Contraband

by George Foy

  But that was not all. Gahagan also polygraphed everyone who worked for him. He paid off someone in the USAF meteorological service to call him when they got weather data emanating from AWACS aircraft, which meant he had a backup warning for the deadliest surveillance system on the East Coast.

  He had a blind front company in Liechtenstein. He always carried an open airline ticket for Tegucigalpa in his breast pocket. He was the only smuggler the pilot knew who had been in the Trade longer than he.

  Gahagan was less than thrilled to see the pilot through the peephole of his office door.

  ‘God, whaddya doing here, Marak,’ he hissed, pulling the pilot into his office. He switched on a series of fans, radios, and full-spectrum jammers to shield their conversation.

  ‘I just wanted—’

  ‘You know you’re hotter than nuclear waste? The scanner’s full of you!’

  ‘Here, too?’

  ‘Here, everywhere.’

  Gahagan nervously straightened his tie. The tie was silk, and decorated with little flamingoes. His nails were both manicured and chewed. His face twitched. It was swollen, of the same hue as the flamingoes. He looked every inch the successful junk-food franchise operator.

  ‘I just wanted to ask—’

  ‘God, I can’t believe you came here!’

  Gahagan opened a container of pills and a bottle of Wild Turkey. He swallowed some of the pills, drinking from the bottle’s neck.

  ‘I needed—’

  ‘Just say what you have to say, and get outta here.’

  ‘Okay, Gene, I—’

  ‘Come on, come on!’

  When he could break through Gahagan’s exclamations, the pilot asked him about Hawkley. But Gahagan shook his head, repeatedly. Sure, he knew of Hawkley, everyone did, because of the Smuggler’s Bible. He subscribed to the Gazette, the CD-ROM updates, through a private mailbox. He knew nothing specific, however. Not where Hawkley lived, or what his history was, nothing. Gahagan’s fear was an unpleasant and expanding gas that blew the pilot out the door of the Taco Commander within ten minutes of getting there.

  Outside, in the iced parking lot of the franchise, the smell of cheap enchiladas mingled in the pilot’s nostrils with the trace stink of Gahagan’s sweat as he thought about what to do next.

  The pilot was very tired. His mind cracked with the clear vodka hangover and the dull fuzz from jisi yomo. The drugs themselves jazzed hard against the pop of adrenaline that came with added news of the chase. All of this slowed his nerve speed; it spread gloom and lethargy where energy was needed. He had to crank the thoughts open.

  First of all, the best person to talk to would be Gershwin. But Gershwin did not hook onto the ’nets. Anyway, the Wildnets no longer felt safe. And physically, of course, Gershwin was on Sandworm Cay. The pilot would have to pass through at least three airports to reach the Cay, and the airports would all be crawling with BON goons. Judging by what was already on the scanner, the goons were all well versed in his vital statistics.

  He could radio Gershwin. The ECM-pak had a single-sideband transmitter that was powerful enough, with outside juice and the right antenna. In his apartment he simply hooked it up to X-Corp’s TV antenna and he could talk to Ghana, if he wanted. But the apartment was gone.

  He fished in his chartcase and selected the US Coast and Geodetic Survey CD-ROM for the Cape May–Block Island region. The ECM screen showed the location of radio antennas, for use as landmarks to take visual or radio bearings, along with the call sign of the station that owned them, or the word ‘ABAND’ if they were not in operation. He found a series of six ‘abandoned’ antennas where an old Marconi station had once stood, on the outer beach of Sandy Hook, New Jersey.

  He looked around the Taco Commander parking lot. The traffic seemed normal to him; no cars double-parked, no ‘7 Brothers’ vans or late-model Crown Victorias, no double or triple whip-antennas, no ninety-degree arrays for direction-finding; mostly construction workers on lunch break, and overweight women with small kids, and compact cars helplessly spinning tires on the ridged and piled-up snow.

  He looked up, and held his breath. Only a flier, used to spotting objects against a backdrop of sky, might have picked it out between the clouds and mall roofs, but there was a UAV, one of the rotary-winged types made for hovering over urban environments. It dipped and buzzed, for all the world like a fat dragonfly, above the seedier areas of Portchester. Almost certainly, the pilot reflected – breathing again – it was running surveillance on the Jamaican posses that still controlled that area. Still he didn’t linger in the parking lot but filled up the Chevy at a self-service station in White Plains and headed south.

