John Birmingham: Without warning

Oblivious to the personal import of what she’d just shown them, Ensign Oschin carried on, cycling through a list of public gathering places that should have been teeming with people. All of them abandoned or empty, or… what?

‘It’s the Rapture,’ whispered an army major standing directly across the table from Musso. He was one of the two who’d unsettled Oschin a few minutes ago. ‘The end of days.’

Musso spoke up loudly and aggressively, smacking down on the first sign of anyone in this command unravelling. ‘Major, if it was the Rapture, don’t you think you’d be gone by now? And where are the sinners? Don’t they get to stay and party? And last time I heard, this thing has a defined horizon, not too far north of here.’

Chastened and not a little put out, the major, whose name-tag read Clarence, clamped his mouth shut again.

Musso wished, for once in his life, that someone was giving him orders as opposed to the other way around. This was one football he didn’t want to run with. He didn’t know what to make of the video streaming out of his homeland. After 9/11 he didn’t think anything could surprise him again. He’d been ready for the day he flicked on the television and saw mushroom clouds blooming over an American city. But this… this was bullshit.

‘Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar…’

The distinct popping sound of gunfire in the middle distance crackled out of a set of speakers. Then came the screams.

‘George,’ growled Musso.

‘I’m on it, sir.’

His second-in-command hurried out of the room to track down the source of this new disturbance. Musso waited for more shots, but none came.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’m not sending any more assets into this thing, whatever it is. I think we’ve established that it’s a no-go zone.’

Both of the helicopters he’d ordered to fly north over international waters had apparently crashed soon after crossing the line that now defined the edge of the phenomenon.

‘Okay. Let’s call up Pacom…’ he started to say.

‘General, pardon me, sir. Permission to report?’

A fresh-faced Marine butterbar in full battle rattle appeared in the doorway, his dark features unaffected by the recent turn of events.

‘Go ahead,’ said Musso.

‘It’s the Cubans, sir. They’ve sent a delegation in through the minefield. They want to talk. Matter of fact, they’re dying to. One of their vehicles hit a mine coming in and the others just kept on rolling.’

Musso stretched and rolled his neck, which had begun to ache with a deep muscle cramp. He was probably hunching his shoulders again. Marlene said she could tell a mile off when he was really pissed, because he seized up like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Marlene… Oh my god…

‘Okay,’ he said quickly. ‘Disarm them and bring them in. They’re a few miles closer to it, whatever it is. They might have seen something we haven’t.’

The lieutenant acknowledged the order and hurried away, weaving around Stavros, who returned at the same moment.

‘I’m afraid a bunch of our guests decided to charge a guard detail,’ he said, explaining the gunshots of just a few minutes ago. Things were moving so quickly that Musso had stopped caring about the incident as soon as it had failed to escalate. ‘Two dead, five wounded. They’ve heard something is up. They think Osama’s let off a nuke or something. The camps are locked down now.’

Musso took in the report and decided it didn’t need any more of his attention. ‘Folks, right now, I gotta say this. I don’t think bin Laden or any of those raghead motherfuckers had anything to do with this. I think it’s much bigger. But what the hell it is, I have no idea.’

The live feed from Oschin’s webcam trawl stuttered along above his head. Mocking them all.

I wish it was just a nuke, thought Musso, but he kept it to himself.

The old sailboat was a twin-masted forty-footer carved out of thousand-year-old Huon pine from the Tasmanian highlands, a beautifully preserved museum piece. She’d placed third on corrected time in a Sydney-Hobart race way back in 1953, and in the decades since had logged enough miles to make it to the moon and back. In that time she’d been the plaything of a builder, a manufacturing tycoon, two dot-com millionaires, and Pete Holder.

Pete knew he was never going to be anywhere near as wealthy as any of the Diamantina’s former skippers – although the dot-com guys had tanked badly a couple of years ago and were probably down to their last two or three million now, hence the bargain basement price he’d paid for the old girl. Not that he could give a shit. The Australian Government issued his passports, but he considered himself a citizen of the waves, and for the past eight years, after taking a redundancy payment from his old job as a rig boss for Shell, he’d been devoted entirely to the pursuit of the world’s most fantastic lifestyle. Mostly that involved meandering from one secret surf break to the next, putting in a few weeks at the Maldives, cutting down the Indonesian archipelago to Nias, or booming across the Pacific to chase triple overhead sets off northern California. And sometimes, of course, to pay for this life of pure indulgence, it meant loading the boat up with half a ton of compressed ganja and running the gauntlet of international super-narcs like the DEA and the AFP.

Even worse than them were the state-sponsored but highly autonomous shakedown artists like the crooked Indonesian Navy commodore he’d tangled with in Bali last year. Or the Peruvian federales he thought he’d paid off in Callao only to have them come back a day later saying they’d ‘lost’ his very generous bribe and would be in need of another to the same value within twenty-four hours – unless Seсor Pedro felt like seeing out his days as a slave in a manganese mine deep in the jungles of la Montana. Pete had transferred the money within two hours and never sailed into the territorial waters of Peru again.

As he watched Fifi and Jules moving around to clear away the remains of lunch, the veteran smuggler catalogued all of the near misses he’d survived over the years. It was a sobering exercise, one he forced himself to endure before every new payday, as a caution against hubris and stupidity. Bad luck he couldn’t control, but with good planning and preparation he could at least minimise any opportunities for the ever fickle finger of fate to insert itself firmly into his anus. Hubris and stupidity, on the other hand, were completely avoidable. They were the principle mechanism by which natural selection thinned out his competitors, and he’d be damned if he were going to fall victim to them. Pete Holder was a survivor.

‘Mr Peter, sir?’

Lee had snuck up on him again. A Malaccan-Chinese from a 300-year-long line of pirates, Mr Lee was always doing that. Pete tried to rearrange his features into a sunny smile, but Lee knew him too well and responded with a pitying shake of the head. Pete was notorious for his ill temper in the hours leading up to a job, and try as he might to control it, his face was always clouded over and dark until they were safely away. Frankly, he resented the necessity for the whole smuggling business and would have done almost anything other than getting a normal job to avoid it. But he couldn’t, so here they were.

‘Hey, Lee. What’s up, mate?’ Pete tried for a light tone, the sort of thing his fellow Tasmanian Errol Flynn might have pulled off if he’d gone into smuggling and full-time surf bummery. Instead he just came off as clipped and nervous. He noticed Fifi and Jules throw a curious glance back his way. They’d only been with him eighteen months, but like Mr Lee they’d learned to read his moods with an almost preternatural accuracy. It was the legacy of living so close together and taking things right up to the edge.