Contraband

by George Foy

  ‘What the fuck you doin’?’ he asked the kid.

  Eltonjohn did not reply. Slowly, methodically, he finished the sight. He repacked the instrument in its case. Then he took out an object so grimy and dog-eared it was barely recognizable as a book. Using tables in back he corrected the time, the sextant altitude, and looked up the sun’s Greenwich Hour Angle. Finally he unfolded a chart of the area and measured a single line with parallel rulers he dug out from his plastic satchel. The line intersected a black rat’s nest of lines already drawn, most of them within fifty or sixty nautical miles of Sandworm Cay.

  ‘I’m lookin’ for the hex wrenches,’ the pilot said, trying hard not to sound annoyed.

  ‘It m-my lunchtime.’

  ‘I know – I just need – what are you doing, anyway? Think the island moved, overnight?’

  The kid narrowed his eyes. He picked up the book and held it protectively in one dark hand. From this angle the pilot could make out the three linked squares surrounding a question mark that were the colophon of Charras Press.

  ‘Oh.’ The pilot nodded in understanding. ‘Hawkley. That bullshit.’

  The eyes darkened. ‘It n-not bullshit.’

  ‘Only for me. You think what you like.’

  ‘It navigation religion.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘No. No, you d-don’t.’ Eltonjohn scrambled to his feet. ‘I take sun sight at d-dayclean, one at noon. Always grok where you are, always take t’ree bearing, Cap’n Hawkley say.’

  ‘OK, kid. Where—’

  ‘You still don’t see.’ Eltonjohn planted himself in front of the pilot. His expression was almost desperate in its intensity. ‘You know where you be, where you andalay. I – I can’t. No one on Sandworm Cay knowin’ direction. Everyone here stuck, on the island, in life, because of this. Fishermen who g-g-get lost, bartenders for lousy smugglers. Wit’ dis religion, maybe I can leave the Cay!’

  The pilot looked at Eltonjohn. He got a strong flashback of Roberto again. But he found the good feelings of machine work had bled off some of the shame, and the memory did not hurt as it would have ten days before.

  ‘You don’t want to learn how to fly, do you?’ he asked suspiciously.

  ‘No, mahn,’ Eltonjohn said, and grinned. ‘I want t-to learn how to pilot superboat; soon come you teachin’ me, no?’

  ‘Of course,’ the pilot yelled at him, ‘so you can become another smuggler and die like the rest of ’em, or end up in Oakdale, sure, and where’s the fuckin’ hex wrenches?’

  As they walked back into the workshed the pilot noticed Presley, the wiry informer, sitting on the deck of the SAR launch, eating a star-apple.

  *

  Days melted into each other.

  At some point the pilot took time off to go look for Presley. He found him at his mother’s, smoking ganja, listening to shifta rap from a Montego Bay station pulled in by his tinny Walkman. Obeah bottles jingled in the open windows. Presley’s mother, a tiny, Spanish-looking woman, fussed in the background, serving bush rum and candied tamarind. The pilot offered him a deal; in exchange for the last VR-Portable and three cheap Virtix serials, the informer would keep an eye on the airstrip and tell him who came in or went out. Presley jerked his machine-pistol slide suspiciously but his eyes never left the shiny black box, the lightweight face-sucker that came with it, lying on the lace covering a ganja crate that was their living room table.

  The pilot had no illusions about Presley. He did not expect him to watch the airstrip, even less did he think the bribe would prevent him from telling BON exactly what the pilot was doing, if that indeed was his game – but he did hope the VR-Portable would dull the edges of his attention a little.

  In this, it soon appeared, he was successful. The next time he saw Presley, the informer was lying in the shade of one of the boatyard Quonset huts, as quiet as if he were dead. Only his fingers moved, gingerly turning the miniature joystick that was built into the VR deck.

  The pilot went back to work after that feeling both pleased with himself, and guilty. When all was said and done, he thought, he had suckered this man into trying something as dangerous in its own way as smack, or ice. Many studies indicated VR-TV trimmed the attention span to less than two minutes; it was suspected that, in the worst of cases, it increased vulnerability to TDF. This was what Presley was risking, all to enable the pilot to run a cargo with less interference.

