Two dozen sailors padded silently in foam-soled deck shoes on the narrow walkways between the silos. They were working on the drones in hushed concentration. An incense stink of hot aircraft oil and spent ammunition. Some scrambled vibe of war and industry and church.
The compartment was painted in sky blue, the tubes in spacy midnight indigo. Henderson headed aft. As he hauled her along, Laura touched the cold latex surface of a tube, wonderingly. Someone had painstakingly stenciled it with dizzy five-pointed stars, comets with whizzing comic-book tails, little yellow ringed Saturns. Like surfboard art. Dreamy and cheap.
Some silos had been welder-cut and hung with arcane repair tools—they were retrofitted for drone launches. The others were older, they looked intact. Still serving their original function, whatever that was.
Henderson spun the manual wheel in the center of a watertight door. It opened with a thermos-bottle thump and they ducked through. Into a coffinlike chamber plated with egg-carton antisound padding.
Laura felt the world tilt subtly beneath her feet. A river rush of ballast tanks and the distant whir of motors. The sub was diving. Then a startling junkyard chorus of pops, harsh creaks, glass-bottle clinking, as pressure began to bite into the hull.
Through the chamber into another room flooded with clean white light. Supersharp fluorescents overhead, that strange laserish light of three-peak spectrum radiance, casting everything into edgy superrealism. Some kind of control room, with a Christmas-tree profusion of machinery. Vast tilted consoles loomed, with banks of switches, flickering readouts, needle-twitching glassy dials. Sailors with short, neat haircuts sat before them in sumptuous padded swivel chairs.
The room was full of crewmen—she kept noticing more and more of them, their heads peeking out through dense clusters of piping and monitors. The room was jammed floor to ceiling with equipment and she couldn’t find the walls. There were men in it elbow to elbow, crammed into arcane little ergonomic nooks. People sockets.
Acceleration hit them; Laura staggered a little. Somewhere, a faint high-pitched whine and a liquid trembling as the great steel mass picked up speed.
Just before her was a sunken area about the size of a bathtub. A man sat in it, wearing bulging padded headphones and clutching a knobbed steering wheel. He was like a child’s doll surrounded by pricey stereo equipment. Just above his head was a gray gasketed lump with the stenciled legend ANTI-COLLISION LIGHT—SWITCH TO FLASH. He was staring fixedly at half a dozen round glass gauges.
This was the pilot, Laura thought. No way to look outside a submarine. Just dials.
Footsteps on a curved stairway at the back of the room—someone coming down from the upper deck. “Hesseltine?”
“Yo!” said Henderson cheerfully. He tugged Laura along by the wrist, and she slammed her elbow jarringly into a vertical column. “Come on,” he insisted, dragging her.
They threaded the maze, to meet their interrogator. The new man was portly, with black curled hair, pouting lips, his eyes heavy-lidded and solemn. He wore shoulder tabs, elaborate sleeve insignia, and a round black-brimmed sailor’s cap with gold lettering. REPUBLIQUE DE MALI. He shook Henderson/Hesseltine’s hand. Maddeningly, the two of them began speaking fluent French.
They climbed the spiral stairs, walked down a long dim stifling corridor. Hesseltine’s shoes squelched loudly. They chattered in French, with enthusiasm.
The officer showed them into a set of narrow shower stalls. “Great,” said Hesseltine, stepping in and pulling Laura after him. For the first time, he let go of her wrist. “You up to taking your own shower, girl? Or do I have to help?”
Laura stared at him mutely.
“Relax,” Hesseltine said. He zipped out of his utility vest. “You’re with the good guys now. They’re gonna bring us something new to wear. Later we’ll eat.” He smiled at her, saw it wasn’t working, and glowered. “Look. What were you doing on that ship? You didn’t turn data banker, did you? Some kind of double-agent scam?”
“No, of course not!”
“You got some special reason to regret those criminals?”
The moral vacuity in it stunned her. They were human beings. “No …” she blurted, almost involuntarily.
Hesseltine pulled off his shirt, revealing a narrow suntanned chest densely packed with muscle.
She stole a sidelong glance at his utility vest. She knew he had a gun in it somewhere.
He caught her looking and his face hardened. “Look. We’ll make this simple. Get in the shower stall and don’t come out till I say. Or else.”
