The bus trip around the south-east headland of Acapulco Bay had not been entirely uneventful. Shah and Julianne had been forced to open fire on a couple of makeshift roadblocks, which had not been there an hour earlier, when they’d run into would-be car-jackers. At least, she assumed they were car-jackers.
Her passengers, paying and non-paying, poured out of the two beaten-up school buses Pieraro had obtained from God only knew where, and stood blinking in the harsh light, on a massive baking-hot slab of cracked concrete, an empty car park overlooking the water. They were all upset, and some of the Americans looked positively ill. The Aussie Rules’ largest sport fisher bobbed slowly up and down at the end of the pier, which jutted out more than a hundred metres into the bay. No other craft were moored there, and one look out over the water told her why. A huge number of vessels, from small aluminium dinghies to ocean-going mega-yachts, were on the move, heading away towards the wide mouth of Acapulco Bay. Only the slightest puff of breeze ruffled the ubiquitous palms on shore, but out on the bay the enormous flotilla had churned up a mass of white water.
‘Any trouble getting away from the marina?’ asked Jules.
‘Some,’ admitted Fifi, who was dressed in a denim micro-skirt and distressed red tee-shirt emblazoned with the legend Zombie Squad – We can handle it from here. We’ve talked about this on the internet. A Marlboro dangled from her lips. Jules wondered what her friend would do when she finally ran out. ‘But we got her done,’ Fifi added, shifting up her PKM for effect.
Jules winced. ‘You didn’t kill anyone, did you?’
The other woman rolled her eyes. ‘Just a few rounds down-range. Jeez, who died and made you Captain Sensible?’
Jules stared past her, into a place she wasn’t even sure existed.
Fifi caught the hint. ‘Oh, yeah. Pete… Uh, sorry.’
‘Right,’ said Julianne, throwing up her hands. ‘Let’s just get them all on board before we draw another crowd, shall we?’
She could see cars had started to pull over to the side of the freeway on the hill up above them. Small groups of people were already picking their way down through the scrub, doubtless hoping to clamber onto the boat with them. To her west, across the confusion of the bay, the centre of Acapulco was a disaster movie. Fires blazed at so many locations that Jules couldn’t count them, but it was eerily quiet, like watching TV with the sound down. After a second she realised why: no sirens, anywhere. The absence was chilling.
‘Come on, move your arses!’ she called out to the dawdling travellers. Phoebe had actually stopped to take pictures with a small digital camera. ‘Excuse me, the fucking tour bus is leaving!’ cried Jules in frustration. ‘Move!’
Shah and Thapa started herding everyone towards the dock, occasionally glancing up towards the roadway behind them. A few more vehicles had pulled over. Pieraro spoke to an old man amongst his people, who nodded before firing off a scorching fusillade of native oaths and curses and clouting a teenaged boy, who’d stopped dead, transfixed by Fifi’s tee-shirt. The Mexicans, all hauling heavy sacks of food by the looks of them, began to run awkwardly down the pier. The Americans, dropping some of their luggage as they went, followed suit as Thapa chivvied them along. ‘If you would be so kind as to be hurrying your arses up now,’ he said with some urgency.
‘Mr Shah?’ Jules called out. ‘My gun, if you please.’
The Gurkha sergeant produced her shotgun from the cabin of the SUV, which they’d parked close to the start of the long pier. He racked a round into the chamber before handing it over to her.
‘Thank you,’ said Jules. She fired three shots into the air over the heads of the people swarming down the hillside towards them. It had a salutary effect on her own charges as well, speeding their passage down the jetty to a sprint.
‘Hell yeah,’ enthused Fifi. ‘Time for a little redneck persuasion.’ She let rip with a short, snarling burst from her heavy Russian machine-gun, firing into the windows of an abandoned building that overlooked the car park, shattering a dozen panes of glass. The sound was scarifying and the small horde descending the slopes stopped and dropped immediately.
‘Go, go!’ said Shah, waving the two women off towards the boat, where Thapa and Pieraro were hurriedly helping everyone aboard – in some cases by throwing them bodily over the side.
The girls didn’t wait to be told twice. They set off at a sprint. Moments later, Jules heard the vehicle start up again, and looking back over her shoulder, she saw the former soldier driving it onto the jetty. He followed them, stopping halfway down, before turning the wheel to create a barrier across the pier.
‘They’ll just crawl over it,’ said Fifi, levelling the PKM on the makeshift blockade.
‘They won’t,’ promised Jules.
Shah climbed out, tossed something into the cabin and ran as quickly as she’d ever seen a short, refrigerator-shaped man run. A few seconds later, as the first of their desperate pursuers made it to the start of the pier, the grenade exploded, lifting the vehicle a few inches off the deck, but not moving it far enough to topple it into the water. Everyone ducked. When Jules straightened up, access from the shore was blocked by the burning wreckage.
‘Nice work, buddy,’ Fifi said as Shah trotted up to them. ‘You like Nascar at all?’
Smiling like an imp, Shah lifted his shoulders. ‘Nascar? Never heard of it. But I never liked Toyotas much.’
Fifi wondered if anyone even drove a Toyota in Nascar.
Out on the water, it was worse. The sport fisher was big and powerful enough to speed around or muscle through the occasional logjams of smaller craft that blocked its way, and the sight of Pieraro, Thapa and Shah heavily tooled up and guarding against all attempts to contest a boarding precluded any such misadventures. But Jules still had a hell of a time clearing the bay, on which an unknowable number of vessels jostled for primacy. Where the hell most of them thought they were going, she couldn’t say. The little runabouts, motorboats and inflatables that numbered in their thousands would founder in even moderate seas, and word from Mr Lee back on the Rules was that storms in the high latitudes had whipped up a bitching four-metre swell on a nasty cross-chop of at least another metre and a half. They were going to have a lot of seasick passengers in less than half an hour. But at least they’d survive the conditions.
Jules shook her head as she spun the wheel to dodge what looked like a garbage barge barely able to stay afloat under the weight of seven or eight hundred people, all tightly packed onto the mounds of rubbish. They were throwing as much of the rotting, malodorous ballast overboard as quickly as they could, but the wake from her sudden turn set the flat-bottomed scow wallowing dangerously, and at least a dozen men and women went over the side. She nudged the throttles forward and tried to ignore their flailing figures. They wouldn’t be the last people to drown today.