Without Warning Part 2

"I'm on it, sir."

His aide hurried out of the room to track down the source of this new disturbance. Musso waited for more shots, but none came.

"Okay," he said. "I'm not sending any more a.s.sets into this thing, whatever it is. I think we've established that it's a no-go zone."

Both of the helicopters he'd ordered to fly north over international waters had apparently crashed soon after crossing the line that now defined the edge of the phenomenon.

"Okay. Let's call up PACOM ..." he started to say.

"General, pardon me, sir? Permission to report?"

A fresh-faced marine b.u.t.terbar in full battle rattle appeared in the doorway, his dark features unaffected by the recent turn of events.

"Go ahead," said Musso.

"It's the Cubans, sir. They've sent a delegation in through the minefield. They want to talk. Matter of fact, they're dying to. One of their vehicles. .h.i.t a mine coming in and the others just kept on rolling."

Musso stretched and rolled his neck, which had begun to ache with a deep muscle cramp. He was probably hunching his shoulders again. Marlene said she could tell a mile off when he was really p.i.s.sed, because he seized up like the hunchback of Notre Dame.

(Marlene... OhmiG.o.d...) "Okay," he said. "Disarm them and bring them in. They're a few miles closer to it, whatever it is. They might have seen something we haven't."

The lieutenant acknowledged the order and hurried away, weaving around Stavros, who returned at the same moment.

"I'm afraid a bunch of our guests decided to charge a guard detail," he said, explaining the gunshots of just a few minutes ago. Things were moving so quickly that Musso had stopped caring about the incident as soon as it didn't escalate. "Two dead, five wounded. They've heard that something is up. They think Osama's set off a nuke or something. The camps are locked down now."

Musso took in the report and decided it didn't need any more of his attention.

"Folks, right now, I gotta say this. I don't think bin Laden or any of those raghead motherf.u.c.kers had anything to do with this. I think it's much bigger, but what the h.e.l.l it is, I have no idea."

The live feed from Oschin's webcam trawl stuttered along above his head. Mocking them all.

wish it was just a nuke, thought Musso, but he kept it to himself.

Pacific Ocean, 600 nm west of Acapulco.

The old sailboat was a twin-masted forty-footer carved out of thousand-year-old Huon pine from the Tasmanian highlands, a beautifully preserved museum piece. She'd placed third on corrected time in a Sydney-Hobart race way back in 1953, and in the decades since had logged enough miles to make it to the moon and back. In that time she'd been the plaything of a builder, a manufacturing tyc.o.o.n, two dot-com millionaires, and Pete Holder.

Pete knew he was never going to be anywhere near as wealthy as any of the Diamantina's former skippers-although the dot-com guys had tanked badly a couple of years ago and were probably down to their last two or three million now, hence the bargain-bas.e.m.e.nt price he'd paid for the old girl. Not that he gave a s.h.i.+t. The Australian government issued his pa.s.sport, but he considered himself a citizen of the waves, and for the past eight years, after taking a redundancy payment from his old job as a rig boss for Sh.e.l.l, he'd been devoted entirely to the pursuit of the world's most fantastic lifestyle. Mostly that involved meandering from one secret surf break to the next, putting in a few weeks at the Maldives, cutting down the Indonesian archipelago to Nias, booming across the Pacific to chase triple-overhead sets off northern California. And sometimes, of course, to pay for this life of pure indulgence, it meant loading the boat up with half a ton of compressed ganja and running the gauntlet of international supernarcs like the DEA and AFP.

Even worse were the state-sponsored but highly autonomous shakedown artists, like the crooked Indonesian navy commodore he'd tangled with in Bali last year, or the Peruvian federales he thought he'd paid off in Callao only to have them come back a day later saying they'd "lost" their very generous bribe and would be in need of another of the same value within twenty-four hours-unless Senor Pedro felt like seeing out his days as a slave in a manganese mine deep in the jungles of la Montana. Pete had transferred the money within two hours and never sailed into the territorial waters of Peru again.

