by George Foy
Both men watched a couple of young women stick twigs in a pig roasting over the coals. The women’s breasts were very long and pointed and hung perilously close to the fire. They giggled in astonishment at Ela’s two-tone hair as her group drew near.
When he saw them arrive the bald man pulled out another gourd and slopped it full of brown-colored liquid from a large earthenware bowl at his feet.
‘Oho, our sleeping beauties,’ he said. ‘Want some kava?’
The pilot took the gourd, partly because no one else would. The kava tasted bitter and strong. It was heavily flavored with ginger, and fizzed on the tongue like soda. The codger looked like he’d already had his share. His face glowed pink, and he was sweating.
‘Long flight,’ the bald man commented, by way of excuse or explanation, and refilled his own container.
From over the rim of the kava gourd, the pilot looked at the other man. There was something curiously familiar about his eyes. He was still trying to place the connection when Ela bent forward from the waist and peered hard at the bearded man’s face. She stuck her finger out and said, ‘Abd el Haq. Son of a gun. You’re Abd el Haq!’ Her voice pulled so hard it was close to breaking.
The pilot leaned forward as well. Now he could see it. The man looked thinner without robes and turban and the beard had been so drastically cut back it looked almost like he was clean shaven. The skin was fairer and, even in places that had been visible before, there seemed to be more wrinkles – this version of the man was a good ten years older than Daud Khan’s crony. But the dark eyes were the same, and the wide curve of mouth, now stretching over an embarrassed chuckle.
The bald man said, ‘Forgive me. Terribly rude, I know. Ladies and gen’mun.’ He stuck his gourd in the bearded man’s direction – ‘meet Forrest Hawkley Stanhope.’
The pilot choked. He blew his mouthful of kava all over Ela.
Hawkley took off the Walkman headphones. A funk beat pounded brass. A voice yelled, ‘Shit! Goddamn! Dance till yer ass falls off!’
Dr Funkenship.
‘Hello, Pookie,’ Hawkley said shyly to his daughter.
*
The girl went rigid. Then she started to tremble. It wasn’t just the fever, though the pilot had already noticed the steadily increasing glassiness of her eyes, and heard her cough, and was certain now the Chitrali flu had found another victim.
She looked like a thin branch, covered by a jumpsuit, shaken by a strong wind. Her face went from white to pink and back again as she stared at her father. Her eyes had heated up to a temperature that would melt asbestos.
When she spoke, her voice was at a low, vibrating pitch that the pilot had never heard before.
‘I knew it,’ she said. ‘I didn’t realize I knew. You’ve lost a lot of weight. That beard looks horrible on you. But I knew it. You son of a bitch! You bastard! You never could resist it, could you? Dressing up, joking around. Why did you call me that name in public? I – I – oh fuck, I don’t even wanna talk to you!’
And she swiveled, and stomped in her heavy jump boots down the length of the longhouse, pushing aside men, and porters with mortar rounds balanced on their heads, and women with pots of kava. She disappeared down the ladder at the structure’s end.
Hawkley – Abd el Haq – the mythic acid guru, author of the legendary Smuggler’s Bible, head hierophant of his own navigational religion, spiritual leader of the world’s indie smugglers, self-styled nemesis of every national police and customs force on the planet – shrugged, and winced, and bit his lip.
‘I always miss, man,’ he muttered. ‘Like, I can never get it right.’
There was an uncomfortable silence. Finally the pilot said, ‘So, where the fuck are we? Headhunter said you’d tell us.’
‘Pulau Karang,’ Hubbard informed him agreeably. ‘It’s an island in the Halmahera Sea.’
‘Thanks a lot.’
‘Off New Guinea,’ Hubbard added, taking a piece of crackling from a palm leaf one of the women was stacking dinner on. ‘North of the Cerams.’
Hawkley took off his glasses and polished them on the sleeve of his jungle shirt. ‘We gotta split this scene by day-clean,’ he said. ‘Before the Indonesians start flying patrols on our ass.’ He pointed the spectacles’ earpieces at the pilot. ‘I wonder if I could rap with you,’ he said, ‘if that’s cool?’
