Shah indicated his agreement but he had one more question. ‘Do we have a destination, Miss?’
‘Please, “Jules” will be fine. And no, I have no idea where we are headed initially. Just the hell away from here and that bloody wave.’
* * * *
It was late before they returned to port. Shah’s men loaded the cruiser in less than an hour, but motoring to and from the Aussie Rules was a nine-hour round trip. For now the marina’s own security staff, boosted by some freelance heavies, were more than up to the task of securing her boat and the small dockside lockup against any looters, but that wouldn’t always be the case. She was quietly relieved when Thapa took up watch on the 42-footer, while she and Mr Shah plotted out their next move.
It was coming up on ten at night, and the dock was well lit, courtesy of a diesel-fired generator she could hear droning away in the distance. Incredibly, she could also hear music, laughter and the tinkle of glasses drifting across from the more expensive berths, where a large number of luxury yachts were docked, one of them as big as her own. Apparently the owners and their guests had enough money and muscle to convince themselves they could remain unaffected by events outside the marina. Not all of the berths were occupied, however. Jules calculated that a third were empty, the boats that normally filled them having lit out already. But of those who had stayed, it seemed most were intent on pretending they could hold back reality with good cheer and hired guns.
Acapulco proper, though, was a patchwork of light and dark. From the flying deck of the cruiser, parts of the city looked entirely normal. Lights twinkled in houses and apartments, traffic streamed along the waterfront, and throngs of people were visible through the big pair of Zeiss binoculars she’d brought back from the Rules. Elsewhere, chaos reigned. Buildings burned and the pop and crackle of gunfire was constant. Sirens had wailed through the first few nights, but they were becoming less frequent. In fact, Jules couldn’t recall the last time she’d noticed one. She poured three cups of coffee and silently thanked God that the thick blanket of toxic waste released by the burning of hundreds of empty American cities had drifted east, and not south. She was convinced this place would be falling apart a lot more quickly if a nuclear winter had descended as it had in Europe.
‘Thapa, come get your brew,’ barked Shah, as he handed a steaming mug down to the heavily armed rifleman on the deck below. Thapa took his drink with a grateful bow of the head and a smile for Jules, making her feel much better about having to hire and trust so many strangers with guns.
She couldn’t help wondering how Pete would have played all this. Badly, she guessed, given that his first thought had been to team up with Shoeless Dan, just a couple of hours before Dan had attacked and killed him. She still missed the old fool, though. They’d been good friends, even if Pete had just a little too much of the surf bum about him to trust in a situation like this. He took his business seriously, and he was a smart bloke who’d played the odds as well as anyone she knew of. But in the end he was like so many Australians she’d met – ultimately prone to falling back on a naive, almost childish belief that everything would work out for the best.
Nothing in Julianne Balwyn’s life led her to believe that. To an outsider, to someone like Shah, for instance, she must surely have appeared as just one more rich oik, the lucky child of old landed gentry, wasting the advantages of the best schools, an ancient title, and a thousand years of hereditary privilege. For Jules, however, her old life was an anxious, contingent affair, where the pressure to maintain appearances was grossly aggravated by the manifest inadequacies of two parents whose laziness and selfishness were exceeded only by their sense of entitlement. She was well rid of all that bullshit.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘We’re not going to need bartenders or butlers, but looking over the old crew manifest, we will easily need more than a dozen warm bods to run the engine room, the bridge, the IT systems, and do general deck duties. Probably be an idea to have a ship’s doctor too, if we can find one. A proper helmsman who could handle the tub in a bad blow. A navigator for when the GPS goes down… I mean, where does it end? How do I pay them all?’
Shah swallowed his coffee in one long draw. ‘You don’t,’ he replied with a single, emphatic shake of the head. ‘They pay you.’
‘Beg your pardon?’ Jules was perplexed, but intrigued.
In reply her new security chief held up the empty mug. ‘This coffee, Miss Julianne, it came from your own stores. But if you had bought it here today, on shore it would have cost you twenty-five euros.’
That caused a raised eyebrow, but on reflection it shouldn’t have. She already knew that raging inflation and currency collapse had reduced the worth of the greenbacks they’d stowed away in the Diamantina to a fraction of their face value. That’s why she’d got rid of them so quickly. The small office and waterfront store she’d rented here for five days had cost fifty thousand US dollars upfront. Now it would probably be a six-figure sum, but she was a lot more sanguine about that than she had been a week earlier. As soon as they’d hit port she’d moved to unload most of the cash as quickly as possible, and had managed to get forty cents on the dollar, taken in the form of fuel, stores, gold, medicine and arms, most of it now safely aboard the Aussie Rules.
Shah moved to the railing of the boat’s flying bridge and gestured at the party scenes around the marina. ‘For now, these people are comfortable,’ he said. ‘They have food, shelter, safety, power.’
He turned away and pointed to the brighter, more chaotic nighttime scene of Acapulco central, where uncontrolled fires duelled with neon and fluorescent light to hold back the darkness. ‘Over there,’ he continued, ‘some people are still fine, but many are beginning to suffer and to fear for themselves. Soon, everyone will be afraid. A cup of coffee, a loaf of bread, it could be worth more than your life. People will pay you to get them away from that.’
