Without Warning Part 6

"Son," said Kipper, who felt old enough to call the airman that, "you and I are going to do our jobs. And somebody, somewhere else, is gonna see to punching lights out on this motherf.u.c.ker."

"So you think it can be turned off, sir?"

The need in the boy's voice was almost painful.

Kipper tried for a nonchalant shrug.

"I'm an engineer. I was always taught that if something can be turned on, it can be turned off," he said.

But he didn't believe that for a second. Not after seeing the thing with his own eyes.

By the time his flight touched down at Sea-Tac, Kipper had almost forgotten the crash back in the Cascades. As the young guardsman who'd strapped him into his seat in the Blackhawk back in the mountains had explained, there were almost certainly no people on that flight anyway. They'd been "disappeared." The phrase gave him a twitchy feeling. It was redolent of the bad old days in Chile, where he'd done some contract work for Arthur Andersen on a power-station project back in the eighties. People by the thousands got "disappeared" there. As frightening as that had been, however, it was also comprehensible. Bunch of a.s.sholes who looked like they'd been tricked out as opera villains in military drag had simply decided to murder anyone who looked sideways at them.

What he'd seen as soon as the chopper lifted clear of the deep valley in which he'd been trekking was entirely incomprehensible. The brooding ma.s.s of the Cascades still blocked from view a good deal of what the guardsmen were calling "the wave," but the G.o.dd.a.m.ned thing was reared up so high he could still see it anyway, soaring off toward s.p.a.ce somewhere beyond the skyline of the ranges. That was bad enough, but what they'd told him about the effect of this "wave" had drilled a cold, dead finger bone into his heart. Hundreds of millions of people, gone. Whole cities, close enough to the whole country, empty. Ships plowing into ports and exploding. Cars just veering off the road, uncontrolled, crashing into each other because n.o.body was behind the wheel. Planes falling out of the sky, as he'd seen with his very own eyes earlier that day. It'd been happening all over. Still was, in fact. The Air National Guard had jets up right now, waiting for half a dozen flights whose tracks were due to take them over Seattle. They'd been authorized to shoot them down well short of the city.

Kipper caught himself obsessively twisting and wrenching one of the straps on his backpack as he tried to imagine what had happened, what bizarre correlation of physical forces might have done such a thing. He couldn't think of a single explanation. He was a civil engineer, a good one, but he maintained a professional interest in related fields, and indeed in most of the hard sciences. As a young boy he'd wanted to be an astronaut-who hadn't?-but he wasn't one for uniforms and taking orders and sucking up a lot of chickens.h.i.t nonsense. So he'd refused to go down the path his old man had been pushing him toward, a career in the air force. He loved building things, not blowing them up. He'd never quite gotten the bug out of his system, though, and a lot of his downtime consisted of reading the sort of scientific journals to which he might have contributed had he pulled on a s.p.a.ce suit for real, instead of just in his dreams.

But nothing he'd ever read or learned or seen in his private or professional experience went one inch toward explaining what the h.e.l.l had happened while he'd been off on his precious f.u.c.king nature walk.

As the C-130 dropped toward the tarmac with a dense, industrial roar, Kipper shook himself out of his thoughts like a dog throwing off pond water. The plane touched down on a patch of concrete ap.r.o.n north of the control tower, affording him a good view of both runways and the terminal complex. He could see right away that things weren't normal. There was an unusually large number of planes on the ground, and none taking off. In one glance he could make out the logos of half a dozen stranded carriers. Midwest. JetBlue. Frontier. China Airlines. They all had flights parked by terminals they wouldn't normally use. A bunch of 737s and MD-80s from Alaska Airlines had huddled together, a bit like an old wagon train, down near the fire station, while a collection of jumbos and long haulers from overseas had gathered at the southern end of the airport. As his plane rumbled along the tarmac, a United Airlines Airbus aborted a landing with a scream of turbines and a building roar as she heaved herself back into the sky again. Kipper craned out of the cabin to see if he could spot whatever had gone wrong, but the guardsmen were already popping harnesses and hurrying him out of the aircraft.

"This way, sir," a woman in a Nomex flight suit yelled at him, pressing a firm hand on his shoulder. "Follow me."

Kipper did as he was told, crouching slightly for no good reason. It just seemed appropriate. The airport was a thunderbowl of screaming engines, jet exhaust, and speeding vehicles, all of it controlled in some vague, chaotic way by hundreds of scurrying, shouting men and women in coveralls and earphones. There were a lot more military uniforms than he was used to seeing, as well. The engineer allowed himself to be led across to a waiting pickup with city markings, where Barney Tench, a huge unkempt figure in khaki drill pants and a faded blue shirt, was waiting for him, looking worried.

Tench came forward, holding out his hand, shaking his head.