As he watched Fifi and Jules, moving around to clear away the remains of lunch, the veteran smuggler catalogued all of the near misses he'd survived over the years. It was a sobering exercise, one he forced himself to endure before every new payday. Bad luck he couldn't control, but with good planning and preparation he could at least minimize opportunities for the ever-fickle finger of fate to insert itself firmly into his a.n.u.s. Hubris and stupidity, on the other hand, were completely avoidable. They were the princ.i.p.al mechanisms by which natural selection thinned out his compet.i.tors, and he'd be dammed if he was going to fall victim to them. Pete Holder was a survivor.

"Mr. Peter, sir?"

Lee had snuck up on him again. A Malaccan Chinese from a three-hundred-year-long line of pirates, Mr. Lee was always doing that. Pete tried to rearrange his features into a sunny smile, but Lee knew him too well and responded with a pitying shake of the head. Pete was notorious for his ill temper in the hours leading up to a job, and try as he might to control it, his face was always clouded and dark until they were safely away. Frankly, he resented the necessity for the whole smuggling business and would have done almost anything short of getting a normal job to avoid it.

"Hey, Lee. What's up, mate?"

Pete tried for a light tone, the sort of thing his fellow Tasmanian Errol Flynn might have pulled off if he'd gone into smuggling and full-time surf b.u.mmery. Instead he came off as clipped and nervous. He noticed Fifi and Jules throw a curious glance back his way. They'd only been with him for about eighteen months, but like Mr. Lee they'd learned to read his moods with an almost preternatural accuracy. It was the legacy of living so close together and taking things right up to the edge.

"Something is up, Mr. Peter."

"Okay. I'm waiting."

Jeez, he wished he could loosen up.

"The Pong Su, she is changing course, sir. She will not meet up with us if she continues on her new heading."

Pete was dressed in ripped board shorts and a sun-faded sky-blue cotton s.h.i.+rt. The Tropic of Cancer was well north of them, and the day would have been uncomfortably warm were it not for a gentle sou'wester that only just bellied out the sails but did little to dry the sweat pooling between the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of his female crew.

"Come see. I show," said Lee.

Jules finished sc.r.a.ping a plate of grilled fish sc.r.a.ps over the side and used the dish to shade her eyes as she straightened up.

"Is there something the matter, Pete?" she called out in her rather posh English accent, what his mother would have called "all peaches and cream."

"Dunno yet," he answered. "Could be. Let's be ready to split just in case. You and Fifi better kit up, too, soon as you're ready."

"Righty-o," she said. The two girls set to their cleaning ch.o.r.es with added vigor. Both were athletic blondes in their twenties and resembled each other closely enough that Pete had long ago taken to calling them "the twins," even though Jules was a Brit, a trust-fund exile from Surrey, while Fifi had run away from a trailer park in Oregon at the age of fifteen. They brought a rare and valuable mix of skills to the Diamantina. Jules had a master's in accountancy from the London School of Economics, and her father, the late Lord Balwyn, had been a two-time winner of the Fastnet race and a board member of the Royal Thames Yacht Club. Or had been, until Scotland Yard had come calling at the manor one day with a warrant for his arrest on 129 charges of fraud and tax evasion.

Fifi, the s.h.i.+p's cook, had not even finished high school, and her only inheritance was genetic. Her mom, one of Larry Flynt's very first Hustler models, had bequeathed her some good looks and a mighty fine a.s.s, but apart from an explosive temper and a morally flexible att.i.tude to life's manifold challenges, that was about it. And compared with her mom, she was still kind of uptight. She'd left home after her fourth "stepdad," the aptly named Randy, a s.h.i.+ftless, unemployed crab-pot repairman, had suggested they have a threesome and go on Springer to tell their story. He'd heard they could score a trip to Chicago, a free stay in a motel, and two hundred dollars cash for expenses.

Fifi was on the road with her thumb in the air about half an hour later.

She was a great cook, however. And h.e.l.l on mag wheels with a loaded weapon.