‘American refugees?’ she pondered aloud. The richest, whitest refugees in the world. It was a bizarre thought, but entirely logical when you considered where events were headed, or indeed where they were right now. ‘Where would we take them? Alaska? Hawaii? The last I heard people were leaving Hawaii, not going there. I don’t think they’re even letting new people in. Same with Seattle, I think. Aid shipments in, flights out, and that’s it.’
Shah moved his shoulder almost imperceptibly. His version of a shrug. ‘If you have English-speaking passengers, take them to an English-speaking port. England, New Zealand, Australia. They are not closed and they will accept refugees, especially with money.’
‘By the time we get there, though, any money they have will be worthless,’ countered Jules.
‘US dollars, certainly,’ he agreed. ‘But yen or pounds or euros – some surviving currency – they will be acceptable. At least to us, in the short term, for the purposes of provisioning. It would help you too, Miss Julianne,’ he added, with a knowing smile.
‘How so?’
‘The yacht is not yours, no? The owner, a famous man, the original passengers and crew, they are gone. But even so, you will need to have some legitimate reason for having taken her over. Ferrying refugees away from danger, especially Americans, to friendly countries – to friendly frightened countries – it could make your passage into any harbour much less difficult. You could be a hero, a rescuer, not a villain and a smuggler.’ His eyes glinted with real humour in the dark.
‘You’re not quite the ramrod-straight, do-it-by-the-book type you first appear, are you, Sergeant?’
‘No good sergeant is, Miss Julianne.’
Jules let her eyes wander over the distant vista of the city as it disintegrated. Long strings of beaded light, the headlights of cars leaving town, wound up into the hills behind the bay. Camp-fires burned here and there, pushing back the blackness, while occasional flashes of light betrayed either cameras or gunfire. A huge blaze had engulfed a high-rise tower, the flames shooting upwards like a giant roman candle, and yet not far away she could see candy
-coloured neon and a pair of searchlights, picking out a nightclub where (local rumour had it) you could still dine and drink as though nothing had happened, as long as you could meet the very steep cover charge.
‘Okay,’ she said, making up her mind. ‘Crew first. They work for their passage or they get left behind. We’ll start here, at the marina, by putting out word we’re offering a berth to qualified hands. But you and I might head out tonight, hit the right bars, gather the first of our flock. We can trawl the international hotels tomorrow, looking for passengers.’
‘And where will we offer passage to, Miss Julianne?’
‘Somewhere big and safe and far away. Somewhere the toxic cloud won’t reach. Somewhere that can feed itself. Defend itself, if need be.’
Shah gave her a quizzical look, inviting her to go on. Jules nodded at a framed photograph fixed to the starboard bulkhead. It showed the boat’s previous owner, Greg Norman, teeing off at Royal Sydney.
‘In for a penny, in for a pound. Let’s take his boat back home for him, shall we?’
* * * *
20
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, CUBA
The scientist droned on, baffling everyone with his impenetrable waffle and jargon-bluster, and in the end it all came to ‘We don’t know shit’.
‘The phenomenon remains non-responsive to magnetic resonance scans,’ said Professor Griffiths. He was a small, round, red-headed toad of a man who’d added yet one more element of misery to Tusk Musso’s existence since his arrival at Gitmo with the National Laboratory team to study the Wave. ‘The precise mechanism by which the phenomenon effects the transubstantiation of certain organic matter to energistic potential remains non-obvious
As he burbled on, the general surreptitiously checked his watch. Griffiths and his eggheads had flown in a few days earlier from Seattle, via Pearl, and Musso remained convinced that Mad Jack Blackstone had facilitated the move as some sort of malicious practical joke. Given the paucity of findings the Nat Lab guys had so far turned up, Griffiths chewed up an enormous amount of Musso’s time and energy with resource requests he simply could not fulfil.
‘Our investigations continue,’ the scientist concluded.
Man, I hope that’s a conclusion, thought Tusk. ‘Any questions?’ asked the Marine, getting to his feet and addressing the room.
Everyone remained unnaturally still. They had learned never to give Griffiths an opening. Ask him how high the Wave went, and you were liable to get a half-hour dissertation on electron orbits.
‘Very good,’ said Musso hurriedly. ‘Bang up presentation there, doc, as always. You keep at it. Get back to us with anything new, of course. But don’t feel the need to interrupt your research otherwise -’
‘Well, about my research, General. This exclusion zone you’ve established along the line of the phenomenon -’
‘Is not open for discussion… Sergeant!’
A Marine Corps gunny rolled up to the podium like an Abrams tank with the throttles thrown wide open. He double-timed Professor Griffiths out of the conference room, closing the door firmly behind them.
Tusk relaxed slightly. He wasn’t being unfair. Everyone had been intrigued and even a little excited when Griffiths had arrived with two pallets full of scientific equipment, but exposure to the man, coupled with a rapid realisation that neither he nor anyone else had yet figured out jack shit about the Wave, tended to dampen that enthusiasm.
