Without warning

by John Birmingham

  ‘Nice work, buddy,’ Fifi said as Shah trotted up to them. ‘You like Nascar at all?’

  Smiling like an imp, Shah lifted his shoulders. ‘Nascar? Never heard of it. But I never liked Toyotas much.’

  Fifi wondered if anyone even drove a Toyota in Nascar.

  * * * *

  Out on the water, it was worse. The sport fisher was big and powerful enough to speed around or muscle through the occasional logjams of smaller craft that blocked its way, and the sight of Pieraro, Thapa and Shah heavily tooled up and guarding against all attempts to contest a boarding precluded any such misadventures. But Jules still had a hell of a time clearing the bay, on which an unknowable number of vessels jostled for primacy. Where the hell most of them thought they were going, she couldn’t say. The little runabouts, motorboats and inflatables that numbered in their thousands would founder in even moderate seas, and word from Mr Lee back on the Rules was that storms in the high latitudes had whipped up a bitching four-metre swell on a nasty cross-chop of at least another metre and a half. They were going to have a lot of seasick passengers in less than half an hour. But at least they’d survive the conditions.

  Jules shook her head as she spun the wheel to dodge what looked like a garbage barge barely able to stay afloat under the weight of seven or eight hundred people, all tightly packed onto the mounds of rubbish. They were throwing as much of the rotting, malodorous ballast overboard as quickly as they could, but the wake from her sudden turn set the flat-bottomed scow wallowing dangerously, and at least a dozen men and women went over the side. She nudged the throttles forward and tried to ignore their flailing figures. They wouldn’t be the last people to drown today.

  A cacophony of horns, whistles, sirens and klaxons overlay the constant screaming and calls for help. The further out into the bay she took them, the worse it grew. Bodies began to appear in the churning water, some floating near capsized boats, and some of them obviously killed by gunfire. At one point she cut their speed back to allow a small pod of surf-skiers to paddle by. They saluted her with their oars before resuming their rhythmic progress.

  ‘How did they get this far?’ she said to nobody in particular.

  Fifi appeared at her elbow with a couple of chilled Coronas. She watched the surfers for a moment before shrugging. ‘Surf breaks get pretty crowded. They’re probably used to it. Wanna beer, Julesy?’

  ‘You have to be fucking kidding… Oh… what the hell. Could you open it for me?’

  Fifi popped the tops and passed one of the bottles to Jules, who kept one hand on the wheel while draining half the cerveza in a few long pulls. The crisp, icy-cold bite was like an angel’s kiss. Indeed, she couldn’t recall ever having enjoyed a beer this much. It was almost obscene.

  ‘You coulda waited, you know,’ said Fifi. ‘I cut up some limes.’

  ‘Only poofs fruit the beer, sweetheart. What’s happening below?’

  Fifi finished her own drink and tossed the empty bottle overboard before answering. It crashed into the prow of a ferry, eliciting a raised fist and a long string of unintelligible curses from the skipper. She flipped him the finger. ‘Miguel’s got the mariachi band all stowed away down below,’ she replied. ‘They’re cool. No problemo. That fucking prom queen, though, and her brother…’

  ‘Theobe and Jason?’

  ‘Yeah, them. They’re already arguing with the banker and his boob job about who gets the big cabin.’

  Jules squeezed her eyes shut for just a second. It was dangerous to have them closed for any longer. ‘As long as they keep it down there, I don’t give a rat’s arse.’

  A deep, high-powered horn sounded off to starboard, where a large container ship had dropped dozens of lines over the side to pick up people struggling in the water. Another big ship, an oil tanker, was heading straight for it. Jules wondered why until she saw the telltale sparkle of gunfire around the tanker’s bridge.

  ‘Damn, Julesy,’ said Fifi. ‘Nobody’s in charge of that son of a bitch. You’d better haul ass. This ain’t gonna be pretty.’

  Jules didn’t need encouraging. As Shah came hammering up the steps to warn them of the impending disaster, she flicked on the boat’s internal PA system. ‘Hey, listen up everyone,’ she began calmly. ‘Get down low and grab something. I’m going to have to lay on some speed and do some rally driving.’