‘Does that mean you’re leaving us here,’ the pilot said, ‘here among eaters of human flesh, and quaffers of human blood?’ The kava was already getting to him.
Hawkley laughed. It was still a good laugh though the volume was trimmed and diminished to a couple of notches short of the uninhibited, rolling belly-rumble of ‘Abd el Haq.’ The quality of it was also changed; it had gone a little stretched, as if its owner’s heart were no longer in it, as if he were really thinking of something else.
‘Don’t worry, man,’ Hawkley said. He got to his feet, still chuckling. ‘I’ll explain everything soon, come.’
*
They sat on a sort of split-rail bamboo porch built on a side entrance to the longhouse, above the deep lapping waters of the lagoon. Lamps hung on the pilings sent shrapnel of light shooting around their faces and hands.
Hawkley looked past the wharf to the lights that marked where his giant seaplane lay anchored.
‘Manley told me about you,’ Hawkley began.
‘So he does know how to find you! He never let on.’
‘He’s the only one with the cross-references, man. And he knows how to keep his mouth shut.’
‘He gets longitude from the Gazette classifieds?’
‘Dig it – you sussed it out!’
‘So did your pal. Alois van der Lubbe.’
‘Alois knows only the longitude.’
‘And the latitude?’
Hawkley smiled. ‘There’s a different – medium – for that.’
‘Which gives Manley your address.’
‘No. It only gives him a town he can snail-mail to. Poste restante, man.’
Hawkley took a deep swig of kava. ‘You know,’ he continued, a little apologetically. ‘I had to make it hard – give me time to check you guys out.’ He noticed the pilot had left his gourd inside, and passed over his own. ‘Manley said you want to find this BON dude?’
The pilot, instinctively, looked for the horizon, couldn’t find it. The moon, in setting, turned the mist a dangerous hue, like boysenberries mixed with black ink.
‘Bokon,’ Hawkley continued. ‘Bokon Taylay.’
‘I heard you could help,’ the pilot said, neutrally.
‘That’s how you hooked up with Eleuthera?’
‘Yup. Can you? Help, I mean?’ The pilot’s tone was still uncommitted, but he couldn’t keep a leash on the curiosity. He’d come a long way to find the answer to this question.
‘I don’t know,’ Hawkley said, looking at the Flying Boat again.
‘You must know something. The Feds been goin’ crazy, last couple of months. They say your groups are the only ones don’t get busted.’
‘They’re just well-organized.’
‘But it’s how they’re well-organized – it cancels out whatever BON does – whatever this Bokon guy does.’
The clamor of voices inside the longhouse died down, briefly. In the lull you could hear the croak of fowl, the grunting of pigs, the lap of confined water.
‘Van der Lubbe mentioned a “.667,” a ratio?’ the pilot continued.
‘Yeah,’ Hawkley said. ‘The .667. I guess that’s part of it.’
He took out some rolling papers and a pouch. He rolled a joint fast and expertly, his fingers avoiding the slightest wasted effort, his tongue moistening the thin paper more delicately than a hummingbird’s.
‘It’s like this.’
He looked at the pilot through the orange scraps of kerosene light. He massaged the rolled spliff between his thumb and first two fingers of each hand, coaxing it into a firm cigar.
‘I figured it out while I was with the Brothers,�
� Hawkley continued. ‘I noticed the small groups did OK. They knew each other, they didn’t need to do a lot of rappin’ and phonin’. But the ones that got bigger, suddenly they were spending close to ninety percent of their time just housekeeping. Sending messages back and forth: do this, don’t do that. Bullshit.
‘I parsed it out,’ he continued. ‘I had just enough stats training to do it. Once they got over a certain size, maybe nine people, their communications went through a paradigm shift, it happened at .667, on average, in terms of signal to noise. Point-six-six-seven is real close to .6653, which happens to be around the frequency (if you read Dr Zatt’s research) where a lot of the world’s behavior goes haywire. Serotonin receptor activity, the effects of crack on brainwaves, the rate at which you pick up your cup of coffee, the point at which wind shear becomes a tornado; below the .6653 ratio of events per minute, or second, whatever, you get normal creative energy, man, the orderly disorder of normal events. Above that, it goes into an unnatural order. A kind of organic facism. Like compulsive behavior. There’s just too much info, and it gets funneled into channels it wouldn’t go in when things were cool. It happens to people, it happens to smugglers’ groups, when they get too big—’
Hawkley paused. He smiled, as if aware that, in going on too long, he had betrayed an obsession best kept to himself. He stuck the joint in his mouth and twisted the end in the sharpener of his pursed lips.