He was a five-star pain in the ass.
‘Okay,’ said Musso, with more relief than was seemly. ‘I can see we lost two or three KIA from boredom there. Not a bad result. Ensign Oschin, you got my PowerPoint files ready?’
‘Coming online now, sir.’
‘Thank you, Oschin. Put it straight up.’
General Musso rubbed at a freshly scabbed-over bloodspot on his shaved head. He’d knocked a small divot out of himself fucking around under a desk earlier, fixing up a data cable that’d come loose. His fingers came away with a few tacky spots of blood and he had to pat down the wound with a piece of tissue paper while he waited for the vision from the Global Hawks.
Two of the giant, experimental UAVs were over the continental US at that moment, covering Miami and Kansas City. In contrast to the first moments after the Disappearance hit, when everyone had been wired and speeding on fear of the unknown, the feeling in the expanded op centre was now resigned and sombre. Everyone knew what to expect from the footage. Empty cities. Deserted streets. Massive pile-ups on the road networks. Some burning buildings, many more charred ruins. Stillness. Ditches and craters of burning ruin in the fields where aircraft had gone down over what many called ‘Flyover Country’, in the Midwest. Where there should have been cattle or horses, there were charred spots and grassfires, especially in west Texas.
Mega-fires still blazed across the length of America, spewing unknowable tonnages of pollution into the atmosphere. Thankfully, there had been only two meltdowns in a couple of older nuclear plants when the auto shutdowns failed – at Browns Ferry in Alabama and Hartsville, South Carolina. On the other hand, many coal-fired plants went up for want of human attention or computer intervention. But in these two metro centres at least, the worst of the conflagration was over. Indeed, it never really started. Cold, soaking rain had hosed down most of the initial outbreaks in Kansas City. An airliner had speared into a power station in Miami, killing the grid before an untended waffle iron or hair curler was able to burn down half the city. Satellite imagery confirmed similar strokes of luck had spared dozens of other cities, but hundreds more had been incinerated. The number of population centres lost came to thousands, however, once you counted all the minor towns and burgs that had gone up for one reason or another.
‘Miami on the right-hand screen, KC to the left, General.’
Musso thanked Ensign Oschin again, even though the two cities didn’t look much alike and there was no trouble telling one from the other. The footage of Kansas City was trisected by a meeting of the Kansas and Missouri rivers in the centre of the metropolis. No beaches, that was for certain. Musso had been to nearby Fort Leavenworth during the course of his career, for some joint-forces training with the US Army. It had been the coldest winter he had ever experienced and he certainly wasn’t eager to go back there any time soon.
‘Okay,’ said Musso, as he turned to address the tightly packed group of officers seated on plastic chairs behind him. ‘This is a highlights package, cut together an hour ago from twelve hours of coverage by our two Hawks.’
Fifteen men and women had squeezed into the small room for the briefing, including Lieutenant Colonel Pileggi, who’d flown up from Joint Task Force Bravo in Honduras the previous day. The senior SOUTHCOM representative sat in the front row with a notepad and pen at the ready. She and Musso were supposed to present a plan to Ritchie that evening to evacuate any and all US citizens who wanted to go, from South and Central America to an as-yet-undetermined location. It meant moving hundreds of thousands of people God only knew where. But certainly not to Gitmo. It already had a diabolical refugee problem.
Musso thumbed a control stick and brought up the first set of images. Still shots from the downtown areas of both cities. ‘I’m afraid there’s nothing new to report here,’ he announced. ‘Just better imaging than we’ve had so far. The power grid in both cities has failed, meaning there’s less chance of a catastrophic urban firestorm starting up, although spot fires continue to break out here and there for whatever reason.’
Musso examined the Kansas City screen, which displayed the footage of a burnt-out Quiktrip on Armour Boulevard, across from a post office and a couple of larger buildings in Northtown. He never could keep all of Kansas City’s various townships and municipalities straight when he was there. The Heart of America Bridge along with the Paseo and Hannibal bridges showed evidence of multi-vehicle pile-ups, some of which had combusted and later burnt out in the schizophrenic weather of the Midwest. A train had derailed on the ASB Bridge next to the Heart of America and d
umped itself into the Muddy Mo. One of the towers, he couldn’t tell which one, looked like it had been slashed with something – probably a Cessna or a Learjet from Downtown Airport.
On the other screen, a Walmart Supercenter on 88th Street in Miami had been reduced to a smouldering shell. Several watercraft in a variety of flavours and sizes had washed up on the beaches and canals. Musso couldn’t help but be struck by the similarity between these images and those stolen from blasted landscapes throughout the Balkans and in Kuwait after the Iraqi invasion. There was one major difference, of course: no bodies.
‘We chose these two cities for the Hawks, partly because they remain comparatively undamaged, and also because local weather patterns have temporarily cleared away some of the pollutants that are choking the air pretty much everywhere else. That won’t last.’
He thumbed the control again, and the twin displays appeared to blink, as they switched to a different video stream.
Without warning Page 24
