Neal Stephenson - Zodiac. The Eco-Thriller

I wound up and tossed a kind of weak Bob Stanley palm-ball in the general direction of his face. The jar described a neat stinky parabola through space, bounced off the top of his head and exploded behind him. He fired again and drilled a hole in the Basco factory. I was scared enough to fall down on my face. Hard to run with an oxygen tank on your back, damn hard.

He had to be wading through a putrescine sea by now anyway, but he didn't notice. A good yuppie has no sense of smell. Laughlin's next shot hit a railing support right next to me and drilled a few metal splinters in my direction. Some of them stuck in my flesh and one shattered the face plate on my Darth Vader mask. Laughlin closed in for a closer shot, made the mistake of stepping through the hatchway and then Boone nailed him in the ear with the output of a CO2 fire extinguisher.

I fucked up my hand trying to rip all those little triangles of glass out of my facemask. Managed to smear a nice gob of blood and putrescine directly on the bridge of my nose. I could still breathe bottled air, fortunately.

Several barfing blue-collar gnomes came up from below, stumbled over the writhing Laughlin and headed toward me, which is to say they tried to get the fuck out of there. Boone had grabbed Laughlin's revolver and that scared the shit out of them.

I grabbed the mask and pulled it away from my mouth.

"Take him!" I shouted, pointing at Laughlin. "Get that nicker out of here. Take him with you."

If we stole the ship with them on board, it'd be kidnapping: a serious charge. We had to get Laughlin off. But if we dragged him off, that might be kidnapping too.

They grabbed Laughlin and dragged him down the gangplank. The ship was empty. Boone had put on an oxygen mask, he'd stolen from a fire box somewhere.

He was pointing at Laughlin's briefcase. He gave it a kick so it slid a few feet away, then brought the revolver down and fired at it. The bullet dug a crater in the fine Moroccan leather, then stopped. Kevlar-lined. Anti-terrorist luggage for the paranoid executive.

For the first time, I got a chance to look down the river, toward the Mystic River and the open sea. The megatug, Extra Stout, was crawling toward us through the blue predawn light, looking like a power plant on a toboggan, plugging the entire river, kicking out a galaxy of black smoke. It was atonement time for Clan Gallagher. 21,000 horses of Irish diesel proceeded ass-backwards, shaking the earth and the water, rattling the windows of the factory. It almost drowned out the meaty splash made when we deposited the gangplank into the Everett River.

We had to get this damn ship disconnected from the pier. That was the whole objective. It was connected by a bow line, a stem line, and two spring lines: four lines. Something big and heavy slapped into my hand. Boone had gotten me a fire ax. He had one of his own.

"This is your only warning," said a voice over some loudspeakers. "Put your hands in the air now or we will be forced to shoot."

One warning. I was guessing we could each take out a rope during the one warning. We headed for the stern. There were two ropes attached to bitts back there.

Ever chop wood? Sometimes if you flail away in a panic, you don't get anywhere, but two or three solid chops will do the job. I used both techniques on the spring line, and I didn't chop it through, but I reduced it to a few shreds of yam that could be relied on to break. Bone severed the stern line in about four strokes.

The guys with the guns had a basic problem here. The deck was a few feet higher than the pier. If we stayed on our bellies, they couldn't see us. So we spent the rest of the gig on our stomachs.

Boone had less stomach than I did, and he knew how to do this GI crawl, so he traveled about twice as fast as me. He ripped off the oxygen mask and splashed it.

By the time I made it to the other end, pushing Laughlin's briefcase in front of me, Boone was way out on the prow, feeding a rope down through one of the hawse-holes, the tunnels that the anchor chains passed through. Bart was down below us on the Zodiac, waiting. He was going to take it out to Extra Stout, now about fifty feet away; they'd attach it to a hawser, and we'd haul that up here and attach it to the Bosco Explorer. I was several yards behind Boone, my Swiss Army knife deployed, sawing through the bow lines strand by strand.

I was lying on the deck with my head sideways, and I noticed that I could see a Basco water tower a thousand feet away. And I could see some guys climbing up there. Guys with guns. Three of them.

Something whizzed over our heads and we heard a distant crack-crack-crack.

"M-16s," Boone said, "or AR-15s, actually."

I slid the briefcase over to him. "I'm done with my part," he explained, and kicked it back to me.

Sawdust flew and a narrow trench appeared in the deck about four feet away from me. At this range, the rounds from the rifles had picked up a vicious tumbling action that would cause them to chew around inside your body like some kind of parasite from outer space.

My air tank exploded and I felt myself being stabbed in the back. There was continuing noise; I was hollering but that wasn't just me. It was the Extra Stout's boathorn, giving us the signal to pull. Boone was going to need help so I got the briefcase in between my face and the water tower and crawled forward, toward the hawse-hole.

I found the rope and started pulling on it. Boone didn't seem to be helping any. There was a lot of slack and then it started pulling back.

Joe Gallagher had told me to look for the towing bitts- sturdy posts sticking out of the deck. If I looped the hawser onto anything else, the Extra Stout would just rip it loose. I found the bitts and rolled their way, trying to keep that briefcase with me, hauling on that rope. If I kept hauling, I'd find Gallagher's hawser. A Kevlar towing line. Kevlar-a wonder material, doubly useful tonight. A product of America's chemical industry. Helping to keep our nation strong. But it was heavy. I put a turn of the rope around the bitt so that it wouldn't slide back on me, and kept pulling on the fucker.

The briefcase jumped into the air as it soaked up a few high-velocity rounds and landed on the deck, out of my reach. I was judging the distance to it when everything was drowned out by sound and light. Maybe they'd thrown up some star flares and started artillery bombardment. This was deep-shit industrial noise, loud enough to cause kidney failure, and fulgurating light, brighter than the sun.

Time to surrender. I scooted away from the cleat, waving my hands. I writhed loose from the remains of the air tank, but it still felt like someone was standing on my back in hockey skates. That allowed me to roll over, belly up like every fish in the Harbor, and stare into the unpolluted heavens. But there was something in the way. Fifty feet above me, a symbolic eyeball looked down from a halogen tornado: a chopper from CBS News.

They wouldn't blow us away on national TV, would they? Highly mediapathic. If they were still shooting, they were missing. I started pulling on the rope again. Boone wasn't helping me because he'd been pretty badly shot.

It went on forever. CBS News would have to edit. The viewing public was sitting around and watching as I endlessly hauled on a fucking rope. On and on and on. CBS watched, the snipers and the guards watched, Gallagher's crew watched, Boone kind of watched through unblinking eyes. No one said anything.

And finally I was holding a big, fat eye splice in my hands, a loop at the end of the Kevlar line, thick as my wrist. The end of the rope. The one that's supposed to go over the bitt. Sailors call it the bitter end. So I tossed it over the bitt,

crawled way up to the prow, pulled myself up to my knees, and gave the Extra Stout the thumbs up.