  *

  The trade winds blew without a break. Although the ventilation was welcome, the winds remained hot and did little to cool the temperature in the hangar.

  The sea pounded relentlessly on the harbor jetty. The generator thudded. Feral donkeys brayed. Gawpies screamed at the slow and larcenous lizards.

  Nights were long, and the stars accumulating under the pressure of trade winds made them lonely. The pilot slept in the second floor of the abandoned hotel, in a steeply canted room with no glass in the windows, on sand washed up at the lower end. Listening to the mosquitoes struggle to penetrate the netting he’d suspended from a chandelier hook. Feeling the hotel tremble as waves hissed in and out of the rooms below. He thought of Carmelita to ease the solitude. One night his want for her got so strong it spilled over into the physical, translated into internal pressure, the familiar keening tension. Seeking release, he made love to the soft coral sand underneath him, rubbing on his stomach until the repeated movement hollowed below him a female mold of himself. The forms were repeated in his brain, in sense impressions of Carmelita’s near-perfect whiteness, in the cold gold memory of a saint’s head around her neck, the soft curves between her breasts, between her thighs and belly. Mentally, the perfection of those curves melded to the ammonia-cleanness of feeling he’d once had for her. Her hoarse street laugh, her endless black nights, the slightly weighted pleasure she took in other men’s admiration had all been minus-factors in that complex equation. Yet they had possessed value because they were part of the specific alchemy of infatuation and anything to do with that alchemy acquired a white-silver sheen of ultimate freedom, and anything not part of the alchemy was shit. In the tension of excitement he could hear her voice ring amid the soft chuckling of her own pleasure. ‘Pilot, corazon. Oh, pilot.’

  After his own release, however, the memories and colors shifted into visions. Visions of the Trade; the kind of archetypal images that had kept him in the business after Poop-face; dreams of dark-hulled schooners waiting off night-bound coasts, and bull’s-eye lanterns flashing in the dark; long lines of mules with swaddled hooves hauling hogsheads of brandy and boxes of China tea over mountain passes in unpronounceable places.

  Slim cloaked women, with dark hair and green eyes, waiting at the inn over the border.

  The tension of pursuit, the release of laughter once the cargo was safely through.

  *

  During the days they listened to the ECM-pak to kill the monotony. They heard shortwave news from the BBC, waltz music from Osterreichisches Rundfunk, the occasional burst-transmission of coded Federal traffic pulled in by the full-spectrum scanner.

  Smuggling traffic on the ham frequencies was way down, as Gershwin said.

  Once only, the pilot hooked into an Iridium satellite link to check the Wildnets.

  He did this at noon, while Eltonjohn was taking his sun sight. He taped the half-sucker to his flying helmet, swiped his UCC-card, logged on, and let the surf-program pop him through the secure-servers then – just like catching the right wave – ride him through and down the riotous, infinite Web, back into the more spare circuits of the smugglers’ Usegroups. Sniffing out, among the thousands of potential combinations, the Wildnets getting traffic that day; figuring, as he usually did, that he could sense, by the volume of illegal traffic, how much heat was being turned on in response.

  The search took longer than usual, although that was probably the satellite ’plex. As he waited for the scan to gel he leafed through the only manual he had for Miss Benthol III’s engines, trying to make out, through the bottom half
of his face-sucker and the mildew of the page, the specs chart for Bravo-drive gaskets.

  When the top half of his face-sucker finally blossomed into the thin-lined, polarized world of a Wildnet scan, the patterns it made seemed thin, like flying over Wyoming, where before it had always looked like the Eastern Seaboard, as seen from the air.

  He joysticked forward anyway. The feeling the 3-D gave was pleasant and familiar – it was like diving, he realized – like plunging into the transparent waters of the harbor beside him. Banked left, right, dove as the glowing boxes of secure ’servers flitted by, their Fedchip data blanked by security algorithms, which was illegal; but that was what made the Wildnets wild.

  Pulling back the joystick, slowing his speed, turning again. Now it felt like he was suddenly much deeper, for there was far less light in this part of the 3-D world.

