“Jesus.” Bert shook his head. “You’re right. Someone’s gonna knock him off. The dumb shit. Well, maybe we can still stop him. I’ll get couriers out.”
As he strode out of the room, the doctor entered. He was a tired young man with a wiry beard and dark rings under his eyes.
“Can I talk to you, Mr. Allison?”
“Sure, for a minute. We’ve got a small emergency.”
“You’ve got a big emergency too, I’m afraid.” The doctor dosed the door. Allison’s senses sharpened suddenly; he could smell the other man’s sweat and fatigue.
“Your wife is a very sick woman. I don’t think we can do much for her, except for the pain.”
“What are you talking about?” His own voice seemed to come from very far away.
“Your wife has malignant melanoma. It’s a kind of skin cancer, very rare, very serious. It’s well advanced and must be all over her body by now.”
“Malignant — ”
“I’ve seen a lot more of it in the last year than most physicians see in a lifetime. Maybe it’s the ultraviolet. But I’m afraid I can’t offer you much hope, Mr. Allison. I’m sorry.
“You didn’t tell her.”
“No.”
“First smart thing I’ve heard you say. I don’t know where Colonel Mercer dug you up, but you can shove your diagnosis up your ass. Get out of here.”
The doctor’s eyes widened. “She’s going to need methadone, not just those analgesics she’s been using. I left enough to keep her comfortable — ”
“Get out!”
“ — for two weeks. By then there’ll be no arguing about it. I’ll be back in four or five days to check on her. Is there anyone else I should look at while I’m here?”
“Get out and don’t come back.”
The doctor shrugged into a dirty windbreaker and put on a black Stetson. “See you soon, Mr. Allison.”
*
Lupe came out of the kitchen. “Mister Allison, have you seen Sarah? It’s time for her snack.”
“I thought she was with you. She’s not upstairs. Go look in the basement.”
A few minutes later everyone in the house was searching for her. Lupe checked through the other buildings; nothing. Allison went back upstairs and searched. Sarah’s room was its usual mess; she wasn’t in the closet, or the bathroom, or under the bed.
When he returned to the kitchen, Bert was there, listening to Lupe’s shrill account of the search.
“Kids can be really creative hiders,” Bert said. “She’ll pop out in a minute, laughing her head off.”
“Don’t give me that shit. I want the whole compound gone over, inside and out. Don’t quit until you find her.”
“Okay. Hey, why don’t I get one of the twins? They might guess where she’s gone.”
“Good idea.” Allison waited impatiently until Bert came back with Ryan. The three-year-old was sleepy; the twins usually woke only after sundown.
“Ryan,” said his father. “Sarah is hiding. Do you know where she’s hiding?”
Ryan shook his head fuzzily, then collapsed on his father’s shoulder. “Think, Ryan. Does Sarah have a secret place, a hiding place?”
“Unga Teh.”
“What? Come on, Ryan.”
“Unca Ted. Said they goin’ shoppin’.”
Bert glanced at Allison. “When, Ryan?”
“Bedtime.”
“Five this morning,” Bert said. “He’s had seven hours.”
“That son-of-a-bitch. I’ll kill him. Where the fuck does he think he can take her? Back to L.A.?”
— Yes. It had to be. Allison pulled Ted’s note out of a pocket. Bob Tony, you owe me a big one. I’ve called it in. You owe me — Ted had said that as they drove away from the apartment building in Santa Monica with Sarah on his lap.
“He’s taking her back to Astrid. Jesus Christ, Bert, he’s insane. It’s three hundred miles. Somebody’s going to pick them off for sure, as soon as they’re out of the Zone.”
“We’ll see about that,” Bert muttered. “We put together a flying column, fifty or a hundred men, we’ll catch up. She’ll be back here by morning.”
“Do it.”
*
Around six that evening, a motorcycle engine bellowed and fell silent outside. The courier was in the house a few seconds later. He was a stocky Chicano, with zinc oxide smeared all over his lips and ears.
“Mr. Allison. Sergeant Chavez reporting. Colonel Mercer got an urgent message for you.”
