“Yeah.” Rhino showed his tobacco-stained teeth. “Fuck, yeah. They’re not dicking around anymore, are they?”
“Perhaps they’re avenging all our deaths,” Jules suggested with no real sincerity.
“I sorely doubt it,” the Rhino said. “But it looks like the president has decided he’s had enough of caring and sharing.”
The way he said “the president” gave Jules to understand that the Rhino most definitely approved.
“So what are we going to do?” she asked. “We need to get to that apartment and get out of the city with Rubin’s papers if we’re to be paid.”
The huge, slab-shouldered sea dog appeared to think about plucking a zucchini and trying his luck but decided against it. The rain came down heavier for a moment, then eased off, as though the downpour had given its all before petering out.
“I’m gonna suggest we keep pressing on, Miss Jules. If we thread ourselves up between the ragheads who started this fight—” He jerked one thumb over his shoulder back toward Union Square. “—and the crazy fucking Ivans down by the river—” He nodded toward the Hudson. “—we might just show ’em all a clean pair of heels.”
Jules frowned, unconvinced, but there didn’t seem to be many alternatives. If the Rhino was right and this was the first day of a battle to retake the city, the army would roll up the island block by block, probably destroying everything in its path. They had to get to Rubin’s apartment and retrieve his documents before that happened, even if it meant dialing up the risk for a day or two. This gig was a big score. If it paid off, she could probably retire from assing about in the smuggling game and set up a legitimate business out on the West Coast, running salvage charters down to LA or something. Or, rather, not running them in person, just raking off the cream while some other poor bastards did the hard work as her contractors and remitted all the profits back to her.
She shivered as the wind knifed in off the river. Her shoulder ached terribly, and she longed to be out of the cold. Across the water New Jersey was a dark continent with just a few mystery points of light to give some sense of the vastness of the graveyard it had become. She wondered idly who or what those lights might be. Freebooters? Scavengers? Some sort of special forces camp with a lot of unwashed Lord Jim types sitting around eating roasted rats off coat hangers?
Possibly not.
There were still mountains of canned and vacuum sealed food in the big cities to make a resort to hobo’s chicken—one of her father’s favorite jokes—a rarity. Another jet plane—no, two of them—came shrieking down out of the night sky, flying just under the low ceiling of cloud, which lit up with their exhausts and running lights. They appeared to drop a stick of bombs somewhere near Gramercy Park.
The Rhino grunted in approval but frowned.
“Miss Jules, I’m going to do something that a good Rhino never does,” he said. “I’m going to lower my horn and back the fuck up. This looks to me like a fight that is only just getting warmed up, and I wonder if we should be heading out into it just yet.”
“We could end up like poor Ryan,” she said.
“Yeah. I vote we hunker down here for a few hours, get some rest, review our plans, and see whether there’s a lull anytime before sunup when we could move a few more blocks.”
Julianne shivered inside her Gore-Tex. The thought of getting somewhere warm and dry appealed in a way that no trip to the Virgin Islands ever had.
“Sounds good to me. Let’s see if this building had a penthouse, shall we?”
“May God strike me down if the worst thing about the end of the world isn’t the impossibility of securing a decent cup of tea when I fucking need it. I could murder a pot of Twinings right now.”
Jules stood at the black granite island bench in the massive, luxuriously fitted out kitchen with hands on hips and frustration acid etched into her face.
The building did not boast a single penthouse, but the top-floor apartments were considerably larger than those below, there being only four of them in all. The Rhino had tried to kick in the door of the first apartment they came to, but it seemed to have been secured by something as extravagant as thick metal locking bolts driven deep into the walls. His size-twelve boots boomed off the hardwood surface without any appreciable return on the effort. The next apartment door, however, yielded to his second kick with a terrible splintering and cracking of the door frame. The noise was awfully loud inside the empty building but insignificant when one considered the uproar of the street fighting a mile or two away. The two smugglers swept the darkened entry hall and a large open-plan living room beyond, but it was obvious that no living soul had set foot in there for years. After securing the wreckage of the front door by pushing a heavy couch up against it, they went about settling in for a few hours: drawing curtains so they could turn on a battery-powered camp light, firing up a small gas stove, and searching the kitchen cupboards for any usable supplies, whereupon Jules was yet again confronted by the barbaric habits of Americans high and low.