  Another long, shrieking blast on the container ship’s horn pounded at them, and all around it, those ships that could put on speed suddenly did so, leaping up at their bows and churning up white wakes.

  ‘You have seen?’ asked Shah.

  Julianne pushed the throttles to three-quarter power and the sport fisher leapt ahead. ‘I’m on it,’ she cried out, over the rising clamour of horns and the screaming of thousands of people in the water and on nearby boats.

  Stray rounds from the firefight on the tanker splattered against their vessel inches from Fifi’s head. She unlimbered the PKM and spat a stream of tracers back at them. ‘Fuckers!’

  ‘Get down and stop arsing around!’ Jules shouted.

  Reefing the wheel to port, she narrowly avoided spearing into an old wooden yacht that looked a lot like the Diamantina. It was certainly of the same vintage and seemed to be crewed by three swimsuit models. Another sharp turn to starboard swept them around two more yachts, which had already collided with each other, and a bright yellow water taxi that was dangerously overloaded. The bow wave from her boat struck it amidships and the taxi went over.

  Jules was sorry, but there was nothing she could do about it. Behind them the horns of both the tanker and the container ship roared in one long, deafening note.

  Shah pointed her towards a stretch of slightly less crowded water and Jules opened the boat’s engines all of the way. The massive bulk of the sixty-foot power craft lifted even higher in the water and she gripped the silver wheel hard, concentrating on not running into anyone. A few blasts on her own horn began to scatter and clear some room up ahead, but then the warning was lost in a huge, world-ending uproar as the two giant ships collided.

  Risking a look back over the stern, she saw the container ship keel over violently. So great was the impact that the giant steel crates stacked high on its deck were thrown clear; those from the upper stacks describing long, slow arcs over the top of a few lucky boats, before crashing down and utterly destroying a host of smaller vessels further out. One rusted blue P amp;O container turned end over end and flew a good hundred metres before slamming amidships into the overcrowded garbage barge they’d left in their wake earlier. It struck like a giant fist, crushing hundreds of people instantly and cleaving the barge in two. Bow and stern folded up like a jackknife and the flat-bottomed craft sank in less than a minute. More and more of the massive steel boxes began to fall away as the container ship tilted over. They rained down over the side, falling directly on top of those vessels and people who’d been initially spared when the first containers had sailed well over their heads.

  Jules flinched, expecting to hear the volcanic eruption of the oil tanker going up, but it never came. The thundering collision and the avalanche of containers gave way to torturous tearing and a grinding of steel plates as momentum crushed the two large ships together.

  ‘Awesome,’ said Fifi as Jules turned away from the spectacle to concentrate on threading their way through the pandemonium of fleeing craft.

  Having hung back while she negotiated a safe passage, Shah appeared at her side now, just as the sport fisher finally swung out around the southern head of Acapulco Bay and got a little sea room around her. To port stood the high, wooded slopes through which they’d driven back from Revolcadero Beach less than an hour ago, and Jules made certain to maintain a safe distance from them. Twice they’d hit roadblocks while rolling through there and she didn’t fancy getting sniped at by some resentful bandito sitting up on the bluffs.

  Around them, the smaller craft began to suffer in the open seas. The cries of distress from hundreds of small boats suddenly swamped by the p
owerful and unruly ocean swell was distressing. Jules had seen a lot of children on some of those dinky little tubs, but she pushed it out of her mind. To stop and pick up anybody would mean getting swarmed by hundreds, possibly thousands, of people. She left the throttles open and brought them around to the south-west, heading for the rendezvous with Mr Lee.

  ‘I have spoken to Thapa,’ said Shah. ‘As you asked, he did some work back on shore, investigating the attack on your vessel by this Shoeless Dan.’

  ‘Whoa!’ cried Fifi. ‘He’s cute and smart. Man, I’m gonna have to get me some of that later.’