‘Well, the rest is a couple pieces of intelligence. Got ’em through Cappy Hubbard – guy who flew the seaplane.’ Hawkley flashed a Zippo. The end of the joint burst into flame, died into a coal, glowed red. Hawkley took a deep drag. The words that followed came in the squeaky, strained-bronchi rhythm of the life-long head.
‘’Mazin’ dude, Cappy. He’s eighty-five years old. Smuggled bombers north to Canada for FDR, before Pearl Harbor – Congress wasn’t supposed to grok. Worked for the OSS. One of the first to get into acid – best customer, once. Real head for my purple. Went Darkworld – few years ago – to work with me, still has friends in – what they call – “intelligence community.”’ Hawkley exhaled, finally. He offered the joint to the pilot, who took a quick drag and passed it back.
‘CIA hates BON,’ Hawkley added, by way of attribution. ‘Territory thing. You really wanna do this, man?’
The pilot picked up the kava gourd again. He decided, even though he was getting heartburn from drinking it, that he liked the stuff. Kava made words flow easier. Feelings seemed more black and white, even when they really were laundry-gray, or deep mauve, like the mist.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m not sure.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I’ve lost friends.’ The pilot’s leg was going to sleep. He shifted uncomfortably. He looked inside the longhouse and noticed a man sitting at a bamboo desk, under a long pole. The man held a string to mouth and ears and spoke urgently into its frayed end. A small packing crate stood on its side on the desk. More strings linked the top of the crate to the top of the pole. Abstract dials and numbers were painted in merry colors along the face of the crate.
‘I don’t get it,’ Hawkley said.
‘It’s simple.’ The pilot spoke his words tense and sharp like spitting. ‘It was fine while I was trading; walkin’ the walk, talkin’ the talk. But now this is all starting to hurt people.’
Hawkley’s joint was two-thirds consumed. He sucked at it in little puffs, pulling it away from his lips with each inhale.
‘You could hurt more people, you stop now.’
‘How?’ The pilot shook his head. ‘No one would give a shit about us anymore, if we went home now.’
‘We found a Yank tailing Daud Khan’s caravan out of Chitral.’
The pilot frowned.
‘Who?’
Hawkley shrugged. ‘We lost him. But so what?’
The pilot shook his head again. ‘That’s not the point.’
‘OK,’ Hawkley said, ‘what about revenge? Now there’s a good, old-fashioned reason. The fact that BON has been offing your compadres, throwing ’em in Oakdale, least I assume it was BON – that doesn’t matter?’
The pilot snorted. ‘That’s not the point, either.’
‘The fact that, if you look at history, smuggling has always gone together with people trying to get rid of pigs, man – crawling out from under some goddamn jackboot or other – that’s not relevant to you?’
‘Jisi yomo don’t exactly go to the underdog,’ the pilot countered.
‘It’s not the cargo, man. It’s the movement.’
‘Oh. Hawkley-isms.’
The bearded man smiled and opened his hands.
‘Sounds great,’ the pilot told him. ‘Don’t mean a whole hell of a lot.’
‘It’s another way, man.’ Hawkley leaned forward. The diffidence, the shyness were gone in a rush of exhaled java weed. ‘Don’t you see? Besides the ways of the state. It’s not always copacetic. But when times get tough, smuggling’s the only way the little guy has to get money, to get ideas. To get guns, or get out, if it comes to that. Why you think smugglers don’t have the same rights as murderers and child molesters and rapists? Huh? Why can BON shoot us on sight, without warning? Why d’you think, under Anglo-Saxon common law, we’re the only people who are guilty until proven innocent?
