Without warning

by John Birmingham

  I wish it was just a nuke, thought Musso, but he kept it to himself.

  * * * *

  4

  MV DIAMANTINA, PACIFIC OCEAN

  The old sailboat was a twin-masted forty-footer carved out of thousand-year-old Huon pine from the Tasmanian highlands, a beautifully preserved museum piece. She’d placed third on corrected time in a Sydney-Hobart race way back in 1953, and in the decades since had logged enough miles to make it to the moon and back. In that time she’d been the plaything of a builder, a manufacturing tycoon, two dot-com millionaires, and Pete Holder.

  Pete knew he was never going to be anywhere near as wealthy as any of the Diamantina’s former skippers – although the dot-com guys had tanked badly a couple of years ago and were probably down to their last two or three million now, hence the bargain basement price he’d paid for the old girl. Not that he could give a shit. The Australian Government issued his passports, but he considered himself a citizen of the waves, and for the past eight years, after taking a redundancy payment from his old job as a rig boss for Shell, he’d been devoted entirely to the pursuit of the world’s most fantastic lifestyle. Mostly that involved meandering from one secret surf break to the next, putting in a few weeks at the Maldives, cutting down the Indonesian archipelago to Nias, or booming across the Pacific to chase triple overhead sets off northern California. And sometimes, of course, to pay for this life of pure indulgence, it meant loading the boat up with half a ton of compressed ganja and running the gauntlet of international super-narcs like the DEA and the AFP.

  Even worse than them were the state-sponsored but highly autonomous shakedown artists like the crooked Indonesian Navy commodore he’d tangled with in Bali last year. Or the Peruvian federales he thought he’d paid off in Callao only to have them come back a day later saying they’d ‘lost’ his very generous bribe and would be in need of another to the same value within twenty-four hours – unless Seсor Pedro felt like seeing out his days as a slave in a manganese mine deep in the jungles of la Montana. Pete had transferred the money within two hours and never sailed into the territorial waters of Peru again.

  As he watched Fifi and Jules moving around to clear away the remains of lunch, the veteran smuggler catalogued all of the near misses he’d survived over the years. It was a sobering exercise, one he forced himself to endure before every new payday, as a caution against hubris and stupidity. Bad luck he couldn’t control, but with good planning and preparation he could at least minimise any opportunities for the ever fickle finger of fate to insert itself firmly into his anus. Hubris and stupidity, on the other hand, were completely avoidable. They were the principle mechanism by which natural selection thinned out his competitors, and he’d be damned if he were going to fall victim to them. Pete Holder was a survivor.

  ‘Mr Peter, sir?’

  Lee had snuck up on him again. A Malaccan-Chinese from a 300-year-long line of pirates, Mr Lee was always doing that. Pete tried to rearrange his features into a sunny smile, but Lee knew him too well and responded with a pitying shake of the head. Pete was notorious for his ill temper in the hours leading up to a job, and try as he might to control it, his face was always clouded over and dark until they were safely away. Frankly, he resented the necessity for the whole smuggling business and would have done almost anything other than getting a normal job to avoid it. But he couldn’t, so here they were.

  ‘Hey, Lee. What’s up, mate?’ Pete tried for a light tone, the sort of thing his fellow Tasmanian Errol Flynn might have pulled off if he’d gone into smuggling and full-time surf bummery. Instead he just came off as clipped and nervous. He noticed Fifi and Jules throw a curious glance back his way. They’d only been with him eighteen months, but like Mr Lee they’d learned to read his moods with an almost preternatural accuracy. It was the legacy of living so close together and taking things right up to the edge.

  ‘Something is up, Mr Peter.’

  ‘Okay. I’m waiting.’ Jeez, he wished he could loosen up.

  ‘The Pong Su, she is changing course, sir. She will not meet up with us if she continues on her new heading.’

  Pete was dressed in ripped board shorts and a sun-faded sky-blue cotton shirt. The Tropic of Cancer was well north of them and the day would have been uncomfortably warm were it not for a gentle sou’-wester, which only just bellied out the sails but did little to dry the sweat pooling between the breasts of his female crew.

