Category 7

by Evans, Bill; Jameson, Marianna

  With liberty and justice for all.

  For all.

  Carter felt his head clear as he stared at the red, white, and blue. His inner vision intensified and narrowed.

  The president is wrong. Terribly wrong, and history will bear witness to it.

  Shaking off the trance, Carter refocused on the flag. As a patriot and believer in democracy as well as destiny, there was only one way he could interpret the president’s words.

  As a declaration of war.

  He has to be stopped. The people have to see what he truly stands for, what has fueled his career.

  Carter was reaching for his phone when movement on the screen of his monitor captured his attention. The small, tight swirl of clouds and rain that had recently entered the easternmost Caribbean Sea had continued to gain momentum without any additional help from him and was gradually climbing toward being a Category 2 hurricane. They were calling her Simone, and she was a perfect storm: compact, slow, worthy of attention. Near the top of her spin, a wisp of clouds resembling a spear pointed north-northwest. Carter let his gaze drift along an invisible trajectory from the spear point to a pronounced indent at the “corner” of the eastern seaboard, where New England distinguished itself from the mid-Atlantic states.

  Carter’s eyes came to rest slightly north of the indent. His anger dissolved and he was filled with a calm, clearheaded resolve.

  He would level the playing field.

  He had already taken Simone from a minor tropical depression to a Category 1 hurricane. Now he would nurture her to bring the world’s attention to the tremendous danger posed by Winslow Benson and his support for nuclear energy. Under his guidance, Simone would become a storm so big, so powerful, that she would dwarf anything yet recorded by man. And he would bring her to the one place that would make the world take notice.

  New York City.

  And the aging Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant that lay thirty-five miles to the north of it.

  CHAPTER 16

  From the tip of Florida to southern Virginia, foaming breakers were bright with the sunburned flesh of rookie boogie boarders and the neon-covered bodies of more serious surfers paddling furiously farther out to catch the next wave, the best wave, the one that could fuel stories for the rest of the season. On the Chesapeake Bay, executives and politicians played hooky on the water, their egos swelling in unison with the sails of their sloops and catamarans. Along the piers and jetties that spliced the Atlantic from the Delaware peninsula up to the Jersey Shore, children squealed with feigned fear and unfeigned pleasure as they dodged the spray from crashing waves. Fishermen off coastal New England hauled in above-average and occasionally perplexing catches as creatures typically seen in deeper waters followed feeder species into the continental shallows.

  Simone, the cause of all the giddy seaside delight, spun tirelessly in the Atlantic, having paused in her path as if contemplating a change of direction or plan. Undisturbed by the aircraft penetrating her walls or the many eyes watching her, she continued her inexorable churn.

  CHAPTER 17

  Friday, July 13, 1:00 P.M., the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, Haiti

  Raoul Patterson walked through the small, dirty shack, his usual confident, military stride made longer by the anger simmering beneath his composed exterior. He was providing an unscheduled wake-up call to Jimmy “Tiger” Strathan, a former USAF pilot who had been headed for his second tour in Iraq when he’d decided he didn’t like getting shot at or being underpaid while doing so. Tiger had relieved himself of his duties, walked away from his country, and gone contract, bumming his way through Central America and the Caribbean until eventually landing in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where Raoul had run into him four days ago.

  While Major Patterson, RAF (Ret.), had no respect for deserters, he had a lot of respect for the U.S. Air Force and the training they gave their pilots. And mercenaries can’t always be choosers. He’d hired Tiger right away, knowing there was a good chance it was a mistake.

  That’s why learning that Tiger’s faint pretensions of intelligence had indeed disappeared came as no surprise. That it had only taken a few days of living in this Caribbean shit hole for him to complete the transformation was more of one.

  The cause of it wasn’t the humidity or the heat, although both were hellish. And, given Tiger’s not-so-latent sociopathic tendencies, it wasn’t the job. Flying test operations for the foundation, which was nothing more than a front for a secret and completely illegal, immoral, and unethical research and development project, was like flying any wartime mission. You focus on the results and ignore everything else. Drop the bombs and win the war or, in this case, zap a cloud with a laser, change the weather, and get rich.