  From the way she was now eyeballing the small, well-muscled Gurkha standing at the stern, Jules knew it was no idle threat. ‘Did he find out anything useful, Mr Shah?’ she asked, as the towering Aztec pyramid of the Fairmont hove into view a few miles off the port bow. ‘It’s okay if he didn’t. I wasn’t expecting much, just wanted to cover our arses really.’

  Shah, who seemed able to maintain his balance in the rough conditions by simply flexing at the knees, dismissed her last words with a shake of his head. ‘It is his job, Miss Julianne, and mine. Private Thapa discovered nothing specific about the attack on your boat, but there are at least three syndicates, criminal enterprises, that moved very quickly to capitalise on the Disappearance. Most of their activities were restricted to land, but one of them already had a history of maritime criminality. Perhaps this was how they came to know your shoeless friend.’

  ‘Makes sense,’ Jules replied with a shrug. ‘Maritime criminality was Shoeless Dan’s special power.’ She spun the wheel to take them on a long, looping course around a paddle-steamer that had somehow found itself blundering through the waves. It was nearly as badly overcrowded as the sunken garbage barge had been, and she wanted to give them a very wide berth. ‘But there’s not much of a piracy culture around here,’ she added. ‘Not like in parts of Asia. A lot of smuggling, yes, but not piracy. The Americans wouldn’t have allowed it, even in Mexican waters. You think somebody’s branching out? I mean, not that we’ll be hanging around long enough for them to try their luck.’

  The huge Gurkha bobbed and ducked quite comically to maintain his balance, without once needing to grab on to anything to steady himself. ‘You will if you insist on hugging the coastline to drop Pieraro’s people anywhere, Miss Julianne,’ he said.

  Jules frowned testily. ‘Look, I’m really pissed off about that. But I didn’t see any way around it. Miguel had that Colombian nutter holding the crowds off us and he could have very easily put us right in the poo if I’d cut up rough about his mariachi band.’

  ‘His what?’

  ‘Sorry. In-joke.’

  Fifi produced another beer from an icebox on the flying deck and winked at Shah. ‘They’re cool with me,’ she said. ‘I think they’re cute. Wanna brew, anyone?’

  Both Jules and Shah answered at once: ‘No.’

  ‘They’re not American citizens,’ the Englishwoman continued. ‘They’re peasants. Nobody is going to take them in as genuine refugees. Even if we can get all the way across the Pacific with the rations we have on board – and, look, I suppose we can – Hawaii will not take them. They’re shedding people at the moment. New Zealand might. Australia won’t. And everybody else is just as likely to open fire on us as soon as we sail into view.’

  Shah held both hands up as if to show her he had nothing left. ‘I do not presume to tell you what you should do. But you have hired me to provide security, and I advise you now that heading back towards the coastline will be a very dangerous business.’

  ‘Fifi, you’ve been out on the Rules with Lee a lot more than me. How’s our provisioning?’

  She drained half of the beer and burped. ‘’Scuse me. It’s not bad, Julesy,’ she replied. That golfer had some good shit in the fridge, and plenty of it. And we topped up the larder nicely. There’s like two frozen pigs and couple of steer down there now. Plus, them Mexicans did bring plenty of food – not like those other fucking snobs. All they brought was expensive luggage and heaps of attitude. I don’t see a problem. Really. Come on, it’ll be fun. Be like Carnivale every night.’

  Jules looked to Shah for support but he remained entirely impassive. ‘I just… it’s just that…’ she faltered. ‘Oh, I don’t know… my father taught me that helping people was wrong. It never ends well. We’re not philanthropists here, we’re smugglers – at best.’

  ‘Foxy fucking smugglers.’ Fifi saluted Julianne with her bottle. ‘And anyway, your old man ate his pistol one night just before the cops grabbed him. Should you really be looking to him for advice?’

  Jules looked completely lost. ‘That was my mother’s fault,’ she said bitterly. ‘If she hadn’t tipped off Scotland Yard about Daddy diddling the tax man…’

  Shah regarded her with some confusion. ‘Your mother informed on your father?’ he asked.

