Without Warning (30 page)

Acapulco proper, however, was a patchwork of light and dark. From the flying deck of the cruiser, parts of the city looked entirely normal. Lights twinkled in houses and apartments, traffic streamed along the waterfront, and throngs of people were visible through the big pair of Zeiss binoculars she’d brought back from the
Rules.
Elsewhere, chaos reigned. Buildings burned, and the pop and crackle of gunfire was constant. Sirens had wailed through the first few nights, but they were becoming less frequent. In fact, Jules couldn’t recall the last time she’d noticed one. She poured three cups of coffee and silently thanked God that the thick blanket of toxic waste released by the burning of hundreds of empty American cities had drifted east, and not south. She was convinced this place would be falling apart a lot more quickly if a nuclear winter had descended as it had in Europe.

“Thapa. Come get your brew,” barked Shah, as he handed a steaming mug down to the heavily armed rifleman on the deck below. Thapa took his drink with a grateful bow of the head and a smile for Jules, making her feel much better about having to hire and trust so many strangers with guns.

She couldn’t help wondering how Pete would have played all this. Badly, she guessed, given that his first thought had been to team up with Shoeless Dan, just a couple of hours before Dan had attacked and killed him. She still missed the old fool, though. They’d been good friends, even if Pete had just a little too much of the surf bum about him in a situation like this. He took his business seriously, and he was a smart bloke who’d played the odds as well as any she knew of. But in the end he was like so many Australians she’d met, ultimately prone to falling back on a naive, almost childish belief that everything would work out for the best.

Nothing in Julianne Balwyn’s life led her to believe that. To an outsider, to someone like Shah for instance, she must surely appear as just one more rich oik, the lucky child of old landed gentry, wasting the advantages of the best schools, an ancient title, and a thousand years of hereditary privilege. For Jules, however, her old life was an anxious, contingent affair, where the pressure to maintain appearances was grossly aggravated by the manifest inadequacies of two parents whose laziness and selfishness were exceeded only by their sense of entitlement. She was well rid of all that bullshit.

“Okay,” she said. “We’re not going to need bartenders or butlers, but looking
over the old crew manifest, we will easily need more than a dozen warm bods to run the engine room, the bridge, the IT systems, and general deck duties. Probably be an idea to have a ship’s doctor, if we can find one, too. A proper helmsman who could handle the tub in a bad blow. A navigator for when the GPS goes down. I mean, where does it end? How do I pay them all?”

Shah swallowed his coffee in one long draw.

“You don’t,” he said with a single, emphatic shake of the head. “They pay you.”

“Beg pardon?”

Jules was perplexed, but intrigued. In reply her new security chief held up the empty mug.

“This coffee, Miss Julianne. It came from your own stores. But if you had bought it here, on shore, today, it would have cost you twenty-five euros.”

That caused a raised eyebrow but on reflection it shouldn’t have. She already knew that raging inflation and currency collapse had reduced the worth of the greenbacks they’d had stowed away in the
Diamantina
to a fraction of their face value. That’s why she’d got rid of them so quickly. The small office and waterfront store she’d rented here for five days had cost fifty thousand U.S. dollars up front. Now it would probably be a six-figure sum, but she was a lot more sanguine about that than she had been a week earlier. As soon as they’d hit port she’d moved to unload most of the cash as quickly as possible, and had managed to get forty cents on the dollar, taken in the form of fuel, stores, gold, medicine, and arms, most of it now safely aboard
the Aussie Rules.

Shah moved to the railing of the boat’s flying bridge and gestured at the party scenes around the marina.

“For now, these people are comfortable,” he said. “They have food, shelter, safety, power.”

He turned away and pointed to the brighter, more chaotic nighttime scene of Acapulco central, where uncontrolled fires dueled with neon and fluorescent light to hold back the darkness.

“Over there,” he continued, “some people are still fine, but many are beginning to suffer and to fear for themselves. Soon, everyone will be afraid. Especially Americans. A cup of coffee, a loaf of bread, it could be worth more than your life. People will pay you to get them away from that.”

“American refugees?” She pondered the thought aloud. The richest, whitest refugees in the world. It was a bizarre thought, but entirely logical when you thought about where events were headed, or indeed where they were right now. “Where would we take them? Alaska? Hawaii? The last I heard, people were leaving Hawaii, not going there. I don’t think they’re
even letting new people in. Same with Seattle, I think. Aid shipments in, flights out and that’s it.”

Shah moved his shoulder almost imperceptibly. His version of a shrug.

“If you have English-speaking passengers take them to an English-speaking port. England. New Zealand. Australia. They are not closed, and they will accept refugees, especially with money.”

“By the time we got there, any money they had would be worthless,” countered Jules.

“U.S. dollars, certainly,” he agreed. “But yen, or pounds or euros. Some surviving currency. They will be acceptable. At least to us, in the short term, for the purposes of provisioning. It would help you, too, Miss Julianne,” he added, with a knowing smile.

“How so?”

“The yacht is not yours, no? The owner, a famous man, the original passengers and crew, they are gone. But even so, you will have to have some legitimate reason for having taken her over. Ferrying refugees away from danger, especially Americans to friendly countries, to friendly
frightened
countries, it could make your passage into any harbor much less difficult. You could be a hero, a rescuer, not a villain and a smuggler.”

His eyes glinted with real humor in the dark.

“You’re not quite the ramrod-straight do-it-by-the-book type you first appear, are you, Sergeant?”

“No good sergeant is, Miss Julianne.”

Jules let her eyes wander over the distant vista of the city as it disintegrated. Long strings of beaded light, the headlights of cars leaving town, wound up into the hills behind the bay. Campfires burned here and there, pushing back the blackness, while occasional flashes of light betrayed either cameras or gunfire. A huge blaze had engulfed a high-rise tower, the flames shooting upward like a giant roman candle, and yet not far away she could see candy-colored neon and a pair of searchlights, picking out a nightclub where local rumor had it you could still dine and drink as though nothing had happened, as long as you could meet the very steep cover charge.

