Without Warning Part 17

"That is your choice, miss."

"Okay then. Your men here. I'm sorry to have to ask, and I mean no disrespect, but do they all speak good English? It's just that it could be an issue in a tight spot, couldn't it?"

Shah's face split open into a wide grin.

"The Queen's English, ma'am. With a touch of 'sarf London, from the instructor in their barracks."

"All right." Jules smiled. "That will do fine. If you would like to detail a small party to pick up your gear from the hotel, I'll draft up some paper for you to check and sign if acceptable. Then I'll need your help transferring those stores behind you to my boat. We'll run out to the yacht, you can meet the others, secure the ship, and then you and I and Mr. ... Thapa, was it? We'll get back on sh.o.r.e and round up some reliable crew."

Shah indicated his agreement but he had one more question.

"Do we have a destination, miss?"

"Please, Jules will be fine. And no, I have no idea where we are headed initially. Just the h.e.l.l away from here and that b.l.o.o.d.y wave."

It was late before they returned to port. Shah's men loaded the cruiser in less than an hour, but motoring to and from the Aussie Rules was a six-hour round trip. For now the marina's own security staff, boosted by some freelance heavies, were more than up to the task of securing her boat and the small dockside lockup against any looters, but that wouldn't always be the case. She was quietly relieved when Thapa took up watch on the forty-two-footer, while she and Mr. Shah plotted their next move.

It was coming up on ten at night, and the yacht club was well lit, courtesy of a diesel-fired generator she could hear droning away in the distance. Incredibly, she could also hear music, laughter, and the tinkle of gla.s.ses drifting across from the more expensive berths, where a large number of luxury yachts were docked, one of them as big as her own. Apparently the owners and their guests had enough money and muscle to convince themselves that they could remain unaffected by events outside the marina. Not all of the berths were occupied, however. Jules calculated that a third were empty, the boats that normally filled them having lit out already. But of those who had stayed, it seemed most were intent on pretending they could hold back grim reality with good cheer, and hired guns.

Acapulco proper, however, was a patchwork of light and dark. From the flying deck of the cruiser, parts of the city looked entirely normal. Lights twinkled in houses and apartments, traffic streamed along the waterfront, and throngs of people were visible through the big pair of Zeiss binoculars she'd brought back from the Rules. Elsewhere, chaos reigned. Buildings burned, and the pop and crackle of gunfire was constant. Sirens had wailed through the first few nights, but they were becoming less frequent. In fact, Jules couldn't recall the last time she'd noticed one. She poured three cups of coffee and silently thanked G.o.d that the thick blanket of toxic waste released by the burning of hundreds of empty American cities had drifted east, and not south. She was convinced this place would be falling apart a lot more quickly if a nuclear winter had descended as it had in Europe.

"Thapa. Come get your brew," barked Shah, as he handed a steaming mug down to the heavily armed rifleman on the deck below. Thapa took his drink with a grateful bow of the head and a smile for Jules, making her feel much better about having to hire and trust so many strangers with guns.

She couldn't help wondering how Pete would have played all this. Badly, she guessed, given that his first thought had been to team up with Shoeless Dan, just a couple of hours before Dan had attacked and killed him. She still missed the old fool, though. They'd been good friends, even if Pete had just a little too much of the surf b.u.m about him in a situation like this. He took his business seriously, and he was a smart bloke who'd played the odds as well as any she knew of. But in the end he was like so many Australians she'd met, ultimately p.r.o.ne to falling back on a naive, almost childish belief that everything would work out for the best.

Nothing in Julianne Balwyn's life led her to believe that. To an outsider, to someone like Shah for instance, she must surely appear as just one more rich oik, the lucky child of old landed gentry, wasting the advantages of the best schools, an ancient t.i.tle, and a thousand years of hereditary privilege. For Jules, however, her old life was an anxious, contingent affair, where the pressure to maintain appearances was grossly aggravated by the manifest inadequacies of two parents whose laziness and selfishness were exceeded only by their sense of ent.i.tlement. She was well rid of all that bulls.h.i.t.

"Okay," she said. "We're not going to need bartenders or butlers, but looking over the old crew manifest, we will easily need more than a dozen warm bods to run the engine room, the bridge, the IT systems, and general deck duties. Probably be an idea to have a ship's doctor, if we can find one, too. A proper helmsman who could handle the tub in a bad blow. A navigator for when the GPS goes down. I mean, where does it end? How do I pay them all?"

