Resistance (Nomad Book 3)

by Matthew Mather

  Jess had a lot of questions, but was too exhausted to ask them. Massarra and Ufuk looked like they knew what they were doing, and that was all she needed for now.

  Her first assigned task was to get the heating working.

  The owner of the boat had installed an old paraffin stove in the main cabin, placed halfway up a bulkhead at the forward end of the saloon. It was an old model, but one Jess was familiar with from her days trekking in mountain huts. Almost ancient technology, but reliable. The stove used no electricity at all, and if there were a fan club for them, Jess would have joined. Under the bench, as Massarra had described, there was at least twenty liters of fuel. Like all heaters of this type, it used a manually pressurized fuel tank to feed the paraffin to an Optimus-type burner, which had to be pre-heated by burning a small quantity of methylated spirits in a moat below it.

  After twenty minutes of fussing over it with frozen fingers, the damn thing finally lit, and a warm glow emanated into the room. She kept it on low. She hoped the heat would push away the smell of frozen mold.

  The next thing she did was check to make sure the short chimney was working. Jess knew that burning paraffin, or any other hydrocarbon fuel, produced toxic fumes that had to be vented. She went topside and held her hand over the mushroom cap over the vent. Even so, a risk remained. The carbon dioxide produced could gradually replace the oxygen in the cabin, and go on to produce carbon monoxide. Really nasty stuff—highly toxic, odorless, colorless and tasteless. If it didn’t kill you, it could leave you permanently brain damaged.

  It was a danger she’d have to continually monitor.

  Raffa and Hector and Giovanni came to join her in the saloon by the time she returned back below. They huddled together in a pile, under everything they could find to cover themselves, propped up on a soiled couch on the side furthest from the water as the boat listed in the wind. Without talking about it, they all wanted to stay as far away from the water as they could—and anyway, it was warmer there, higher up, as the heat from the burner rose. Jess attached a single LED headlamp to the bulkhead; set to its red low-power setting.

  The slap and creak of the boat against the waves was mercifully rhythmic. She closed her eyes and wrapped her arms around Hector, telling Ufuk to wake her every two hours to make sure they weren’t being slowly poisoned.

  The small cabin felt like a cocoon, sliding across the water. Moving away from the monster, Dr. Müller. To be honest, Jess had never felt comfortable in Sanctuary Europe, entombed below millions of tons of rock, trapped with Müller. Somehow she knew he wouldn’t be so easily beaten. Maybe he was already dead, killed in the collapse. That was too much to hope for, but at least she was away from him. Somehow, she felt at ease, free again, running away. But who were her rescuers? Ufuk and Massarra? They weren’t who they seemed, that was all she knew for sure.

  She drifted off to sleep as she felt Hector twitching into his own dreams.

  Chapter 10

  Northern Mediterranean Sea

  Jess woke to the sound of howling wind. It took her a few seconds to remember where she was, and took more than that to calm her heart, which pounded as hard as the waves crashed against the hull. Weak gray light seeped into the cabin through the portholes. Her body tipped to one side. The boat crashed into another wave, and she surged back. Was it a storm? Giovanni and Hector and Raffa slept through it, the nest-knot of them jammed between the galley table—bolted to the floor—and the couch. Jess extricated herself and found her parka and gloves and hat before opening the hatch and sliding herself halfway out.

  “Good morning,” Ufuk yelled over the noise of the wind. He stood at the four-foot-wide metal driving wheel, his body upright at thirty degrees to the deck’s surface as it angled against the wind. He wore a thick parka and snow pants, with layers of hats on his head over goggles. “Or should I say, good afternoon. You’ve been asleep for…fifteen, maybe sixteen hours.”

  “Is everything okay?” Jess asked in a panic. The fury of the wind and waves frightened her. She wasn’t a sailor. A cascading sheet of spray flew over her head as another wave thudded into the boat.

  “Fantastic,” Ufuk replied. “Amazing wind. We’ve been making seven or eight knots. Nice steady seas.”

