Without warning

by John Birmingham

  Lee said nothing, contenting himself with his kretek cigarette and a contemplative air. He gazed past Ross, away down the marina, where Fifi could see Thapa standing watch over a dozen men who’d also turned up to apply for berths on the yacht.

  Something about the Rhino’s demeanour changed. His eyes hardened and his voice took on a commanding, almost military, tone. ‘Now, given the size of that sport fisher you got all shot up over there, I figure you’ve got yourself a real ocean liner stowed away somewhere. And it’s gonna have all manner of sensors, radar, communications gear and other assorted technological doodads, none of which you know a damn thing about – am I right? Looks more like the starship Enterprise than a sailboat to you, right? No, don’t answer. The Rhino is always right. And of course, given all the holes some douche bag has already shot in your runabout, you know what sort of trouble is waiting for you up ahead. So here’s the Rhino’s iron-clad guaran-goddamn-tee: you take me out to your boat, I’ll prove to you that I can run your systems, and then you can get me the hell out of here before it blows up. I need to get out of Acapulco, and you need a pro out there, Miss Fifi. Someone who knows these waters and the sort of lowlife scum that swims in ‘em sometimes. Seems to me that the last thing you need to be worrying about is which button to press when a bunch of bad guys come charging over the horizon with knives between their teeth.’ With that the Rhino sat back and puffed contentedly on his cigar, releasing a swirling cloud of thick white smoke with a self-satisfied whoosh.

  Fifi leaned forward now, bunching her boobs up between her arms, to see if Ross would drop his gaze. He didn’t. ‘Would I be right in assuming you’d know one end of a gun from the other, Rhino?’ she asked.

  ‘Twenty years in service, ma’am. You can assume away, but you know what they say about people who “assume”.’

  She nodded. ‘So, y’all said you ran charters. What happened to your boat? Why don’t you just get the hell out under your own power?’

  The Rhino folded his massive forearms and gestured towards her vessel. ‘See all the holes in your hull? The ones in mine were a lot bigger. I ran a legitimate business, miss. I don’t know what you did before all this, but the fact that you’re sitting here tells me it probably wasn’t legit, and you had the guns and the balls to fight off whoever came after you. I wasn’t so lucky.’

  Lee exhaled a thin stream of fragrant smoke. ‘Mr Rhino,’ he said. ‘Your lost boat, do you know who attacked you?’

  The former Coast Guard chief nodded. ‘I do. A local pecker-head, working for a toothfish poacher down south. Said he was recruiting for his bossman. Wouldn’t take no for an answer, so he shot up my boat when that was the only answer I had for him.’

  ‘Why didn’t he shoot you?’ asked Fifi.

  ‘Shooting my boat hurt more,’ he said, quite honestly, she believed.

  A lot of folks made the error of mistaking Fifi for some kind of life-sized Sluttymuch Barbie. But she’d been looking out for herself long enough to have developed a wild dog’s instinct for sniffing out troublesome men. The job at Lenny Wah’s take-out, which quickly morphed into cooking as well as cleaning, had scored her a spot on a catering-industry training course run by a Bay Area businessmen’s charity – ‘guilty fags’, she called them – sponsoring college degrees for homeless kids. Her army-surplus cot in the storeroom at Lenny’s counted as homeless. She graduated in the top five of her class, and landed a gig with an LA-based catering firm that specialised in providing ‘nutritional services’ for the military in shitholes-of-the-week like Bosnia and Mogadishu.

  Fifi moved a lot more easily through that sort of crowd than the five-star ghetto of West Coast fine dining, and after shacking up with an Army Ranger for twelve months in the Balkans, she could field-strip an M4 carbine blindfolded. She’d also had a lot of experience with men like the Rhino; hard, uncompromising, and occasionally stupid men who were, nonetheless, decent at heart.

  She leaned over to Mr Lee. ‘What d’you think?’ she whispered.

  ‘He’ll eat too much, but he’s okay,’ replied the Chinaman. ‘Mr Pete would have liked him.’