She got into the shower and shut its door and turned it on. She stayed in it for ten minutes, while it squeezed out maybe a quart of buzzing ultrasonic mist. She rinsed salt from what was left of her clothes and ran some thin acrid soap through her hair.
“Okay,” Hesseltine shouted at her. She stepped out, wearing the raincoat again. Hesseltine was neatly groomed. He wore a midnight-blue naval uniform and was lacing his deck shoes. Someone had laid out a gray terry-cloth sweatsuit for her: drawstring pants, a hooded pullover.
She stepped into the pants, turned her back on him, threw off the raincoat, and tunneled quickly into the pullover. She turned back, saw that he had been watching her in the mirror. Not with lust or even appreciation—there was a chill, vacant look on his face, like an evil child methodically killing a bug.
As she turned back, the look vanished like a card trick.
He’d never sneaked a glimpse at all. Hesseltine was a gentleman. This was an embarrassing but necessary situation that the two of them were working through like adults. Somehow Hesseltine was managing to say all this to her, while bent over and tying his shoes. The lie was radiating out of him. Out of his pores, like sweat.
A sailor waited for them outside, a wiry little veteran with a gray mustache and faraway eyes. He led them aft to a tiny cabin, where the hull formed a rounded, sloping roof. The place was about the size of a garden tool shed. Four deathly pale sailors, with their sleeves rolled up and collars open, were sitting at a tiny cafe table, silently playing a checker game.
The French-speaking officer was there. “Sit down,” he said in English. Laura sat on a cramped wall bench, close enough to one of the four sailors that she smelled his floral deodorant.
Across the cabin, stuck to the curved ceiling, were idealized portrait posters of men in elaborate uniforms. She had a quick look at two of the names: DE GAULLE, JARUZELSKI. Meaningless.
“My name is Baptiste,” said the sailor. “Political Officer aboard this vessel. We are to have a discussion.” Pause, for two beats. “Would you like some tea?”
“Yes,” Laura said. The mist-shower hadn’t offered enough for drinking. Her throat felt leathery with seawater and shock. She felt a sudden trembling shoot through her.
She didn’t delude herself that this was a situation she could handle. She was in the hands of murderers. It surprised her that they would pretend to consult her about her own fate.
They must want something from her, though. Hesseltine’s lean, weasely face had a look on it like something she would have scraped from a boot. She wondered how badly she wanted to live. What she was willing to do for it.
Hesseltine laughed at her. “Don’t look that way, uh, Laura. Stop worrying. You’re safe now.” Baptiste shot him a cynical look from beneath heavy eyelids. A sudden sharp cascade of metallic pressure pops rang from the wall. Laura started like an antelope. One of the four sailors nearby languidly moved a checker piece with one forefinger.
She stared at Hesseltine, then took a cup from Baptiste and drank. It was tepid and sweet. Were they poisoning her? It didn’t matter. She could die at their whim.
“My name is Laura Day Webster,” she told them. “I’m an associate of Rizome Industries Group. I live in Galveston, Texas.” It all sounded so pathetically brittle and faraway.
“You’re shivering,” Baptiste observed. He leaned backward and turned up a thermostat on the bulkhead. Even here, in some sort of rec room, the b
ulkhead was grotesquely cluttered: a speaker grille, an air ionizer, an eight-socketed surge-protected power plug, a wall clock reading 12:17 Greenwich Mean Time.
“Welcome aboard the SSBN Thermopylae,” Baptiste said.
Laura said nothing.
“Cat got your tongue?” Hesseltine said. Baptiste laughed.
“Come on,” Hesseltine said. “You were chattering away like a magpie when you thought I was a goddamn data pirate.”
“We are not pirates, Mrs. Webster,” Baptiste soothed. “We are the world police.”
“You’re not Vienna,” Laura said.
“He means the real police,” Hesseltine said impatiently. “Not that crowd of lead-assed bureaucrats.”
Laura rubbed one bloodshot eye. “If you’re police, then am I under arrest?”
Hesseltine and Baptiste shared a manly chuckle over her naivete. “We are not bourgeois legalists,” Baptiste said. “We do not issue arrests.”