  When he got to Sandy Hook he found only four of the antennas still standing. The others had been eaten through by the salt teeth of the Atlantic wind. The survivors stood forlorn amid the scrub pines, sandwiched between half-eroded dunes, eelgrass, and a transport dump for an oil distribution company. A row fifty yards long of yellow Sunoco signs, with the trademark blue arrow darting off to nowhere, followed a rusted chain-link fence into the graininess of snow-night.

  On two of the four antennas, the ceramic insulators remained intact.

  The pilot had to file away rust to make a good contact for the ECM-pak’s alligator clips. For added power he hooked up the car battery to the ECM. Removing the half-sucker, he taped his headphones back in the leather flying helmet, jacked in the cord, switched to SSB and called for the Connie on 2078.5 and 2.153 megahertz, the call-up frequencies Gershwin monitored.

  Snow drifted against the carryall. The sea sobbed in the embrace of an invisible shore. The wind stuck anesthetic needles all over his body. The leather helmet kept his ears fairly warm but he lost touch with his fingers as he typed back and forth between frequencies. He thought about Eltonjohn and Roberto to warm his resolve by the heat of his anger, to fight against the feeling that he was losing touch with the real world, stuck here between cold dun sand and gray winter sea, trying to radio for information about a man who might never have existed except in stories.

  The tiredness grew in him. It turned everything black. The dead Marconi station looked like the end of the world, all communications finally cut, no one else to send, no one to receive. No other towers or buzzing transmitters smelling of hot insulation to blip the messages of hope and alliance – all true messages, in the final analysis, being of hope and alliance, or their destruction. The messages would never be written. Only one survivor, thin and disillusioned, squatting by the blasted husks of communication devices, whispering lost, useless queries to the seawind.

  For seventy minutes he got nothing. However when he ran the overlap program, looking for a frequency directory, it automatically booted up the interface software he got with the last Gazette update. The software, working on schedules and X-ray feedback from the Great Red Spot of Jupiter, asked him if he wanted to spike his transmissions to coincide with troughs in energy on Jupiter. The pilot, mumbling ‘What the fuck,’ clicked on the ‘Yes’ icon. Shortly thereafter he heard Gershwin’s voice, tiny as a fly’s, extrude the broad accent of the Bahamas across the ether.

  ‘You get my cable?’ he asked Gershwin. ‘Over.’

  ‘Roger,’ came the reply. Neutral, even across that distance.

  ‘I told him not to come.’ He could not say Eltonjohn’s name.

  ‘Roger,’ Gershwin said.

  ‘I want to do something about it,’ he shouted in the mike. ‘To make up for it. Do you understand? People say Hawkley knows how to stop these ambushes. Do you copy? He knows how to fix Bokon. I want to find Hawkley. Over.’

  ‘Hawkley,’ Gershwin repeated. ‘Over.’

  ‘Can you tell me?’

  ‘What you want to know?’

  ‘Where he is.’

  ‘Don’t know nothin’.’

  ‘Anything, man. Help me.’

  Noise, white gray black noise scratched electric fingernails across the background wavelengths. Behind the noise, a front-end bass, a gr
unt, a phrase – ‘Git da funk up off da floor! Yow! Come on!’

  Dr Funkenship.

  ‘Pilot, dis Connie Bar,’ Gershwin said. ‘Stand by.’

  ‘Hurry up,’ the pilot told him, conscious of the ever-watchful radiomen of BON, and their skill at triangulation.

  Gershwin came back a few minutes later. ‘Someone comin’ Stateside, mebbe four–five days,’ he said. ‘Somethin’ for you. Message wit Lee. Over.’

  ‘What?’ the pilot said. ‘Who?’

  There was no reply for a full thirty seconds, and then the transmission came again.

  ‘Pilot,’ the voice warned. ‘Take heed. John Crow circlin’, mahn.’