“There simply is no fucking tea in this place,” she complained.
The Rhino snorted his amusement.
“Got plenty of stale coffee if you want. Or drinking chocolate. Does that stuff keep?”
“Let me see,” she said, taking the small white canister from him. A twelve-ounce tin of Dagoba organic. Jules rolled her eyes. “Well, it’s hardly Vosges La Parisienne Couture cocoa, but I suppose we’ll see. At least it’s never been opened.”
As the Rhino set to brewing a small pot of water poured from his canteen, Julianne retrieved their commission papers from her small backpack. In addition to the satelilite maps and out-of-date intel on the surrounding area, she carried a private lettre de course from Samuel Rubin’s attorney in Seattle, authorizing them to search Rubin’s New York apartment and seize any and all documentation relating to his disputed claim to part ownership of the new Sonoma “Sunset” gas and oil field, along with detailed floor plans of the apartment and instructions for accessing a hidden safe in the library. She also found their original letters of acceptance into the Manhattan clearance and salvage program. She was about to toss them away as being no longer necessary, when caution stayed her hand. The only safe and sure way into New York, a Declared Zone, had been via the salvage program, and given how everything had gone so spectacularly wrong in the last twenty-four hours, it might turn out that those crumpled form letters were their only way out of the city as well. They wouldn’t stop an F-16 from dropping smart bombs on them should they be mistaken for villains, but if they ran into any U.S. ground forces, it probably would pay to have a piece of paper explaining how they came to be in the city.
Of course, what they were actually doing was illegal in a Declared Zone, even with Rubin’s letter to wave in the face of any overzealous state-sponsored busybodies who might care to interfere.
The Rhino used their single fluorescent camp light to search the kitchen for coffee mugs. The white glow threw long, swinging shadows over the living area as he moved from cupboard to cupboard.
“Damn, but these folks lived well,” he said. “They gotta have eight different types of noodles in here.”
Jules looked up from the sat maps of the Upper East Side she had been studying to find the Rhino waving a packet of linguini around.
“That’s pasta. Not noodles,” she said.
“Here we go. Cups and saucers. Got a special cupboard just for themselves. How pretentious is that?”
“Depends on the make of china,” she said, standing up straight and stretching her back muscles. “Tell you what, Rhino. How about you come over here and update these maps. Draw in what you know of who controls which parts of the city now. It might help us find a way through to Rubin’s place. I’ll make supper.”
“Huh, good luck with that,” he scoffed. “These snobs didn’t have anything worth scavenging from the larder. You know, we’d be a lot better off looting from dead rednecks. Score ourselves a whole chicken in a can or some Vienna franks. Hav
e to be better than these … what the fuck are these? Imported dog turds?”
He held up a small plastic packet and scowled at it in the lamplight.
“Give me those,” said Jules, suddenly excited. “Oh, my God, you fucking Philistine, they’re dried porcini. We may well dine in style yet. Let me see if I can find any decent oil. I’m willing to bet a place like this will have top-shelf extra virgin. It keeps for years.”
“Just don’t burn my hot chocolate while you’re getting carried away there, Martha Stewart.”
He had a point. The pot of water on their little primus stove was but a moment away from bubbling merrily, so Jules put off her grocery search to make the drinks. Her injured arm was still half numb and next to useless, which meant doing everything one-handed, a slow, frustrating process. The Dagoba drinking chocolate came in a powder that had all but solidified in its cardboard canister. With some difficulty and discomfort she managed to hack off a couple of chunks, which she stirred into the hot water. She checked the walk-in larder, hopeful of finding a tin of condensed milk, but that was too much to expect, and she resigned herself to the necessity of a thin, stale brew. The scent of it was still heady enough to make her mouth water and her stomach grumble in protest.
