Quest for the Ark

by Taggart Rehnn

  However, at about the same time, the premises’ rightful ‘tenants’ arrived—and, in the ensuing pitched battle, both palafitos caught fire.

  As Gennady, Tony and David were putting as much distance from the place as possible as fast as they could, both the flames and the combat kept intensifying. Suspiciously—given the location and intensity of the flames—both palafitos exploded in colossal balls of fire, at almost the same time. Some of the perpetual oil spills all around them also caught fire then. Soon enough nothing would be left but smoldering ruins and the carbonized remains of those Oleg had murdered. In the mayhem, many members of both groups of ‘chemists’ died as well, their boats and equipment engulfed by the flames, and then gradually swallowed by the lake in an orgy of screams, threats and curses.

  “Guess your vampire cleaned up for nothing,” ironized Gennady, who might not have ‘seen’ Severian, but sure saw the cleaning implements displaced.

  “I tried to save their lives by burning the place down! Palafitos can be rebuilt. The solar power, that’s another story. But palafitos can be rebuilt. We couldn’t be sure the place was totally clean. Those corpses were laced with furanyl fentanyl. I couldn’t even give them proper soldier’s burials in this rotten watery grave. I reasoned that if they got there and thought it was a trap, Arturo would really be in trouble. Now he’s fucked! I was hoping the battle would keep them all far enough for the lab to burn. The corpses…at least the corpses won’t be eaten or desecrated. But now…now…now everything is fucked!” snarled Tony, as they headed at full speed to their intended destinations, on a backdrop of Catatumbo lightning and massive discharges from the battle royale for the palafitos in flames. Arturo—a.k.a. the ‘Empress’— would have to be very resourceful to find a way out of this mess, but Tony was determined to make good on his promise, should he survive this night.

  Severian reached the hidden Russian base when the submarines were still two hours ETA from their rendezvous points with the boats. By then, leaving the blaze behind, the three boats—including the towed one—were racing full tilt towards the coordinates where they were supposed to split, and had almost reached that point without further incident.

  But then, less than a mile from that point, a substantial group of lake pirates on large high-performance boats converged on their convoy. As they prepared to repeal the attack, a incredibly fast shadow—one Tony recognized from their road trip, a shadow that dwelt between Barquisimeto and Valencia—descended on the pirates with demonic fury, striking them, it might seem, from every imaginable direction.

  Unexpectedly mauled from above, the pirates lost control. Boats started running amok, some of the boats crossing paths and colliding—two of them exploding, as machine gun fire from the boat they were about to hit reached the other boat’s fuel tank. Watching their demise, the three men on the attacked convoy sighed with relief. However, before the battle was over, Gennady was shot, on a leg and an arm—something he, preferring to risk his life to keep his alibi rather than risk meeting the submariners and then having to watch his shadow at Seryshevo, chose to tell no one and keep going.

  Seeing the first glimmer of the submarine’s emersion beacon on top of the sail, he quickly tapped David’s back and jumped immediately on his boat, awkwardly, but just a bit. Before David could ask him what was wrong, Gennady had left the scene at full throttle. Assuming he might have been just grazed by a bullet, David shrugged, saluted him, turned around, and, as planned, prepared to come onboard and take his equipment to this first sub.

  All the while, Gennady was heading towards Barranquitas, on the west shore of the lake, where he would try to seek attention for his wounds. After that, he would contact Maracaibo. Although the pain was becoming too much to bear, he now had no other option.

  Once far enough from the submarine, he did slow down, however, to quickly dress his wounds. Well aware that in his increasingly precarious state he might not survive a confrontation with drug dealers in the area, he then opted for driving his boat as slowly and stealthily as he could, always in the direction of Barranquitas. His going slowly would also give Tony, David, and the submariners time to complete their insane maneuver ballet before Gennady’s handler in Maracaibo could send an alert up the food chain.

