‘Jeez, Julesy. We taking a mariachi band with us? Cool.’
Fifi had switched over to a Larry the Cable Guy camouflage baseball cap, with the trademark fish-hook in the bill. Jules ignored the hat, especially the Confederate flag.
‘Don’t start, Fifi. Just get them on board.’
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.
A cacophony of horns, whistles, sirens and klaxons overlay the constant screaming and calls for help. The further out into the bay she took them, the worse it grew. Bodies began to appear in the churning water, some floating near capsized boats, and some of them obviously killed by gunfire. At one point she cut their speed back to allow a small pod of surf-skiers to paddle by. They saluted her with their oars before resuming their rhythmic progress.
‘How did they get this far?’ she said to nobody in particular.
Fifi appeared at her elbow with a couple of chilled Coronas. She watched the surfers for a moment before shrugging. ‘Surf breaks get pretty crowded. They’re probably used to it. Wanna beer, Julesy?’
‘You have to be fucking kidding… Oh… what the hell. Could you open it for me?’
Fifi popped the tops and passed one of the bottles to Jules, who kept one hand on the wheel while draining half the cerveza in a few long pulls. The crisp, icy-cold bite was like an angel’s kiss. Indeed, she couldn’t recall ever having enjoyed a beer this much. It was almost obscene.
‘You coulda waited, you know,’ said Fifi. ‘I cut up some limes.’
‘Only poofs fruit the beer, sweetheart. What’s happening below?’
Fifi finished her own drink and tossed the empty bottle overboard before answering. It crashed into the prow of a ferry, eliciting a raised fist and a long string of unintelligible curses from the skipper. She flipped him the finger. ‘Miguel’s got the mariachi band all stowed away down below,’ she replied. ‘They’re cool. No problemo. That fucking prom queen, though, and her brother…’
‘Theobe and Jason?’
‘Yeah, them. They’re already arguing with the banker and his boob job about who gets the big cabin.’
Jules squeezed her eyes shut for just a second. It was dangerous to have them closed for any longer. ‘As long as they keep it down there, I don’t give a rat’s arse.’
A deep, high-powered horn sounded off to starboard, where a large container ship had dropped dozens of lines over the side to pick up people struggling in the water. Another big ship, an oil tanker, was heading straight for it. Jules wondered why until she saw the telltale sparkle of gunfire around the tanker’s bridge.
‘Damn, Julesy,’ said Fifi. ‘Nobody’s in charge of that son of a bitch. You’d better haul ass. This ain’t gonna be pretty.’
Jules didn’t need encouraging. As Shah came hammering up the steps to warn them of the impending disaster, she flicked on the boat’s internal PA system. ‘Hey, listen up everyone,’ she began calmly. ‘Get down low and grab something. I’m going to have to lay on some speed and do some rally driving.’
Another long, shrieking blast on the container ship’s horn pounded at them, and all around it, those ships that could put on speed suddenly did so, leaping up at their bows and churning up white wakes.
‘You have seen?’ asked Shah.
Julianne pushed the throttles to three-quarter power and the sport fisher leapt ahead. ‘I’m on it,’ she cried out, over the rising clamour of horns and the screaming of thousands of people in the water and on nearby boats.
Stray rounds from the firefight on the tanker splattered against their vessel inches from Fifi’s head. She unlimbered the PKM and spat a stream of tracers back at them. ‘Fuckers!’
‘Get down and stop arsing around!’ Jules shouted.
Reefing the wheel to port, she narrowly avoided spearing into an old wooden yacht that looked a lot like the Diamantina. It was certainly of the same vintage and seemed to be crewed by three swimsuit models. Another sharp turn to starboard swept them around two more yachts, which had already collided with each other, and a bright yellow water taxi that was dangerously overloaded. The bow wave from her boat struck it amidships and the taxi went over.
Jules was sorry, but there was nothing she could do about it. Behind them the horns of both the tanker and the container ship roared in one long, deafening note.
Shah pointed her towards a stretch of slightly less crowded water and Jules opened the boat’s engines all of the way. The massive bulk of the sixty-foot power craft lifted even higher in the water and she gripped the silver wheel hard, concentrating on not running into anyone. A few blasts on her own horn began to scatter and clear some room up ahead, but then the warning was lost in a huge, world-ending uproar as the two giant ships collided.
Risking a look back over the stern, she saw the container ship keel over violently. So great was the impact that the giant steel crates stacked high on its deck were thrown clear; those from the upper stacks describing long, slow arcs over the top of a few lucky boats, before crashing down and utterly destroying a host of smaller vessels further out. One rusted blue P amp;O container turned end over end and flew a good hundred metres before slamming amidships into the overcrowded garbage barge they’d left in their wake earlier. It struck like a giant fist, crushing hundreds of people instantly and cleaving the barge in two. Bow and stern folded up like a jackknife and the flat-bottomed craft sank in less than a minute. More and more of the massive steel boxes began to fall away as the container ship tilted over. They rained down over the side, falling directly on top of those vessels and people who’d been initially spared when the first containers had sailed well over their heads.
Jules flinched, expecting to hear the volcanic eruption of the oil tanker going up, but it never came. The thundering collision and the avalanche of containers gave way to torturous tearing and a grinding of steel plates as momentum crushed the two large ships together.
‘Awesome,’ said Fifi as Jules turned away from the spectacle to concentrate on threading their way through the pandemonium of fleeing craft.