  So it definitely wasn’t the job.

  What had changed Tiger was the apparent absence of civil structure. Amidst the squalid lawlessness that defined much of this small, desperate nation-state, Tiger had thought to become the master of his own fate. And so he had, Raoul acknowledged with a grim smile, by forgetting Raoul’s rules for his crew.

  Coming to a halt, Raoul stood in the doorless opening of the bedroom, surveying the scene before him with disgust. He wasn’t sure which was worse, the stench or the sight.

  A miasma of sweat, booze, farts, and sex hung in the room like an impenetrable fog. Six bare legs—two male, four female—stuck out at odd angles from beneath a tangle of filthy sheets and torn mosquito netting. Two empty bottles of Jim Beam lay on the floor. One appeared to have spilled when a stray limb had knocked it over. Judging by the nearly bestial cacophony of sounds coming from the bed, the other had been consumed.

  The bottle blonde draped across Tiger’s chest was Annike, a European of blurry provenance and invisible means of support who turned up anywhere there were flyboys. She had bad taste in clothes and worse taste in men, but she had big tits and liked weird sex, which made her slightly more than tolerable in this part of the world. Raoul didn’t know the other woman, but given the position in which she’d fallen asleep or passed out, she knew both Tiger and Annike intimately. Her skin was black as coal and streaked and dotted with scars. She couldn’t have been more than twenty at a push and was likely far younger.

  To each his own.

  Raoul crossed the room and drove a knuckle deep into the instep of the cleaner of Tiger’s feet, causing the younger, stupider man to jerk his legs up, dislodging both women. They fell to the floor in an obscene sprawl, one on either side of the bed, but didn’t wake up. The stereophonic thuds and grunts, and perhaps the pain, brought Tiger up on one elbow.

  “What the fuck—,” he rasped, then peered through barely slitted eyes. “Oh. Hey, boss.”

  “Get your ass down to the hangar. We’re flying,” Raoul ordered, his clipped words belying the calmness of his voice. He couldn’t stop the occasional trace of his native Yorkshire seeping into his painstakingly acquired high-street accent when he was annoyed, but he made a point of never raising his voice. He’d discovered early in his career that not shouting scared more people more of the time. It worked for Clint Eastwood and it worked for Raoul Patterson.

  “Uh, I don’t think I can—”

  “I’m not interested in what you think. I said we’re flying. Now get your sorry, drunken ass out of that bacterial stew and into your clothes. I’m giving you five minutes and then I’m leaving. Permanently.”

  Tiger’s twenty-six-year-old eyes widened painfully.

  Clearly, Raoul’s rules hadn’t been fully taken to heart by Tiger, who, despite the warnings, had decided last night to show himself to be an arrogant, sloppy drunk and, according to the juju amulet around the younger woman’s neck, a defiler of local religious taboos. Either condition could get him killed in this part of the city, where ignorance fed irrationality and local gangs had a penchant for blood and violence.

  A lesson in crew discipline was required.

  “I need—”

  “If you’re thinking of a shower, stop. There’s no water. You have four
minutes and thirty seconds. I’ll be in the other room.” Raoul turned his back and left the doorway.

  A minute or so later, Tiger stumbled into the small central room of the house, shirt hanging open, jeans buttoned at the waist but unzipped, underwear lost or forgotten. He leaned against the wall and blinked, his movements uncoordinated and lethargic as his reflexes struggled to come online.

  Raoul studied him dispassionately. “Where’s your documentation?”

  Keeping his papers safe, if not always immediately available, was another critical point.

  “Huh?” Tiger looked at him with unfocused eyes.

  “Your passport.”

  “Oh. Somewhere.” He patted his bare chest absently in search of a pocket.

  Raoul let the search continue for fifteen seconds before he Frisbeed the small folder across the room, where the corner of it hit Tiger at high speed in the solar plexus. He grunted and pitched forward but caught himself before he fell, then straightened up, clutching the flat missile to his stomach. Raoul began a silent countdown from five. By the time he got to three, Tiger bent over and began to throw up.

