Firefight Y2K

by Dean Ing

  Eventually Vicki went outside the sea gate and knelt on the wood. Pius rolled to assist her, breathing softly to avoid blowhole spray that could soak her with its faint alien rankness. She fed him one small squid, earning a rapid burst of friendly Delphinese complaint at her stinginess, and she knew he would wait for her to return.

  The videotape was fully spent. The batteries should be good for another cartridge but Vicki took fresh nicad cells from the lab with a new blank tape cartridge just to be on the safe side. She was hurrying back to Pius when she saw the aircraft dip near. Sure enough, it was one of the Helio Couriers which, everybody knew, meant that the passengers had clout with American cloak-and-dagger people. On the other hand, there’d been a lot of that kind of air traffic in the area for the past fortnight. She was increasingly glad that McEachern and Digby had gone to Cooktown to get shickered. Plastered, she told herself; must revert to American slang for the day.

  Something seemed to be bothering the big griseus, she thought, fumbling to replace the equipment on Pius’s backpack. He had never refused to enter the sea gate before. Don’t get shirty, she thought; if I’m late it’s my bum, not yours. And because of Pius, she was clearly going to be late. The fact of his early return made the tape important, though. The microcorder operated only when triggered by calls made by Pius himself, and it pinged to remind him of squid when the cartridge was expended. That meant he might return once a month-though he was very early this time. Two years ago it had been once a week, and no one was sure why Pius communicated with his fellows less as time passed. Perhaps he was growing laconic with age, she thought, giving him a pat before she upended the squid bucket.

  Pius whirled and took a mouthful of delicacies in one ravening swoop, pausing an instant to study Vicki, then seemed to evaporate into the bay, leaving only a roil of salt water in his wake. Water and uneaten squid. Boy, you must have a heavy date, she mused. It did not occur to Vicki Lorenz that the big cetacean might be hurrying, not toward, but away from something.

  She wheeled the decrepit Holden sedan onto the taxi strip, chagrined to see that the pilot had already set his chocks and tiedowns. The portly fellow standing with the attaché case would be Harriman Rooker, from the cut of his dark suit and the creases in his trousers which might have been aligned by laser. The little weatherbeaten man sitting on the B-four bag, then, had to be Jochen Shuler.

  Vicki made breathless apologies. “I had a visitor who wouldn’t wait,” she smiled. “Dolphins can be a surly lot.”

  So could State Department men. “At least you make no secret about your priorities, Dr. Lorenz,” Rooker said. “It is Dr. Victoire Lorenz?” The hand was impeccably manicured, its grip cool and brief, the smile a micron thick.

  “I truly am sorry,” she said, fighting irritation, and turned toward the smaller man. Shuler wore rumpled khakis and no tie, his voice a calm basso rasp leavened with humor. “Forget it,” he said, with a shoulder pat that was somehow not patronizing. “It’s not as if we were perishable.”

  The imp of extravagance made her say it: “Everybody’s perishable in tropical salt. You come here all bright and shiny, but you leave all sheit and briny.” Shuler’s control was excellent; his wiry frame shook silently but he only put his head down and grinned. Rooker was plainly not amused. Well, at least she could relate to one of them.

  The pilot, Rooker explained, was prepared to stay and take care of the Courier. He looked as though he could do it, all right. The bulge in his jacket was no cigarette case. Rooker selected three of his four pieces of luggage for the Holden’s boot (trunk, dammit; trunk, Vicki scolded herself). One, a locked leather and canvas mail sack, required both men to lift. Shuler lugged his one huge bag into the rear seat. The bag clinked. Perrier water? Booze?

  Vicki appointed herself tour guide without thinking and drove along access roads until she was pointing out the salt water pens where young dolphins and other cetaceans were monitored. “We know Delphinese has dialectal differences, just as people and honeybees have local variants of language. We’re using recorders to identify various subspecies by sonic signatures. I’ve made friends with a big Risso’s dolphin that roams around loose with a video recorder, sort of a linguistic shill. Maybe we can get some idea whether a grampus orca, a killer whale, sweet-talks a little tursiops before he swallows it. Generally, larger species communicate in lower frequencies-” She broke off, glancing at Harriman Rooker who sat erect beside her, his right arm lying precisely along the windowframe. Straightens pictures, she guessed. His left hand was in his lap and-inexcusable for a trained observer-Vicki realized only then that a wrist manacle bound the man to his equipment. She pulled to a stop, killed the engine. “You didn’t come here for a tour,” she accused. With sudden intuition, she did not want to know why they had come.