‘I mean, I s’pose it could get out of hand,’ he continued. ‘You’d have total anarchy if it was all smugglers, no Coast Guard. There’s definitely a balance to be struck. But right now the imbalance is on their side. Right now, the big organizations got the upper hand. Ninety-five percent of people’s lives have to do with big organizations. Living creatures, man, giant bureaucratic godzillas! They eat, they grow, there is nothing people can do to fight them! Only us, man – only the smuggling nodes, the ones that can live outside the various ’nets. We’re the only ones got an alternative.’
Hawkley flicked his roach over the porch into the water, where it sank and was eaten by a small yellow fish.
‘And just for the record,’ Hawkley added, ‘Martha left me. Not the other way around. I mean, I’m not saying she was wrong. I don’t think I made a very good husband, or father; it’s why I didn’t argue. But she was the one who split.’
‘That’s not what Ela says.’
‘No.’
‘You really hurt her, you know that?’
‘It’s not losing your friends so much is it?’ Hawkley told him gently. ‘It’s losing Ela.’
The pilot did not respond. There was a second desk in the longhouse he had not noticed before. The man at this desk wore a uniform made of a policeman’s hat, denim shorts, and black dress shoes. In some curious resonance with what was currently fashionable in the City, he wore a half-dozen watches, all Rolex, all fake, on both wrists. He was busy shifting large flat leaves of palm from a stack on the right side of his desk to a stack on the other.
‘I’m sorry, man,’ Hawkley said. He picked up the kava gourd, bit its rim thoughtfully, and shook his head. ‘Listen, I’m gonna tell you what I know.’
‘I don’t need this.’
‘It won’t tie you—’
‘I don’t want this.’
‘It’s just info,’ Hawkley said. ‘Information is neutral. It’s what you do with it that defines you—’
‘Spare me the pop psychology, OK?’
Hawkley blew his breath out his nose hard. The pilot winced. Finally, after almost two minutes had passed, he said, ‘There was a woman, in Chitral.’
‘Zayid Shah’s wife.’ Hawkley nodded.
‘You know about her?’ The pilot could not keep the surprise out of his voice.
‘Sure.’
The pilot leaned forward. ‘What happened to her, Hawkley?’
‘He sent her to Lahore for trial.’
‘And?’
‘And I don’t know.’ Hawkley looked at his seaplane again. ‘Is that what’s bothering you? It had nothing to do with the dance. Zayid Shah gets his cut.’
‘It had to do with us.’ The pilot
picked up the kava gourd, finished the last drops. ‘If it wasn’t for me, if it wasn’t for the Trade, she would never have seen Rocketman, she would never have gone to jail.’
‘Oh, she won’t go to jail.’
‘How do you know?’
Hawkley laughed. It was almost the old laugh, full of juice and volcanoes.
‘Her dad’s a brigadier general in ISI. Oh, they’ll do a court thing, maybe, so face is saved. But if anyone’s goin’ upriver, believe me, it’ll be Zayid Shah, not his wife.’
The pilot upended the gourd again. He knew there was nothing inside but it gave him time to think. Hawkley took out his rolling papers once more.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘you came to see me. You dropped in on my run without an invite. How come I feel like I’m asking you for a favor?’
There was room now, the pilot realized; in the area of his brain that, without his being aware, had been frozen because of what happened in Chitral, as well as by the pathetic arrogance of what he was attempting, there was now room for the data he had come so far to find.
Out of nowhere he found himself missing the ECM-pak. He wanted to do a scan; he wanted to run the sat-nav, and get the exact longitude and latitude, down to the decimal points, of where he now was sitting.
‘What the fuck,’ he said finally, ‘hit me.’
So Hawkley told him.
*
He didn’t know much, the smuggler said. Sometime in August BON had gone online with new analysis software. The program’s code name was ‘Control,’ and it didn’t fool with the traditional methods of tracking and tracing that the Wildnets – with their crippled Fedchips, their mobile uplinks, their codes and scramblers and cyphered algorithms – had been created to evade.
Yet somehow, after only a month in operation, the bigger groups started getting picked off, one by one: BON assault teams, BON fighters and cutters waiting for them at rendezvous points that were supposed to be absolutely secret; as if their plans and evasions had gone completely transparent to the electronic vision of Control.