  These were steady seas? Jess’s head knocked into the doorframe on another crunching impact. The boat rolled up and back down. White caps surged over dark waters into the misty distance. “Where’s Massarra?” she asked.

  Ufuk let go of the wheel with one hand to point forward. Jess craned her neck around the doorframe to look toward the front of the boat. Massarra was perched precariously near the bow, but clipped in with a carabiner to the side railing. The Israeli was busy chipping away ice from the deck with an ice ax. She waved.

  “Massarra took the night shift,” Ufuk said.

  “What can I do?” Jess yelled.

  Ufuk smiled, the scraggly beginnings of his beard encrusted with ice. “Coffee.”

  Jess fired up a propane-canister powered boiler—part of the equipment they'd brought from the mountain—and made some coffee. It was a struggle just to stay on her feet, and her robotic prosthetic was almost out of power. The last time she’d plugged it in was more than a day ago in the snowcat. Options for power on board were limited to the ship’s daisy-chained twelve-volt batteries, and she wanted to leave them for more critical things. For now her leg had returned to the more passive prosthetic mode.

  She brought up two insulated steaming mugs of coffee in time to shuffle past Massarra on her way to one of the back cabins to sleep. She looked beyond exhausted.

  “Take the wheel,” Ufuk said as soon and she handed over the coffee.

  “I don’t know anything about boats.” She grabbed the wheel anyway, as much to stabilize herself from falling over against the heaving deck.

  “It’s easy. See the compass?” He pointed at a yellow globe in front of the wheel. A ball wiggled back and forth inside it. “Keep out heading due south for now.”

  “I thought you said we couldn’t trust a compass,” she yelled over the noise.

  “Magnetic north seems pretty stable, for now at least. We should be using a compass heading of 150 to 160 degrees, but with the 20-degree shift, it’s more like 180 degrees, due south. Although it’s not due south anymore. You understand?”

  Jess gripped the wheel and tried to keep the boat on course. It bucked back and forth with each wave. “And steer out of the way of anything, right?”

  “We shouldn’t see much. But yes, try not to hit anything.”

  She strained her eyes to peer through the spray and mist. Brown clouds hung low overhead. It was midday, but dark as twilight. “How do we know where we are?”

  “Massarra is keeping a plot on a map in the cabin, but I’ve also got this.” He pointed at his tablet, strapped against the wall beside the hatch, covered by a layer of clear plastic. “It’s tracking our position.”

  It looked like a GPS map, with a red dot moving against a map. They were most of the way down the coast to Rome already, if it was to be believed. She frowned at looked at it again. Other red dots hovered near theirs.

  “It’s not GPS, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Ufuk explained. “GPS doesn’t exist anymore. We’re getting a triangulated position relative to where my tiny drones think they are. They’re nearer the coast, holding position near known terrain markers.”

  “Won’t we be easy to spot, with all those drones following us?”

  Ufuk smiled an I’m-cleverer-than-that grin. “There are a dozen we’re using.” He leaned forward to tap a button on the screen. Dozens more dots popped onto the display. “But I’ve got hundreds more flying over the middle of Italy, on the other coast, even back north. All over the place. It hides the radio chatter as well, by blanketing half of Italy with transmissions back and forth between them. All encrypted, of course.”

  “Security by drowning out the signal?”

  Ufuk’s grin turned into an amused grimace. “Not the exact word
ing I’d use right now.”

  “So how long is this going to take?” She already felt like she was going to throw up the MRE crackers she'd scarfed down a few minutes before.

  “About a thousand eight hundred kilometers is the total distance.” Ufuk sat beside the tablet and zoomed the screen display out. “We head down the coast to near Naples, then out across the open sea to round Sicily, and drop straight south east until we hit the coast of Libya. With good wind, maybe six or seven days. It should get warmer as we get south.”

  He made it sound so simple.