"Man, am I glad to you see you, buddy," he called out over the background roar. "Thought we might have lost you up there, Kip. We lost a lot of people upstate. I think Locke's gone, Owen too. n.o.body can find the mayor either, but Nickells wasn't scheduled to be out of town, so maybe he'll turn up. It's chaos, man. f.u.c.king chaos."

His friend sounded unbalanced, which was one of the more disturbing developments of the morning. Barney Tench was usually as phlegmatic as a statue. Nothing upset him. It was why Kipper had insisted on hauling him in all the way from Pittsburgh when he'd taken the city engineer's job. There'd been some grumbling about him hiring an old college beer buddy, but that had fallen away as Barn had settled into the job. You couldn't ask for a better right-hand man.

Except that at this moment, his strong right hand was trembling and pale.

Kipper threw his gear in the back of the truck, yelled his thanks to the aircrew who'd picked him up, and climbed up into the driver's-side seat, motioning for Barney to follow.

"Okay, Barn, gimme the keys. I'll drive, you chill the f.u.c.k out, and we'll deal with this like we would any problem. Step by step. First. Has anyone spoken to Barbara since you got my number off her? She'll be freaking out wanting to know I'm okay."

Barney had the good grace to look guilty.

"I'm sorry, Kip. It's just been a h.e.l.l of a morning. And I ... well ..."

"Okay. Give me your cell. I'll call her now."

Barney shook his head.

"No point, man. The nets are jammed. Your sat phone might work, though."

Kipper took a small, calming breath. "Okay. Two minutes."

Kipper hopped out again, and hurried around to retrieve his phone from the backpack in which he'd stored it. The signal strength was good, and he was relieved to get a clear dial tone. The call to Barb's phone, however, stalled before it began. A recorded voice told him that due to higher than normal demand, his call could not be connected. Kip grunted and tried their home phone number, an old-fashioned landline. It went through to voice mail on the fifth ring.

"Hi, honey. It's me. They got me. I'm back safe. I have to go into the city. When you get home and get this message, stay there. Don't go out again, okay? Things are gonna be crazy for a while. Love you. Love to Suzie, too."

He hung up, hoping that would forestall a scene later on. If Barb wasn't at home it probably meant they were caught up in some traffic jam somewhere, hopefully not for too long. Some of the roads had looked like parking lots on the flight in. It was going to take them a while to drive into town.

"Okay, let's get going," he said, climbing back into the cabin.

They pulled away, with Kipper driving south, toward the main terminal building. As they approached, he could tell it was crowded, with thousands of people lining the big gla.s.s windows that looked out over the tarmac.

"You got any idea what's going on, Barn, beyond the headlines?" he asked.

"Wish I did, Kip. This is like a horror movie. First I heard this morning was Ross Reynolds on KUOW saying he thought we'd been nuked or something. Communications went down. Civil-defense alarms went off. Chaos and f.u.c.king madness."

"But it wasn't an attack?"

Kipper threaded past a knot of distressed-looking travelers who were making their way toward a transit bus from a Horizon Air Dash 8. Then he accelerated toward a vehicle exit up ahead.

"You've seen that thing, haven't you? Not unless we got attacked by the Death Star or something. Right now the whole f.u.c.king world is just as weirded out as us."

Kipper waved off a security guard who seemed intent on holding them up, and accelerated past, paying no respect at all to his frantically waving clipboard.

The F-150 bounced up and down as they hit the outer road surface, and Kip wrenched them around before accelerating toward the next exit. There appeared to be a couple of dozen soldiers on duty around the airport, although what role they were playing he couldn't tell. Mostly they seemed to be doing traffic control, barring any civilians from leaving the facility. That's gonna end in tears, he thought. Seattle wasn't the sort of town where folks took well to being d.i.c.ked around by crew cuts and camouflage. It was a righteous certainty that if he stuck his head outside right now he'd hear some would-be grunge G.o.d caterwauling about "fascists" and "n.a.z.is."

"I'm sorry," said Kipper. "I didn't think, Barney. You got family, back East."

Barney breathed deeply and nodded.

"Everyone has somebody. So do you."

Kipper said nothing.

His immediate family was here, thank Christ. But his dad was in Kansas City. And he had a sister in New York. Their mother had died three years back. New York and KC, of course, were both behind the Wave.

He knew now why Barney had sounded so bad on the phone. There were some good folks on the city council, as well as a fair leavening of pinheads. But if Seattle was on the front line of a fight against something with the power to zap a whole continent, they were all in deep, deep s.h.i.t.

Pacific Ocean, 570 nm west of Acapulco

"Man, I vote we stay the h.e.l.l away from that," said Fifi.