Allison felt his legs trembling. Arms folded, he said: “Is it about Sarah?”
Chavez looked puzzled. “I dunno, sir.” He drew a brown envelope from an inside pocket of his fatigue jacket, and handed it over.
Allison tore the envelope open. He read the message twice before it made sense:
A tug with two barges anchored in the bay this afternoon. Right over the tanker. They say they’re from San Francisco and going to salvage the Sitka. No reply when I ordered them off Mercer.
“Chavez! Go get thirty men for escort duty in fifteen minutes. We’re going into Monterey.”
Chapter 14
They had to carry Don on board Rachel, Bernie, the medical student, examined him while the tug’s engines warmed up.
“I think you’re gonna be lucky. You have a low threshold, okay, so it didn’t take much exposure or a very long latency period. But you’re also recovering fast. Another two days and you’ll be all right.”
“Two days of this? Christ.” The insides of his eye sockets felt full of grit; tears oozed continuously between his swollen lids. It took enormous effort not to rub at his eyes. The tiny cabin was dark, but even the light of Bernie’s pencil flash was painful.
“Listen, you’ve done well to go this long without getting photophthalmia. I see lots of people on their fourth, fifth episode. Most of them are right on the edge of permanent blindness, okay, and they still can’t get it through their heads that they shouldn’t go outside anymore without protecting their eyes.”
“Bernie, I’m supposed to be diving tomorrow. Can I do it with my eyes in this condition?”
“Keep your shades on, okay? Have a good trip.”
As Rachel ran through the Golden Gate and south down the coast, Don lay in a restless doze. Kirstie looked in on him from time to time, before finally climbing into the upper bunk and falling asleep.
He woke at dawn, feeling a little better, and left the cabin without disturbing Kirstie. Morrie was in the galley, drinking instant coffee. They had a breakfast of cornmeal muffins, and talked quietly about the earthquake.
Its epicentre had been right on the Hayward Fault, running east and west through Berkeley and up into the hills, but it had been felt over a wide area. The Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct had been severed, so almost the entire San Francisco peninsula was without water. Hundreds of fires had broken out; the emergency medical centres were crowded with burn victims. Landslides had erased whole neighbourhoods, and aftershocks had brought down many buildings weakened by the first quake. Tens of thousands of people had moved into parks and other open spaces, preferring to risk blisters and snow blindness rather than burial.
The local councils, scarcely recovered from their battles with the feds, were almost paralyzed. Without fuel to run generators and vehicles, they were reduced to what could be done by dazed, disorganized, hungry people. It was not enough.
Another storm had swept in during the night, and Rachel battered through it all the next morning. But the skies cleared behind it; when Rachel anchored in Monterey Bay over the tanker, it was on a beautiful summer afternoon.
The oil barge was anchored a short distance from the tug, while Squid’s barge was brought alongside Rachel. A crew of mechanics transferred to the barge to prepare the sub; Don went with them, wearing dark sunglasses.
“Let’s take her down tonight, if you’re up to it,” said Morrie as they were eating dinner in the barge’s tiny wardroom. “I want to get a look at how the ship’s lying.”
/> “Sure,” said Don. He wiped up the last of his rabbit stew with a scrap of bread. Rabbit had become a popular food lately, a cheap source of animal protein; it was the bread that was the luxury.
The radio squawked. Leaning back in his chair, Don picked up the microphone. “Kennard.”
“Don, it’s Bill.” The captain’s voice was almost unrecognizable in the static. “We just got a message from Monterey. The natives don’t sound very friendly.”
“Ah. What’s the message?”
“It’s from a guy called Colonel Mercer. Calls himself the commanding officer of the Provisional Defence Forces of the Martial Law Zone. He says we’re on their territory and we better go home.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I said I’d pass the word to the man in charge, but I don’t think I got through. He kept saying, I repeat, you are to depart at once. Do you acknowledge?”
“Uh-huh. Well, keep trying. Tell him we’re sorry to trouble him, but we’re a duly constituted salvage operation engaged in peaceful work. We won’t cause him any problems.”