  Most of the lines of communication connecting the various boxes were black, one-directional. It was like the last time he’d checked the ’nets, only more so. If he knew nothing about the Wildnets, the pilot thought, he would figure this was a dead area, a place where every living thing had either been killed, or escaped, or was so tightly protected it might as well be dead. But that last would be illusion; for while the SAPs, mostly, were secure, the lines between them were not, they were part of the overall Web and thus detectable by the Fedchip transponders that every Internet server, since the AGATE laws, was obliged to carry.

  So the Fedchips were not all bad, the pilot reflected further as he followed one Usegroup from a cellphone link in El Paso all the way to a SAP-satellite hookup in Fort Meyers; an old DeLisi hangout. It was the data from Fedchips, along with the pirated NSA software that parsed them, that made this scan possible, and allowed him to track.

  Clicking onto the line he read messages written in typical DeLisi style, but with none of the incomprehensible bits of cypher and code that usually obscured their meaning.

  Mole 16.

  Get back to me, now.

  Mole 16. Urgent.

  Where the fuck are you?

  Abort now.

  Abort NOW.

  Mole 16.

  ‘Mole 16’ was not responding. The pilot checked a couple of Neta hubs. They were on maintenance, carrier only.

  Casually, he joysticked over to a South Florida SAP, clicking briefly on a black line; it was the only major datastream coming out of this one. The traffic here looked like a list of commands, all cyphered. He was about to go somewhere else when, in his far lefthand field of view, the Fort Meyers SAP blew up.

  The box pulsed briefly; then the light inside it flared to an intensity that hurt the pilot’s eyes so much he closed them.

  When he looked again, the ’server was gone. The black lines that had hooked it to the other SAPs in this route pulsed, shriveled like cat whiskers in a candle flame, and then – disappeared.

  He glanced around him. The other ’servers were clicking off, the way tree-frogs stop peeping when something lands on a night pond. Within ten seconds every single one was offline. The Florida SAP sector was clear, like a dead sea – almost completely bare of Wild traffic. The only strong light came from a SAP in Homestead.

  As the pilot watched, attracted despite himself to the strength of unchallenged light, a search engine came to life next to the ’server. It moved left, and stopped. The black circle holding its Fedchip ID was blacked out, which was normal for Wildnets.

  Beside the ID-block, a single word glowed on its own, in sharp purple lines, as if written in neon.

  ‘CONTROL,’ the circle said.

  The engine grew. From the size of a pinhead, inside a few seconds it had become the size of a quarter, a baseball. It looked like an eighteen-wheeler coming fast at you down a one-way street. Now ‘CONTROL’ was taking up a third of the ’sucker’s world. CONTROL was coming after him—

  The pilot ripped off the half-sucker. His fingers were trembling. Shutter fatigue made his eyes sting. He held down his own ‘CONTROL,’ the left-most key on his ECM, together with the ‘ALT’ and ‘DELETE’ keys.

  On his lap, the half-sucker screen went blank.

  From the helmet audio, he could hear a faint hiss, that gradually lost volume.

  At length it was absorbed in the whisper of the trade winds and the sea around him.

  *

  The pilot kept a watch on the broadcast channels. He did not check the Wildnets again.

  He did not know what had happened to that ’server – it could have been something simple, like a major power surge – but the sight of the explosion, and those channels shriveling up and disappearing, had left him deeply uneasy.

  When he swam, the empty, clear sea reminded him of the silent Wildnet, and the memory cut his pleasure in the sport, so that now he did it strictly to cool his body down, and climbed out of the water almost immediately.

  There was no time, anyway, for abstract searches, or sport-swimming for that matter. His spare days were dwindling as the first possible date for the rendezvous approached. Time now was part of the process of repair; it was a function of quality. You marked hours by the ground gained, in increments of fuel flowing, of vacuum achieved, of pressure built.

  They got the starboard engine running again, and tuned, and were starting to fine-tune the port when one morning the pilot looked up thoughtfully and said to Eltonjohn, ‘Let’s see that Bible again – that’s the sixth burst on the same frequency, and it’s loud.’