  Rooker’s pale eyes swept her face, hawk-bright, unblinking. “No,” he agreed. “We are here for an exchange of information-and other valuables. A matter of the most extreme urgency, Dr. Lorenz.”

  “Vicki, please,” she urged with her most engaging smile.

  “If I must. I suggest that you tell us what our next move should be.”

  She searched the implacable features, puzzled, then faintly irked. She felt as if she had been thrust into the middle of a conversation she hadn’t been listening to. “Well, you could try telling me what information you need, and why the urgency.”

  He stared until she grew positively uneasy. And that made her, unaccountably, angry. Then, “Tell us about Agung Bondjol,” he said. Softly, but cold, cold.

  “Uh. A kid from Djakarta, wasn’t he? Right; he was with that Wisconsin senator on the R. L. Carson when she sank a few hundred miles south of here last month. One of the four people lost.”

  From the back seat: “Some kid.”

  “Thank you, Jo,” Rooker said quickly, in that’ll-be-enough tones. “Nothing more, Dr.-Vicki?”

  “If there was, I didn’t read it. I don’t pay much attention to the news on any medium, you know.”

  “Apparently. Now tell us about Alec Korff.” The transition was verbally smooth, but for Vicki it was viciously abrupt.

  She took a deep breath. “Poet first, I suppose; that’s how he liked it. And because he could be acclaimed at that and starve at the same time, he made his living as a tooling engineer.

  “Korff got interested in interspecies communication between cetaceans and humans; his mystic side, I guess. He didn’t give two whoops about explicit messages. Just the emotional parts.”

  Low, but sharp: “You’re sure of that?”

  Long pause, as Vicki studied the sea for solace. Then she said, “Certain as one person can be of another. He once said that the truth is built from gestures, but words are the lumber of lies. He hated phonies and loved cetaceans.

  “You know, of course, that I lived with Korff. Met him while I was getting my doctorate at Woods Hole and he was designing equipment for whales and dolphins. Prosthetic hands they could work with flipper phalanges, underwater vocoders, that sort of thing. When I landed the job here, he came with me.”

  She waited for Rooker to respond. When he did not, she sighed, “Korff was happy here. I knew when he was really contented because he’d compose doggerel on serious topics and laugh his arse off about it. Hiding his pearls like a swine, he said. Everybody’s heard Mariner Adrift, but did you ever hear Fourteen Thousand Pounds of God? Pompous and self-deprecating, and hides a great truth right out in the open.

  The orca’s fangèd dignity

  Fills me with humility.

  One is wise to genuflect

  To seven tons of self-respect.

  The killer whale doesn’t really have fangs, of course. Just teeth a tyrannosaur would envy. Korff knew that. He knew a hell of a lot about cetaceans.”

  Still no response. Rooker was not going to let her off the hook. “And two years come November,” she recited quickly, fingernails biting her palms, “Korff took his goddamn sloop along the goddamn Barrier Reef and caught a goddamn
tradewind squall or something and goddammit, drowned! Is that what you wanted to hear?”

  “Quite the contrary,” Rooker said, still watching her.

  Instantly she was out of the car. “I don’t know why I let the consulate talk me into this pig-in-a-poke hostess job on my own time, and now it’s become cat-and-mouse insinuation, and I won’t have it! If you know anything, you know how I felt about Korff and-and you can go piss up a rope, mate,” she stormed. She slammed the door so hard the Holden groaned on its shocks.

  Halfway to her bungalow afoot, she looked back to see Shuler patiently following. He had a bottle in each hand, so she waited. It seemed a good idea at the time.

  Given that they knew her fondness for mezcal, how did they know she couldn’t get it locally? Vicki considered many such nuances in the next hour, sitting cross-legged with Jo Shuler while they plastered themselves into a thin film on her verandah. At first he answered nearly as many questions as he asked. She learned that he was detached from the U.S. Mine Defense Labs in Panama City, Florida; an expert in experimental sonar video and no ignoramus on dolphin research either. He had read her papers on cetacean language, but his own papers were classified. He did not elaborate.

