Hurricane Fever

by Tobias S. Buckell

  “I’m not fucking CIA. I already shot you, not going to torture you. Seen enough of that in my life. But you killed an innocent. A civilian,” Roo said. “My nephew. There is a price for that.”

  “His death is just a taste of what comes in the war,” the neo-Nazi hissed. “The clash of civilizations is coming. The rising tide is here.”

  Roo sighed. Well, there was another hurricane coming, he thought. That was about the only tide coming anytime soon.

  He got up and rifled through the pockets of the dead men on the floor and found a passport. Thumbing through, he looked at the last date stamp on the paper. Thank goodness for old, paper-oriented passport systems and tourist nostalgia for having a stamp in their passport to memorialize their travels.

  The Aves Island CARICOM non-exclusive trade zone was the last place the man had been. “You can’t know where you going, if you don’t know where you’re coming from,” Roo said.

  “What?”

  Roo held up the passport. “A week on Aves Island before coming here, when you could have come straight from…” He flipped through. “Budapest. What were you doing on Aves?”

  “Fuck you.”

  So. Something interesting.

  “It took me four hours to scrub all my nephew’s blood off the cockpit floor where you killed him,” Roo told his captive. “I had a lot of time to do a lot of thinking. Thinking about what I would do next. And I’ve decided this: you and your men here, they killed Delroy. But it didn’t start with you. Someone else further up the food chain did that. So I’m going to kill you, and then start working my way up to find out who caused this. And then I’m going to kill them, too.”

  * * *

  Kit waited for him in the car. He handed her a small baggie with a phone sealed inside. She looked at the flesh-shaped bulge at the bottom. “Is that an index finger?”

  “I want to find out who they really were. The passports were fake, though helpful.”

  He put the duffel bag in the back. He used one of the hotel towels to clean blood off the spear he’d pulled free of the last man.

  “Spear fishing?” an older man in a maintenance uniform asked.

  Roo looked up. Nodded.

  “Catch anything big?”

  “Not big enough to keep,” Roo said.

  “Better luck next time.”

  He got in, shut the door, and sat for a moment with his hands on the wheel. There was blood in the crevices between his cuticles.

  “Did you kill the last one?” Kit asked quietly.

  Roo shook his head slowly. “No. Pulled the spear out the back and let him scream a bit, but no.” Killing someone tied up in front of him … he couldn’t do that. Not even in the middle of all that white-hot rage.

  “So…”

  “Left him holding a sheet to his stomach wound. The harder he presses, the slower he’ll bleed out,” Roo said. “Figure the cops’ll roll up on him soon. Even if you and I disappear following this lead, we’ll leave a fairly obvious path for anyone behind us to follow.”

  He crept the car forward and put the gaudy condos and hotel block of Frenchman’s Reef in his rearview mirror.

  14

  The blue articulated crane, a two-story-tall spider of a contraption that glinted here and there in the midnight dark, gently lowered the Spitfire into the water with its padded metallic claws as Roo stood on the bow. Once in the water and settled, Roo tied them off to the concrete walls, then clambered out onto the dock.

  Tinker climbed out of the cab of the crane and smiled when Roo handed him a thick brick of paper money. “Fuck me,” he said, flipping at the ends of it absently. And then he realized how much Roo had just handed him. Once more, with a mild awe in his voice, he repeated, “Fuck. Me.”

  “That should get your engines up and running,” Roo said. “Maybe see you down south some time?”

  “This is too much,” Tinker said, his beard blowing in the wind.

  “Hide it good,” Roo said. “If they figure out you helped me they’ll hassle you for serious.”

  Tinker shrugged. “Weren’t here. Saw nothing. Boatyard’s gonna be pissed I hot-wired their crane, though. It was a quick, dirty thing. Good thing it’s electric, not some damn engine. Start an older one up everyone for miles would have known what we were up to.” And it had still been loud enough as it was, making Roo nervous about getting caught.

  “I left an envelope of cash in their mailbox,” Roo said. “They’re taken care of.”

