Hurricane Fever

by Tobias S. Buckell

  Kit and he’d taken turns sailing all night, and now for most of the dark, stormy day. He’d let her take a spare room in the starboard hull for when she was off her watch.

  With the waves crashing hard against the side of the ship, they had started zigzagging their way toward Aves so they could either sail into or with the swells. If they let the waves come at their sides they would flip the catamaran. Which meant it was going to take longer than he wanted to get to Aves.

  “It’s okay,” Roo mumbled, bracing himself against the wall with one hand to keep wedged in place. It was disconcerting to feel the catamaran rocking from side to side, as it was usually so stable. But they were sailing south. The wind and waves coming from the east were large enough to rock the catamaran, though already clocking slightly more northish as trailing arms of the hurricane would be reaching them. That’s why it was still dark out. The sun was lost to them, the sky covered in ominous clouds as if the apocalypse had begun.

  “Police scanner says your boat’s up and gone,” Jacinta said. “Where you holing up?”

  “I’m not,” Roo said.

  “You at sea?” Jacinta was shocked. “Where you headed?”

  “Jacinta…” Roo said, rubbing his eyes. “You have something for me or not?”

  “You never sent over the heavy metal you promised,” she said. “You know how I feel about broken promises, Roo.”

  Shit.

  Roo put his back to a wall and used a leg to steady himself. “Delroy’s dead.”

  “I know,” Jacinta said. “I’m sorry.”

  “I had to go after them,” Roo said.

  “With a speargun?”

  “Delroy’s dead.” Roo repeated that flatly.

  “I’m not a corporation,” Jacinta said. “You don’t get billed by me for my services. You either pay me, or you don’t. I didn’t demand it up front because … you know.”

  “Then I will either owe you a favor, or pay you the heavy metal when I’m next in town. You need the favor before I can pay you, I’ll settle up,” Roo said, knowing damn well he was going to pay her before she could call it in.

  He could almost hear the predatory smile on the other side. “I know who your little mamacita is.” She was vamping a bit, now, enjoying the moment of holding something over him.

  Roo looked down at the gun in his right hand and rubbed the flat space around the safety thoughtfully. What, he wondered, was going to happen next?

  He suddenly realized he wanted to hang up. Not to find out.

  Somewhere, something deep inside him wanted to believe that Kit was Zee’s sister, hidden away in Florida all this time. A secret that Zee had managed to keep.

  “She’s French,” Jacinta said. And Roo let out a puff of sad air. “A DGSE agent stationed out of Guadeloupe and Martinique. Popped up a few times in French Guyana. She trained in the Thirteenth Parachute Dragoons, so … don’t get any ideas, Roo. She’ll probably kick your ass. And she’s most definitely not Zee’s sister, or related to Zee in any way. Her name is Katrina Prideaux.”

  “Thank you, Jacinta,” Roo said.

  “Roo,” Jacinta’s voice softened, “I went to the memorial service this morning. Before it got too bad.…”

  Roo ended the call quickly.

  Gun in hand, he walked up the steps and into the main cabin, then out into the spray-filled cockpit. Katrina sat in the captain’s chair, a rope serving as a quick and dirty seat belt.

  They were moving with the waves: surfing down them a little as they caught up to the boat, then the bows pitching up as the swells swept on by. Katrina was no longer using her feet to steer, now. Her back muscles strained to hang on to the wheel under a seawater-soaked blouse. She’d pulled her hair back into a ponytail, and was shivering.

  Salt crusted everything. Water droplets beaded every surface in the cockpit, including the waterproof heads-up display windows.

  “Bonjour Katrina Prideaux,” Roo shouted. “Je suis très heureux de faire votre connaissance.”

  The Spitfire slid down the back of a wave. The next towered ten feet over the cockpit behind them. In the trough it felt like the entire world was suddenly glassy oceanic gray and full of spray. The wave threatened to envelop them. The cockpit, with windows on the front and the main cabin in front of it, was completely open to the rear. Any waves coming from behind the catamaran would dash themselves right against anyone standing in it. But the slope of this wave caught the stern first. Spitfire rose with the giant wave. The deck pitched down as they began to rise and move with the wave, instead of it dashing against them.