  Almost certainly, the moment he’d report to his handlers in Maracaibo, the entire Tablazo Strait and the seaway at Lake Maracaibo’s mouth would become deadly traps for Tony’s northbound submarines. “They’d better have express delivery. Maybe that vampire-drone!” he told himself, laughing and shaking his head, at the absurdity of the idea. Go figure what drugs he had absorbed in that dope lab, if he wasn’t already getting feverish from those fucking wounds. “Vampires! Genoshka: you’re quite fucked up!” he thought and chuckled as he kept scanning for the town’s lights, trying to ignore the pain.

  Once close enough to Barranquitas, he noticed the town itself was still mostly in darkness, its very roads little more than tracts of dark mud, rife with over a foot-deep trenches excavated by too many tires from too many trucks and too many jeeps for such a small place. Then, suddenly, he noticed flashes and rattling from weapons fire in some areas of the town. So much for a sleepy fishing village: scores of fishermen, now turned dealers, were ostensibly battling it all out against a rival gang. This wasn’t about shrimp, tilapia and trout, but likely about ‘stackers’, ‘tina’ and ‘stash’.

  “Well, I either dodge this, look for a pharmacy, and waste time trying to get to Maracaibo by road; or tough it out, steal some fuel for the boat, and then head directly for Maracaibo—or at least get to La Ensenada, somehow. From there, I will call Viktor,” he thought. “As things stand, maybe the submarines will be in Miami by the time I get to Maracaibo,” he kept planning while laughing at his own predicament as was stealing a can of gas for his boat.

  Sadly, his good mood and good fortune were short lived: someone approached, stealthily, trying to catch him from behind. But he heard a boot being sucked from the mud, as his attacked lifted a foot to pounce. Pivoting fast as lightning, he whacked his attacker with the can using one hand, stabbed him in the neck with the other, recovered the dagger and the can, boarded his boat, rowed away as silently as he could, and left the man, bleeding and gurgling to death on the shore.

  Only when he had put some distance from that place did he fill up. Still then, just in case, he rowed some more to get farther away from the shootout that still was rocking Barranquitas. Then, shortly after starting the motor, he almost got caught again by a returning coke smuggler. The smuggler, however, was fully loaded; so he was forced to decide whether risking a valuable ‘stash’ load or catching someone who shouldn’t be there—and fortunately, he chose to let Gennady go. And then, while in excruciating pain, Gennady cranked his high performance boat, heading north-northwest, determined not to stop until he got to La Ensenada.

  By the time Gennady stabbed the man in Barranquitas, alarms were still blaring at the Russian secret base and frantic searches were underway to find who had stolen those boxes. Only when a stash of gold bars, seemingly stolen at the same time, were found inside a rusting empty oil tank—suggesting they had been taken simply to create a distraction—the base commander sent boats to further secure the two leaky submarines, only possible justification for such brazen theft—and decided they should alert ‘Natalia Vassilissa’, as she preferred to be called.

  When, after a night and over a day of partying hard, ‘Vavoom’ finally could shake her hallucinogens, she started dressing down the same base commander she had undressed with her teeth the night prior. But, by then, unbeknownst to them, enough time had been wasted to allow the submarine-tethering maneuver to make good progress.

  First, the robotic arms on both experimental submarines had worked like a charm. Then, after a very quick, remotely activated surfacing of both Russian submarines, their tracking devices had been deactivated by crawler robots dropped inside the bridge through each of the subs’ primary access hatches. Such astounding success would, however, al
so mark a particularly nightmarish episode for the base’s commander: since nobody could imagine someone with Severian’s ‘peculiar mind abilities’ intervention, ‘Vavoom’ immediately wondered how could have the rotating codes possibly been hacked without the commander’s complicit help—and assumed treason.

  When she started flicking her tongue like an emotionally perturbed angry iguana, he knew full well this time around he was going to be the one getting fucked. And indeed, without saying a word, ‘Vavoom’ suddenly stopped the flicking, whipped him in the face, left and right, using her constant companion—a black ‘riding crop’ type of whip—, immediately relieved the commander from duty, and sent him to roast in the brig, pending an investigation that would take place in Moscow.

  To make matters even worse, when the boats sent to secure the submarines reached their last known coordinates, not only were the submarines no longer there, but they could not be tracked either. This perforce meant all tracking devices on board had either been removed or deactivated, reinforcing the idea of treason by some higher officer.

