by Frank Tayell
“The same has to be true for the US, doesn’t it?” I asked.
“You’re forgetting two things,” he said. “It’s a much bigger country, and I know where the bombs were going to be dropped. Maybe a few went off course, and you’ve got to factor in the unpredictability of fallout, but Crossfields Landing was fine when I left.”
“That’s that town in Maine where you sailed out from?”
“Right. I kept a summerhouse up there. Well, I say summer, they think snow and ice makes for a warm day. Owning a small boat seven hundred miles from DC gave me a legitimate excuse to disappear for a few days at a time. And sometimes I did actually go there, and a few times I even went fishing. Not that I ever caught much. After the outbreak, after Prometheus, after the agents on my trail finally decided that there were bigger priorities than treason, that’s where I went. There was this kid who’d inherited an old tackle shop, the summer before last. Him and a few friends had dropped out of high school, hitched their way up there. Anyway, by the time I reached the town they’d turned the place into a...”
“Just get to the point,” Kim cut in. “How many people were there?”
“About sixty. Give or take.”
“And that was months ago. Too long. Too much could have happened. You’ve no idea if anyone is left at all.”
“And no reason to suspect otherwise. That was about a month after the outbreak, and sure that’s a long time. But since it all started in New York, that means it was a month after everyone in the world started heading away from that corner of the East Coast. I mean, who in their right mind would actually head in that direction?”
“Exactly,” Kim muttered caustically. “Yet that’s where you want us to go.”
“They’re good people. Look, it’s just one option, and I think it’s a better bet, long term, than some village on a rainy island on the wrong side of the Atlantic.”
“Maybe,” she said dismissively. “That’s sixty people. Sixty. And Scotland’s gone, England’s a wasteland. Where else? I mean, how many people are there left?” Kim asked, again.
“In the whole world? I’ve no idea. I can only tell you what I saw getting to the Atlantic and then crossing it.”
“Then just tell us how many people you know about.”
“You want a number? Let’s see. There’s Captain Mills and his crew on the HMS Vehement. They lost a few when the naval battle kicked off, but there were about ninety left. Then there’s the Santa Maria, Sophia Augusto’s fishing trawler. They had a crew of twenty five bolstered by another sixty family, friends and hangers on. Another hundred or so survived from the flotilla. And then there’s another hundred in that village on the Irish coast.”
“So, in total, as far as you know, that’s just four or five hundred people. Out of how many? A billion? More? And that was months ago.”
“Exactly, there’s bound to be more by now.”
“Or none left at all. You can’t be certain anyone’s left.”
“No more certain than you can be that they are all dead. And there’s no reason to think they would be. Those guys in Crossfields Landing had more munitions than most medium sized countries. And if they needed to retreat, then there’s the sea at their backs. As for the Vehement, exactly who’s going to threaten a nuclear powered, nuclear-armed submarine? Anyway, it’s Sophia who’s going to be waiting for me. Or she’ll send someone.”
“How can you be certain she will?” I asked.
“I told you. Sophia owes me. She won’t let me down.”
“You’ve said that,” Kim said, “half a dozen times, but you’ve not said why, or why Bill and I should trust her.”
“You trust me, don’t you?” he retorted.
“Surprisingly, yes. But that’s not what I meant. What’s your connection with her?”
“I thought I told you? No? OK, well for that we have to go back a few years.”
“Can’t you just give us the short version?” she asked.
“Why? What else have you got planned. We’ve at least another hour before we get to the next lock. As I was saying, we have to go back a few years. Her family has been fishing for years. Father to son to niece to cousin. The surname changed, but someone in that family was hauling cod out of the Atlantic since before Amerigo Vespucci’s name was first misspelt. Most recently that was Sophia. She had delusions of acting until her brother drowned, and she realised that living in increasingly smaller apartments chasing increasingly irregular work was even less appealing than spending the rest of her life knee-deep in fish guts. She returned to Puerto Rico, claimed her inheritance and discovered it consisted of a boat that leaked more than a five-cent sieve. She’d gone to Hollywood hoping to get rich and didn’t see why that should change. She needed a new boat. Ideally she needed more than one. No bank was ever going to front her that kind of cash, so she got her loan from a group of unpleasant men with deep pockets and long memories.