  Four hundred and fifty million miles away, the Great Red Spot kicked into another storm. Static rose, and fell. In the hiatus, the pilot heard Gershwin’s voice repeat, ‘John Crow circlin’ . . .’

  The static rose once more.

  That was no use at all, the pilot fumed as, trembling from the cold, he packed away the alligator clips and ECM and stowed them in the Chevy’s trunk. John Crow, he knew, was the Bahamian term for buzzards. Easy enough to figure that one out. But he had no idea who Lee was.

  He did not make the connection till he hit Newark, and saw the airport spreading its long light-sheathed legs before the tarry thrust of the eight-lane.

  Lee was the waiter at the Weather Café. It made sense, in a bizarre sort of way, that in the worldwide fraternity of mixologists, Gershwin and Lee should know of one another.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  ‘. . . the smugglers are dangerous enough. However the committee must bear in mind the nihilistic ideology underlying some of these groups – the so-called Hawkley-ites. These people actually believe they can establish communities – they call them “nodes” – they create “market-lines” and behave like sovereign states. They think they have a right to trade freely with each other without any regulation or permission from government. When our special ops squads, with the permission of the Philippines government, took out the Manila node, one of our primary objectives was to demonstrate the impotence of this ideology. Then we put a media blackout on the strike, and we played up the Mexican terrorists instead – we were not being humble: no, we were trying to halt the spread of a virus.’

  ————–(name blanked out)

  Assistant Administrator, Special Operations, Bureau of Nationalizations

  quoted in Nationalizations, Terrorism & Contraband: A Report by the National Intelligence Committee

  William Gates, Chairman

  Washington, DC.

  While the pilot sent messages to Sandworm Cay, Rocketman dug himself into the farthest corner of the south reading room of the New York Public Library at 42nd Street. He felt safe there, protected by the stone lions outside, hidden from Department of Mental Health investigators by ramparts of stacked books. He wore a heavy disguise consisting of a huge Afro wig and yellow sunglasses, with a long brown chesterfield coat, somewhat too small, and tassel loafers borrowed from PC. He scrawled made-up names on his blue-white call slips as he ordered up every reference he could find on Hawkley.

  He found a great deal of raw data, for Hawkley had (apparently) done a lot of things before he (supposedly) wrote the Smuggler’s Bible. However most of the information was third- or fourth-hand; stories told by a buddy of a friend of the writer’s, surfacing among several dozen volumes of dubious journalistic worth that all purported to describe the colorful rise and honky-tonk fall of the psychedelic movement in San Francisco.

  A lot of the data were out-and-out myth, unlikely tales told in the vernacular of alchemy and magic without even a hint of substantiation. Invariably those tales grew more out of some need of the teller’s than from the original taproot of fact.

  Still, from the vast amount of chaff some grains of hard detail did emerge. The kernels of that information seemed so innocuous, yet so strange in their normalcy, that they killed the suspicion, sown in the back of Rocketman’s mind by the pilot, that Hawkley might after all turn out to be as insubstantial as the stories told of him.

  Forrest Hawkley Stanhope was born into the bourbon-and-branchwater aristocracy of Tennessee. His father was a surgeon and his grandfather a United States senator. He was thrown out of a military academy in South Carolina for trying to brew hootch in a soapstone laundry vat in the basement. He left home at seventeen and drifted west. In San Francisco he shacked up with a chemistry major from Indiana named Martha Cahoon. Together they began manufacturing lysergic acid dyethylamide 25 – LSD – in the bathtub, and supplying the product to the burgeoning hippie population of the City by the Bay.