Having hung back while she negotiated a safe passage, Shah appeared at her side now, just as the sport fisher finally swung out around the southern head of Acapulco Bay and got a little sea room around her. To port stood the high, wooded slopes through which they’d driven back from Revolcadero Beach less than an hour ago, and Jules made certain to maintain a safe distance from them. Twice they’d hit roadblocks while rolling through there and she didn’t fancy getting sniped at by some resentful bandito sitting up on the bluffs.
Around them, the smaller craft began to suffer in the open seas. The cries of distress from hundreds of small boats suddenly swamped by the powerful and unruly ocean swell was distressing. Jules had seen a lot of children on some of those dinky little tubs, but she pushed it out of her mind. To stop and pick up anybody would mean getting swarmed by hundreds, possibly thousands, of people. She left the throttles open and brought them around to the south-west, heading for the rendezvous with Mr Lee.
‘I have spoken to Thapa,’ said Shah. ‘As you asked, he did some work back on shore, investigating the attack on your vessel by this Shoeless Dan.’
‘Whoa!’ cried Fifi. ‘He’s cute and smart. Man, I’m gonna have to get me some of that later.’
From the way she was now eyeballing the small, well-muscled Gurkha standing at the stern, Jules knew it was no idle threat. ‘Did he find out anything useful, Mr Shah?’ she asked, as the towering Aztec pyramid of the Fairmont hove into view a few miles off the port bow. ‘It’s okay if he didn’t. I wasn’t expecting much, just wanted to cover our arses really.’
Shah, who seemed able to maintain his balance in the rough conditions by simply flexing at the knees, dismissed her last words with a shake of his head. ‘It is his job, Miss Julianne, and mine. Private Thapa discovered nothing specific about the attack on your boat, but there are at least three syndicates, criminal enterprises, that moved very quickly to capitalise on the Disappearance. Most of their activities were restricted to land, but one of them already had a history of maritime criminality. Perhaps this was how they came to know your shoeless friend.’
‘Makes sense,’ Jules replied with a shrug. ‘Maritime criminality was Shoeless Dan’s special power.’ She spun the wheel to take them on a long, looping course around a paddle-steamer that had somehow found itself blundering through the waves. It was nearly as badly overcrowded as the sunken garbage barge had been, and she wanted to give them a very wide berth. ‘But there’s not much of a piracy culture around here,’ she added. ‘Not like in parts of Asia. A lot of smuggling, yes, but not piracy. The Americans wouldn’t have allowed it, even in Mexican waters. You think somebody’s branching out? I mean, not that we’ll be hanging around long enough for them to try their luck.’
The huge Gurkha bobbed and ducked quite comically to maintain his balance, without once needing to grab on to anything to steady himself. ‘You will if you insist on hugging the coastline to drop Pieraro’s people anywhere, Miss Julianne,’ he said.
Jules frowned testily. ‘Look, I’m really pissed off about that. But I didn’t see any way around it. Miguel had that Colombian nutter holding the crowds off us and he could have very easily put us right in the poo if I’d cut up rough about his mariachi band.’
‘His what?’
‘Sorry. In-joke.’
Fifi produced another beer from an icebox on the flying deck and winked at Shah. ‘They’re cool with me,’ she said. ‘I think they’re cute. Wanna brew, anyone?’
Both Jules and Shah answered at once: ‘No.’
‘They’re not American citizens,’ the Englishwoman continued. ‘They’re peasants. Nobody is going to take them in as genuine refugees. Even if we can get all the way across the Pacific with the rations we have on board – and, look, I suppose we can – Hawaii will not take them. They’re shedding people at the moment. New Zealand might. Australia won’t. And everybody else is just as likely to open fire on us as soon as we sail into view.’
Shah held both hands up as if to show her he had nothing left. ‘I do not presume to tell you what you should do. But you have hired me to provide security, and I advise you now that heading back towards the coastline will be a very dangerous business.’
‘Fifi, you’ve been out on the Rules with Lee a lot more than me. How’s our provisioning?’
She drained half of the beer and burped. ‘’Scuse me. It’s not bad, Julesy,’ she replied. That golfer had some good shit in the fridge, and plenty of it. And we topped up the larder nicely. There’s like two frozen pigs and couple of steer down there now. Plus, them Mexicans did bring plenty of food – not like those other fucking snobs. All they brought was expensive luggage and heaps of attitude. I don’t see a problem. Really. Come on, it’ll be fun. Be like Carnivale every night.’
Jules looked to Shah for support but he remained entirely impassive. ‘I just… it’s just that…’ she faltered. ‘Oh, I don’t know… my father taught me that helping people was wrong. It never ends well. We’re not philanthropists here, we’re smugglers – at best.’
‘Foxy fucking smugglers.’ Fifi saluted Julianne with her bottle. ‘And anyway, your old man ate his pistol one night just before the cops grabbed him. Should you really be looking to him for advice?’
Jules looked completely lost. ‘That was my mother’s fault,’ she said bitterly. ‘If she hadn’t tipped off Scotland Yard about Daddy diddling the tax man…’
Shah regarded her with some confusion. ‘Your mother informed on your father?’ he asked.
‘After a less than satisfying divorce settlement failed to provide for her in the style to which she’d so been looking forward,’ Jules explained. She was surprised to find it hard to speak, with her throat suddenly locking. ‘I was his favourite,’ she said quietly.