“She managed to make her repayments, and all was peachy, right up until the hurricane hit. I doubt you’ll remember that particular storm, it was back in the dark ages before we had twenty four news. It blacked-out a few hundred miles of coast, destroyed some villages, devastated a few towns and flooded the port. She lost her boats. That didn’t stop her getting in a dinghy trying to rescue people stranded by the flooding. And that is how she came to my attention. There was a piece about her on the news. An election was coming up and I thought she’d look good on a stage next to my candidate. By the time I found her, she’d been told that press, fame and a civics award weren’t much use when the interest was due. I say she was ‘told’, the people she owed the money to had burnt down her office, and that was a real feat given the flooding. So I made her an offer.”
“What? One she couldn’t refuse?” Kim asked, sarcastically.
“Of course she could have refused. The alternative was smuggling drugs north and guns south until she was caught or killed. She knew it. I knew it. I offered to pay off her debts, buy her two new boats and make sure she wasn’t bothered again. In return...”
“No, hang on. What do you mean by ‘make sure’?”
“I grew up running drugs and guns for an organised crime syndicate in London,” he said. “I crossed the Atlantic on a fake passport and bribed, blackmailed and bludgeoned my way to the top. What do you think I mean? I had the cash, and was looking for a very public good deed to perform. In return she’d...”
“No,” Kim cut in again. “I don’t buy it. There’s no way she’d swap a school of piranhas for one big shark. What exactly did you tell her, because I bet you didn’t tell her the truth?”
“The truth was that I wanted a way to get across to England without the authorities knowing I’d left. This was back when I was just planning to kill Quigley and old Lord Masterton. My plan was to make a lot of noise about taking my boat out for a weeks fishing and hiking. Except I’d have been picked up by her trawler somewhere out in international waters. We’d head east, and then her boat would get into trouble and need to be towed to the nearest port for repairs. And with a boat that size, and that’s why I bought her a boat that size, it would be somewhere in Britain. No one would notice if one of the crew disappeared for a few hours and that was all I needed.”
“Seriously? You told her that?” Kim asked.
“Of course not.”
“Well what did you tell her?” she insisted.
“Is it important?”
“Aside from the fact we’re likely to meet her? Yes, it is important,” she replied. “For all this talk of other people out there somewhere, right here right now it’s just us. We have to trust each other and that means no more secrets, no more sly insinuations or political prevarication. So what did you tell her?”
“Alright, the truth. I told her I was waging my own private war against this mob she’d borrowed the money from. I told her that one day, maybe, I’d have them on the run. And when I did I’d need to follow them across to Europe. Then I showed her a photo. It was from the front
page of the Washington Post, and it was one of me standing next to the President back when he was still the Governor.”
“You led her to believe that you were some kind of crusading super-hero with west-wing credentials?” she asked, incredulously.
“So what? I wasn’t going to tell her the truth. I don’t know if she actually believed me or if she just wanted to. I bought her boats legitimately. Two deep-sea trawlers that were state of the art, for their day. All the taxes were paid, and the press were there to film my candidate smashing a bottle of champagne on the Santa Maria’s prow. She had what she wanted. And so did I. Until I discovered Prometheus. The more I found out, the plainer it got that I was going to end up with the NSA, the FBI, the CIA and the rest of that federal alphabet soup on my trail. Sophia and her boat just weren’t going to cut it. I had a friend who owned a farm. It was more of a compound really, the kind with its own airstrip. That was how I was planning on getting out of the US. When the outbreak hit, that’s where I went.”
“You’d have been shot down, if you’d flown here,” I said.