  ‘Okay, Rhino.’ She turned back to face the old chief, who had heard everything. ‘If you’ve brought any kit with you, stow it over there by the ramp. You can start out by helping to load some stores while we finish talking to these other guys.’ Fifi waved towards the small crowd of hopefuls gathered by the marina gate and watched over by Thapa.

  The Rhino nodded brusquely and said ‘Thanks’ before looking around. ‘You said you wanted some stores loaded?’

  ‘Inside,’ she said, gesturing to the wooden shed in front of which they sat. ‘Bags of rice, beans, lots of canned foods. Heavy work. But that won’t bother you – you’re the Rhino.’

  ‘No,’ he agreed, flashing a stagy grin and tucking his cigar firmly into the corner of his mouth. He pointed at one of his massive biceps and said, around the cigar, ‘Yeah, it’ll be no bother at all since I didn’t get these from pettin’ kitty cats.’

  Ross paused before ducking his head into the shed. ‘Oh, one other thing. You got a humidor on that boat?’

  Fifi gave a quizzical look. ‘Like a hot tub, you mean?’

  ‘No, darlin’, it’s a little storage compartment for my Cuban friends here.’ The Rhino blew a thin stream of blue smoke into the sky.

  Fifi shrugged. ‘I reckon so. It has everything else.’ The last thing she heard as the Rhino signified his approval and disappeared into the shed was, ‘Oh yeah, it’s good to be the Rhino.’

  * * * *

  The lambent glow of Acapulco, a soft dome of light defining a horizon at the edge of the world in the absolute blackness of night at sea, had changed character to Jules’s eye. It looked less artificial now, less fixed. Suffused by a burnt-orange tincture, it flickered and even flared at times.

  ‘Another high-rise going up,’ said Fifi.

  ‘I imagine so.’

  They worked by starlight and the pale illumination of a red moon. It had been that bloodstained colour since the Wave appeared. The Aussie Rules remained blacked out, a precaution against more attacks, as the new crew members that Fifi and Mr Lee had chosen helped to move supplies from the sport fisher to its mother ship.

  Jules was generally pleased with the haul of men and cargo. She’d been a bit taken aback by the Rhino when she’d first met him, especially by the perpetual wreath of cigar smoke that preceded and followed him like London fog, but had quickly come to accept his bluster and bullshit as a well-polished routine. He’d probably been practising it on tourists for years and had forgotten how not to be in character. She couldn’t fault his work ethic or his skill sets, however. He’d fired up whole suites of sensors and arrays in the bridge that had proven completely impenetrable to everyone else. And having done so, he’d gone right back to hauling sacks of rice and freshly killed meat – very expensive, freshly killed meat – onto the boat deck of the Rules and from there off to the freezers. Another odd thing: every so often he would stop one of the other workers, point to one of his enormous biceps and say, ‘You don’t get these from pettin’ kitty cats’, whatever that meant. Odd, very odd.

  He stayed out of the ice room with Pete’s body in, though. For now, that was sealed off.

  ‘I’m glad Miguel kicked the shit out of those assholes,’ said Fifi as she picked up an LNG canister and hoisted it over her shoulder.

  Jules grunted after catching a sack of potatoes that had been tossed up by Thapa as though it was no heavier than a bag of fairy floss. ‘Bloody hell,’ she cursed, struggling not to fall over.

  A German man, short but powerful-looking, caught her gently by the elbow. ‘Not so good to be falling overboard, no?’ He grinned, his teeth standing out in the wine-red light.

  ‘No. Thank you…’ replied Jules, reaching for his name. The yacht was beginning to fill up with strangers, and although she tried to commit all their names and potted histories to memory, there was just so much for her to do each day that she never
really felt as if she was getting on top of any one job.

  ‘This is Dietmar,’ Fifi said, rescuing her. ‘He’s German, you know, like hot-dogs used to be. He’s our navigator now. Used to work on a container ship.’

  The German, who looked to be in his thirties, nodded enthusiastically as he wrestled the heavy bag of potatoes off Jules, before flinging them over his shoulder with as little apparent trouble as Thapa had experienced.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘You’ll do.’

