NightSun

by Dan Vining

  “Surface!” Nix ordered.

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  “Climb!” Nate said.

  The sub was surfacing. Tucker went right and Nate went left and the Crows both shot higher, climbing like bottle rockets once they were out of each other’s way. They climbed to a thousand feet and steered into cloverleaf turns in opposite directions until they came back around, side by side again, hovering. Cho came close to blacking out.

  “Stay high, but get over in front of it,” Nate said to Tucker.

  They watched on their screens through the long-range lenses. The sub—still powering forward—was fully surfaced now. The top of the conning tower opened and a skinny tattooed young man—his whole head was inked—climbed out onto the rolling deck. The sub had a four-foot shark fin welded onto its spine, some stoner’s idea of a joke. The skinny man stumbled toward it and grabbed hold, steadied himself, looking aft. The blue balloon was just ten feet off the water, the antenna line caught in a patch of seaweed draped over the sub’s tail. The man made his way unsteadily forward again to the conning tower and shouted down into the open hatch. After a second, the sub cut its speed to a crawl. The man hesitated, then went aft again, slipping and sliding on the deck.

  “Ten bucks says he goes over the side,” Tucker said.

  Another man—a Black in a beige leisure suit—appeared in the conning tower, shouting in the direction of the skinny man. The first man shouted back and went on trying to disentangle the drape of seaweed. When the kelp came free, the skinny man lost his footing, went half over the side, saving himself only by seizing another handful of the seaweed. He shouted for help, on his belly against the hull. The man in the conning tower thought the whole thing was funny and didn’t move an inch. The skinny man managed to pull himself onto the deck. He didn’t look at the man in the tower, just went at the tangle of kelp again, finding the antenna line. He gave the wire a yank to break it loose. The line snapped off. The balloon rose, free! The skinny man made a futile jump to catch it—like a daddy at Disneyland—but it was long gone. It came straight up, caught a wicked fast thermal, and went sideways toward the horizon, out to sea.

  Tucker was laughing.

  “This isn’t good for us,” Nate said.

  The second man in the conning tower now had an oversize phone to his ear, a sat-phone. The man finished his call and dropped down into the sub, and a second later it started moving forward again at full speed. The skinny man had to trot to make it forward and all but dove down into the conn. The boat was submerging, and this time all the way.

  Nate pivoted the bird. From this height, the coastline was clearly visible, with Todos Santos ten miles distant and Ensenada another twelve miles beyond. Nate drew a line on the ocean and headed in, flying the speed of the sub, in the same direction.

  Chapter Forty-One

  A long hour had passed. They were still five miles west of Todos Santos, still flying above the sub, flying low and slow along that straight line drawn toward Ensenada. No La Guardia Civil helicopters had come out to meet them, so that was good, but second and third and fourth thoughts were nagging Nate. At this speed, it would take another hour to get into the harbor. The sun was dropping, getting close to dusk. That was good for the sub. When dusk came on, the world got sleepy, and people started letting things slide until they stopped paying attention to everything. Especially in Mexico. They’d probably invented Happy Hour.

  It was torture for Nate and Tucker to fly at sixteen miles per hour. Like any fighter pilots, they weren’t built for slow pursuit. They were all about Now, always impatient for the end. CROs always wanted things to get real and get done. Nothing quite made sense to them until it did, in the air or on the ground.

  “I got an idea, Tucker,” Nate said, dry. “Why don’t you go on to Todos Santos?”

  “Thank you, Father,” Tucker said, and sped forward before Nate could change his mind.

  Nate said, after another long mile, “See anything, Rockett?”

  “Nossir.”

  “Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink,” Nate said. “That’s what my dad used to say, every time we sailed our Hobie Cat.” Memories were dogging him.

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  There was no air. “Maybe they’re all dead up front,” one man said.

  More than a few of them started considering that possibility, as unlikely as it was. They started grumbling again and the ones up front went back to pounding on the door.

  “God damn it!” a despairing woman said. “Surface!”