“Maybe. Maybe not,” he said, airily. “It didn’t matter. By the time I got there the plane was gone. If I was going to get across the Atlantic it was going to be by sea. Except when I managed to reach Sophia, she was already stuck in the middle of that flotilla of refugees all heading for the UK.”
“So who dropped you in Norfolk?” I asked.
“I’m getting to that. On the day of the outbreak when the news was still talking about virulent strains, pandemics, and terrorist attacks, Sophia loaded up her two boats with food, fuel, family, friends and the few lucky strangers who just happened to be passing. She took the boats out, and headed north. They found a secluded bay, and it would have stayed secluded if everything that could float wasn’t looking for that exact same thing. Now from what she said...”
“The short version,” Kim cut in sharply. Begrudgingly, she added, “Please.”
“Alright. A lot of boats sailed into that bay. The Santa Maria was the only ship that sailed out. We’re talking about a couple of weeks after the outbreak and she had no idea where to go. She’d lost one boat and a lot of friends. There were thousands of ships out in the Atlantic all in the same... well, I was going to say ‘the same boat’. They were all in the same situation, low on food, low on fuel, looking for sanctuary. Most of the ships that had set off in those early days had ended up in Greenland. It was inevitable, really. I mean, if you were listening to the radio you heard that the outbreak had spread to nearly everywhere in the world. Then you had a few places like the UK and New Zealand which were issuing warnings that they’d sink anyone who’d approach. In the Atlantic, that left Greenland. Not because it was safe, or because there was anything special about it. Just because the locals had all headed off into the Arctic instead of hanging around chattering into a radio.”
“That’s how the virus got there, then?” Kim asked.
“Well technically it’s not a virus, but I guess that’s close enough. No, that’s not how it got there. Those boats had all been at sea for days. The infection came by plane, same as it had everywhere else. By the time those boats arrived the place was a warzone. You had units from the Scandinavian military, who’d been detailed to Greenland to set up a redoubt, battling mercenaries, militias and anyone who could hijack a plane from pretty much everywhere in the hemisphere. Add to that a few locals not quick enough to get out, throw in the undead, and those boats that made it there, well, the few that still had any fuel turned right around. Most didn’t. Most people had no choice but to stay and fight, and I guess most died.”
“That’s not the flotilla that was heading to the UK, though?” I asked.
“No. That was made up of the boats too slow to get to Greenland, or the people who’d left later on. The Americas, West Africa, even Europe, they came from pretty much everywhere. They’d been drifting out in the Atlantic and the only place left, the one place they could reach that was safe was the UK. And they knew it had to be safe, because they could hear the BBC broadcasting ‘there are no reported cases in the UK or Ireland’. That was about the time I called her up asking for a lift. I’d paid for a good communications rig, I mean, there wasn’t much point me planning to use her boat if I couldn’t get in touch with her. But like I said, by then she was stuck in the middle of that mass of boats and rafts and everything else. But the radio turned out to help in the end, it’s how she managed to get in touch with Captain Mills.”
“He’s the Captain of the submarine?”
“The HMS Vehement, one of the British Trident submarines. He was ordered to launch a missile, and detonate it above the flotilla. He refused in part, I like to think, thanks to me.”
“How’s that?” I asked.
“Once I’d learnt what Prometheus was, I’d tried to come up with a way of stopping it. I’d tried the political route. I’d called in every favour, tried blackmailing every politician I had some dirt on, I even tried just asking nicely. That didn’t work. So I tried to get a message to the people who stood between the big red button and the bombs going off. And it looks like that didn’t work so well either.”
“What?” Kim scoffed. “You sent out a couple of hundred emails titled ‘read this and save the world’, and this Captain actually opened it?”
“No, of course not. It was far more complicated, and a lot simpler, than that. I was very, very good at what I did. But I was desperate. It was my last throw of the dice. That’s why I ended up on the run. No, the problem was getting a message to people stuck on a submarine out at sea. The Vehement was in for repairs when the outbreak occurred. It’s why I was able to get Captain Mills and why I couldn’t get a message to any of the others.”