  When the information was relied to the base, the commander was taken out of the brig and asked a few more questions, this time ‘a bit more forcefully’. Being understandably keen in stopping both the submarines and the torture, he then had suggested ‘Vavoom’ call Moscow to authorize indiscriminate bombing of the only narrow shipping lane through which Lake Maracaibo can be exited—a course of action she had agreed, in principle.

  Although such bombing would have obliterated the shipping lane—and this, further crippled the already terminally damaged local economy—planes were dispatched, awaiting only orders to deploy. Unfortunately for the former base commander, Moscow had immediately countermanded the order, further enraging ‘Vavoom’, who now had authorized ‘Stage 2’ interrogation on site, just in case, while she nervously read her instructions, flicking her tongue, quickly memorizing the details before the message self-erased: Moscow would claim those submarines had never existed—or rather, they might have; but if they did exist, were never there. If any evidence should indicate they were there, someone had stolen them from a naval base near Murmansk. This would be the official story. Elevated nuclear radiation in the lake was due to nuclear American spy submarines. If Venezuelan forces should manage to intercept them, the Venezuelans had attempted to capture the American spy subs as they tried to escape into the Gulf of Venezuela; but the spies had resisted, and it became necessary to neutralize them—assuming the Venezuelans could sink them. In short, it then became a totally Venezuelan matter, and the submarines’ rightful owners were there just sent for when the heist was discovered.

  Were Venezuelans to choose not to sink them—in order to prevent massive radiation leaks or to save the shipping lane; or to fail, because the submarines should elude them—then American mercenaries had stolen them from a base in Murmansk; and, again, they had never been on any mission in Lake Maracaibo.

  The base commander should immediately return to Moscow to be debriefed, unharmed. That final order made ‘Vavoom’ flicker her tongue like an entire coterie of iguanas on meth, forced her to stop the interrogation, apologize to him and then strenuously try to make amends. She had not been aware of the commander’s family ties. She had begun as a ‘sparrow’, and fast risen through the ranks to become a fearsome ‘eagle’. Now painfully aware this stupid ‘mishap’ might well turn her to ‘chicken cacciatore’, she left the room snarling and cursing like a drunken sailor in a tavern brawl.

  A few hours later, while ‘Vavoom’ was in the throngs of passion, drowning in vodka, suffering a nervous breakdown, having rough sex with one of her minions nicknamed ‘Gorachlen’, Tony was on the second submarine, using a secure line to talk to a man with a strong Israeli accent. “Yes, Simón,” he was saying, “David did quite well; but he, most definitely, is in no shape, physical or mental, to be reactivated. No way, no how.” When Simón protested that this wasn’t was his sources told him, the discussion turned to acrimonious argument for a while, as Tony listed a long list of deficiencies to David’s performance, both in France and in Venezuela—including a fling with a DGSE operative codename “Irène” who ended up dead because of him.

  Eventually, as things calmed down, the other man eventually agreed to abandon his plans to fully reactivate David—and also, confirmed he had found the funds to maintain a joint discrete round-the-clock protection detachment, not only for the Rumanian family from Palos Verdes, but also for Haim’s family, his synagogue, and David’s family as well.

  At that point, he and Tony had changed subject, and started discussing a safe haven for the Russian base sub-commander—which, unbeknownst to Simón, Tony’s brother would exfiltrate under an assumed name through Colombia, using the open ticket Severian would now need no more. To get to Bogotá, Arturo, a.k.a the ‘Empress’, would not only take the base sub-commander but also his surviving ‘colleagues’ at ‘El Putafito’ across the coca fields, since the burning palafitos had resulted in an all-out gang war they could not possibly win—and rely on Tony’s contacts among ‘coke barons’ to get safe-passage on the Colombian leg of his escape. To cross the Venezuelan side, Arturo would have to improvise.

  The morning after the submarines crossed Tablazo Strait, an inflatable boat carrying David and two sailors reached the beaches of San Nicolás, in Aruba, where a jeep awaited them. And in hardly another hour, the three had safely arrived in Oranjestaad.