“Do you have those energy bars you pinched from the hotel?” she asked the Rhino, who was searching for something, presumably a pencil or pen with which he could shade the sat maps as she’d asked.
“In my smaller pack, over by the ugly coffee table,” he answered as he methodically opened and closed a line of drawers in a blond wood sideboard on top of which sat an enormous flat panel television. “Hot damn! Check this out.”
Jules expected to find him holding up a new gun or perhaps even chicken in a can but was genuinely surprised to find him standing there patting what looked like a Viking helmet on his head.
“Pretty sweet, huh? There’s nothing a Rhino likes more than extra horns.”
She refused to bite. “Just try the kitchen drawers if you’re looking for something to write with,” she suggested. “Even the rich write notes to themselves.” As she fetched the energy bars, Jules marveled that he called his ruck a small pack. It was large enough to serve her as a full-size backpack.
The Rhino left the ridiculous helmet on his enormous head, where, unfortunately, it fit perfectly. He picked up his mug of chocolate as he walked past.
“I’ve never asked you,” said Jules. “Are you going to take an up-front fee from Rubin when we get back—”
“If we get back,” he corrected, finding a marker in the first drawer he tried.
“Of course. How very Pollyanna of me. So if we get back. An up-front fee or the equity deal?”
The Rhino stopped by the end of the island bench to sip his drink and consider her question. He actually scratched one of the giant protuberant cow’s horns on his newfound head gear as he did so.
“Well, I have done some thinking on that, Miss Jules, I must admit. The prospect of a straight-up payday does appeal. I could set myself up in fine style with a quarter million new bucks. Finding a boat’s no problem at all, of course. There’s plenty of them lying around with no owners to lay claim. But manning them, provisioning, fuel oil, it all adds up. A payday would be mighty useful.”
Julianne took a few experimental sips of her own drink. It wasn’t too bad, and she was desperately hungry. “You couldn’t be thinking of going back into the charter business, surely? There’s no market for it.”
“No,” he agreed as the rumble of an especially large explosion rolled over the building. “I was thinking more in terms of a small trader, you know, zipping around the islands, maybe even down south to some of the secured ports. Old Roberto is a murderous thug, but he does run a tight ship down there in the federation now, and he’s looking to do business. Coffee. Cocoa …” He held up the steaming cup. “Even sugar from the Caribbean. They’re all paying well now.”
“That’s all?” she asked skeptically. “You wouldn’t be tempted to run a little marching powder up the coast?”
He looked truly offended at the suggestion.
“Miss Jules, I was a career coast guard man! My whole life was about chasing bad guys, not being one.”
“Rhino. You’re a smuggler now. A people smuggler for a year after the Wave. Contraband and zone runner ever since.”
He blew her off with a flip of one hand.
“Bullshit. I might be bending the odd law here and there, but I’m doing what’s right. Those rich assholes we got out of Acapulco, yeah, they were rich and kind of assholey, but that didn’t mean they had to die there, and that’s what would have happened. And Miguel and his family, they were good folks who just needed a break. We gave them one. As for Rubin, the man says he owns a chunk of that oil field off Sonoma. Says he has the papers to prove it. Half a dozen fucking foreign oil companies say he doesn’t. You know what I think? I think he does and they’re just trying to frighten him off the claim, keep it for themselves. So sure, I’m breaking the law going into a zone without the exact right papers and passes signed and stamped in triplicate, but goddamn, this is still the United States, and I will go where I please, and I will be ass fucked by rabid monkeys before I stand by and let a little guy get bullied out of what’s his by a bunch of giant foreign oil firms.”
Jules was smirking by the time he’d finished his small speech, unsure whether he was kidding or if indeed he might have convinced himself of his own rectitude and heroic status. She moved around from behind the granite-topped island bench and into the living area to retrieve one of the energy bars.
