‘Okay, let’s get going,’ he said, climbing back into the cabin.
They pulled away, with Kipper driving south, towards the main terminal building. As they approached, he could tell it was crowded, with thousands of people lining the big glass windows that looked out over the tarmac.
‘You got any idea what’s going on, Barn, beyond the headlines?’ he asked his friend.
‘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 fucking madness.’
‘But it wasn’t an attack?’ As he spoke, Kipper threaded past a knot of distressed-looking travellers, who were making their way towards a transit bus from a Horizon Air Dash 8. That done, he accelerated towards a vehicle exit up ahead.
‘You’ve seen that thing, haven’t you?’ said Tench, answering Kip’s question with one of his own. ‘Not unless we got attacked by the Death Star or the Go’auld or something. Right now the whole fucking 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 waved clipboard.
The council F-100 bounced up and down as they hit the outer road surface and Kip wrenched it around before gunning it towards the next exit. There appeared to be a couple of dozen soldiers on duty around this part of 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 dicked 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 god caterwauling about fascists and nazis.
‘I’m sorry, Barney,’ said Kipper, breaking the silence. ‘I didn’t think – you got family back east.’
Tench 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 in the front line of a fight against something that had the power to zap a whole continent, they were all in deep, deep shit.
9
MV DIAMANTINA, PACIFIC OCEAN, WEST OF ACAPOLCO
‘Man, I vote we stay the hell away from that,’ said Fifi.
It looked like Hollywood’s idea of a mid-ocean tsunami, a mind-fucking wall of water that stretched across the horizon and reached miles into the sky – which was utter bullshit, 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 and neither one even noticeable as it had passed under the hull. The thing to the north was nothing like a tsunami. And, some five hundred and seventy nautical miles offshore from Acapulco, 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, Pete?’ asked Jules with a much cooler demeanour. ‘That bloody thing starts below the horizon. God 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 main mast 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 pissed 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 hell out of here, shall we?’
By ‘this’ she meant boarding the luxury cruiser they’d intercepted on their run towards the Mexican coast. The vessel, an enormous aluminium and composite super-yacht, 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 down through four decks before kissing the waterline, where, he would have guessed, it was maybe two hundred and thirty or even two forty feet in length. A big twin-engine sport fisher, hanging from two cranes in a dedicated docking bay at the stern, easily outsized the Diamantina all on its own. Instead, the super-yacht 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 fucking amphibious assault ship for the go-go party crowd,’ he mused.
Not a soul moved anywhere on the open decks, while behind the yacht 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 was grinning, 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 leaving the horizon. ‘I dunno, Pete. We’re coming up on that thing, and we’re much closer than you thought was safe a coupla hours back. It’s like it’s curving towards us or something.’
‘Mr Lee, would 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 course 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 super-yacht 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.