Neal Stephenson - Zodiac. The Eco-Thriller

"No," I said.

"Hey, we got some Guinness down here. Can we come up there and check out your boat?"

"Ship," the sailor blurted reflexively. Then a diligent pause. "I don't think Skipper'd mind," he concluded. "We're under real tight security when we get into port. 'Cause of terrorists. But this ain't in port."

If Bart had proposed, back on Spectacle Island, that we board in this fashion, I'd have laughed in his face. But that

was Bart's magic. The sailor unrolled a rope ladder down the side of the ship and we climbed up over the gunwhales.

"You know, in your own utterly twisted way, you've got more balls than I do," I said to Bart as we were climbing up. He just shrugged and looked mildly bewildered.

The sailor's name was Tom. We handed him a Guinness and did a quick orbit of the deck, checking out such wonders as the anchor chains and the lifeboats and the bit hatches that led down into the toxic hplds. The whole ship stank of organic solvents.

"Fuckin" water sure stinks tonight," Bart observed. I kicked him in the left gastrocnemius.

"Yeah, don't ask me about that," Tom said with a kind of shit-eating chuckle.

After we'd checked out the butt end of the ship, examined the controls of the big crane, they headed up toward the bow and I couldn't resist leaning out over the aft rail and trying to nail Boone with a loogie. He was there, all right, though I wouldn't have seen him if I hadn't been looking. He was totally black, there weren't any lights back here, and when he saw someone above him he collapsed against the hull and froze. I missed by a yard.

I took out a flashlight and shone it over my face for a second. Then I shone it down on his face. I'd never seen utter, jaw-dropping amazement on Boone's face before and it was kind of fulfilling. Then I just turned around and left. He was doing pretty well; he was over halfway up.

Tom showed us the bridge and the lounge where the rest of the crew was sitting around watching "Wheel of Fortune" and drinking Rolling Rock. They all said quick hellos and then went back to watching the tube. We were in your basic cramped but comfy nautical cabin, with fake-wood paneling glued up over the steel bulkheads, a semi-installed car stereo strung out across the shelves, pictures of babes with big tits on the walls. Up in one comer, a CB radio was roaring and babbling away for background noise.

We watched the show a little, worked on our beers, exchanged routine male-bonding dialog about the wild scene on Spectacle Island and the fact that women were present, some good looking. I let Bart handle most of that; a cutaway blueprint of the Basco Explorer was tacked up on the wall and I was trying to memorize its every detail.

The world's strange. You plan something like sneaking onto a ship and then you get completely paranoid about the chances of being noticed; you figure watchmen are spaced every twenty feet along the rail. But hanging out in that cabin, drinking bad beer and watching TV, surrounded by total darkness outside, I knew these guys never had a chance of noticing Boone. We might as well have dropped him on the deck with a helicopter. I just hoped he'd find a nontoxic hideaway.

They say that parents can pick out their babies' cries in the midst of total pandemonium. Maybe it's true. In Guadalajara, I've seen evidence to support the notion. Anyway, it seems some of those parental circuits were wired into my brain, since I caught Debbie's voice right in that cabin.

My heart was beating so hard it threw me off balance and I had to grab a bulkhead. I thought she was somewhere on board. I thought they'd taken her prisoner, then I traced the sound to the CB in the corner.

A powerful transmission was breaking through the clutter. I heard the sound of an outboard motor, the chuff of waves against a fiberglass hull and a man's voice, high-pitched and strained: "Explorer... Explorer ... come in." Debbie's voice was in the background, on the same transmission. I couldn't make it all out, but she was issuing some kind of death threat, and she was scared.

I took a swig of Guinness to relax, breathed deep and said, "Hey, I think someone's calling you."

That brought the skipper awake. He was a gleeful, potato-faced Irishman who'd been lying on a naugahyde bench, dozing through the tail end of a rough thirty-six hours, probably having been called out of a bar in Jersey to make an emergency run to Boston. He ambled over and picked up the mike. "Explorer."

On the other end, a new voice had taken over. "It's Laughlin. We're coming in," he said, loud and tense and dominating.

"Dogfuckers!" Debbie called in the background.

Withering disgust passed over the skipper's face; he wasn't

in control of his own ship. The world's biggest asshole was running the show. "We're still out here," he said.

The crewmen turned away from the TV and laughed.

"We have some special cargo to bring on board and we need to do it quickly and quietly," Laughlin said, "we'll probably need a crane and a net."

I tried to think of nonviolent ways to torture Laughlin to death.

"I think you guys better go," Tom said.

"That's okay, I feel kind of sick anyway," I said.

Bart shrugged, clueless but cooperative. We cleared out. I remembered to turn around at the last minute and check the channel they were using on the CB: Eleven.

On the ladder, I was ready to jump into the water to get there faster. Then I thought about what was being pumped out underneath us. If they were unloading enough poison to kill every bug in the Harbor, it must be incredibly concentrated in the vicinity of the ship. So I took the slow way down; when you're in a hurry, it takes a hell of a long time to descend a rope ladder. But by the time Bart got to the bottom I'd started the motor; by the time Tom had leaned over the rail to wave good-bye to us, we were a hundred feet away, invisible, picking up speed.

Next challenge: picking out the boat where Debbie was being held. The obvious thing was to hang around the Basco Explorer and wait. Then I got to thinking: what if Laughlin changed his mind and decided to dump her in the Harbor? I picked up our walkie-talkie to listen, then realized it didn't even receive channel eleven.

They had to be coming from the mainland. We knew they'd been beaching their boats somewhere along Dorchester Bay. That still left us with a lot of water to cover, but with the fifty-horse motor, this Zodiac absolutely kicked ass. I cranked it up and headed for Southie in a broad zigzag. I told Bart what we were looking for: a Boston Whaler ferrying Debbie and a pack of goons.

The bastards weren't using their running lights; we almost ran right over them. Bart noticed it first and grabbed my arm and then I saw the side of the boat, white fiberglass with a harpoon logo, right in our path. Jerked the motor to one side, came very close to capsizing the Zode, and blew a twenty-foot rooster tail of toxic brine over their transom.

When I brought it around I was expecting them to be blasting out of there, trying to get away from us-make my day, Laughlin-but they were dead in the water, rooting around for flashlights. Bart speared a beam into the Whaler and blinded some goons, but we saw no signs of Debbie. She must have seen us, and jumped out, and now she couldn't call out for help because they'd hear her too. Either that, or her head wasn't above water.

I picked up a flotation cushion and frisbeed it back into her general location, then picked a different place and waved the flashlight. "She's over there!" I shouted, loud enough to be heard, cranked the Zode and headed out into the middle of nowhere. Within seconds I heard them behind me. I brought the Zode around to a stop and aimed the light into the water again as they headed toward us with all the horsepower they had.

When I knew they were going to overshoot, I twitched the throttle again and blew out of their path, spun the boat and returned to where I'd thrown out the cushion.