  Though overjoyed the submarine’s doctor had given him a clean bill of health— and his calculations had given Catatumbo, at least for the foreseeable, if not a clean bill of health, at least a pretty decent diagnosis—David was now dying for a hot shower, clean clothes, and ravenous for some decent food.

  Come hell or high water, the shower was going to be his first order of business—the very first thing he would the moment he was alone in his hotel room, even before calling Deborah. On his way to the shower enclosure, throwing his submariner clothing all over the place, he only stopped for a moment to have a look at the toilet and couldn’t avoid a deep, almost hysterical, belly laugh, when he found himself checking for spiders on the floor.

  Immediately after, he jumped in the hot, steamy shower and giggled as he opened it full blast. Like a child with a new toy, he tried every single bottle of shampoo, cream, body lotion, soap bar and conditioner he could lay his hands on, enjoying every minute of the jets massaging his body and washing away so much more than grime and fatigue. His mind raced as he watched the water swirl in the sink, shedding tears of joy and of horror along with those far more profane from shampoo suds irritating his eyes.

  Though delightfully distracted and pleasantly relaxed, he suddenly heard a noise. “Room service, Sir,” called the chambermaid, suspiciously ignoring the giant “Do not disturb” sign David was perfectly sure he had hanged from the room’s doorknob.

  At first he shrugged it off, and kept showering. But then, he heard another, different noise, like a bucket of ice where a bottle is plopped, followed by the door softly closing, as if someone had just left—and after that, dead silence.

  Startled, and a tad intrigued, at first, he hesitated. Tony sending him a ‘thank you’ gift? That didn’t sound like his style. Could it be a trap, instead? The Russians? The neo-Nazis? The drug dealers? Venezuela was still too close for comfort to shrug them all off.

  Fearing an ambush, he first cautiously opened and then pushed the shower door shut, but left the water running. Taking his military-grade dagger from his pants left on the floor, firmly clutching it, ready for close combat, he then stealthily emerged, naked as a worm, crossed the long corridor tiptoeing, and finally burst into the living room—only to find Debbie, his wife, lying on the couch, dressed as a French maid, feather duster and tiara included, smiling and waving to him, with one very expensive bottle of champagne cooling off on the bottle rest right beside her.

  Eyes widened by the shock, letting the dagger drop, he at first stood there, mouth agape, frozen. Gradually, though, he bent o
ne knee, resting it on the floor, and now, closer to her, stuttered: “De-de-de-bbie! How come you’re here and nobody told me?”

  Chuckling, and blushing as she noticed how her costume clearly affected him, she replied, jiggling: “Need to know basis, darling!” Following a first passionate kiss, it was she who took the initiative, pulling him in the direction of the bedroom—and not exactly by the hand. “We waited long enough, Dave. Now it’s time we have our own home-made whirlwind, with Catatumbo lightning and lots of thunder!”

  “And a large bottle of champagne, baby!” he said, taking her in his arms as she grabbed the bottle and the ice bucket, holding the tiny feather duster’s handle in her teeth.

  Two months later, having graduated from at a very upscale rehab clinic in Malibu, his life just rebuilt—like the clinic and most of the area—Tony’s brother Arturo was leaving the building. After the ‘Putafito’ was blown to smithereens and burned down, he had escaped Venezuela, across the jungle and coca fields, and finally left from Bogotá onboard a private jet sent by Tony. “I was so saturated with dope then, that that was the only way I could leave,” he started telling the hunk on a Ferrari that was waiting for him, a rather well known personal trainer he had met on one of his outings, barely a week ago.

  Clearly, things with Arturo’s new flame were going fascinatingly well, and moving fabulously fast and furiously forward. Seeing them kiss, from the clinic someone yelled, waving to Arturo and smiling: “Goodbye, Empress! Stay clean!”

  “I will, darling. I most definitely will! You too, stay out of trouble! Bye!” Arturo replied, teary eyed, waving back.

  “Empress?” asked the man on the Ferrari, helping Arturo load his luggage in the trunk. “A man with a voice like thunder, with tapered muscles like sculpted steel, taller than my bodyguards? Empress? Really?”