  Tinker slipped the cash into a pocket in his dirty overalls, and frowned. “You gonna be okay, Roo?” He glanced at the Spitfire’s cabin. Wondering, no doubt, who Kit was. “The memorial…”

  “Good-bye, Tinker. See you down south, some day. Okay?”

  Tinker nodded, and grabbed Roo’s forearm in an awkward shake. “Some day,” he grunted.

  Roo watched him amble out of the yard, a ball cap pulled firmly down over his face.

  “Will he be okay?” Kit asked softly. Roo knew what she was asking. A camera, somewhere, would tag him. He would get questioned. But Tinker knew that.

  “Cash will keep him out of trouble,” Roo said. And let him mess around with his boat for another year.

  He’d never end up down south, Roo knew. He’d buy some other half-working contraption. Come up with some other crazy dream that he would get to half work and half spectacularly fail. He’d grumble about it to anyone who’d listen at the Sand Dollar.

  And be one of the more content men Roo had known.

  The wind kicked up a bit. Hurricane Njema was making its presence felt. Still a little over a day away.

  After a half hour of checking the bilges and the hull patches, Roo untied them and motored out from the docks, using the heads-up display on his cockpit windows to navigate them through the deep black, cloudy midnight. Ghostly green charts plotted his blind course out to sea. The blinking lights of harbor navigation buoys were highlighted by the heads-up display.

  “You still have a chance to get in the dinghy and go back,” Roo told Kit. “You sure you want to run a hurricane at sea? Njema is turning this way. I’ll head south for Aves Island, but Njema might turn and follow us.”

  “Roo, I’m in this to find the people who killed someone I loved dearly. If you think that means we sail to Aves, we sail to Aves.”

  She’d hardened a bit since the hotel. Her jaw still set in determination, her eyes a bit weary. It was always like that, Roo thought, after action.

  In the formal days, he had to give up his weapon and spend time coming down. The CIG would put him up somewhere quiet and give him a therapy program to talk to for a few weeks. Get his head sorted out. Because taking a life was never an easy thing.

  Except this time it had been almost too easy.

  He thought about the killing as the moon broke the clouds and the dark silhouettes of island hills filled in around him as his eyes eagerly adjusted to the light.

  No, shooting each of those fuckers who’d been waiting for Kit had been easy. No harder than shooting a fish. Because they’d killed Delroy. And nothing could make him feel guilty about bringing Delroy justice. Maybe his mind would sort it out differently later on. But there was a reason vengeance was a basic human emotion. It was real. It was understandable.

  That visceral identification didn’t come with some of the other things he’d been asked to do, long ago. Or even the things he’d done when younger, before the CIG had put him to work.

  It felt more like self-defense. Bloody, horrible, but with no doubt in his mind that it was the right course.

  He would pay. He knew the shakes would come at some point.

  But the torturous second-guessing, the existential fear of creeping evil. Not this time, he thought, gunning the engines. He was charting the right course.

  “Okay,” he said to her. “Okay.”

  Roo didn’t put up the sails for almost an hour, not wanting to be seen from shore. He spent that hour watching the charge on the ship’s batteries drop until he was
uncomfortable, then rolled everything out.

  The strong winds yanked at the sails. The mast shivered, and then the Spitfire surged forward happily.

  This was better than trying to fly to Aves, or taking a ferry. They would have been flagged and arrested. The cops wouldn’t assume Roo would ship out the day before a hurricane made landfall. Too stupid.

  Very stupid.

  He leaned back out of the cockpit’s roof to look up through a clear plastic window at the mainsail overhead. It bellied out a little, but was fairly taut. The familiar creaks of stays, the hull shifting, and the waves slapping the hull made him smile briefly.

  And then the smile faded due to guilt at the happiness and familiarity of being at sea.

  Kit had left him alone for all the prep and casting off. But now she moved to stand next to him. “You going to sail us all the way to Aves by yourself, or do you want me take a turn?”

  “A watch,” Roo said automatically. “It’s called a watch.”

  She folded her arms. “Do you want me to take a watch?”

