John Birmingham - Without warning

It was coming up on ten at night, and the dock was well lit, courtesy of a diesel-fired generator she could hear droning away in the distance. Incredibly, she could also hear music, laughter and the tinkle of glasses drifting across from the more expensive berths, where a large number of luxury yachts were docked, one of them as big as her own. Apparently the owners and their guests had enough money and muscle to convince themselves they could remain unaffected by events outside the marina. Not all of the berths were occupied, however. Jules calculated that a third were empty, the boats that normally filled them having lit out already. But of those who had stayed, it seemed most were intent on pretending they could hold back reality with good cheer and hired guns.

Acapulco proper, though, was a patchwork of light and dark. From the flying deck of the cruiser, parts of the city looked entirely normal. Lights twinkled in houses and apartments, traffic streamed along the waterfront, and throngs of people were visible through the big pair of Zeiss binoculars she’d brought back from the Rules. Elsewhere, chaos reigned. Buildings burned and the pop and crackle of gunfire was constant. Sirens had wailed through the first few nights, but they were becoming less frequent. In fact, Jules couldn’t recall the last time she’d noticed one. She poured three cups of coffee and silently thanked God that the thick blanket of toxic waste released by the burning of hundreds of empty American cities had drifted east, and not south. She was convinced this place would be falling apart a lot more quickly if a nuclear winter had descended as it had in Europe.

‘Thapa, come get your brew,’ barked Shah, as he handed a steaming mug down to the heavily armed rifleman on the deck below. Thapa took his drink with a grateful bow of the head and a smile for Jules, making her feel much better about having to hire and trust so many strangers with guns.

She couldn’t help wondering how Pete would have played all this. Badly, she guessed, given that his first thought had been to team up with Shoeless Dan, just a couple of hours before Dan had attacked and killed him. She still missed the old fool, though. They’d been good friends, even if Pete had just a little too much of the surf bum about him to trust in a situation like this. He took his business seriously, and he was a smart bloke who’d played the odds as well as anyone she knew of. But in the end he was like so many Australians she’d met – ultimately prone to falling back on a naive, almost childish belief that everything would work out for the best.

Nothing in Julianne Balwyn’s life led her to believe that. To an outsider, to someone like Shah, for instance, she must surely have appeared as just one more rich oik, the lucky child of old landed gentry, wasting the advantages of the best schools, an ancient title, and a thousand years of hereditary privilege. For Jules, however, her old life was an anxious, contingent affair, where the pressure to maintain appearances was grossly aggravated by the manifest inadequacies of two parents whose laziness and selfishness were exceeded only by their sense of entitlement. She was well rid of all that bullshit.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘We’re not going to need bartenders or butlers, but looking over the old crew manifest, we will easily need more than a dozen warm bods to run the engine room, the bridge, the IT systems, and do general deck duties. Probably be an idea to have a ship’s doctor too, if we can find one. A proper helmsman who could handle the tub in a bad blow. A navigator for when the GPS goes down… I mean, where does it end? How do I pay them all?’

Shah swallowed his coffee in one long draw. ‘You don’t,’ he replied with a single, emphatic shake of the head. ‘They pay you.’

‘Beg your pardon?’ Jules was perplexed, but intrigued.

In reply her new security chief held up the empty mug. ‘This coffee, Miss Julianne, it came from your own stores. But if you had bought it here today, on shore it would have cost you twenty-five euros.’

That caused a raised eyebrow, but on reflection it shouldn’t have. She already knew that raging inflation and currency collapse had reduced the worth of the greenbacks they’d stowed away in the Diamantina to a fraction of their face value. That’s why she’d got rid of them so quickly. The small office and waterfront store she’d rented here for five days had cost fifty thousand US dollars upfront. Now it would probably be a six-figure sum, but she was a lot more sanguine about that than she had been a week earlier. As soon as they’d hit port she’d moved to unload most of the cash as quickly as possible, and had managed to get forty cents on the dollar, taken in the form of fuel, stores, gold, medicine and arms, most of it now safely aboard the Aussie Rules.

Shah moved to the railing of the boat’s flying bridge and gestured at the party scenes around the marina. ‘For now, these people are comfortable,’ he said. ‘They have food, shelter, safety, power.’

He turned away and pointed to the brighter, more chaotic nighttime scene of Acapulco central, where uncontrolled fires duelled with neon and fluorescent light to hold back the darkness. ‘Over there,’ he continued, ‘some people are still fine, but many are beginning to suffer and to fear for themselves. Soon, everyone will be afraid. A cup of coffee, a loaf of bread, it could be worth more than your life. People will pay you to get them away from that.’

‘American refugees?’ she pondered aloud. The richest, whitest refugees in the world. It was a bizarre thought, but entirely logical when you considered where events were headed, or indeed where they were right now. ‘Where would we take them? Alaska? Hawaii? The last I heard people were leaving Hawaii, not going there. I don’t think they’re even letting new people in. Same with Seattle, I think. Aid shipments in, flights out, and that’s it.’

Shah moved his shoulder almost imperceptibly. His version of a shrug. ‘If you have English-speaking passengers, take them to an English-speaking port. England, New Zealand, Australia. They are not closed and they will accept refugees, especially with money.’

‘By the time we get there, though, any money they have will be worthless,’ countered Jules.

‘US dollars, certainly,’ he agreed. ‘But yen or pounds or euros – some surviving currency – they will be acceptable. At least to us, in the short term, for the purposes of provisioning. It would help you too, Miss Julianne,’ he added, with a knowing smile.

‘How so?’

‘The yacht is not yours, no? The owner, a famous man, the original passengers and crew, they are gone. But even so, you will need to have some legitimate reason for having taken her over. Ferrying refugees away from danger, especially Americans, to friendly countries – to friendly frightened countries – it could make your passage into any harbour much less difficult. You could be a hero, a rescuer, not a villain and a smuggler.’ His eyes glinted with real humour in the dark.

‘You’re not quite the ramrod-straight, do-it-by-the-book type you first appear, are you, Sergeant?’

‘No good sergeant is, Miss Julianne.’

Jules let her eyes wander over the distant vista of the city as it disintegrated. Long strings of beaded light, the headlights of cars leaving town, wound up into the hills behind the bay. Camp-fires burned here and there, pushing back the blackness, while occasional flashes of light betrayed either cameras or gunfire. A huge blaze had engulfed a high-rise tower, the flames shooting upwards like a giant roman candle, and yet not far away she could see candy-coloured neon and a pair of searchlights, picking out a nightclub where (local rumour had it) you could still dine and drink as though nothing had happened, as long as you could meet the very steep cover charge.