by Alex Archer
"Ask for more time," Tex had advised her. "It's pretty standard for negotiations like this." She had. Although neither one of them was a professional negotiator, she understood the mechanics of hostage taking – you kill your hostage, you're out of leverage.
Her face twisted before she could stop it. "Thinkin' about her?" Tex asked softly.
She nodded. Though she knew intellectually she had done the right thing, her guts knotted every time she did so. There were so many horrible things they could do to her, she knew.
"Don't."
She looked at nothing for a moment, then nodded.
"Where'd you get the nickname Tex?" she asked, making herself sound cheerful. She hoped it didn't sound as brittle to him as it did to her.
He winced. "In the Army. Most of my squaddies in basic were Easterners. To them anybody from west of the Mississippi was Texan. Especially someone who was indiscreet enough to admit he'd been a cowboy. I hate that name, but it's stuck like a bad debt."
"Why?"
"Because I hated it. The Army's like that. And of course the network publicists had to run with it."
Annja laughed. "You were really a Ranger?"
His expression didn't exactly harden. Maybe set a bit. After a moment, he sighed. "Yeah. It's public record. But don't go believing everything you hear about me. Especially around the network."
She pursed her lips. "Okay. Were you really an adventure outfitter in Alaska and Africa?"
"Yes."
"Survival instructor?"
"Uh-huh."
"Medical bush pilot in Central and South America?"
He sighed. "Yup."
"You've been busy."
"Ran away from home when I was fourteen. Worked in oil fields for a while, then as a hunting guide. Wasn't hard to pass for older – I've been this size since eighth grade."
"Were you abused as a child?" Annja asked with genuine concern.
He laughed. It was a rich laugh. It did not strike her as a laugh with much to hide. "Oh, heck no. The opposite, if anything. My parents were nice as they come. Maybe too nice. They converted to Buddhism when I was thirteen."
"Seriously?"
"Cross my heart. What really did it was the veganism." He shuddered theatrically. "If I never see another tofu, it'll be twenty years too soon."
"You ran away from veganism?"
"Can you think of a better reason? That, and the chores got boring. It was a real working ranch, cattle and horses, not some rich folks' fancy. Not sure how my folks rationalize raising beef cattle as vegetarians – they still do it, by the way. Being a cowboy ain't as romantic as the movies make out. So mainly I ran away to have adventures." He laughed. "Of all the reasons to run away, that's probably about the worst."
"But haven't you, well, had adventures?"
He looked at her with level blue eyes. "Yeah. And that's the problem. You've had adventures, Annja. What'd they feel like?"
She thought for a moment. "Miserable. Mostly uncomfortable, inconvenient and scary."
"Me, too. Face it – adventure sucks."
She thought about that and found nothing to contradict. "Ever thought about quitting?"
"Oh, hell no. It's an addiction. I never tried crack, never even smoked cigarettes after my first one made me throw up. But I'm pretty sure the adventurous life hooks you worse. But what the hey – it's not like anyone gets out of this life alive, is it?"
His eyes danced. Annja laughed again. "No," she said. "I guess not."
****
John O'Groats was everything her heart could possibly have dreamed. Damp, gray, windswept and dismal. With sheep. Had the sun continued to shine, the land would have been dazzling green, between the boulders, anyway. But the sun refused to cooperate.
But outside was brilliant in comparison to the inside of the pub called the Jolly Wrecker. Especially the back room, with the sweating ancient wooden barrels and dust-coated bottles stacked around the sod walls. Despite the fact it was half-dug into a hillock, the wind whistled in the rafters and occasionally down the back of Annja's neck where she sat in a chair that seemed to possess no two legs of equal length. The pub had grass on the roof and a weathered sign with the image of a jolly-looking sport with a peg leg and a grappling anchor, dressed in a yellow rain slicker and what she would have called a sou' wester. She suspected the place had started life as a shepherd's hut.
