Trident Force

by Michael Howe

  As the woman spoke, Chrissie saw the glint of recognition in her eyes. Chrissie was grateful that she had the grace not to start the “Aren’t you Chrissie Clark . . .” game.

  The woman was right, she thought. It was already getting chilly and they said it would cloud over during the evening. She glanced out the corner of her eye at the woman, who was busy talking with the equally elderly man on her other side. She might very well be a somebody, but she wasn’t a big-time somebody, a somebody whom Chrissie would be expected to recognize. The realization was a relief. Chrissie had grown tired of big-time somebodies.

  Chrissie’s trip to the top of the charts had taken longer than those of some of her peers. She’d started in clubs that, during the day, smelled as if they could use a good scrubbing. She’d been spotted by Harold, a slick guy who was better connected than her then-current agent had been. Harold managed to put together a few small shows and she developed a regional reputation. She finally tired of Harold’s insistence that her body was part of the deal, and eventually found Buddy, and Buddy managed to do it. Big shows. A contract with a big label. An international following.

  Chrissie had been at the top of the charts now for almost five years, but she still wasn’t comfortable. She was reconciled to her royalties dropping because everybody was copying her stuff, and she almost looked forward to returning to live shows. Even now, there was for her nothing quite like having twenty thousand people around you, screaming their love for you. And she returned the emotion. When she smiled and waved, both were acts of total sincerity.

  But what was going to happen when she finally fell off the top? When Buddy could no longer pull rabbits out of his hat? When people no longer even wanted to steal her stuff?

  Nobody just sinks slowly and disappears anymore. Now you fall with a loud, bone-shattering crash. One moment you’re the Queen of the Universe, the next you’re the worst sort of tramp. And when that happens, the media—and the self-appointed bloggers, most of whom she suspected couldn’t tie their own shoes—fall upon you. They tear you to pieces with both beak and claw and then gnaw on your still-living organs.

  She’d once had tons of friends—friends who were no-bodies. But she’d lost track of most of them. Now she spent her time being seen with somebodies, very few of whom she considered friends.

  Chrissie felt an overwhelming desire to speak with the lady next to her, whoever she was. “There’s something almost surreal about lying in these deck chairs when we’re headed toward the South Pole,” she remarked.

  The woman looked at her and smiled. “They’ve become part of the ritual, haven’t they? Years ago, Fred and I made a number of passages to Europe on liners and everybody seemed to feel they had to spend hours in the deck chairs. Even in the winter.”

  On hearing his name, Fred raised his head, smiled at his wife, then at Chrissie and then settled back into his chair.

  “We put on every scrap of clothing we owned,” continued the woman, “wrapped up in one of those horse blankets they provided and lay there, a brilliant smile pasted on our faces, obviously having the time of our lives.”

  As the singer listened, she realized the woman was studying her, even evaluating her. Maybe she’s trying to decide whether or not to introduce me to her grandson, she thought. She must have one. That might be a real adventure. A change of pace. To have a boyfriend who’s not a somebody, who doesn’t have a big, gold ring in his ear and an incessant need for attention. Like she once did.

  Chrissie lay back in the chair and was soon dozing, lulled by the ship’s stabilizer-gentled motion.

  By noon, Aurora had crossed the forty-fifth parallel, the wind had increased, and the sky to the south had started to darken. Despite the increasing seas, the ship barely rolled, thanks to the new, cutting-edge stabilizer system installed during the overhaul. And the ship’s third engineer, Jacob Rounding, could appreciate the stellar operation of the new system. He could but he didn’t because he simply didn’t care.

  Jake Rounding was born with a chip on his shoulder, and for various confused reasons, it had grown much larger over the decades, until now he was thin, white-haired and stooped under the weight of a very heavy block.

  Rounding had drifted into the merchant marine and over the years risen from engineman to his current position. His superiors considered him more than competent and his subordinates considered him okay to work for. But nobody had ever described him as warm or cheerful. There are many more aimless wanderers like him to be found at sea, even in today’s world of high-tech navigation.