“Cardiac arrests,” Hesseltine said, tapping his teeth with his thumbnail. He truly believed he was being funny. Baptiste stared at him, puzzled, missing the English idiom.
“I saw you on Singapore TV,” Hesseltine told her suddenly. “You said you opposed the data havens, wanted them shut down. But you sure went about it in a screwy way. The haven bankers—my former coworkers, you know—laughed their asses off when they saw you handing that democratic guff to Parliament.”
He poured himself tea. “Of course, they’re mostly refugees now, and a pretty good number of the bastards are on the bottom of the sea. No thanks to you, though—you were trying to kiss them into submission. And you, a rootin-tootin’ cowboy Texan, too. It’s a good thing they didn’t try that at the Alamo.”
Another sailor made a move in the checker game, and the third one swore in response. Laura flinched.
“Pay them no mind,” Baptiste told her quickly. “They’re off duty.”
“What?” Laura said blankly.
“Off duty,” he said impatiently, as if it embarrassed him. “They are Blue Crew. We are Red Crew.”
“Oh … what’s that they’re playing?”
He shrugged. “Uckers.”
“Uckers? What’s that?”
“It’s a kind of ludo.”
Hesseltine assembled, aimed, and fired a grin at her. “Sub crews,” he said. “A very special breed. Highly trained. A disciplined elite.”
The four Blue Crewmen hunched closer over their board. They refused to look at him.
“It’s an odd situation,” said Baptiste. He was talking about her, not himself. “We don’t quite know what to do with you. You see, we exist to protect people like you.”
“You do?”
“We are the cutting edge of the emergent global order.”
“Why did you bring me here?” Laura said. “You could have shot me. Or left me to drown.”
“Oh, come on,” said Hesseltine.
“He’s one of our finest operatives,” explained Baptiste. “A real artist.”
“Thanks.”
“Of course he would rescue a pretty woman at the end of his assignment—he couldn’t resist a final dramatic grace note!”
“Just the kind of guy I am,” Hesseltine admitted.
“That’s it?” Laura said quietly. “You saved me just on a whim? After killing all those people?”
Hesseltine stared at her. “You’re gonna piss me off in a minute.… Don’t you think they’d have killed me if they knew what I was? That wasn’t just your mickey-mouse industrial espionage, y’know. I spent months and months in a deadly deep-cover operation for the highest geopolitical stakes! Those Yung Soo Chim guys had background checks like nobody’s business, and they watched my ass like a hawk.”
He leaned back. “But will I get credit? Hell, no, I won’t.” He stared at his cup. “I mean, that’s part of the whole undercover biz, no credit.…”
“It was a very slick operation,” said Baptiste. “Compare it to Grenada. Our attack on the Singapore criminals was surgical, almost bloodless.”
Laura realized something. “You want me to be grateful.”
“Well, yeah,” said Hesseltine, looking up. “A little of that wouldn’t be too out of line, after all the effort we put into it.”
He smiled at Baptiste. “Look at that face! You should’ve heard her in Parliament, going on and on about Grenada. The carpet bombing took out this big mansion the Rastas gave her. It really pissed her off.”
It was as if he’d stabbed her. “You killed Winston Stubbs in my house! While I was standing next to him. With my baby in my arms.”
“Oh,” Baptiste said, relaxing ostentatiously. “The Stubbs killing. That wasn’t us. That was one of Singapore’s.”
“I don’t believe it,” Laura said, sagging back. “We got a FACT communiqué taking credit!”
“A set of initials means very little,” said Baptiste. “FACT was an old front-group. Nothing compared to our modern operations.… In truth, it was Singapore’s Merlion-Commandos. I don’t think the Singapore civilian government ever knew of their actions.”
“Lots of ex-paras, Berets, Spetsnaz, that sort of thing,” Hesseltine said. “They tend to run a little wild. I mean, face it—these are guys who gave their lives to the art of warfare. Then all of a sudden, you know, Abolition, Vienna Convention. One day they’re the shield of their nation, next day they’re bums, got their walking papers, that’s about it.”
“Men who once commanded armies, and billions in government funds,” Baptiste recited mournfully. “Now, nonpersons. Spurned. Purged. Even vilified.”