Shah swallowed his coffee in one long draw.

"You don't," he said with a single, emphatic shake of the head. "They pay you."

"Beg pardon?"

Jules was perplexed, but intrigued. In reply her new security chief held up the empty mug.

"This coffee, Miss Julianne. It came from your own stores. But if you had bought it here, on sh.o.r.e, today, it would have cost you twenty-five euros."

That caused a raised eyebrow but on reflection it shouldn't have. She already knew that raging inflation and currency collapse had reduced the worth of the greenbacks they'd had stowed away in the Diamantina to a fraction of their face value. That's why she'd got rid of them so quickly. The small office and waterfront store she'd rented here for five days had cost fifty thousand U.S. dollars up front. Now it would probably be a six-figure sum, but she was a lot more sanguine about that than she had been a week earlier. As soon as they'd hit port she'd moved to unload most of the cash as quickly as possible, and had managed to get forty cents on the dollar, taken in the form of fuel, stores, gold, medicine, and arms, most of it now safely aboard the Aussie Rules.

Shah moved to the railing of the boat's flying bridge and gestured at the party scenes around the marina.

"For now, these people are comfortable," he said. "They have food, shelter, safety, power."

He turned away and pointed to the brighter, more chaotic nighttime scene of Acapulco central, where uncontrolled fires dueled with neon and fluorescent light to hold back the darkness.

"Over there," he continued, "some people are still fine, but many are beginning to suffer and to fear for themselves. Soon, everyone will be afraid. Especially Americans. A cup of coffee, a loaf of bread, it could be worth more than your life. People will pay you to get them away from that."

"American refugees?" She pondered the thought aloud. The richest, whitest refugees in the world. It was a bizarre thought, but entirely logical when you thought about where events were headed, or indeed where they were right now. "Where would we take them? Alaska? Hawaii? The last I heard, people were leaving Hawaii, not going there. I don't think they're even letting new people in. Same with Seattle, I think. Aid shipments in, flights out and that's it."

Shah moved his shoulder almost imperceptibly. His version of a shrug.

"If you have English-speaking pa.s.sengers take them to an English-speaking port. England. New Zealand. Australia. They are not closed, and they will accept refugees, especially with money."

"By the time we got there, any money they had would be worthless," countered Jules.

"U.S. dollars, certainly," he agreed. "But yen, or pounds or euros. Some surviving currency. They will be acceptable. At least to us, in the short term, for the purposes of provisioning. It would help you, too, Miss Julianne," he added, with a knowing smile.

"How so?"

"The yacht is not yours, no? The owner, a famous man, the original pa.s.sengers and crew, they are gone. But even so, you will have to have some legitimate reason for having taken her over. Ferrying refugees away from danger, especially Americans to friendly countries, to friendly frightened countries, it could make your pa.s.sage into any harbor much less difficult. You could be a hero, a rescuer, not a villain and a smuggler."

His eyes glinted with real humor in the dark.

"You're not quite the ramrod-straight do-it-by-the-book type you first appear, are you, Sergeant?"

"No good sergeant is, Miss Julianne."

Jules let her eyes wander over the distant vista of the city as it disintegrated. Long strings of beaded light, the headlights of cars leaving town, wound up into the hills behind the bay. Campfires burned here and there, pushing back the blackness, while occasional flashes of light betrayed either cameras or gunfire. A huge blaze had engulfed a high-rise tower, the flames shooting upward like a giant roman candle, and yet not far away she could see candy-colored neon and a pair of searchlights, picking out a nightclub where local rumor had it you could still dine and drink as though nothing had happened, as long as you could meet the very steep cover charge.

"Okay," said Jules, making up her mind. "Crew first. They work for their pa.s.sage or they get left behind. We'll start here, at the marina, put out word that we're offering a berth to qualified hands. But you and I might head out tonight, hit the right bars, gather the first of our flock. We can trawl the international hotels tomorrow, looking for pa.s.sengers."

"And to where will we offer pa.s.sage, Miss Julianne?"

"Somewhere big and safe and far away. Somewhere the toxic cloud won't reach. Somewhere that can feed itself. Defend itself, if need be."