  There was a rhythm to it. A wet, dangerous, constant, exhausting rhythm.

  Kit set the autopilot, tapping on the salt-encrusted glass of the cockpit window. “I didn’t know you could speak French,” she said. In English, but an English without the flat Midwestern accent she’d been adopting earlier. Now her own slight French accent replaced it.

  Without her hand at the wheel, the autopilot struggled to smoothly handle the massive swells on its own. The rudders kicked, following digital instructions that were not as instinctual as a human hand.

  “Delroy and I had plans to visit Guadeloupe,” Roo said. “I was taking lessons.”

  Kit pointed at the gun held loosely by his thigh. “Do you need the gun?” she asked.

  Roo looked down at it, then back up at her, still tied tight into the chair. “Probably not,” he said.

  Kit untied the rope. “You knew I was lying, a long time ago. I’m fairly sure of that,” she said calmly. She held on tight to a handrail and stepped closer to him. “And you haven’t felt I was a threat. Now that you know who I am, do you think it’s all changed somehow?”

  Roo flicked the safety back on, but didn’t say anything.

  She stepped closer. “You let me on this boat because, deep down, you think I might be able to help you. You have good instincts, Roo. Listen to them. Let me help you.”

  He looked at another massive wave dominating the horizon behind the catamaran.

  This was all such a bad idea. But then, he always went for hooking into people. Whether virtually or in real life, it was about following the chain of people.

  Kit was another link.

  “So you’re DGSE?” he asked.

  “Yeah.” The wave struck, and the back of the ship dipped below the surface of this one instead of rising with it. A steeper wave, it gently grabbed the back of the ship. A foot of water suddenly rose up to boil around Roo’s knees. Kit’s eyes flickered with a moment of panic as she gripped the nearby rail with both hands.

  After the wave passed by and the Spitfire pulled free of the fingers of ocean water, as the scuppers hissed and gushed leftover water over the side, Roo looked at the soaking wet French agent in front of him.

  “How much further were you going to take all this?” he asked her.

  “My orders were to pretend to be Zee’s sister to see if we could find out what your part in all this was, and why he reached out to you. But then I ended up in the middle of a running gun battle within minutes of meeting you. Everything since then has been me making it up. It’s been a mess. I’m hoping we can still find a way to work together.”

  She hung tight as another wave struck. The autopilot systems were coping remarkably well.

  “You stayed with me,” Roo said. “But how do we get past suspicion and toward trust when you never told me who you were that whole time?”

  “You and I,” Kit said, “have to start all over again. I understand that. I broke your trust. But you knew something was wrong with me and kept me close. So just trust that. Let’s see if we can build on that.”

  They braced and let another wave sweep through the cockpit.

  Kit started shivering. Even in the Caribbean, the water was just a few degrees colder in the storm. Enough to start sucking away your body heat.

  “Roo. This storm…” she said. “We’re in trouble, aren’t we?”

  He could see what she was thinking. A man in grief
, taking to the sea. She’d been caught up in the moment and running away toward some solution. Now she was wondering if he was out here to push the edge, maybe nearly commit suicide by storm. She was wondering if he’d dragged her down with him.

  And maybe, somewhere deep inside of him, in a place he wasn’t going to look too carefully, it was true. If they died out here, he’d take his revenge and grief down in pieces to the lightless abyssal mud thousands of feet below them.

  Where it truly belonged.

  This was why, whenever he killed someone in the field, they took the gun and sent him to a beach for a few weeks, he thought. Meeting the therapists. Getting your head straight.

  Roo cracked open the cockpit locker. “I should have shown this to you,” he shouted. “I’m not thinking straight.”

  He pulled out Delroy’s survival suit. That’s why he’d been avoiding getting the equipment out. Avoiding one last thing of Delroy’s because he couldn’t face seeing it. And because of that, all the while he put her at risk of getting swept off and dying.