He could hear the twins rummaging through the gun locker just beyond the forward bulkhead as he sat at the nav station and tried to make sense of the screens in front of him. Even with air-conditioning it was hot belowdecks, and the prospect of a transfer going bad gave the confines of the boat a claustrophobic feeling. The Diamantina was fitted out for high luxury, thanks to her former owners, and Pete was able to sink into a soft leather swivel chair adapted for maritime use from a Herman Miller original, but nothing about sitting in front of the flat-panel displays in the small nook outside his personal cabin made him happy. He could see immediately what Lee was talking about as he watched a computer-generated track of the Pong Su, the North Korean freighter scheduled to swap four million dollars' worth of perfectly counterfeited U.S. currency for a "full stick," one million dollars' worth of the real deal bundled away in the Diamantina's stronghold. That money represented the profits of three high-risk dope runs from Mexico up to California. Currency fraud wasn't the sort of business they normally got into, but the blowout in Bali had left him few options. The four large he could trade in Mexico for two million U.S. real, a profit of one hundred percent.

Or that was the plan, anyway.

But forty minutes ago the Pong Su had deviated sharply off course, and was apparently running rudderless. It looked for all the world as though she'd lost steering.

"No good, Mr. Peter," avowed Lee. "Look here, and here, too."

It was only then that Pete realized the Pong Su wasn't the only s.h.i.+p in trouble. Five other vessels within the Diamantina's radar bubble had all likewise veered off course and appeared to be heading out of the designated s.h.i.+pping lanes.

"Pete, you'd better come up on deck. There's something very strange happening off to the north."

It was Jules, with Fifi at her elbow right behind her.

After cleaning up, they had changed into their rig for the handover. Both were now dressed in ballistic vests and wearing combat harnesses weighed down with reloads for the Vietnam-era M16s and grenade launchers that they would take from the armory fifteen minutes before the rendezvous. But Pete Holder was beginning to doubt there'd be any rendezvous today, or ever.

"What do you mean strange?"

"I mean odd, weird, right out of the b.l.o.o.d.y ordinary, Pete. It looks like a storm front came out of that heat haze to the north, but... well ... you'll need to see for yourself."

Grunting in frustration, he pushed himself up out of the chair and hurried up on deck. Moving forward to the bow, s.h.i.+elding his eyes, he saw immediately what she meant. Far to the north of them half the sky seemed to be taken up with the queerest, most exotic-looking storm front he'd ever seen. It appeared to sparkle and hang still in the air. It must have been a long way distant, because it appeared from beneath the horizon and climbed away into the stratosphere. Just standing, watching it, he felt insignificant and deeply vulnerable.

"Radio's not working!" Fifi called out from below.

"Radio's fine ..." he started to say, then stopped. They'd been monitoring the airwaves for any U.S. or Mexican government traffic, using the yacht's high-gain antennae to eavesdrop on coast guard and navy signals, a constant background chatter. It was only when Fifi pointed out the silence from the radio that he realized he'd heard nothing from it in more than half an hour. Frowning at the bizarre weather up ahead, he hastened back belowdecks.

Mr. Lee was flicking switches and twirling dials on the M802 marine radio. It was only then that they picked up the babble of some commercial station down in Acapulco, where a DJ was reading in heavily accented English a local police order imposing an immediate curfew, which would remain in effect until contact with the central government was "reestablished."

"Oh, b.u.g.g.e.r this ..." muttered Pete at the unpleasant feeling of deja vu. It transported him back to the day he'd woken up late in the morning, dockside in Santa Monica, after a hard night's partying with his then relatively new crewmates. He'd spent nearly the entire day mooching around, drinking Irish coffee and napping off his hangover. It had been September 11, 2001, and he'd missed almost all of the day that had changed the world. Only Lee's return from the city in the afternoon had alerted him to the news from the East Coast. As he sat belowdecks again, sweat leaking out of his armpits and trickling down his sides, listening to an increasingly hysterical radio jock talking about " la catastrofe" and watching the strange, ghostly track of those five s.h.i.+ps to the north, Pete Holder felt as though time had folded back in on itself.

"I dunno what's happened," he said, "but I got a sick feeling about this. And about that weird f.u.c.king storm front. I'm gonna go with my gut. Mr. Lee, let's make ready for a fast run, sou'-sou'west. Keep a watch on the Pong Su. If nothing changes we're gonna blow this off in fifteen minutes. I want to put some serious miles between us and ... whatever."