  Did he want to go down to his cabin and sleep with her wandering around the Spitfire?

  Why not? If she was after the data, it was hanging from his neck with her none the wiser. As long as he slept with a gun in his hand and the door locked, he should be safe.

  A younger Roo would have just slammed some methamphetamines and done the whole trip wired. But he wanted to show up to Aves rested and ready.

  So Roo hopped down from the captain’s chair. He started to show her the basics, the sheets for the roller furling and the mechanized windlasses. She nodded patiently, slipped into the plastic chair, and then trimmed the mainsail slightly, adjusted the jib.

  The Spitfire, ever so slightly, sped up a quarter of a knot according to the heads-up display.

  Roo stopped patronizing her. “You’ve sailed before,” he muttered.

  “In the Keys,” she said.

  Respect. She didn’t give him grief for assuming otherwise, but he should have asked first. She disconnected the autopilot and steered with her feet on the stainless-steel wheel rather than her hands, settling her back against the chair with a satisfied grunt that Roo knew well.

  He gave her a brief overview of the nav software. “Do you want some coffee?”

  “God. Please,” she said.

  It felt strange to go downstairs leaving a stranger sailing his boat out in the inky black seas. But she had a good hand.

  He came back to find that she’d created a personalized account on the nav software and rearranged the heads-up displays on the cockpit windows to suit herself. “Thanks,” she said, taking the steaming, bitter mug he handed her.

  She’d called up a satellite picture of Njema and for a moment they both stared at the concentrated swirl of cloudy energy. The barest of its edges, a single wisp, seemed to be reaching out for a small dot on the map. She pointed at it. “What’s that?”

  “Anegada,” Roo said. “Where I grew up.”

  “Small island,” Kit said.

  “Underwater island,” Roo replied. “They leave the name up on the map out of habit. And because the big ships still get stuck on it sometimes.” The rest of the Virgin Islands were mountains thrust out of the ocean. They curved, the weathered and eroded edges of an ancient volcanic rim. Anegada was a reef, though. With some sand on top. Some coconut trees and brush. By the time Roo was a kid, most of the houses left on it were on stilts, and tourists came to visit a “Caribbean Venice.”

  By his teenage years, it was a Caribbean Atlantis. One of many islands all over the world lost to the rising oceans.

  “Oh,” Kit said. “I’m sorry.”

  Roo shrugged. Old history. “It’s not too different from Aves.”

  “What do you think we’ll find there?”

  “Trouble. It’s Aves Island. It’s always fucking trouble,” Roo growled.

  There was a second curve of Caribbean Islands farther west of the islands everyone could see on the map; an underwater chain of mountains that didn’t quite reach the surface. If you looked at a topographical map of the world under the Caribbean Sea you could see the peaks and valleys lurking in the blue depths.

  Less than a couple hundred miles south of Puerto Rico, and a hundred and fifty miles west of Dominica, one tiny tip of this chain breached the surface of the Caribbean Ocean just ever so slightly.

  That was Aves Island. Decades ago, little more than a small spit of sand in the middle of the north basin of the inner Caribbean Sea. For much of the twentieth century, Venezuela effectively claimed it for themselves. An interesting claim, as Venezuela lay more or less four hundred miles to the south in South America. Claiming Aves, however, extended Venezuela’s international maritime borders absurdly far north and allowed it to bring most of the Caribbean Sea within the dotted line. To further cement the claim, Venezuela built stilted structures on Aves to garrison soldiers and paid several families to live on the island.

  Dominica had protested in the past. World law claimed that nations owned areas out to within two hundred miles of their borders, and Aves fell into the borders of Dominica. But what was Dominica? A small independent Caribbean nation of a hundred thousand.

  Venezuela, a medium-sized South American state with a standing navy, a large military, and its own air force, could squat on the island. The long-standing disputes over who owned Aves that went back to colonial times were settled by their presence, and Dominican politicians had kept the peace by affirming Venezeula’s right to own Aves.