“What if he doesn’t buy it?”
“Well, I don’t know. But we’re not going home.”
“That’s the spirit.”
“By the way, we’re going down for a trial run in about an hour.”
When Squid was swung up and out on its crane, the seas were still choppy but predictable, and the operator dipped the submersible into the water without trouble. Morrie let them drop quickly.
“It’s a lot clearer than I expected,” he said as he switched on the floodlights. Orienting himself quickly, Morrie put Squid on a southeasterly course and a steep descent. Sonar pinged briskly, and the screen showed the profile of the bottom. Don had trouble reading the instruments through his dark glasses, but when he took them off the reflected glare of the floodlights made him wince.
“There’s the hull,” he said after a few minutes, pointing to a bulge on the otherwise flat profile on the sonar screen. “We should be right on top of it. Yeah, there she is.”
A thin coating of algae clothed the hull, new growth since Don and Kirstie had first seen the tanker. Colonies of marine life — seaweed, starfish, barnacles — had taken hold here and there. The hull stretched away into the gloom; Squid glided above it, from near the stern to the vast, blunt bows. The water thickened rapidly until visibility was no more than two metres in a brown-black murk.
“There’s the main rupture,” Don said. “It’s not putting out as much oil as it was in the spring.”
They surveyed the whole expanse of the hull and found no new leaks. But Morrie spotted patches relatively free of algae, where the metal shone brightly in the sub’s floodlights. Don called Rachel, Bill Murphy answered.
“We’re amidships, and just found an area that looks like someone’s been testing the hull.”
“Copy. Can you judge how recently?”
“The scratches are clean and bright. It must have been since Kirstie and I were here.”
“Maybe our Colonel Mercer,” Morrie suggested.
“Could be,” said Bill. “Maybe that’s why he doesn’t want us around. Do you feel like claim jumpers?”
“No,” answered Don, “but I don’t like the idea of having to fight somebody for the privilege of pumping gas. We’re continuing with the survey.”
Several places along the hull showed similar marks, though none were deep enough to penetrate the steel. They found no new ruptures.
“We’re in luck,” said Don as Squid rose towards the surface. “Tomorrow morning we’ll secure the valve mounting, and bring the umbilical down. Day after tomorrow we’ll be in business.” Condensation dripped on his head and shoulders. “Unless those people in Monterey make trouble.”
*
Allison stood on the roof of the Monterey City Hall and looked northeast through binoculars. The sun was long since down, and the bay was black. The ship’s running lights were tiny but bright.
“Think they can do it?” he asked Mercer.
“I dunno. They got that tug and a couple of barges. They don’t look like a holiday cruise.”
“Griswold says they’d need a submersible — one of those minisubs.”
“Maybe they got one.” Mercer squatted down against the parapet, out of the wind. “The hell with ‘em. We’ll go get our gas somewhere else.”
“No,” said Allison. “They’re not getting a goddamn drop of our oil. None. None.”
“Hey, okay — 1 hear you. No need to yell. But what’s the difference? They get our oil, we get somebody else’s.”
“No. The bastards get that oil, they’ll be back for our food — ”
“What food?”
“Our food, our weapons. Jesus, there’re millions of people in the Bay Area. Give ‘em gas and they’ll be down here in trucks, like locusts. Uh-uh. I’m stopping ‘em right now, while I’ve got ‘em by the balls.”
“Oh, we got ‘em by the balls, huh? I didn’t notice.”
“You get some artillery in place. That ship isn’t more than four miles offshore from Moss Landing. We’ll sink the bastards.”
“Aw, shit.” But Mercer stood up. “I’ll try it, but — ”
“Just do it, Odell. Do it. By tomorrow morning.”
“Hey, Bob — something the matter?”
“Nothing you need to worry about. Just get those goddamn guns set up, okay?”
“Yeah, yeah.” He walked away, a shadow in the darkness. Allison didn’t notice; he had already turned to study the ship’s lights again.