It looked like Hollywood's idea of a mid-ocean tsunami, a mind-f.u.c.king wall of water that stretched across the horizon and reached miles into the sky-which was utter bulls.h.i.t, of course. The Diamantina had struck two tsunamis in the time that Pete had been her skipper, both of them over a thousand nautical miles away from any coast, neither of them even noticeable as they pa.s.sed under the hull. The thing to the north was nothing like a tsunami. And they were sailing closer to it with every minute.

"No arguments from me, sweetheart," he agreed. "We'll keep a safe distance."

"That's not what I said," she insisted.

"And how close is that?" asked Jules with a much cooler demeanor. "That b.l.o.o.d.y thing starts below the horizon, Pete. G.o.d knows how high it is. If it wanted to reach out and grab us it probably could."

Pete Holder swung under the boom of the mainmast to get a better view. He frowned.

"I don't think it's going to grab anyone, Jules. It's not alive. It's not even moving."

"Whatever," she said with real exasperation. Whenever she was p.i.s.sed off with him her voice became even more clipped and correct than normal. "If we have to do this, let's get it done, and then get the h.e.l.l out of here, shall we?"

By "this" she meant boarding the luxury cruiser they'd intercepted on their run toward the Mexican coast. The vessel, an enormous aluminum and composite superyacht, was obviously unmanned. It wasn't drifting, but the engines were pushing it along on a southerly heading at just a nudge over six knots. It had emerged from behind the screen of the energy wave two hours earlier, easily visible on the Diamantina's radar. Pete had thought nothing of it until Mr. Lee had come to drag him away from the news feed on the computer. Lee's incomparable pirate's eye had spotted something very special on the horizon.

The empty yacht-the crew had to be dead or "gone"-presented as a brilliant white blade on the deep blue of the Pacific. It almost hurt to look at the thing, so brightly did it gleam in the tropical sun. From the bridge it dropped through four decks before kissing the waterline, where he would have guessed it was maybe 230 or even 240 feet in length. A big twin-engine game fisher hanging from two cranes in a dedicated docking bay at the stern would have easily outsized the Diamantina all on its own. Instead it looked like a toy, which in a way it was. A rich man's plaything. Pete could see other, slightly smaller vessels stowed away in the rear dock.

"It's like a f.u.c.king amphibious a.s.sault ship for the go-go party crowd." He whistled.

Not a soul moved anywhere on the open decks, and behind her the impossible, iridescent wall of coherent energy raised itself high into the heavens.

"You're going to steal it, aren't you?" said Jules in a resigned voice.

"No. I'm going to salvage her." Pete grinned, his first real, sunny smile in hours. "Keep her safe from the sort of villainous rogues one meets around these parts. I'm sure if the owners ever make it back from the Twilight Zone there'll be a more than generous reward for her return."

Jules rolled her eyes. Fifi nodded uncertainly. Her eyes never left the horizon.

"I dunno, Pete. We're coming up on that thing. We're much closer than you thought was safe coupla hours back. It's like it's curving toward us or something."

"Mr. Lee, could you bring us alongside her?" said Pete, ignoring Fifi's quite reasonable point. Selective deafness was a useful skill he'd picked up from his mother.

The old Chinese pirate grinned and began to swing their helm over on a converging curse with the slow, aimless track of the yacht. As they drew closer Pete noted the name on the stern. The Aussie Rules.

He whistled, both at the unexpected connection with home, and the very strong feeling that he knew this boat from somewhere. It was maddening though, he couldn't remember where. There was little time to ponder the mystery, as he busied himself with preparations for the boarding. Truth was, he was no happier than Fifi about their proximity to the vast standing wave that filled the northern sky, but if his instincts played out, this baby might be the answer to their prayers. It could be that the superyacht was too hot to hold on to even with the world collapsing around his ears, but she'd be packed to the gunnels with all sorts of goodies they could trade for jewels or gold. He had a feeling that the world's definition of wealth was going to get back to basics very quickly.

Still, he was no happier than Fifi about their proximity to the vast standing wave that filled the northern sky.

"Steady as she goes, Mr. Lee. Steady now."

Over the next five minutes Lee brought the Diamantina alongside the immense bulk of the yacht. Even with the sun high overhead, they sailed in the shade of the much larger vessel. Lee matched their speed to that of their quarry, and then slowly dialed down the engines, slipping back toward the docking bay at the vessel's stern. Pete could tell that the yacht had been well cared for. Anyone who could afford to buy such a magnificent craft could obviously afford to lavish attention on her. Her hull was free of any buildup below the wa-terline. The portholes were all crystal clear, the gla.s.s freshly cleaned, possibly even this morning. As they drew level with the docking bay, Lee edged their speed back up again, holding position perfectly, just a foot away. Pete gave him a nod and a wink before stepping off. The little Chinaman stood at the wheel, as though organically connected to the Diamantina through it. He didn't move much, but when he did it was in perfect sync with the swell, the light chop, and the grosser, sluggish movement of the other vessel.