  ‘Come see. I show,’ said Lee.

  Jules finished scraping a plate of grilled fish scraps over the side and used the dish to shade her eyes as she straightened up. ‘Is there something the matter, Pete?’ she called out in her rather posh English accent, the sort of accent his mother would have called ‘all peaches and cream’.

  ‘Dunno yet,’ he answered. ‘Could be. Let’s be ready to split just in case. You and Fifi better kit up too, soon as you’re ready.’

  ‘Righty-o,’ she said. The two girls set about their cleaning chores with added vigour. Both were athletic blondes in their early twenties and resembled each other closely enough that Pete had long ago taken to calling them ‘the Twins’, even though Jules was a Brit, a trust-fund exile from Surrey, while Fifi had run away from a trailer park in Oregon at the age of fifteen. They brought a rare and valuable mix of skills to the Diamantina. Jules had a masters in accounting from the London School of Economics, and her father, the late Lord Balwyn, was a two-time winner of the Fastnet race and a board member of the Royal Thames Cruising Yacht Squadron. Or he had been on the RTCYS board, until Scotland Yard had come calling at the Manor one day with a warrant for his arrest on a hundred and twenty-nine charges of fraud and tax evasion.

  Fifi, the ship’s cook, on the other hand, had not even finished high school and her only inheritance was genetic. Her mom, one of Larry Flynt’s very first Hustler models, had bequeathed her some good looks and a mighty fine arse, but apart from an explosive temper and a morally flexible attitude to life’s manifold challenges, that was about it. And compared to her mom, Fifi was still kind of uptight. She’d left home after her fourth ‘stepdad’, the aptly named Randy, a shiftless, unemployed crab-pot repairman, had suggested they have a threesome and go on Springer to tell their story. He’d heard they could score a trip to Chicago, a free stay in a motel, and two hundred dollars’ cash for expenses. Fifi was on the road, with her thumb in the air, about half an hour later.

  She was a great cook, however, and hell on mag wheels with a loaded weapon.

  Pete could hear the Twins rummaging through the gun locker just beyond the forward bulkhead as he sat at the nav station and tried to make sense of the screens in front of him. Even with the air-con running, it was hot below decks, and the prospect of a transfer going bad gave the confines of the boat a claustrophobic feeling. The Diamantina was fitted out for high luxury, thanks to her former owners, the dot-com greedheads, and Pete was able to sink into a soft leather swivel chair adapted for maritime use from a Herman Miller original, but nothing about sitting in front of the flat panel displays in the small nook outside his personal cabin made him happy. He could see immediately what Lee was talking about as he watched a computer-generated track of the Pong Su, the North Korean freighter scheduled to swap four million dollars’ worth of perfectly counterfeited US currency for a ‘full stick’ – one million dollars of the real deal bundled away in the Diamantina’s stronghold. That money represented the profits of three high-risk dope runs from Mexico up to California. It wasn’t the sort of business they’d normally choose to get into, but the blow-out in Bali had left him few options.

  Now it seemed he had fewer still. Forty minutes ago the Pong Su had deviated sharply off course, and was apparently running rudderless. It looked for all the world as though she’d lost steering.

  ‘No good, Mr Peter,’ avowed Lee. ‘Look here, and here too.’

  It was only then that Pete realised that the Pong Su wasn’t the only ship in trouble. Five other vessels within the Diamantina’s radar bubble had all li
kewise veered off course and appeared to be heading out of the designated shipping lanes.

  ‘Pete, you’d better come up on deck. There’s something very strange happening off to the north.’ It was Jules, with Fifi at her elbow. After cleaning up they had changed into their rig for the handover. Both were now dressed in ballistic vests and wearing combat harnesses weighed down with reloads for the Vietnam-era M16s and grenade launchers they would take from the armoury fifteen minutes before the rendezvous. But Pete Holder was beginning to doubt there’d be any rendezvous today, or ever.

  ‘What do you mean “strange”?’ he asked.

  ‘I mean odd, weird, right out of the bloody ordinary, Pete. It looks like a storm front came out of that heat haze to the north, but… well… you’ll need to see for yourself.’