  ‘Yo, Boss Jules!’ called out a hoarse, rasping voice. The Rhino. ‘Where do you want me to stow your boom sticks?’

  Jules smiled and nodded at Dietmar, to thank him for his help. She peered down onto the boat deck, swarming with Gurkhas and new crew-mates, and found the Rhino shouldering a wooden box of Mexican Army rifles that Shah had secured from somewhere.

  The number of things she didn’t know about on this yacht was growing bigger and bigger every minute.

  ‘Take them through to the gym, Rhino,’ she called down. ‘We’re using that as an armoury for now. One of the Gurkhas will show you where it is, if you need.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ll follow my horn, it always knows the way,’ he replied. ‘Oh, and where the hell is the humidor that Cap’n Fifi told me about? I’ve got four boxes of Davidoff Anniversario number 1s in my ruck and if they dry out, you’ll find out up close and personal why rhinos are such surly beasts.’

  ‘Library,’ she called back at his retreating form as another newcomer, an Indian by the look of him, smiled and nodded shyly.

  ‘Engine room, please?’ he asked.

  ‘Follow the Rhino, sailor, but take the second stairwell down two decks. You won’t miss it.’

  She turned around to ask Fifi if she could spare a few minutes to take her through the crew manifest again, but she was gone. Probably chatting up Dietmar on the way to the galley. Julianne took a few moments to just lean on the starboard rail and stare back towards the coastline. They were still a good twenty miles out from shore, giving them enough time to see anyone coming at them. The radar, which was now working much more effectively thanks to the Rhino, was showing dozens of vessels within a few nautical miles, but Mr Lee constantly adjusted their position to maintain a safe distance from any possible contacts. And, she had to admit, she felt much more secure with Shah’s men and all the new arrivals on board.

  Not that she’d be staying tonight. They had to take the smaller boat back to the marina later, stay the night there, and then pick up their passengers and the Pieraro clan in the morning.

  Although, looking at the baleful light of the burning city, she had to wonder what sort of fresh hell she’d be sailing into, and whether Miguel would even make it back in time. He had a 400-mile round trip to retrieve his family, and the night-time roads, if not choked with refugees, would almost certainly be stalked by brigands and highwaymen. She wondered whether he’d make it, and how long she could afford to wait.

  * * * *

  College students. More than a thousand of them.

  They formed a moat around the entrance of the Fairmont when Jules returned with Shah to pick up her passengers and Pieraro. Security had deteriorated all over Acapulco during the night, as though news of the Israeli attack had somehow finally uncapped all the base animal fears stirred up by the Disappearance.

  While Mr Lee and three of Shah’s men supervised her newly hired crew in final preparations on board the Aussie Rules, now ten miles offshore, at the marina Fifi and Thapa prepped the launch for a quick dash across the bay. Jules had chosen a rendezvous point much closer to the Fairmont, to avoid a confrontation with the mob that had gathered at the gates of the marina demanding to be let in. Driving through the city, she could understand their motivation. Anarchy was loose.

  Whatever remnant of order had prevailed until yesterday was gone and the madness she had been expecting was finally upon them. It was like moving through a city at war with itself. No, it was worse than that, because there were no sides, just a general eruption, a battle of all against all. Packs of young men fell on individuals caught out alone. Larger gangs fell on them in turn. There had been no uniformed police or city authorities visible for days, but even the sort of organised private muscle that had protected places like the marina and Acapulco Diamante were much less in evidence, either hunkered down behind high walls and barricades, or simply dissipated as men flaked away to protect their own immediate interests and families. Gunfire, thick oily smoke, occasional explosions and the mob sounds of fear and rage lay over the entire city.