  “Shut up, they’ll gas us again,” a man said.

  The panic ramped up fast. Suddenly they were all gasping, fists clinched, pounding on the low ceiling and the walls. “Let us out of here!”

  A white-haired man stood against the back wall of the cargo box, still on his feet although he was likely the oldest among them. His back was ramrod straight and his eyes were clear and bright, the color of the sky on a better day than this.

  Without an introduction, he began…

  I shant forget the night when I dropped behind the fight

  With a bullet where my belt plate shoulda been.

  I was chokin’ mad with thirst and the man that spied me first

  Was our good old grinnin’, gruntin’ Gunga Din.

  It quieted the panicked. Someone even smiled. The children turned to stare at the man, whom none of them had paid any mind before.

  He lifted up my head and he plugged me where I bled,

  And he gave me half a pint of water green.

  Though I’ve belted you and flayed you,

  by the living God that made you,

  You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.

  Up front, the crewmembers were as drained as the people in back but at least now Nix, Perry, and Víbora weren’t feuding or casting blame. It used up too much oxygen. Perry was at the helm, on the floor with a plastic jug of water between his legs, his shoulders slumped forward, breathing as if he’d just run a footrace. Nix sat in his vibrating lawn chair, his eyes on the deck. The shouting from the cargo hold had stopped. Through the holes they could hear a man speaking, calmly.

  “What is that?” Perry said.

  Nix, who was closest to the door, said, “Somebody saying a poem or something.”

  “Poem,” Perry said.

  “Tap the next tank,” Nix said to Víbora. Víbora didn’t get up, just rolled over on his hip, reached up, and started screwing closed one valve, moving a rubber hose to the next tank in line and opening the new valve.

  There was no hiss.

  “Empty,” Víbora said.

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  Tucker lapped Todos Santos and once more started up Nate’s line drawn on the blank ocean. He’d already twice flown all the way over into Ensenada, looking for anything, seeing nothing. “They’re gone,” Cho said behind him. “Or at least they’re not here. It’s going to be dark soon. No way they’d go in blind.”

  “Who’s going to tell him, you or me?” When Cho didn’t answer, Tucker went to the radio, “Hey, Nate.”

  Silence. Tucker rotated his Crow, a slow spin, came around until his nose was pointed toward the long brown line of the coast. Baja looked a thousand miles long.

  “Nate.”

  Nate returned to the airwaves. “I’m here,” he said. Tucker didn’t have him on the heads-up screen but he remembered the look on Nate’s face when they were on the ground at Tecate. “You go north, check Puerto Nuevo again, then watch Ensenada,” Nate said. “At least until the federales come out. We’ll go south.”

  “What’s south?” Cho said.

  “A memory,” Nate said.

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  “I got ’em,” Nate radioed. “Big as hell.”

  He was riding high. The sub was a hundred feet in front of him, running due south, submerged except for the conning tower. The sun would be gone in a half
hour. The scene below—the golden expanse of sea, the shoulders of the tan mountains, the curving hyperblack coastal highway, the pastels of the sky—looked like a commercial for the Baja Department of Tourism.

  “Where are you?” Tucker came on to say.

  “Five klicks south of La Bufadora, just offshore of Punta Banda,” Nate said. “Come on down. Bring your longboard.”

  Five minutes later, Tucker was on Nate’s port side.

  “I can’t believe it,” Cho said, looking down at the conning tower.

  “What do you need me to do, sir?” Rockett said, not over the radio. “When we go in.”

  “Remind me I’m never wrong,” Nate said.

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  There it was, Conqueroo. Until the thirteen bodies on Coronado had overwhelmed him, Nate had kept count of the dead he’d seen. He’d also kept track of something else: the times he had come close to dying himself. What did close mean to him? Close enough to see it, feel it, taste it, look into its eyes, shake its hand, learn its real name. By his count, he’d almost died four times. (Being shot and stepped on and thrown off the roof in Boyle Heights wasn’t one of them, nor the episode in the exploding restaurant kitchen.) Nate’s most recent real brush with Mr. D—number four—had come two years ago, when a shoulder-fired rocket had blown him out of the sky over Van Nuys. But first on the list was Conqueroo, a left-hand reef break in Mexico, when Nate was nineteen.