  Grunting in frustration, he pushed himself up out of the chair and hurried up on deck. Moving forward to the bow, shielding his eyes, he saw immediately what she meant. Far to the north of them, half the sky seemed to be taken up with the queerest, most exotic-looking storm front he’d ever seen. It appeared to sparkle and hang still in the air. It must have been a long way distant, because it appeared from beneath the horizon and climbed away into the stratosphere. Just standing, watching it, he felt insignificant and deeply vulnerable.

  ‘Radio’s not working!’ Fifi called out from below.

  ‘Radio’s fine…’ he started to say, then stopped. They’d been monitoring the airwaves for any US or Mexican government traffic, using the yacht’s high-gain antennae to eavesdrop on Coast Guard and Navy signals – a constant background chatter. It was only when Fifi pointed out the silence from the radio that he realised he’d heard nothing in over half an hour. Frowning at the bizarre weather up ahead, he hastened back below decks.

  Mr Lee was flicking switches and twirling dials on the M802 marine radio. It was only then that they picked up the babble of some commercial station down in Acapulco, where a DJ was reading in heavily accented English a local police order imposing an immediate curfew that would remain in effect until contact with the central government was ‘re-established’.

  ‘Oh, bugger this…’ muttered Pete at the unpleasant feeling of dйjа vu. It transported him back to when he’d woken up late one morning, dockside in Santa Monica, after a hard night’s partying with his then relatively new crew-mates. He’d spent nearly the entire day mooching around, drinking Irish coffee and napping off his hangover. It was 11 September, 2001 and he’d missed almost all of the day that had changed the world. Only Lee’s return from the city in the afternoon had alerted him to the news from the East Coast. As he sat below decks now, sweat leaking out of his armpits and trickling down his sides, listening to an increasingly hysterical radio jock talking about ‘la catбstrofe’, and watching the strange, ghostly track of those five ships to the north, Pete Holder felt as though time had folded back in on itself.

  ‘I dunno what’s happened,’ he said, ‘but I’ve got a sick feeling about this. And about that weird fucking storm front. I’m gonna go with my gut. Mr Lee, let’s make ready for a fast run, sou’-sou’-west. Keep a watch on the Pong Su. If nothing changes, we’re gonna blow this off in fifteen minutes. I want to put some serious miles between us and… whatever.’

  * * * *

  The Diamantina slipped through a light swell, pushed south-southwest by a freshening breeze. Mr Lee had the wheel, as phlegmatic in the face of world’s end as he had been staring down the barrel of an M16 in Bali. Pete wondered what, if anything, would upset him. Not that it mattered, because between himself and the Twins there was plenty of freaking out to go around.

  ‘Zombie Jew on a fucking Zimmer frame,’ cursed Fifi.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s redneck for “Christ on a crutch”, Pete. Let’s stay on the ball, shall we?’ said Jules.

  The three smugglers were crouched in front of the Samsung monitor, a brand new 23-inch flat screen Pete had picked up back in La Paz during a night of tequila shots and hard bartering with an Italian yachtsman of long acquaintance. CNN’s Asian bureau, reporting out of the network’s regional HQ in Hong Kong, was running in a small window that took up about a quarter of the screen. Jules had plugged into the live web feed via an iridium phone, and if they watched it much longer they’d need all the counterfeit money in the hold to pay this month’s bill. If it ever arrived.

  Pete’s eyes flicked over to the GPS window, which showed them retreating from the abandoned rendezvous with the Pong Su at eleven knots. The North Korean ship was still describing a long, lazy arc that would eventually see it run aground somewhere near Mazatlan, in the next day or so. Pete, the only one of them to have a seat in front of the display, had to rub his eyes. Like an addicted gamer, he’d been staring so hard at the screen he hadn’t blinked in a long while. He shook his head as he rubbed the irritation away, his vision blurring slightly when he refocused on the window in which footage of a major highway crash was now being shown.