Shah gave her a quizzical look, inviting her to go on. Jules nodded at a framed photograph fixed to the starboard bulkhead. It showed the boat's previous owner, Greg Norman, teeing off at Royal Sydney.

"In for a penny, in for a pound. Let's take his boat back home for him, shall we?"

Guantanamo Bay naval base, Cuba

The scientist droned on, baffling everyone with his impenetrable waffle and jargonbl.u.s.ter, and in the end it all came to "We don't know s.h.i.t."

"The phenomenon remains nonresponsive to magnetic resonance scans," said Professor Griffiths, a small, round, redheaded toad of a man who'd added yet one more element of misery to Tusk Musso's existence since his arrival at Gitmo with the National Laboratory team to study the Wave.

"The precise mechanism by which the phenomenon effects the transub-stantiation of certain organic matter to energistic potential and organic tailings remains non.o.bvious," he burbled on, as Musso surrept.i.tiously checked his watch. Griffiths and his eggheads had flown in from Seattle, via Pearl, and Musso remained convinced that Mad Jack Blackstone had facilitated the move as some sort of malicious practical joke. Given the paucity of findings the Nat Lab guys had so far turned up, Griffiths chewed up an enormous amount of Musso's time and energy with resource requests he simply could not fulfill.

"Our investigations continue," the scientist concluded.

Man, I hope that's a conclusion, thought Tusk.

"Any questions?" asked the marine, standing and addressing the room. Everyone remained unnaturally still. They had learned never to give Griffiths an opening. Ask him how high the Wave went and you were liable to get a half-hour dissertation on electron orbits.

"Very good," said Tusk, hurriedly. "Bang-up presentation there, Doc, as always. You keep at it. Get back to us with anything new, of course. But don't feel the need to interrupt your research otherwise ..."

"Well, about my research, General. This exclusion zone you've established along the line of the phenomenon ..."

"Is not open for discussion ... Sergeant!"

A Marine Corps gunny rolled up to the podium like an Abrams tank with the throttles thrown wide open. He double-timed Professor Griffiths out of the conference room, closing the door firmly behind them.

Tusk relaxed slightly.

He wasn't being unfair. Everyone had been intrigued and even a little excited when Griffiths had arrived with two pallets full of scientific equipment, but exposure to the man, coupled with a rapid realization that neither he nor anyone else had yet figured out jack s.h.i.t about the Wave, tended to dampen that enthusiasm.

And he was a five-star pain in the a.s.s.

"Okay," said Musso with more relief than was seemly. "I can see we lost two or three KIA from boredom there. Not a bad result. Ensign Oschin, you got my PowerPoint files ready?"

"The file's coming online now, sir."

"Thank you, Oschin. Put it straight up."

Tusk Musso rubbed at a freshly scabbed-over blood spot on his shaved head. He'd knocked a small divot out of himself f.u.c.king around under a desk earlier, fixing up a data cable that'd come loose. His fingers came away with a few tacky spots of blood and he had to pat down the wound with a piece of tissue paper while he waited for the vision from the Global Hawks.

Two of the giant, experimental UAVs were over the continental U.S. at that moment, covering Miami and Kansas City. In contrast to the first moments after the Disappearance, when everyone had been wired and speeding on fear of the unknown, the feeling in the expanded op center was now resigned and somber. Everyone knew what to expect from the footage. Empty cities. Deserted streets. Ma.s.sive pileups on the road networks. Some burning buildings, many more charred ruins. Stillness. Ditches and craters of burning ruin in the fields where aircraft had gone down over what many called "flyover country" in the Midwest. Where there should be cattle or horses, there were charred spots and gra.s.sfires, especially in West Texas.

Megafires still blazed across the length of America, spewing unknowable tonnages of pollution into the atmosphere. Thankfully, there had been only two meltdowns in a couple of older nuclear plants when the auto shutdowns failed, at Browns Ferry in Alabama and Hartsville, South Carolina. On the other hand, many coal-fired plants went up for want of human attention or computer intervention. But in these two metro centers, at least, the worst of the conflagration was over. Indeed, it had never really started. Cold, soaking rain had hosed down most of the initial outbreaks in KC. And an airliner had speared into a power station in Miami, killing the grid before an untended waffle iron or hair curler was able to burn down half the city. Satellite imagery confirmed that similar strokes of luck had spared dozens of other cities, but hundreds more had been incinerated. Thousands, if you counted all the minor towns and burgs that had gone up for one reason or another.