  Ten minutes later, Raoul had his depleted, dry-heaving co-pilot by the arm and was pulling him to the door. “Better here than in my cockpit,” he muttered. “And for God’s sake, Strathan, tackle in.”

  After a bone-cracking twenty-minute drive along the coast on badly paved roads and pocked dirt tracks in an open Jeep, they arrived at what passed for a hangar. Tiger was in much better shape, relatively speaking. He looked like hell and stank like a whorehouse, but he’d achieved relative cognition by sucking on a canister of oxygen for the whole drive. Now he was downing small cups of hot, bitter coffee one of the mechanics had offered him.

  Raoul knew Tiger was in no shape to fly anything. However, given the pre-determined flight plan and mission, that was a moot point.

  Raoul walked back into what someone had generously termed “the office” and handed Tiger a beat-up black canvas bag. “On your feet. Let’s go.”

  “Look, could you cut the commanding-officer crap? This excursion of yours wasn’t planned, okay? I thought I had the day off,” Tiger griped.

  “Plans change.”

  “Your plans changed. That doesn’t mean mine have to.” He stood up gingerly, as if the sudden change of altitude might send him crashing. “Where are we going, anyway?”

  “Inland.”

  Raoul allowed himself a smile as the few people within earshot turned to look at him for confirmation. From their location on the coast, “inland” meant only one thing: drug running.

  Of the half-dozen men in the room, only Tiger was openly incredulous. The rest had seen and heard too much in their lives for anything to surprise them, and after a moment they looked away, never having displayed the slightest curiosity. Theirs was a world in which questions were not asked and tales were not told. Doing either could get you killed.

  “You gotta be fucking kidding me,” Tiger said.

  “Actually, I am. We’re going sightseeing.” Raoul turned and walked out of the small room at the back of the building. Calling it a building was a compliment. It really wasn’t much more than a supersized shack.

  When he reached the aging chopper, Raoul climbed into the pilot’s seat and began the pre-flight checks. Tiger climbed in beside him, more subdued than he had been at the house.

  “This thing’s older than me,” he said derisively, looking at the stripped-down display that had dials that were actually connected to mechanical equipment and real fluids instead of circuit boards and sensors.

  Raoul spared him a glance. “It may well be older than your mother.” And held together with spit and rubber bands.

  “Do you know how to fly it?”

  “I did thirty years ago. I’m sure it will come back to me,” Raoul replied as the rotors groaned into a slow revolution. Even that kicked up dust devils. Getting airborne as soon as possible was a necessity. “Are you in?”

  “Yeah. No headset?”

  “No need. The radio was stolen a few years ago.”

  Tiger looked distinctly uncomfortable. “What happened to the doors?”

  “Took them off,” Raoul replied absently as he monitored the gauges. “The wind coming through all the bullet holes made a hell of a racket.”

  Ten minutes later they were cruising over the edge of the coastline heading northeast, toward the open ocean.

  “So, what are we really doing?” Tiger shouted over the loud and unhealthy whine of the ancient engine.

  “A little bit of freelance recon,” Raoul replied, and pointed to the canvas bag at Tiger’s feet.

  Tiger gingerly opened it and stared at the video camera, then looked back at Raoul in confusion. “Uh, how much are we getting paid for this?”

  “A once in a lifetime price,” Raoul replied after a moment’s consideration. It wasn’t a lie. “I’ll tell you when to start filming.”

  Tiger nodded and stared straight ahead. The uneasy silence lasted longer than Raoul had anticipated.

  “So, I heard you had a wild night,” he said eventually.

  A slow, debauched grin spanned Tiger’s face. “You saw the results,” he said. “Those bitches did things I didn’t think were possible.”

  Stupid git. “I meant before that. In the pub.”

  Calling the place a pub was as much a misnomer as calling the place they parked the planes a hangar, but it was the best description he could come up with. In that part of the city, any place a non-local could get a drink without getting knifed deserved to be called a pub.

  “What about it?”

  “You made a lot of friends last night.”