  Shit.

  They weren’t in the worst of the hurricane. It was just a bad storm right now. But that was still no excuse. The swells were tall, the wind strong, and the cockpit awash with water. And it would be getting a little worse, though Roo felt they could weather it just fine.

  “A survival suit,” he said. And gave her the same exact rundown he always gave Delroy as he helped her suit up. “It’s the closest thing you’ll ever wear to a spacesuit. It gets bad enough, just zip up, jump off, and leave me. You’ll get picked up once the worst of it all blows past. Understand?”

  Kit nodded. No recrimination in her eyes, but a strong look of relief. Roo got suited up as well, tucking the gun away deep within one of the many inner pockets.

  It was time to get his head in the game. He strapped himself into the captain’s chair and motioned Kit over. “What were you hoping to find? What happened to Zee? Why are the French all up in this?”

  Kit staggered over and shoved her back against the cabin so she could face him and keep herself secure. Roo offered her a harness clip, and she snapped on. Even if a wave knocked her clear off the boat she could pull herself back aboard.

  If she chose.

  “For the past few years I’ve been assigned to a team specializing in genetic terrorism,” Kit said. “Two months ago in Bordeaux two families died of a particularly virulent hemorrhagic fever.”

  “Like Ebola?” Roo asked. He imagined people dying, blood leaking out of their orifices. People in masks and clean-suits standing around.

  Dying like that was horrific. And not something you associated with Bordeaux, France. But the superflu that hit ten years ago caused redesigns of major airports to include medical testing facilities and quarantine hospitals. Bugs could travel anywhere within a half day.

  “Ebola would have made sense in a larger city. Still, people travel, Bordeaux is easy to get to by rail from Paris and an international flight. But these families hadn’t traveled anywhere. They were immigrants, but long since settled in their routine. The house was in the country, a retreat with a fully stocked automatic bar. It was supposed to be a rare, much needed, quiet vacation for them. They had the place stocked with groceries ahead of time, planning to stay in and cook for themselves. They were infected on a Friday evening, by Sunday leaking blood from around their eyeballs and barely strong enough to call for help. An emergency quarantine of the whole town locked the situation down.”

  Roo shook his head. “You think it was a test run of some kind?”

  “Yes. A minor test. A taste of things to come. It was a strain of the Marburg virus, originally discovered in Eastern Europe and cultivated by the Russians last century.”

  “There are European hemorrhagic fevers?”

  “Eastern Europe. It’s very old, and the vector was likely African monkeys. But yes. We’ve always been haunted by them. No one’s been comfortable that the Russians canned it and kept it alive. But then, the E.U. and U.S. keep some very nasty viruses alive as well.”

  That was the sort of apocalyptic, mutually assured destruction sort of thing that appealed to paranoid, large nationalistic militaries. Last solution bullshit. And, Roo thought, whenever something like that was left around, someone would decide to use it for something. “That’s what killed the two families in Bordeaux?”

  “There was MARV-like code in the DNA. First we thought it was just that. But the more we sequenced and poked around the more worried we got, because we found elements of an aerosolized Venezuelan hemorrhagic fever grafted in. Had we not assumed the worst and quarantined the area, it may have spread via emergency support personnel. DGSE treats it as an unknown bioterrorist attack.”

  “But I haven’t heard about it,” Roo said.

  “We kept a lid on it and declared it Ebola,” Kit said. “No one claimed the attack, so we refused to give them the satisfaction of terrorizing anyone. But Roo, it’s important we catch these people. If they release it in a big city anywhere … hemorrhagic fever is bad enough. But if all it takes is a sneeze to spread it, it will spread like a flu. But one where you vomit blood. That has a fifty percent mortality rate. That’s Black Death all over again. Worse.”

  “Is that how Zee died?” Roo asked reluctantly.

