The water rushed over her, warm and dank. Twilight was leaching from the sky, but the ship's blaze lit the straits like a battlefield.
Another minor explosion, and a flare of light by the ship's single lifeboat. He'd killed them. Good God, they were going to kill them all! How many people-a hundred, a hundred and fifty? They'd been herded into a cattle car and taken out to sea and butchered! Burned and drowned, like vermin!
A drone hummed angrily just over her head. She felt the wind of it on her sodden hair.
She got the ring wedged under her armpits and started swimming hard.
The sea seemed to be boiling. She thought of sharks.
Suddenly the opaque depths beneath her naked legs were full of lurking presences. She-swam hard, until the panic strength faded into chilly shock. She turned and looked.
It was going. Stern last, rising above the sea in the last hissing remnants of flame, like a distant candlelit tombstone.
She watched it for long, thudding heartbeat seconds. Then it was gone, sinking into nothingness, blackness, and ooze.
The night was overcast. Darkness came on like a shroud.
The rush of afterwash hit her and bobbed her like a buoy.
Another hum overhead. Then, in the distance, in the dark- ness, the chatter of machine-gun fire.
They were killing the survivors in the water. Shooting them from drones, out of darkness, with infrareds. She began swimming again, desperately, away.
She couldn't die out here. No, not blown to shreds out here, killed like a statistic... . David, the baby .. .
An inflatable boat surged by, dark man-shapes and the quiet mutter of an engine. A slap in the water-someone had tossed her a line. She heard Hennessey's voice. "Grab it.
Hurry up!"
She did it. It was that, or die here. They tugged her in and hauled her up, over the inflatable's hull. Hennessey grinned at her in his drenched clothes. He had companions: four sailors in white round hats, neat silky uniforms, dark with a gleam of gold.
She sprawled in the rippling bottom of the boat, against a hull black and slick as a gut, in her sari blouse and under- wear. One of the sailors tossed the flotation ring overboard.
They picked up speed, heading away, up the straits.
The closest sailor leaned toward her, an Anglo about forty.
His face looked as white as a sliced apple. "Cigarette, lady?"
She stared at him. He leaned back, shrugging.
She coughed on seawater, then gathered her legs in, trembling, wretched. A long time passed. Then her brain began to work again.
The ship had never had a chance. Not even to scream out an SOS. The first missile had wiped out the bridge-radio, radar, and all. The killers had cut their throat first thing.
But to kill a hundred people in the middle of the Malacca
Straits! To commit an atrocity like that-surely other ships must have seen the explosion, the smoke. To have done such a thing, so viciously, so blatantly .. .
Her voice, when she, finally got, it out, was cracked and weak. "Hennessey... ?"
"Henderson," he told her. He tugged his drenched red rain slicker over his head. Beneath it was a bright orange life jacket. Under that a sleeveless utility vest, bulges and little metal zips and Velcro flaps. "Here, put this slicker on."
He shoved it at her. She held it numbly.
Henderson chuckled. "Put it on! You want to meet a hundred red-blooded sailors in wet underwear?"
The words didn't quite register, but she started on it any- way. They were speeding in darkness, the boat bouncing, the wind tearing and flapping at the raincoat. She struggled with it for what seemed an endless time. It clung to her bare wet skin like a bloody hide.
"Looks like you need a hand," Henderson said. He crawled forward and helped her into it. "There. That's better."
"You killed them all," Laura croaked.
Henderson aimed amused glances at the sailors. "None of that, now," he said loudly. "Besides, I had a little help from the attack ship!" He laughed.
Sailor number two cut back the engine. They were coasting forward in darkness. "Boat," he said. "A sub is a `boat.'
Sir. "
In the darkness, she heard water cascading and the gurgle of surf. She could barely see it in the dimness, a vague blue-black sheen. But she could smell it and feel it, almost taste it on her skin.
It was huge. It was close. A vast black rectangle of painted steel. A conning tower.
A monstrous submarine.
9
It was huge and alive, ticking over like some transatlantic jet, drizzling seawater with sharp pneumatic huffing and a deep shuddering hum. Laura heard drones hissing past her in the darkness, taxiing in to land on the hull. Evil, waspish sounds. She couldn't see them, but she knew the machines could see her, lit by her own body heat.
The inflatable collided gently with the sub, a rubbery jolt.
The sailors climbed a detachable rope ladder up the dark curving hull. Henderson waited as they left. Then he smeared wet hair from his eyes and grabbed her arm.
"Don't do stupid shit," he told her. "Don't yell, don't act up, don't be a bitch. I saved your life. So don't embarrass me. Because you'll die."
He sent her up the ladder ahead of him. The rungs hurt her hands, and the slick steel hull was deep-water-cold under her bare feet. The flattened hull stretched out endlessly into wash- ing darkness. Behind her, the conning tower loomed thirty feet high. Long spines of black-and-white antennas sprouted from its peak.
A dozen more sailors clustered on the hull, in elegant bell-bottom trousers and long-sleeved blouses with gold-braided cuffs. They tended to the drones, manhandling them down a series of yawning hatches. They moved with a strange tippy- toeing, hunch-shouldered look. As if they found the empty night sky oppressive.
The inflatable's crew expertly hauled it up after them, flinging rope hand over hand. They deflated it, trampling out air in a demented sombrero dance, then stuffed the wet rubber mass into a seabag.
It was all over in a few moments. They were jumping back into their vast steel warren, like rats. Henderson hustled
Laura over a hatch coaming onto a recessed floor. It sank beneath their feet. The hatch slammed over her head with an ear-popping huff and a squeal of hydraulics.
They emerged from the elevator shaft into a vast cylindrical warehouse lit with sullen yellow bulbs. It had two decks: a lower floor, beneath her bare feet, of solid iron, and an upper one of perforated grating. It was cavernous, two hundred feet long; every ten feet it was cut, left and right, by massive bulging elevator shafts. Shafts nine feet across, steel silos, their bases stuck with plugs and power cables. Like bio-tech tanks, she thought, big fermenters.
Two dozen sailors padded silently in foam-soled deck shoes on the narrow walkways between the silos. They were work- ing on the drones in hushed concentration. An incense stink of hot aircraft oil and spent ammunition. Some scrambled vibe of war and industry and church.
The compartment was painted in sky blue, the tubes in spacy midnight indigo. Henderson headed aft. As he hauled her along, Laura touched the cold latex surface of a tube, wonderingly. Someone had painstakingly stenciled it with dizzy five-pointed stars, comets with whizzing comic-book tails, little yellow ringed Saturns. Like surfboard art. Dreamy and cheap.
Some silos had been welder-cut and, hung with arcane repair tools-they were retrofitted for drone launches. The others were older, they looked intact. Still serving their origi- nal function, whatever that was.
Henderson spun the manual wheel in the center of a water- tight door. It opened with a thermos-bottle thump and they ducked through. Into a coffinlike chamber plated with egg- carton antisound padding.