  Third Engineer Rounding was examining an electrical distribution box on the deck just above the boat deck when he first spotted the little girl. She was talking excitedly to an elderly couple—waving her arms and dancing from foot to foot—and the couple appeared to be utterly enthralled. Rounding suddenly felt as if a spear had been thrust into his chest. The little girl looked just like Annie had when she was young.

  Well over twenty years ago Jacob Rounding had found himself living with a woman whose essential cheerfulness had seemed, for a time, to be the perfect counterbalance for his own gloom. A child had resulted, a little girl whom they named Annie. And Annie had captured Jake’s soul. In time, however, the adults’ relationship was destroyed both by Jake’s incessant gloom as well as by the constant absences demanded by his profession.

  During the first few years after the split, until Annie’s eighth or ninth birthday, Jake had managed to keep in touch with her and her mother. As the time passed, a portion of the mother’s cheer had become barbed, at least with respect to Jake, but Annie’s joy had remained pure, her enthusiasm undiminished. Then the mother had found what turned out to be the right man, for a change, and married. Every effort was made by both sides for Jake to spend time with his daughter, but it simply wasn’t the same. He came to feel he was shut out, unwanted. He was driven back to sea—to voyage from here to there, purposelessly and forever.

  And yet, his love for, his obsession with, his daughter had grown with every night he spent lying in his bunk, alone in the dark, emotionally lost and going nowhere.

  He’d planned to see her again. Time and time again. But, somehow, something had always interfered, so, instead of knowing the real Annie, he dreamed of the little girl who once was, many, many years before.

  Then it was too late. She was gone. According to the news she’d joined some half-assed demonstration about something nobody would remember two days later. The weather had been hot, as was the political situation; the cops were cranky, and somebody had given an order that may or may not have been misunderstood. Depending on whom you believed. The fact was that Annie was dead. The system had taken from Jake the one thing, the one person, about whom he cared in the slightest. And with respect to Annie, he had cared with every ounce of his soul.

  Trembling, Third Engineer Jacob Rounding forced himself back to the junction box to try to determine why the electricity was off in two of the most expensive suites. He decided he was going to have to send one of the electricians.

  “How’s it going, Cagayan?” asked Jake Rounding an hour later as he tried to peer into the tiny space behind the backup generator.

  “Good, Mr. Rounding,” stuttered Marcello as he returned to wiping up the diesel oil that had spilled from a leak, now repaired, in the generator’s supply line.

  “Find any other problems?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Good.”

  Cagayan listened as Rounding turned and continued on his way. He then reached into his right pants pocket and rubbed the cell phone. It’d become for him a fetish, the ultimate symbol of power. Of strength.

  Although he had not appreciated it at the time, Marcello had experienced power from even his youngest years. His father, as stern and demanding as any man with too many children, no money and no wife might well be, had required his near total obedience. He had rewarded performance with food, and failure with starvation and beatings.

  The boy recognized power and autho
rity, but he had not begun to understand its totality until the day his father, his existing icon of power, had been forced to his knees. There, in the eyes of the soldier, he had seen the pleasure that comes from the exercise of power. And from that day on he had been compelled by the world around him to learn more and more about power, strength and weakness.

  The runty, malnourished boy’s path to the sea was a long, painful one. It started with unending hours of walking down muddy roads and across fields and through the hot, damp forest, sleeping where he could. Along the way he stole food from farmers just as impoverished as his father. Then one night, one of those impoverished farmers named Pablo caught him stealing a banana and beat him severely. Instead of driving him off into the forest, however, Pablo threw him in an old pigpen behind his house, which was itself little more than a shell of random, rotten planks, flattened tin cans and tree branches—and made a virtual slave of him.