"We cool?" asked Pete.

Fifi and Jules, both of them back in their combat rigs, agreed in turn.

"Okay," he said, "let's f.u.c.k this cat."

Lady Julianne Balwyn was not, at first blush, the sort of fabulous creature one might expect to find gracing one of England's older landed families. She had the bearing, the soft beauty, and the polished vowels of a woman whose family had enjoyed hundreds of years of privilege and favor. But in her case, as with her father, something had gone wrong. Lord Balwyn, a spectacular wastrel and confidence man, had told her more than once that Sir Francis Drake had added his seed to the Balwyn family line, accounting for the freebooters and blackguards who regularly popped up in their history, and whether it was true or not-Jules was smart enough to take everything her father said with a mountain of salt-it was undeniable that in the last Lord Balwyn's eldest daughter, the family's propensity for throwing up the occasional black sheep had reached a very particular zenith.

As she cross-decked from the Diamantina to the superyacht, however, she found herself once again grateful to her father for instilling in her such a bleak, pragmatic, Nietzschean view of humanity. While Pete, their putative leader, was lost in an uncontrolled moment of fanboy worship, Jules kept her head down and her poo in one sock.

A favorite saying of Daddy's.

"Holy s.h.i.t," cried Pete. "You know what, I really think this is Greg Norman's yacht."

"Who?" asked Fifi.

"You know," said Pete, who was now very excited. "The golfer? The Great White Shark? A terrible f.u.c.kin' choker, actually, but a great businessman. I think he designed a lot of golf courses when he wasn't losing PGA playoffs. Talk about money for nothing and your chicks for free. Although, you know, your lady golfers, there's a reason those chicks are free. Anyway, I'm pretty sure this is his yacht. Or was."

"You think so?" Jules deadpanned, as they stood by a large swimming pool, inlaid with a stylized shark motif. She held a solid gold putter in one hand and in the other a white straw hat, both sporting the same cartoon outline of a great white.

"Greg who?" asked Fifi.

Pete shook his head despairingly.

"If it ain't NASCAR it just ain't real for you, is it, sweetheart?"

"What's up with NASCAR?"

Before Pete could answer, Jules cut him off, snapping her fingers.

"Excuse me, people? End of the world over here? Greg Norman's yacht getting all Marie Celeste on us? Let's maintain our focus, shall we?"

"Sorry," said Pete. "It's just, you know, it's the Shark, baby!"

"Stupid f.u.c.king game anyway," muttered Fifi. "Buncha fat-a.s.s white guys in ugly pants, driving around in those f.a.ggy little carts ..."

"Fifi." Jules's voice took on a warning edge. She was fond of her white-trash friend, but managing the bimbo eruptions was a full-time job.

"Got it, got it," said Fifi. "Maintaining focus."

"Come on, let's have a little look-see," said Jules. She slipped her carbine over one shoulder and took out a handgun, a Beretta Px4, even though she wasn't expecting to find anyone on board. They'd been calling out since boarding, but it had the same feeling as knocking on the door of an empty house. She knew they were alone. The ever-suspicious Fifi, however, kept a sawed-off shotgun to hand with a sh.e.l.l racked in the tube. Her thumb stroked the safety, ready to flick it off at the slightest provocation.

They stood by the pool, located on the second of four upper decks, the sun glinting fiercely off the water as it slowly sloshed around with the gentle motion of the boat. The tip of the Diamantina's mainmast rolled through a small arc a few meters away. By leaning over the polished rail, Jules could see the top of Mr. Lee's bald head a long way below. The pool looked to be about ten meters long, with four round black stools peeping above the waterline at the far end, where they ab.u.t.ted a full bar with its own beer taps and all the fixings for a high-end c.o.c.ktail party. A large plate of fruit salad, wilted in the heat, lay untouched in the center of the polished hardwood bar top. White padded cushions lay along both sides of the pool, with pillows scattered here and there. She could read Pete like a cheap novel and knew that it was all he could do to resist diving in and asking the girls to set him up a margarita. To move things along she strode forward, taking the port-side companionway.

"h.e.l.lo," she called out. "Is anyone on board? Do you need help?"

"Oh, f.u.c.k!" Fifi cried out. "Oh, gross me out!"

Jules spun around, but no obvious threat had emerged from anywhere. Rather, Fifi was dancing about as if she'd trodden in something nasty.

Which she had.

"Oh, G.o.dd.a.m.n! This is worse than rendered hog fat."

"What is it?" asked Jules, as she hurried over, just one step behind Pete.

"Gawd, that is nasty," he said, suddenly pulling up.

Before them on the deck was a pile of burned clothes out of which had leaked a couple of gallons of the vilest-looking green-black substance Jules had ever seen.