Without Warning (55 page)

“How did they get this far?” she said to nobody in particular.

Fifi appeared at her elbow with a couple of chilled Coronas. She watched the surfers for a moment before shrugging.

“Surf breaks get pretty crowded. They’re probably used to it. Wanna beer?”

“You have to be fucking kidding … oh … what the hell. Could you open it for me?”

Fifi popped the tops and passed one to Jules. She kept one hand to the wheel while draining half the cerveza in a couple of long pulls. The crisp, icy cold bite was like an angel’s kiss. Indeed, she couldn’t recall ever enjoying a beer nearly as much. It was almost obscene.

“You coulda waited, you know,” said Fifi. “I cut up some limes.”

“Only poofs fruit the beer, sweetheart. What’s happening below?”

Fifi finished her own drink and tossed the empty bottle overboard before answering. It crashed into the prow of a ferry, eliciting a raised fist and long string of unintelligible curses from the skipper. She flipped him the finger.

“Miguel’s got the mariachi band all stowed away down below. They’re cool. No problemo. That fucking prom queen though, and her brother …”

“Phoebe and Jason?”

“Yeah, them. They’re already arguing with the banker and his boob job about who gets the big cabin.”

Jules squeezed her eyes shut for just a second. It was dangerous to have them closed for any longer.

“As long as they keep it down there, I don’t give a rat’s arse.”

A deep, high-powered horn sounded off to starboard. A large container ship had dropped dozens of lines over the side to pick up people struggling in the water. Another big ship, an oil tanker, was heading straight for it. Jules wondered why until she saw the telltale sparkle of gunfire around the bridge.

“Damn, Julesy,” said Fifi. “Nobody’s in charge of that son of a bitch. You’d better haul ass. This ain’t gonna be pretty.”

Jules did not need encouraging. As Shah came hammering up the steps to warn them of the impending disaster, she flicked on the boat’s PA system.

“Hey. Listen up, everyone. Get down low and grab something. I’m going to have to lay on some speed and do some rally driving.”

Another long, shrieking blast on the container ship’s horn pounded at them, and all around her, those ships that could put on speed suddenly did so, leaping up at their bows and churning up white wakes.

“You have seen?” asked Shah.

Julianne pushed the throttles to three-quarter power, and the boat leapt ahead.

“I’m on it,” she cried out over the rising clamor of horns and the screaming of thousands of people in the water and on nearby boats.

Stray rounds from the firefight on the tanker splattered against the boat inches from Fifi’s head. She unlimbered the PKM and spat a stream of tracers back at them. “Fuckers!”

“Get down and stop arsing around!” Jules shouted.

Reefing the wheel to port, she narrowly avoided spearing an old wooden yacht that looked a lot like the
Diamantina.
It was certainly of the same vintage, and seemed to be crewed by three swimsuit models. Another sharp turn to starboard swept them around two more yachts, which had already collided with each other, and a bright yellow water taxi that was dangerously overloaded. The bow wave from her boat struck it amidships and it went over.

Jules was sorry, but there was nothing she could do about it.

Behind them the horns of both the tanker and the container ship roared in one long, deafening note.

Shah pointed her toward a stretch of slightly less crowded water, and Jules opened the boat’s engines all the way. The massive bulk of the sixty-foot power craft lifted even higher in the water, and she gripped the silver wheel hard, concentrating on not running into anyone. A few blasts on her own horn began to scatter and clear some room up ahead, but then the warning was lost in a huge, world-ending uproar as the two giant ships collided. Risking a look back over the stern, she saw the container ship keel over violently. So great was the impact that dozens of the giant steel crates stacked high on its deck were thrown clear; those from the upper stacks described long slow arcs over the top of a few lucky ships before crashing down and utterly destroying a host of smaller boats. One rusted blue P&O container turned end over end and flew a good hundred meters before slamming amidships into the overcrowded garbage barge they had previously left in their wake. It struck like a giant fist, crushing hundreds of people instantly and cleaving the barge in two. Bow and stern folded up like a jackknife and sank in less than a minute. More and more of the massive steel boxes began to fall away as the ship tilted over. They rained down over the side, falling directly on top of those vessels and people who’d been initially spared as the first containers sailed well over their heads.

Jules flinched, expecting to hear the volcanic eruption of the oil tanker going up, but it never came. Then the thundering collision and avalanche of containers gave way to torturous tearing and grinding of steel plates as momentum crushed the two ships together.

“Awesome,” said Fifi as Jules turned away from the spectacle to concentrate on threading their way through the pandemonium of fleeing craft.

Having hung back while she negotiated safe passage through the chaos of the collision, Shah appeared at her side as they finally swung out around the southern head of Acapulco Bay and got a little sea room in which to maneuver. To port stood the high, wooded slopes through which they’d driven back from Revolcadero Beach, and Jules made certain to maintain a safe distance from them. Twice they’d hit roadblocks rolling through there, and she didn’t fancy getting sniped by some resentful bandito sitting up on the bluffs. Around them the smaller craft began to suffer in the open ocean. The cries of distress from hundreds of small boats suddenly swamped by the powerful and unruly ocean swell was distressing. She had seen a lot of children on some of those dinky little tubs, but she pushed them out of her mind. To stop and pick up anybody would mean getting swarmed by hundreds, possibly thousands of people. Julianne left the throttles open and brought them around to the southwest, heading for the rendezvous with Mr. Lee.

“I have spoken to Thapa,” said Shah after a few moments. “As you asked, he has done some work back on shore. Investigating the attack on your vessel by this Shoeless Dan.”

“Whoa,” said Fifi. “He’s cute
and
smart. Man, I’m gonna have to get me some of that later.”

The way she was eyeballing the small, well-muscled Gurkha standing at the stern, Jules knew it was no idle threat.