  Kit looked down. “The same virus. DGSE shared information with all the agencies about the attack. CIA found Zee dead in Miami. He’d taped all the ducts and air gaps in a hotel room shut with garbage bags and tape. He called you. Then he called the CDC and told them he was dying of an aerosolized Marburg virus and to treat the hotel he was in as a biohazard. He died halfway through the call.”

  “Without telling you who did it to him,” Roo said, puzzled.

  “He wasn’t sure,” Kit said. “That’s what I’m here to find out.”

  Roo took a deep breath. Then he pulled the tree frog necklace off and handed it to her. She looked down at it. She could tell it was something important. “That’s what Zee left me,” Roo said, tightly. “Go down, stay dry, see what you can figure out. I’ll sail.”

  Kit’s eyes were wide. “Thank you, Roo.”

  He shut the cabin doors behind her and zipped his survival suit up tight against the increasingly large waves and stinging wind.

  The autopilot was struggling. It was too dangerous to run with the waves, now. He was going to have to turn them around to face the waves so that they could break over the ship’s bows. And he’d have to turn the catamaran quickly, without tipping them over. He would spend the rest of the night staring Njema down, eye to eye. Let the violence sweep right past him, through him, or wait until it headed north again.

  Roo clipped in and glanced back at the towering swells. The wind whipped spray off their tips, creating a violent storm of white that filled the air above the dark green gaps of the ocean.

  He spun the wheel and triggered a command to reef the sails further.

  16

  Somewhere around midnight the tip of Njema’s southernmost spiral passed them by. The winds shifted, and while the swells remained building-sized, their slopes were gentle and predictable.

  While pointed into the wind, Roo’s reefed sails hadn’t done much to propel them forward in any way. They’d just kept him pointed into the howling wind. So each battering wave had shoved the Spitfire backward. Time and time again. The GPS plot showed they’d continued to move south all through the night. A good forty miles.

  At three in the morning, Roo’d felt comfortable turning them southwest toward Aves and letting out some sail. By five he was letting the autopilot take control again.

  At sunrise Roo washed his face with some freshwater via a deck hose in the corner of the cockpit, scrubbing away caked-on salt and letting the cold water shock him.

  There was a danger in sailing. The ocean looked infinite from the cockpit. The horizon hundreds of miles away. But the truth was that you were only actually seeing a few miles in any direction. With radar, a camera at the tip of the mast sweeping for obje
cts, and modern collision alarms plugged into a distributed navigation system, the chance of stumbling over something was small.

  But you still needed to stay alert. For other small craft. For something floating in the water.

  Yes, you could let your eyes sink closed for a few minutes. And open them to find something large coming over the horizon. No alarms because the software was glitched.

  Container ships couldn’t swerve to avoid you, even if they wished they could.

  So after washing his face Roo got back into the chair and kept on for Aves, leaving Kit downstairs.

  By the afternoon the sunlight glinted off the waves and the rhythm of the swells changed. They weren’t in the deep ocean anymore; the depth finder was able to find the bottom underneath them.

  The first hint of Aves were the tops of the office buildings. Communications equipment and whip antennas appeared, as if floating on the ocean surface. A distant helipad rose from the horizon.

  As they got closer, the glinting metal windows of the main cluster of high-rises loomed over a tiny spit of sand.

  Roo made a phone call. “Hey, Elvin! It’s Roo.”

  A moment on the other side. “Prudence?”

  Roo made a face. He wasn’t sure if Elvin had refused to use his nickname to keep needling him, or just out of a strange sense of formality. He’d last sat on the deck of the Spitfire with Elvin a few years back when he’d sailed around St. Vincent a bit. Helped Elvin fix a broken 3-D printer.

  He kept in touch because Elvin worked private security gigs up and down the islands. The kind of person you wanted to know, because Elvin knew who was up to what in terms of larger corporations. It was an old habit, because Roo wasn’t in the game anymore. But he couldn’t help himself when it came to collecting contacts like Elvin.

  And now … it came in handy.

  “Been a while,” Roo said. “But I need to ask you a favor. I’m coming into Aves. Need your help feeling my way around.”