  Shuler even managed to explain his companion’s cryptic manner, after a fashion. It wasn’t nice, Vicki decided, but it made sense. “Okay,” she said, stifling a belch, “so some nit at Rand Corporation figured Korff was alive and that I knew it. I’m sure he isn’t, and if he is, I don’t.” She shrugged: “You know what I mean. So much for heavy thinkers at Rand.”

  Shuler regarded her gravely, listing to port a bit. “Why are you so sure?”

  “You want it straight?” Why was she so willing to bare these intimacies? Something beyond her normal candor was squeezing her brains. “Okay: Alec Korff had a few leftover sex hangups, and very tough standards, but he was highly sexed. Me, too. My mother hated him for his honesty about it. She was a tiny little thing, always trying to prove something by vamping him. Then one day she phoned-I was on the extension and I don’t think either of them knew it. She implied she might fly up to see him alone. Korff suggested she could ride a whiskbroom and save the price of a ticket.” She spread her hands wide. “How could I not love a man like that? Anyway, the point is that we clicked. It was like finding the other half of yourself. He played poet for me and I played floozy for him.” With a sly grin: “It’d take him years to develop a replacement, I think. Oh yes, he’d have got in touch with me, all righty.” She took a mighty swig, remembering. “You can go back to the car and tell Mr. stiff-corset Rooker all about it.”

  “I bet he’s blushing about the corset,” Shuler laughed, then looked abashed.

  Vicki squinted hard. “You’re bugged, aren’t you? He’s been listening!” She saw guilt, and a touch of truculence, and went on. “You two have been rough-smoothing me, haven’t you? He’s really the rough and you’re really the smooth. How many of my old friends did you bastards interview before I fitted into your computers?” She stared grimly at her bottle; she had consumed over a pint of the stuff and now she had a good idea why Shuler was drinking from another bottle.

  “I dunno about that, Vicki, I was briefed just like Rooker was. He’s used to representing the government, negotiating with some pretty weird groups. I’m just a technician like you. Lissen, lady, we’re hip-deep in hockey-all of us.”

  She flung the bottle far out over the turf, watched it bounce. “Not me, I feel bonzer.”

  “You’re just high.”

  “High? I could hunt kookaburra with a croquet mallet,” she boasted, then went down on hands and knees near the immobile Shuler, shouting, “That’s a bird, Rooker, you twit!” Then she saw past Shuler’s foolish grin, realized that he carried a shoulder holster too, and sat back. “You people scare me. Go away.”

  “We’re scared too,” he said, no longer playing the drunk. As though Rooker were standing before them he went on, “She’s about to pass out on us, Harriman. Why can’t we drop this interrogation farce and accept her at face value? Or d’you have any nasty little questions to add to mine before the drug wears off?”

  Australian slang is compost-rich with unspeakable utterance. Vicki Lorenz had heard most of it, and found it useful now. She had not exhausted her repertoire when she began to snore.

  Jo Shuler waited for a moment, moved near enough to tap his forefinger against her knee. Snores. “Drive that heap on over here,” he said to his signet ring. “She’s out. We can put a call through while she sleeps it off. For the record, I say we take a chance on her.” Then he managed to carry Vicki inside to the couch, and waited for Harriman Rooker.

  Late afternoon shadows dappled the verandah before Vicki had swept the cobwebs from her mind. To Rooker’s apology she replied, “Maybe I could accept those vague insinuations if I knew what’s behind them. What’s so earth-shaking about that kid, Bondjol?”

  “He’s small loss in himself,” Rooker agreed. “He’s a renegade Sufi Moslem-pantheist, denied the concept of evil, embraced drugs to find religious ecstasy, learned he could purchase other ecstasy from the proceeds of his drug-running-tricks that’d get him arrested in Djakarta if he weren’t the pampered son of an Indonesian deputy premier.”

  “I take it a deputy premier’s a real honcho.”

  “Oh, yes; roughly equal to half a vice president for openers. But the elder Bondjol is quite the pivotal figure. He’s made it very clear: if the United States wants to keep some leased bases, Bondjol gets his son back.”

