John Birmingham - Without warning

She had gathered a small group of potential customers around a table, sipping cocktails at hyper-inflated prices, and eating macadamias that weren’t quite worth their weight in gold. The bar filled up as the day waned, mostly with displaced Americans and wealthy vacationers from Mexico City. Her grandfather, Lord Rupert, had been in Singapore just before the Japanese took it in ‘42 and Jules wondered idly if Raffles had felt like this. A genteel outpost surrounded by a gathering darkness. It was hard to tell which group was more desperate: the Americans, who filled up the room with booming voices and sheer physical presence; or the Mexican elite, whose anxiety was quieter and, if possible, much more extreme. For her purposes, however, only the gringos held any interest.

Jules had been following enough of the news to know that she could get the displaced Yanks into port legitimately at a number of places around the Pacific as part of some deal called Operation Uplift. She could even hit up the remains of the American Government for her fuel and supply costs if she felt really cheeky – and could be arsed filling out the appropriate forms for lodgement at the nearest consulate or embassy. The wealthy Mexicans, however, had nothing even resembling the wreckage of a government to lobby foreign capitals on their behalf, and Jules wasn’t willing to take the risk of running them all the way to Sydney only to have some little immigration Nazi with a clipboard tell her they couldn’t land. Miguel and his family, she’d get in somewhere by other means, but that marked the outer limits of her largesse.

So they’d been sitting at a table in the coolest, darkest corner of the bar, a small band of super-rich refugees, negotiating payment for passage, when the background buzz in the place suddenly spiked upwards and drowned out all conversation. Somebody screamed ‘No!’ and Jules tensed up, instinctively reaching for the pistol hidden in her small carry-all, but staying her hand once she realised nothing was going down. A small crowd had gathered under a television fixed high in another corner of the bar and something had set them off. Briefly she fought down a surge of panic, like a rat twisting in her mind, terrified that the Wave had expanded again.

A barman turned up the volume as people argued and shushed each other, and Jules recognised the voice of the BBC World presenter Mishal Husain. Poor old Pete’d had the hots for her. Jules smiled sadly at the memory of him drunk on Jamaican rum, stoned on hash and growling at the TV about exactly what he’d like to be doing to Ms Husain while she burbled on about some EU trade meeting. She missed him terribly.

‘In Tehran alone,’ read Husain, ‘it is estimated that three million died in the initial blast and firestorm, which extended more than a dozen miles from ground zero. Many more died quickly from radiation exposure, and experts say that the final toll in that city alone may reach six million. Other Iranian cities destroyed in the attack include Qom, Isfahan…’

Pieraro crossed himself as the news silenced the entire bar for a second. Her Gurkhas, Shah and Thapa, standing a few feet away, providing a formidable barrier to anybody wanting to approach them, did not visibly react. Their eyes continued to sweep the room like cameras.

‘That’s it. I’m not going to Hawaii,’ said the construction magnate.

‘What?’ asked Jules, still straining to hear the television.

‘Pearl Harbor. That’s in Hawaii. If there’s gonna be a nuclear war, it’ll get hit for sure. I’m not paying you everything I have left just to get my family turned into fucking shadows on a wall by some Chinese A-bomb.’

Cesky was his name. Henry Cesky. A squat, powerful-looking man with coarse black hair and a nose that had obviously been broken more than once. He owned a hundred-plus building cranes towering over twelve North American cities. Within half an hour of hearing about the Disappearance, he’d transferred as much available cash as he could from his US accounts to a series of shelf companies registered in Vanuatu, using that money to buy gold and diamonds in Acapulco. Cesky was travelling with his second wife and four children, all girls, and as soon as he and Jules had met, the construction king had demanded passage to Hawaii for them and then Seattle for himself.

‘I still got an office in Seattle,’ he’d said in a deep, rasping voice that was just barely inflected with a trace of Eastern Europe under his harsh Brooklyn accent. ‘My girls, they can’t go to Seattle – too close to that fucking wave, it is. But I don’t mind that. I don’t think that fucking thing is going nowhere. So you take me there. Lotta fucking work to be done in the Northwest now. Lotta money too be made, to make up what I lost and what you fucking pirates are stealing from me. But my girls, they go somewhere I know they’re safe. Hawaii.’

That had been half an hour ago. Now Cesky’s tune was entirely different.

‘No fucking way do they set foot on those islands! No fucking way do they get within a hundred thousand miles. You take them as far away from this bullshit as you can.’ He was pointing at the TV screen. ‘New Zealand – they filmed that Lord of the Rings there. Got some great fucking six-star lodges built for the movie stars. End of the fucking earth, it is. Went fishing there once. That’d be good. Or Tasmania – where they got that devil in the cartoon – that’s even further away. But no fucking Pearl Harbor. Not now.’

Jules felt like her head was going to spin off. Cesky wasn’t the worst of them, not by a long shot. That’d be the porn king, Larry Zood. He didn’t look like a porn king, possibly because he was an internet porn king, and so looked more like a crooked real-estate broker. But he oozed a sort of pre-emptive creepiness that assured her he would one day weigh three hundred pounds, wear a bad hairpiece, and still insist on bouncing hotties on his knee.

Having arrived at the table an hour ago with a small imitation Faberge egg, Zood had tossed it to Jules like a golf ball, demanding to know upfront how many of his ‘bitches’ he could take with him. ‘I’ll give you one egg per bitch,’ he’d offered. ‘They’re fakes, from Thailand, but the jewels are real. I can leave a few bitches behind. They know that. Makes ‘em extra keen to please, if you know what I mean. But I will need some with me. I don’t like the water – I don’t even like the hot tub they got by the pool over there – so a fucking sea voyage? Shit, if you don’t mind I’m just gonna bomb myself with crystal meth and stay in my suite getting blown. That’s why I need some bitches with me.’

The Brit was tempted to shoot him right there and then, and she wasn’t the only one.

He’d been trying to get Fifi to climb on board since finding out that her mother had been one of the original Hustler babes. ‘Larry Flynt was a great American hero,’ Zood announced now in all earnestness, before grabbing one of Fifi’s boobs and squeezing experimentally. When she peeled his hand away with a painful jujitsu technique he simply laughed. ‘Ow! What a fucking rack. That was totally worth it.’

‘Jules,’ said Fifi, between thinly pressed lips, ‘if this fucking nimrod gets on the boat, he pays twice the going rate.’

‘Fine by me,’ she agreed.

‘Hey!’ protested the porn king.

Jules leaned forward and fixed him with a glare like a pin pushed into a butterfly’s back. ‘Understand this, Mr Zood. We are not your bitches, we are people smugglers. Criminals. If you touch any of my crew, or any other passenger, like that again, I will have Mr Shah take out his pistol and shoot you in the head. And, yes, you will now pay double the asking rate if you wish to leave this city with us.’