  For the next three months Marcello worked Pablo’s tiny fields—his bare feet deep in the richly organic mud, his body lashed by the hot, summer sun—while Pablo starved and beat him. It didn’t take him long to understand that Pablo beat him not because he had misbehaved but because beating Marcello gave him pleasure. When a man is weak himself, it is always a pleasure to inflict his will on somebody even weaker.

  One night Pablo went a little too far—he beat Marcello so severely that the boy’s brain stopped working correctly and his left knee, when it finally healed, would only bend with the greatest effort. Believing he’d killed Marcello, Pablo threw his remains over his shoulder and carried him a mile into the forest through a torrential downpour. There he dumped him in a muddy ditch, anticipating that the wild boars would dispose of the meat. And there Marcello would have died if not rescued by some missionaries.

  The missionaries succeeded in saving his body but had no luck with his soul. Marcello feared them because he could not understand the power about which they preached. To him, power was a stick, a fist, a gun. As soon as he could, he escaped into the forest and finally out onto another mud road, now limping and stuttering from injuries that never healed.

  Over the following years—years filled with hunger and degradation—he tried once or twice to rise up, to be strong himself, only to be brutally beaten down again. Because he stuttered and had to think before he spoke, and was very small and skinny, some called him mono—monkey. Others just called him tonto. Stupid.

  When he did finally reach the sea, he was able to get a job crawling through and shoveling out the truly foul bilges of a hopelessly rotten, dirty inter-island passenger ship. It was the sort of ship that appears occasionally on the evening news having sunk, drowning four hundred people in the process.

  Twenty years later, when Omar came across him in a back-street bar in Rio, Marcello had accepted the world’s judgment of him and concluded he’d gotten as far as he ever would. He was an oiler, a bilge cleaner, an unlicensed engineman, and that was all he ever would be. His destiny was to do all the mindless shit work. He would always be the mono, the tonto. He hated everybody around him and he hated himself even more.

  Omar had first spotted Marcello because the small, unemployed oiler was sitting alone at the bar, stuttering quietly to himself through clenched teeth. It took Omar less than one beer to determine that the Filipino might well be a surprisingly valuable asset. His rage was sincere, deep-seated and white-hot; he was aimless, despondent, and he was far smarter than even he seemed to believe. Shortly thereafter Omar discovered a bonus quality: Marcello had always made a point of listing himself as a Roman Catholic, even though his parents had been Moslems.

  Over the next few weeks they met from time to time. They spoke of oppression and power, hatred and revenge. They went up into the mountains to drink beer while Omar taught Marcello about rifles. They also spoke of money, but it soon became clear to Omar that power of a much purer, more personal sort was the key to Cagayan. Deep within his disciple burned a long-denied lust to have power of his own. The power to force his will upon, and control the destinies of, others. The power to decide who will live and who will die. The power of the rifle. And the bomb. All Omar had to do was awaken the passion and show Cagayan how to make it real.

  As they spoke, long-abandoned furies moved to the forefront of Cagayan’s consciousness. So powerful did they become that he seemed to pay little attention when Omar made some suggestions about how to save himself after he’d launched the mini-holocaust.

  In due course, Aurora’s overhaul was completed and a significant number of new crew members had to be hired quickly. Omar arranged for Marcello to be one of them.

  Cagayan rubbed the cell phone again. He could use it at any time. Type in a number and press call and the world would end. He was the strong one. He was the one with the power, and the temptation to exercise it was almost overwhelming. But now was not the time, not the place, for the terror to be the greatest.

  He went back to wiping up the oil.

  “Some of these PFDs are beginning to look a little tired,” said the chief mate to the boatswain as he looked into a locker near the starboard lifeboats.

  “Yes, sir, they are,” replied MacNeal, the boatswain. “There’s some paperwork headed your way already.”

  “Good. I must say you’ve kept right on top of the bright-work. The captain was very pleased at how good the ship looked during the Welcome Aboard Party.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Mate.”