  Driving was a nightmare, with streets frequently choked and impassable. Only Shah’s handling of the all-terrain SUV had allowed them any headway through the worst of the snarls. At times he simply mounted the kerb and rolled through private homes to dodge some of the blockages. When the roads opened up, the former soldier drove fast and aggressively, twice knocking down small groups of men armed with improvised weapons who attempted to bar their passage along the Escenica carriageway as it ran through scrubland in the hills to the west of Revolcadero Beach. The thud of impact as the Toyota struck human flesh made her shudder and close her eyes. It was somehow much worse sitting passively in the seat beside Shah. The situation eased somewhat as they came down out of the hills and drove onto the long strip of dual laneway of the Costero de Las Palmas. Sprinklers still sprayed long arcs of recycled water over the empty, bright green golf courses to their left, and the beach-front resorts of Revolcadero on the right had not yet been touched by the violence that gripped the centre of Acapulco, but the evidence of accelerating collapse was everywhere. In the long lines of slow-moving cars piled high with personal goods. In the swarms of people sitting on the tarmac at the aeropuerto international, desperate for flights out, even though no aircraft remained there and none were flying in. And in the mob of seething, chanting American college students now laying siege to the gates of the Fairmont, where resort security led a grim effort to hold them at bay.

  ‘What the fuck?’ said Jules, as Shah slowed and pulled over to the side of the road, well away from the mob scene.

  ‘Spring break,’ Shah replied, by way of explanation. ‘Many students on cruise ships from America. Cheap cruises. Very ugly.’

  ‘That’s great. But what are they doing here?’

  She could see some of Pieraro’s street toughs wielding canes and clubs to beat back the Americans, but many of the students seemed prepared to respond in kind. One group in particular had kitted themselves out with a mix of sporting equipment, protective gear and improvised weapons like baseball bats, and even one cricket bat that she could see. They appeared to work as a flying squad, charging from one spot to the next whenever the security men threatened more beatings and mayhem.

  ‘Bit of a fucking cock-up then, Sergeant Shah.’

  ‘A bit, Miss Julianne.’

  He started the engine again and pulled back into the sluggish stream of traffic that rolled straight through the centre of the crowd.

  ‘Don’t stop,’ she ordered him. ‘I’ll see if I can get Miguel’s attention as we roll past.’

  Shah crunched the stick into low gear. There was no moving any faster than a trot anyway, with the road and the dusty verge completely choked with foot traffic and hundreds of vehicles. Dozens of cars had stopped from want of gas and been pushed onto the verge, creating obstacles around which flowed the slow-moving mass of refugees. The exodus from the city poured through and past the huge knot of young Americans, who all seemed to be carrying expensive backpacks and luggage. More than a few were drunk. As Jules rolled down the window she was struck by the stench of so many people packed in closely together.

  ‘It’s bloody hopeless,’ she said after a few minutes. ‘I’ll have to go in on foot. Turn off up ahead, Mr Shah, and take the car down to the sand. It can run on sand, can’t it?’

  The Gurkha nodded. ‘I shall wait by the cabanas directly out the back. I will not move until you come for me.’

  Jules thought about taking
the shotgun, but settled instead on a concealed pistol, which she carried in a holster on her hip under a long shirt. She was dressed in desert boots, khaki shorts and a white sea-cotton top, and didn’t look all that out of place in the young crowd. She waved off Shah and began to push her way forward. He was right. They were mostly young Americans, very obviously holidaying students. She supposed there had to be a few thousand of them in Acapulco at any time of year, but their numbers would probably swell during semester breaks. What the hell they were doing camped out in front of the Fairmont, she had no idea, but the deeper she moved into the crowd the uglier and more charged with menace the atmosphere grew, mostly thanks to the same street thugs they’d run into at the roadblock yesterday.

  She recognised Pieraro’s second in charge, Roberto, the Colombian guy, standing atop a stone wall, looking splendid in black combat pants and a matching wife-beater. His eyes were hidden behind silver sunglasses and he was sporting some fabulous new bling, but there was no mistaking the brute arrogance and cruelty of the man. He seemed to be enjoying himself, sooling small packs of his men onto the gringos whenever they threatened to push too far into the complex – although his goons seemed less enthusiastic about tangling with the mob of drunken, fired-up college jocks who had armed themselves with the sporting kit. They were pretty evenly matched.