"Miami on the right-hand screen. KC to the left, General."

Musso thanked Ensign Oschin again, even though the two cities didn't look much alike, and there was no trouble telling one from the other. The footage of Kansas City was trisected by a meeting of the Kansas and Missouri rivers in the center of the metropolis. No beaches, that was for certain. Musso had been to nearby Fort Leavenworth during the course of his career for some joint forces training with the U.S. Army. It had been the coldest winter he had ever experienced, and he certainly wasn't eager to go back there anytime soon.

"Okay," said Musso, as he turned to address the tightly packed group of officers seated on plastic chairs behind him. "This is a highlight package, cut together an hour ago from twelve hours of coverage by our two Hawks."

Fifteen men and women had squeezed into the small room for the briefing, including Lieutenant Colonel Pileggi, who'd flown up from Joint Task Force Bravo in Honduras the previous day. The senior SOUTHCOM representative sat in the front row with a notepad and pen at the ready. She and Musso were supposed to present a plan to Ritchie that evening to evacuate any and all U.S. citizens who wanted to go, from south and central America to an as-yet-undetermined location. It meant moving hundreds of thousands of people G.o.d only knew where. But certainly not to Gitmo. It already had a diabolical refugee problem.

Musso thumbed a control stick and brought up the first set of images. Still shots from the downtown areas of both cities.

"I'm afraid there's nothing new to report here," he said. "Just better imaging than we've had so far. The power grid in both cities has failed, meaning there's less chance of a catastrophic urban firestorm starting, although spot fires continue to break out here and there for whatever reason."

Musso examined the Kansas City screen, which displayed the footage of a burned-out QuikTrip on Armor Boulevard, across from a U.S. post office and a couple of larger buildings in Northtown. He never could keep all of Kansas City's various townships and munic.i.p.alities straight when he was there. The Heart of America bridge, along with the Paseo and Hannibal bridges, showed evidence of multivehicle pileups, some of which had combusted and later burned out in the schizophrenic weather of the Midwest. A train had derailed on the ASB bridge next to the Heart of America and dumped itself into the Muddy Mo. One of the towers, he couldn't tell which one, looked like it had been slashed with something, probably a Cessna or a Learjet from the downtown airport.

On the other screen a Wal-Mart supercenter on Eighty-eighth Street in Miami had been reduced to a smoldering sh.e.l.l. Several watercraft in a variety of flavors and sizes had washed up on the beaches and ca.n.a.ls. Musso couldn't help but be struck by the similarity to images stolen from blasted landscapes throughout the Balkans and in Kuwait after the Iraqi invasion. There was one major difference, of course. No bodies.

"We chose these two cities for the Hawks, partly because they remain comparatively undamaged and also because local weather patterns have temporarily cleared away some of the pollutants choking the air pretty much everywhere else. That won't last."

He thumbed the control again, and the twinned displays appeared to blink, as they switched to a different video stream.

"You're now looking at imaging taken from Montgomery, Memphis, and St. Louis as the first bird made its way up to KC."

The screens reformatted into a series of windows, all showing bleak, gray landscapes that reminded Musso of photographs of old industrial towns, where soggy ash and acid rain permanently blanketed the landscape, leaching the color from everything. A couple of low grunts and a curse or two were evidence that some capacity to be surprised remained in his audience.

"This nuclear-winter effect has been replicated across the continental U.S., although not uniformly. As you might expect, the concentrations of airborne pollutants are most dense at the source, and data from our weather satellites indicates that a significantly thick tail measuring about a hundred and fifty to two hundred miles extends east from each of the largest cities to have burned. In some areas of the country, in certain parts of the Rockies and on the West Coast well to the north and south of the LA basin, the concentration of particulates is not yet at critical levels. Because of a low-pressure system sitting off the coast last week, Seattle did suffer some contamination from the megafires that burned out Portland and Spokane, but that system moved east and dragged a good deal of the plume with it."

The scratch on his head was bleeding again, forcing Musso to dab at it with another tissue. He patted down his pockets, unable to find one, until Colonel Pileggi pa.s.sed him a Kleenex from a handbag down by her feet.