The Diamantina slipped through a light swell, pushed on by a freshening breeze. Mr. Lee had the wheel, as phlegmatic in the face of the world's end as he had been staring down the barrel of an M16 in Bali. Pete wondered what, if anything, would upset him.

Not that it mattered, because between himself and the twins there was plenty of freaking out to go round.

"Zombie Jew on a f.u.c.king Zimmer frame," said Fifi.

"What?" said Pete.

"It's redneck for 'Christ on a crutch,' Pete. Let's stay on the ball, shall we?" said Jules.

The three smugglers were crouched in front of the Samsung monitor, a brand-new twenty-three-inch flat screen Pete had picked up back in La Paz during a night of tequila shots and hard bartering with an Italian yachtsman of long acquaintance. CNN's Asia bureau, reporting out of the network's regional HQ in Hong Kong, ran in a small window taking up about a quarter of the screen. Jules had plugged into the live web feed via an Iridium phone, and if they watched it much longer they'd need all of the money in the hold to pay this month's bill.

If it ever arrived.

Pete's eyes flicked over to the GPS window, which showed them retreating from the abandoned rendezvous with the Pong Su at eleven knots. The North Korean s.h.i.+p was still describing a long, lazy arc that would eventually see it run aground somewhere near Mazatlan, in the next day or so. Pete, the only one of them to have a seat in front of the display, had to rub his eyes. Like an addicted gamer, he'd been staring so hard at the screen he hadn't blinked in a long while. He shook his head as he rubbed the irritation away, his vision blurring slightly when he refocused on the window in which footage of a major highway crash was now running.

He couldn't get his head around the pictures that had come in from a small Canadian local news team, some guys out of Edmonton according to the dateline. The image seemed to be out of focus or something. He could tell they were looking at a big pileup on a six-lane highway, but everything was indistinct, as though viewed through poorly blown gla.s.s.

"The effect is stationary," the heavily accented Quebecois voice-over a.s.sured everyone. "Mounted police at the scene are not allowing anyone to approach the phenomenon after the loss of the two fire engines."

Blurred, wavering vision of two fire trucks came up, both of them overturned in a deep ditch by the side of the road. A few hundred meters beyond them a large pileup of vehicles burned freely.

"Oh, man, this is really putting the zap on my head," Fifi muttered.

"We really need to think this through," said Jules, in her oddly cool, high-tone manner. "This could be quite awful."

Pete rubbed at his three-day beard, completely lost for an answer. For a few minutes, a little earlier, he'd actually thought of heading north to raid an empty city. He could have sailed into Santa Monica and picked up a super-yacht, provisioned her for a year, filled the leftover s.p.a.ce with jewels and ammo. But CNN had convinced him otherwise. It was abundantly clear that you could go into the "storm front" that had appeared to their north, but you'd never come back. What was the old Argentine phrase? It "disappeared" people.

"I think we might shoot through to my old stomping ground," he said. "Hobart looks far enough away to me. And I know people there. We can move this money in a flash."

"But what if it starts growing?" asked Fifi, with a sharp edge to her voice. "What if it just eats up the whole world? Like the Blob or something?"

Pete gave her his most open, honest face.

"Then we're f.u.c.ked, darlin'. Aren't we?"

"Pete... ?"

It was Jules, if anything looking even more concerned than before. The worry lines between her eyes were virtual canyons now.

"How fast can we get to Hobart?"

"Why?" he asked. Jules had a postgraduate degree in keeping a stiff upper lip, probably thanks to her old man. If she thought something even worse was coming their way, it really didn't bear thinking about.

"Because n.o.body will want greenbacks if Uncle Sam's beamed up to the Enterprise and flown away for good."

The bow of the yacht sliced into the face of a larger than normal wave, throwing them all slightly off balance. The Diamantina climbed up and over the crest, slamming down hard on the far side with a great, hollow boom. Fifi and Jules braced themselves against the nearest bulkhead. Pete hung on to the arms of his chair. On the computer screen, Stan Grant interviewed a physicist from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, but Pete Holder had already tuned out. Jules was right. If this was a permanent deal they had very little time before their hard-earned stick was worth less than a handful of Polish zlotys.

