there of a 'Sugared Devil' or sometimes just 'Sugar Man,' who appears on their streets and buys excessively from their shops and sometimes talks to some of the children and presents them with gifts."

There was a pause.

"Han saw one of the kids who had a gift. It was a bone sculpture of a bird. Han thought it might be African, but he let the kid keep it. But he's been over there a few times for Ottawa, and he usually knows these things."

So it was Shanghai. I wasn't going there without the dog.

Of picking up Cody, I will have to relate some of that to you later. We are in Shanghai now, and the afternoon beckons with small errands. Han is a trustworthy and enjoyable companion, and Willoughby has been excellent company. We were recalling last night the time in school when you insisted to Professor MacAllen that a cover fire often proved more distraction than it was worth. You won that argument! We had a good laugh.

Cody loves Shanghai, the smells, the attention, but always there is the work. And I feel this is where I will confront Medicine Man. This is where the souls must be put to rest.

with warmest wishes of the season,

Sarge