Some places reeked of quaintness, others of atmosphere. The Jolly Wrecker mostly reeked of lanolin, although stale alcohol, mildew and faint but persistent hints of decay played their little parts. Even with the dim bare bulb, which must have pulled all of five watts, hanging far enough from the already low wood-beamed ceiling on its frayed cord to threaten Annja's cranium, it was like being inside a ship's hold.
"So," said the fat man with the greasy gray-and-brown locks spilling down around the shoulders of the dark blue rainslicker he wore over a dark pullover, "what can we do you for?"
Stop with the lame eighties one-liners, Annja had to forcibly restrain herself from answering.
Tex leaned forward and rested a forearm on the moist round table. Although his chair was as functionally unstable as hers, she noticed it didn't rock. Whereas every time she breathed one of her chair legs thumped accusingly on the warped plank floor.
"Information," Tex said, smiling. "We want information."
"You won't get it," the man across from him said promptly.
Tex's eyebrows shot up. Annja almost felt relief at seeing him nonplussed for once.
"It's a quote from The Prisoner," said the woman who sat beside the fat man. "An old series on the telly." She reached over to pat a pudgy hand almost as burdensomely beringed as her own. "Be a dear, Phil, and show our guests a little consideration. They've had a long journey."
"Sorry, luv. Can't help me'self. I can resist anything but temptation, you know."
"That and bad jokes," the woman replied.
The man looked back to Tex with dark eyes that danced despite the gloom. He had a keg head on a barrel body, a beard and a mustache with turned-up tips and in general a strong resemblance to dead British actor Oliver Reed, who had always been a favorite of Annja's, clandestinely watching movies in the TV room after the sisters had gone to bed. He called himself Phil Dirt. He looked like an old mod passed through a life of extreme ups and downs and going at last to seed, albeit not without a fight.
"Magic words?" he said.
"Huh?" Tex said. He blinked. He was still adrift at the stout man's earlier response. This abrupt but not unfriendly question pushed him further out to sea. "Please?"
"We'll pay," Annja said hastily.
Phil brightened visibly. "The very ones!"
The woman who sat beside him shook her head without looking up from her knitting. She had been introduced as Vicious Suze. What she looked like was a youngish Italian grandmother, or an aging Gypsy aunt. She had a big nose and dark eyes in a well-upholstered olive face, framed by long raven'swing hair with dramatic silver streaks that flowed down her shoulders over the shawl with which she wrapped her generous form. Her dress seemed to have been made of myriad brightly colored scarves. The name was clearly ironic, Annja thought. She showed an abundance of bustling motherly energy and cheer.
"Phil," Suze said with a tut-tut for punctuation, "the e-mail said they would. And anyway, dear Tex is family."
"It's always good to hear," Phil said with an expansive gesture. "Always make things explicit, say I."
"That's the law of good old B6," rasped the man who loomed over his right shoulder like a skeleton at a feast.
"The sequel to Babylon 5?" Annja asked, bewildered. She had gone into TV-trivia mode, having at last recognized The Prisoner as the sixties cult show starring Patrick McGoohan.
"Black Bart's Bloody Buggerin' Broadcastin' Brood," said what appeared to be a vaguely conical mass of abandoned brush standing by the barrels over Phil Dirt's left shoulder. Surreptitiously Annja counted the B s on her fingers. Closer inspection through t
he gloom, conducted earlier when the leader of the crew had introduced the man by the unlikely moniker of Ob Noxious, showed him to be an enormous fat guy with a nose like a large-pored potato and two murky green eyes squinting out from more graying blond hair and beard than seemed humanly possible. He looked to Annja as if, should you toss a bucket or two of green paint over him, he could play the Swamp Thing in a movie without recourse to special effects. Or even makeup.
"So you call yourselves Black Bart's Bloody Buggerin' Broadcastin' Brood," Annja repeated, trying desperately to understand why Tex had brought her here.
"Right," said the man to Phil's right. "One of the last free-range pirate radio crews in the British Isles, we are." He was called Lightnin' Rod, and seemed to be the station's power-plant guy. He was tall and cadaverous, with long lank black hair just touched with gray, a long, droopy black handlebar mustache and black eyes.