“Did he find out anything useful?” she asked, as the towering Aztec pyramid of the Fairmont hove into view a few miles off the port bow. “It’s okay if he didn’t. I wasn’t expecting much. Just wanted to cover our arses really.”

Shah, who seemed able to maintain his balance in the rough conditions simply flexing at the knees, shook his head.

“It is his job. And mine. He discovered nothing specific about the attack on your boat, but there are at least three syndicates, criminal enterprises, that moved very quickly to capitalize on the Disappearance. Most of their activities were restricted to land, but one of them already had a history of maritime criminality. Perhaps this is how they came to know your shoeless friend.”

“Makes sense.” Jules shrugged. “Maritime criminality was Shoeless Dan’s special power.” She spun the wheel to take them on a long looping course around a paddle steamer that had somehow found itself blundering through the waves. It was nearly as badly overcrowded as the sunken garbage barge had been, and she wanted to give it a very wide berth. “But there’s not much of a piracy culture around here,” she added. “Not like parts of Asia. A lot of smuggling yes. But not piracy. The Americans would not have allowed it, even in Mexican waters. You think somebody’s branching out? I mean, not that we’ll be hanging around long enough for them to try their luck.”

Shah bobbed and ducked quite comically to maintain his balance without ever once needing to grab on to anything to steady himself.

“You will if you insist on hugging the coastline to drop Pieraro’s people anywhere,” he said.

Jules frowned testily. “Look, I’m really pissed off about that. But I didn’t see any way around it. Miguel had that Colombian nutter holding the crowds off us, and he could have very easily put us right in the poo if I’d cut up rough about the mariachi band.”

“The what?”

“Sorry. In-joke.”

Fifi produced another beer from an icebox on the flying deck and winked at Shah.

“They’re cool with me,” she said. “I think they’re cute. Wanna brew?”

Both Jules and Shah answered at once. “No.”

“They’re not American citizens,” Jules continued. “They’re peasants. Nobody is going to take them in as genuine refugees. Even if we can get all the way across the Pacific with the rations we have on board—and, look, I suppose we can—Hawaii will not take them. They’re shedding people at the moment. New Zealand might. Australia won’t. And everybody else is just as likely to open fire on us as soon as we sail into view.”

Shah held both hands up as if to show her that he had nothing left.

“I do not presume to tell you what you should do. But you have hired me to provide security, and I advise you now that heading back toward the coastline will be a very dangerous business.”

“Fifi, you’ve been out on the
Rules
with Lee a lot more than me. How’s our provisioning?”

She drained half the beer and burped.

“ ‘Scuse me. It’s not bad, Julesy. That golfer had some good shit in the fridge, and plenty of it. And we topped up the larder nicely. There’s like two frozen pigs and a couple of steer down there now. Plus, them Mexicans did bring plenty of food. Not like those other fucking snobs. All they brought was expensive luggage and heaps of attitude. I don’t see a problem. Really. Come on. It’ll be fun. Be like Carnivale every night.”

Jules looked to Shah for support, but he remained entirely impassive.

“I just… it’s just that… oh, I don’t know … my father taught me that helping people was wrong. It never ended well. We’re not philanthropists here. We’re smugglers at best.”

“Foxy fucking smugglers,” said Fifi, saluting Julianne with her bottle. “And anyway, your old man ate his pistol one night just before the cops grabbed him. Should you really be looking to him for advice?”

Jules looked completely lost.

“That was my mother’s fault,” she said bitterly. “If she hadn’t tipped off Scotland Yard about Daddy’s diddling the tax man …”

Shah regarded her with some confusion.

“Your mother informed on your father?’

“After a less-than-satisfying divorce settlement failed to provide for her in the style to which she’d
so
been looking forward,” Jules explained.

She was surprised to find it hard to speak, with her throat suddenly locking.

“I was his favorite,” she said quietly.

The sutures in his butt made it all but impossible to run, and for a running-high junkie like Melton, that was becoming every bit as uncomfortable as his assorted injuries.

“You’ll have to excuse my irritability, Sadie. I’ve been folded, spindled,
and
mutilated. Puts a man in a poor frame of mind.”

The al-Jazeera correspondent clicked his coffee cup against Melton’s and smiled.

“It is nothing. Really. Look at what is happening to the world. And you are worried about your manners.”

“Well, perhaps if people were possessed of a few more manners, they wouldn’t go around killing each other with such abandon.”

Sayad al-Mirsaad’s eyes flickered nervously around the departure lounge. Kuwait International Airport was swarming with armed personnel from a dozen different countries—mostly American, however—and the atmosphere was twitchy and dangerous. Dense knots of travelers, civilian and military, crowded around every available television screen to follow the war news. There had already been one unpleasant incident when al-Mirsaad had been recognized from a report he’d filed on the sinking of the USS
Hopper.
A
couple of marines didn’t think he was suitably respectful in tone, and Melton had been forced to intervene before the little Jordanian got stomped.

It had put the American in a bad mood, arguing with his own people, even if they were a couple of Podunk assholes who would have left the world a better place had they stayed home and been zapped by the Wave. He’d been snappy and irritable ever since, and his inability to break out of the blue funk simply made it all the worse.

He needed to piss, his wounded hand throbbed like a bastard, and he’d had no sleep in the thirty-six hours since the first Israeli warhead had gone off. He was grateful to Sayad for hauling his ass out of TRANSCOM limbo, though, especially so given the business-class ticket, paid for by BBC World, that his colleague had handed him.

“You’re off to London, you lucky devil,” said al-Mirsaad as he handed over the precious travel wallet. “You don’t deserve it, of course, what with your whoring and drinking and your disgraceful attitude to the Prophet and his faithful. I should really be going in your place. After all, I am much more virtuous.”