  Vicki considered this. “If you think I can round up a million dolphins and send them out to find the body-forget it. I’m not sure I could even get such complicated messages across in Delphinese-”

  “Somebody sure as hell can,” Jo Shuler put in.

  Rooker: “You still don’t understand. Western media haven’t broken the story yet, but it’s all over Indonesia: Agung Bondjol is alive, sending notes on driftwood-or was, ten days ago. I think you’d better view this tape,” he added, patting the attache case.

  It took an interminable twenty minutes to locate a compatible playback machine in the lab. The men stood behind Vicki as she sat through the experience. The R. L. Carson had been a four-hundred tonner, a small coastal survey vessel inside the great Barrier Reef with Australian permission, under contract to the United States Navy. The vessel carried unusual passengers: the swarthy young Bondjol with two camp followers and Bondjol’s host, Wisconsin Senator Distel Mayer. This part of the tape, chuckled Jo Shuler, had been surreptitious film footage saved by a crew member. The good senator had paid more attention to one of Bondjol’s young ladies than he had to the wonders of the reef. Thus far it was an old story, a junketeering politician with a foreign guest on a U.S. vessel far from home.

  Shuler cut through Vicki’s cynical thoughts: “Now you know why Mayer’s so helpful in persuading our media to hold the story. The next stuff, I put together at M.D.L. from the ship’s recordings. It’s computer-enhanced video from experimental sonar equipment.”

  The scene was panoramic now, a vertical view of sandy bottom and projecting coral heads with preternatural color separation. Visually it seemed as if animation had been projected over a live scene. It was a hell of a research tool, she thought longingly. The audio was a series of clicks and coos, with a descending twitter. Vicki punched the tape to “hold” and glanced toward the Navy civilian. “Don’t ask,” Shuler said quickly. “I promise you’ll be the first nonmilitary group to get this enhancement rig. It may take a year or two, we’re working on better . . .”

  “That’s not it,” she said. “The audio, though: isn’t it ours?” She re-ran the last few seconds as Rooker shrugged his ignorance.

  “The Great White Father signal,” Shuler nodded. “Sure. It’s becoming standard procedure for the Navy in such treacherous channels, when they don’t mind making the noise. But it won’t be any more,” he added darkly.

  Cape Melville Station had developed two messages in Delphinese that, in themselv
es, justified every penny spent on research. The first message was a call for help, repeatedly sent by a battery-powered tape loop whenever a modern life jacket was immersed in salt water. During the past year, over a hundred lives had been saved when cetaceans-chiefly the smaller dolphins but in one documented case, a lesser rorqual whale-towed shipwrecked humans to safety. The device had come too late for Korff, though.

  The Great White Father signal had a very different effect. It seemed to make nearby cetaceans happy, to provoke playful broachings and aerobatics as though performing for a visiting dignitary. “I hope you don’t let whalers get a copy of this,” Vicki said ominously. “It was intended as a friendly greeting. The people of the sea are too trusting for their own good.”

  “Is that a fact,” murmured Harriman Rooker, his eyebrows arched. “Roll the tape.”

  The tape repeated its record, then proceeded as the Carson swept over sandy shallows, reef fish darting into coral masses that projected nearly to the hull. Then Vicki saw a thin undulating line of bright brown cross the video screen, rising slightly as the ship approached. Something darted away at the edge of the screen; something else-two somethings, then others, regular brown cylindrical shapes-swerved into view, attached to the brown line like sodden floats on a hawser. One of the cylinders disappeared, suddenly filled the screen, moved away again. Then the varicolored display turned brilliant yellow for an instant.

  “Concussion wave,” Shuler explained.

  Nearby coral masses seemed to roll as the picture returned, hunks of the stuff crumbling away with the reef flora and fauna.

  Vicki stopped the tape again. “Did the boilers explode?”

  “The Carson was diesel,” said Shuler. “It took us hours to identify those drums and the cable, but there’s not much doubt it was some of our old munitions. A mine cable barrier, the kind we used in the Philippines forty years ago. Five hundred pound TNT charges intended against assault boats. We’re not sure exactly how it got to Australia, but we’re not ruling out your cetaceans, Vicki.”