  “Just follow the headings I give you, and don’t hit anything. That’s all you need to do.” Ufuk stood to go below. “I am, how do you say it…bushed?”

  “Wait.”

  “You don’t understand the heading?”

  “I need some answers. Now.” All the questions she had, all the things she hadn’t asked. It wasn’t enough to just following a compass heading.

  Ufuk hovered for a seconds, but then sat on the bench next to her.

  “Do you have teams out there managing these drones?”

  “As I already said, they’re mostly automated. We had four refueling tankers in the air, two on this side of Italy. They can keep hundreds of drones in the air for a week, but two of the tankers have been taken offline.”

  “Destroyed, you mean?”

  “Hard to tell. I did have four teams of men running operations for me, but all have been compromised, like the men up in the mountain. Security keys were revoked for all manned centers last night, and we lost dozens of small drones.”

  “How do you control them all?”

  “Automated, like I said.”

  It wasn’t much of an answer, but she let it go. “So you have no people on the ground?”

  “Just us, until Africa.”

  “But you have contacts there?” She found it both hard to believe and frightening that he had contacts in Libya.

  “This is more of Massarra’s field of play. But, yes, we should. I have supplies hidden as well.”

  “You mean you planned this?”

  “My company, before Nomad, spanned most of the planet—we had offices in forty countries—but this scrambling for our lives? You think I planned this?”

  Jess wasn’t sure what to believe. If something went wrong, she suspected a small army of drones would appear to levitate this guy to safety, somehow.

  “Müller was partially right,” Ufuk added. “I have supported the Levantine Council for some time. I admired their objectives, for helping save the Middle East. My family is from here.”

  “A lot of people in Sanctuary said the Levantines were the terrorists.”

  “They do have relationships with extremist groups—Müller was also correct in that—but the Levantine Council was created to unite moderate groups, offer something else to youth who felt that extremism was the only option.”

  “Why do they need links to extremists at all?”

  “They cannot be avoided entirely in that part of the world. Hezbollah, Hamas, they all have political aims as well. Where Western governments failed to wipe out extremist groups, the Levantine Council has been more successful.”

  “And Massarra? How do you know her?”

  “She was tasked to meet me on several occasions. To facilitate communication between myself and the Council.”

  “That’s all?”

  “And she helped me with some…business.”

  “What kind of business?”

  “My connections to the Levantines would have been disastrous for my business in the United States if I had been open about it.” He shrugged. “She helped with that business.”

  “And who is she? Really?”

  “Perhaps you should ask her that question.”

  “I’m asking you.”

  “It is not my place to say. Anything else you need to know, you should ask her. I do, however, caution you. She travelled many hundreds of miles and put herself at great personal risk to save your life. Several times. Remember that.”

  Of course Jess couldn’t forget. She owed the woman her life many times over. “Is there anything left of the Levantine Council?”

  “I’ve managed some limited communications. We need whatever allies we can find.”

  “Can you get me a channel to Ain Salah with that thing?” She pointed at the tablet.

  “He would need to be connected to an encrypted digital line on his end, and this might not exist in Al Jawf. It’s not clear how I could manage—”

  “Did you destroy Sanctuary?” She’d asked it before, and she would keep asking until the truth came out.

  “I did not.” Ufuk’s expression was empty. “I would venture to suggest Dr. Müller was involved, but I realize that makes no sense. I have no idea right now.”

  Jess studied his face, watched the tiny wrinkles around his eyes. Was he lying? The only person it made sense to destroy Sanctuary Europe was the man sitting in front of her—who had his own seemingly endless resources scattered everywhere. Then again, he didn’t seem to be taking a safe route out of this, and even more important: stuck on a tiny boat with him in the middle of a frozen ocean wasn’t the right time to start an argument that might have a bad ending. Could only have a bad ending. Her primary responsibility right now was to protect Hector, and to do that, she needed this man, for good or bad. At least for now.