  What started out as a hobby soon became a crusade. Hawkley and his girlfriend believed in their product. They wanted to make the purest LSD the world had ever known. They wanted to turn the world on to it in a chain reaction of hits that cost two bucks or even less and often were handed out free. They refined the chemical to the limits of the possible. Even the inventor of LSD, Dr Albert Hofmann of Sandoz AG in Basel, Switzerland, had only succeeded in precipitating it into a yellowish powder. Hawkley and Cahoon purified the basic ingredient, ergotamine tartrate. Then they refined the formula. They refined the refinements, again and again, till they ended up with a blue-green, crystalline substance that was so pure it had become piezoelectric – when shaken, or subjected to any other form of pressure, the crystals gave off sparks. They put this LSD into clear tablets and dyed it different colors. They made a liquid of it, tinted it blue, and called it ‘mother’s milk.’ According to legend Hawkley believed that the feelings of the person making LSD at the time of precipitation shaped what kind of trip you got from the drug. Whatever the reason, Hawkley’s acid – known as Orange Sunshine, White Lightning, or just plain ‘purple,’ after one type of colored tab – soon became known as the key of choice to a magic kingdom of rainbow colors and peaceful fantasies. This was a time when people truly believed that there existed another dimension to the mind which, once explored, would forever eliminate war, ugliness, and Ma Bell bills. At their peak, Hawkley and Cahoon were sought after by rock stars and philosophers, as well as by police and the phone company. They manufactured millions of hits, made hundreds of thousands of dollars, and gave away fortunes in free LSD tabs. They were never arrested.

  But the trip started to turn bad in other ways. The great American marketing machine ate up and chewed down the hippie movement and barfed it out again in profitable, homogenized form. Every aspect of the counterculture was ripped off, packaged in glossy rainbows, and sold at a hefty markup. Pirates brewed low-grade acid and flogged it as Hawkley’s. Magic kingdom or no, Nixon bombed Cambodia. Then Nixon himself was busted. Hawkley split up with Cahoon, who left California, taking their year-old daughter with her. The chief wizard of acid became a recluse. He became, frankly, weird. He lived on steaks because, he believed, Cointelpro was poisoning the vegetables. When he saw anyone, it was from the political fringe of what people once called ‘The Revolution’; the Diggers, who wanted to change society by making fun of it; or the Motherfuckers, an East Coast splinter group of Students for a Democratic Society, who wanted to off the bourgeois pigs with Hawkley acid, free love, and bombs made from cleaning products. He also hung out with the Brothers of Carnal Bliss, a former Carmel motorcycle gang who had vowed to undermine US society by smuggling in as much cannabis as they possibly could.

  Somewhere during this period Hawkley vanished from all records. During this period, too, the Brothers of Carnal Bliss developed into a major international ring that employed over seven hundred committed smugglers. At one stage they were shipping two tons of weed and hash into the United States every month, most of it from Afghanistan.

  The Brothers were busted in ’76. Although in smuggling circles Hawkley was rumored to have been a main man in their organization, he was not arrested, or indicted, or even located. He had, to all intents and purposes, ceased to exist – until, in 1987, the first edition of The Freetrader’s Almanac and Cookbook came out, with the name
‘Hawkley’ on the cover. The book included a wealth of useful tips, dispensed in dated flower-power style cut with a few words of Lingua which (as gang talk) was just beginning to define itself in the backstreets. There was also a lot of flipped-out philosophizing and a do-it-yourself religion based on stellar navigation, and the adjustment of compasses.

  Later on, as the Wildnets came into being, the Smuggler’s Bible got wired. Its updates on various security arrangements were sent out in CD form, and subsequently downloaded through the ’nets.

  But in all the books there was not one single clue as to where Hawkley was now, or what he was doing, or whether he was even alive.

  When he had read through all the material he could find, Rocketman sat back in his seat and scratched his Afro.

  He thought about the three weeks he had spent in the Haight. He’d done Hawkley acid eight times, and slept with more girls than he could honestly remember. The craving for ballistic flight had started before; but the combination of Orange Sunshine and the sweet and repeated orgasms he experienced between the fresh tan thighs and soft lips of those self-styled love-children had for the first time opened wide his imagination to what rocket flight would be like. To Rocketman, Hawkley had become a symbol, over the years, of the power of the imagination, before it was contaminated by narcs, FBI informants, Pentagon spooks, and all the enemies of wing-ed man. He wanted to find Hawkley, he realized, not just to help out Skid, but to repossess the purity of imagination he once had known – the purity that had dissipated with age and vanished forever in a beautiful, white-clouded, deadly explosion over Cape Canaveral on January 12, 1986.

  *

  Gershwin’s contact got in touch with Lee at the Weather Café three days after the pilot had radioed Sandworm Cay.

  The pilot had already seen Lee, and given him the number of his new beeper service.