Annja sneaked a sidewise glance at Tex. She didn't believe in ESP, but all the same she beamed a thought at him: I hope you know what you're doing.
He winked at her.
"Since the music-hall routine will never end, otherwise," Vicious Suze said, her plump fingers moving like hummingbirds around a butterfly bush at her knitting, "what sort of information did you have in mind, ducks?"
"Anomalous traffic in the sea north of here," Tex said.
"Surface? Air? Radio?" Phil Dirt asked.
"Yes."
He raised an eyebrow at the American, then chuckled. "Aye."
"Boats, helicopters," Rod said. "See 'em all the time, buzzing off to sea."
"Do you know where they go?" she asked.
Phil looked at her a moment with an appreciative twinkle in his eye. With something like a shock she realized he was ogling her. She didn't know whether to be horrified or flattered.
He sighed. "No idea, I'm afraid."
"Can you find out?" Tex asked.
"Gannet can," Rod rasped.
"Who's Gannet?"
"Gannet Hundredmind," Phil said. A corner of his mustache quirked up in evident amusement as he said it. Another in-joke, Annja figured. She refused to ask.
"Our boy wonder in residence," said Vicious Suze, knitting away. "He's all that keeps us on the air, you know."
"Can you take us to him?" Annja asked.
Phil Dirt smiled hugely. "Just how adventurous are you feeling, luv?"
"What makes me think," she said, "there's no right answer to that question?"
Chapter 13
"Adventures," Annja muttered to Tex as the black Zodiac boat bottomed between two-story North Sea waves. The seat slammed her tailbone again. A spray of saltwater drenched her anew. Her hair felt as if she had soaked it with an entire bottle of some toxic hairspray, from all the salt. "Why does it always have to be adventures?"
Her companion had his head up and his jaw set in a somewhat fixed smile. "What'd I tell you earlier?"
In the stern, Lightnin' Rod steered, looking even more pirate-like with a black head rag sporting a skull and crossed cutlasses tied over his lengthy windblown locks. Having seen the same logo on a T-shirt sporting the legend Pirates of the Internet, worn by a geek from the tech department of the television station, Annja knew the kerchief probably came from some online store. She wasn't sure whether that added or detracted from the effect.
Ahead of them the Gannet C drilling platform rose slowly out of the gloom like a giant battle robot from some science fiction yarn. A few lights shone yellow and furtive from its bulk in the overcast early evening. Abandoned in the early nineties by British Petroleum after it ran too dry to remain economical to operate, the platform had become the haven and broadcasting station for Black Bart's bunch. The John o' Groat's contingent were cramped into the black inflatable power craft looking as serene as if bashing through sea were no more strenuous than a stroll in Hyde Park.
In among the shadowed pillars that formed the legs of the station, they found a welded metal ladder awaiting them. With a theatrical gesture Phil Dirt waved them to go up first. Tex in turn deferred to Annja.
Annja put a hand on a rung. It was cold and slick. Just the way she expected. Oh, well, she thought, no one is shooting at me.
She climbed. Tex followed.
"Our friends are being pretty magnanimous letting us go first," he called when they were twenty or so feet up.
"I just kind of figured Phil did it so he could watch my butt," Annja said.
"Well, that's certainly among the fringe benefits, ma'am. But, going first, if we slip and fall we fall on them. As opposed to vice versa."
"I feel so special."
****
"Right," the young man said, rubbing together hands in fingerless gloves. "Let's see what we have, then."
The main engineering room at the heart of Black Bart's broadcasting station was a boxy steel womb lined with racks and racks of equipment of unknown purpose. The various tiny multi-colored blinking lights and indicators provided all the illumination except for a few amber blackout foot lamps. It added to the sense of claustrophobia, as well as giving Annja the impression of being surrounded by hundreds of psychedelic rats.
Gannet Hundredmind swiveled on his stool, flipping switches to the left and right, at seeming random. Annja and Tex stood behind him. Annja tried hard not to hover. Tex looked centered and relaxed and in general as if he was having a fine old time. But then, he always looked like that.