"You're right," he said tonelessly. "We have to get back onsh.o.r.e and change our money over. Do we know if the Caymans are affected? Or the Ca.n.a.l?"

"We can find out." Jules nodded at the screen. "But, Pete, I don't think we can get there in time. We have to get onsh.o.r.e as soon as we can. Somewhere big enough to convert the money, but far enough removed from ... whatever it is ... that blind panic hasn't taken over yet."

"Acapulco's still there," said Fifi. "But it's locked down, accordin' to the radio."

"That might be a good thing." Jules shrugged. "They keep a lid on things long enough, we might just get in and out. Otherwise we'd have to run down to Guatemala or El Salvador."

Pete chewed his lower lip, sucking the salt from it as he pondered the unfolding disaster. A window displaying the Google news page refreshed, informing him that nearly three thousand stories had already been filed on the phenomenon; none of them from North America. The bright blue hyperlinks all led to European and Asian sites. One, from Agence France-Presse, reported that trading had been suspended on the London, Tokyo, and Sydney stock exchanges. Just beneath it, a Novosti report out of Moscow claimed that the Russian armed forces had all been called into barracks and placed on high alert. Pete adjusted his balance as the Diamantina slipped sideways down the face of another large wave.

"You're right," he concluded. "We've got to get in somewhere fast. This feels like a big bucket of s.h.i.+t about to tip over and bury the whole world. Let's head for Acapulco."

"You sure?" said Fifi, her usually sunny features darkened by real fear. "That's close to the ... thing."

"I know," said Pete. "But I got friends there. Well, contacts anyway. And the effect's not moving."

For now, he thought.

Coalition headquarters, Qatar.

The shock and awe was not long in coming. Coalition headquarters in Qatar was a focal point of communications links, neutron-star-dense, not all of them controlled by the military. Hundreds of journalists had gathered there to report on the invasion of Iraq, and many if not all of them enjoyed direct voice and data access to their own headquarters and, of course, to the wider global media. The "incident," as it was now being referred to, occurred shortly before a scheduled press briefing in the main media room, giving the a.s.sembled journalists just long enough to work up a fine head of blind panic and to warn their colleagues who might have been disinclined to attend the tightly scripted and mostly useless briefing that for once "the follies" might be worth a look. Bret Melton couldn't believe the turnout. Normally this room was only half full, but today every seat was taken, and in the back half even the aisles were full. He doubted it had anything to do with the scheduled appearance of the British and Australian task force commanders to do their first joint conference with General Franks.

Indeed, neither Franks nor the junior Coalition partners were anywhere to be seen as a USAF colonel took the podium. Melton, a former ranger, was a nine-year veteran of the Army Times foreign desk and knew most of the U.S. military's Qatar-based flack handlers by first names. He had never seen the air force bird before. He keyed on his Dictaphone as soon as the officer appeared, ensuring that the first twenty seconds of his recording was taken up with the jabbering crescendo of two hundred plus colleagues all shouting individual questions at the front of the room. He had no trouble resisting the urge to join in the raucous a.s.sault on the dignity of the briefer. What would be the point? Melton waited for the chaos to die down. The colonel did nothing to calm the room. He merely placed a sheaf of papers on the podium and stood at ease examining the unruly mob with cool aloofness. Nearly a minute and half after he had first entered the room, the reporters slowly, gradually quieted down and resumed their seats like shamefaced schoolchildren. As if to make the point about who precisely was in charge, the colonel's eyes traversed his audience with a cold, mechanical detachment.

Melton readied his pen to take notes. His Sony recorder was working perfectly, but that was exactly when you couldn't trust the d.a.m.n things.

"Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Colonel Yost, and I will be taking your briefing tonight in place of Generals Franks and Wall and Brigadier McNairn. They have been indisposed by developments but will make themselves available for questioning as soon as possible."

An Italian TV producer sitting directly in front of Melton leapt to his feet and called out, "When?"