  The Crows hovered at five hundred feet a half-mile offshore of the hideaway cove, like rich people in box seats. Ten minutes ago, they’d watched as the submarine—still half-submerged, only the conn showing—powered in toward shore just past a rocky point. And then it had stopped cold, well out beyond the waves. It hadn’t moved again, was just sitting there offshore.

  It was an unusual place, a cove with a small river—just a stream, really—coming down from between the low brown hills before crossing under the highway beneath a simple arch of a bridge. The beach was half rock/half sand with the river splitting it. There was nothing around, not even a fishing shack. The whole scene was empty, empty and beautiful in the dusk. There were two lines of surf. The set farthest out from the beach was a roller that never broke, just flexed its muscular shoulders then shoved its mass of water on toward the beach, onto an up-slope on the bottom and then a reef. The reef created the second line of waves, the shore-break. The waves were long and straight, tubular and translucent. From offshore, from the helos’ high angle, in the last light of the day, they looked like pastel glass tunnels, too good to be true.

  “Does it have a name?” Tucker said.

  “Conqueroo. That’s what we called it.”

  “Where are all the surfers?”

  “Somebody or something ran ’em off.”

  “Is that a river?” Cho asked.

  “A big creek. Twenty feet across. Freshwater.”

  “What’s up in the hills?”

  “I don’t know,” Nate said, in a voice none of them had heard before. “Never went up there.”

  “They’re surfacing,” Rockett said.

  Cho was watching the shore through binoculars. “I see boats, coming down the creek. Four Zodiacs with outboards, two men in each boat.”

  Tucker fired up his track & target gear. “They’re coming out through that surf?”

  “It’s better than having them swim in,” Cho said.

  “Stay here,” Nate said, peeling off from Tucker. He shot out sideways, northward. “I’m going up in the hills.”

  “The hatch is opening,” Tucker said. “The same guy—the guy with the sat-phone before—is sticking his head up.”

  Nate cranked into a hard right. A beat later, he was over the coastal highway and then across it. He climbed even higher as the brown hills came up under him. He took up a position above the narrow river, high above it. A dirt road came off the coast and wound up into the hills, came out into a half-open wooded area next to the river, piñon pines with the underbrush cleared away, a campground or picnic area. It was rustic, not much to it—no buildings, not even portable toilets—but it looked sanctioned, government-issued. There were no campers or picnickers—not that it was empty. Two stake trucks with canvas roofs were next to the water, under the trees. A driver sat on the bumper of one, smoking a cigarette, kicking at the dirt. Nate drifted sideways and found another angle. A second man was stretched out on a picnic table.

  Nate radioed the others, “I got two trucks up here in a picnic area, two drivers.”

  “There’s a third man, in the back of the truck,” Rockett said, over Nate’s shoulder.

  “Two drivers and middle management,” Nate told everyone.

  Tucker came back with, “Tat Man is out on deck and a new cat has come out too, Latin-looking. It’s happening.”

  “Here they come,” Cho said. “They’re bringing the first people up on deck.”

  “They look half dead,” Tucker said. “There are six of them, holding onto each other. Shit, there are kids.”

  Nate let the Crow slow-drift southward and looked down. The Zodiacs were just coming down the last stretch, transitioning from the river, powering into the ocean, toward the shore-break.

  “Stay up,” Nate said to Tucker. “Tail at the sun, nose down. So you don’t catch the light.”

  “I don’t think they’re looking up right now. God damn, are you seeing this?”