“Okay,” said Jules, making up her mind. “Crew first. They work for their passage or they get left behind. We’ll start here, at the marina, put out word that we’re offering a berth to qualified hands. But you and I might head out tonight, hit the right bars, gather the first of our flock. We can trawl the international hotels tomorrow, looking for passengers.”

“And to where will we offer passage, Miss Julianne?”

“Somewhere big and safe and far away. Somewhere the toxic cloud won’t reach. Somewhere that can feed itself. Defend itself, if need be.”

Shah gave her a quizzical look, inviting her to go on. Jules nodded at a framed photograph fixed to the starboard bulkhead. It showed the boat’s previous owner, Greg Norman, teeing off at Royal Sydney.

“In for a penny, in for a pound. Let’s take his boat back home for him, shall we?”

The scientist droned on, baffling everyone with his impenetrable waffle and jargonbluster, and in the end it all came to “We don’t know shit.”

“The phenomenon remains nonresponsive to magnetic resonance scans,” said Professor Griffiths, a small, round, redheaded toad of a man who’d added yet one more element of misery to Tusk Musso’s existence since his arrival at Gitmo with the National Laboratory team to study the Wave.

“The precise mechanism by which the phenomenon effects the transub-stantiation of certain organic matter to energistic potential and organic tailings remains nonobvious,” he burbled on, as Musso surreptitiously checked his watch. Griffiths and his eggheads had flown in from Seattle, via Pearl, and Musso remained convinced that Mad Jack Blackstone had facilitated the move as some sort of malicious practical joke. Given the paucity of findings the Nat Lab guys had so far turned up, Griffiths chewed up an enormous amount of Musso’s time and energy with resource requests he simply could not fulfill.

“Our investigations continue,” the scientist concluded.

Man, I hope that’s a conclusion,
thought Tusk.

“Any questions?” asked the marine, standing and addressing the room. Everyone remained unnaturally still. They had learned never to give Griffiths an opening. Ask him how high the Wave went and you were liable to get a half-hour dissertation on electron orbits.

“Very good,” said Tusk, hurriedly. “Bang-up presentation there, Doc, as always. You keep at it. Get back to us with anything new, of course. But don’t feel the need to interrupt your research otherwise …”

“Well, about my research, General. This exclusion zone you’ve established along the line of the phenomenon …”

“Is not open for discussion … Sergeant!”

A Marine Corps gunny rolled up to the podium like an Abrams tank with the throttles thrown wide open. He double-timed Professor Griffiths out of the conference room, closing the door firmly behind them.

Tusk relaxed slightly.

He wasn’t being unfair. Everyone had been intrigued and even a little excited when Griffiths had arrived with two pallets full of scientific equipment, but exposure to the man, coupled with a rapid realization that neither he nor anyone else had yet figured out jack shit about the Wave, tended to dampen that enthusiasm.

And he was a five-star pain in the ass.

“Okay,” said Musso with more relief than was seemly. “I can see we lost two or three KIA from boredom there. Not a bad result. Ensign Oschin, you got my PowerPoint files ready?”

“The file’s coming online now, sir.”

“Thank you, Oschin. Put it straight up.”

Tusk Musso rubbed at a freshly scabbed-over blood spot on his shaved head. He’d knocked a small divot out of himself fucking around under a desk earlier, fixing up a data cable that’d come loose. His fingers came away with a few tacky spots of blood and he had to pat down the wound with a piece of tissue paper while he waited for the vision from the Global Hawks.

Two of the giant, experimental UAVs were over the continental U.S. at that moment, covering Miami and Kansas City. In contrast to the first moments after the Disappearance, when everyone had been wired and speeding on fear of the unknown, the feeling in the expanded op center was now resigned and somber. Everyone knew what to expect from the footage. Empty cities. Deserted streets. Massive pileups on the road networks. Some burning buildings, many more charred ruins. Stillness. Ditches and craters of burning ruin in the fields where aircraft had gone down over what many called “flyover country” in the Midwest. Where there should be cattle or horses, there were charred spots and grassfires, especially in West Texas.

Megafires still blazed across the length of America, spewing unknowable tonnages of pollution into the atmosphere. Thankfully, there had been only two meltdowns in a couple of older nuclear plants when the auto shutdowns failed, at Browns Ferry in Alabama and Hartsville, South Carolina. On the other hand, many coal-fired plants went up for want of human attention or computer intervention. But in these two metro centers, at least, the worst of the conflagration was over. Indeed, it had never really started. Cold, soaking rain had hosed down most of the initial outbreaks in KC. And an airliner had speared into a power station in Miami, killing the grid before an untended waffle iron or hair curler was able to burn down half the city. Satellite imagery confirmed that similar strokes of luck had spared dozens of other cities, but hundreds more had been incinerated. Thousands, if you counted all the minor towns and burgs that had gone up for one reason or another.

“Miami on the right-hand screen. KC to the left, General.”

Musso thanked Ensign Oschin again, even though the two cities didn’t look much alike, and there was no trouble telling one from the other. The footage of Kansas City was trisected by a meeting of the Kansas and Missouri rivers in the center of the metropolis. No beaches, that was for certain. Musso had been to nearby Fort Leavenworth during the course of his career for some joint forces training with the U.S. Army. It had been the coldest winter he had ever experienced, and he certainly wasn’t eager to go back there anytime soon.

“Okay,” said Musso, as he turned to address the tightly packed group of officers seated on plastic chairs behind him. “This is a highlight package, cut together an hour ago from twelve hours of coverage by our two Hawks.”