*
Just before sunrise, Don and Morrie boarded Squid again. An hour later, after various items had been loaded aboard and tested, the submersible sank into the sea. The eastern sky had been a pink-and-white smear of clouds; within seconds, Squid was sinking through blackness.
While Morrie piloted the submersible, Don ran through a long check list. He found he could read without too much strain, though his eyes still felt scratchy. The descent was uneventful.
When the tanker’s hull emerged out of the darkness, Morrie steered Squid east, towards the bows. The water was browner and murkier than yesterday; the current must have shifted west a little.
“This’ll do,” said Don. He gripped a manipulator knob. The arm went out, poised over the hull, and began to whine. Don inspected the disc-shaped multiple tool at its end, rotating it until a drill bit locked into position.
The other manipulator, controlled by Morrie, drew a heavy plate from its carrier on Squid’s belly. It was well over a metre square, with a sixty-centimetre hole in its centre and smaller holes near its corners. The plate slid onto the hull with a muffled thump; Squid wallowed upward until Don corrected its buoyancy. Then his hand went back to the manipulator knob. The tool arm went out, poised over one of the plate’s corner holes, and descended. The drill bit slid through the hole and touched the steel of the hull; Squid began to vibrate as the drill dug in. Morrie shifted the sub’s balance to keep it level.
The drilling took a long time. Sometimes the water turned dark brown, opaque with oil droplets, and Don waited until he could see the drill bit again.
“Through,” he said at last, and withdrew the drill. A jet of pale gasoline shot up. As the gas spread, Don rotated the tool head to lock in a bolt driver and lowered it into the corner hole. Squeezing a trigger produced a loud clang; the submersible shuddered, and the gas flow stopped. One corner of the plate was secured.
Three more times Don drilled through the hull; when the plate was fully secured, he began to cut around the central circle. The diamond saw was effective but slow, and gasoline swirled out of the lengthening cut. The noise and vibration went on and on. When the radio crackled, Don gratefully stopped cutting.
It was Bill Murphy. “We got another message, Don. It’s from some guy named. Allison. Says he’s Colonel Mercer’s boss. He wants to talk with you.”
“Can you patch him through?”
“Will do.” A moment later, a strange voice
sounded scratchily in the speaker.
“Hello? This is Robert Anthony Allison. Am I talking to the head of the salvage operation?”
“Yes. Donald Kennard.”
“I understand you’re in a sub, down on the tanker.”
“Yes.”
“Well, my friend, you have just one hour to get back up to the surface and start moving out of the bay. One hour from now.”
“Can’t do it.”
“My friend, you will do it. In one hour, six howitzers will start firing on you. They will keep firing until they sink your ship”
“That’s insane,” Don snapped. “You’d set the slick on fire. It’d burn till the tanker was empty.”
“You’re full of shit,” Allison shouted. “That’s diesel oil and it won’t bum. Even if it did, only one tank is leaking. My people tell me the other tanks are still intact.”
“Mr. Allison. We’ve already cut into another tank. A lot of gasoline is escaping right now. Some of it’s already on the surface. It will burn and it’ll ignite the diesel. That’ll make the rest of the cargo unsalvageable for months, if ever.”
“Great. I’d rather have that than see you bastards walk away with it. You’ve got fifty-six minutes.”
“I need more time than that,” Don said. “I’m coming in to talk to you.”
The answer was a long time coming. “What’s to talk about?”
“Sharing the tanker.”
Again, silence. Then: “Have you got the authority to negotiate?”
“This is my project, Mr. Allison.”
“Okay. Come into Monterey harbour. How long will it take you?”
“Maybe two hours, three hours tops.”
“All right. You’ll be met.”
The transmission ended, and Bill Murphy came on. “This is a hell of a note, Don. That guy sounds crazy. You sure you’ll be okay?”
“No, but don’t tell Kirstie that. Look, we’ve come this far. We’re not going to turn around and go home empty-handed because of some bullshit threat. If they’re willing to see me, they’re willing to bargain.”
“I hope you’re doing the right thing.”
“So do I. Anyway, we’ll finish this and get back up as soon as we can.”
Tsunami: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller Page 19