  Nate pivoted, switched to the long lens. The first of the Zodiacs were punching into the shore-break, an eight-foot wall of water. Each boat had a man in the bow holding onto a rope and a motorman with both hands on the tiller and throttle. There didn’t seem to be much wave-timing involved, just bravado and brute force. The first boat made it up and over the wave, cutting through the top two feet of curling water, the Zodiac almost standing on its tail as it powered over. The second boat was twenty feet behind the first on the same line. It had an easier go of it, though the same wave was still alive and kicking.

  “They’re bringing more people on deck,” Cho said. “How much sun is left?” Cho said. “They can’t do this in the dark, can they?”

  Tucker said, “This makes the RV deal look like a real good plan.”

  Into all the charged radio talk—Nate and Tucker and Cho talking over each other, running their words together—came a calm voice, Carlisle. “Where are you, Nate?” she said.

  “Here. We got ’em,” Nate said, fast. “South of Ensenada. Where are you?”

  “Waiting off Todos Santos,” she said.

  “You got a boat for us?”

  “A hydrofoil, a whale-watching boat. It’ll hold forty. Where is here, how far south?”

  “Five kilometers below La Bufadora, the point. They’re right now taking them off the sub for the run to the beach. In Zodiacs.”

  “The sub?”

  “Guess I didn’t mention that. They have a submarine.”

  Then, company. La Guardia Civil was back, one fat black bird, hugging the coastline and coming south at five hundred feet. It passed on over the cove, continued on without changing speed or altering course. It was not possible that they hadn’t seen the action, but they kept on going.

  “And there they go,” Nate said. “Nothing to see here.”

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  Bridget Lindgren was in the first Zodiac going in to shore, pressed tight against her father, under his arm. She was so cold. How could it be so cold, if this was Mexico? The sun was still up and everything was pretty and warm-colored, so how could it be so cold? Then she thought that maybe it wasn’t the seawater making her shiver. She remembered how she’d shivered after they’d told her nanna was dead. (What they had said was that they had lost Nanna, but she knew what they meant.) They had told her they were staying in that camp with the trailers and tents—and they had hugged her, tighter than ever before, but then they had gone off with their arms around each other and left her in the dark
tent, shivering so hard she wondered if a person her age could die just from shivering. Now her father and another father were shouting for everyone to hold on, as if any of them weren’t holding on already in every way they could. Though she knew it might make her more afraid and even colder, she pushed herself up until her head was above her daddy’s shoulder, until she could see ahead. She’d never seen the ocean until that last day in that town on the coast when they got a ride over from the dried-up vineyards and then another ride down to Los Angeles with the woman. And she’d certainly never seen the ocean from the ocean, looking toward the land. So she didn’t know what she was seeing in front of them, a smooth hump of water getting humpier and humpier until the rubber boat tipped up with it. She was seeing so many things she had never seen before, and not all good. The open boat kept rising, going up the backside of the wave, the outboard motor racing, sounding desperate, overwhelmed.

  Bridget’s mother squatted in the bottom looking with both eyes at the six inches of water splashing over her feet. Only the children would have been surprised if she’d jumped over the side. She buried her head under both of her arms. Her husband reached out with his free arm and pulled her close to him and their daughter, just as the bottom fell out from under the Zodiac and it nosed over the shoulder of the wave.

  The little girl was surprised by how soft the landing was. The boat dipped, then righted itself, came up again, and then they were surrounded by foam, the wave behind them. The foam was just foam, like a bubble bath. She looked back. The man at the motor twisted the stick more and the engine growled even louder and the boat jumped forward. They had won a fight with Nature. It was something else that was new, and this time, it felt good. Her father squeezed her tighter, but now it was more like a hug hello instead of goodbye. The motorman smiled at her. He pointed. Ahead was something strange and wonderful. Just as the ocean was ending, a new pathway of water opened up before them, water that was coming toward them, toward the ocean. A creek, like the ones at home? It was as if the beach was opened up, split down the middle. The Mexican man standing in the bow turned and shouted something to the motorman and he steered left and rode the new water across the beach and then under a high bridge, into a place of trees, strange as that was. She patted her mother’s foot.