  “How long did you know about Nomad?” She asked quietly this time. It wasn’t an accusation, but sad, like asking when an affair had started when you’d already accepted and moved on.

  Even if her voice didn’t carry venom, Ufuk grimaced. “Ten years ago. About the same time as I became one of the richest people in the world from my technology adventures.”

  “And that’s why they asked you to become part of…whatever, the Sanctuary network?”

  “Müller started it a long time before that. Maybe twenty-two years ago. It was already well underway before I was invited to be a part of the club. They used American international spy agencies to keep track of us, to keep track of everything. I think that was part of the reason they were so invasive. Revealing the secret was a death sentence.”

  “Surely somebody must have talked.”

  “Some did.” Ufuk shrugged. “But their voices were drowned in the media as crackpots, and they soon disappeared. I didn’t want to be one of them. It was then that I began to change my development objectives.”

  “And you contacted the Levantines.”

  “And that.”

  “But you didn’t tell them about Nomad either.”

  Ufuk shook his head slowly.

  “I can’t imagine people like that wouldn’t be upset about you killing their people.”

  “I didn’t kill them. I’m trying to save…it’s complicated.”

  “You certainly didn’t help them.” Now she was goading him.

  Ufuk closed his eyes and hung his head low. The boat surged and crested another wave. “I am very tired, Jessica. Can I go and get some sleep? Can you handle the boat?”

  Chapter 11

  Mid-latitudes of the Mediterranean Sea

  The oily dimness of what passed for daytime slipped away into night, and they strapped a collection of six LED lamps onto the bow of the boat. An attempt at headlights. A poor one. All they did was light up the mist and settling ash into a glow that obscured anything ahead, and there was never anything ahead except more waves and water and the occasional slop of pancake ice.

  Jess was thankful for that.

  The winds remained steady, keeping them cutting across the waves at six or seven knots, Ufuk told Jess, or about fifteen kilometers an hour. She had to convert that into ten miles per hour in her head. It seemed like they were moving faster. Ten miles an hour was jogging pace, but it added up. The boat never stopped moving, and as Massarra had pointed out, needed no fuel. It was quiet and efficient.

  One wave and then the next. Jess never realized how empty an ocean could be.

  She wondered if
the fish at the bottom of the sea had even noticed the passing of Nomad. How would they? It was already dark down there, pitch black as the night now enveloping them. The waves wouldn’t have affected the depths. Not that deep. What about the volcanic events? Maybe. Then she remembered the documentaries about the colonies of sea creatures that lived around volcanic vents. They didn’t even need sunlight to exist. Maybe had been the first life on Earth. They would survive this. Life on this planet would go on, no matter what. The thought comforted Jess.

  That night she huddled back with Hector and Giovanni in the saloon near the heater, but Raffa was nowhere to be found. Jess discovered him in one of the back two bedrooms in the aft, stuffed into two sleeping bags. He had never been much of a talker, even in Italian to Giovanni, but the past few days since he was separated from his brother—he’d hardly said a word. Jess was worried about him, but gave him his space.

  They were all mourning someone.

  The next morning was much the same as the first. Jess woke before Giovanni and Hector, and brought a coffee up to Ufuk before she took over her shift. Massarra was already in her room in the aft, so Ufuk took up the job of circling the boat and chipping off the ice. Today thick gray clouds almost touched the waters, and regular four-foot swells appeared from the mists and disappeared behind. Every now and then, the boat thudded into a patch of pancake ice. No floes, no icebergs—it hadn’t been cold enough for long enough for that—but mushy cakes of ice had formed between the rolling swells.

  After a while, it all became normal.

  Around noon that day came the only excitement. They completed the first leg and were somewhere off the coast of Italy between Rome and Naples. Massarra took over and tacked the boat, explaining to keep a heading of 250 degrees as they headed out past the tip of Sicily. The wind blew up in sheeting gusts, but instead of bringing down the sails, Massarra had them unfurl the spinnaker, which seemed insane to Jess.