  The frequency was 4.4191 megahertz, on the single-sideband part of the scan. It was listed in the Smuggler’s Bible as a BON Southern District operations channel based at Miami Command Center. The pilot listened for a while, then shut the ECM down. At lunchtime he asked the boatyard manager to travel-lift the superboat into the water before sunset.

  He sent Eltonjohn home early that evening and left his pay, in Deutschmarks, at the Connie Bar. After dark he loaded Miss Benthol III with the remaining spare parts, storing these in the tight passenger sections he had built into the hull amidships. Then he hand-jerked fuel into two of the tanks, started up the port engine, and rumbled slowly out of the harbor, into the ocean swells, steering north and west for Saint Dominique island.

  Almost the last sight he had of Sandworm was that of Presley, standing in the lee of a burnt-out hangar, his wiry body, turning, turning, graceful but with no relevance to the world immediately around him – turning to confront, or watch, or flee the tycoons and fashion models, the beautiful and largely white actors of Pain in the Afternoon or Malibu Heat or Easthampton as they danced and plotted, real as life, in full 3-D before him.

  *

  About two hours into the three-hour passage a thin black shape crawled out of the forward hatch and staggered aft against the boat’s pounding. The pilot slowed the Miss Benthol down and opened the canopies.

  Eltonjohn was shaking all over with cold and seasickness, but hope was blooming like small herbs in his voice. ‘You t-t-take me now, pilot!’ he yelled through castanet teeth.

  ‘Get in, you loco islander,’ the pilot shouted back, trying hard to press welcome out of his voice. But it was too dangerous now to go back to Sandworm Cay and anyway he had to admit he enjoyed the kid’s company.

  They got both engines all the way tuned two nights later in Saint Dominique. They filled the long-distance tanks with 103-octane from an airfield fuel truck. That same night the radio code from the Colombians came in. This meant the rendezvous with the mother-ship would occur during the next satellite window, in four nights’ time at a pre-arranged hour in a prearranged spot halfway between the Muertos and Double Headed Shot Cays.

  The ECM-pak was still pulling in a lot of BON traffic so the pilot fueled up and left Saint Dominique twenty-four hours early. He anchored off the Muertos while he waited, watching Eltonjohn perform his navigational rites on the beach, in the crazed sun.

  He’d not had the energy to maroon the kid on Saint Dominique. He did not know, or care to find out, what marooning would do in terms of psychic damage to a Sandworm island
er.

  He did not try to reach Gershwin on the ham bandwidths.

  Since Eltonjohn had stowed away on the boat – left Sandworm without his permission, or anyone else’s – the pilot reasoned, a little lazily, that it no longer was his responsibility.

  Chapter Fourteen

  ‘When the Man set up the Anti-Gang and Terrorist Environment Laws – usually known as “AGATE” – he jived us like this was so he could waste Chihuahuan Adornista bomb-throwers. Bullshit. The bombers did him little harm in the pocketbook. What hurt him in the wallet was freetraders. When Congress passed AGATE every one of the brothers knew it was so BON could off freetraders, without reference to picayune shit like the Bill of Rights, using maximum lethal force.’

  Hawkley

  Appendix ‘C’

  The Freetrader’s Almanac and Cookbook

  Short-short-long; short-short-long; ‘uniform’ from a red lamp.

  The signal.

  The Miss Benthol III groaned uncomfortably in the fat swells. Her engines farted and popped. Warm rashers of Gulf Stream water slopped around her narrow deck. She was not made for idling, or going slow in any form.

  The mother-ship was a big charcoal shape in the starlight. The twin islands of her silhouette revealed her ancestry: an ancient, World War II-surplus T-2 tanker. The pilot wondered with the part of his brain that was not tensed for action, where the hell they’d found that rustbucket, when even Panama outlawed carrying oil in single-hulled ships.

  The politicals came by rubber raft, outboard driven. In the escaped angles of flashlight the pilot saw with surprise that most of them were Indians. Auracanians, he thought, still on the lam from the heirs of Valdivia. Most of them were in their twenties or thirties, but a couple were very old. They’d all been limited to one bag. At least two of the men had chosen to carry a guitar instead, and one had a small harp. They looked at the superboat in wonder and dismay.

  ‘Where is the sheep?’ one of them said.