  He couldn’t get his head around these pictures, which had come in from a small Canadian news team – some guys out of Quebec, according to the dateline. The image seemed to be out of focus or something. He could tell they were looking at a big pile-up on a six-lane highway, but everything was indistinct, as though viewed through poorly blown glass.

  ‘The effect is stationary,’ the heavily accented Quebecois voice-over assured everyone. ‘Mounted Police at the scene are not allowing anyone to approach the phenomenon after the loss of the two fire engines.’

  Blurred, wavering vision of two fire tenders came up, both of them overturned in a deep ditch by the side of the road. A few hundred metres beyond them, a large pile-up of vehicles burned freely.

  ‘Oh man, this is really putting the zap on my head,’ Fifi muttered.

  ‘We need to think this through,’ said Jules, in her oddly cool, high-tone manner. ‘This could be quite awful.’

  Pete rubbed at his three-day beard, completely lost for an answer. For a few minutes, a little earlier, he’d actually thought of heading north to raid an empty city. He could have sailed into Santa Monica and picked up a super-yacht, provisioned her for a year, filled the leftover space with jewels and ammo. But CNN had convinced him otherwise. It was abundantly clear that you could go into the ‘storm front’ that had appeared to their north, but you’d never come back. What was the old Argentinian phrase? It ‘disappeared’ people.

  ‘I think we might shoot through to my old stomping ground,’ he said. ‘Hobart looks far enough away to me. And I know people there. We can move this money in a flash.’

  ‘But what if it starts growing?’ asked Fifi, with a sharp edge to her voice. ‘What if it just eats up the whole world, like the Blob or something?’

  Pete gave her his most open, honest face. ‘Then we’re fucked, darlin’. Aren’t we?’

  ‘Pete…’ It was Jules, if anything looking even more concerned than before. The worry lines between her eyes were virtual canyons now. ‘How fast can we get to Hobart?’

  ‘Why?’ he asked. Jules had a post-graduate degree in keeping a stiff upper lip, probably thanks to her old man. If she thought something even worse was coming their way, it really didn’t bear thinking about.

  ‘Because nobody will want greenbacks if Uncle Sam’s beamed up to the Enterprise and flown away for good.’

  The bow of the yacht sliced into the face of a larger than normal wave, throwing them all slightly off balance. The Diamantina climbed up and over the crest, slamming down hard on the far side with a great, hollow boom. Fifi and Jules braced themselves against the nearest bulkhead. Pete hung on to the arms of his chair. On the computer screen, Stan Grant interviewed a physicist from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, but Pete Holder had already tuned out. Jules had a point: if this was a permanent deal, they had very little time before their hard-earned stick was worth less than a handful of Polish zlotys.

  ‘You’re right,’ he said tonelessly. ‘We have to get back onshore and change our mo
ney over. Do we know if the Caymans are affected? Or the Canal?’

  ‘We can find out,’ Jules replied, nodding at the screen. ‘But Pete, I don’t think we can get there in time. We have to get onshore as soon as we can. Somewhere big enough to convert the money, but far enough removed from whatever it is, that blind panic hasn’t taken over yet.’

  ‘Acapulco’s still there,’ said Fifi. ‘But they’re locked down, accordin’ to the radio.’

  ‘That might be a good thing,’ shrugged Jules. ‘If they keep a lid on things long enough, we might just get in and out. Otherwise we’ll have to run down to Guatemala or El Salvador.’

  Pete chewed his lower lip, sucking the salt from it as he pondered the unfolding disaster. A window displaying the Google news page refreshed, informing him that nearly three thousand stories had already been filed on the phenomenon – none of them from North America. The bright blue hyperlinks all led to European and Asian sites. One, from Agence France-Presse, reported that trading had been suspended on the London, Tokyo and Sydney stock exchanges. Just beneath it, a Novosti report from Moscow claimed that the Russian armed forces had all been called into barracks and placed on high alert. Pete adjusted his balance as the Diamantina slipped sideways down the face of another large wave. ‘You’re right,’ he concluded. ‘We’ve got to get in somewhere, fast. This feels like a big bucket of shit’s about to tip over and bury the whole world. Let’s head for Acapulco.’