“So, seriously,” she said. “Will you be taking the quarter million up front? Or a share of the Sonoma field? And before you answer, you should know I cannot take seriously anything you say while you are wearing that ridiculous helmet.”
24
New York
In another era, perhaps he would have held his council in a grand war tent, sitting on fine pillows and handwoven rugs. Instead, the emir made war from a third-floor office in an anonymous building in the midtown region of Manhattan. He was of course more familiar with this sort of environment than he was with grand war tents or the stony deserts in which the Prophet had pitched them when he first brought the word of God to the heathen tribesmen of Arabia, but he found it hard to romanticize the image of a holy war generaled from the entirely unromantic command post of some dead heathen’s windowless office. Perhaps it would help if it were not all going so badly.
The emir, surrounded by his most trusted lieutenants, leaned over the huge map of Manhattan that had been spread out on the dead man’s cheap chipboard desk. From where he stood, with his knuckles resting on the New Jersey Turnpike and the upper reaches of Central Park, he could see a broken photo frame lying on the floor in the corner of the office. A pretty blond woman and two children dressed in cowboy outfits smiled out from behind the shattered glass, presumably the family of the man who had worked in this office.
The photograph reminded the emir that this was not a simple blood feud with an old foe. It was certainly that, but even more it was now a struggle to claim a new homeland for those who had survived the Second Holocaust. Many of his warriors had brought their families with them not because they wanted to but because there was nowhere left for them in the old world. This was especially true of those who had been forced from Great Britain.
Fortunately, their families seemed to be safe for the moment. He had worried privately that the Americans might bomb the makeshift villages they had established for the women and children, but for the moment they seemed to have gone undetected. It was, after all, a very large and empty land these days.
As he examined the map again, he wasn’t sure if they’d be safe much longer.
“It may have been best had we waited and stuck to our original schedule,” he thought out loud.
“No,” insisted Abu Dujana, the Indonesian, one of the few who had come without his kin. “It was a rare opportunity to cut off the head of the taip
an, and you were right to strike when you did. We all agreed then, as we all agree now.”
Dujana looked at each man in turn, searching their eyes with his own for any sign of disagreement. But there was none. The emir had consulted with each of them and sought their counsel sincerely before making the decision to bring forward their attack when they learned that President Kipper would be in New York.
“Are we not told by the Prophet himself to fight and kill the disbelievers wherever we find them?” Dujana asked. “To lie in wait and ambush them using every stratagem of war?” The four men around the table were all intimately familiar with the holy Koran. They nodded in agreement.
The emir stood up straight, stretching his back and trying to get some distance from the immediate crisis so that he might have time to think, to see a way through. He was young for one to whom such a momentous undertaking had been fated and as fit as any man under his command, but he felt tired and worried. The problem was that unlike the Prophet he was not a military commander and had no pretensions to being one. That was why he surrounded himself with men like Dujana, famed for taking the battle against the Indonesian military dictatorship right up to the gates of the presidential palace. The emir was not burdened with false modesty. He knew that inspiring men, and even women when necessary, was a special talent gifted to him by God. However, to lead men in battle, particularly in an environment such as New York, required a very different set of skills, which he did not possess.
Amin Bashir, like him a German but unlike him a man experienced in the extremes of urban warfare, pointed to an area of the map at the southern end of Manhattan. Bashir had brought all of his family with him. Three of his five sons were fighting alongside him, and the emir knew he was willing to sacrifice them all if need be.
“Such a somber mood does not well suit what we have achieved in this battle,” Bashir said. “We do not serve God if we underestimate his enemies. Just like Mohammed and the first converts from Medina, we face a people given to war with a mighty prowess. But they are not invincible. Even before God laid them low they were not invincible. Right here, at this crucial juncture, their arrogance caused them to overreach, and many hundreds of their men were led into slaughter at the hands of mere janissaries. It might seem an evil thing that this Kipper still lives. But how can it be anything but the will of God?”
After America Page 25