  So Venezuela hunkered down there, because the inner Caribbean Sea held a wealth of oil resources in the deeps, much of it becoming more attractive as other wells throughout the world dried up. And the benefit of drilling in the Caribbean was not having to dodge the occasional iceberg like one had to do in the mostly melted, but still often dangerous Arctic seas.

  During the Caracas riots several politicians in CARICOM with ties to international energy companies saw an opportunity: take Aves, and they would regain the Caribbean Sea and the wealth underneath it.

  Like the European Union, Caribbean Islands had been slowly opening up economically at the turn of the century, creating common passports for travel, and even creating shared currencies over the decades. But it was Aves Island that created the modern pan-Caribbean state.

  It began with lawsuits in the world courts from Dominica against Venezuela. With their leadership tied up in the riots, the maneuver went ignored. At the same time, the Caribbean media went on the offensive, decrying the stealing of Caribbean wealth by the South American country.

  The second stage happened with the secret backing of French and U.S. intelligence agencies looking to blunt Chinese and Venezuelan cooperation and control of the Caribbean basin: a small CARICOM Force Squad used a captured narco-submarine to land on Aves Island in the middle of the night.

  They overpowered the Venezuelan forces, deported the handful of civilians, and “returned” the island to Dominica.

  Venezuela mobilized half its air force and most of its navy: ten smaller ships and a troop carrier. But the rest of the army remained busy at home. The re-invasion failed as ad-hoc Caribbean intelligence networks tracked the attacks and flew single-use drones into Venezuelan planes to neuter their air force.

  Then, halfway to Aves Island, four hundred toy planes flew into the Venezuelan naval fleet. Each one equipped with IEDs or homemade napalm, they sank the troop carrier after a whole day of radio-controlled toy drone kamikaze attacks launched from St. Lucia by expatriate controllers linking in via satellite from all over the world.

  When the Venezuelan Navy turned back, they rendezvoused off of the coast of Grenada. The implicit threat to Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, and Grenada created even more national Caribbean solidarity. In three days, the generation’s long experiment of trying to bind the dozens of major islands together into a larger identity had been cemented by the Southern threat.

  When Caribbean Sea deep oil rigs appeared, the oil royalties were
set up similarly to the North Sea Norwegian and Alaskan methods. Half the money went directly to citizens as cash payouts. A bid to avoid direct corruption.

  The other half went to governments, many of which began to use the money for infrastructure.

  And the Caribbean Community, now suddenly of serious interest to the larger world, began to invest in military and intelligence. Beefing up Aves Island. Building a drone air force that could reach into Venezuela. Building the Caribbean Navy’s automated fast-attack hydrofoil gunships.

  Aves, not forgotten, grew. At first a large garrison to protect it. Then the floating airport to house the larger drones. And the people to feed and house them. Then came the stilt homes for living. And boardwalks. And floating gardens to feed them. The docks. An economy. Oil development money.

  A CARICOM free trade zone, it became a port of call for docks and ships traveling through the Caribbean. A beacon of Caribbean strength.

  A powder keg, because it was the fulcrum on which so much depended.

  “Something fucked up is always going down on Aves,” Roo said to Kit, looking out at the dark, windy seas.

  15

  A phone buzzed.

  For a split second Roo couldn’t tell where he was. He was alone in the dark, the world shifting and tilting around him.

  Sleep had struck him hard, and not stayed nearly long enough.

  He blinked. The Spitfire heaved, shuddered down a wave, and struck the trough. Things clattered and fell, bouncing off shelves or knocking around inside cupboards.

  The phone buzzed again. Rattling away against varnished wooden rails where it had fetched up.

  Roo still clutched the gun in his hand. He faced the door to his locked cabin.

  With a deep breath he grabbed the phone. “Yeah?”

  Jacinta answered. “It’s getting full shit here, man. Already flooding coming up over Yacht Haven and into the streets through the barriers. How’s Njema treating you?”

  Roo unlocked the door and peeked out a larger porthole in the corridor. They were riding fifteen-foot swells. Which explained the beating he’d gotten while sleeping. He’d been tossed all around his bed. He checked the wall clock. Almost time to relieve Kit from sailing.