“By lawyers!” said Hesseltine, becoming animated. “And chickenshit peaceniks! Who would have thought it, you know? But when it came, it was so sudden.…”
“Armies belong to nation-states,” said Baptiste. “It is hard to establish true military loyalty to a more modern, global institution.… But now that we own our own country—the Republic of Mali—recruiting has picked up remarkably.”
“And it helps, too, that we happen to be the global good guys,” Hesseltine said airily. “Any dumbass merc will fight for pay for Grenada or Singapore, or some jungle-jabber African regime. But we get committed personnel who truly recognize the global threat and are prepared to take action. For justice.” He leaned back, crossing his arms.
She knew she could not take much more of this. She was holding herself together somehow, but it was a waking nightmare. She would have understood it if they’d been heel-clicking Nazi executioners … but to meet with this smarmy little Frenchman and this empty-eyed good-old-boy psychotic.… The utter banality, the soullessness of it …
She could feel the iron walls closing in on her. In a minute she was going to scream.
“You look a little pale,” Hesseltine remarked. “We’ll get some chow into you, that’ll perk you up. There’s always great chow on a sub. It’s a navy tradition.” He stood up. “Where’s the head?”
Baptiste gave him directions. He watched Hesseltine go, admiringly. “More tea, Mrs. Webster?”
“Yes-thank-you …”
“I don’t think you recognize the genuine quality of Mr. Hesseltine,” Baptiste chided, pouring. “Pollard, Reilly, Sorge … he could match with history’s finest! A natural operative! A romantic figure, really—born out of his own true time.… Someday your grandchildren will talk about that man.”
Laura’s brain went into automatic pilot. She slipped into babbling surrealism. “This is quite a ship you have here. Boat, I mean.”
“Yes. It’s a nuclear-powered American Trident, which cost over five hundred million of your country’s dollars.”
She nodded stupidly: right, yes, uh-huh. “So, this is an old Cold War sub?”
“A ballistic missile sub, exactly.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It’s a launch platform.”
“What? I don’t understand.”
He smiled at her. “I think ‘nuclear deterrent’ is the concept you’re searching for, Mrs. Web
ster.”
“‘Deterrent.’ Deterring what?”
“Vienna, of course. I should think that would be obvious.”
Laura sipped her tea. Five hundred million dollars. Nuclear powered. Ballistic missiles. It was as if he’d told her that they were reanimating corpses on board. It was far too horrible, way off the scale of reason and credibility.
There was no proof. He hadn’t shown her anything. They were bullshitting her. Magic tricks. They were liars. She didn’t believe it.
“You don’t seem disturbed,” Baptiste said approvingly. “You’re not superstitious about wicked nuclear power?”
She shook her head, not trusting herself to speak aloud.
“Once there were dozens of nuclear submarines,” said Baptiste. “France had them. Britain, U.S., Russia. Training, techniques, traditions, all well established. You’re in no danger—these men are thoroughly trained from the original coursework and documents. Plus, many modern improvements!”
“No danger.”
“No.”
“Then what are you going to do with me?”
He shook his head, ruefully. Bells rang. It was time to eat.
Baptiste found Hesseltine and took them both to the officers’ mess. It was a nasty little place, next to the clattering, hissing racket of the galley. They sat at a solidly anchored square table on metal chairs covered in green-and-yellow vinyl. Three officers were already there, being served by a cook in an apron and crisp paper hat.
Baptiste introduced the officers as the captain-lieutenant, captain second rank, and the senior executive officer, who was actually the junior of the bunch. He gave no names and they didn’t seem to miss them. Two were Europeans, Germans maybe, and the third looked Russian. They all spoke Net English.
It was clear from the beginning that this was Hesseltine’s show. Laura was some kind of battle trophy Hesseltine had won, blond cheesecake for the camera to dwell on during slow moments in his cinema biography. She didn’t have to say anything—they didn’t expect it from her. The crewmen gave her strange, muddied looks compounded of regret, speculation, and some kind of truly twisted superstitious dread. They dug into their meals: foil-covered microwave trays marked “Aero Cubana: Clase Primera.” Laura picked at her tray. Aero Cubana. She’d flown on Aero Cubana, with David at her side and the baby in her lap. David and Loretta. Oh, God …
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