  ‘After a less than satisfying divorce settlement failed to provide for her in the style to which she’d so been looking forward,’ Jules explained. She was surprised to find it hard to speak, with her throat suddenly locking. ‘I was his favourite,’ she said quietly.

  * * * *

  34

  KUWAIT INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, KUWAIT CITY

  The sutures in his butt made it all but impossible to run, and for a ‘running high’ junkie like Bret Melton, that was becoming every bit as uncomfortable as his assorted injuries. ‘You’ll have to excuse my irritability, Sadie. I’ve been folded, spindled and mutilated. Puts a man in a poor frame of mind.’

  The Al Jazeera correspondent clicked his coffee cup against Melton’s and smiled. The Army Times reporter was pathetically grateful to him for getting him out of that hangar in the boonies. ‘It is nothing, really,’ Mirsaad replied. ‘Look at what is happening to the world. And you are worried about your manners.’

  ‘Well, perhaps if people were possessed of a few more manners, they wouldn’t go around killing each other with such abandon.’

  Sayad al Mirsaad’s eyes flickered nervously around the departure lounge. Kuwait International Airport was swarming with armed personnel from a dozen different countries, mostly American, however, and the atmosphere was twitchy and dangerous. Dense knots of travellers, civilian and military, crowded around every available television screen to follow the war news. There had already been one unpleasant incident where Mirsaad had been recognised from a report he’d just filed on the sinking of the USS Hopper. A couple of Marines didn’t think he was suitably respectful in tone and Melton had been forced to intervene before the little Jordanian got stomped. It had put the American in a bad mood, arguing with his own people, even if they were a couple of Podunk assholes who would have left the world a better place had they stayed home and been zapped by the Wave. He’d been snappy and irritable ever since, and his inability to break out of the blue funk simply made it all the worse.

  He needed to piss, his wounded hand throbbed like a bastard, and he’d had no sleep since the first Israeli warhead had gone off. He was grateful to Sayad for hauling his ass out of TRANSCOM limbo, especially so given the business-class ticket, paid for by BBC World, that his colleague had handed him.

  ‘You’re off to London, you lucky devil,’ Mirsaad had said as he handed over the precious travel wallet. ‘You don’t deserve it, of course, what with your whoring and drinking and your disgraceful attitude to the Prophet and his faithful. I should really be going in your place. After all, I am much more virtuous.’

  And behind his friend’s twinkling eyes and ready smile, Melton had seen real fear at being left behind to burn in a nuclear furnace. It made it all the more affecting that he had agreed to track Melton down for the British broadcaster, which had lost contact with him when he was injured. Bret wondered whether he would have done the same thing in Mirsaad’s place. The small coterie of full-time war correspondents tended to be close and unusually supportive of each other, but Mirsaad had spent days hunting him through the vast labyrinth of the US Transport Command and, having fo
und him in that transit hangar out in the desert, had insisted on personally driving the injured reporter three hundred miles to Kuwait City.

  ‘Don’t you have a job?’ asked Melton as they waited in the lounge for his BA flight to England.

  ‘I am a roving reporter,’ Mirsaad replied with a grin. ‘I rove, therefore I am. And I will file many stories on the reaction to the Israeli bombs and to the American pull-out. Frankly, if it keeps me away from the bombsites themselves, I am grateful. I have heard from colleagues sent into Egypt and Syria about the conditions there. Many of them are now very sick. The network has suspended operations in the irradiated areas until they are safe. Well, safer. For now, Kuwait and Qatar are my beats, as you say. I shall fly out to Coalition headquarters when you have gone for a briefing on the ceasefire.’

  Melton snorted. ‘Not much of a ceasefire, Sadie. The Israelis wiped the field clean with a couple of airburst nukes. EMPs fried everything the Iranians had.’

  Mirsaad’s fragile smile fell away. ‘You know, a lot of people are saying that if your government had not warned Tehran and the others, they would not have deployed all of their defences to be wiped out. Many people think it was a conspiracy, a plot between Washington and Tel Aviv to steal all of the oil, not just Saddam’s.’