Black Rain

Everyone ducked as an object trailing flames hurtled through the dark sky toward them. It fell short, bouncing and skipping oddly across the ground, some type of bololike device burning at both ends. The dry grasses lit around it, just as more flames arced into the sky.

“Everybody down,” Verhoven said.

The trails of fire swung through the air in strange wobbling paths, two balls of flame orbiting each other on a piece of twine. They crashed and sparked. Ten, then twenty, then more, one after another in bunches, hailing down from all directions.

Susan began kicking sand toward the licks of fire that came closest. McCarter joined her, but the thin weedy grasses quickly burned to embers and there was no real danger.

Just then, the porter returned, awkwardly carrying four rifles and a box of loaded clips.

Verhoven grabbed them.

“Pass them out,” Danielle ordered. The chanting voices around them had taken on a different sound, darker and more ominous, curling around the clearing as one voice after another repeated a single word.

From the look on his face, Devers recognized the word, but this time he didn’t translate it. That was a bad sign.

Danielle checked the computer screen—there were targets all around them, too many to count. She turned to Devers.

“White Faces,” he said, catching her glare.

“What does it mean?”

“The White Face is a spirit. The ghost. The bringer of death.”

Before long, the shouting voices began to seem like a roll call. One after another the Chollokwan were announcing themselves. Bellowing at the top of their lungs, working themselves into a frenzy. Danielle guessed their number in the fifties, and then the seventies, and then more.

Beside her, Hawker stood up. He stepped forward to where Verhoven was about to hand over the last rifle. “Better give that one to me,” he said.

Verhoven held back for a second and then slapped the rifle into Hawker’s outstretched hand.

Danielle gazed at Hawker once again, but this time she found no comfort in his eyes. They were cold and grim. He was amused no more.

One of Verhoven’s men spoke. “There’s a hell of a lot of them out there. A hundred at least, maybe more.”

Verhoven disagreed. He glanced at the screen and its multiple flashing dots. “Less by far. Certainly less than they want us to believe.” He glared at the man.

“Maybe,” Devers said, “but this sounds like a war party, these guys consider themselves the spirits of death. They cover themselves in white paint and they go out on raids. They believe the paint makes them invincible like the White Face, the one they consider already dead. They believe it protects them, because if they’re already dead then they can’t be killed.”

As if in response to what Devers had said, the voices stopped cold. Danielle looked around: no one had charged yet. The bolos still burned where they’d fallen and thin wisps of smoke drifted across the camp. But the air was still.

Danielle saw the movement on the screen and looked up. She saw a shape in the tree line, silhouetted by small fires. In seconds, a dozen or more were burning, blazing up into the trees, with new fires being lit all along the perimeter. The end result was like a fuse running slowly around the edge of the clearing, tracking along the trees in a clockwise motion, down to the south and up along the east.

The undergrowth crackled and burned as the fires merged and the flames tracked up the eastern perimeter. With the naked eye, she could see the silhouette of runners with torches in their hands, sprinting past the fires, the flames trailing out behind them. Before long, the clearing was encircled in a rapidly growing conflagration.

“My God, they’re going to burn us,” Polaski whispered.

Hawker tried to calm him. “There’s nothing to burn in here.”

Danielle took a breath. That was true. The clearing was barren of any major source of fuel, but smoke was another problem. The fires surrounding them were oily and the smoke hung thick and heavily. It quickly became difficult to breathe. With one eye on the perimeter, she broke into the first-aid kit, pulling out a stack of thin paper respirators. With only a half dozen, she gave one each to Susan, Polaski, McCarter and the porters.

One of Verhoven’s men dropped his night-vision goggles. “We’re blind now. They’ve made the scopes useless.”

“They don’t know that,” Hawker said.

Aside from Verhoven and Hawker, everyone had become jumpy. She sensed it even in herself. She needed information and turned to Devers. “Come on. What the hell do they want?”

“I don’t think they want anything,” Devers said.

“What do you mean?”

“They just keep repeating the same words over and over again. Fire for fire, fire for the plague.” He shouted to be heard above the crackling flames now surrounding them. “They’re either telling us something or telling themselves. Winding each other up.”