  “What do you think of the new men you got in Rio?”

  “For the most part they’re good. No real bad apples, no real incompetents, although a few are pretty young and green. There’re a couple I might like to trade in at the end of this trip, but I don’t really have anything to complain about.”

  “Good,” said Winters as the pair continued to walk forward. After they’d gone a few paces, the mate stopped and banged his hand on one of number three boat’s gripes—the wire straps that held the boat securely in its cradle. “I see you replaced this one. By this time tomorrow we’ll probably be back in the usual shit, so let’s take the chance to fix and secure anything else that needs fixing and securing this afternoon.”

  “Yes, sir.” By now both the wind and the ship’s motion were beginning to develop a certain edge.

  The mate and the boatswain continued their tour of inspection. It was a ritual with which both were very familiar. The mate would comment on things, knowing that in most cases the boatswain was already working on them, and the boatswain would agree, knowing the mate was condemned to return soon to his purgatory of paperwork. The two had now been working together for several years and had developed a comfortable relationship. Anyway, that was how matters have always been handled between mates and boatswains.

  Despite the growing seas, Aurora continued to make good time as she sliced her way south toward the fiftieth parallel and the even worse weather that awaited her there.

  As midnight approached, a number of the tables in the Masthead Lounge, the larger of the ship’s two lounges, remained crowded. While pop music played quietly in the background and three servers made the rounds, the more social among the passengers were able to enjoy themselves or, in a few cases, drink themselves half to death. Thanks to their inability to see anything but their own reflections in the lounge’s picture windows, most were blissfully unaware of what the dawn might bring.

  At table seven, Senator Alvin Bergstrom held court. In attendance were Babs, Linda Williams and several media persons who were there to get a little “background,” having promised to use no direct quotes. Wendell Gardner had also settled there a few minutes before, after managing to wear out his welcome at several other tables, even though the other people at those tables had essentially agreed with his stridently advocated positions.

  “I’m still a little confused about the man versus nature argument,” remarked one of the news reporters.

  “That’s no longer a legitimate question,” replied Linda, before Wendell could butt in. “Our computer models prove that
all significant change is controllable . . . by us.”

  “But some big names continue to argue the contrary . . .”

  “Old has-beens!” shouted Wendell before Linda could cut him off again. “Those characters are stuck in the past . . . and many of them have accepted money over the years from the oil companies. Look, who’s getting all the federal grants these days? It’s not the old, corrupt fogies; it’s the young people who know what’s what.”

  Linda glowered at Wendell while the senator sat, smiling, and Babs squirmed. How much of this would the media end up indirectly attributing to the senator? she worried. Guilt by association was a big part of the game. And how would his backers react? God, she might yet have to find a new job. And all because the old bastard had the hots for a girl forty years younger than he was.

  At table thirteen Tim Sanders was exchanging pleasantries with Sam and Alison Parker—a pair of lively senior citizens who looked half their real age—when Dana returned from checking on Katie.

  “All well?” asked Alison.

  “Oh yes,” replied Dana with a smile. “She’s sound asleep, and anyway what could happen to her? We know the neighbors on each side and across the hall—Katie introduced us to them. I’ve already spoken to the night steward and she knows how to ring for him.”

  “She’ll be fine,” Alison assured her.

  “You know,” started Sam, “this is the fourth expedition cruise we’ve been on—Asia, Africa and South America—but I have a feeling this one is a little different. We’re still trying to keep an open mind about this global warming business, and when I attend some of these seminars I get the same feeling I got when we went on one of those long weekends the time-share developers give out. We ended up almost locked in a room for hours while three brokers triple-teamed us to buy a unit.”

  “We’re here for the penguins,” said Tim, “and anything else we get to see or do. I mean, Antarctica is Antarctica, whether or not it’s shrinking, so when special discounts were offered to schoolteachers in my area, Dana and I decided it would be a great family adventure, especially since . . .”