  Tiger clearly wasn’t happy with the indirect approach. “What the hell are you getting at?”

  Soon enough, mate. “Okay, get into position.”

  Tiger shook his head in disgust and lifted the camera out of the bag.

  Raoul pointed at a patch of shallow water off the starboard side. “Start filming when we get to that reef.”

  “What are we looking for?”

  “Sharks.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Just turn on the bloody camera.”

  Tiger brought the camera to his eye and aimed it downward. Raoul saw the zoom lens fully extend.

  “Hey, there are sharks down there.”

  “Imagine that,” Raoul replied drily. “How many?”

  “Three. No, wait. Four.”

  “What are they doing?”

  Tiger raised his head and gave Raoul an unsubtle look. “They’re swimming, Raoul.”

  Arse. “I’m going to try to go a little lower on the next pass. Can you get down on the floor? I want to get the cleanest shots that we can so I can wrap this up and get back before anyone notices.”

  Tiger looked back at him with wary eyes. “Notices what?”

  “Just get on the floor and keep shooting.”

  Raoul watched the young fool unbuckle his harness and wedge himself onto the floor in front of the seat, legs dangling over the side, feet not seeking the security of the skid. He held on to the door frame loosely with one hand as he turned to give Raoul a quick, delighted grin over his shoulder.

  “I feel like those guys in ‘Nam. You know, the ones in the movies who were always riding shotgun.” He turned back to the unsecured opening and lifted the camera to his eye again.

  You stupid, ignorant fuck. Raoul shot past the small, reef-rimmed cay and began a slow loop as he dropped to fifty feet. He didn’t want to scare the fishies too much. That would ruin the effect.

  “You were quite chatty in the pub last night,” he said conversationally.

  Tiger froze and the hand wrapped around the video camera slowly drifted to his lap. “Say what?”

  “You got pissed—sorry, hammered, as you Yanks say—and started talking about what you were doing earlier in the week.” Raoul’s voice was nearly cheerful over the roar of the rotors. “The storm, the plane, the equipment—you were having qui
te a lot of fun, weren’t you? Regaling the other poor sods with tales of your glory.” He paused. “Unfortunately, the trouble is that not only was that bad form, but you really don’t have a fucking clue what you were talking about.”

  The look in Tiger’s eyes had gone from caution to fear, which left only two stages before reality sank in. Raoul knew he wouldn’t have to wait too long.

  “I wasn’t talking about—”

  “I was there to babysit. I heard you, Jimmy.”

  “Hey, don’t call me—”

  “I thought I made it clear that I don’t tolerate that sort of behavior on my team, Jimmy, even for shit-hot Yank flyboys like you. Do you remember the part where I told you that I don’t care what you drink or when or how much as long as you can fly when I need you to? And that I don’t care who or what you fuck but that if you talked about the missions to anyone you’d be taken off the team? Do you remember that little chat?”

  “Okay. Yeah. Got it. I’ll … I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

  “No, Jimmy. I’m not giving you a warning. I’m telling you good-bye.”

  The kid’s Adam’s apple was working overtime and he looked like he was about to wet himself. He’d shot right past panic into terror. Stage Four.

  “Fine. Okay. As soon as we get back—”

  “It’s too late for that, Jimmy. Cheers.” Raoul tilted the chopper abruptly and the stunned, unsecured Jimmy “Tiger” Strathan fell out, too terrified to scream.

  Righting the old bird, Raoul gained a little altitude and set a new course, not bothering to notice where Tiger fell or whether he survived splashdown. He didn’t have to. Such an outcome would be temporary at best given the only signs of life within twenty miles were four sharks.

  Besides, he had other things on his mind now that Tiger had been taken care of. Like getting his crew out of the country before any of what that fucking Yank had been yapping about last night made it back to anyone who might care. Of course, in a conveniently perverse twist of happenstance, most everyone who might care was busy preparing for Hurricane Simone, which was projected to cause heavy rains and strong winds as it skirted north of the island sometime in the next forty-eight hours. If the storm track changed and the island took a direct hit, tens of thousands of people would be in trouble.