“And this message from a complete stranger was enough to stop him from launching?”
“No. I said the message was a small part of it. The first order he got when he was underway was a strange one. He was told to open his letter of last resort.”
“What’s that?” Kim asked.
“The first thing a Prime Minister did on taking office was to write a letter to each of the Captains of the nuclear-armed submarines,” I said. “The letter said what they should do if Britain was attacked and communication with the government was lost. Retaliate, scuttle the boat, seek sanctuary in the US or Australia or whatever other course suited the whims of the PM.”
“Exactly,” Sholto said, “so since the letter was only meant to be read when the Prime Minister and the rest of the cabinet were dead, Captain Mills thought being told to open it was odd. When he did, he found the orders weren’t for retaliation, but for a pre-emptive strike against oil and gas refineries in Russia. These were his Prometheus targets, and they’d matched what I’d sent him. Nevertheless, he cued up the data, waited for the order to launch and then he sat and thought. But when the order to fire came it was with a new set of targets, the flotilla. And he refused to kill so many civilians.”
“But clearly someone else didn’t,” Kim said. “Otherwise more people would have survived.”
“Fortunately there wasn’t another sub in the Atlantic. The orders went to some cruisers and destroyers. They launched a conventional attack. Captain Mills decided that if he was going to mutiny he might as well do it properly so he started torpedoing the Navy ships. They retaliated, and...” he noticed Kim’s expression. “And after that you had the evacuation and Prometheus. After a few days, when the dust had settled the Royal Navy ships had been sunk, but so had most of the flotilla, and the Vehement was damaged. The Santa Maria was still afloat, and Sophia, with Captain Mills, started a rescue operation. They took the people they rescued to Ireland.”
“Why Ireland? Because it was closest?”
“Sure. Partly. And partly because it wasn’t the UK. But that wasn’t the whole reason. You remember that message they were broadcasting? It said there were no threats in the UK and Ireland. So Britain wasn’t the only place that was safe. According to the radio.”
“Well, was it?”
“It could have been. Politics.” He shook his head. “No one in Whitehall had thought to talk to Dublin about that message. They just broadcast it anyway, and started talking about plans to shift people from evacuation zones across the Irish Sea and across the border with the north. That made Dublin nervous. Of course, the people at the top, Quigley and his ilk, they had no plans to evacuate anyone. But the Irish government wasn’t to know this and Quigley didn’t tell them. Worried they were going to be swamped by millions of English refugees, Ireland offered sanctuary to every EU military unit that needed safe harbour. That meant planes and that meant the virus. When they’d started pulling refugees out of the water they had had a whole stretch of the east coast, south of Dublin. By the time they picked me up they were down to one village.”
“Why there?” I asked, “Why not the Atlantic coast? That would have been closer to the flotilla.”
“Because” he said with a shrug, “that was where someone had tried to organise a defence. Maybe if they’d set it up somewhere else, more people would have survived. Who knows?”
“One village,” Kim said. “A few hundred people left out of all those refugees. It’s not much.”
“You’re focusing on the wrong things. I’m talking about a few hundred people in a functioning community. Who knows how many other small groups there might be up in the mountains or out on the smaller Islands? Maybe I should have said they retreated to one village. From what they said, they’ve got the seeds of a proper civilisation. Imagine hot water on tap...”
“Wait, hang on,” Kim said, “Do you mean you haven’t actually seen it? You didn’t even go to this village in Ireland?”
“Well, no. Not exactly.”
“Not exactly? What does that mean?”
“I’d reached Sophia, on the radio I’d bought for her. She’d passed the message onto Captain Mills and he and his sub came out to meet me. By that stage he’d abandoned the rescue operation and was planning a trip around the UK. He wanted to confirm the extent of the nuclear attack, or as much of it as could be seen from a few miles out to sea. He dropped me off in Norfolk. I made my way to London and...”