Lightnin' Rod had stayed with the Zodiac boat when the others went up, apparently to berth it somewhere. Making her apologies, the matronly Suze had vanished after the climb to the platform, a chilly collection of rusty pipes and metal bulkheads, saying she wanted to tend to dinner. The others who had met the Americans in the Jolly Wrecker escorted them through a warren of dimly lit passages that echoed to the sounds of their footsteps, with water incessantly dripping from overhead. Now they stood in a clump at the back of the control center and chatted while young Gannet worked his magic.
"Sodding podcasts," Phil was saying to a stocky guy with a fluorescent pink Mohawk, jughandle ears and a pug's face, who wore grimy dark coveralls. He was Stan the Man McLeod, the physical plant engineer who kept the place as livable as it was – which, on first impression, wasn't very, although Annja suspected he deserved huge credit for keeping it habitable at all in the chill and hostile environment. He poured a sable ferret named Isadora from one big, stained, scarred, crack-nailed fist to the other without seeming to notice. "They're stealing our audiences right out from beneath our noses, they are."
"It's a terrible thing," added Rod, who had just slid in the door. "The pigs couldn't shut us down for decades of tryin' their black-hearted best. And here we are getting done down by Silicon bleeding Valley!"
"We get all manner of chatter on the air up here," Gannet said. The young broadcast engineer had turned back to his monitor. He wore grimy cargo pants and several layers of sweaters over what was evidently a skinny young frame, so that his head stuck on a thin neck out of an incongruously huge mass of clothing. He looked like a plush toy turtle. "Satellite phone broadcasts, other radio traffic. It's increased a great deal the past few months. Never paid much mind to it before this, though."
"Can you listen in on any of the traffic?" Annja asked.
Gannet gave her a questioning look. He had pale skin that in the glow looked blue-white, and moist, almost purplish lips. "Oi, that would be un-ethical, now, wouldn't it?" he commented in a lilting Liverpudlian accent. Then he grinned. "Not that that slowed me down much. But the phone traffic is all encrypted. The rest is bloody banal. Talking to ships, the odd helicopter, that sort of thing. If I had to guess, I'd say somebody else has occupied another old rig like this rattletrap. Only they're a bit better funded than we are."
"Kids these day," Rod was saying, shaking his gaunt-cheeked head. "They've no appreciation for the fact we do this out of love. Not like when we was young."
"Do you know which platform?" Annja asked.
Gannet shook his shaggy head. "There's a doze
n it could be. More. Sorry."
"Can you triangulate the traffic?" Tex asked.
The boy held up a forefinger. "Ah," he said. "That we can do."
His fingers danced over his keyboard.
"Gotcher!" Gannet crowed, calling his elders from the back of the room. A map appeared, showing an angular mass of land narrowing into the northeast, breaking into a trickle of islands, as if squeezed from a cake froster with a tendency to drip. A red cross showed in the water above and to the left of the last island.
"We've our latitude and longitude. Now let's see what's there."
The map shrank and moved to the left of the screen. A text box appeared, and next to it the image of what appeared to be a Cubist mountain rising from the sea. The box showed the bolded words, Claidheamh Mór B.
"Cl – cl – whoa," Tex said. He looked at Annja, who shook her head.
"Sorry. I don't do Gaelic."
"Ah, but you should," said Gannet. "Just say it Claymore B, and you'll not be far off. That's what it means." He clicked some more at his keys. "Abandoned 1998. Bought in 2002 by a then newly formed oil consortium called Euro Petro."
"I've heard of them," Annja said. "I've seen their commercials."
Tex nodded. "I don't know about you," he said, "but something about that perky self-righteousness about how environmentally and socially conscious they are just goes right down my spine like a cheese grater."
"Me, too."
"Especially since it's all a sham," Gannet said cheerfully. "They deserve the name pirates far more than our lot."
"What do you mean?" Annja asked. "I thought the European Union was the majority owner."
"And that makes a difference how?" Gannet asked. "Most of the world's known oil reserves are owned by government companies. All just a matter of what you call the thieves in charge, innit?"