"Thanks, Susan. Feels like I'm bleeding out here."

"Don't worry, General. Chicks dig scars."

A strained chuckle ran through the tightly packed group and eased just a little of the utter hopelessness that had begun to take hold. Musso turned back to the briefing with at least some sense of purpose.

"Okay. Average temperatures under the particulate cloud are up to twenty degrees cooler than average, although again that varies from one locale to another. The variations are much more p.r.o.nounced inland than by the sea, and proximity to a major source has an effect, too."

"That solves Gore's global-warming problem." Major Clarence snorted.

"Quiet on deck," Colonel Stavros shouted.

Musso ignored the distraction and brought up satellite coverage of the Eurasian landma.s.s.

"The plume has moved across Europe and is within two days of reaching the eastern seaboard of China. It is largely contained within the Northern Hemisphere between thirty and sixty degrees lat.i.tude. The climatic effects are less severe than on the North American continent, but they remain significant, and I'm told they'll probably deteriorate for another two to three weeks, before stabilizing for six to twelve months."

"There's a lot of wiggle room in those figures, General," said Pileggi, as she looked up from scribbling in her notebook.

"Enough of a margin to mean the difference between a lot of people living and dying," he agreed. "I've been on to PACOM to tighten them up, but that's as good as they'll commit to for now. You know what scientists are like," he added, shaking his head. The specter of Professor Griffiths still haunted the briefing room.

The display returned to top-down street scenes in Miami and KC. Not a living thing moved anywhere in either city.

"The weather data are important to us because they directly affect our mission, the evacuation of all U.S. citizens who want it, to a secure location, as yet to be determined." Musso turned to Pileggi while he dabbed at his cut again. "Your airfield is going to be vital in that effort, especially if we evacuate to Australia, New Zealand, or our allies in Asia."

"I understand, sir. If I may, what about defense a.s.sets?" Pileggi asked. "Castro is gone, but Chavez isn't. I do not have any air cover to speak of outside of our allies in the region, and their air power isn't quite up to dealing with Hugo if he gets froggy. Plus, we're going to need to secure the Ca.n.a.l."

"I know," agreed Musso. "I've been on to PACOM about it. Pearl's promising whatever they can spare, but at the moment, that's nothing."

The colonel persisted anyway.

"If they're serious about the refugee problem they need to find that support," she said. "My staff have planned our side of any evacuation based on being able to ship people through Panama. If the government collapses-a pretty good bet-that ca.n.a.l is going to stop working. These locks are a century old and require ground crews to run them. At some very narrow points, the ships are actually pulled by tugs. All of these locations are extremely vulnerable to attack."

Musso threw up his hands.

"I know all about it, Colonel. But at the moment, it's a tenth-order issue for them. I'll see what I can do to change that. We need to plan for the worst, though."

"There are some contingency plans, but they are almost uniformly awful," said Pileggi. "Some ships could try to head to Nicaragua and cross there. Most of Nicaragua can be crossed by traveling upriver to a point where the trip overland to the Pacific side is maybe eight to ten miles. The navy could pick up folks on the other side, but it would require heavy combat power on the ground to secure any transit, especially if Nicaragua goes under. Alternately, a convoy could sail around the tip of South America. But that route is vulnerable to Chavez and his navy. I also imagine there will be a significant rise in piracy throughout those waters should there be a breakdown in state control. Another option is to disembark any civilians on the Atlantic side of the Ca.n.a.l Zone, where our own forces could establish a defensive position of sorts. Those civilians would then be escorted overland to the Pacific side or to a usable airfield. Another nightmare."

"I'll talk to Ritchie," said Musso.

There was no avoiding it. More than a hundred civilian craft lay at anchor down in the bay, most of them carrying U.S. nationals who'd gravitated to the nearest and most obvious symbol of American power still in existence in this part of the world. Just feeding them and supplying enough fresh water each day was a herculean challenge. They couldn't stay. But moving them was a nontrivial problem, too. From Musso's perspective, maintaining control of the Ca.n.a.l was still a number-one priority for the United States. At least in the short term. He was responsible for the transport and protection of any American refugees who requested it, and that meant putting most of them through Panama. Where they went after that was a matter for diplomatic negotiations under way at Pearl.